ON TIKTOK,

USf=RS DRAPE
THEMSELVES
IN THE
TRAPPINGS OF
BhACK CULTURE-
AND STEAL
THE VIRAl
SPOTLIGHT.
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WE ARE BEING TESTED.
AND WE WILL TEST BACK.
This virus is testing us—and testing people on the front lines
most of all. Abbott is getting new tests into their hands to
deliver the critical results they need. And until this fight is over,
we will never quit. Because they never quit.
ELECTRIC WORD WIRED 28.09

MY

IDENTITY

EXISTS

AS

THE

SUM TOTAL

OF

OTHERS’

PERCEPTION. P 66

•••
0 0 3
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FEATURES WIRED 28.09

MAYOR LONDON BREED in her

office at San Francisco City Hall.

P.44 SAN FRANCISCO’S P.32 THE EVOLUTION OF

DIGITAL BLACKFACE
P.66 BRUTAL HONESTY,
- UNCHECKED SOBBING

IMMUNE SYSTEM On TikTok, exploitation

of Black culture is wildly
Scenes from a “self-
breakthrough” seminar
popular—and insidious. in China.
by Jason Parham by Yiren Lu

Why did a city beset by dysfunc-

P.54 THE HUNT FOR THE P.76 SPREADSHEET
tion and inequality face the onset of
Covid-19 better than any other major
- MAGA BOMBER - PATRIOT
American metropolis? Because his- Racing to catch the man One IT guy in Ohio is on
tory gave it some very powerful and who mailed explosives to a quest to restore rights
specific societal antibodies. the president’s critics. to voters.
by Daniel Duane by Garrett M. Graff by Jack Hitt

PHOTOGRAPH I ERICA OEEMAN

•••
0 0 5
Introducing the

Get WIRED
Podcast
hosted by
Lauren Goode.

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tomorrow
Get WIRED is a new podcast about
how the future is realized. Each week,
we burrow down new rabbit holes to
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business, science to design. Through
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anywhere else, Get WIRED is the
smartest, sharpest, most thorough
show on how tech transforms what it
means to be human.

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Spotify, or wherever you get
your podcasts.
CONTENTS WIRED 28.09

ELECTRIC MIND
WORD GRENADES

-
P.8 Totally Wired

-
P.9 Rants and Raves

P.11 Les Complications de Karen

- by Virginia Heffernan

ON THE P.14 Programming for the People

- by Paul Ford
COVER P.16 The American Dream Is Alive—
- in Canada!
by Clive Thompson

-P.18 L_
The Dangers of Ubiquitous Video
_ __
by Siva Vaidhyanathan

GADGET LAB:
BACK TO SCHOOL

Photograph
by Jessica Pettway

P.21 Fetish
- Celestron telescope

Behind the Scenes P.22 Level Up

Days ahead of deadline, pho- Chromebooks for every student

tographer Jessica Pettway P.24 Head to Head

ordered props for the cover
shoot to be delivered to her
- Kid-friendly tablets

Brooklyn studio. But then, P.26 Top 3

like so many things, they were Family ebikes
delayed by the pandemic. P.28 Weekend Project
So wired writer Jason Par- - L_
Preparing_ __
a Zoom zone
ham—the author of the cover
story—ended up racing to
Pettway’s studio with sev-
eral options, including his own
costume-jewelry rope chain.
SIX-WORD
SCI-FI
P.88 Very Short Stories
by WIRED readers

•••
0 0 7
ELECTRIC WORD

TOTALLY WIRED DIARIES OF AN

UNBRIDLED DIGITOPIAN

Recently, you would have found me

cross-legged and forlorn in front of our
junk drawer, sifting through a sea of
wires. Wires. Blech. I shudder to even
type it! (NB: “Type” is a bit of a misno-
mer here, as I’m currently beta-test-
ing a VR app that lets me dance my
words into being. Despite the sweat-
ing, it works a treat!) My hab-keeping
had unearthed a crypt of connections
past, a potter’s field of dangles and don-
gles long decommissioned. This is how
we used to live, I thought glumly, strid-
ing with my armful of cables and char-
gers to the local e-shredder.
But as I watched the machine’s
brawny cable-rending teeth munch happily upon its new meal, I admit that I brightened. You
see, electronic recycling is a rackety business—yet for me its gnashing made no more than the
faintest hum, swaddled as I was in the cloudlike embrace of my headphones’ noise-canceling
technology. My grin widened. This was a moment I live for: when our wirebound limitations
give way to freedom.
Our world is ever surging forward, but progress is less linear than it is convulsive. With tech-
nology as with society at large, we gather and gather, then suddenly spring. Welcome as these
quantum leaps are, they can be taxing as well. So much Big is happening, your faithful scribe
has come to treasure the Small. Noise cancellation is paramount, not because it shuts the world
out but because it helps bring us the calm needed to connect with what that noisy world makes
possible—its people, its art, its urgency. To burrow into beauty, to nuzzle the now.
Years ago I scoffed at these devices as the refuge of the weary traveler, a way for rumpled
suits to numb the claustrophobic roar of their tin-can surroundings, opiates of illusory isolation.
Today’s versions, though—quite the opposite! Thanks to the wonders of active noise cancellation,
they are built to carve cocoon from cacophony. Inverted sound waves strip away the wind and
chatter of your environment; more refined modulation of low-end frequencies minimizes the
“eardrum suck” sensations of generations past. The result is phone conversations that haven’t
felt this intimate since the last time we cradled a receiver next to our ear and whispered with a
teenage crush, cord coiled around our finger, feet tracing idle lines on the bedroom wall. When
I need to be alone, there’s no focus like the one found inside an ambient soundscape, my favor-
ite ASMR humming along, productivity scrolling out before me.
Speaking of which, friends, I have chores to complete. Now that the junk drawer has been
purged, it’s time your humble narrator gathers and springs to the next item on what my habmate
calls a “Ripley-do list.” That VR headset isn’t going to dry itself, you know. Thanks for listening.

SILENTLY YOURS,
RIPLEY D. LIGHT

ILLUSTRATION / SAM WHITNEY

 WIRED 28.09

RANTS AND RAVES

Endless Summer
For our June cover story, Andy Greenberg chronicled the transformation of
Marcus Hutchins (left) from blackhat to whitehat hacker. In the magazine,
Mara Hvistendahl wrote about iFlytek, a Chinese company that has built
pervasive—and troubling—voice-recognition software. In our July/August
issue, Evan Ratliff profiled a virologist who spent years helping to create pan-
demic insurance, which nobody bought. And Brian Barrett wrote about his
friend Brian Wallach’s battle with ALS and Wallach’s work to help others who
are suffering from the disease. At wired .com, Maria Streshinsky wrote about
the struggle to protect vulnerable family members from Covid-19.

RE: “THE CONFESSIONS ney to be measured not in tional insurance. I proffer

↙ OF MARCUS HUTCHINS”
I am a 60-year-old with three
pieces but as a whole. —Rick
Bulman, via mail@wired .com
another reason: They knew
they could rely on the fed-
children and one grandchild. eral government to bail them
RE: “FLYING FISH IS out, as in 2008. —Kirk Miller,
As a teenager, my thirst for
LISTENING” via mail@wired .com
Readers adrenaline led me to begin a
life of petty crimes. Most of Given the power inherent in
share their my victims were people who this technology, it is highly RE: “A LIFE JUST OUT
OF REACH”
confessions, trusted me. Eventually I was likely that corporate and polit-
ical policymakers will seek My husband was diagnosed
warnings, caught and arrested. The man
most impacted by me went to to exploit it to advance their in February. We live in Aus-
and high- the prosecutor and pleaded goals, unless legislation, edu- tralia, where it’s called MND
level my case for forgiveness. He cation, and restrictions are
put in place. —Kevin Rofheart,
(motor neuron disease). He
is 36, and we have three
support: said, “I would trust him right
now with the key to my home. via mail@wired .com boys, ages 8, 10, and 12. My
I believe he is contrite and husband was a phys ed and
can see his errors.” Hearing The future is cyber-totalitarian: health teacher, but he had
these words—while sounding Old centralized powers didn’t to stop working. He created
wonderful—piled on so much have the capacity to process a YouTube channel called
grief, embarrassment, and vast operations better han- Team Reilly vs. MND and
shame, it was hard for me to dled by distributed individu- is bringing hope to those
breathe. I still tear up thinking als. With growing computing with illnesses by sharing his
about his grace. Marcus, you power, and the feedback loop battle in a humorous way,
cannot change what you did. of data perfecting data, the with some real talk. He has
What you can do is give your- game is now inverted. —Artur always had a positive atti-
self grace and forgive your- Deus Dionisio (@Artdeus- tude, so he is using this for
self. Then realize the burden dionisio), via Twitter good in the bad. —Emma
you now carry to help others Reilly, via mail@wired .com
not go where you did. —Mike RE: “THIS IS NATHAN
Jenkins, via mail@wired .com WOLFE. WE SHOULD HAVE RE: “THE COUNTRY IS
LISTENED TO HIM” REOPENING. I’M STILL
Every kid should read this to Where did all the billions of ON LOCKDOWN”
learn the value of trial and dollars go that were intended After reading this, my heart
error and trial again. Every to increase our readiness? fractured. There is a whole
RE: “A LIFE JUST parent should read it to remind Though this administration has class of people who haven’t
OUT OF REACH” themselves that life is a jour- proven inept in providing guid- been heard or seen because
ance, our lack of preparedness they don’t have financial
goes back multiple adminis- means. My daughter has

"Brian, the courage trations. —John Bongiovanni,

microbiologist, via mail@
wired .com
a rare and painful genetic
mutation. When Covid hit,
her husband lost his job.

and strength you've We’re in the midst of an infor-

mation revolution. But it has
Soon I won’t be able to help
them out with rent anymore.
The thought of my daughter

shown in the face of a downside: The accompany-

ing disinformation revolution.
How can we get people to
trying to look after herself
and her husband is more
than a mother can bear.

daunting odds is an understand the risks and do

the right thing if we can’t get
the right information to them?
—Jackie Haverty, via email

~ inspiration to us all!' —Yogi McCaw, via mail@

wired .com
GET MORE WIRED
a& - Joe Bklen (@JoeBklen) vle Twitter The article says companies If you are a print subscriber, you
"'c:0 didn’t buy pandemic insurance can read all wired stories online.
E because they were reluctant To authenticate your subscription,
"'
0: to spend more money on addi- go to: wired .com/register.

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M I N D G R E N A D E S

LA VIE
KARENNESQUE
What French feminism can teach us about the viral female archetype.

BY VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN

I was looking for an excuse to dip into psychedelic French feminism of the 1970s when a new Karen
video barged into my timeline. There she was: Another white woman, shrieking, stabbing the air,
berserk over obscure and chronically unmet needs. Q Bingo. Hysteria in public spaces! A sexist trope
to be mischievously “reclaimed”! French feminists, if I remember right, often relish extravagant
displays of feminine emotion as both a symptom of patriarchy—and a protest against it. L’hystérie
Karennesque might yield to their analysis, and even introduce a new archetype of the unruly
woman, akin to Molly Bloom or Medusa. Thus I consulted the work of Hélène Cixous (b. 1937), the
Algerian-born rhetorician; Julia Kristeva (b. 1941), the scholar of abjection and horror; and Luce
Irigaray (b. 1930), author of Speculum of the Other Woman, which must have the greatest feminist
title of all time. One of their shared domains is hysteria, which they—with a commitment to

ILLUSTRATION / JORDAN MOSS 0 1 1

M I N D G R E N A D E S

complexity over clarity—seek to “prob- A third, more layered Karen refuses to Karen’s performances, as she dramatizes
lematize,” using ample scare quotes. wear a mask at a Trader Joe’s. She shouts, her thirst to be known and seen. To that
Karen is, of course, the generic name “Democratic pigs!” at some of the workers, end, Karen makes scenes, turning ordi-
for the ubiquitous American harpy who, only to shift her complaint from a politi- nary spaces into spotlighted stages. “Get
through the long summer of 2020, pitched cal to a medical one, telling an onlooker that on camera!” shouts Bebe Karen. But
fits about masks and sometimes about race, that her “doctor” has diagnosed her with in the theatrical assertion of her privilege,
in public spaces. Rules are galling to Karen. a “breathing problem.” She then claims in she forfeits that very privilege. No cop or
They drive her to madness. And, indeed, the an axiom known only to her that the staff doctor ever comes for her. She’s seen at last,
summer was defined by new rules about are violating “federal law.” but in a godforsaken way, an object of ridi-
masking and social distancing—these on This third Karen—incidentally clad in cule, forever on the internet.
top of the tinderbox of political distress. a slim-fitting T-shirt emblazoned with The best I can add to the street definition
As much as white women might resist the word “Bebe”—introduces a new note of Karen, with reference to feminist analy-
the reflection, Karen holds a mirror up to to the role. Her invocation of the medi- sis of la langue féminine, is that she is eas-
social nature, revealing the ghoulish face cal establishment and the federal gov- ily affronted by routine codes of conduct,
of both feminine self-dramatization and ernment, both coded male, is an effort to and when asked to comply, reliably lurches
reflexive white imperialism. In exposing align herself with logos—the amorphous between operatically exaggerating her sub-
long-repressed social dynamics, Karen concept, big with French feminists, of “the jectivity and calling on invented moral laws
could qualify as what Cixous praised as an Word of God,” which informs the conceits as if she were Moses or Kanye West.
“admirable hysteric”—one who, in Kriste- of “logic” and “the law.” Later, this Karen If Karen is antiheroic in an interesting
va’s view, subverts at a fever pitch the mas- told ABC News that she saw her tantrum way, it’s because she undoes a cherished
ter discourse of rules and regulations. as resistance to masculine dominance: social fiction: “We’re all in it together.”

If Karen is antiheroic in an interesting way, it’s

because she undoes a cherished social fiction:
“We’re all in it together.” Karen is in it alone.
In the right French frame of mind, namely, a man she claims threatened Karen’s in it alone, with her breathing
Karen can be seen as the monstrous her off camera, using “the c-word.” “I did problem. In shattering the square-one
embodiment of femininity gone amok, a what any normal human being, a woman, social pact, Karen becomes a scapegoat
saboteuse, a puncturer of social norms. would do, if she was being harassed by for the privilege and racism that drive all
Some deconstructionists saw Archie a man ... I start yelling, in self-defense.” public-space encounters—a truth too ter-
Bunker, the conservative crank from With her rant and her calling down of rible to contemplate.
All in the Family, as an arch debunker: a federal law, Karen signals that she has— Racism is always waiting in the wings
standing exposé of the folkways of white she believes—ever more fearsome mascu- with Karen. She fears contact with those she
men. Perhaps Karen—however racist—is line institutions at her back. This appears despises for “harassing” her, while refus-
everywhitewoman, railing about her spe- to afford her a moment of relief from psy- ing to admit that she, unmasked and thus
cialness and calling in the National Guard. chic isolation. Examples of this recourse shedding microbes by the billions, might
We should not underestimate Karen’s to male authority in other Karens include: be the one against whom others should be
own capacity for violence. One Karen “My father will sue you,” “God will pun- protected. That’s why Karens pose such a
video shows a woman in a Fiesta super- ish you,” “Officer, an African American is unique threat to the social order: They won’t
market in Dallas, hurling plastic-wrapped threatening my life.” be good, like the other women, and disguise
pork and chicken onto the floor to protest Voilà: near-Parisian levels of complex- (mask!) their entitlement. And they refuse to
the requirement that she wear a mask. She ity. Add to all the Bebe logo—logo, from make common cause with their fellows—
Who Flings Meat: a new Medea. logos, come on—that, as French for baby, especially Black people.
Another unmasked Karen, this one in a suggests Karen’s self-infantilization, her This came to light in May, with the notori-
New York City bagel shop, demonstrates her longing for a father’s protection. Complex- ous video of Amy Cooper calling the police
autonomy by coughing forcefully in the face ity, the real c-word, compounds. on a Black birder named Christian Coo-
of another patron. This looks like assault. Panic and privilege jostle unnervingly in per. (No relation, but to French feminists
there are no coincidences. Perhaps the
coopers—barrel makers—have us all over CHARTGEIST
one.) When Amy Cooper called the police BY JON J. EILENBERG
and superciliously described Christian
Cooper as both a threat to her life (he was
not) and an “African American,” it became
clear that Karens, though sometimes var- BEATING SARS-COV-2
nished with liberal tolerance, have racism
on speed dial, along with lawyers and cops.
Like the Karens asked to wear a mask,
Going Masks
Amy Cooper balked at the suggestion that mask-free
she was bound by rules, but she seemed to own
more profoundly horrified by the fact the libs

that the rules had a Black enforcer. The

EASY
rules were supposed to be hers. In July,
the Manhattan DA’s office announced it
was charging her with filing a false report,
only to have Christian Cooper say he Organizing
believed Amy Cooper, who lost her job anti-mask

and reputation (and also formally apol-

.
.·
protests WFH

ogized), has “already paid a steep price.” EFFECTIVE

Criminalizing the actions of one Karen

might indeed be bad appling, a distrac-
BACK TO SCHOOL
tion from the racisme systémique that the
video served to put on display.
The sin of Karening does seem to pun-
Perpetual Normal IRL
ish itself. Every time, the video that will “Blame Your instruction
Kid for Not
CONVENIENCE FOR PARENTS

serve as Karen’s pillory is already rolling Being Able to

by the time she’s caught in the act, so the Work Day”
jig is, as it were, pre-up; even as Karen
unspools her shrieks, she knows it’s her • IRL instruction
with staggered
last hurrah. The fix is in. She’s going to schedules
land hard on Instagram—or Twitter or
Facebook or CNN. In-person
While French feminism of the ’70s is Virtual wrestling team and
instruction choir practices
equal to the task of “complicating,” in
feminist terms, the figure of the Karen, it CONVENIENCE FOR CORONAVIRUS

is less able to illuminate her racism. The

feminists I consulted are white, upper- THE EDIBLE INTERNET
class women; Cixous was born to a French
imperialist culture. To shore up the posi-
tion of women as “subalterns”—part of #catloaf Cake
a colonial population outside the power
structure—Cixous, for one, wrote that
women are Black people. Oy.
SCRUMPTIOUSNESS

“As soon as [women] begin to speak,

at the same time as they’re taught their
name, they can be taught that their ter-
ritory is black: because you are Africa,
you are black.”
Now that’s truly problematic. Like Sourdough
.. starter Goya beans
Karens, like racism itself, it can’t ever be
clarified. It’s a problem, tout court. DIVISIVENESS

VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN (@page88) is a

regular contributor to wired .

• ••
0 1 3
TECH SUPPORT
Don’t listen to “real” programmers. When people build a database to manage
reading lists or feed their neighbors, that’s coding—and culture.

BY PAUL FORD

It’s a normal afternoon in July. I’m at work in my little corner, speaking into the camera. The children are in their
rooms, regressing. I leave the bedroom-office to get more coffee. My spouse is in our small kitchen, kneading dough
while on a video call of her own. I eavesdrop for a minute. She’s not a programmer, but she’s talking about a data-
base. The database lists people who need food, cooks, drivers, and deliveries. Q We are past the New York City
Covid-19 peak. Things have started to reopen, but our neighborhood is in trouble, and people are hungry. There’s a
M I N D G R E N A D E S

church that’s opened space for a food pan- “real programming” is. This has been the to feed the neighborhood, that’s culture.
try, a restaurant owner who has given her- history of the World Wide Web, for example. Meanwhile my wife is becoming a data
self to feeding the neighborhood, and lots Go ahead and tweet “HTML is real program- modeler. She has new friends on Slack, and
of volunteers. You have to get calories to ming,” and watch programmers show up in they’ve divided the neighborhood into zones,
people, so you need aluminum trays, baking your mentions to go, “As if.” Except when you to cluster deliveries. They write notes in the
flour, gas, schedules, and phone numbers. write a web page in HTML, you are creat- notes field in Airtable, and people read and
You need to know who’s halal or vegetar- ing a data model that will be interpreted by respond to those notes. Community hap-
ian and who wants turkey wings. It’s a com- the browser. This is what programming is. pens that way. The community creates the
plex data model. It involves date fields, text Code culture can be solipsistic and data, and the data represents the commu-
fields, integers, notes. You need lots of peo- exhausting. Programmers fight over semi- nity. Beats doing nothing.
ple to log in, but you need to protect private colon placement and the right way to be Our giant social networks are just data-
data too. You’d think their planning conver- object-oriented or functional or what- bases too. Of course they own all the data, and
sations would be about making lots of rice. ever else will let them feel in control and the data model. You would never use Insta-
But that is just a data point. smarter and more economically safe, and gram to manage food deliveries. Instagram
The tool the mutual aid group has set- always I want to shout back: Code isn’t is for uploading photos, looking at photos,
tled on to track everything is Airtable, a enough on its own. We throw code away and liking photos in endless sequence. But
database-as-a-service program. You log when it runs out its clock; we migrate data really all that’s different here is that, instead
in and there’s your database. There are to new databases, so as not to lose one pre- of liking photos—not the worst thing a per-
a host of tools like this now, “low code” cious bit. Code is a story we tell about data. son can do, mind you—people are making
or “no code” software with names like
Zapier or Coda or Appy Pie. Amazon just
launched its own, called Honeycode. At
first glance these tools look like flowcharts
married to spreadsheets, but they’re pow- We throw code away when it runs
erful ways to build little data-management
apps. Airtable in particular keeps showing
out its clock; we migrate databases
up everywhere for managing office sup- so as not to lose one precious bit.
plies or scheduling appointments or track-
ing who at wired has their fingers on this Code is a story we tell about data.
column. The more features you use, the
more they charge for it, and it can add up But programmer culture tends to devalue sure a nice elderly lady gets callaloo greens.
quickly. I know because I see the invoices data. The database is boring, old, staid Or even a crabby elderly lady. Or even chard.
at my company; we use it to track projects. technology. Managing it is an acronym It’s the same basic technological deal, except
(Though Airtable has made its Airtable Pro job (DBA, for database administrator). You the energy of the conversation flows out of
plan free for certain Covid-related efforts set up your tables and columns, and add the community instead of into the platform.
like the mutual aid society.) rows of data. Programming is where the No one owns their network, although the
“Real” coders in my experience have action is. Sure, 80 percent of your code in data lives on servers controlled by Airtable.
often sneered at this kind of software, even Swift, Java, C#, or JavaScript is about pull- I get asked a lot about learning to code.
back when it was just FileMaker and Micro- ing data out of a database and putting data Sure, if you can. It’s fun. But the real action,
soft Access managing the flower shop or back in. But that other 20 percent is where the crux of things, is there in the database.
tracking the cats at the animal shelter. It’s the action is, where you make the next big Grab a tiny, free database like SQLite.
not hard to see why. These tools are just world-shaking thing. Which is great! Go to! Import a few million rows of data. Make
databases with a form-making interface on But don’t forget that most of the world is them searchable. It’s one of the most
top, and with no code in between. It reduces trying to manage their small business with soothing activities known to humankind,
software development, in all its complex- a really messy spreadsheet. taking big piles of messy data and massag-
ity and immense profitability, to a set of I’ve always loved that moment when ing them into the rigid structure required
simple data types and form elements. You someone shows you the thing they built of a relational database. It’s true power. Or
wouldn’t build a banking system in it, or a for tracking books they’ve read or for their mess around with Airtable or its no-code
game. It lacks the features of big, grown-up jewelry business. Amateur software is mag- ilk. If you do it long enough and work with
databases like Oracle or IBM’s Db2 or Post- ical because you can see the seams and friends, you can do wonderful things. You
greSQL. And since it is for amateurs, the end how people wrestled the computer. Like can build data models that work well
result ends up looking amateur. outsider art. So much of the tech industry enough to feed people who need the help.
But it sure does work. I’ve noticed that today is about making things look profes- That’s real programming.
when software lets nonprogrammers do sional, maybe convincing Apple to let you
programmer things, it makes the program- into the App Store to join the great undif- PAUL FORD (@ftrain) is a programmer,
mers nervous. Suddenly they stop smiling ferentiated mass of other apps. That’s soft- essayist, and cofounder of Postlight, a
indulgently and start talking about what ware. When people build their own Airtable digital strategy firm.

ILLUSTRATION / JANICE CHANG

•••
0 1 5
NORTH STAR
The American dream is alive and well—in Canada.

BY CLIVE THOMPSON

Nitin Alabur is an iOS developer from India who lived in the US and
dreamed of creating a tech startup. “I had a zillion ideas,” he tells
me. But he’d been hired by a US firm under an H-1B visa, which ties
you to your employer. A green card that would make self-employ-
ment possible was years away. “It felt like shackles,” he says. Q So
he bailed. Alabur fled for a place where it’s much easier for ambi-
tious immigrants to pursue the American dream: Canada. Q He dis-
covered, to his delight, that Canada issues work permits to highly
skilled immigrants in mere weeks, and permanent residency—the
equivalent of a green card—in less than six months. In late 2018, he
and his wife became permanent residents of Canada, and they’re
now building a financial services startup. He soberly warns other
young Indian engineers and students: There’s no point moving to
the US. Head north instead. Q Immigrants! They get the job done,
right? For years, America believed that creed, and high-tech inno-
vation was propelled by plucky newcomers from Nikola Tesla to
Sergey Brin of Google to Eric Yuan of Zoom. For years, Silicon Valley
won the global race for talent. Q But there’s a new global winner:
Canada, and particularly Toronto. Since 2013, the tech scene there
has grown faster than in any other North American city. In 2017,
Toronto added more tech jobs than Seattle, the San Francisco Bay
M I N D G R E N A D E S

Area, and Washington, DC, combined; in a howl—Canada created a fast track that
2018 (the most recent year for which num- lets some skilled foreigners acquire a work
bers are available), the city was second only authorization in as little as 10 days.
to the Bay Area in new tech jobs. Toronto is This is a huge boon for attracting AI
so crammed with immigrants that nearly talent. Doing truly pioneering work in AI
50 percent of all residents were born out- requires advanced research and devel- ANGRY NERD
side the country. opment skills. No country has enough of BY ANGELA WATERCUTTER
“I call it our secret sauce,” says Humera those people, so they’re all trying to poach
Malik, founder of Canvass Analytics, which from one another. You win by casting a
creates AI that helps factories monitor their wide net. (Iran? Filled with math savants,
machinery and processes. Malik, who is and several Toronto firms I talked to have
from Pakistan, hired over three-quarters eagerly hired them.)
of her firm’s engineers from abroad, Canada’s immigration policy is hardly
including Iran, Singapore, and India. warm and fuzzy. On the contrary, it’s icily
What happened? For one thing, Silicon calculating. The government loves edu-
Valley, now a victim of its own success, is cated, elite newcomers, because they
unlivably expensive. Toronto is cheaper. help propel the economy, says immi-
There is also Toronto’s pull factor: It has gration lawyer Peter Rekai, but it wants
become a global AI hub because it’s the them young, so they won’t drain the pub-

WE’RE ALL DOOMED

Canada’s immigration policy
It’s 1:14 am and I can’t escape the
is hardly warm and fuzzy. On the downward spiral. Eyes near bleeding,
I swipe my right thumb down, then

contrary, it’s icily calculating. up, in an anxious twitch. A tweet from

Quartz journalist Karen Ho pauses
the descent: “Hey, are you doom-
home of deep-learning pioneers like lic health care system. Their parents are scrolling?” Yes I am, Karen, and I hate
myself for it. Doomscrolling—the com-
Geoff Hinton at the University of Toronto much less welcome. pulsion to constantly check Twitter,
—and “brilliance attracts brilliance,” But Toronto’s rise shows that culture also Facebook, Feedly, Reddit, Digg, any-
notes Garth Gibson, head of the city’s Vec- matters. The US is losing this competition thing and everything, so as not to miss
a single modern misery—has been a
tor Institute, which supports AI in aca- not just because of bad policy; it now seems pastime for years, but the pandemic
deme and industry. to be a dangerously racist place. One self- turned it into my full-time gig. Then the
But this is also a story of the US actively taught Nigerian coder I spoke to, Joseph worldwide protests over police bru-
tality sent me into overtime. Endlessly
chasing away immigrants. The system can Cobhams, dreamed of “building a prod- addictive, the wretched habit is unrav-
be laborious to navigate (Yuan’s applica- uct that a billion people use.” But when he eling whatever shreds of sanity I have
tion was denied eight times before he got visited New York City, he was stopped by left. It must stop. I’m not saying I wish
to check out completely. That helps no
in). And it’s gotten harder. Donald Trump police three times in two weeks. one. What I’m saying is that reading
began his road to the White House by call- “I don’t want to be the boy who cried one more study about where SARS-
ing Mexican immigrants “rapists” and wolf” and seem oversensitive, he adds, CoV-2 really came from (possibly,
maybe, but probably not), or whether
then banned travelers from Muslim coun- “but I don’t want to be another statistic.” I should be wearing a mask to bed and
tries as one of his first presidential acts. He headed north and hasn’t regretted it in the shower, won’t make me a hap-
This summer, to the horror of Silicon Val- one whit. To be sure, Canada has racism, pier, healthier human. Simply looking
at protest footage all day or reading
ley, he suspended H-1B visas for the rest and it treated its indigenous population tweets deep into the night won’t bring
of the year. He proposed, and then under brutally. But Cobhams has lived in Toronto justice any faster. No one can support
pressure retracted, rules making it nigh for a year, and he says, “I haven’t had 1 per- friends and family in times of crisis
with their mental health in shambles.
impossible for foreign students to remain cent” of the racially charged interactions What even awaits me at the bottom of
in the country during the pandemic. he had during his brief visit to the US. the doomscroll? In a more biblical age,
Meanwhile, Canada has been gleefully It’s a dynamic we should understand by doom meant the last judgment at the
end of days. As I flick and flick, trudg-
counterprogramming. The country’s now. When opportunity knocks, the door ing through the apocalyptic waste-
immigration rules have long prioritized needs to open. land of hatred and destruction, maybe
newcomers who are educated, highly that’s what I’m searching for—a des-
tination, a decision, a final reckoning.
skilled, and fluent in one of the country’s CLIVE THOMPSON (@pomeranian99) is a But all that’s down there, I’m afraid, is
two official languages. Then in 2017—as w i r e d contributing
editor. Write to him at the pit of hell.
Trump’s snarling nativism was building to clive@[Link].

ILLUSTRATION / SAM WHITNEY

•••
0 1 7
 - -- -
- -- ........
_

THE DANGERS OF
UBIQUITOUS VIDEO
Moving images bombard our brains and fog our thoughts—but every
now and then they expand our minds.

BY SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN

We might look back at 2020 as the year of maximum screen time. Severed by the pan-
demic from face-to-face interactions, we have been chained to our devices, making
more video and watching more video than ever before. This ubiquity of moving images—
this videocracy that first took shape during the aughts, with the rise of data-connected
phones, Facebook, and YouTube—has become the chief way many of us view the world.
And it’s dangerous. We anchor our public debates on video. We make judgments based
on moving images and truncated sounds. They guide and structure the consideration
of our public concerns. Q Video resists thought. It breaks linear modes of argumenta-
tion and resists complexity, containing all within a frame often now the size of a human
hand. Videos can mislead us even when they aren’t clearly false or fraudulent, danger-
ous or destructive. Even those we might consider “news” or “documentary” may be a
form of propaganda, compressing and distorting events, stories, and issues. Q The pro-
pagandistic effect was most acute when the moving image was new. A film like Leni
 M I N D G R E N A D E S

Riefenstahl’s Olympia (1938), for instance, the face of this montage. We can’t mount lowed and were quickly forgotten.
once could draw viewers into its embrace cohesive and convincing arguments with We had the opportunity, back then, to
with an erotic idealization of the “Aryan” ease or confidence. We mistrust everything convene and deliberate seriously about
body and allusions to classical empires. because we can’t trust anything. the constant plague of racially motivated
Audiences in the 1930s didn’t have the That’s not to say collective, collaborative police violence. But the “national conversa-
language or the tools to understand these thought is impossible in the age of ubiqui- tion,” as some proposed to call it, had got-
tricks. They could not stop a film to study it, tous video. It just means that we have to ten focused on one person, one event, and
then rewind and watch again. They didn’t try harder, that we must construct better one poor-quality video. That made it all too
have the armor made from decades’ worth methods to defuse propaganda with delib- easy to dismiss, as if the pattern of injustice
of criticism, the hard-earned knowledge eration. I’m not sure we can do this. But were somehow not yet fully clear.
of the risk: that video can undermine and the events of this past spring and summer, The elements of that pattern are now laid
overwhelm collective thought. when a single viral video seemed to move out for everyone to see, in one video after
We’re more sophisticated now, but the the world toward justice, gives me cause another of Black people’s mistreatment by
risk has not subsided. If anything, it has for limited optimism. police. Today, paradoxically, the very pro-
increased exponentially. The rapid, global The footage capturing the last eight min- fusion of such videos has helped us in this
proliferation of digital video, from around utes of George Floyd’s life, as a Minneap- moment to deliberate on greater, broader
2005 up through the present, makes it
harder to sort and contextualize what we
see—to think about, through, and with
video. We may now resist the clumsy, over-
bearing propaganda of Olympia, or of any
other single piece of video, but we’re more
susceptible to the barrage of subtler, less
bombastic messages that flow around us, The same cacophonous media environment
each unworthy of attention yet influential
in the aggregate. For every helpful medi-
that tends to dazzle and confuse us in this
cal news clip about Covid-19, the platforms case yielded clarity. Video resists thought,
host dozens of videos coaxing viewers to
mistrust medical experts or vaccinations. but it doesn’t prevent it.
For every stirring scene of a Confeder-
ate statue coming down, there are count- olis police officer crushed it out of him on questions; not just on one story but on all
less paranoid and racist rants delivered May 25, launched a remarkable, trans- the policies behind it. The same cacopho-
to a camera. Cell phone footage too, and national movement for racial justice. Like nous media environment that tends to daz-
sponsored messages, political ads, instant Eric Garner, who died at the hands of a zle and confuse us—that stupefying
replays on the Jumbotron, doorbell cam- New York City police officer in 2014, Floyd video-after-video-after-video-after-video
era clips, and schoolroom lessons given had his public execution by asphyxiation effect—in this case yielded clarity. Video
via Zoom. These all are streams within documented by a bystander recording on resists thought, but it does not prevent it.
the torrent of stimuli. In the form of our a mobile phone. The moving images and The footage of Floyd’s death forced the
phones, we all have Times Square in our sounds quickly wrapped the globe, punc- issue with its length: dreadful and transfix-
pockets. It’s the environment that distorts turing illusions, igniting latent frustrations, ing, a format that invited contemplation. If
reality now. and propelling millions out into the streets. this principle could be extended—if we
The overall effect is of cacophony: a vast, Floyd’s death was captured by raw video. could learn to harness our attention, dis-
loud, bright, fractured, narcissistic ecosys- Its truths were impossible to deny. The offi- cipline ourselves, and focus—then perhaps
tem that leaves us little room for thoughtful cer’s voice was clear. Floyd’s voice was we’d have a chance to curb injustice on an
deliberation. It’s not that we’ll believe the clear. The bystanders’ voices were clear. even grander scale. With cameras every-
latest Covid conspiracy video (although too The image was clear. It was more powerful where, we have a lot of evidence from
many people do). It’s that seeing video after than any video of police brutality that came which to draw. But it will take work. The
video after video after video renders us before, and yet it also built upon them all. torrent of video never stops battering our
unable to judge. They’re all making contra- Now think back to Rodney King. George minds. When thought prevails, it’s by
dictory claims; they’re all just slick enough Holliday just happened to be one of the few weathering this downpour and pushing
to make plausible demands for our atten- Americans toting a portable video camera through to higher ground.
tion and respect. We find ourselves numbed in 1991, and he just happened to be there
by overstimulation, distracted by constant to capture King’s beating by Los Angeles SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN (@sivavaid) is a
movement and sound, unable to relate to police officers on a grainy analog video- professor at the University of Virginia
those ensconced in different bubbles and tape. Stirring demonstrations broke out all and the author of Antisocial Media: How
t
g
influenced by different visions of reality. We over the country, along with riots. Com- Facebook Disconnects Us and Under-
can’t address our problems collectively in missions and studies of police violence fol- mines Democracy.

ILLUSTRATION / ELENA LACEY

•••
0 1 9
 PROMOTION

SEPTEMBER
2020

THE 2020 has seen

WIRED 25 a world in crisis,
but leaders,
scientists, tech-
nologists, and
activists across
the globe are
working to make
things better.
This fall, the
WIRED 25 list will
honor these inspir-
ing individuals.

Tune in this
September to
learn who made
the list and how
these change-
VISIT makers, upstarts,
[Link]/25 and icons are
solving the world’s
most intractable
problems.
GADGET LAB

Back
to ↘

SCHOOL
Whether your kids are returning to
class physically or virtually, they’ll need the
right setup for learning—and maybe some
gear at home to keep them edu-tained.

FETISH

Celestron StarSense
Explorer DX 102AZ
Refractor Telescope

Celestron’s line of StarSense

telescopes is aimed at aspir-
ing astronomers, and they’re
especially fun for the littlest
stargazers. Thanks to the com-
panion smartphone app, even
my 5-year-old can locate stars,
planets, and nebulae all by him-
self. There’s no need to fully
grasp complexities like declina-
tion, inclination, and azimuth;
the Celestron app translates it
into clear visual instructions.
You simply mount the smart-
phone in the built-in cradle,
which points the phone’s cam-
era at an image of the heavens
reflected in an angled mirror.
This allows the app to scan
the sky while your phone dis-
plays a map of the stars. Pick a
celestial object and onscreen
arrows will show you how much
to turn, raise, or lower the tele-
scope. The system really helped
my kids connect the things we
could see with our own eyes in
the night sky with the things we
could see via the lens. The whole
family navigated the galaxy like
Picard until it was time to beam
back to Earth (and bed). $400
—Scott Gilbertson

PHOTOGRAPHS / SARAH KNOBEL

•••
0 2 1
GADGET LAB → BACK TO SCHOOL

LEVEL
FETISH
UP

Essential
GRADES K–8

Lenovo Duet

ELEMENTS
Chromebook
At just over 2 pounds with the keyboard
TABLET-
attached, Lenovo’s tablet-laptop hybrid is LAPTOP
wonderfully portable. Though petite, the HYBRID
magnetically attached keyboard is easy to
type on, especially for smaller hands. When
you remove the keyboard, the Duet auto- 11-HOUR
matically switches to ChromeOS’ tablet BATTERY
↘ mode, which is perfect for light-duty tasks LIFE
From classes via Zoom to course- like browsing the web, watching videos, and
listening to music. The screen is sharp and
work in the cloud, a browser-powered plenty bright, and the Duet has more than
Chromebook is the go-to laptop for enough battery life (11 hours in my testing) to
students of all ages. —Scott Gilbertson make it through a day’s assignments. There’s
no headphone jack, but maybe that’s a good
thing—you’ll be able to hear if the kiddo is
sneaking in YouTube videos instead of doing
homework. $279

•••
0 2 2
 HIGH SCHOOL COLLEGE
L-------~ . ' ' ' . ' ' ' . ' ' '

HP Chromebook Samsung Galaxy

x360 12b Chromebook
The 12-inch touchscreen on HP’s mid-price Samsung has been building premium Android
TALLER, HI-RES,
Chromebook could be brighter, but it does ROOMIER
phones for more than a decade, and all that 4K SCREEN
have a 3:2 aspect ratio, making it a little SCREEN design know-how has resulted in one of the
taller than the more common 16:9 wide- nicest ChromeOS devices on the market.
screen models. That extra height is welcome The Galaxy’s gorgeous aluminum body and
when doing research on the web or typing GREAT-
hi-res, 4K display are paired with a speedy STYLUS
essays in Google Docs. Also, the laptop’s SOUNDING 10th-generation Intel processor that offers BUILT IN
hinge makes it possible to fold the screen all SPEAKERS more power and agility than your undergrad
the way around the back for a configuration will likely need, though they’ll be thankful for
that’s great for reading an ebook or doodling the extra juice in after-hours gaming ses-
with a stylus ($60). The eight hours of bat- STURDY sions. Those niceties come at the cost of bat- ALL-METAL
tery life is mediocre for a Chromebook, but KEYBOARD, tery life, which is a paltry 6.5 hours. But it’s a BODY
the speakers—by audiophile faves Bang & LARGE smart contortionist: Pop the included stylus
Olufsen, no less—are surprisingly powerful TRACKPAD out of its built-in dock, fold the screen all the
for such a small machine. $359 way back to tablet mode, and Google’s Keep
note-taking app automatically opens, ready JUST
for that chemistry lecture. $1,000 9.9 MM
THICK
GADGET LAB → BACK TO SCHOOL

Clutch ↘
Depending on how schools—and your

PLAYERS
HEAD
TO workplace—reopen, your sanity may depend
HEAD on more screen time for your kids. We recom-
mend a child-friendly tablet. —Adrienne So

BEST FOR: BEST FOR:

RAMPAGING YOU’LL-GROW-INTO-IT
RUG RATS KIDS

Amazon Fire HD 8 Apple iPad

Kids Edition Mini
The Fire HD 8 Kids Edition is The Mini is a more versatile
a worthy tablet—not neces- device that’s best for older kids
sarily for the hardware, which who want to do more than just
is solid enough, but for every- consume books and videos.
thing that comes with it. The Sure, Apple’s parental controls
device includes a one-year sub- will let your child safely down-
scription to Amazon’s Free- load whatever apps and Apple
Time Unlimited (a $36 value). Arcade games you approve,
The service ensures that every and kid-friendly streaming plat-
one of the 2,000-plus videos, forms like Amazon Prime, PBS
apps, games, books, Audible Kids, and Disney+ are all in the
books, or websites that your App Store. Plus, they’ll look
child encounters on the 8-inch great on the Mini’s superior 7.9-
screen is age-appropriate. Par- inch display. But the Mini also
ents can monitor their kids’ works with the Apple Pencil
usage on their own phone with ($99) and has the computing
a dashboard that lets them set brawn required to run creative
time limits and other restric- apps and host high-quality
tions. The two-year warranty video chats. If your pretween
comes in handy when Thing 2 likes to draw her own comics,
drops the Fire in a puddle. record her own dance videos,
$140 and FaceTime Grandma, the
Mini is the better pick.
$399

AMAZON’S
FREETIME PARENTAL
UNLIMITED CONTROLS
INCLUDED FOR SAFE
DOWNLOADS

COMES WITH
ITS OWN BONUS: ONE
PUFFY FREE YEAR OF
PROTECTIVE APPLE TV+
CASE

POWER USER Setting up the device Amazon Fire tablets: Android phones Apple iPhones and
with the proper paren- Set them up with an and tablets: Create iPads: Give your child
Hand-Me- tal controls will let you Amazon FreeTime a Google account for their own Apple ID,
block apps, set time account, which will them, then keep tabs then set up Family
Downs 101 limits, and review any let you manage their on their usage and Sharing. On any iPhone,
Have an old smart- game, app, or video access from any set restrictions with iPad, or Mac, go to
phone or tablet lying your child tries to pur- web browser. Surf to Google’s Family Link Settings > (your name)
around? Here’s how chase. Follow these [Link] mobile app, which and add Apple IDs for
to prep it for your device-specific steps. to restrict content you install on your your kids. Set rules for
bored kid. —A.S. and time spent. own phone. each family member.
 Get More A.I.
Get More Robots
Get More Ideas
Get More Rockets
Get More Crispr
Get More Blockchain
Get More Informed
Get More at [Link]
Christie Hemm Klok

Subscribers get unlimited access to all WIRED stories online.

To authenticate your subscription, go to [Link]/register. Not a subscriber but want to get the
best daily news and analysis of the biggest stories in tech? Subscribe at [Link]/subscribe.
GADGET LAB → BACK TO SCHOOL

Tot ↘

WHEELS
The best way to haul tiny humans by bike is
with the help of an electric motor. Our favorite
family ebikes are maneuverable, powerful, and
computer-controlled. —Adrienne So

FOR MORE BUYING

ADVICE, VISIT
[Link]/GEAR

•••
0 2 6
 TOP 3

Rad Power Bikes

RadWagon 4
Seattle-based Rad makes affordable
ebikes that ship directly to your home.
(Don’t worry, they’re easy to assemble.)
The newest RadWagon combines small,
fat tires and a low center of gravity to
give it a stable ride, and adding rear-rack
accessories like grip bars, a seat pad,
and foot pegs turns it into a kid carrier.
The 750-watt rear hub motor offers five
levels of pedal assistance to climb hills or
power over gritty gravel at a top speed
of 20 mph, the limit for most ebikes in US
cities. You can also easily adjust the tele-
scoping seat post and handlebar stem to
accommodate two different-size parents
for shared school pickups and drop-offs.
$1,599
(Accessories $25 and up)

Tern HSD S8i

This compact ebike is only 5.5 feet long—
about the length of an average road bicy-
cle. Despite the small size, it can carry an
adult, a kid or two, and a week’s worth of
groceries after you attach the accessories
you need (seats, grip bars, panniers) to its
rear and front racks. The 400-watt Bosch
motor provides four levels of pedal assis-
tance. The bike also has all the safety and
comfort accoutrements you need in a city:
headlights and tail lights, hydraulic disc
brakes, front fork suspension, and an
integrated wheel lock to secure the bike
during quick bodega stops. Storage is
convenient too. Stand it on its tail to stash
it in a corner, or fold down the handlebars
to shove it into a car.
$3,099
(Accessories $40 and up)

Urban Arrow Family

When you take the kids out in the car, do
you throw bags and bags of gear, snacks,
and toys into your trunk? Then you need a
bakfiets, a Dutch-style front-loading cargo
bike. The easy-to-steer Family is powered
by a 570-watt Bosch motor with four levels
of assistance, and the frame sports a low
box in front that lets you keep an eye on
the cargo, human or otherwise. Just buckle
your kids into their plushy padded seats
(a two-seat bench is included) and go. Its
Enviolo hub has a wide range of shifting
options (but no discrete gears); twist the
shifter by tiny increments to fine-tune just
how hard you need to pedal up even the
steepest hills.
$4,999
GADGET LAB → BACK TO SCHOOL

Meet ↘

SPACE
You’re stuck at home and feeling isolated;
WEEKEND
chances are your kid is too. Here’s how to help them
PROJECT
make their own area—for remote schoolwork or
just e-hanging with friends. —Boone Ashworth

OBJECTIVE STEP BY STEP

FIND YOUR SOUND FRAME THE SHOT

Unless you want to go mad from the shrieks Figure out the right height and placement
of every child on the Zoom call, get your for both the device and the child, and advise
kid some headphones. We recommend the your kid to stay at eye level with the cam-
$80 Puro Sound BT2200 Bluetooth model era—unless everyone on the call wants to
for youngsters. They isolate outside noise peer straight up their nose. Filucci says to
GEAR UP and limit the volume to eardrum-safe deci- also consider what’s being revealed by the
bel levels. If the quality of your kid’s audio camera: “That could be details about your
You’ll need a is important (maybe they’re in an a cappella kid’s bedroom that may feel super personal.
device with a group), invest in a dedicated microphone or How much of that information do you want
camera. Laptops a gaming headset with a high-quality mic. to be potentially public or shared?”
are the obvious
choice: They’re
the most versatile
GET SETTLED and require fewer
accessories. (See
Every kid needs page 22 for our BRIGHTEN THE SCENE
a Zoom zone to student Chrome-
call their own. “In book picks.) Tab- Being able to read others’
a perfect world, lets can also facial expressions on a video
a child has a des- work, especially chat goes a long way toward
ignated study ones designed making people feel more con-
space with lim- for kids. A smart- nected. If your kid’s image is
ited distractions, phone will suffice dark and blurry, it’s easier for
with all of their in a pinch but not them to disappear in the grid BUILD A
tech needs fig- for doing school- of faces. Keep light sources BACKDROP
ured out and work. Just sta- behind the camera and away
set up ahead of bilize the device: from the lens. Avoid backlight- To win back some
time,” says Sierra Get a sturdy ing. If their room is too dim, clip privacy, set up
Filucci, edito- stand or prop it a $60 Lume Cube Panel Mini a backdrop. Try
rial director of against a stack of video light to their device. erecting a trifold
Common Sense books. display board, like
Media, a non- the kind kids use
profit children’s for science fair
advocacy group. uuuuuuuu
uuuuuuu projects. Zoom’s
If they don’t have uuuuuuuu 1: “virtual back-
uuuuuuu 1:
their own desk, uuuuuuuu r ground” feature
set them up in a is another option;
shared space, like your kid can
the kitchen table. appear in front of
Use masking tape a beautiful vista
to mark out an or a psychedelic
area they can be dreamscape. For
in charge of. added realism,
set up a green
screen behind
your child. This
trick, borrowed
from television,
helps the com-
puter’s camera
see the outline
of the human in
the shot. Buy a
premade green
screen, or just
paint your own.

•••
0 2 8 ILLUSTRATIONS / STORYTK
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PAINTING / JENNY SHARAF

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0 3 1
TikTok is joy and creativity, is Generation Z, is the future of entertainment—
 is the exploitation of Black culture at its most refined and disturbing.

STOLEN
MOMENTS
by Jason Parham Photographs by Jessica Pettway
 034

E V E RY T H I N G W I L L C H A N G E I N S I X D AY S ,
when George Floyd stops breathing under
the knee of a white police officer. But for
now, it is May 19, an ordinary day during
a global pandemic, and Brianna Black-
mon is just waking up in her bedroom in
Columbia, South Carolina, where she lives
with her boyfriend and their blue-nose pit
bull, DJ.
Blackmon showers, carefully applies
powder-blue eyeshadow in the bath-
room mirror, and marbles her lips with a
muted sparkle gloss. The shirt she picks out
is a simple crop top, on which the phrase
“More Self-Love” is printed. Blackmon is a
23-year-old musician who performs under
the name BJ From the Burbs. After she fin-
ishes her morning routine, she walks into
her home office to record a new freestyle.
The space doubles as a makeshift studio,
and today’s session will be extra special.
Once there, comfortably situated on the
couch, Blackmon opens the TikTok app
on her phone and taps Record.
The night before, Blackmon got word
about Blackout Day, a demonstration of Within a month of
being on TikTok,
solidarity among Black users on TikTok Brianna Blackmon
who claim the platform is unfairly censor- had a viral hit.
“MY BLACKNESS
IS NOT A SHOW.”
ing them. To show unity, all creators were
asked to switch their avatars to an image
of a Black Power fist. She wants this free-
style to be her contribution. By the sixth
take, Blackmon lands on a version she’s
happy with and uploads it to her 176,000
followers. Over a slow-building trap beat,
she rides the bubbling momentum. “Black
creators on this app have had enough,” she
raps. “So we switched our pictures, put our
fists up just to say what’s up.” Before long,
the 53-second freestyle is doing numbers,
making rounds on other users’ personal
feeds—the algorithmically driven For You
pages. The praise floods in.
“Go awf,” comments @vixxienewell.
“YESS!!!” says @taylorcassidyj, one of the
app’s more visible Black creators.
“I have chills mama,” says @seiricean.
Adds @d_damodel: “Ayeeee ok
.”
Blackmon uploads three more videos
throughout the day. In one, she urges fol-
lowers to donate “to the collection plate in
my bio” (aka her CashApp). None of them
performs quite as well as the initial free-
style, but she’s satisfied and considers the
day a win.
When Blackmon opens TikTok again the
following morning—“to check my views,”
she says—she realizes something has gone
wrong. Her freestyle post is still there, but
it’s now silent. The audio has been com-
pletely removed. In her three months on
the app, it’s a first. “You know how you get
an instinct where you’re like, ‘That’s not
right’?” Blackmon tells me in June, when
we talk by phone. “That one did not sit well
with my spirit.”
TikTok often mutes posts for violating its
community guidelines, but Blackmon isn’t
told which guideline she violated. As is typ-
ical in these cases, she’s given no explana-
tion or notice of any kind. She reflects back
on the video—no cursing, no hate speech,
nothing too controversial. When she looks
Matthew Hope created the hashtag
for a way to appeal the decision, she can’t #BlackCreatorsFedUp on TikTok.
find one. She’s left only with a suspicion, a Black slang. In one of the most recog-
taste of something bitter. “It’s not just me,” nized Vines during that period, 16-year-
Blackmon says. “They are picking on cer- old Kayla Newman—best known by her
tain types of creators.” alias, Peaches Monroee—delights in her
The following day, sans makeup, Black- own fabulousness. “On fleek” was born,
mon uploads another video, done in one and The Culture adjusted accordingly.
off-the-cuff take. “Isn’t this funny—TikTok The app eventually went bust. Its success
doesn’t silence Black creators?” she says in led competitors, like Instagram, to create
a mocking tone. “Then why did they take their own video features. And unlike You-
my sound down from my video, from Tube, Vine never figured out a way to
my pro-Black rap that went viral yes-
terday? I wonder.” It was almost too
absurd. Blackmon made a video pro-
testing censorship—and was censored. Is
BE~ORE share revenue with users; a deal to pay
top creators to produce content fell
through in 2015. Big names departed
the platform, and revenues dwindled. In
this what it meant to be Black and unapol- S H E MADE
SHE M A D E IT
I T BIG
B I G ON
O N TIKTOK,
T I K T O K , BBLACKMON
L ACKMON H AD
HAD 2017, Twitter shut down Vine, and it was
ogetic on TikTok? built modest followings on other platforms. mourned largely by millennials and Gen
TikTok has an irresistible draw. In my On YouTube, she posted videos about her Zers who’d made a home on the platform.
casual use, I often find myself spellbound life in a series she called STORYTIME. She Around that time, ByteDance, a Beijing-
by its gonzo humor and mini-blockbusters, talked about getting married at 19 (she’s based tech company at the forefront of
full of conceptual daring. The app’s direc- since divorced) and the time she tried Chinese social media, was launching an
tive, it seems, is to optimize happiness. (and failed, hilariously) to work as a strip- app called Douyin. In the early days, it was
But something lurks beneath the gloss. As per. Building an audience on Instagram used to create homemade music videos, but
TikTok has grown to more than 800 mil- proved harder. “You have to be on vaca- users quickly turned it into a marketplace
lion users, it has begun to mirror the larger tion,” Blackmon says, “or doing something for all sorts of short-form content. By 2018,
world: the quirks, passions, and prejudices extravagant,” which she wasn’t. She didn’t ByteDance had released the app outside
of the people who have started to populate feel as if she could be herself. China, acquired the lip-sync app [Link],
and influence the form. I’d heard stories Another app Blackmon checked out, but and renamed the international version Tik-
like Blackmon’s, bits and pieces of discour- only as a spectator, was Vine. Launched Tok. Vine supercharged—videos were now
agement and grievance, but I wanted to in 2013, Vine was TikTok before TikTok. capped at 15 seconds, and later 60—TikTok
understand it fully. So I started reaching With a remarkably simple premise— also offered a suite of editing tools, from
out to TikTokers in all parts of the coun- upload six-second videos that would loop filters to green-screen special effects, that
try, some veterans of the app, others new infinitely—Vine appealed to a dopamine- gave creators near-limitless possibilities.
to it, to learn about their experiences, to crazed culture that desired virality in short, In the beginning, TikTok’s embrace of
see what was going on. repetitive bursts. wackiness and absence of anything even
Over a period of two months, I heard But the real allure of the app could be marginally serious was its prime attrac-
from 29 Black creators who shared sto- traced, in large part, to the ingenuity of tion, and its most marketable one. Twitter
ries about muted posts, in-app harass- the Black creators who made much of was preoccupied with millennial bicker-
ment, and incidents of racism. They said its most irresistible content. Bought by ing; the election of Donald Trump turned
the problems on the app are deeper Twitter in 2012, Vine became the domi- Facebook into a political echo chamber;
and more widespread than simple iso- nant engine of Black culture on the inter- Instagram felt plastic; gamers ran Twitch.
lated incidents. “Ever since I joined I’ve net from around 2014 to 2016. It rivaled On TikTok, kids just wanted to have fun. It
felt like the app is against me,” one told Twitter in its capacity to incubate trends, was a place for dance challenges and well-
me. Another added, “It’s disgusting how hyping Southern dance crazes such as the ness how-tos, movie reviews and the kind
much they have allowed to go unchecked.” Nae Nae and career-boosting comedians of existence-pondering comedy sketches
Together, their experiences belie the per- like King Bach. “I was there for the short BoJack Horseman might post were he on
ception of TikTok as an app of joy and cre- comedy,” Blackmon says. Arguably Vine’s the app (or real). The platform elevated
ativity, revealing instead a place tangled biggest impact was how it mainstreamed creativity and experimentation above all
up in an ancient pain—a site of blurred else; its algorithm, as Blackmon puts it, is
visions and youthful ignorances, where generous. Though personalized based on
flattery quickly turns into mockery, mock- 037 user activity, For You feeds retain a light
ery into theft, and theft into something randomness—according to TikTok, the
altogether more disturbing. algorithm tries to avoid duplicating con-
tent or privileging accounts with large fol- Videos like Guarino’s are among a dis-
lowings. As Blackmon says, “it’s one of the turbing and ongoing form of content pro-
only places where you can have no follow- duction that suggests a twisted love of
ing, no content, and you post one thing and
it gets a million views in a day.”
Blackmon signed up for TikTok in Feb-
ruary, about a month before the Covid-
IN Black culture through caricature. It’s been
called digital blackface, and Blackmon
started seeing examples of it almost imme-
diately after she joined TikTok, mostly
19 stay-at-home orders started coming A V
A V II DEO
D E O UPLOADED
U P L O A D E D TO
T O TIKTOIC
TIKTOK LL AST
AST being posted by young white women and
down. Like a diary, many of her early vid- December, a white teen saunters through white gay men. “I have never seen so many
eos chronicle daily mundanities—cook- an airport terminal, roller suitcase in teenagers who are this race-obsessed,” she
ing a buffalo chicken wrap, talking about hand. As he passes the check-in counter says. “My Blackness is not a show, it’s not
natural hair, declaring a newfound love for Spirit—the notoriously awful low-cost something you just turn on.” Another user,
for iced coffee. “I don’t know what Cau- airline—a look of mild irritation crosses 19-year-old Mia Brier, calls it “low-key rac-
casian woman got into me, but iced cof- his face. He glances left, then right. “Whew ism”—you might have to sit with it for a
fee—bitch!” Blackmon says, raising the chile, the ghetto,” he says, elongating the o moment before the extent of the ugliness
glass into the video frame. “Well call me
Karen, OK,” she jokes, invoking the meme
for privileged white womanhood. With
more than half a million views, it was her
first viral hit; she’d been on the app less
than a month. A week later, she struck gold
ON TIKTOK, CREATORS
again. A video of Blackmon dancing with
a stranger in the restroom mirror at a club
racked up 615,000 views.
BLACKNESS WITH AN
TikTok, it turned out, was reminiscent of
Vine in more ways than one. The common
denominator of many of its viral moments
DRIVEN VIRTUOSITY,
is an unspoken partiality to Black cul-
tural expression. It works like an accel-
erant. Chart-topping rap songs, from the
ON BLACK RHYTHMS,
likes of Drake and K Camp and Megan
Thee Stallion, provide the soundtrack
to weekly dance challenges. Lil Nas X
AFFECT, SLANG.
is the app’s first breakout artist, and its
most recognized pedagogue around self-
improvement, Tabitha Brown, is a Black
mother and vegan from North Carolina. in ghetto. Only it’s not the young man’s voice becomes clear. (Guarino did not respond
When, at the end of 2019, a random voice- we hear. It’s that of reality diva NeNe Leakes, to messages seeking comment and before
mail of a Black woman colorfully referring whose audio was pulled, edited, and resyn- press time deleted his TikTok account.)
to her coworker Rachel as a “big, fat, white, chronized for the eight-second clip. Minstrelsy thrives on TikTok, but the
nasty-smelling, fat bitch” began to circu- Chris Guarino, the guy with the suit- phenomenon goes back a long way. The
late, the woman’s hostility and perceived case, is an 18-year-old college student in earliest American iterations emerged in
sassiness became a costume for everyone South Florida. He joined TikTok “as a joke,” the 1840s as a form of entertainment and
to put on and make their own. The collec- according to his bio, and his posts are gen- endured for more than a century. White
tive fascination again proved the point. As erally preoccupied with goofball antics. people would darken their skin with burnt
Blackmon puts it, “Be clear: Without Black Typical fare: In a video from last year, cork, greasepaint, or shoe polish and per-
culture, TikTok wouldn’t even be a thing.” he mocks his dog Coco for having a “lit- form in variety shows. The musical acts,
Other creators, the majority of them tle potato booty.” On a good day, Guarino comedy sketches, and dances relied on
white, have figured that out, too. In fact, is lucky to get 1,000 eyes on a post. That stock characters, like Sambo and Zip
they’ve come to learn that the quickest is, until December, when he uploaded the Coon, to parade Blackness as laughably
route to success on TikTok is right through Spirit airline parody. It became his biggest uneducated or as a target of humiliation.
the bountiful fields of Black expression. hit, exceeding half a million views. By the 1950s, the shows fell out of favor,
 but as Lauren Michele Jackson, the aca- rities), TikTok is a video-first platform, and
039
demic and author of White Negroes, put on it, creators embody Blackness with an
it, “the tenets of minstrel performance auteur-driven virtuosity—taking on Black
remain alive today in television, movies, rhythms, gestures, affect, slang. The most
music, and, in its most advanced iteration, effective videos come down to one fac- uploaded the first iteration of what would
on the internet.” tor: how well a creator grabs hold of our become known as the #HowsMyForm
The very tools that have made TikTok attention. That is to say, how deftly they challenge. In the opening frame, 17-year-
into one of the most efficient, visible cul- make what we watch theirs. Blackness is old Ricket sets the bait with a raunchy
tural products of the era—easy to use, a proven attention getter. Its adoption is caption: “Best S3X positions for guys with
hypercustomizable—make instances of racism, custom-fit. 9-12-inchers.” The challenge is meant to
digital blackface uniquely personal. Unlike One highly visible avatar of the trend is capitalize on a racial stereotype, which is
Facebook and Twitter, where instances the Hot Cheeto Girl, a meme that plays on soon made explicit. As rapper 645AR’s song
of digital blackface are either text-based the image of a loud and defiant low-income “Yoga” plays in the background, a new cap-
(abusing Black vernacular) or image-based youth. The hashtag has over 160 million tion appears, insisting: “Ok, now that all
(trotting out memes or GIFs of Black celeb- views and is one of the app’s more slippery the black guys are here can you help me
instances of cultural distortion. For Whitney with my waves!” The video garnered over
Roberts, a 35-year-old writer and podcast 423,000 views and birthed one monstrous
host in Philly, trends like the Hot Cheeto Girl iteration after the next.

EMBODY have a troubling history that exemplify just

one way already marginalized people are
subtly debased on the app. “There were little
Almost every #HowsMyForm video
played on degrading stereotypes of some
kind—Middle Eastern people as terror-

AUTEUR- white girls slicking their edges and draw-

ing their eyebrows all weird,” Roberts says.
“They would wrap tape around their fin-
ists, Mexicans as border-hopping illegal
immigrants, poor white people as inbred
hicks—and the majority of these videos use

TAKING gers to be their fake nails. They’d put hoops

on. When you call them out, it’s, ‘Anyone
of any race can be a Hot Cheeto Girl.’ No
a three-act structure. The opening frame
begins with a creator staring or lip-syncing
into the camera as a “how to” statement

GESTURES, sweetheart, we know what you’re doing. We

know that the Hot Cheeto Girl is just a deriv-
ative of the ghetto girl, the hood rat, the Sha-
pops on-screen (such as: “How to make
the best fried chicken”); the next frame is
followed by a greeting (such as: “Now that
naynay that people used to call Black and all the black people are here”); the stunt
Latinx women.” (TikTok has said it does not culminates in the third frame and typi-
allow blackface, but how broadly it inter- cally ends on the very question—How’s my
prets blackface is an open question. Imper- form?—from which the challenge draws
sonations for the purposes of “parody” or its name. Some of the most insidious sati-
“commentary” are permitted.) rize slavery. When viewers reach the final
The TikTok challenge is another fraught seconds of TikToker @Kalebcram’s video,
avenue for remixing racial stereotypes. he freezes in place, bending forward as he
Even if you follow TikTok only from a dis- pretends to pick cotton. “Hows my form,”
tance, you’ve likely heard about challenges. the caption reads.
Usually started by a creator or influencer, a TikTok offers creators countless ways
challenge spans all sorts of silliness. They to customize their actions for the amuse-
Jason Parham
include things like seeing which creator ment and delight of scrollers. @Kalebcram
(@nonlinearnotes) is a senior
can best choreograph a dance (#Renegade) chose to adorn his bent-over posture with
writer at wired . He wrote about
and who can swap clothes with their part- a Photoshopped cotton plant and a meme
the subscription site OnlyFans
ner in the funniest way (#FlipTheSwitch). of Martin Luther King Jr., just in case you
in issue 27.09.
They spread from the original post out- didn’t get the joke.
ward, each creator attempting to put their
own spin on it. The result has engendered a
lively, sometimes strange culture of com-
petition within the TikTok community.
Sometime on April 14, Carter Ricket
RACIAL “The N-word is only a racist word if
you use it in a racist way.”
Not long ago, a [Link] petition
was started to remove Micala from TikTok;
suffering of real people taking on cruel
shapes, remade into shareable emblems of
mockery and humor. When this happens,
Blackness—or what is perceived as Black
M O C K E R Y IIS
MOCKERY S N O T , II H
NOT, A V E TTO
HAVE O A S S U M E , TTHE
ASSUME, HE as of late July, some 880 people had signed identity—thrives outside of context. It’s
sole aim of these posts. What non-Black it. The animosity has built up to such a diluted and remixed to a dizzying degree.
creators ultimately desire is what most degree that a TikTok page was created Black people lose control over how their
TikTok creators desire—virality, clout, with the sole intent of drawing attention humanity is presented.
followers. To be seen and memed. One to her casual bigotry. Micala and I ended In 2013, the writer Aisha Harris sug-
white TikToker I spoke with, Morgan up exchanging a few messages, and at one gested that blackface’s mainstream allure
Eckroth, a 21-year-old barista in Corval- point she seemed genuinely interested in was about “a persistent, if unconscious,
lis, Oregon, fears that many of her fellow talking with me, but communication even- desire to see Black people perform.” Toni
creators don’t understand the larger con- tually went cold. Morrison took it a step further, likening the
sequences of what they’re doing. “Virality She may have been unwilling to explain centuries-old practice to a “kind of public
often occurs through shocking behavior,” her actions, but one of her videos, from pornography.” The comedian Paul Mooney
says Eckroth, whose fame is mostly rooted May, does serve as a kind of self-justi- drove the point home: “The Black man in
in videos about making coffee in a small fication. “At the end of the day, clout is America is the most copied man on this
town. “Whether it’s acting provocatively, still clout—whether it’s good clout or bad planet,” Mooney said. “Everybody wanna
bullying, or using racial slurs and stereo- clout,” she says, waving a finger in and out be a nigga but nobody wanna be a nigga.”
types, a lot of users see that their question- of the frame. “Because through the good For some, being Black in the public
able behavior gets a reaction, and that just clout you’re always going to have haters, square has meant inhabiting a deformed
encourages them.” and if you got bad clout you’re always identity, of having your Blackness mis-
Maybe so, though offending white cre- going to have supporters. So either way shapen. Call it the slow gentrification of
ators I reached out to were often either you win.” Black humanity. Call it underhanded cul-
nonresponsive or defensive on the subject Wearing a mask has long been part of the tural theft. Call it the shameless leveraging
of digital blackface, suggesting at least a social internet. The web has operated like of anti-Blackness. The incidents are infinite
vague awareness that there was something a Party City costume shop since dotcom- and varied. It happens in small exhales. It
demeaning in their behavior. One creator era chat rooms made cool the idea of happens in echoing thunderclaps.
I attempted to speak with was Micala, or inhabiting made-up identities and hiding
@Bluntshawty360 (she has since changed behind usernames. These personas could
her handle), who is known for voicing con- be intensely liberating, allowing people to
troversial opinions about the different explore hidden ideas or sexualities, or sim-
ways white people take on Black culture. ply enjoy a carnivalesque permissiveness
When I reached her by direct message in
July, she was hesitant to chat, suspicious
that I might “twist” her words and present
them out of context. Some of the things
to say or do something outrageous. It’s all
just a joke. For clout. For show.
But the mask of Blackness cannot be
worn without conse-
•
she has said on TikTok include:
“It’s 2020 and Black bitches still get mad
when a white bitch tries to act like them
or look like them. Can’t y’all just embrace
quences. It can’t be worn
as a joke without reaching
into some deep cultural
TIKTOK'
and historical ugliness, without opening
that shit?” a wound of abuse and humiliation. C O M M U N I T Y GUIDEliNES
COMMUNITY G U I D E L I N E S PROFESS
PROFESS A
A
“Y’all don’t even realize, if it wasn’t for As the web expanded, the masks came mission “to inspire creativity and bring joy.”
a certain amount of white people, y’all to audiovisual life—and the pain only But many Black users, who think they’re
would still be slaves.” deepened. In the early 2010s, Sweet fulfilling just that goal, often find them-
“I understand racism is still alive, but the Brown and Charles Ramsey offered live- selves muted, censored, or worse.
shit goes both ways on why it’s still alive.” witness accounts of real-life horrors on Earlier this year, a TikToker named Pre-
the nightly news, only to have their words cious Bissah began calling attention to spe-
refashioned and auto-tuned into inter- cific grievances. She felt that non-Black
040 net fodder. Everybody has seen “Ain’t people shouldn’t say the N-word, so she
nobody got time for that!” or “Dead give- spoke out. She felt that racism had no place
away!” filtered through social media, the on the app, so she spoke out. Her beliefs
Whitney Roberts calls
her TikTok account an
“educational platform.”

seemed to square with the kind of envi- Bissah, like many Black users, had a against community guidelines.” Bissah
ronment TikTok wants to foster: one free of so-called backup account at the ready, appealed the decision to remove her orig-
hate. Bissah ended up having her account for just this eventuality. In a video posted inal account, and seven weeks later Tik-
taken from her without explanation; she to this new account, Bissah talked about Tok restored it.
believes she was reported by people who what drove her to join the app in the first Other Black users share similar expe-
took issue with what she had to say. “Basi- place. “I wanted to uplift people who look riences. On Blackout Day, a 16-year-old
cally they were mad that I was pro-Black,” like me,” she said. “Growing up I was never named Iman, who goes by @theemuse on
she told me over email. Perhaps Bissah was comfortable in my skin. I wanted to bleach TikTok, posted a video in which she duets a
somehow seen to run afoul of TikTok’s rule my skin. I was not comfortable with being fellow user “who said she could go and buy
against “hateful ideologies.” Often, pro- who I am.” TikTok presented her with an Black people.” (A “duet” is when two videos
Black rhetoric—Bissah’s page is all about opportunity to reach young women just are spliced side by side and play simulta-
uplifting Black girls and women—is mis- like herself, “to let them know that they’re neously.) TikTok, which insists speech that
understood as anti-white. beautiful. I don’t understand why that is “dehumanizes” protected groups is never
tolerated, removed Iman’s video but left
the original one untouched. When I asked
TikTok to respond to Iman’s case, as well
as Bissah’s and many others, the company
declined to comment.
“It’s definitely discouraging,” says Mat-
thew Hope, who is 18 and lives just outside
Atlanta. He started the hashtag #BlackCre-
atorsFedUp. “Black creators have called me
and told me that they don’t want to post
anymore.” I heard a version of this from
so many of them that their stories began to
bleed into and out of one another, painting
a troubling portrait of the various and com-
plex ways that Black creators face harass-
ment. Here are several more:
Jamia Morales (@mia_mor.18): “The big-
ger I get, the more I realize—I can always
be myself but I can’t always be as outspo-
ken. They call me a nigger—with the e-r—
they call me a monkey, they call me an
uneducated Black person.”
Aiyana Katori (@aiyanakatori): “I see
people duetting other Black creators’ stuff
only to tell them to go back where they
came from or comment on their ‘nigger
appearance.’ ”
Whitney Roberts (@antiblackfishclub):
“People were leaving monkey emoji in my
comments over a video where I was talking
about clothes, something frivolous and
funny. In another video I was just talking
about 4c hair, about a different grade of
hair, and why people shouldn’t necessarily
diminish it. That got taken down. But there
are whole blackface videos that won’t get
taken down.”
Avalon Rose (@[Link]): “I’ve
seen videos saying all Black people are
 Nineteen-year-old Mia Brier uses TikTok
to post about race and gender issues.

thugs and rapists.” letter said. “We welcome the voices of the tive leadership, established a fund to gen-
Jawanza Tucker (@rekcut_): “I made a Black community wholeheartedly.” Not erate revenue for users, and hired an AI
TikTok doing sign language, and then I once, however, were the specific con- policy analyst whose research focuses on
got reported—it’s such bullshit.” (People cerns of Black creators—being muted for racial bias in algorithms. The company has
may have reported the sign language as nonoffensive speech, getting harassed by promised it will check in with Black cre-
“gang signs.”) perpetrators who face little or no con- ators again in early fall to get feedback.
Matthew Hope (@[Link]): “It’s clear sequences, the very existence of digital “When I think of the most inspiring, cre-
that people are freely allowed to express blackface—addressed in the letter. One ative voices on our platform, Black creators
their radical beliefs or political ideologies— creator described the company’s response II are a huge part of that,” Kudzi Chikumbu,
just not Black people.” to me as “a poetically structured PR stunt.” the director of TikTok’s creator community,
Hadeal Abdelatti (@hadealspeaks): “I TikTok continues to make announce- tells me. “We know we have work to do.”
have seen people say ‘You are subhuman’ ments. It has formed a “creator diversity It’s not the only thing they’re work-
and ‘If Black people get equality then collective” to regularly meet with execu- ing on. As relations between Washington
where will I get my pets?’ ”
Sudani R. (@theesudani): “I and several
other Black girls were harassed by this
white man claiming to be ‘Afro-sexual.’
He would duet videos of young Black girls
sexualizing us and being disgusting. Tik-
Tok did absolutely nothing until a white
TikToker made up a conspiracy about him
murdering a Black woman and he was
mass reported. If he was targeting and
harassing young white girls he wouldn’t
have had his page up for as long as he did.”
Mia Brier (@garfieldsfatbussyy): “It takes
a lot for Black people to get justice in this
world. It takes us going crazy.”
When everything changed on May 25—
when a police officer knelt on a man’s neck
as he struggled to breathe, and this coun-
try woke up to at least some understand-
ing of systemic racism—nothing much
changed for Black creators on TikTok. They
remained vulnerable to hate, sometimes
overwhelming hate. The company, mean-
while, expressed a desire to course-correct.
Protesters in the millions were pouring out
onto the streets, and in early June, TikTok
took a series of steps to acknowledge just
how badly it had failed its Black creator
community. That, in fact, there might be a
race problem after all.
In an attempt to open the channels
of communication, TikTok promised to
“repair that trust” and “actively promote
and protect” diversity across the platform.
In a letter released two weeks after Black-
out Day, the company partially owned up
to the uneven treatment of its Black cre-
ators, apologizing to anyone who has “felt
unsafe, unsupported, or suppressed,” the
and Beijing have deteriorated, a number screen I gazed out into a kind of Black over the past few months in lockdown
of US lawmakers have fretted over Tik- Universe. Here were Black people doing reporting this story, you begin to see it as a
Tok’s potential ties to the Chinese gov- what we do: playing spades at a barbecue; prism through which to better understand
ernment. In July, as part of his reelection hanging out with family members back yourself and the world around you—what
campaign, President Trump began running home, caught mid-laugh. We posed for draws you in, what makes you laugh, what
ads on Facebook and Instagram proclaim- the camera every chance we got because repels you. There were moments when,
ing, “TikTok is spying on you.” (Security we understood, though we never spoke it, scrolling through TikTok, I began to look
experts say the company’s data collection that we’d exist here—somewhere—for- upon myself not as I am but as blurred pro-
seems to be in line with other social media ever. There was air in our lungs, fire in jections of a fractured self.
apps.) TikTok has already been outlawed our bones. The world of technology has always
in India, one of the company’s most influ- As a Black man, my relationship to understood its function as radical and
ential markets. images is fraught. Fraught in the sense that, utopian. It has been less inclined to
Of course, none of this changes the feel- if images speak our humanness into being, acknowledge how dismissive it can be of
ings and experiences of users, the actual if they tell us how we are made visible to margins and the people who arise from
people who use the app and offer up their ourselves and to others, it is also a language those spaces; how, when unattended, it
data for manipulation. If the concern is that is often used against us: as surveillance, can quicken erasure. TikTok is Genera-
their safety and security—and it should as documentation, through grainy smart- tion Z. It is both the most exciting cultural
be—perhaps that concern should extend phone cameras as figures of unwant. This product of this time and also at grave risk
to their daily encounters with racism. is America, after all, where Black humanity of alienating the very people it needs to
Because in America, racism is the very air has barely been recognized. succeed. Radiating in these videos are
we breathe. If we can breathe at all. TikTok may very well be the future of forms of Blackness that are profoundly
the image. Never have moving pictures felt resilient and, thus, profoundly beautiful.
as urgent, mesmerizing, and immediate In this urgency from creators to speak
as they do on the app. At their best, their loudly and unceasingly is an even more
most useful, these images flicker across incandescent image of Blackness, one that
our screens with an infectious kineticism. says I won’t be contained, I won’t be made
These images bring us joy. Especially now, insignificant.
they bring us relief, they bring us wonder. Although TikTok eventually restored
And they’re built, by design, on a kind the audio on her Blackout Day freestyle,
of appropriation—the original lip-syncing Blackmon is trying to avoid further con-
app required users to mime existing audio. troversy. These days, she mostly posts
TikTok hinges on how imaginatively users spur-of-the-moment content, including
can build upon something that’s already occasional food commentary, or what she
out there; it becomes all about the trans- calls her “Real B*tch Reviews.” (She’s a fan
formation. What sours this creative of bagels and warns against buying Morn-
A S LLONG
ONG A
ASS II CAN
C A N RUMEMIEit,
E M E M B E R , II'VE
’ V E BIUN
EEN repackaging, mutates the joy into hate- ingstar chicken nuggets or using mustard
drawn to images that affirm Black life. I fulness, is when the content is estranged as a dipping sauce for carrots.) Yet she still
didn’t always know why, but I did recog- from its original context. The way some- feels watched. When she texts me out of
nize a temptation in them, and a danger. I one or something can so quickly and eas- the blue in mid-July, it’s to inform me that
searched for them everywhere—in video- ily be warped, diluted, recast as something another post of hers, a joke about hair, has
games and movies, on TV shows like Mar- other. The way one’s culture can be sto- just been muted.
tin, in the issues of Vibe and XXL I’d thumb len and made monstrous, made meaning- I keep returning to something she told
through during weekend grocery runs with less. “TikTok all but eradicates traditional me in our very first conversation. We were
my mom. They spoke to me. I wanted to norms about cultural ownership,” the critic talking about how certain TikTokers act in
understand. I listened. Jon Caramanica has written. If you spend real life, when they’ve turned off the cam-
But it wasn’t until college, where I spent a long enough time on the app, as I did era. Maybe they’re nice kids. Maybe they’re
hours a day clicking through Facebook, not overtly racist. So what then? “When
feeling connected to a world and the peo- people do those things on the app to get
ple who made it for what felt like the very 043 clout, to get views, to get fame, but then
first time, that I finally began to articulate they’re a completely different person off
what part of me had known since boyhood: the app,” Blackmon said, “that is where the
that images make us true. From my laptop problem lies.” �
SAN
FRANCISCO’S
HARD-WON

1978 > 1986 >

IMMUNE
SYSTEM 1989 >
 PEOP~E WITH AIDS
ALLIANCE

1983 > 2 011 >

Why did a city beset by

dysfunction and inequality
face the onset of Covid-19
better than any other major
American metropolis? Because
history gave it some very
powerful and specific
societal antibodies.
1979 >

BY > DA N IE L DUA NE

2020 >
TO
BACK IN 1977, WHEN A KOREAN
War veteran named Harvey Milk won
election to the San Francisco Board of
Supervisors, he became California’s first
openly gay public official. A year later, when
a former city supervisor carried a handgun
into the beautiful beaux arts City Hall, shot
Mayor George Moscone to death, and then
did the same to Milk, the citywide trauma
stitched LGBTQ identity irrevocably into
the fabric of San Francisco public life. Three
years later, when the earliest AIDS cases
hit San Francisco, the city responded with
more compassion and scientific curiosity
than ideological judgment.
It helped that San Francisco’s major
public health institutions had unusually
live in San Francisco for the past 20 years 30s in June and, even during a midsummer close ties to one another. The sole medical
has been to live with outrage that a soci- bump, never became unmanageable. school in town, the superb UCSF School of
ety so innovative and compassionate can Caveats are in order, of course. Low- Medicine, operated its own teaching hos-
so reliably fail to meet even the most basic income communities suffered more than pitals and also provided doctors to San
challenges of public life. their share of infection, and roughly 20 per- Francisco General Hospital, a sprawling
This city never stopped being pretty— cent of the city’s working-age people filed for brick colossus in the historically working-

Archives, San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library; AP Photo/Jason M. Grow; AP Photo/Eric Risberg; Lacy Atkins/
Previous spread, left to right by row: Terry Schmitt/San Francisco Chronicle/Polaris; San Francisco General Hospital Aids Ward 5b/5a
salmon boats on the bay, coyotes in the unemployment in a matter of weeks. The city class Mission District, run by the city’s pub-
park—and the local spirit of utopian toler- also has an abundance of affluence, which lic health department. San Francisco also
ance feels very much alive. Rainbow flags turns out to be protective against Covid-19, happens to be both a city and a county,
outnumber Stars and Stripes, teenage run- because spacious living quarters and bank meaning the mayor has direct control of the
aways dance on the grass at Hippie Hill in accounts insulate people from one another. health department, the health department

San Francisco Chronicle/Polaris; AP Images/Paul Sakuma; Jessica Christian/San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images
Golden Gate Park, and tech entrepreneurs Yet, consider the obvious compari- has direct access to the mayor, and both
promise to make the world a better place. son: New York City, where the pandemic work with top-line researchers at UCSF.
Still, it gets hard to stomach a place where hit almost simultaneously. In the first two Throughout the early ’80s, as AIDS dev-
the world’s finest computer engineers design months of New York’s initial outbreak, more astated entire San Francisco neighbor-
weed-delivery apps while destitute families than 14,700 residents died of Covid. San hoods, national journalists were still calling
live in cars and heroin addicts defecate on Francisco has a tenth of the population, so the AIDS “gay-related immunodeficiency”
sidewalks—where a startup like AltSchool comparable death toll would’ve been 1,470. and describing its risk factors as 4H—as in
can raise nearly $200 million to reinvent The actual number was 35. On April 7, New homosexuals, heroin users, hemophiliacs,
education and squander it while public York’s single worst day, 597 people died. On and Haitians. UCSF clinicians, meanwhile,
schoolteachers earn so little that the city has San Francisco’s worst day, three people died. were busy launching the world’s first ded-
to build subsidized apartments for them. The New York has a higher population den- icated AIDS units, wards 86 and 5b at San
more Black Lives Matter window posters one sity than San Francisco, but San Francisco Francisco General, and founding the Center
sees in rich-liberal neighborhoods that con- is still one of the most dense cities in the for AIDS Prevention Studies, one of the first
sistently oppose public housing, the more country. Yet it maintained a far lower total of its kind. Before President Ronald Reagan
clear it becomes that something is wrong mortality rate (even through midsummer) managed to say the word “AIDS” in public,
with San Francisco progressivism. than less dense cities nationwide—5.9
So it comes as a welcome surprise that deaths per 100,000 residents. The figure for
San Francisco executed by far the most suc- Dallas was more than six times that; for Los P H OTO GR AP H S BY >
cessful initial response to Covid-19 of any Angeles and Boston, 17 times; Chicago, 45. E R I C A D E E M AN
major American city. As the US federal gov- It wasn’t just big cities, either. Any county-
ernment humiliated itself with a pandemic by-county pandemic map of the United
response that ranks among the world’s States revealed countless places with lower
worst, and hundreds of health care work- density and worse outcomes.
ers nationwide lost their lives, San Francisco So how did San Francisco fare so well? /

flattened its early infection curve at a bless- Why such unusual numbers? The answer
edly low level. Local hospitals never had begins with the city’s old utopian tolerance
more than 100 patients hospitalized with and runs deeply through its experience with
Covid-19. That number dipped into the low the last great global pandemic.

•••
0 4 6
UCSF and SF General were developing the
San Francisco model of AIDS care—now
the global standard—with teams of nurses,
social workers, nutritionists, doctors, addic-
tion specialists, and psychiatrists all work-
ing together.
As thousands of San Franciscans lost their
lives to AIDS, this collaboration between a
first-rate medical school and a municipal
public health department proved a powerful
magnet for ambitious researchers all over
the country. Diane Havlir, for one, was just
out of Duke Medical School in 1984 when
she moved to San Francisco, precisely to
work on AIDS—“running toward the fire,”
as she puts it. She ended up helping to pio-
neer lifesaving retroviral therapies for AIDS,
served on the World Health Organization’s
HIV guidelines committee, and eventually
took over UCSF’s HIV and Infectious Disease
Division, which included the original Ward
86. “A dream job,” she says.
By the early 2000s, AIDS was the lead-
ing cause of death worldwide for people
between the ages of 15 and 59, and San
Francisco was the world’s most mature hub
of research and practice addressing the epi-
demic. At the same time, the first dotcom
bust was yielding to the tech boom that
gave us Facebook and Google. A new tide
of computer scientists and venture capital-
ists mingled with San Francisco’s existing
population of medical researchers, and in
the late ’90s and early 2000s, city govern-
ment rezoned more than 300 acres of an
old industrial district to create the Mission
Bay Biotech Cluster. That city within a city,
built on landfill atop a former bay inlet,
now houses biotech startup incubators
and a UCSF children’s hospital financed
by Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff. It’s also
the home of the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub,
a nonprofit created by Mark Zuckerberg
and Priscilla Chan with an endowment of
$600 million and the philanthropic goal of
eradicating or managing all human disease
within the lifetime of today’s children. The “If a doctor who was part of
result has been to make this midsize city,
with only a single medical school—run by
what was happening in San
the state, no less—into the biotech capital Francisco during the AIDS
of the US, rivaled only by Boston, which has crisis is telling you, ‘You got
three medical schools, and far exceeding something to worry about,’ ”
New York City, which has seven.
Put another way, the quality of openness
says/ San Francisco mayor
that made San Francisco an early cradle of London Breed, “then you got
LGBTQ life inspired a response to HIV/AIDS something
/ to worry about.”
S O C I A L- D I S TA N C I N G C I R C L E S I N M I S S I O N D O L O R E S PA R K S F ’ S L A R G E S T H O M E L E S S S H E LT E R , M S C S O U T H

so vigorous that it transformed this city’s that once it got here it would move quickly, surge wards filled with intensive-care beds.
entire public health landscape into one of and also a foreboding sense that there was Colfax’s office streamlined command and
international significance. not a coordinated federal response. We were control to focus the entire department on the
going to need to react locally and regionally novel coronavirus. Less than a week later, on
and create systems without sufficient oper- January 27, Breed activated the city govern-
ON DECEMBER 31 LAST YEAR, ational support from the federal side.” ment’s own Emergency Operations Center,
Chinese health officials released their first Deciding it was time to tell the mayor, preparing to coordinate a response across
official report of a mysterious pneumo- Colfax walked out of his office in San departments, plan outreach efforts, and com-
nia outbreak in the city of Wuhan. Within Francisco’s Civic Center Plaza, crossed Grove mandeer city property and resources.
a day, a Reuters article about that outbreak Street, ascended the broad marble steps of The next obvious step was to mobilize the
appeared in one of the many professional City Hall, and made his way up to the second city government as a whole and prepare the
daily newsfeeds to which Diane Havlir floor. There, he briefed Mayor London Breed, public for profound disruptions to daily life.
subscribes. a pragmatic San Francisco native who grew Both carried political and economic risks,
“Whenever a new epidemic comes out, up in low-income housing near City Hall. given that tourism was already cratering
I’m at the edge of my seat, reading every new Breed confesses that she was initially skep- in San Francisco’s Chinatown; word of an
fact,” says Havlir. By early January, Havlir’s tical in the face of Colfax’s alarm. impending epidemic had the potential to
newsfeeds were carrying daily updates, “I was getting a little tired of hearing every spread the damage across the city’s entire
including news of an early epidemiological day that this thing is going to be big,” says $10 billion annual tourist industry.
link to a seafood market in Wuhan. Breed. “I was like, ‘We don’t have any cases!’ Breed let a few weeks go by, even as
“I remember it quickly became clear this I don’t think I really understood until they Covid-19 patients from outside San Francisco
was no SARS,” says Havlir. “SARS affected explained, ‘Here’s the number of hospital arrived by ambulance at the shadowy con-
8,000 people, and this virus was taking beds we have and ICUs and ventilators, and crete entrance to the emergency department
off and transmitting at a much more rapid if we do nothing, people are going to die, like at UCSF. In the last week of February, though,
pace in a country that responded quickly, a lot of people.’ ” Colfax’s warnings became more urgent.
where masks were not stigmatized and peo- On January 21, with only a single con- As he put it to me, “All the expertise in the
ple would stay home, and they could build a firmed case in the US, and President Trump department is saying to go now.”
hospital in two weeks.” still insisting he was “not at all” worried about “My response was, ‘We’re in trouble,’ ”
The Wuhan outbreak also caught the a pandemic and that “we have it totally under Breed recalls. “If a doctor who was part of
attention of Grant Colfax, who had done his control,” emergency preparedness plans what was happening in San Francisco during
medical residency at UCSF and served as were activated simultaneously at three major the AIDS crisis is telling you, ‘You got some-
President Obama’s director of national AIDS San Francisco institutions: the teaching hos- thing to worry about,’ then you got some-
policy before taking his current job as direc- pital at UCSF Medical Center, SF General, and thing to worry about.”
tor of the San Francisco Department of Public Colfax’s office at the Department of Public On February 25, with only 53 confirmed
Health. “As I was watching the data,” Colfax Health. The two hospitals canceled elective cases in the US, 10 in California, and still not
told me, “there was an increasing consensus surgeries and cleared entire floors to create a single one confirmed to have been con-

•••
0 4 8
A S H U T T E R E D D O G - G R O O M I N G S H O P I N N O E VA L L E Y H E A LT H D E PA R T M E N T S I G N S , S E E N E V E R Y W H E R E

tracted by a San Francisco resident, Breed dangerous than out. Reports of doctors and thousands of people in the Bay Area to work
called a press conference in the majestic nurses in China dying added to the uncer- from home. This had both the powerful prac-
neoclassical rotunda of City Hall. Wearing a tainty about who was most vulnerable. That tical effect of taking people out of circulation
royal-blue suit and with Colfax at her side, made it difficult for Christie to know what and an arguably greater cultural effect.
and speaking to a small clutch of reporters measures could protect Twitter employees “These are global companies, and the
and photographers, Breed declared a local inside company offices, much less in pub- reason they have become trillion-dollar
state of emergency. With the stroke of a pen, lic places or on mass transit to and from companies is that they’re really good at
she made all 30,000 city employees subject work. Looking at preliminary public mea- taking complex data and doing smart
to conversion into emergency workers and sures like Breed’s emergency declaration, things with it,” says Bob Wachter, the chair
eliminated bureaucratic red tape to allow Christie sensed that city officials were strug- of UCSF’s Department of Medicine and,
decisive action by a normally sclerotic city gling with the same uncertainty. on the strength of edifying tweeting, San
bureaucracy. Twitter execs realized they couldn’t Francisco’s unofficial town crier for the
afford to stand by until the science and offi- pandemic. “If these companies were tak-
cial guidance were settled. “If we wait for ing this seriously, that got me to sit up and
LESS THAN HALF A MILE FROM enough data to present itself for a jurisdic- take notice, and it got others to sit up and
City Hall, in a block-long, 1937 art deco tion to make a confident decision,” Christie take notice.”
monolith, one particular company was remembers thinking, “we might be too late It didn’t hurt that city officials were on the
responding with similar speed. Twitter, like for our own people.” same page. On March 2, the very day Twitter
most tech firms, likes to ground strategy and On Wednesday, February 26, the execu- encouraged all its employees to work from
decisionmaking in quantitative metrics, but tive team ordered every Twitter employee home—and within hours of a tweet from
the early days of the pandemic frustrated in Japan to begin working at home imme- New York mayor Bill de Blasio encourag-
that impulse. “Where we found ourselves diately. Two days later workers in Korea ing his constituents to “go on with your lives
was having to make decisions based on lack were told to stay home. A directive for the + get out on the town”—Breed encouraged
of data,” says Jennifer Christie, Twitter’s chief rest of the company’s staff wasn’t far behind. San Franciscans, via Twitter, to “prepare for
in charge of the company’s workforce. By On Friday, the 28th, Christie stepped into possible disruption from an outbreak” by
mid- to late February, news out of China was a conference room with CEO Jack Dorsey keeping medications on hand, making plans
already suggesting that Covid-19 spread fast and other executives. “We decided that for childcare if schools closed or parents got
and killed people. By that point, Christie and on Monday we had to strongly encourage sick, and caring for any family members
the rest of the company’s executives were everybody to stay home,” she says. who fell ill.
trying to figure out how to protect Twitter’s By the end of that week, Lyft, Facebook, Around the same time, Colfax called Diane
5,000-plus worldwide employees. But the Google, Apple, and Salesforce had all fol- Havlir at UCSF to ask her and a few col-
mechanisms of the virus’s spread were lowed Twitter’s example, and San Francisco leagues, including an epidemiologist named
unclear—whether it was mostly spread discovered its first two cases of local resi- George Rutherford, yet another veteran local
through the air or via contact with contam- dents with Covid-19. Collectively, these AIDS researcher, to create an informal advi-
inated surfaces, whether indoors was more companies eventually ordered many tens of sory group—keeping an eye on emerging
 '

science and passing along what they learned. health officers’ announcement. On Monday IN THE FIRST WEEK OF MARCH, A
The group convened for the first time on morning, according to her office, two things UCSF biochemist named Joe DeRisi noticed
March 6. From then on, information about happened at once: The health officers his phone buzzing with an unfamiliar num-
the virus flowed directly from some of the delayed their press conference, and word of ber. A wiry, white-haired doctor in his early
world’s leading infectious-disease epidemi- Breed’s impending announcement leaked fifties and a longtime colleague of Havlir
ologists through Colfax to a mayor in charge to the local press, effectively making Breed and Rutherford, DeRisi first made a name
of every city and county agency. the first elected official in the US to order her for himself by inventing a device called the
The day of the advisory group’s first meet- jurisdiction’s residents to shelter at home. Virochip that can speedily identify viruses in
ing, Breed and Colfax urged everyone over That afternoon, as foot and car traf- blood or spinal fluid, and for using it to iden-
the age of 60 to work from home, businesses fic thickened with San Franciscans panic- tify the SARS virus in 2003.
to freeze nonessential employee travel and shopping for all-purpose flour and toilet When DeRisi answered the phone that
large in-person meetings, and all concerts paper, all those county health officers held day, he recalls hearing a man’s voice say,
and conventions to be canceled. In days to their own press conference, closing non- “Hey, this is Gavin”—as in, Gavin Newsom,
follow, as news broke of a terrifying outbreak essential businesses across the region and governor of California.
at a nursing home in Washington state, Breed collectively ordering nearly 7 million Bay “I don’t know who gave him my number,”
and Colfax issued increasingly restrictive Area residents to shelter at home. DeRisi says. “He basically said, you know,
public health orders: banning most visits to “You got lucky with your politicians,” says ‘What can the state do right? What could the
the enormous Laguna Honda Hospital, a city- Peter Staley, a longtime AIDS activist who state do wrong?’”
run nursing home with 780 residents; order- now lives in New York. “New York did not, As it happened, DeRisi had strong opinions
ing deep cleaning of single-room-occupancy and obviously the nation did not. It really on the matter. In addition to his post at UCSF,
hotels where residents often lived in crowded triggered everybody who survived the early DeRisi is also co-president of CZ Biohub,
conditions; and shutting down the entire San AIDS years, all the early AIDS activists who Zuckerberg and Chan’s $600 million moon
Francisco Unified School District. watched all our friends die because Ronald shot in the fight against human disease. Back
Colfax also convinced Breed to put a mor- Reagan didn’t do the right thing at the begin- in January, DeRisi had flown to Cambodia for
atorium on gatherings—first of more than ning of an epidemic, and to watch Donald a project with the Gates Foundation aimed
1,000 people, then of more than 100 people. Trump not do the right thing has just forced us at creating a real-time global pathogen-
“They kept coming to me with arbitrary all to relive that pain and horror, because the monitoring system—an open source data-
numbers to reduce events to,” Breed told me. whole job of a politician during an epidemic is base of pathogens active worldwide. While
“I was like, ‘What are we doing here? What to do exactly what the experts tell them to do. there, he spent six days helping local scien-
is your medical advice for what makes the The ones who appear alarmist at the begin- tists set up a CZ Biohub technology called
most sense?’” On Friday, March 13, she says, ning, because you don’t yet see the deaths, IDseq that, with enormous cloud-based /
“I got aggressive with Doctor Colfax and they are the politicians who save lives.” computing power, can rapidly analyze the /
"------
said, ‘We need to shut the city down.’ ” Breed genomic makeup of viruses and bacteria
says she reached out to mayors of neigh- around the world. Less than three weeks after
boring cities with the expectation of issu- he got home, in late January, Cambodia got its
ing a joint shelter-at-home order sometime first case of Covid-19, and DeRisi’s counter-
the following week. The next day, though, a parts sequenced its viral genome and posted

X:
Saturday, Santa Clara County, just down the the result—one of the first outside China—
peninsula, reported an alarming accelera- on two open source global health databases.
tion in cases: from 71 to 227 in just five days. By the time the governor called, DeRisi
On Sunday afternoon, the city’s health was focused on yet another way that CZ
officer joined a conference call with six other Eight days after Biohub could help with the worsening pan-
Bay Area health officers—all of whom, by demic. Testing resources were in dangerously
California law, have the authority to issue
the governor’s short supply in San Francisco, especially the
legally binding health orders. By the eve- executive order, lab capacity needed to process a lot of tests
ning, they had decided to shut down the DeRisi’s new quickly. This was partly because the CDC
region during a joint press conference the clinical lab, a joint had distributed faulty test kits early on, and
following day. required that all test processing be done at
Breed was taken aback. “I was like, ‘You’re
UCSF/Biohub CDC headquarters in Atlanta. On top of that,
just going to do this without the mayors?’” operation, was the Food and Drug Administration’s rigid
she recalls saying. ready to process approvals process prevented many local and
She felt it was important for an elected more than a private labs and hospitals from using their
executive to initiate such a dramatic move. own tests. By early March, the federal gov-
So on Sunday afternoon, Breed ordered her
thousand Covid-19 ernment had backed down on some of those
staff to prepare a statement and call a press samples a day, requirements, and UCSF had developed
conference of her own, to coincide with the for free. its own kits, but local labs still only had the

•••
0 5 0
 Technology. There, they loaded that fifth
Agilent Bravo onto a gray Rubbermaid cart.
Rolling the robot to the front door, the two
realized it was raining.
“You know, normally you have profes-
sional movers who handle this very sensi-
tive automation,” DeRisi told me, chuckling.
“These $80,000 robots are touchy. So we go
dumpster-diving in the trash for plastic and
cardboard and tape it all over into this very
sketchy umbrella-like contraption,” DeRisi
says, “and then roll it down 16th Street.”
On March 20, exactly eight days after
Newsom’s executive order and at a cost of
about $4 million, DeRisi’s new clinical lab,
a joint UCSF/Biohub operation, was open
for business, ready to process more than a
thousand Covid-19 samples a day, for free.
Not a moment too soon, either: During the
last week of that month, the number of San
Franciscans hospitalized with confirmed
Covid-19 leapt from 12 to 57, with 21 of them
in intensive care. By the first week of April,
those numbers had jumped yet again. The
pandemic’s first proper wave was looming
over San Francisco.

G R A N T C O L FA X , T H E H E A D O F T H E P U B L I C H E A LT H A G E N C Y ONE OF THE LESSONS OF THE

so-called San Francisco model of AIDS
care is that experts can be a lot more effec-
tive against an epidemic if they join hands
with community leaders who already have
the trust of populations at high risk of get-
capacity to process a limited number of them. sity lawyers, talking about transforming that ting infected. Valerie Tulier-Laiwa, a long-
“It was beginning to get panicky,” DeRisi empty floor into a Covid-19 test-processing time community advocate who grew up in
says. But he knew that CZ Biohub’s facil- facility. With clearance in hand and help the Mission District, knew that her commu-
ity, in a glass and stone office tower across from the dean of the graduate division, nity was uniquely vulnerable to Covid-19. “It
the street from the Golden State Warriors’ DeRisi recruited dozens of UCSF postdoc felt to me it was people who were affluent,
new basketball arena, could help get the and graduate students as volunteers and who had money, who could travel, who were
job done. The building had an entire floor— divided them into 11 working groups, each predominantly white, that were getting sick
16,000 square feet—sitting empty under tasked with a different part of the prob- at first,” she said. “But I knew eventually it
lease to UCSF. CZ Biohub also had access to lem: equipment supply, data management, was going to filter down into communities of
scores of UCSF grad students and research- how to get patient samples into the build- color and poor communities, and that it was
ers who could analyze these tests in their ing. DeRisi himself pitched in wherever going to hit Latinos hard because of congre-
sleep. What DeRisi’s colleagues did not have he was needed, like on the rainy morning gate living, because they still had to work in
was the necessary California state certifica- of Saturday, March 14, when a colleague the service industry.”
tion to process clinical test samples and tell offered to lend DeRisi’s team an additional Tulier-Laiwa had already gathered the
patients the results. Agilent Bravo liquid-handling robot, a boxy leaders of several dozen Latinx community
DeRisi says he mentioned this to Newsom contraption that costs about $80,000. At groups to form what they called the Latino
and was surprised when, the following that point, the clinic had just four and could Task Force on Covid-19, educating residents
week, on the morning of March 12, the gov- have used several more. about handwashing and masks, and estab-
ernor issued Executive Order N-25-20, sus- So DeRisi and his colleague walked out lishing a food bank, when they got a call from
pending those regulations. Within hours, the front doors, crossed busy Third Street, a woman named Diane Jones, a former Ward
DeRisi and UCSF chancellor Sam Hawgood and marched quickly past Benioff Children’s 86 nurse turned AIDS activist.
were on a conference call with their univer- Hospital to the UCSF Center for Advanced At the nearby Zuckerberg San Francisco
General Hospital, it turned out, Havlir’s
team in the HIV and Infectious Disease divi-
sion had noticed that 80 percent of their
Covid-19 inpatients were Latinx, a clear
indication that the virus, as Havlir puts it,
“was spreading in the community that’s right
in the backyard of our hospital.”
During an epidemic like Covid-19 in which
symptoms can be mild or nonexistent, hospi-
talized patients are a fraction of the people
infected in a community, so it becomes criti-
cal to find the others and isolate them before
they pass the virus on. Without a vaccine or
proven treatment, Havlir thought her best
chance at saving lives was to test widely
in the Mission and support everyone who
tested positive with the food and resources
necessary to isolate themselves. It wouldn’t
be cheap—test processing alone might cost
hundreds of thousands of dollars—and it
might not even be workable, given uncer-
tainty about whether any public or commer-
cial lab could process the requisite number
of samples fast enough to break the chain
of infection. So Havlir called DeRisi, whom
she’d known for 20 years.
DeRisi was delighted. “I thought, ‘Man,
now we’re talking. This is a great study. Let’s
do this thing!’” T H E R O O T S O F S A N F R A N C I S C O , O N D I S P L AY

With the full support of CZ Biohub and its

new clinical lab, Havlir reached out to Jones,
the AIDS activist, who well understood the been warning for more than a month that “Nothing fancy about it, no guys in uniforms
stigma associated with disease and how it people living on the streets and in shelters with special biohazard suits,” says DeRisi.
can make people reluctant to get tested. As were at high risk—both of getting infected “It’s like, Brian, in his Honda Accord with the
Jones put it, “You’ll just find out you’re positive and of severe illness, due to cramped and Coleman cooler.”
and lose your job and get kicked out of your unclean living conditions and chronic health The UCSF/CZ Biohub lab processed 90
house and die alone.” Similar fears, related to problems. Those warnings were borne out percent of the samples within 24 hours. It
Covid-19, were acute among Mission District on April 10, when a new round of testing at found 2 percent of them positive, about 80
residents who supported large households MSC South found 68 residents positive. So people. Community wellness workers then
and couldn’t isolate themselves, much less the public health department announced offered to visit each one of those people
feed the kids, without a paycheck. that the entire shelter would be converted with food, grocery vouchers, cleaning sup-
Working closely with Jones and Havlir, into a Covid-19 ward and all noninfected plies, and face masks. Those who couldn’t
the Latino Task Force mobilized hundreds residents moved into hotel rooms. self-isolate at home were connected to the
of volunteers, including many who spoke By late April, with citywide hospitaliza- public health department for help in secur-
Spanish and a few who spoke the Mayan tions of confirmed cases relatively stable at ing a hotel room.
language common among undocumented around 90—an apparent flattening of the
day laborers. By the time those volunteers curve—Tulier-Laiwa and other Latino Task
went door to door encouraging people to Force members joined Havlir and her UCSF THE PANDEMIC’S INITIAL SURGE
get tested, the citywide mood of fear had colleagues, plus volunteers from CZ Biohub, began to recede from San Francisco on May
worsened. A small outbreak of Covid-19 at at open-air testing sites in parks and pub- 3, as the total number of confirmed hospi-
Laguna Honda Hospital, the city’s big nurs- lic spaces in the Mission District. Over a talized Covid patients fell to 86. The local
ing home, prompted Colfax to lock down the four-day stretch, and a few additional days economy was still in tatters, with count-
entire facility in protective quarantine. Then, in May testing homebound residents, they less restaurants closed and for-rent signs
on April 5, at San Francisco’s largest home- drew blood from nearly 4,000 adults and in apartment windows. By mid-June, as
less shelter, MSC South, two residents tested kids. A colleague of Havlir and DeRisi drove California’s overall infection rate began
positive. Advocates for the homeless had the samples across town in his own car. inching upward again, hospitalizations in
San Francisco bottomed out in the mid-30s. tional travel bans had grounded dozens of old cultural paralysis of the city’s compet-
Between June 19 and July 13, New York City Rutherford’s colleagues at the UCSF Institute ing worldviews: an old-line progressivism
saw 464 people succumb to Covid-19; in for Global Health Sciences. Public health that does a great job fighting for individual
that same three weeks in San Francisco the experts, in essence, were prevented from freedoms but less so creating a better future
death toll was exactly one. visiting their HIV and Ebola projects over- for anyone’s kids, a techno-libertarianism
Every expert I spoke with credited a mea- seas. Rutherford sent one of them down to that treats government as irrelevant to the
sure of dumb luck. San Francisco appeared the city’s Emergency Operations Center. creation of healthy society, and a prevail-
not to have had any of the so-called super- “He confirmed that what they really ing attitude that mostly just values getting
spreader events at which a single infected needed help with was contact tracing,” rich enough to buy a piece of paradise, and
person unwittingly infects dozens of oth- Rutherford says. “So we said, ‘OK, we got all then making sure newcomers don’t screw
ers—like those that occurred at a church in these people sitting around, let’s put ’em to it up with unsightly apartment buildings or
South Korea or a funeral in Albany, Georgia. work.’ ” A few members of Rutherford’s team mass transit.
The San Francisco 49ers may also have then created an online curriculum to teach Walking these abnormally quiet streets in
done their part, back in early February, by contact tracing. In the course of two days, midsummer, with traffic at historic lows and
losing the Super Bowl to the Kansas City they trained 40 of their colleagues. In just air clear enough to see from midcity hilltops
Chiefs. A victory parade could have trig- over a week, they’d trained 65 city employ- to the green Santa Cruz Mountains behind
gered a mass outbreak the way Mardi Gras ees, including personnel from the city attor- San Jose, east to conical Mount Diablo and
seems to have done in Louisiana. ney’s and assessor’s offices. Pretty soon, north into the wine country of Napa Valley,
Still, experts also credited widespread Rutherford’s team had also trained almost it was hard not to feel something new in the
compliance with social-distancing and every librarian in town. That operation has atmosphere—a sense that San Francisco
mask-wearing rules by San Franciscans of since trained 200 contact tracers and case might yet turn a positive corner. Tech still
all backgrounds—what Wachter calls “the investigators in San Francisco alone—plenty has all the money and power, and both still
receptor arm of this region.” He’d been doing to do the job properly by interviewing every corrupt the way they have from time imme-
a call-in radio show and was impressed infected person, figuring out who they’ve morial, but tech’s money and power depend
by the scientific literacy of callers. “Their been close to in recent days, contacting and on trust in data and respect for science. In
questions have been spectacular,” he said. testing all those people, and connecting the case of Covid-19, the relevant data hap-
“Really, really interesting, about stuff like the ones who can’t self-isolate at home to pened to be epidemiological. The relevant
characteristics of different antibody tests. people who can help them get food and cash scientists were public health experts whose
It’s a very sophisticated and curious citizenry and hotel rooms. discipline lies in treating entire societies as
that doesn’t completely mistrust its govern- One day, Rutherford told me, he was sit- singular patients—which, of course, they
ment.” Wachter didn’t see San Franciscans ting around minding his own business and are. Key to the playbook of these experts is
as having blind faith in government—just a got a call asking, “Why don’t we do this recognition that you cannot truly save any-
general confidence that, as he put it, “we’re for the whole state?” His team then part- body without at least partly saving every-
governed at the local and state levels by nered with UCLA to create an online acad- body. And you can’t do the latter without
people who want to get the balance between emy used by the Newsom administration to help from activists in the LGBTQ, Latinx, and
capitalism and taking care of people right.” retrain at least 7,000 additional civil ser- Black communities.
In practice, that meant San Franciscans vants, across California, into a statewide Covid-19 taught every San Franciscan an
and their neighbors around the Bay Area army of contact tracers. object lesson in the degree to which the fate
did as told, at least for a while. They stayed of the individual remains bound up with the
home, wore masks, washed hands. All those fate of the group. That was evident in early-
early actions by public health officials and SAN FRANCISCO STILL FEELS summer protest marches, when people of
industry leaders, making sure that local incomprehensible and contradictory in all all skin colors wore masks that were
hospitals never got overwhelmed, also pre- the ways it did before Covid-19. While school thought to do little for their wearers but
served resources for areas more vulnerable districts elsewhere, including New York City, quite a lot to protect everyone else. It was
to an outbreak, like in the Mission. In fact, pivoted to distance learning in a matter of evident in late July, too, as California’s infec-
earlier this spring, UCSF was able to send days, San Francisco’s public schools flat- tion rate skyrocketed into frightening terri-
24 nurses and doctors to volunteer at hard- out shut down for four weeks in the early tory, San Francisco’s climbed just enough to
hit hospitals in New York and another 40 to days of the pandemic. Many unhoused San be worrisome, and San Franciscans
the Navajo Nation. The CZ Biohub/UCSF lab, Franciscans still have no shelter, and zon- retreated dutifully into their homes for yet
the one built in eight days, can now process ing restrictions still make it nearly impossible another round of sacrifice.
up to 2,600 tests daily and offers its services to build the high-density housing that could
free to every county in California. truly ease rents and real estate prices. DANIEL DUANE (@Danielduane) is
George Rutherford, meanwhile, the epi- This city’s collective response to Covid- the author of six books. He’s at work on
demiologist from Colfax’s informal advi- 19 in those early months, however, feels the next, about California. His last story
sory group, emerged as the state leader in deeply hopeful. Somehow or other, the for wired, about San Francisco public
contact tracing. Back in March, interna- SARS-CoV-2 virus cut through the decades- schools, was in issue 26.07.

•••
0 5 3
 S C A R R E D B Y T R AU M A A N D D E VO T E D T O T R U M P, A D I S T U R B E D M A N
BEGAN MAILING EXPLOSIVES TO THE PRESIDENT’S CRITICS—ONE AFTER
ANOTHER AFTER ANOTHER—ON THE EVE OF AN ELECTION.

T H E U N T O L D S T O RY O F F O U R DAY S I N O C T O B E R .

THE
FURIOUS H U N T
FOR THE
MAGA BOMBER

BY ILLUSTRATIONS BY

GARRETT M. GRAFF M I K E M CQ UA D E

•••
0 5 4
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 would anyone but Soros’ house staff know
that the camera guarding the mailbox was
inoperative?
But the next day, the Secret Service dis-
covered a similar package at the nearby

W
residence of Hillary Clinton, addressed to
the 2016 presidential candidate. And with
that, the “174 case,” FBI code for a bombing
investigation, morphed into a “266 case”: an
investigation into domestic terrorism.
By Wednesday at 8 am, news of the bomb
at the Soros residence made the morning
show at CNN; commentator John Avlon ran
a segment about how Soros had long been a
target of conservative and anti-Semitic con-
spiracy theories. Then, as CNN anchors Jim
Sciutto and Poppy Harlow were anchoring
their 9 am show, the alert came that a sus-
picious device had appeared in CNN’s own
mail room. (It was intended for former CIA
director and TV commentator John Brennan,
who was actually a regular fixture on CNN’s
competitor, MSNBC.)
As the NYPD-FBI bomb squad rushed to
the scene, authorities decided to lock down
much of Columbus Circle, evacuating the
55-floor Time Warner Center and closing a
Weird things happen in and around New York City nearly every day, so the appear- subway station. Tens of thousands of work-
ance of a suspicious package at George Soros’ residence in Westchester County ers poured out of their offices and shops.
didn’t initially raise many eyebrows at the FBI’s hulking New York field office. Sciutto and Harlow evacuated their studio
Late on the evening of Monday, October 22, 2018, the office received an alert but continued to report on the unfolding
known as a “nine-liner”—a brief update on an unfolding situation that, in the clas- situation from the street, via Skype and cell
sic muddle of government communications, is actually 11 lines long. As a routine phones, along with their colleagues. Bomb
precautionary response, a team of bomb techs headed to Katonah, New York, to technicians loaded the device into one of
examine the yellow padded envelope. Given the rarity of mail bombs—the US the NYPD’s three “total containment ves-
Postal Service encounters about 16 a year, amid plenty of hoaxes—the technicians sels”—a specially configured truck with a
had good reason to expect it was a false alarm. round, reinforced storage unit able to absorb
But they quickly sent an update when they arrived on the scene: “Boss, we a bomb’s blast—and a six-vehicle convoy of
found some energetic material,” an agent on the ground reported by phone to police and fire vehicles hustled the bomb
William Sweeney, the FBI assistant director in charge of the New York office. to an NYPD firing range in the Bronx. From
“We have a viable device.” the scene, Sweeney called one of his depu-
Sweeney, a 20-year veteran of the bureau, had spent the bulk of his career ties: “Set up the JOC.” It was time to open the
in the tri-state area and now oversaw the agency’s largest, most powerful, and crisis command center, the Joint Operations
most politically fraught office, comprising more than 2,000 agents, analysts, Center, in Chelsea. The country had a serial
surveillance specialists, and other personnel, who handled everything from bomber on its hands.
Italian mobsters to Russian spies at the UN. His friendly neighborhood-dad per- The hours ahead would see a Herculean
sona belied his role as one of the FBI’s most important feudal lords, and he was mobilization of federal resources and a
no stranger to terrorism cases. A year earlier, when a would-be suicide bomber nationwide manhunt, equaled in the past
had targeted the Port Authority bus terminal in 2017, the suspect’s body was still decade perhaps only by the search for the
smoking from his incompletely detonated pipe bomb when Sweeney arrived Boston Marathon bombing suspects. What
on the scene. Now, Sweeney knew that the follow-up call from the agents in none of the investigators knew, though, was
Katonah would change the night’s rhythm dramatically. An actual working how much the Hunted Man himself seemed
bomb? “That starts the machine,” Sweeney says. to be enjoying the coverage. As CNN broad-
Multiple FBI teams were dispatched, including the office’s terrorism unit. cast the breaking news about the unfold-
One investigator’s initial theory was that this was an inside job: The package ing terror campaign, he wandered into a tire
had appeared in a mailbox at the Soros residence that was surveilled by a faulty store and smiled broadly as he watched the
security camera, which meant there was no record of how it got there. How chaos unfold on TV.

0
•••5 6
 strong enough to fight back, he wouldn’t be the victim

UNTIL anymore. His body started growing, and people started

to notice. Before long, the Hunted Man began to feel that
he was capable of great things.
then, very little had gone right for the
figure staring into the screen. His path to
becoming the Hunted Man arguably began
around 1967, when he was about 6, and his
father abandoned the family. “He was sup-
posed to give us $25 a month, but he just left
AS
and disappeared,” the Hunted Man’s mother the hours ticked by on Wednesday, October 24, the
would say later. “Never even a postcard.” The bombing case spiraled far beyond the New York region.
Hunted Man, then a small boy with “severe In Washington, DC, the Secret Service intercepted a pack-
learning disabilities,” a stutter, and a delicate age intended for former president Barack Obama, and the
frame, “waited and waited and waited” for Capitol Police found a package addressed to congress-
his father to return, a family friend recalls. person Maxine Waters. Yet another package addressed
When he started exhibiting behavior to Waters was found in California, headed to her local
problems, his mother enrolled him in a series district office there. “Wednesday was true chaos,” recalls
of rigorous, discipline-focused schools— Philip Bartlett, the head of the New York division of the
two military-style elementary schools, US Postal Inspectors. “The media was on fire.” Every two
then a parochial boarding school called hours there were teleconferences with agency head-
St. Stanislaus, in southern Mississippi. quarters to share updates.
He arrived at St. Stanislaus as an 11-year- The common denominator between the would-be
old sixth grader and almost immediately targets became increasingly obvious: All were promi-
began calling his mother every day, beg- nent Democratic officials or vocal critics of President
ging to come home. He didn’t explain to her Trump. And all of the packages listed their return address
why he wanted to leave, but one of the cler- as that of congressperson Debbie Wasserman Schultz,
ics who supervised his dormitory, he later the former head of the Democratic National Committee.
alleged, had begun sexually abusing him. Ominously, each device contained a photo of the
The Hunted Man said he tried to complain intended victim with a large red X marked across their
to another priest at the school, but received face. Just two weeks before the midterm congressional
only a scolding in return; he tried to tell elections, someone was sending a message.
another student, but the student laughed at As the investigation unfolded, the memory and legacy of two other notori-
him. The sexual abuse continued for much of ous cases loomed large. From 1978 until 1995, a killer eventually nicknamed
the school year, the Hunted Man said, during the Unabomber had mailed carefully crafted explosive devices to universities
which time he wore three or even four pants and other targets—killing three people and injuring nearly two dozen—before
at once in a futile attempt to ward off the the FBI tracked him down: a reclusive, technophobic mathematician named
rapes. He was finally able to convince his Ted Kaczynski.
mother to pull him out of the school only by Five years after Kaczynski was caught in 1996, another serial attacker had
threatening suicide. (The current president targeted media and political leaders using white envelopes containing deadly
of St. Stanislaus told wired in an email that anthrax power. Those attacks disrupted mail rooms and offices around the
the Hunted Man’s allegations were “thor- country as hoaxes and suspicious white powders caused fire departments,
oughly investigated by outside authorities bomb squads, and hazmat teams to race from scene to scene. The anthrax scare
and found not to be credible”; the school has came in October 2001, just weeks after 9/11, leaving many Americans to fear
faced and denied other allegations of sexual that al Qaeda was continuing its assault on America, now with biological weap-
abuse from around the same time.) ons. The letters infected 17 people and left five dead before stopping as abruptly
Back at home in South Florida, he became as they had started. The case lingered unsolved for years, as one theory after
quiet and withdrawn, sometimes eating his another was discarded. One “person of interest” who had been investigated
meals in his room alone. In high school he for many months, Steven Hatfill, ended up being paid nearly $6 million by the
found some reprieve on the soccer field, Justice Department for violations of his privacy and damage to his reputation.
where he excelled. But his small size and Only in 2008 did the FBI zero in on government biodefense expert Bruce Ivins,
stuttering problem combined to make him who committed suicide that summer when he learned that he was about to be
a target for bullies. He found it hard to talk charged in the case. The investigation ended inconclusively.
to girls; the fear of rejection crippled him. The leaders of the new mail-bomb investigation swore that this wouldn’t be
Then, at the young age of 15, he found a another anthrax case. “We’ve got to fix this quick,” Sweeney remembers think-
way to stop feeling so small: He started using ing. “It’s a race to get ahead of this.”
steroids. He figured that maybe, if he were At first, time did not seem to be on the investigators’ side. On Thursday, two
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new packages addressed to former vice off from going down the stream.”
president Joe Biden turned up in Delaware, Amid the deluge of more than 300,000 parcels a day,
and another—the ninth bomb yet—was a team of detectives from the Miami-Dade police man-
intercepted on its way to actor Robert De aged to find one additional device—an identical package
Niro, who had been playing special coun- addressed to US senator Cory Booker.
sel Robert Mueller on Saturday Night Live. A Across the country, as word spread about the
10th bomb, addressed to former US attorney attempted bombings, investigators began to identify
general Eric Holder’s law office in DC, ended other likely targets. In New York alone, officials began
up being defused in a Broward County, intercepting and searching the mail of 37 individuals
Florida, parking lot. A postal carrier had who seemed to match the public profile of the other
tried to return the package to sender, only package recipients.
to be met by an addled staff at Wasserman But of course, the most important goal wasn’t just to
Schultz’s office near Fort Lauderdale. As intercept new bombs and identify the next targets; it was
Ashan Benedict, the head of the New York to catch whoever was sending them. Investigators knew
office of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, they were racing a clock—no one had been injured, and
Firearms, and Explosives, recalls, the mas- none of the devices had exploded yet, but it seemed only
sive investigative team was struggling to a matter of time before one did, either accidentally or by
understand the scope of the threat: “What design. “Are these going to take down a building? No. But
is going on here, and what is the threat level? if it goes off in your hand or in your face, you’re probably
What’s the public safety risk?” getting killed,” Sweeney says.
Luckily for investigators, the national Having traced the induction points of the devices
response to the 2001 anthrax crisis had to various street-corner mail collection boxes, postal
furnished them with some new capabil- inspectors and other federal agents in South Florida
ities, thanks in part to an effort to bulk up began looking for nearby surveillance cameras that
the capacity of the US Postal Inspection might have captured the moment when their suspect
Service—a low-profile but wide-ranging dropped off one of the packages. They began collecting
law enforcement agency. The Post Office, cameras and footage from local stores, shopping centers,
for instance, had bolstered a program to and anywhere else that seemed to have a view of one
take time-stamped digital photographs of of the likely mailboxes, amassing more than 80,000 hours of video. As Bartlett
all the more than 140 billion pieces of mail recalls, the instructions to the field were: “Just take the DVRs, we’ll buy you a new
that enter its system each year. The effort pri- one.” All told, postal inspectors reviewed about 13 terabytes of surveillance video.
marily allows mail to be sorted electronically Finally, one team of investigators caught a glimpse of someone dropping off
as it rushes through one of the system’s hun- one of the packages. For the first time, investigators stared at a grainy image of
dreds of large processing centers, but it has their unknown subject. They couldn’t discern too much detail, but they could
the added benefit of helping postal inspec- tell that he cut a distinctly muscular figure.
tors narrow down precisely where a given
piece of mail has entered the system.
Within hours, the postal inspectors had
determined that at least some of the devices
appeared to have come through the Royal
Palm mail sorting facility in Opa-Locka,
THE
Florida, a giant processing center the size of Hunted Man started with oral steroids in high school, but before long he moved
eight football fields that receives hundreds to injections. He knew he was only supposed to take them weekly, but he started
of thousands of packages a day. injecting himself every day. Throughout his life, people who knew him remarked
In Florida, the postal inspectors began a on the paradox of the Hunted Man—the bulky, muscular figure with the docile,
massive, around-the-clock physical effort almost childlike personality.
to intercept any further packages that were As he grew up, his life never found a steady gear. Three times he tried to com-
still in processing. Several law enforcement plete college, a few times he was arrested for minor crimes. In his twenties, he
personnel waded into the Royal Palms pro- held down a string of money-making gigs on the margins of society—working
cessing center and other facilities to join the odd jobs, delivering newspapers, and staffing a concession stand. He became
search. “We had FBI, ATF, Secret Service, his grandparents’ caretaker, bathing and feeding them, and he dressed up as
Florida Department of Law Enforcement, Mickey Mouse for family birthday parties; all the while he kept dreaming that his
agents from the US Postal Service inspector big break was never far off. His youngest sister’s assessment was harsh: “I hate
general, Miami-Dade police, our own uni- to say this, but his intelligence level was quite low. I saw that, no matter his age,
formed Postal Police officers—all our part- his mind functioned as a 17-year-old.”
ners—searching,” says inspector Antonio By the early 1990s, while he was still living with his grandparents, he began
Gomez. “Our goal was to cut these packages working in strip clubs. He started as a bouncer, then moved into performing,
and his steroid use increased steadily as he bulked up for the stage.
At his peak he was taking a cocktail of some 170 supplements a day. HE BECAME
The drugs seemed to wreak havoc on his mind and his home life;
steroids are known to cause nervousness, restlessness, and mood
swings. Already a traumatized person, he began to show a paranoid
CONVINCED
streak that would worsen as the years passed; as he said later, “I
would feel vulnerable, uptight, and impatient. Sometimes feel like
I’m going insane.” In 1994 he pushed his grandfather and got kicked
THAT PIZZA
out of the house; he spent the next six years touring the country as a
performer with an exotic dance revue. DELIVERYMEN
In 2000 the Hunted Man returned to South Florida, reconciled
with his grandparents, and managed to put together enough money
to open a dry-cleaning business. But he was not a natural busi- LIKE HIM
nessman. Two years into the venture, he got into a dispute with his
electric utility, Florida Power and Light, and threatened to blow up
the company if it cut off his power. He claims he owed just $174,
WERE BEING
but he felt wronged. A judge sentenced him to a year of probation;
his grandfather died; his dry-cleaning business tanked. So he went
back to strip clubs.
TARGETED FOR
It was like that with the Hunted Man: Nothing ever seemed to
break his way. Around 2007, with the help of an aunt, he managed to ASSASSINATION
purchase a house near the peak of the real estate bubble, only to lose
it to foreclosure in the Great Recession two years later. In 2013, after
filing for personal bankruptcy, he settled a lawsuit for his alleged BY THE LEFT.
abuse at the Catholic school. But whereas other nationwide vic-
tims of clergy abuse received six- and seven-figure settlements, he
received $6,000 in return for the agony of dredging up the alleged
nightmare of his childhood.
The Hunted Man had hit bottom. He was living in his white Dodge tion before. “I don’t think he even knew who
touring van. A pile of foam pads served as his bed, and his clothes the president was at any point over the last
hung from an adjustable curtain rod. He showered at a local gym 20 years,” his youngest sister wrote later.
and cooked his meals in a crock-pot in the DJ booth of the strip clubs Now he was attending rallies, passing out
where he worked. (His coworkers complained.) At times, according brochures, and decking out his white van
to his lawyers, he was suicidal. with custom pro-Trump stickers. He joined
But it was also during this bleak period that, in a sense, the Hunted hundreds of right-wing Facebook groups
Man found something he’d been waiting for ever since he was 6 years like USA Patriots for Donald Trump (sample
old. In his lawsuit against St. Stanislaus in 2013, the Hunted Man’s post: “Democrat terrorist group Antifa plan to
lawyer described how his client was coping with his years of alleged make US ‘ungovernable’”), Mad World News
abuse by listening obsessively to self-help tapes by Tony Robbins (“VIDEO: Hillary’s Deep KKK ties exposed,
and Donald Trump. Ultimately, the Hunted Man would credit those here’s what she’s been hiding”), and the Angry
self-help gurus with rescuing him from the abyss. As his lawyer put it, Patriot (“EXPOSED: THIS is the REAL reason
the Hunted Man “found in Donald Trump a sort of surrogate father.” Obama is letting ISIS murder Americans”).
He devoured Fox News at the beginning and
end of every day, barraging friends and fam-
ily with group texts that linked to articles from

BY the network.
For years, the Hunted Man had relied on
the services of a strip-mall spiritualist in
the time Trump declared he was running for president in June of Pompano Beach who practiced Santeria to
2015, the Hunted Man was already what his lawyers would later help him; she charged between $20 and $65
call a “Trump superfan.” He had attended a Trump career-coaching to light special candles that would ward off
event, devoured the mogul’s TV shows, and purchased several evil, bring him luck, and fulfill his wishes. His
products branded with the Trump name. And now the Hunted Man belief in the power of Trump’s election had a
believed that his hero was fighting to Make America Great Again for similarly magical quality; if only Trump was
“forgotten people” precisely like him. given the opportunity to fulfill his campaign
His sudden turn as a political apostle shocked his family mem- promises, his own life would improve, many
bers, who couldn’t remember ever hearing him talk about an elec- of its unfairnesses made right.

0
•••6 0
 When Trump actually won power, the As the midterms approached, the Hunted Man
Hunted Man’s attention shifted: He became worked closely with his strip-mall spiritual adviser to
hyperaware of all the enemies who wanted influence the election; he scribbled out rambling attacks
to thwart the president—and to bring the on Democrats who he hoped would be impeded by
Hunted Man, personally, to harm. In Trump’s the candles’ special powers. But he also put together
own words and in those of his supporters a plan for more direct action against the nation’s inter-
online, he heard that Trump was under nal enemies.
attack by a Democratic cabal, that people On October 18, 2018, he drove about 45 minutes into
like John Brennan and James Clapper were the center of Fort Lauderdale and pulled up to a blue
part of a Deep State conspiracy. In January mailbox across the street from a Men’s Wearhouse. He
2017, the Hunted Man spent $2,000 to travel parked his van, and at 2:41 am, his arm muscles bulging
to Washington for the inauguration; on the out of a black tank top, he slipped a padded envelope
train ride home, he claimed a woman who addressed to George Soros in Katonah, New York, into
was incensed at Trump threw things at him. the metal slot. Every few days he dropped more enve-
Back in Florida, the Hunted Man plastered lopes into collection boxes.
his white Dodge Ram with ever-more- That following week, the Hunted Man was able to
violent pro-Trump decals. When it was van- revel in the events he’d set in motion. Seeing coverage
dalized, he believed he had been targeted of the device he’d sent to Soros in the news, he sent a text
by Antifa. message on Tuesday at 10:04 am to a friend with a link
As 2017 unfolded, the Hunted Man grew to a New York Times story about the attempted attack.
increasingly unnerved by media coverage To the friend—who doubled as his steroid dealer—the text didn’t stand out; he’d
of the president. By the end of the year, he received dozens over recent months from the Hunted Man. The unsolicited mis-
had begun Googling the addresses of Nancy sives about politics had grown so frequent that he’d asked the bomber to stop
Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and Maxine Waters. contacting him unless he needed steroids.
Later came search queries like “how do The next night, as he watched television, the Hunted Man felt his first
they make letter bomb,” “how to kill all moment of fear: He was watching the news of his unfolding attack, and an
democrats,” “how to kill George Soros,” FBI official—maybe it was the FBI’s Bill Sweeney—came on the screen and
and “Eric holder wife and children,” along explained in grave tones that the full resources of the FBI and the federal gov-
with queries for the addresses of Anderson ernment were being mobilized to hunt the bomber down. The comment about
Cooper, former FBI agent Peter Strzok, and him hit like a jolt of electricity; he had never fully considered that there would
Hillary Clinton. be severe consequences.
For a few years the Hunted Man had been
working as a pizza delivery driver for a suc-
cession of chain restaurants—Pizza Hut,
Domino’s, Papa John’s. Then in 2018 he
picked up a job as a bouncer at a West Palm
Beach strip club called Ultra, and his steroid
NOW
use increased dramatically. The approach- that investigators had found a snippet of surveillance video footage showing the
ing midterm elections loomed large on Fox bomber, they possessed a valuable piece of information: They knew where he’d
and Twitter. been at a particular moment in time. The FBI quickly brought in an elite techni-
The drugs seemed to deepen the Hunted cal unit known as the Cellular Analysis Survey Team, which began tracing and
Man’s paranoia. At one point he came to matching every cell phone that had been in the vicinity of that particular mail-
believe that “leftist followers” had smashed box around that time. While that effort was underway, an even more solid lead
his window, slashed his tires, and cut his fuel emerged 1,000 miles from Florida, in Quantico, Virginia.
lines in an attempt to kill him. That summer, The FBI’s national laboratory sprawls across a wooded campus inside the
when a Papa John’s delivery driver was mur- Marine Corps base at Quantico, which also houses the FBI training academy.
dered in New York, the Hunted Man became Explosions and gun shots regularly echo through the 547-acre campus. The
convinced that pizza deliverymen like him first bomb to arrive there for analysis on the evening of Wednesday, October 24,
were being targeted for assassination by the was the one that had been intercepted on its way to Maxine Waters’ DC office.
left because of a racist slur used by the Papa First it was taken to a demolition range on the Marine base, where ordnance
John’s founder. His conspiratorial think- experts ensured it wouldn’t explode and its powdery contents were emptied out.
ing found reinforcement in the media he Then it entered a kind of rapid disassembly line that took it to several parts of the
consumed. On October 11, Hannity said on sprawling FBI lab. From the demolition range it went to the lab’s chemical explo-
his nightly Fox News talk show, “Just look sives unit. When Christine Marsh, a chemist who specializes in IEDs, began test-
at the large number of Democratic lead- ing the powder recovered from the device, she was immediately puzzled. Few
ers encouraging mob violence against their of the ingredients made sense—there was a low-explosive pyrotechnic, akin to
political opponents.” what you’d find in commercial fireworks, but there was also fertilizer and pool
shock, a water treatment chemical. “The fertilizer used was not con- one sent to Maxine Waters. When they fed
tributing to the explosive component,” Marsh says. “Pool shock? It it into the FBI’s fingerprint database, a set of
was hard to tell why it was put in there. Did he read something that possible matches came back quickly. Then it
made him think it was useful? We were scratching our heads.” was up to a human examiner to identify the
The other thing that stood out as examiners began to disassem- closest match. The examiner found one and
ble the devices was that there didn’t seem to be any fuse or mecha- called for a supervisor to verify it at around
nism for setting off an explosion. That raised a question: Were they 4 am. With the identification confirmed by a
dealing with someone who just didn’t know how to make a bomb, second person, the FBI pulled the individual’s
or had the perpetrator purposefully stopped short of manufactur- file. It was the same name uncovered by the
ing a working device? DNA database. The FBI had not just a lead but
On Thursday, more bombs started to arrive in Quantico for a suspect: Cesar Altieri Sayoc.
analysis. The next stop on their urgent tour through the FBI facility
was the trace evidence unit, where the components were inspected
for hairs, fibers, and any other physical evidence that might help
investigators. “Every single person in hairs and fabrics worked some
part of this case,” says Jessica Walker, a trace examiner in the lab.
“We were all working different devices, all divvied up.”
AROUND
As Walker worked, she was surprised to discover not just one hair 2:30 that same morning—just as the DNA lab
but multiple hairs, some even with their roots attached—a potential in Quantico was learning his name for the
gold mine of traceable genetic material. “The amount of DNA was first time—the Hunted Man, Sayoc, pulled up
extensive,” another examiner recalls. “I’m not sure why, or how he to the West Palm Beach strip joint where he’d
managed to do that.” (Steroids can cause damage to hair follicles and been working as a bouncer. It so happened
often lead to hair loss.) Walker would remove each strand, place it that Ultra Gentleman’s Club sat just across
in a tube, and take it directly to the facility’s DNA lab. The now dis- the street from the Trump International Golf
mantled device, meanwhile, headed next to the FBI lab’s finger- Course, where the president would often
print examiners. play when he was staying at Mar-a-Lago. At
The DNA lab and the fingerprint lab were the last stops on the FBI’s times, patrons and employees at Ultra could
forensic disassembly line: It was up to them to see if they could match glimpse Trump’s motorcade from the parking
the traces of evidence found on the bombs to the file of a known
criminal. Between 9 am and early evening on Thursday, the trace evi-
dence team had managed to shuttle one hair to the DNA lab, and the
DNA unit itself, meanwhile, had picked up a fair amount of genetic
material by swabbing the pipes, end caps, digital timers, and other
components. With that, the lab had collected enough material to
build a solid DNA profile by 6:30 pm—a stunningly swift turnaround. EARLY FRIDAY
And when the lab plugged that DNA profile into a national data-
base that Thursday night, it quickly returned a result: There was a
known suspect in Florida whose DNA profile matched this one. Now MORNING, A MERE
the examiners just needed to figure out who it was. To get the sus-
pect’s name, the FBI had to contact the database’s Florida admin-
istrator. They woke him up at around midnight. Normally, federal
80 HOURS AFTER THE
requests for a DNA match must follow a multistep protocol, in which
the state’s lab has to verify the FBI’s work. But the administrator
was able to make an exception for an ongoing bomb spree: By early
FIRST DEVICE HAD
morning, the Florida lab had provided the name of the convicted
offender who matched the FBI’s profile. Around 2:30 am on Friday, BEEN FOUND AT THE
a mere 80 hours after the first device had been found at the Soros
residence, that name was sent out to bureau leaders.
“Rumor made it through the lab pretty quickly that DNA’s got a SOROS RESIDENCE,
hit,” Walker recalls. “That got everyone reenergized.” But the DNA
hit could only be classified as an “investigative lead”—it couldn’t be
considered a legal “match” until the FBI lab was able to obtain a DNA
THE SUSPECT ’S NAME
sample directly from the suspect, run it, and statistically calculate
how rare a profile match could be.
Over at the fingerprint lab, meanwhile, another lead was com-
WAS SENT OUT TO
ing together in the wee hours. Early Friday morning, examiners had
isolated a fingerprint on that first device to arrive in Quantico, the BUREAU LEADERS.
•••
0 6 2
 l
~

FLOl

lot as he headed back and forth, a quick nine-minute drive across Highway 98.
The club was best known for a 7-foot, 1,200-pound, anatomically correct clay
gargoyle—named Harold—that was once perched in the parking lot. A new owner
had made some upgrades in 2015, but the place still seemed tired. “Girls are aver-
age; during the day anyway. Some can be pushy; but that’s true anywhere,” one
Yelp reviewer observed that year. Yet for Sayoc, the job represented opportunity;
he’d purchased thousands of dollars of new steroids to bulk up for the role. He
claimed his bench press now approached 500 pounds—an impressive weight for
anyone, let alone a man pushing 60.
That night, Sayoc walked into the club carrying two black binders. Sitting at a
table and using the light from his phone to illuminate their pages in the darkness
of the club, he began flipping through the binders. His coworker Philip Costa—
the guy who tallied the strippers’ lap dances over the course of an evening—
noticed Sayoc reading; the pages appeared to be filled with images of faces, cut
out and assembled collage-style. Costa had a sinking thought: Those collages
look like the type of thing a serial killer makes in movies.
After a while, Sayoc headed out to the parking lot. When Costa went outside him-
self a while later, he says he found Sayoc standing by his white van, a fire burning
next to him on the asphalt. The club’s staff knew that Sayoc was a bit of an odd duck, Further cell phone tower pings helped
and after Costa noticed the flames, a third coworker—the club’s gardener, who narrow the circle, and the hunt quickened.
that night was there as a patron—said that maybe Sayoc was just cooking dinner. Within about 30 minutes, Stemen got a radio
Later, when Sayoc returned from the parking lot, Costa asked what he was call: A surveillance team had spotted Sayoc’s
doing: Just burning my credit card bills, Sayoc had replied. He continued to flip van in the parking lot of an Autozone in
through the binders, tearing out certain pages and throwing them away. Plantation, Florida. Her team was just four
As the club emptied out, Costa later recalled, the two men watched cable news minutes away.
coverage of the mysterious bombing campaign underway on one of the club As they arrived, a surveillance team told
TVs. “Who would do this?” Costa asked out loud. Sayoc just nodded. They left them that Sayoc’s van was empty, so they sus-
for a quick trip to the Dunkin’ Donuts across the street and, fortified with coffee, pected he was inside the store. Members of
returned to the club to close out the night’s books with the DJ and bartender. the SWAT team stayed in their vehicles along-
With dawn fast approaching, they finally all left the club, locked the doors, and side and behind the Autozone to keep him
headed for the parking lot. Perhaps Sayoc suspected he didn’t have long; as he from spotting them through the windows
headed for his van, he called back over his shoulder, “Love you guys.” along the front. Looking at the other agents in
It was, Costa later recalled, the only time Sayoc had ever expressed any affec- their SWAT gear, Stemen realized she was the
tion for them. only person dressed in plain clothes—she’d
have to be the one to make a positive ID. She
got out of the Suburban and walked around
to the store’s entrance. It was a hot, clear

ONCE day—the warmest it had been there since the

bombs started turning up on the news.
Stemen had her cell phone pressed to her
investigators had Cesar Sayoc’s name, the rest was easy. “We’re going to own this ear, with the leader of the SWAT team on the
dude,” Sweeney recalls thinking when he heard about the DNA and fingerprint other end of the call. On her first pass through
matches. “Start to finish, it was unbelievably fast.” Agents, analysts, and foren- the store she didn’t spot Sayoc, so she set-
sics experts on the overnight shift began working up a full file on their suspect: tled in to browse. A few moments passed
his criminal history, phone numbers, known relatives, known addresses, and so before he emerged from an aisle, carrying
forth. Prosecutors began preparing new search warrants and requests for clear- new brake pads for his van. As he moved to
ance to track his cell phone. the cash register, Stemen wasn’t sure she had
The FBI’s Cellular Analysis Survey Team quickly matched Sayoc’s name to a cell the right man. He didn’t look much like his
phone and began tracking the device, locating him in South Florida. The Florida driver’s license photo; it was clear he’d been
Highway Patrol came in for a briefing on the suspect, and the FBI’s Miami SWAT working out since then. She moved closer as
team mobilized to arrest him. he tried to pay for his purchase, but a store
In Miami, the FBI assistant special agent in charge, Denise Stemen, arrived at employee interrupted her when she was
the field office around 6:30 am for the day shift. Stemen, like her New York col- about 10 feet away: “Ma’am, can I help you
league Sweeney, had been with the bureau for nearly 20 years. A onetime star find something?”
volleyball athlete turned high school varsity coach, she’d arrived in the Miami field Thinking quickly, Stemen flashed a dis-
office in 2009, just as the Great Recession upended Florida real estate, and she’d arming smile and played dumb: “I’m talking
made her career cleaning up the mess left behind, investigating mortgage fraud. to my husband, he wants a specific thing,
That day, she’d expected to spend her shift in the command post and had come to and I’m trying to figure it out.” The employee
work dressed in a suit. Instead, she was assigned to oversee the SWAT team, and laughed; Sayoc looked over and laughed too.
at around 8 am they rolled out of the complex to begin the hunt. They had strict As soon as he turned to her, Stemen knew she
instructions from Washington: They could make the arrest only if Sayoc’s vehicle had the right person.
was stationary and he was out in the open; if the van was rigged with explosives, Continuing his checkout, the employee
or if Sayoc was carrying ordnance with him, the FBI wanted to minimize the dam- asked for Sayoc’s cell phone number for
age any such bombs could do. Autozone’s loyalty program. He recited the
By that point, the FBI had traced Sayoc’s cell phone to the Boca Raton area. digits of his number. Stemen quietly repeated
Covert surveillance teams began scouring the area for his vehicle, described ini- the last four digits to her colleague outside,
tially to them as a white Dodge Ram van. verified that it was the same cell phone they
Investigators had spent the morning querying all manner of databases to were tracking, and ordered the SWAT team
uncover potentially useful nuggets about Sayoc; while Stemen’s team headed to make the arrest as soon as their suspect
north, a big clue arrived: A license plate reader had captured a photo of left the building.
Sayoc’s van with its pro-Trump decals, a big “CNN sucks” sign, and pictures of Sayoc picked up his brake pads and
Democratic figures like Michael Moore, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama with headed out to the parking lot. The SWAT team
targets drawn on their faces. “They sent the photo to our cell phones, and when closed in so quickly that Stemen didn’t see
we enlarged it my first thought was, ‘I’m shocked we haven’t been called about anything until the flash-bang grenade went
him,’” Stemen recalls. off. By the time the smoke cleared, Sayoc was
on the ground in handcuffs. Inside, Stemen
quickly identified herself as law enforce-
ment, reassured the staff, and then told the
employee: Don’t touch your computer, I need
AS
the record of that transaction. investigators began to piece together a portrait of their
Outside, agents quickly asked Sayoc what 56-year-old suspect, they quickly realized that Donald
are known as the Quarles questions, a limited Trump had become the center of Sayoc’s world. The col-
exception to Miranda warnings that allows lapse of his always tenuous life since his dry-cleaning
law enforcement to ask about threats to pub- business failed—the sense that he was destined to be a
lic safety: Were there explosives on Sayoc or lifelong victim, a nobody—coincided with the rise of a
in his van that were set to explode? man he admired. And he had come to see the president’s
He answered no, and they hustled him into enemies as the forces holding both of them down. “In my
a vehicle to get him back to the field office delusions, I felt this was a way to get these people off my
before the media arrived. Bomb technicians back,” Sayoc later wrote.
began to examine the van; once they were Sayoc’s extremism followed almost the precise arc
satisfied there were no active devices inside, that for years had troubled national security officials who
they prepared to tow the vehicle to an FBI watched young men radicalized online by ISIS. But this
garage. But before they could, news helicop- time, the rhetoric wasn’t coming from YouTube videos
ters chattered overhead and began broad- made in Syria and shared through encrypted chat rooms. Sayoc’s poison had
casting to the world the first images that come right from the mouth of a US president, his allies, and the Facebook and
would come to stand in for the entire strange Twitter posts that he’d consumed in the back of his white van. Sayoc’s lawyers
American episode: the shots of Sayoc’s van. later assembled a record of the dozens of presidential tweets attacking the spe-
After a while, Stemen asked one of the FBI cific targets of the mail bombs.
agents to go into the Autozone and purchase In March 2019, Sayoc pleaded guilty to 65 felonies, and that August, Judge Jed
a blue tarp to cover the vehicle. S. Rakoff of the Federal District Court in Manhattan sentenced him to 20 years in
Miles away, Sayoc’s mother and sis- prison. The judge imposed a relatively light penalty in part because it wasn’t clear
ter were at a Florida hospital, where his that Sayoc’s bombs had ever been intended to go off. While they could have been
mother was recovering from a surgery, ignited by accident, Sayoc wrote in letters to the court that he had deliberately
when the television news flashed a photo of omitted fuses or an ignition system. (“It was nothing more than a crude counter-
her son and the van. His sister, who’d been feit stage prop,” Sayoc wrote in a letter responding to questions from wired.) Still,
estranged from him for nearly four years, the judge said, Sayoc’s devices “were intended to strike fear and terror into the
collapsed to the floor in surprise; she’d never minds of their victims.”
even known her brother to care about poli- In his final courtroom appearance, Sayoc—freed from his daily regimen of drugs
tics. How could he have been responsible for and supplements—appeared contrite and diminished. He had tried to hang him-
such a terror spree? self in jail at one point, but in his time behind bars he had received psychological
Even as Sayoc was driven away from treatment for the first time in his life and had been placed on antianxiety medi-
the scene, his handiwork was continu- cation. Since then, he’d signed up for a program that trained him to be a compan-
ing to make itself known: That day, inves- ion for prisoners who were on suicide watch. During the many months he’d spent
tigators located additional packages aimed inside Manhattan’s federal Metropolitan Correctional Center, he’d crossed paths
at former director of national intelligence with the drug lord El Chapo, disgraced Trump campaign aide Paul Manafort, and
James Clapper, US senator Kamala Harris mega-rich child predator Jeffrey Epstein, according to Sayoc’s letter to wired .
of California, and soon-to-be presidential In their arguments to the judge, Sayoc’s lawyers called him a “broken man” and
candidate Tom Steyer. It wasn’t until early pointed to his years of trauma, untreated mental illness, and drug use as aggravat-
the following week—and the discovery of ing factors. But, they argued, he likely would have never been driven to violence
two more devices, another targeting CNN in without all the MAGA rhetoric and hate speech. After his sentencing, Sayoc’s con-
Atlanta and another targeting Steyer—that gressional representative, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, released an even blunter
investigators breathed a tentative sigh of summary of the case: “This president’s words have consequences.”
relief. “After Monday, looking at the mail net- Sayoc, now federal inmate number 17781-104 and set for release in 2035, cur-
work, we were pretty confident there weren’t rently lives at the federal US penitentiary in Marion, Illinois, one of the federal
any more devices,” says Philip Bartlett of the prison system’s most star-studded venues—home to arms dealer Viktor Bout
US Postal Inspectors. and several al Qaeda terrorists. He’s seen little of his fellow inmates, though, as
The FBI had their suspect; now they he spent much of the year in isolation, a move meant to limit the spread of the
needed to answer the question ringing coronavirus. As an incarcerated felon in the state of Illinois, Sayoc is ineligible
around in his sister’s head and find a motive. to vote in the upcoming presidential election.
As it turned out, they didn’t have to look
far. “That van—that’s what we call a clue,” GARRETT M. GRAFF (@vermontgmg) is a contributing editor for wired and
Bartlett says dryly. a paid contributor to CNN.

•••
0 6 5
Endless Talking,
Brutal Honesty,
and Uncontrolled
Sobbing at a
Chinese Self-
Breakthrough
Seminar
 '

I went in hoping to
better understand
China’s tech culture.
I left with a radically
transformed
vision of my Chinese
American self.
by Yiren Lu

Illustrations by Richard Chance

-
- :SZJ
- ...t&.
 years abroad and had her own business. Xiao wrote
cheesy soap operas that belied her intellectual prow-
ess. Yang was a tech exec whose expertise in Western
astrology made her perhaps the most respected class-
mate. One woman ran an education nonprofit; another

It
had been a chief of staff at a major investment firm.
There were two men in the class. Huang was perpetu-
ally sunny, though he’d recently been through a divorce,
while Wu was moody for no apparent reason.

was a
Each of us had come to the class seeking something
different. Some wanted coaching on how to deal with
drama at work; others wanted to change ingrained hab-
its. My reasons were professional and personal. For

balmy
five years, I’d balanced a job in software engineering
in New York with a side gig in freelance journalism. In
writing about technology, I’d become aware of a rever-
sal between Silicon Valley and China. After decades
of copycat culture, Chinese tech companies like Ten-

week
cent, Alibaba, and ByteDance, maker of TikTok, were
now out-innovating Western ones in mobile payments, 0
ecommerce, and livestreaming. By attending the class,
which was sponsored by ZhenFund, one of the most
prestigious early-stage venture capital firms in China,
in September, and in gleaming office I hoped to get insight into the sort of personalities, family back-
grounds, and cultural mores that have driven and shaped the Chi-
buildings in Beijing’s Central Business nese tech industry.
District, startup employees hunched On a more intimate level, the class was also an opportunity to
over their computers putting in the get to know a group of Chinese people who weren’t related to me
long hours customary in Chinese tech by blood. I’m a second-generation Chinese American, and I’ve
always wondered about the other life I might have lived had my
culture. Nearby, I was hunkered down parents never emigrated, first to Canada for graduate school and
with eight Chinese entrepreneurs, also then, when I was 3, to California. My parents were educated, priv-
working 12-hour days. But we weren’t ileged. Had they stayed in China, my Zhen Academy classmates
working on a startup, we were working might have been my peers.
I had initially proposed shadowing the class for a day, but Ji Gu,
on ourselves. ¶ This was Zhen Acad- Zhen Academy’s founder and the class leader, made my full partic-
emy, a seminar loosely based on a Stan- ipation a prerequisite for writing about the course. (I also agreed
ford University course and designed to not to use the real names of the participants, to protect their pri-
help entrepreneurs examine their own vacy.) So I agreed, assuming I would sit back and let others do the
talking. That turned out not to be the case.
blind spots. ¶ My classmates, ranging That first morning, with Gu at the helm and three teaching assis-
in age from their twenties to their fif- tants helping, was spent establishing ground rules. But in the after-
ties, occupied a rarefied demographic in noon, as I settled into a post-lunch slump, one of the teaching
Chinese society, and they’d come from assistants stormed back into the room and announced that he
would be quitting the class. The morning session, he said, had left
all over the country—Beijing, Sichuan,
a bad taste in his mouth. Certain students had been unreasonably
Shanghai, Guangdong. Hu was a prag- aggressive, and the rest of us had sat there and done nothing.
matist who grew up poor, literally won His announcement electrified the room. It was pretty clear who
the lottery in college, and at 26 was had been “unreasonably aggressive”: Chen, the designer. A stylish
woman in her mid-thirties, she was clearly accustomed to com-
now a health care entrepreneur mar- manding an audience. That morning she had immediately taken
ried to a mogul 20 years her senior. Chen charge of a discussion about the penalty for being late to class,
was a fashion designer who had spent proposing fines of more than $100. Though a few people made
brief, joking counterarguments, none of us pushed back hard. She
spoke in unimpeachable tones, and her reasoning—that a heavy
fee would incentivize people to stick to a schedule—made some
sense. Eventually everyone, including me, agreed to her plan. It
 didn’t seem to matter enough to make a fuss, and we were inclined
to go along.
Now the teaching assistant asked us if we really agreed. He had
been late that morning, despite having left home an hour early.
Life always contains unforeseen circumstances.
Wu, who that morning had proposed A/B-testing different pen- The episode reminded me of a term I’d heard before,
alties, said he’d agreed to the fines because he just wanted the dis- in the context of Bridgewater, the asset management
cussion to wrap up. Huang turned the focus back on the teaching firm. Ray Dalio, Bridgewater’s founder, had built his
assistant, asking if his own lateness had prompted an extreme company around the idea of “radical transparency”
reaction. Meanwhile, Chen, who had been listening to the thinly and frequently evangelized for its adoption in other
veiled criticism with seeming equanimity, defended herself by say- companies. Yet the notion of constantly giving your
ing that she’d supported severe punishments because she thought coworkers no-holds-barred feedback was considered
that they would never have to be applied. so outlandish that Bridgewater was sometimes called
Later, I wondered whether the teaching assistant’s outburst had a cult. For all our pretensions of being straight shoot-
been a teaching trick, an exaggerated reaction to get the ball roll- ers, Americans don’t really have the stomach for it. At
ing. In real life, you don’t tell a person that they like the sound of least at the office. But encountering radical transpar-
their own voice too much or that they are indiscreet or dominate ency in a Chinese setting seemed even more unlikely.
conversations. Those things are whispered behind a In my reporting work, I’d spoken to many old-school
person’s back or, more politely, are stowed away for Chinese laobans (bosses), where the communication
6 9
future reference. In transgressing the normal rules of had been ludicrously circuitous and involved numerous
social decorum, the teaching assistant set the tone for concessions to hierarchy and “face.” My classmates dis-
the rest of the class: This was a place where we were proved my skepticism. They were chameleons, slipping
not only allowed but expected to be fully transparent. easily between the opaqueness of traditional China and
the unvarnished directness of modern China.
That afternoon, Gu pulled the teaching
assistant who was so offended aside to talk
him down; he was persuaded to stay.

I first
heard
about
Ji Gu
two years ago when I was interviewing Anna
Fang, the CEO of ZhenFund, for an article
about the competitive Chinese tech startup
scene. I asked her what happened to failed
startup entrepreneurs. Did they try again? She
mentioned that ZhenFund was sponsoring a
class called the Failure Clinic, taught by an
entrepreneur named Ji Gu, and that attendance
was restricted to founders who had lost half a
million dollars of their investors’ money. The
purpose of the class was exploratory as well
as recuperative: Many of those failed entre-
preneurs went on to raise more money and
try their hand at business again.
 Westerners predicted that economic liberalization would lead
to political agitation and activism—that Chinese citizens would
demand the rights and freedoms available in the West. But that
0 7 0
hasn’t really come to pass. Instead, the quest has turned inward.
The past few years have seen a growing interest in raising the shui
ping, or level of attainment, of the Chinese consumer. DeDao, an
Gu and I had dinner at a seafood restaurant near her educational app funded by ZhenFund, sells audio columns by
house the next time I was in Beijing. She was tall, with prominent pundits and academics discussing topics like “Doing
boy-short hair and strong features. My first impres- things that don’t provide immediate returns, but are still worth-
sion was that she was aloof, cool-headed. But as din- while” or “What does it mean to tackle challenges?” As of last year,
ner went on, it was apparent that she contained great it had 30 million users. “The Chinese have worked hard the last two
reserves of empathy and was unusually astute at dis- decades for a better future,” says Sara Jane Ho, who runs a business
secting the vanities and vicissitudes of human behavior. teaching etiquette to affluent women. “So the natural extension
Gu grew up in China but spent her young adulthood in is to improve oneself both inside and out—whether that means
Singapore, Canada, and the US. She graduated from improving one’s external appearance, by dressing and beauty, or
Cornell University and then went to Stanford Busi- increasing one’s own culture, self-awareness, and sophistication
ness School. There, she took a class called Interper- by learning psychology, interpersonal relations, or philosophy.”
sonal Dynamics. Nicknamed “Touchy-Feely,” the class The Zhen Academy course caters to some of the same impulses.
aimed to teach would-be captains of industry the soft By the time I enrolled, Gu had dropped the business failure require-
skills they wouldn’t learn in corporate finance lectures. ment and adopted a broader goal of “self-breakthrough.” The
After Stanford, Gu returned to China and became name was changed from Failure Clinic to Zhen Academy and billed
the chief operating officer of an AI startup in Bei- as a general-purpose course for entrepreneurs to improve their
jing. But soon she faced upheavals: a divorce and her self-awareness and avoid pitfalls in decisionmaking. (The stigma
departure from the startup. The double whammy of of the word failure, Gu says, proved more of a drawback than an
personal and professional setbacks eviscerated her. enticement.) To ascertain your level of commitment, Gu required
In her early thirties, without a husband or a job, Gu a written application and multiple rounds of phone interviews.
reevaluated her life. She recalled the Touchy-Feely She charged $5,000 for the six days—a hefty investment, but one
course and how it had helped her gain confidence that Chinese professionals were increasingly willing to make. I
and recognize that everyone had blind spots. She’d attended Zhen Academy’s 20th session. Many of my classmates
always loved teaching and had hoped, after proving had been referred by their friends.
herself in the tech industry, to become a
lecturer at Stanford. Fang and Bob Xu, the
founder of ZhenFund and a doyen of the
Chinese VC industry, encouraged her to
take a more direct path. She began teach-
ing a version of the course, tailored for Chi-
nese entrepreneurs whose ventures had
failed. It was premised on the idea that the There were many
problems commonly blamed for entre-
preneurial failure—cash flow shortages,
moments when my
stiff competition—can be excuses for two liberal Western
deeper issues: breakdowns in human rela-
tionships or founders’ inability to see their sensibilities ran up
own strengths and weaknesses.
The Failure Clinic was the first course against candid, Chinese
of its kind in the Chinese tech world, and
it came along as Chinese development
ones. These moments
was hitting an inflection point. After Deng left me confused.
Xiaoping opened up the country econom-
ically in 1978, the main concern of most The comments often
Chinese citizens was making money. For a
long time, hunger was barely at bay. But by seemed misogynistic
2017, when the clinic was launched, China
was solidly a middle-income country. The
or callous; they
material needs of many more people were also seemed to get
at something real.
satisfied, and they began looking for some-
thing more.
The drama of three classmates to give feedback to. Chen was picked
the most, and she looked nervous as she waited for

the first
us to speak. She needn’t have worried. The feedback
was good. Even the teaching assistant told her that
she’d risen in his estimation. He could tell that since

afternoon the first day she had been curbing her impulses, giving
others the floor. She had even changed her earrings
after he told her that the ones she was wearing—two
had broken the ice, and by the second day we found large black pearls—swayed back and forth in his line
a comfortable rhythm as a class. Each morning at 9 of vision and distracted him. He said he could tell that
o’clock we’d array ourselves, meditation-retreat style, she was an open and honest person. He encouraged
on cushions around the perimeter of the conference her to take advantage of the rest of the course to con-
room; the assistants would order coffee, and then the tinue to improve.
day would begin. We’d be there for the next 12 hours. Yet Chen’s so-called improvement in the class left
Sometimes Gu would give a short lecture, or we’d do me unsettled. I couldn’t help but think that, had those
exercises like mock conversations between a boss criticisms been leveled in the US, they would have felt
and an employee. But mostly we talked, endlessly, tinged with sexism, and would have been received
about our jobs, our romantic lives, our parents, our that way. Why shouldn’t she command a room? Why
grandparents. shouldn’t she wear the earrings she wanted to wear?
Talking posed a challenge for me. While my Manda- We were forcing her to get a likability makeover of the
rin was strong for someone who had grown up in the sort that stifles women everywhere.
US, I wasn’t fluent enough to express myself in the way And what did it say about me that I did, indeed, like
I wanted. This had some benefits: I had to think before her more after?
I spoke. I was more measured. I was a better listener. There were many moments like this, when my liberal
But it was also frustrating, as though I’d turned into a Western sensibilities ran up against candid, Chinese
person who was meek and slow on the uptake. It made ones. These moments left me confused. The comments
me think twice about the Chinese speakers at work or often seemed misogynistic or callous; they also seemed
school in the US who I’d judged as passive or retiring. to get at something real.
Perhaps they were also funny, assertive, flirtatious, For all our obsession with self-help books and moti-
and profane in their native tongue, as I am in mine. vational videos, Americans often emphasize “feeling
We were expected to make “progress” in the class: good” about ourselves; we pull off this delicate act by
Gu and the teaching assistants would poke and probe redefining our flaws as something to be embraced.
to provoke an emotional breakthrough. At first, this Self-help exists to uplift. It traffics in empowering mes-
felt forced and contrived, but it was also effective. The sages. It tells us that our only flaw is negativity. We must
“best” student by the breakthrough criterion was Chen. put positive energy out in the world, or celebrate our
Even on the first day, when she’d been criticized for inner goddess.
pushing excessive late fees, it was apparent that her In China, the message is bleaker, but also more brac-
strong exterior was also protective. Over the course of ing: Of course you are flawed, and of course you want
the week, I saw her mellow out as she got to know us to fix those flaws. Suggestions to lose weight, com-
better. Extroverted and glamorous, she used her cha- ments on physical appearance, gender stereotypes,
risma benevolently, complimenting a shy classmate on discussions of net worth, are not only commonplace,
her makeup and giving each of us fashion tips. Once, they’re considered motivating exhortations. There’s no
Chen began crying after describing her childhood, and expectation that society will change, so the responsi-
Gu embraced her in a warm hug. bility is on you to get with the program.
One afternoon we were each instructed to choose Think your husband is having an affair with a
younger woman? Hire a mistress dispeller to gain the
woman’s confidence or bribe her to break up the rela-
tionship. Aren’t pretty enough? Get plastic surgery. Your
parents are poor migrant workers without a hukou, a
residency permit that allows you to access public ben-
efits like school or health care in Beijing or Shanghai?
 The American side of me said that
my identity is intrinsic, independent
of others. The Chinese side of me
said that my identity exists as the
sum total of others’ perceptions.

Tough luck. Go out and make some money to buy your My parents put pressure on me to win music compe-
way in. There is no reinterpreting these facts. Compe- titions, get into a top-ranked university, get a presti-
tition is brutal, and the market is cruel. gious job. If I failed to do so, they seemed to believe,
One day in class, we were asked to label certain per- the world would look down on me. Early on in the
sonal characteristics—family background, education, course, one of the teaching assistants pointed out that
profession, looks, wealth, height, marriage status, geo- in an exercise about our identities, I had listed things
graphic location—as either strengths or weaknesses. that I do or had done—gone to Harvard, worked as a
What happened next was the most matter-of-fact Google engineer—and not things that I am. I brushed
accounting of personal failings and assets I have ever her off at the time, but she had touched a nerve. I
heard. One student explained that she thought she was both a child of America and my parents’ daugh-
must be pretty, because men had always chased her, ter. The American side of me said that my identity is
and she felt she’d become even prettier after double intrinsic, independent of others. The Chinese side of
eyelid surgery. Another acknowledged that her face me said that my identity exists as the sum total of oth-
was crooked. When I gave my self-assessment—I con- ers’ perception.
sidered my education and family to be strengths, and This conflict came to a head one afternoon during
my looks and wealth to be weaknesses—it was the class. The previous evening, I’d confided in one of the
first time in a very long time I’d said something neg- teaching assistants that because I cared too much about
ative about myself and not been told that I just had my image, I often refrained from saying things or trying
low self-esteem. No one said anything. There were no new things that I might not be good at and might make
immediate protests or reassurances. And while initially me seem dumb. She had responded by saying that,
the silence triggered something lonely and insecure in well, yes, because I’d gone to Harvard, people would
me, I also felt relieved. My insecurities weren’t just in indeed perhaps find it disappointing if I seemed dumb.
my head. They were real things that I could change or This was not what I wanted to hear. “I feel like I’ve
compensate for. In fact, if I lived in China, they were worked so hard to convince myself that I don’t need
things that market conditions would force me to change to care about others’ expectations,” I told her in front
and compensate for. of the class that afternoon. “And now I feel like it was
Of course, viewing life as a series of market inter- all a delusion.”
actions—the labor market, the education market, the By now I was crying, great heaving sobs that seemed
marriage market—and seeking to maximize your value to have come out of nowhere. When I looked up, I saw
within these markets exacts an emotional toll. I know a sea of friendly, albeit slightly baffled faces. One of
because, to a certain extent, that was how I was raised. the teaching assistants gave me a pack of tissues. Hu,

Yiren Lu (@yirenlu) is a software engineer and writer

0 7
in New York. This is her first story for wired .
 Bank. In the 1970s, my dad’s family was considered
well-to-do, because they had two bicycles and a sew-
ing machine. Today, an upper-middle-class young
person owns a late-model mobile phone, enjoys craft
cocktails at clubs where international DJs spin tunes,
the health care entrepreneur, said, “You know, none and vacations abroad. It’s clear to me why some Chi-
of us really care that much.” I nodded, sniffling. I knew nese people accept the trade that many in the West
that intellectually, but deep down, I had bought into consider Faustian—economic prosperity for freedom.
the market-based model perhaps even more than the When my parents first came to North America in
actual Chinese people in the room. the late ’80s for graduate school, there was never a
Gu spoke often of finding a happy equilibrium doubt that they would try to stay. Going back was
between your relationship with yourself and your rela- considered a shameful failure. Today, while Chinese
tionship with others. I leaned too far in one direc- students paying full tuition still fill seats in master’s
tion—seeking consensus and being hyperaware of how programs in the US, their experience suggests some-
people perceived me. Chen, Gu said, had leaned too thing more akin to the grand tours that upper-class
hard in the other. It was a hard balance to strike. Chen’s Americans undertook in Europe in the 19th century.
stated goal for the class was to become less dominant In 2017, eight in 10 Chinese students studying abroad
in groups. But then, at moments, when she excitedly returned after graduation, according to Quartz, up
tried to interject into the conversation and Gu would from just one in 10 in 2002. These repatriates, called
shush her, that often felt like an abnegation of herself. “sea turtles,” have made a simple calculus: If they stay
in the US, they can get stable but faceless jobs at Ernst
& Young or Microsoft. Even if they find exciting posi-
tions, they have to contend with hostile immigration
policies and a bamboo ceiling. Or they can go home
to more dynamic career prospects and apartments
and restaurants that are just as nice as those in New
York or San Francisco.

Like many
One would think that all these sea turtles, edu-
cated or at least exposed to the democratic tradition,

American-
would chafe under restrictions to speech, press, and
assembly. Yet the impression I got at Zhen Academy,
where roughly half of the class had spent some time

born
abroad, and from talking to Chinese friends in the US,
was the opposite. Some students, particularly from

Chinese,
privileged classes, “come to this country and see how
democracy works, and they actually become disen-
chanted,” says Yuhua Wang, a professor of political
science at Harvard. “Part of the reason is that they
I spent my childhood and adolescence holding my Chinese her- see the problems, the inefficiencies, the gridlock of
itage in slight disdain. When I was in elementary and middle democracy. Back in China, everything seems to work
school, our trips to see the grandparents in Nanjing and Shang- very smoothly, because there’s a very strong party.”
hai meant a number of physical inconveniences—air pollution, In their eyes, the Chinese government is absolute
mosquitoes, dirty hospitals, squat toilets. Later on, as China but not arbitrary, and its decisions, while often harsh,
developed, we saw its particular combination of gaudy consum- nevertheless have a kind of logic. If you take eco-
erism and political centralization as gauche. My younger sister nomic growth and ideological control as first prin-
and I made fun of the fake Louis Vuitton bags, the sun umbrel- ciples, everything else follows: The government shut
las, the transactional nature of romantic relationships. We also down cryptocurrency exchanges because they led to
viewed the government with suspicion. Our schools had taught speculative, fraudulent activity. It forcibly quaran-
us that liberal democracy is the only legitimate form of govern- tined Covid-19 patients in special facilities because
ment, that anything else was evil and doomed to fail. We were transmission was happening in families; it made
haughty in our moral superiority. WeChat moderators criminally liable for content,
Yet China didn’t fail. It thrived. During my childhood and early because what’s a more effective way of monitor-
adulthood, China transformed from a backwater to a global
superpower. Per capita GDP grew from less than
$400 in the early 1990s to roughly $10,000 today.
Poverty (defined as living on $1.90 a day) fell from 30
3
percent to less than 2 percent, according to the World
ing social media than from the bottom up?
Putting aside whether you agree with these
actions or the principles underlying them,
the hyperrational system can resonate with
a class of technocratic professionals.
It’s also a system that has largely bene-
fited people like my classmates. Huang spent
seven years in Paris getting a master’s and
PhD in history. One day over lunch, he told
me that Chinese society could be divided
into three groups—the top 15 percent, the
next 30 percent, and the bottom 55 per-
cent, i.e., the masses. Each of these groups
understood their respective role—the top
groups were to be the “brain” of the country;
the bottom, the “body.” In his opinion, this
partitioning of responsibilities meant that,
unlike in the US, where we are governed by
the majority, China’s decisions reflected the
thinking of the smartest people and were
made in the country’s long-term interest.
When I asked whether this meant the top
15 percent would make decisions that bene-
fited only themselves, he seemed unmoved.
After all, further enrichment at the top could
only happen if the masses were fed, enter-
tained, and sufficiently wealthy to drive
domestic consumption.
My visit to Beijing for Zhen Academy coin- is focused on how the government responds to the
cided with the lead-up to the 70th anniversary of the pandemic; it shows you how decisive and determined
founding of the People’s Republic of China. The date they were,” he says. “When you watch the media in
was marked with a grand military parade meant, the US, what you hear about is how the behavior of
in part, to convey to China’s laobaixing—“regular local officials in Wuhan led to the cover-up of the
folks”—that China was rich and strong, and that Chi- pandemic early on, which led to all the problems.
nese people could hold their heads up in the world. They’re both saying something true … but the per-
It was the sort of thing that was easy to dismiss as spectives are totally different.”
bread and circuses, but in all my interactions I was For many sea turtles who grew up primed with
struck by a genuine swagger and pride in China’s Chinese media and with firsthand experience of Chi-
ascendance. Several of my classmates at Zhen Acad- na’s economic transformation, reports in the West-
emy applauded me on my farsightedness in wanting ern media about arrests of political activists or the
to better understand China, and one asked when I surveillance and detention of minority groups like
was planning on moving there, so confident was he the Uighurs, or even the US government’s contention
that being in China would benefit me. that China is forcing the repatriation of dissident Chi-
In the months after I attended Zhen Academy, as nese living abroad, served not as a revelation but as
Covid-19 swept across the globe—bringing daily life further proof that the Western media, threatened
to a standstill and US-China relations to new lows—I by China’s rise and incapable of understanding the
was often struck by the gap between how Americans situation on the ground, was biased against them.
saw China and how Chinese people saw their own
country. Wang, the Harvard professor, pointed out the
differences in media coverage of the Covid-19 pan-
demic. In the Chinese media, “a lot of the coverage
 a vicarious one in an unequal society. For
people like my classmates, who are fully
capable of recognizing propaganda and are
0 7 5
best positioned to benefit from this system,
the official messaging of working toward
a collective goal of economic prosperity
and national glory both sanctifies and aligns with their

On the last
own ambitions.
If there is a difference between what self-break-
through, or self-actualization—or whatever you call

day of the
what we were doing at the Zhen Academy—means
in the US and China, then perhaps it is in the balance

course,
among what Gu calls the four quadrants of integral
psychology: “I, you, us, them.” Human beings, she says,
are by nature social animals. It’s not as simple as just
doing what you want; you have to intersect with what
we did an exercise that consisted of ranking our personal others want, too.
values. The assistants handed us a set of flash cards, each Toward the very end of class, I had a conversation
containing words like love, wealth, power, excellence, with Hu, the health care entrepreneur. She’d heard me
friendship, and independence, and told us to select our struggle with how to balance my dual career of com-
top five. There was a flash card labeled ai guo, or “patri- puter engineering and freelance writing; I’d talked
otism,” which elicited titters. about whether to pursue some of my less lucrative
The exercise was jovial, and after we had laid out the and more unstable interests full-time. She questioned
flash cards we walked around and looked at everyone whether they needed to be less lucrative and more
else’s choices, like elementary school students display- unstable: “There are ways to build a business from your
ing family genealogy projects. Surprisingly, a number writing. There’s sponsorships and affiliate marketing.
named freedom as a top value. Others listed wealth. You can have a subscription service, you can write for
My own values were health, love, knowledge, cre- TV, for podcasts. You can come up with something
ativity, and pragmatism. I noticed that one of the new.” She was arguing that the choice was neither to
central themes of my life was that the first four val- blindly follow my dreams nor to blindly chase finan-
ues—idealistic, romantic notions—were often in cial security. Rather, there was a third path, one that
conflict with the fifth. I wanted to be a free-spirited would require creativity but might ultimately recon-
bohemian, but I also wanted to max out my 401(k). cile all my contradictory desires.
Perhaps that pragmatism is a vestige of my upbring- It was the sort of “monetize your passion” think-
ing. Several of my classmates told me that, despite my American ing I was accustomed to hearing in Silicon Valley but
accent and Western demeanor, they saw me as a deeply traditional that I saw everywhere in China: the twentysomething
Chinese girl, more traditional, in fact, than people in China today. selling marked-up cosmetic sample kits on Taobao; a
It made sense. My parents left China in the 1980s with the val- millennial farmer and chef who amassed more than
ues of their time. When they graduated from college in 1985, 30 million followers on Douyin, China’s TikTok, by
many people were still assigned a job within a danwei, or work streaming videos of her life in rural Sichuan; Zhen
unit. This danwei would then take care of you: It would assign Academy itself, born of Ji Gu’s disappointments.
you housing; you might meet your spouse there. All you needed The day after the course ended, Gu and I went to
was to acquiesce to the system. dinner at a popular hot-pot place in the city. We ended
But over the next 35 years, China changed. The private mar- up brainstorming how she might be able to bring a ver-
ket blossomed. Real estate prices skyrocketed. Danwei were sion of this course online, or to America. “If you have
disbanded, leaving university graduates to fend for themselves. a few friends who are interested,” she said, smiling, “I
Acquiescence was no longer an option. can handle the rest.”
Today China is 1.4 billion strivers, many of whom juxtapose
within themselves tradition and modernity, freedom and duty,
obeisance and hustle. The hand of the state is the ever present
guiding force. It manages this striving, swaying the direction of
industry and prescribing a set of public virtues and narratives.
Walk around any major city and you’ll see the slogan “Chinese
Dream, My Dream” printed on banners and construction placards,
the characters formatted so that the dream character is shared
between “China” and “My.” The country’s dream is your dream.
For many of China’s migrant and factory workers, the dream is
 0 7 6

Spread-
BY Jack Hitt

sheet
Patriot In November, thousands could show
up to cast their ballot, only to be told
they’ve been purged from the voter
rolls. A bunch of activists—and one
Ohio IT guy with lots of cats—are
combing through the data, racing to
restore people’s rights.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY Glenna Jennings Steve Tingley-Hock,

voter activist
r
l • •
~
.. ~
 He squeaked out a win, and to this day his

This
opponent, Stacey Abrams, has refused to
concede. Determining how many legiti-
mate voters have been disappeared from
voter rolls in these purges has been diffi-
cult to measure. After a Virginia election

past
in 2013, one calculation revealed that as
many as 17 percent of the purged voters
in some counties should not have been.
These error rates are not merely distort-

April,
ing the vote but now appear to be affect-
ing outcomes.
Cleaning up the voter rolls makes sense
and is mandated by federal law; states are
required to remove the dead and those
who have moved out of state by running
their voter lists alongside state registers of
death notices and postal records. But many
states pile on conditions for voter eligibility
in the lead-up to Wisconsin’s spring elec- mate, mostly Democratic, voters would get that seem designed to increase the popu-
tion, there was a ruckus that, from afar, cut. The tie-breaking vote would decide lation deemed ineligible to vote. Ohio, like
made no sense. There didn’t seem to be the timing of the purge—before or after the a number of states, has a “use it or lose it”
much to vote for. Bernie Sanders had November presidential election. Karofsky law, which requires the removal of every-
already conceded, so the Democratic pri- was a likely “after” vote. What happened one who has skipped voting in two general
mary was a dud, and President Trump had next made the stakes glaringly obvious. elections in a row. Putting aside the princi-
no opponents. There was a state supreme Karofsky won the election, setting the stage ple—should citizens have the liberty to vote
court judgeship on the ballot, pitting a lib- for a delayed purge. But then the conser- in as few elections as they please?—add-
eral, Jill Karofsky, against a conservative, vative judge decided to do something so ing conditions makes the purging process
Daniel Kelly, but even a liberal victory legally bizarre that the very word used to more complex. And when you add com-
would only make a solidly conservative describe his action is not yet in Webster’s plex conditions to a process involving a
court one vote less so. Dictionary. With three months left in his state database with millions of names, that
And yet the race was all blood and claw. lame-duck judgeship, Kelly decided to means more room for error. For instance,
A Republican-backed ad accused Karof- “unrecuse” himself, and suddenly a purge in Ohio, the one opportunity you have to
sky, a prosecutor, of offering “no jail time of 129,000 names seemed possible. halt this process comes when the state
for a monster who sexually assaulted a The furious maneuvering was testa- mails out a postcard and asks, like some
5-year-old girl,” even though she’d had ment to what is at stake this year. Wiscon- kind of ontological joke, if you reside at
nothing to do with the sentencing. Karof- sin is a key state for President Trump in the the same address. (“You sent me this card
sky said Kelly displayed “corruption in November election, as it was in 2016. That here, didn’t you? Duh.”) How easy is it to
its purest form.” The other conservative year, he won by the narrowest of victories: flick the card into the trash can, along with
justices on the court took the rare step of 22,748 votes. Now it was conceivable that your chance to vote on Election Day?
condemning Karofsky for being “insulting” a single judge in a single case in a single Numerous think tanks and voter groups
and “slanderous,” with no “fitness for this state could determine if Trump kept his job. have studied this problem of wrongly
bench.” Then, when the Democratic gover- Breathtaking voter purges like the one purged voters, typically after elections. But
nor allowed more time for mail-in ballots in Wisconsin have become more notice- in a small town in Ohio, there is at least one
because of the Covid-19 pandemic, Repub- able these days, in part because they now man who is very much at battle stations,
lican state legislators immediately defied involve increasingly enormous chunks of obsessed with fixing the problem before it
him. They took their fight all the way to voters—often in states and counties with a happens. Steve Tingley-Hock is an IT guy
the United States Supreme Court, and won. history of racial discrimination. Last year, who has long toiled in the trenches of data-
But there was more here than the usual North Carolina removed 8 percent of its base management, working the vast credit
partisan rancor: A single case from the voters from the rolls in one week. The most card data bank of American Express for
Wisconsin Supreme Court’s previous ses- scandalous removal to date involved the
sion had ended in a tie, because Kelly had Georgia governor’s race in 2018, when
recused himself. This case turned on a dull Brian Kemp, then secretary of state, spent
bureaucratic process, but one with alarm- the two years before the race purging more
ing ramifications. A massive purge of the than 300,000 voters. That Kemp was also Jen Miller of
voter rolls had been planned for 2020, but the Republican candidate for governor the League of Women
it was delayed over fears that a lot of legiti- meant the umpire was also in the game. Voters in Ohio
•••
0 7 9
years. In his off hours, he has developed a League of Women Voters in Ohio. She lives
unique hobby: scrutinizing state voter files. in Columbus and is committed to main- A 2013 Supreme Court
Last fall he had an opportunity to put these taining proper voter rolls and encouraging case led to an increase
skills to a unique test. Early on in an Ohio people to cast ballots—a bipartisan mission in voter purges.
purge process, he and other data analysts that’s remained unchanged since the league
received the purge list. Deploying several was founded in 1920. Miller was concerned
basic data query techniques, he identified because Ohio’s new Republican secretary
thousands of voters mistakenly headed for of state, Frank LaRose, had announced a
ejection. massive purge of nearly 235,000 voters
Now, armed with his work, voter rights just a few months after 267,000 had been
groups in a handful of states are trying to scrubbed from the rolls. “If you’ve already
plug these holes in the voter registration removed a quarter million,” she said, “you
system—before hundreds of thousands of would think it wouldn’t be another quarter.”
voters are drained from the rolls ahead of Then she got a surprise. director of All Voting Is Local-Ohio, an
the presidential election. It’s the story of “I’m in my garden, literally,” Miller told ACLU-affiliated voter group—first heard
database nerds, armed with a deep knowl- me, when LaRose “calls me on my cell about the secretary of state’s list, he was
edge of SQL, trying to preserve democracy phone and says, ‘Hey, Jen, would you stunned. “I was like, ‘What? Really?’” Many
in America. like the list?’ ” At that moment, “my dogs voters find out they’ve been cut only when
decided to have a very noisy fight right they’re turned away from polling places on
beside me,” she said, as the weight of what Election Day.

It
just happened set in. LaRose was offer- Then Miller got a look at the task at hand.
ing the ultimate in transparency. Miller’s When she clicked on the list, what she saw
organization would get a chance to check was a simple Excel spreadsheet with voters’
his work before these voters got the boot. identification numbers and their names and
all began in the middle of the summer Of course Miller said yes, and LaRose for- addresses, but no phone numbers and no
of 2019, when Jen Miller was a little anx- warded the database file. The news spread. explanation for why they were removed.
ious. Miller is executive director of the When Michael Brickner—then the state Just names and addresses. Almost a quar-

•••
0 8 0
ter of a million of them. How do you contact ect, which issues official analyses about
them to find out if they still live in the same voter lists. I asked Tingley-Hock about the
place and are active voters? Go to every membership of this elite organization. There
door? Try to track down phone numbers are no other members. “I am the Ohio Voter
and call them? Encourage every voter in Project,” he said.
the state to check their own status on the

It
state’s voter registration website, to make
sure they weren’t removed in error? That
last method had always been part of the
league’s voter outreach, and it’s how Miller
got her first hint that the number of errors didn’t take Tingley-Hock long to find the
in the state’s database might be immense. clerical error that led to Miller’s status in the
Miller frequently gives public talks about voter database. It happened when Franklin
voting. On stage, she’s high energy. She’s the County, where she lives, uploaded its voter
daughter of a baker, the offspring of gener- data to the state and something went a little
ations of bakers, she’ll tell you. She might haywire. The state uses four different ven-
roll up her sleeves or, as she did at one event dors to pull names from all its counties and
last year, wear a jean jacket over her busi- merges them into a master list. So human
ness casual, with a gigantic button reading, or technical errors should be no surprise.
“I believe in the Power of Women.” As is his way, Tingley-Hock ran a com-
There was this one speech she wanted parative search to see how many other vot-
to tell me about. She’d decided that she ers were listed as “active” on the Franklin
would demonstrate how to go about County database but got glitched into “con-
checking one’s voter status. She had the firmation” status at the state level. He found
state’s voter site mirrored from her com- more than 20,000 of them, just in this one
puter and projected onto a screen. In Ohio, county, all in a waiting period before being
she told the audience, you want to see pushed off the rolls. Ohio has 88 counties.
yourself marked “active” on the site, and No longer was there just an uneasy sense
not “confirmation” status. that something was hinky. Miller had the
“I was explaining how to do it, and receipts—a precise list of names and
decided to use my name,” Miller recalled. addresses—and could show the secretary
“Then, click, and it said ‘confirmation’ sta- of state, unequivocally, that this specific
tus. And it was, like, the purge timeline had set of active voters at the county level had
started on me!” But Miller hadn’t moved, been mistakenly cast into purgatory at the
and she’d voted diligently in every elec- state level. Those Franklin County voters
tion. “It was just like, ‘What?’ ” She had underscored the fact that the massive list
time to rectify the situation, but her status that LaRose provided Miller might have
meant she was headed down the chute to serious issues.
the voter trash heap. Tingley-Hock and the league continued
Naturally, she wanted to find out how their broader effort to check the massive
she got bumped. She turned to a member purge list. Several other groups, like All Vot-
of the league, Steve Tingley-Hock, who was ing Is Local, as well as newspapers like The
already hard at work evaluating LaRose’s Columbus Dispatch, were also poring over
purge list, which numbered nearly 235,000 the data and finding various chunks of vot-
names. She was hesitant to ask him to take ers who didn’t seem to belong in a purge.
on even more, but she was curious about Tingley-Hock remembered when he ran his
the error. “It’s kind of like asking your friend first query of 7.8 million voters in the state’s
who’s a roofer to do your roof on the week- database against those on the purge list.
end,” she said. Well, not quite. It’s more like “All of them should have been in confir-
asking your friend who’s a roofer but also mation or inactive status,” Tingley-Hock
spends his weekends studying the minutiae said, so when his search came back with
of roofing technology, is a one-man roof- more than 11,000 in active status, “I ran it
ing cheerleader, and has been simply dying two more times to make sure I hadn’t made
for someone to ask him to evaluate a roof. a mistake.” He kept chipping away at the
It would be hard to overstate Tingley- list like this, coming across errors affect-
Hock’s passion for voter lists. He is a mem- ing more names and then bringing them
ber of something called the Ohio Voter Proj- to Miller and LaRose. Thanks to the efforts

•••
0 8 3
of Tingley-Hock and other volunteers, as couldn’t find his name on the voting rolls, Since Roberts issued his opinion, states
well as journalists and data analysts, by he cheerfully tweeted a video selfie, saying, have gone wild passing laws that restrict
the the time the purge went through on “No matter which side, it’s important that early voting, end same-day registration,
September 6, more than 40,000 people your voice be heard!” (The error was fixed and require photo identification—all of
on the initial list had been able to preserve that day, and he voted.) which might have been challenged by
their registration. But those Rockwellian sentiments have federal overseers. In Texas, a federal dis-
But the notion that so many voters taken a back seat in a time of political trict court found that a set of voter pro-
could have been purged in error, or have polarization. Democrats argue that Repub- visions had “a discriminatory effect and
little opportunity to reaffirm their sta- licans are using suppression tactics to pre- purpose” and constituted a poll tax; they
tus, alarmed many advocates. When the vent legitimate voters from having their were resubmitted the very same day that
story became public, it was a shock. The say, while Republicans counter that Dem- the Supreme Court issued its opinion. The
secretary of state pledged to correct the ocrats’ loosey-goosey voting rules invite rules are now in force.
mistakes; that was the reason he’d crowd- voter fraud. All these measures tend to disenfran-
sourced the list in the first place. But that’s a false equivalence, conve- chise voters whose lives are typically more
“He didn’t crowdsource it,” Tingley- nient for cable talk shows. Suppression in flux—poor voters, people who live in cit-
Hock told me. “He Steve-sourced it. The tactics have been shown to leave millions ies, younger voters, and racial minorities.
errors that I found in Ohio, for an IT per- of voters stranded on Election Day, while These people also tend to vote for Demo-
son like me, they’re egregious. I mean, the fraud allegations have simply never crats. The numbers bear out the true sig-
I am embarrassed for my profession as held up. Think about how hard fraud would nificance of Robert’s 2013 court opinion:
practiced.” On the phone, Tingley-Hock actually be. You’d have to find a dead guy According to one calculation by the Bren-
comes across as a testy fellow, the kind of still on the rolls, or a person who had nan Center, almost “4 million more names
guy who could get prickly about a missing moved out of state, convince someone to were purged from the rolls between 2014
Oxford comma. The discovery of errors commit a felony for a single vote, and then and 2016 than between 2006 and 2008.”
on this scale left him reeling. “How many send them in with a fake ID or the abil- Or take Georgia again. In the four years
times do you go out as an individual doing ity to accurately forge a signature. In fact, after Shelby, the state purged twice as
something in public where you’re going to an analysis by the conservative Heritage many voters—1.5 million—as it did in the
be wrong 20 percent of the time?” Foundation of more than 3 billion votes four years before the decision.
Painstakingly checking these purged cast in US elections dating back to World Most recently, top Republican Party offi-
lists in real time had long been one of those War II found just 10 instances of in-person cials have thrown out that old Rockwell
projects everybody hoped somebody would voter fraud. (That’s not a typo. They found script about the civic romance of voting.
get around to. “Steve just started bird-dog- 10. That’s 0.000000003 percent.) A pres- This spring, when Democrats in Congress
ging it,” Brickner said, “and he did some- idential commission created by President proposed more money for absentee vot-
thing a lot of other advocacy organizations Trump and headed by Kris Kobach, the ing because of the pandemic, Trump lost
and data scientists and experts have said former Kansas secretary of state who has it during an interview with Fox & Friends:
that they wanted to do, and Steve just did it.” pressed for strict voter-ID laws, spent a “They had things—levels of voting that, if
year digging for recent examples of in-per- you ever agreed to it, you’d never have a
son voter fraud and came up dry, nothing Republican elected in this country again.”
but a few secondhand rumors.

There’s
If one could identify the moment when
the frequency and size of voter purges

In
really changed, it would probably be the
2013 US Supreme Court decision in Shelby
a traditional, almost romantic view of County v. Holder. An Alabama county had
voting in the US. Norman Rockwell cap- challenged the law that required the fed-
tured it in his painting of the undecided eral government to approve changes to February, I traveled to Marysville,
voter. Maybe you know the picture. There’s voting rules in states and counties, partic- Ohio, a small town nestled around a few
a white guy in a suit and hat standing in a ularly in the South, with an egregious his- cloverleafs up the highway from Colum-
curtained voting booth, holding a newspa- tory of discriminatory voter suppression. bus. Tingley-Hock had invited me to watch
per with pictures of Dewey and Roosevelt The court concluded that a federal over- him work.
and the headline “WHICH ONE?” sight was no longer needed. In the opinion, We agreed to meet downtown at the
The meaning was obvious: Voting was a Chief Justice John Roberts wrote sunnily public library on a Saturday morning. I had
civic duty. Americans might disagree about that things “have changed dramatically” hoped to sit around Tingley-Hock’s din-
who to vote for, but voting was always to since the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights ing room table, where he typically powers
be encouraged. When Quinton Lucas, the Act that required the oversight. Racism of up his laptop, but he waved me off from
young Democratic mayor of Kansas City, the type that required “extraordinary mea- coming to his house. There was the con-
was turned away from his polling sta- sures to address an extraordinary problem” cern about his dog, Mocha, who isn’t fond
tion earlier this spring because the clerk was a thing of the past. of newcomers. Then there were the cats,
 Tingley-
every week or every month. Some states
charge for the list, but in Ohio, the weekly
list is free and requires nothing more than

Hock comes hitting the Download button on a public

website. Only a few elections ago, com-
paring these voter lists from week to week

across as the would have required immense computing

power and a lot of time. Not anymore.

kind of guy
Tingley-Hock’s mobile gear consists
of nothing more than a basic Thinkpad, a
Lenovo E350, with a Unix operating sys-

who could tem running Perl with a fast processor. (At

home he uses a modified tower Windows

get prickly about an

10 desktop.) He can download Ohio’s voter
database of 7.8 million voters every week
and run a program that flags every change

Oxford comma. The in voter status. He prints out the list. One
of the issues that plagues these voter lists
is the oldest—garbage in/garbage out. The

discovery of errors ETL (extract, transform, load) software he

runs will snag on so much as a stray comma

on this scale left him

or an odd character, like an upside-down
question mark or a foreign letter.
We ran the program, brooming the files

reeling. Tango, Daphne, Wendy, and Zeus. “And

of tiny little bits of orthographic litter so we
could compare the new files to the old. Most
of the time, we waited. “You load the file,
those are the indoor cats,” he said. There and when it blows up, it tells you which line
was also the menagerie of outdoor cats, it blew up on, so you go to that line, you cor-
which “varies by time of day, anywhere rect it, and then you run it again,” he said.
from a couple to six or eight.” Library it is. Ohio has a particular problem, for some rea-
Tingley-Hock pulled up to Marysville son, with stray + signs. “In Georgia, there are
Public Library in an old white pickup so usually a few backslashes that blow up, but
mottled with to-be-painted splotches that other than that it loads pretty clean.” As we
he appeared to be wheeling around town ran Ohio’s list, the system kept blowing up.
in a Holstein cow. His truck, like so much “OK,” Tingley-Hock said, “so we have
of the technology in his life, is about as another problem in line 1,570,093.” He
analog as he can make it. When I men- scrolled down past a million and a half
tioned that I had gotten to the library with voters. “Oh, there it is, right after Tyler—
my rental car’s onboard GPS, he furrowed the plus sign.”
his brow. He may be as nimble as a gym- Once Tingley-Hock tidied up literally
nast on the keyboard, but he’s no fan of every jot and tittle, he ran the software
tracking technologies. to compare this week’s list to last week’s
Tingley-Hock looks nothing like the deli- and pull out every change in the voter
cate pinkie-extending Anglo tea-drinker my list. The day that we ran Ohio’s latest list,
prejudices conjured from his name. He is a 4,736 names were jettisoned. North Caro-
fullback of a man, well into his sixties, with lina, likewise, drops several thousand vot-
a long white mane, scrunched apple cheeks, ers every week. After he does his work, he
and spry blue eyes that suggested the Wiz- posts the numbers on his site.
ard of Oz, pre-tornado. We sat in a library The next day, Tingley-Hock and I met at a
conference room, and he gave me a primer local sports bar. A sign in the door of Benny’s
on how to run one’s fingers through a quar- Pizza Pub & Patio scolded me: “No weapons
ter million voters to find potential mistakes. allowed on premises.” Despite having my lib-
Voter lists are massive data sets that typ- erty crimped, the wings were tasty. We went
ically change from day to day, as names are over the numbers. These routine drops never
taken out and new ones get added. In most get any notice, but they add up to numbers as
states, a fresh voter list is made available big as any concentrated purge. North Caro-

•••
0 8 5
lina quietly dropped 94,000 voters in 2018 in the US in 2008, after it was made pub- says, it’s “a gigantic effect. Huge effect.”
this way, he said. Most are probably names lic that his brother had embezzled money So O’Neill created an app. Once you’ve
of people who have died or moved, but from the organization and that the board downloaded it, the Voter Network app
who’s checking? “This goes on week after had approved a secret repayment agree- would check in regularly with a constantly
week after week after week, and nobody ment. Two years later, the US organization updated list of voters being dropped or
blinks an eye about it.” collapsed after far-right propagandist James purged, and it would ping you if one of them
He gets exasperated. His frowning-wizard O’Keefe doctored footage that showed low- synced with a name in the address book
face appears. If the massive purges have an level staffers giving legally dubious advice on your phone. The idea is that you’ll get in
error rate of somewhere around 20 percent, to Hannah Giles, a conservative activist, touch with the dropped voter and let them
are these regular drops comparably flawed? who was posing as a sex worker trying to know that they won’t be able to vote unless
escape an abusive pimp. they register again.
Rathke, however, has never stopped After creating the app, O’Neill faced one
organizing. Still lean and gangly at 72, he big hurdle: Where to get that constantly

Given
runs Acorn International. After talking to updated list of voters being dropped or
Tingley-Hock, he decided to get back into purged?
the US voter registration game. He created “I just happened to set up a Twitter
the Voter Purge Project, whose primary alert for anyone mentioning voter purges,”
that purges tend to affect Democratic mission is to give Steve Tingley-Hock reg- O’Neill said, “and I saw this project and
voters, I was expecting to hear that the ular downloads of voter registration files some tweets about it, and it turned out to
Democratic National Committee had a so he can quickly cull the names of voters be Wade’s project.” The app is available on
robust program to address them. When who’ve been dropped. Google Play, but it is still in development.
I reached Reyna Walters-Morgan, the Before Rathke got involved, Tingley-Hock When it becomes fully operational, purged
DNC’s director of voter protection and civic was working only on state lists—like those voters could be getting a text from a friend
engagement, she said, “We rely very heav- in Ohio or North Carolina—that were free telling them to reregister—or register for
ily on our state party partners to do some or relatively cheap to obtain. “One of the the first time.
additional web work and follow up on these scandals here,” Rathke said, “is that some This idea of relying on people who know
issues.” When I pressed, asking if the DNC lists are exorbitantly expensive. In Alabama, each other to get out the vote, Green says,
was examining these lists with granular it costs over $36,000 every time you pull a is really a return to “old political organiz-
attention—the way Tingley-Hock does—she list. In Wisconsin, which has a huge issue ing tactics.” One person contacts 10 others,
said we’d have to go off the record. During around their purges, it’s $12,500.” who each contact 10 more. These are the
this secret, off-the-record conversation, she So far, Rathke’s organization is working kinds of tactics that have been used since
said nothing of any interest. toward a regular vetting of voter rolls in 13 Rathke first got into organizing, back when
Walters-Morgan did want me to know states. He is preparing to sue nine states, Richard Nixon was president—updated for
that the national party, on the record, was including Wisconsin, to obtain lower-cost the smart phone.
on top of the situation. “The DNC also has a access to their voter lists. In June he began Megan Gall, the national data director
year-round voter assistance hotline, and we his first field test of 100 voters in Georgia, for All Voting Is Local, also reached out
ramp it up around election time,” she said. pulled from one of Tingley-Hock’s lists. So to Tingley-Hock; he is sending her lists
Wade Rathke, a veteran voter-registeration far, his volunteers knocked on doors and of people pushed off the rolls weekly or
advocate, considers the voter assistance found 80 people home, 16 of whom were monthly in Ohio, Georgia, and Florida.
hotline laughable. That is, he literally burst voters wrongly dropped. Gall’s group then contacts those people to
out laughing when I asked him about it. If Recently, another bit of serendipity get them reregistered.
you don’t realize you’ve been excluded from occurred. An app developer in San Fran- Gall’s colleagues have been testing the
voting until Election Day, a complaint to a cisco named Nick O’Neill started reading efficacy of different messages delivered by
hotline does little good. But reaching out about voter purges. An idea hit him. He’d text. “The two most powerful messages,”
to disenfranchised voters before Election already created apps to make it easier for she said, “have been a generic voting rights
Day—now that has promise. citizens to contact their representatives. message, like, ‘Hey, voting is your right, it
Earlier this year, The New York Times ran Now he wanted to try a new method for is safe, it is secret, you should go do it.’ The
a story about Tingley-Hock’s work, and sev- keeping them registered to vote. other one is a little bit of social pressure.”
eral activists realized that he was spinning “We came up with this idea of applying Telling a voter that their neighbor is reg-
gold. Rathke was one of them. Rathke’s relational contacts to purged voters,” O’Neill istered turns out to be a major motivator.
name may be familiar: In 1970 he founded said. The more personal contact a voter has The power of the relational contact again.
Acorn, one of the largest and most success- with someone, the more likely they are to Curiously, an outraged text message—
ful groups that organized poor and work- act. Such motivation, says Don Green, a “They’re stealing your right to vote!”—does
ing people. Acorn also registered millions of professor of political science at Columbia not work as well. It gets people enraged
new voters over the years. The other reason University, is “stronger if you talk to people enough to click on the All Voting Is Local
Rathke’s name may ring a bell is that he had that you know—your neighbor, your fam- site. “But then,” Gall told me, “when we fol-
to step down from a leadership role at Acorn ily members, or coworkers.” In fact, Green lowed up and said, ‘How likely are you to

•••
0 8 6
register to vote?’ that messaging actually suppressed people’s inter-
est.” So far the organization has texted more than 1 million people in COLOPHON
Florida, Georgia, and Ohio, and it recently expanded its operations
into Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Arizona. Bold Decisions That Helped
All that on-the-ground, text-by-text, friend-to-friend activism Get This Issue Out:
could make a big difference in enfranchising voters in November.
But the real impact of the work of Tingley-Hock and the League
of Women Voters and others—the real legacy of Ohio—might Asking for a rent reduction; letting the sourdough
starter die a noble death; using the dryer as a
happen at an earlier stage, with the actual purges. “Secretaries standing desk; declaring my intent to purchase
of state who are processing these lists,” Rathke said, “have to be an orange pickup truck; making pizza on the grill;
camping in my parents’ front yard at 48 years
correct. That hasn’t been true, until now.” of age; buying a wet suit to swim in the bay;
gorging on eggs and toast till I met the minimum
In other words, they know they are being watched. weight requirement for giving blood; celebrat-
The biggest purge since LaRose finalized Ohio’s list happened last ing YA author and longtime wired subscriber
Gloria Skurzynski, who turned 90 this summer;
winter in Georgia. There, the voter rolls had remained untouched deciding that Bob’s Burgers is better than The
Simpsons; asking for the weird-looking purple
since 2017, when a massive purge “affected a disproportionate vegetable at the farmers’ market and discovering
number of people of color,” according to one analysis, and had the life-changing flavor of kohlrabi; stepping on
a bathroom scale for the first time in months
huge implications for the controversial 2018 governor’s race. But (dammit); setting a timer on all my devices to limit
when the new secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, publicly said Twitter to 20 minutes a day; abandoning a terrible
book, though it felt like sacrilege; paddleboarding
that he would be releasing his work in December, just as Ohio had around Alameda in 5.5 hours; taking a big risk at
a wildly inappropriate time; helping my roommate
done, he made a point of sounding downright Rockwellian. dye her hair pink; night-swimming in the moonlight;
“Accurate and up-to-date voter rolls are vital to secure elec- putting mayonnaise on my egg-and-cheese sand-
wiches; turning all my tops into crop tops; creating
tions,” Raffensperger proclaimed. “That is why my office is releas- a new human life in the Year of Our Lord 2020.
ing the full list to ensure that people who are still eligible voters is a registered trademark of Advance
wi r e d

can update their information.” Magazine Publishers Inc. Copyright ©2020

Condé Nast. All rights reserved. Printed in the
Right away, Tingley-Hock called Raffensperger’s office to buy USA. Volume 28, No. 9. wi r e d (ISSN 1059–1028)
is published monthly, except for the combined
the voter files ($250 a pull). The Atlanta Journal-Constitution also July/August issue, by Condé Nast, which is a
went to work comparing the purge list with the previous voter division of Advance Magazine Publishers Inc.
Editorial office: 520 Third Street, Ste. 305, San
database to do the same. According the Journal-Constitution, the Francisco, CA 94107-1815. Principal office:
Condé Nast, 1 World Trade Center, New York,
number of voters tossed for not voting was more than 120,000, NY 10007. Roger Lynch, Chief Executive Offi-
so the voter reregistration folks have their work cut out for them. cer; Pamela Drucker Mann, Chief Revenue &
Marketing Officer, US; Mike Goss, Chief Finan-
But in terms of racial or ethnic patterns, both Tingley-Hock and cial Officer. Periodicals postage paid at New
York, NY, and at additional mailing offices.
the newspaper, working separately, found the same surprising Canada Post Publications Mail Agreement
thing: Minorities were not overrepresented. In fact, the purge list No.40644503. Canadian Goods and Services
Tax Registration No. 123242885 RT0001.
this time reflected voters in general. The newspaper study broke
POSTMASTER: Send all UAA to CFS (see DMM
the purge down by county and found that the cuts were almost [Link]); NONPOSTAL AND MILITARY FACIL-
exactly in line with local demographics. ITIES: Send address corrections to wired , PO
Box 37617, Boone, IA 50037-0662. For subscrip-
“In Georgia, they have to report a person’s gender, their race, tions, address changes, adjustments, or back
issue inquiries: Please write to wi r e d , PO Box
and their ethnicity,” Tingley-Hock said. His findings were in line 37617, Boone, IA 50037-0662, call (800) 769
with the newspaper’s. If 33 percent of the full voter base was Black, 4733, or email subscriptions@wi r e d .com. Please
give both new and old addresses as printed on
then 31 percent of the voters purged were Black. White voters are most recent label. First copy of new subscription
will be mailed within eight weeks after receipt of
63 percent of the voter base and 59 percent of those cut. “It was order. Address all editorial, business, and pro-
absolutely almost dead on to the makeup of the state as a whole.” duction correspondence to wi r e d Magazine, 1
World Trade Center, New York, NY 10007. For
Meanwhile, in Wisconsin, the state supreme court decided in permissions and reprint requests, please call
(212) 630 5656 or fax requests to (212) 630
early July that it wouldn’t fast-track the voter purge after all. The 5883. Visit us online at [Link] r e d .com. To sub-
court will hear arguments in the case in September, but given scribe to other Condé Nast magazines on the
web, visit wi r e d .[Link]. Occasionally, we
the timing and Wisconsin law, a purge is unlikely until 2021. Two make our subscriber list available to carefully
judges dissented from that opinion: One was David Kelly, who screened companies that offer products and ser-
vices that we believe would interest our readers.
will be replaced by Karofsky in August. If you do not want to receive these offers and/or
information, please advise us at PO Box 37617,
So, in Wisconsin, justice will take its time. And in other states, Boone, IA 50037-0662, or call (800) 769 4733.
perhaps, bureaucrats in charge of maintaining state voters lists
wi r e dis not responsible for the return or loss
appear to know that in a newsroom, or in a kitchen prowling with of, or for damage or any other injury to, unsolic-
ited manuscripts, unsolicited artwork (includ-
cats, someone is sweeping the detritus from lines of data, compar- ing, but not limited to, drawings, photographs,
ing lists, and holding them to account. and transparencies), or any other unsolicited
materials. Those submitting manuscripts, pho-
tographs, artwork, or other materials for con-
sideration should not send originals, unless
JACK HITT (@jackhitt) is the author, most recently, of Bunch of specifically requested to do so by wi r e d in writ-
Amateurs: A Search for the American Character and cohosts the ing. Manuscripts, photographs, artwork, and
other materials submitted must be accompa-
history podcast Uncivil. nied by a self-addressed, stamped envelope.
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Honorable ANNA ROSE MCHUGH VIA FACEBOOK @GUABO VIA INSTAGRAM be written by you. Submit your story on Facebook,
Mentions SHE COULD SEE WHO HAD STAYED. MY MOM STILL THINKS I’M COOL. Twitter, or Instagram, along with #WIREDBACKPAGE.
@PAMELEEN VIA INSTAGRAM @PASHUTINSKI VIA INSTAGRAM We’ll pick one to illustrate here.
0 8 8 ILLUSTRATION / MAXIME MOUYSSET
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