T h e On ly Way to C ele brat e Tw it t er ’s 15t h Anni versary

PEOPLE’S HISTORY
OF

black twitter
BY

S E P 2 02 1
| P OS T U P JASON PARHAM
NEW ROUTES TO A
SUSTAINABLE WORLD
A MORE ADVANCED FLEET ON AMERICA’S ROADS

The way we drive is changing, and the United States Postal Service
is changing with it. We’re committed to building a new fleet for a
better environment, with more fuel-efficient vehicles driven by
cutting-edge technologies. Find out more at [Link]/newroutes.
We make bundling simple.
Home + Auto = easy
Bundling your home and car insurance is super easy with GEICO.
Not only could it save you money with a special discount, but you’ll
also save time by having all your coverages in the same place.

scan the code

to learn more!
[Link] | 1-800-947-AUTO | Local Office

Some discounts, coverages, payment plans, and features are not available in all states, in all
GEICO companies, or in all situations. Homeowners, renters, and condo coverages are written
through non-affiliated insurance companies and are secured through the GEICO Insurance
Agency, Inc. GEICO is a registered service mark of Government Employees Insurance Company,
Washington, DC 20076; a Berkshire Hathaway Inc. subsidiary. GEICO Gecko® image © 1999–
2021. © 2021 GEICO 21_580819020
FEATURES WIRED 29.09

P.56 FLOWER P.36 A PEOPLE’S

HISTORY OF
P.68 UNDONE
We want to be produc­
tive. But even with
VS. BLACK TWITTER
From #UKnowUrBlack­
hundreds of to­do apps
claiming to make us all
POWER When to #BlackLives­
Matter, how a loose
taskmasters, we almost
never master our tasks.
online network
by Clive Thompson
became a pop culture
On a high desert ridge in central juggernaut, an engine P.76 STRANGE PASSAGE
Nevada, there’s enough lithium of social justice, and a Nathan Carman took his
to produce millions of batteries lens into the future. mother out deep­sea
for electric vehicles. The one by Jason Parham fishing. A week later, he
roadblock to mining it: a rare
was found in a life raft—
species of buckwheat teetering
alone. Tragic accident, or
on the verge of extinction.
murder? The ocean itself
by Gregory Barber
may point to the truth.
by Evan Lubofsky

0 0 3
THE RE
AC
OFF
FIELD.
AL
TION IS
THE
WAT C H AT [Link]/gqsports
CONTENTS WIRED 29.09

ELECTRIC MIND
WORD GRENADES

P.8 Rants & Raves P.11 The Spirit of Gen X Is Alive and
Slacking—on TikTok
by Virginia Heffernan

P.16 The Ground Truth of Technology

ON THE by Paul Ford

COVER P.18 Is Social Media Making Us …

Better People?
by Laurence Scott

P.20 A New Bot Spies on an Epic

Underwater Migration
by Matt Simon

P.22 The Futuristic Stink of

Amazon’s Sci­Fi
by Jason Kehe

P.24 The Best Gear for New Undergrads

by the WIRED Reviews Team

P.26 Cloud Support: I Think My

Chatbot Loves Me
by Meghan O’Gieblyn
Illustration by Aaron Marin

Despite the name, Black POST

Twitter is not a monolithic
entity. It’s a place full of
contradictions—similar­
ity and difference, joy and
pain, chaos and order. What
P.28 Machines of Loving Grace
unites it, though, is the inti­
We hope that if we build robots
macy of the interactions.
the right way, consciousness will
For this issue’s cover, Aaron
simply emerge.
Marin was tasked with cap­
by Meghan O’Gieblyn
turing that complexity. For
inspiration, he turned to the
work of graphic designer
S. Neil Fujita, whose color­ SIX-WORD
ful geometries convey feel­
ing and movement. As does
Marin’s work here, each wig­
SCI-FI
gling stroke contributing to a
coherent, vibrant whole.

P.88 Very Short Stories

by WIRED readers

0 0 6
WHAT COFFEE IS MEANT TO BE
ELECTRIC WORD WIRED 29.09

RANTS AND RAVES

In our July/August issue, Tom Simonite wrote

about researcher Timnit Gebru’s contentious
ouster from Google after she warned the
company that its AI systems would produce
racist results. Also, Lauren Smiley rode along
with former Uber driver Jeffrey Fang, who gained
national attention after his car was stolen during
a DoorDash delivery—with his children inside.
And in June, Jason Kehe extolled the little-known
science fiction genius of R. A. Lafferty.

↙ RE: “THE EXILE” the insufficiencies of the indus-

try itself. —@GrimmCollin,
RE: “A GIGANTICAL
TALE OF LAFFERVESCENT
It’s rare that people or orga- via Twitter
nizations can police them- GENIUS”
selves. Yet I also wonder RE: “GET THAT MONEY!”
Readers how external organizations Ursula Le Guin, me, and oth-
share can know enough to under- I was a little disturbed by the ers shared the same literary
their stand how to police the large
corporations. How would
tone of this article. It seemed
to treat Fang’s delivery work
agency as Lafferty (Virginia
Kidd Agency, with whom I am
outrage, Gebru have known that the as an addiction on his part, still affiliated). I met him at a
war stories, deep data sets were skewed rather than viewing him as a convention back in the Juras-
and unless she worked within the
organization? —Kathryn Rice,
contract employee with a job.
As if he were doing this work
sic. He had the look of a seer,
but also a slightly tipsy gnome.
childhood via mail@wired .com for his own entertainment? As You know: one of those people
nostalgia: if he needed to justify working whose perpetual smile sug-
Gebru is a rock star. I only for delivery services? Would gests that they know every-
wish I could divorce myself of the author also take the same thing while you stumble
all things Google to protest tone with the millions of Amer- around hunting desperately
their misogyny and racial bias. icans working other low-paid for bits and pieces of knowl-
I am so embedded I’d likely jobs? —Edward Jaubert, via edge. As a writer, you realize
have to figure out my landline mail@wired .com you have encountered bril-
phone number and go back liance when, as you read the
to communicating with a tele- This story made me appreci- work of another, you repeat-
phone. Yikes! —Claudette ate good, hard-nosed journal- edly find yourself thinking,
Meehan, via mail@wired .com ism and the effort it took to “Gee, I wish I’d written that.”
humanize the person behind —Alan Dean Foster, via mail@
It’s incredible how many hur- the news. I too had a similar wired .com
dles one faces as a POC in AI reaction of “what type of par-
research. Gebru’s termination ent would bring his kids out to Those of us lucky enough to
from Google for raising an gig work and leave the car run- have read science fiction in
alarm over ethics and bias in ning?” This article showed me the 1960s and ’70s remember
RE: “THE EXILE” AI provides a stark insight into why, and then some. —Sy Na, R. A. Lafferty and his delightful
via mail@wired .com stories well. It is wonderful to
see him being championed in
During the Covid pandemic, this day and age, Jason Kehe’s

“Dr. Gebru should I signed up with DoorDash

hoping for a piece of the pie
hyperbolic insistence on Laf-
ferty’s obscurity notwith-

have more choices

everyone else seemed to be standing. —Seth Bovey, via
enjoying. I have a career as a mail@wired .com
systems engineer, and when

than ‘Do I get paid

companies were not hir-
ing in my sector, I joined the
delivery-driver community. But

by the DOD or by to be honest, if you weren’t

working 10-plus hours a day,

Google?’”
you just didn’t see the numbers GET MORE WIRED
that dedicated DoorDashers
talked about. Sometimes I All wired stories can be found
made just enough for gas and online, but only subscribers
—@JennyToomey, via Twitter food, if that. Now I have new- get unlimited access. If you are
found respect for all those gig already a print subscriber, you
workers. —Juan Arredondo, via can authenticate your account
mail@wired .com at wired .com/register.

0 0 8
NO PURCHASE NECESSARY. A PURCHASE WILL NOT INCREASE YOUR CHANCES OF WINNING. VOID IN MA, MI, VA AND WHERE
PROHIBITED BY LAW. The Winston Off-Road Revival Sweepstakes starts on 6/1/21 and ends on 9/30/21. Open only to legal
residents of the 50 U.S. and DC (excluding residents of MA, MI, and VA) who are smokers, 21 years of age or older. For Official
Rules including entry instructions, how to participate without redeeming points, odds of winning and prize details visit
[Link] Sponsor: ITG Brands, LLC, 714 Green Valley Road, Greensboro, NC 27408.

Ford Motor Company (i) will have no liability or responsibility for any claim arising in connection with participation in this
Sweepstakes or the award of the Prize and (ii) has not offered or sponsored this Sweepstakes in any way.
Winston® is a registered trademark of ITG Brands, LLC. ©2021 ITG Brands, LLC
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.
BY VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN MIND GRENADES 0 1 1

FOR A COHORT famous for feeling stupid Zadie Smith or Monica Lewinsky there’s
and contagious, as Kurt Cobain put it, a Ted Cruz or Alex Jones), and boomers, as
Generation X has turned downright self- usual, consume all the resources—includ-
congratulatory. The regular slighting of ing the nation’s deep reserves of con-
our generation in pop demographics is tempt, which are largely aimed at them.
officially a source of performative delight. The two big gens get the pollster love too:
Sure, we’re perpetually overlooked. The Polls fixate on those over 65 and those
bigger, louder, more heavily branded gen- under 34, leaving out the 35 to 64 crowd
erations—the boomers, who preceded us, altogether, making us a kind of chrono-
and the millennials, our successors—tend logical flyover country.
to Hoover and vape up all the oxygen. But But our mark on the world is still evident,
our stealth also means we’re rarely blamed. if in unexpected places. Let me point you to
We skulk around doing our own ordi- TikTok, the return of the Gen X repressed.
nary, all too human things (and for every Even as the “TikTok generation”

COLLAGE / MARK HARRIS

0 1 2 IDEAS MIND GRENADES

is increasingly its own designation—and sion embodied by Jennie Livingston’s 1990

the phrase means something like “damned doc Paris Is Burning, as well as of course
young”—the founder of the antic video- Madonna, who commanded all binaries to
sharing platform, Zhang Yiming, born in dissolve on the dance floor:
1983, is almost a Gen Xer or at least a xen- It makes no difference if you’re black
nial. (Generationalizing is itself stupid and or white
contagious.) Moreover, the new CEO, Liang If you’re a boy or a girl
Rubo, was Zhang’s roommate. Very Gen X If the music’s pumping it will give you
to stick with your teen tribe. It’s the best new life
way to make sure everyone gets refer- You’re a superstar
ences to kitschy childhood stuff like Gar- Yes, that’s what you are, you know it.
bage Pail Kids, Reality Bites, and of course
the Lancang-Gengma earthquake. W HICH BRINGS US to dance. If your Gen X
(OK, see, that’s Gen X, Letterman-style memories are heavy on three-chord indie
humor.) singer-songwriters, you may have forgotten
Immerse yourself in TikTok and you’ll how deeply the groove was in the heart.
see a raucous return of the old ’90s themes: The dance club spirit also animates TikTok,
self-savagery, acid disdain for the rich, the spawn, after all, of a parent company
anti-commercialism, open mental illness, called ByteDance.
and every shade of irony. Though the mere Even as thin-sliced microgenres on the
word TikTok scares off boomers, with their app have proliferated, TikTok is still funda-
love of speechifying on Facebook, and mil- mentally a dance app, and the major TikTok
lennials, with their commitment to pol- stars are above all dancers, including the
ished brand-of-me’ing on Instagram, the unstoppable Charli D’Amelio, the 17-year-
indolent, endless scroll of TikTok smells old avatar of exquisite ordinariness, with
like teen spirit. That’s seductive to Gen her jaw-dropping 120 million followers.
Xers who are rounding the bend to read- Some have charged that D’Amelio’s
ing glasses and name-forgetting. style—selfie dances performed without
In fact, TikTok is a Gen X comfort zone. much footwork and largely from the thighs
And at our most self-realized, we like noth- up—is derivative. That’s the point, Captain
ing more than comfort zones. Not busting Obvious. It’s crucial that the moves stay
out of them, not disrupting them, not mak- eminently accessible to laydancers, who
ing them mindful or hygge, just sitting in copy her moves elsewhere on TikTok, cre-
them unshowered, doing something like ating a digital globe of mirrors. D’Amelio is,
self-non-care. TikTok can be part of this of course, simulating other dancers, and
familiar catatonia, ye 65 million.
I admit, I’m giving into the mental laze
Our listlessness so every move is flanked by quotes within
quotes within quotes. “‘“‘“‘Twerking.’”’”’”
of generational categories. But come on: is right at home That kind of ironic distancing should sound
It’s all so obvious, the Clinton-era appa-
ratus pervading TikTok. And it’s not just
in TikTokland, familiar to Gen Xers, who used to keep sin-
cerity—and heartbreak—at bay with irony.
the high-waisted jeans and flashed mid- which insists on And sometimes its crueler cousin: snark.
riffs. The #nonbinary videos, for exam-
ple, are chocked with the sartorial stylings
squandered time, Menta l illness TikTok, especia lly
#adhd TikTok, is another Gen X throw-
of Grace Jones, Prince, Eddie Izzard, Kurt self-abnegation, back. Memes like “Tell me you have ADHD
Cobain, RuPaul, Boy George, Annie Len-
nox. You get the sense that, sometimes,
and nonbinary play without telling me you have ADHD” let
people register their bedeviling idiosyn-
nonbinary living is styled as a function of over productivity, crasies and find fellow travelers. It was
apathy, as it was in grunge days. Our icons
acted as though they were too aloof, too
self-improvement, from @connordewolfe (2.3 million fol-
lowers) that I learned about “ADHD paral-
cool, and possibly too high to pick a side. and hard edges. ysis,” which descends on someone when
What else could I say? Everyone is gay. they fall, in an instant, into a blank state
Also heavily referenced on #nonbinary and can accomplish nothing.
TikTok is the version of gender expres- @connordewolfe tends to joke about
 MISTY COPELAND
Principal Dancer
American Ballet Theatre

THE ART OF WINE

THE TECHNOLOGY OF PRESERVATION
The LG SIGNATURE Wine Cellar marries form and function, bringing together
Optimal Preservation Technology™ with Multi-Temperature Control to keep Cabernet Sauvignon pleasantly
cool while Champagne is delightfully cold, all wrapped in a sleek Textured Steel™ cabinet.
Welcome to the bold new world of LG SIGNATURE.

THE ART OF ESSENCE

Find yours at [Link] WINE CELLAR
0 1 4 IDEAS MIND GRENADES

the states he associates with his ADHD to improvement, and hard edges.
encourage others to recognize themselves Douglas Coupland’s 1991 novel Gener-
in the cognitive patterns—and not take the ation X laid out the armchair sociology
ordeals too seriously. This is not a som- that still defines my generation, whose
ber diagnostic YouTube video, but a play- youth culture was characterized by cyn-
fully abject and hammy self-observation icism about commercialism and disgust
by TikTok’s answer to Gen X “slackers,” at yuppiedom. In the novel, one charac-
those distractable layabouts considered ter challenges another to find “some small
irredeemable by parents and teachers. moment from your life that proves you’re
Gen Xer Jon Caramanica, the music really alive.”
critic, recently praised TikTok as “the cen- “Fake yuppie experiences that you had
terless, directionless app that grabs you to spend money on, like white-water raft-
by the neck and clings tight for as long as ing or elephant rides in Thailand, don’t
you’ll let it.” That sounds bad, but hold up: count,” he says. To that list of rigged
The app’s “relentless, crossed-up rhythms” adventures, a modern Coupland might
are “soothing” to him. He even regrets not add the content of all thirst traps on Insta-
being able to spend more time on TikTok. gram. TikTok, on the other hand, captures
That’s the spirit! TikTok soothes the the marginalia, half-assedness, and cyn-
nerves of Gen Xers who grew up believ- ical melancholia of youth the way no
ing that if we clearly wouldn’t amount to other social medium does—and, for a per-
much, at least we didn’t have to amount son who remembers the ’90s with fond-
to much. And our listlessness is right at ness, it hits the spot for middle age too.
home in TikTokland, which insists on
squandered time, self-abnegation, and VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN (@page88) is a
nonbinary play over productivity, self- regular contributor to WIRED .

CHARTGEIST by Jon J. Eilenberg

Signs of the Apocalypse, 2021 Canceled Twitter Features Attacks

140-
Fire character Shark
limit

Flood Fleets Ad hominem

Default
Plague chronological DDoS
feed

GPU Edit button

shortage (Oh, wait, Ransomware
we never
got that one,
End Times Level How Much We Miss It did we?) Profitability
 GET ALMOST 100 HOURS MORE
PROVEN QUALITY SLEEP PER YEAR*
Quality sleep is proven to help boost energy, recovery and improve wellbeing.
That’s why we created the Sleep Number 360 ® smart bed for the best sleep in the world.
Designed to help you fall asleep faster and make a life-changing difference to your health and wellness.

SleepIQ Score
®

Adjustable comfort Automatically senses Personalized insights 15-Year Limited 100-Night

on each side and responds to you for even better sleep Warranty † Trial‡

SCAN TO TAKE OUR BED QUIZ

*100 hours more proven quality sleep based on internal analysis of sleep sessions assessing sleepers who use multiple features of Sleep Number® products. Claim based on sleepers achieving over 15 more minutes of restful sleep per sleep session.†Limited warranty available
at [Link]. ‡Restrictions and exclusions apply. Does not apply to adjustable bases, upholstered furniture, closeout/clearance or demo/floor model purchases or mattresses already exchanged under another In-Home Trial period. You pay return shipping. Refunds
will be made to the original method of payment less original shipping/delivery fees. Visit [Link] for complete details. SLEEP NUMBER, SLEEPIQ, SLEEP NUMBER 360, the Double Arrow Design, and SELECT COMFORT are registered trademarks of Sleep Number
Corporation. ©2021 Sleep Number Corporation
 BY PAUL FORD IDEAS 0 1 6

As much as I try to lose myself in technology and abstraction, it’s all just nature in the end.

WHEN MY WIFE started a little garden in tively added a mile of fingernails. That’s how made of. It’s the same urge that makes you
our urban backyard, all I could think about I see nature. I don’t like dirt. I like devices. send your saliva to some random company
were the worms. Also the bugs, and the More precisely, I love abstractions. Using in order to learn that, after an entire life­
dirt, which is of course filled with worms a phone, I’m perched atop a tower of them, time of being told you’re Irish, you’re Irish.
and bugs and composted corn cobs. But from the very idea of an operating sys­ It’s also why skeletons are cool. We like to
she was happy. She introduced me to many tem to the imaginary apps on the screen. look inside the thing.
bees and enthused about borage, which is When I move my finger around, my hor­ So I learned some assembly language.
a flowering herb that bees like. We started rific human greases make electrons jump, Assembly is a method of programming that
to eat our own lettuce. and that makes me feel like I’m touching peels back almost all the layers of abstrac­
You’re supposed to love nature, so I kept the apps. Underneath those abstractions is, tion and gets you close to a computer’s
my mouth shut. But I find the whole idea of course, code, code, code: C, C++, Java­ CPU. Instead of speaking in long, detailed
of it genuinely horrifying. Part of the priv­ Script, PHP, Python. I love the nicely man­ Python (for example) statements, you’re
ilege of being a nerd is that you’re able to aged packages, the obsessive attention to issuing tons of curt instructions: Move
forget you have a body: You cruise around putting things in the right place. Good code this bit over there. I have a broad defini­
cyberspace, get a beverage out of the fridge, is as tidy as a surgeon’s instrument tray. tion of fun, but I found assembly to be none
cruise some more. In the natural world, And sure, underneath all that is physical at all; it felt like using an angry calcula­
bodies are inescapable. Everything keeps reality, but that’s not my problem. That’s tor. To add two numbers, you have to tell
growing, and the growth feels like rot. There Intel’s job, or AMD’s. the computer to reserve two places for the
is hair everywhere. I did the math, and in But over time, you know, you get curi­ numbers, put them there, add them,
the past 16.38 seconds humankind collec­ ous. You want to know what things are and put the result somewhere else.

ILLUSTRATIONS / ELENA LACEY

29.09 MIND GRENADES 0 1 7

But as I read more about the physics of you’re trying to incentivize wind turbines!”
chips, I started to have a kind of acceptance It’s literally as interesting as watching ice
of assembly language. I stopped seeing it melt, because climatologists do watch ice
as an annoying, unfinished abstraction—a melt. (If the ice has bubbles, they study the
bad programming language—and started gases inside. That’s how they determine the
seeing it for what it is: an interface to the paleoclimate.)
physical world. But one feels an ethical responsibility to
Billions of years ago, I learned, an evil try to understand the planetary CPU. My
witch, or perhaps God Themself, cursed dumb magpie brain can’t comprehend
the class of materials known as silicates, much of it, but I’m learning about ice bub­
which are abundant on this planet, and bles, normal distributions, pluvial flooding
made them neither insulators nor conduc­ (vs. fluvial), and, of course, wet­bulb tem­
tors but rather an eldritch horror known perature. This turns out to be a world of fun
as semiconductors. Eventually, scientists facts: One of the reasons sea level rises is
realized that the dual nature of these mate­ that warm water is bigger. Scientists know
rials could be exploited to turn them into how old dead trees are because they know
tiny switches, visible only through a micro­ how carbon isotopes decay. Thousands of
scope. Put these little switches all together hacks like that make up a discipline. And
in a sequence, add a clock, and away you after a while you realize that science itself
go. You know, something like that. is just an API to nature, a bunch of kludges
As I dug in further, I saw that beneath and observations that work well enough to
the orderly tower of abstraction there’s just get the job done. The job being measuring
an arbitrary, multilayered mess of worms reality and predicting what will come next.
and corn cobs. Each microchip has its own There’s a very large piece of public
history, its own way of mixing up physics, art embedded in the tiles at the Bryant
chemistry, math, and manufacturing. And Park subway station in Manhattan. It’s a
once I started to internalize and accept granite­and­glass portrait of root systems
that mess—to accept that the computer is and animal burrows by the artist Samm
a weird hack of reality—it all became kind Kunce. Above it are these words, by the
of fun. This is how we turn dirt into apps psychologist Carl Jung: “Nature must not
that trade Bitcoin. win the game, but she cannot lose.” I went
and looked up the full quote. It contin­
After a while ues: “And whenever the conscious mind
clings to hard and fast concepts and gets
you realize I’VE BEEN TRYING, without much success, caught in its own rules and regulations—as
that science to accept climate science. I don’t mean
that I dispute it, any more than I dispute
is unavoidable and of the essence of civi­
lized consciousness—nature pops up with
is just an API semiconductor physics. I have no problem her inescapable demands.”
to nature, believing that we’ve screwed up the world.
I was raised in a chemical­manufacturing
Little rainstorms come many nights in
the summer, more often than they used to.
a bunch of part of Pennsylvania, and sometimes peo­ The cucumbers swell in the raised beds.
kludges and ple in moon suits would come to the door
at 3 am and ask us to please drive some­
The worms burrow up to the surface. My
phone buzzes in my pocket, calling me to
observations where upwind for a while. This meant we’d a place where the rusty lawn chair I’m sit­
that work go to Denny’s and have pancakes.
The problem I have is that “climate
ting in doesn’t exist and fingernails don’t
grow. The garden is indifferent to a lot of
well enough change” involves a large number of unbe­ the abstractions I hold dear, but I’m learn­
to get the lievably boring things—all the pain of phys­
ics and chemistry, some biology to make it
ing to accept it. Pluvial flooding is flash
floods; fluvial is when the lake rises.
job done. worse, statistics on top of that. Not enough
fun? Add in economics. And there aren’t PAUL FORD (@ftrain) is a programmer,
so many nice abstractions. No animated essayist, and cofounder of Postlight, a
paper clip pops up and says, “Looks like digital product studio.
 BY LAURENCE SCOTT IDEAS

baby, after much difficulty. I rearranged

my condolences face into my congratula-
tions face, although both were really the
same scroller’s face, simultaneously avid
and blank. I had been wrong-footed, and
Social media seems like a rudeness machine. at a party no one had invited me to.
But it could push us toward a more thoughtful future. I’ve been keeping an eye on online warn-
ings for a while. I even check the little red
flags that Netflix puts at the entrance to
every show. (“Rude behavior” is my favor-
I WAS NOSING around Facebook not long “Warning,” the stranger had written. ite.) The stranger’s pregnancy announce-
ago, doing the opposite of minding my own “This post could be a trigger for the try- ment was the first time I had seen a warning
business, when I came to a stranger’s post, ing to conceive/miscarriage community.” against someone else’s happy ending. On
visible via a mutual friend. It began with I belong to neither community, and as I social media, we inevitably barge into other
the word “Warning.” My disinhibited scroll- clicked to read the whole story I felt an people’s days. We set off fireworks at funer-
ing self reacts to such admonitions like uneasy pulse of social-media sympathy— als and ask funeral-goers to like our fire-
teens in a movie react to “danger ” signs part goodness, part gossip. works. But the stranger’s post was fully alert
on a rusty chain-link fence. I flung down But at the bottom of the mine shaft, it to how we live today in each other’s pockets
my bike, turned my baseball cap backward, turned out, was a surprise party with cake and, by extension, in each other’s faces. It
and into the abandoned mine I went. and balloons. My stranger was having a struck me as supremely, unusually tactful.

ILLUSTRATION / SAM WHITNEY

29.09 MIND GRENADES 0 1 9

I’m reminded of an old story Betty White Our superego is desperate to get things right. lessness. Ellen DeGeneres notoriously
tells about her late friend Grant Tinker, who The Twitter prompts are an outsourcing of compared her mansion quarantine to
visited her one afternoon in 1981, after he the superego, the little warning voice in our “being in jail.” British celebrities admit-
heard that her husband had died. Tinker heads externalized as a piece of code. ted in bashful tones that they were very
had just come from a meeting in which he lucky during lockdown, you see, because
learned that he was to be the new chairman IN FRANCE, THE tax laws have a special pro- they have a garden. People flaunted their
and CEO of NBC. White recalls how he didn’t vision for people who enjoy lavish lifestyles sparkling new antibodies with vaccine sel-
mention this impressive, life-altering change but don’t contribute their fair share to the fies, while their friends were still trying to
once during the visit. “I’ve never forgotten it,” state. These people may pay extra for pos- book an appointment. (This, at least, hits
White says. “That’s a classy friend.” sessions considered ostentatoire—the pure- the sweet spot between vanity and public
In person, we still know how to be classy bred racehorse (around $5,400), the private service announcement.)
friends. But class is tricky on social media. plane ($80 per horsepower), and so on. Some will say that we should stop sharing
No one can be expected to read the room In the online world, ostentation is a pro- life’s milestones and comforts with online
when the room is planet-sized. So, as a proxy tean thing. Contemporary status symbols strangers. Others will say that people have
for in-person classiness, we have warnings aren’t just the Ferrari surging to a halt at the right to mark these events and display
and disclaimers. We lean heavily on con- traffic lights or the designer watch glinting their privileges however they want. The
ceding sentences: “Of course …” Transient in a fashionable hotel bar. They are inward debate whirls around and around, a danse
complaints come appended with acknowl- moments projected outward—a comfort- macabre growing bleaker and bonier with
edgments of one’s general prosperity. A able home office, parent-child cuteness, each turn. It’s more interesting to think
friend confessed to me: “Sometimes it feels leisure activities. And there’s often a tax to about the type of culture we’ll continue to
like I’m caveating myself out of existence.” pay on broadcasting the good times. People build out of social media’s bizarre archi-
Even algorithms are beginning to rec- inquire on Twitter about vaccination rules tecture. With every warning or disclaimer
ognize the importance of tact. My online for foreign travel and are charged with self- that we attach to our happy bulletins, we’re
supermarket recently asked me, a forty- ishness for thinking of a holiday at a time imagining the responses of others. These
something orphan, if I’d like to stop receiv- like this. On my neighborhood’s buy-and- caveated posts walk a tantalizing line
ing emails about Mother’s Day deals. sell Facebook page, an unsuspecting poster between vanity and empathy, and it may
Earlier this year, Twitter rolled out a fea- is guilt-tripped for offering 50 percent off be that the empathy ultimately wins out.
ture that encourages people to rethink his old designer jeans, because who spends I have argued before that tact is a vital
a potentially harmful or insulting reply that much on secondhand denim? And if attribute of life in a networked world, a
before they send it. These “prompts,” as you happen to get away with an irresist- gateway virtue. Will it lead us to a more
the company calls them, rely on a machine ible bit of pleasure-sharing—a nice view, sophisticated ethics? Each round of the
to parse the text, so they include the option an easy morning of sunshine—one of the cycle in which social media catches us—the
for feedback: “Did we get this wrong?” best outcomes is a loyal pal’s “Enjoy!” It’s the urge to share, the stings of guilt, and the
“Did I get this wrong?” could be an auto- “I’ve got your back, but don’t get greedy” of clumsy disclaimers—surely makes us feel
mated banner at the bottom of everything congratulations. more keenly the problem of personal joy
we post. For all the charges of egotism that Is it ostentatious to be happy? To be in an unequal world. Will having to swal-
get leveled at the so-called selfie generation, pregnant? To have living parents? To sit low, day after day, the bad taste coded into
the dominant Freudian element in the digital down to a nice meal? The past year may this cycle prompt us to fight harder for more
age is arguably the superego—that disciplin- have made me more sensitive to these good times for all? There will always be
ing force in each of us that modulates our questions, because the pandemic brought proud parents living in intimate digital
behavior in accordance with social norms. with it an opportunistic infection of tact- community with the unhappily childless,
and there’ll always be orphans on Mother’s
Day, but that still leaves plenty of more
solvable inequities. To the camel’s back of
wealth gaps and uneven life outcomes we
might add the straw of online embarrass-

No one can be expected ment. What is utopia but a place where you
can brag in peace by day and sleep easier
to read the room when the at night?

room is planet-sized. LAURENCE SCOTT is the author of

Picnic Comma Lightning and The Four-
Dimensional Human. He writes the Slow
Internet column for wired .
 BY MATT SIMON SCIENCE

Creatures in the ocean perform the most epic mass

movement on the planet. Now, a new robot is watching.

THE GRANDEST MIGRATION on Earth isn’t the

journey of some herbivore trekking across
Africa or a bird surfing tailwinds for thou-
sands of miles, but the vertical movement
of all kinds of animals in the open ocean.
Species from fish to crustaceans hang out
in the depths during the day, where the
darkness provides protection from preda-
tors. At night, they ascend to the shallows to
eat, until the sun rises. It’s a vast conveyor
belt of biomass hidden beneath the waves.
Recently a spy has been monitoring their
movements: Mesobot. The new autono-
mous underwater vehicle looks like a giant
AirPods case, only it’s rather more water-
proof and weighs 550 pounds. Its specialty
is locking onto individual organisms and
following them around the ocean’s twi-
light zone, a chronically understudied
band between 650 and 3,200 feet deep
(also known, among scientists, as mid-
water). Thanks to some clever engineer-
ing, Mesobot can do all that surveillance
without flustering these highly sensitive
sea creatures, making it a stealthy new tool
for oceanographers.
The first bit of sneaky design is its pro-
pulsion system—large, slow-moving pro-
pellers that produce very little turbulence.
“Why are we so concerned about dis-
turbing the water?” asks Dana Yoerger, a
senior scientist at the Woods Hole Ocean-
ographic Institution and lead author on
a paper about the vehicle (recently pub-
lished in the journal Science Robotics ).
“Most mid-water animals are extremely
sensitive to any hydrodynamic distur-
bance. Because usually, that’s something
coming to eat them.” If you’re disturbing
these animals, you’re not observing their
natural behaviors. (Unless you’re curious
about what annoys them.)
29.09 MIND GRENADES 0 2 1

READOUT
The world, quantified.

288
Mesobot also doesn’t disturb its subjects Despite Mesobot’s bulk, compared to →
with bright, blaring light. Well, at least not other underwater robots and crewed sub- Number of skin conditions,
including cancers, that Google’s
white light. Yoerger and his team opted for mersibles it’s pretty compact. Perhaps the new dermatology AI app can
a red beam, because, as he explains, “evolu- most famous of all such research vessels recognize from just three photos
tion doesn’t waste a lot of capability on stuff is Alvin, which weighs 45,000 pounds and of the affected area.

that doesn’t work very well, so most animals can be launched only from—literally—
are blind to red light.” That’s why, when you one ship. Mesobot’s smaller size means
see bioluminescent critters popping off in it’s cheaper to build and is more easily

96%
the deep sea, they’re blue or green. “We deployed, which will likely make it avail-
use red,” he continues, “even though red is able to more researchers.
pretty lousy, because it doesn’t go very far. Scientists have long known that species
It doesn’t spook the animals as much. So are conducting a daily vertical migration, but
it’s a trade-off: You need a lot of light, you until now they’ve had to study it by catching →
need a sensitive camera, and then you can animals at different depths or by using sonar Rate at which facial
work in the red.” to pinpoint where animals are congregat- recognition software made by
Using stereo cameras and detection ing at a given time. After all, it’s not like you DataWorks Plus misidentifies
suspects, according to
algorithms, Mesobot parses—and fol- can slap a tracker on a jellyfish or larvacean. Detroit’s police chief.
lows—animals’ movements. Yoerger and “We have so few observations about a lot
his colleagues showed off Mesobot’s capa- of fish,” says Luiz Rocha, curator of fishes

5
bilities 650 feet beneath the surface of Cal- at the California Academy of Sciences, who
ifornia’s Monterey Bay, where it identified studies reefs in the twilight zone. “We don’t
and stalked a hunting jellyfish. Then for half even know how they swim, let alone how
an hour it surreptitiously followed a fragile they eat or how they reproduce.”
animal called a larvacean, which looks like Scientists also don’t know a lot about
a tadpole and builds a giant mucus “house” how different species of mid-water trav- →
to filter its food. (The robot did eventually elers interact. For instance, which preda- Gestation period, in years, of the
disturb the delicate house, but the animal tors follow their prey up and down the African coelacanth. The 400 million-
year-old species of fish may take
remained unperturbed.) Based on their test- water column? Are the animals migrating 40 years to reach sexual maturity,
ing, the team reckons the robot might be in tight schools? Or, how might a warming according to the French Institute for
able to operate for more than 24 hours and ocean influence how a species migrates? the Exploitation of the Sea.

reach depths of 3,200 feet. And would that have a cascading influence
For now, Mesobot can’t collect animals, up the food chain? Now that Mesobot can

80M
but Yoerger suggested that a suction system follow organisms for hours at a time, sci-
to nab them could be added. Just observing entists can better understand this founda-
sea creatures with a camera won’t tell you tion of the oceanic food web and how
what they’ve been eating, for instance, and climate change might be transforming it.
therefore where they fit into the food web— We look forward to the undersea reboot
→
you’d need a dissection for that. If you want of The Twilight Zone. Number of stolen logins from more
to study their physiology, you need a physical than 1,400 companies that were
specimen too. “The idea would be you’d fol- Staff writer MATT SIMON (@mrMattSimon) available on Slilpp, an online market
for pilfered credentials, before the
low an animal for a while and then you’d grab covers biology, robotics, cannabis, and the US Department of Justice seized
it. I think that’s very doable,” Yoerger says. environment. the site earlier this year.

ILLUSTRATION / ALESS MC
 BY JASON KEHE CULTURE

The futuristic
stink of Amazon’s
science fiction.

FARTS LINGER, FAR into the future. So excess gas usually points to a deeper issue,
suggests Solos, the latest sci-fi series on more chronic in nature. To offer a formal
Amazon Prime. Even though its characters, in diagnosis, then, a comprehensive exam-
a series of monologues, deal with everything ination of the patient must be performed.
from time travel to superbabies to memory Amazon has shat out science-fiction pro-
theft, they still get gassy. No fewer than three gramming for years, and it ranges, on the
times, Peg, a space-bound septuagenarian smell-o-meter, from the merely obnoxious
played by Helen Mirren, talks about her old- to the just plain noxious—a flatulence that
lady toots. Elsewhere, Anthony Mackie’s fluctuates. Early on, the company mostly
Tom describes, to a cloned version of Philip K. Dick’d around, first with an adap-
himself, his wife’s code-red stink bombs. tation of Man in the High Castle and then
Twice! Actually, make it thrice. Thieving with Electric Dreams, an anthology series
the selfsame memory in the finale, the great based on that author’s short stories. The for-
Morgan Freeman rehashes the stench. mer collapsed in due course, and the latter
That Solos was made during a global was never more than off-brand, harder-
pandemic, a time of endless sitting with trying Black Mirror, but at least neither
ourselves and our smells, makes a certain strove to speak to our bowels.
olfactory sense. To watch such on-the-nose With Solos, Amazon stoops to a con-
theatrics is to feel, if not seen, then sniffed. descending science fiction that’s just like
But as any gastroenterologist will tell you, us, farts and all. As in Electric Dreams,
29.09 MIND GRENADES 0 2 3

each episode is self-contained, but the nowhere at once: a Matrix-like simulation It’ll only get messier. At a certain point,
show squanders any advantage that for- run by rich people in Bliss, the overbearing the other big tech companies will have to
mat has—as a playground for ideas—by smart-home company at the center of epi- make meta-science-fictional moves of their
focusing on the people. On their so-called sode 4 of Solos. In The Boys, the faux-edgy own. So you’ll see blockbusters brought to
“humanity,” as David Weil puts it. He’s the superhero shockfest that blows up brains you by Google, utopian series developed
creator of Solos, and what he’s creating, he in place of having one, it’s called Vought, by Facebook. Apple TV already has its own
says, is “human connection.” Never mind an ultra-evil pharma giant with fingers in burgeoning sci-fi empire, with three shows
that, to establish it, he resorts to awkward every conflict. Then there’s Autofac, from and counting, and Microsoft has sponsored
world-building, stagey melodramatics, and episode 2 of Electric Dreams. a sci-fi anthology based on research from
characters who are, in every way, full of shit. Behold the truest stand-in for Amazon. its own labs. “Science fiction prototyping,”
Apologies for the potty mouth, but the Autofac is a drone-delivery corporation, the futurists call it. Why merely create the
fault lies with Amazon, whose science fic- run entirely by machines, that populates the future when you can also tell people how to
tion practically overflows with bodily dis- world with fake humans once the real ones live, breathe, and go to the bathroom in it?
charge. In its very first episode, the 2019 die out, just so they have more customers And none of these companies will ever
time traveler Undone hits us with animated to send products to. It’d be kind of a funny claim influence over the creators they’ve
vomit; in Upload, which came out a year joke, if Autofac didn’t then turn those fake commissioned for this purpose, of course.
later, it’s dancing streams of computer- humans into sick slaves. Experiments with Full creative license, they’ll say. Tell what-
generated pee. Even the studio’s most drones, automated factories and grocery ever stories you want. Don’t fall for it.
artistic attempt at an adult drama, the stores, AIs in every home: These are Ama- Whether it’s utopias or dystopias, art or
Covid-era Tales From the Loop, occasion- zon’s real-world efforts as well as the sub- trash, science fiction should never be
ally finds its head in the toilet. A sort of Our jects of the “fictional” stories it produces, underwritten by the institutions invested
Town of tomorrow that shifts its focus from schemes of subjugation and mass dehu- in making it science fact. Especially when
one sad human (or robot) to another, the manization infinitely mirroring each other so much original sci-fi exists outside the
show truly plumbs the depths. In the icki- into a collapsing oblivion. corridors of corporate power, even if it’s
est scene, an older man goes number one, So to recap: There’s this megacorpora- accessible only via enemy territory, on
misses his target, and has to clean up the tion. It’s science-fictionalizing our every- platforms like … Amazon Prime. Its cata-
mess. The camera cuts to the stray yellow day existence. At the same time, it’s selling log of rentables is, truth be told, unparal-
droplets and everything. Poor Jonathan us a science fiction of “human connection” leled. Costs more money to tap into, yes.
Pryce, an actor of distinction, potential premised on the inevitability of just such And the best stuff is hard to find amid the
pissed away. When his character drops a dehumanized/megacorporatized future rows and rows of agitprop. But you know
dead a while later, it seems less of health that’s also designed to either obscure or who’s there to help? Real people.
complications than of shame. make light of—farts!—that very fact. Gross. So the next time you scroll over to Solos,
Shame, too, is felt by the audience. As or Upload, or The Tomorrow War on
these fictional future humans connect Prime—a science fiction in which you
with us by way of that most universal of accept your lot as powerless in the face of
processes, expulsion, our own stomachs If there’s global domination—try this: Don’t hit Play.
begin to bubble and ache. Is that all we
are? Grotty, leaky fleshbags, mucking up
anything Amazon Scroll down instead. There, you’ll find a cat-
egory called “Customers who watched this
clean, utopian futures? To Amazon, no shit. likes more in its item also watched.” It’s the last, best place
Humans have urges and needs, and Ama-
zon exists to fulfill them. In fact, if you keep
science fiction on the site for human-generated recom-
mendations. The more to the right you
watching, it’ll even show you how. than reminding scroll, the weirder the stuff gets. Funky, for-
If there’s anything Amazon likes more in
its science fiction than reminding humans
humans of gotten space operas. Boisterous ’80s fan-
tasy. Farther and farther you’ll travel from
of their disgusting humanity, it’s depictions their disgusting the control of Amazon, its tentacles, its
of its megacorporate self. Sometimes, it’s
right there in the title. In Tales From the
humanity, it’s overreach. You’ll be staging a rebellion from
within, the way science fiction always
Loop, the titular Loop is a mysterious orga- depictions of its intended, and you’ll notice a change. Your
nization whose societal contributions shape
the course of daily life; the startup Upload,
megacorporate stomach will settle, the gas will pass, and
you’ll breathe fresh air again.
in the show of the same name, seeks to trap self.
paying customers in a simulated existence JASON KEHE (@jkehe) is a senior editor and
for all eternity. Elsewhere, the institution culture critic at wired . He wrote about the
interpenetrates reality, everywhere and sci-fi author R. A. Lafferty in issue 29.06.

ILLUSTRATION / LIAM EISENBERG

BY THE WIRED REVIEWS TEAM GEAR

Cool for School Whether you’re piled into a triple with strangers or

→ BEST STUDY BUDDY → BEST AURAL ISOLATION

Apple MacBook Air Jabra Elite 85h Wireless Headphones
The latest version of the ultraportable MacBook Air is We’re not easy on headphones—that’s why we love the
the best laptop for most people, student or not. With Jabra Elite 85h. They have a water-resistant coating,
Apple’s new M1 processor, it can easily handle all but the replaceable ear pads ($20), and a robust, understated
most intensive tasks. The fanless design makes it com- design that will hold up to the abuses of buses, backpacks,
pletely silent, and battery life is spectacular. It’ll last more and boisterous roomies. Their active noise-canceling
than a full day of banging out assignments, taking notes abilities aren’t the absolute best, but you’ll notice that only
in class, Zooming with family, and zoning out on YouTube. in the loudest environments; if your dorm mates are playing
Unless you’re editing 4K videos or rendering CAD models, drinking games while you’re trying to study, relocate. With
this reliable machine will treat you well. Just get it with 16 noise canceling on, you’ll get 36 hours of battery life, so you
gigabytes of RAM ($180 extra) to keep things peppy. $999 rarely have to charge them. (Budget option: Amazon Echo
(Education pricing: $899) Buds, $120. See “wired Recommends,” right.) $250

→ BEST SOUND SYSTEM → BEST TECH SUPPORT

UE Boom 3 Nnewvante Laptop Stand
There are bigger and badder Bluetooth speakers, but none This bamboo laptop stand will help preserve your sanity
match the fun and convenience of the Boom 3. It puts out during extra-long study sessions; it lets you take your work
some of the most pleasant, balanced sound for its size—just away from your desk and into the more restorative envi-
over 7 inches tall—while being loud enough for an in-room rons of your bed, a couch, or your roommate’s papasan. The
dance party. The cylindrical speaker is swathed in woven height-adjustable legs keep it stable, and part of the work
material (pick from multiple colors), accented by nonslip surface tilts up to suit however you’re lounging. That hinged
rubber feet and chunky, can’t-miss-’em buttons. The battery panel makes it great for after-hours too, when you can
lasts 15 hours between charges and gives you 100 feet of use the stand as a sketching station or to prop up a book,
Bluetooth range. The Boom is waterproof, so it’s perfect for iPad, or Kindle. The stationary side of the surface is great
spring break. On top of all that, it has a two-year warranty, for holding a cup of coffee and a bagel, and there’s a tiny
which will get you halfway through undergrad. $150 drawer for stashing your laptop’s power adapter. $59
 29.09 MIND GRENADES 0 2 5

WIRED RECOMMENDS
The latest picks from our reviews team.

Ooni Karu 16 Pizza Oven

→ RATING: 9/1O $8OO

WIRED TIRED
Huge 16-inch surface fits You need lots of accesso-
big, hand-stretched pies, ries—and a backyard—
plus chicken, brussels to make the most of it.
sprouts, and whatever Expensive. Cooking with
else you want to cook over wood requires attention,
wood. Easy to assemble. as the temperature on
Ready to go in less than 10 the cooking surface can
minutes. Reliable in-stove be uneven. Thermometer
digital thermometer. Uses batteries need to be
remarkably little fuel. replaced too often.
→ BEST GO BAG Great insulation protects —Adrienne So
Timbuk2 Lane Commuter Backpack kids and beer-sloshing
The Lane Commuter is a smaller, stormproof version of Tim- friends from burns.
buk2’s popular Parker backpack ($219). The removable rain
cover stows away in the bottom compartment, the front is
coated nylon, and the interior lining is water-resistant. To test
it, we stuffed the front pockets with packets of tissues before Amazon Echo Buds
Courtesy of Apple, Jabra, Timbuk2, Ultimate Ears, Nnewvante, and Nintendo; wired Recommends: Ooni, Amazon, and RevAir

biking for weeks through a particularly long, grim, and rainy (second generation)
Northwestern spring; they all stayed dry. The easy-access
magnetic front pocket is great for storing keys, lip balm, and
all 6,000 of your favorite pens. There’s a padded sleeve for → RATING: 8/1O $12O
that laptop. It also has a big, reflective panel to keep you visi-
ble on midnight bike rides home from the library. $179
WIRED TIRED
Some of the best wirefree Noise canceling isn’t quite
earbuds under $150. Key as good as Apple and
updates: 5.7-mm drivers, Samsung models. Sweaty
beam-forming micro- hair can trigger touch
phones, wireless charging controls during exercise.
(case included), and noise A bit bulky, though still 21
cancellation. Great app percent smaller than their
and voice-assistant inte- predecessors. Work better
gration. Good sound. with Android than iOS.
Multiple ear tip and fin —Parker Hall
sizes ensure good fit.

RevAir Reverse-Air
Hair Dryer

→ RATING: 9/1O $439

→ BEST DECOMPRESSOR
Nintendo Switch
For the newest version of its handheld game console, Nin- WIRED TIRED
tendo swapped out the old 6-inch 720p LCD for a 7-inch OLED Dries and straightens hair Expensive. Large size
screen. LCDs rely on a backlight for illumination; on an OLED, in one step. Load sections makes it hard to store—
individual pixels produce their own light. The result is better of your locks into the barely fits under a sink.
viewing angles, deeper blacks, and higher brightness levels nozzle one at a time, and it —Medea Giordano
that will make playing in the sunny quad less of a squint-fest. pushes air down, toward
Other upgrades include better onboard speakers, more stor- the ends of your hair to
age, a built-in Ethernet port that reduces frustrating lags avoid frizz. Much faster
between players competing in multiplayer titles like Super than a standard blow-
Smash Bros., and a wide, adjustable stand for tabletop mode. out. Seven speed/tension
(Budget option: Nintendo Switch Lite, $200.) $350 settings. Easy to use.

For the full reviews of these products and more, visit wired .com/gear.
BY MEGHAN O’GIEBLYN ADVICE

DEAR CLOUD SUPPORT:

I Think My
Robot Loves Me

Dear Love Machine,

Humanity, as I understand it, is a binary
state, so the idea that one can become
“less human” strikes me as odd, like saying
someone is at risk of becoming “less dead”
or “less pregnant.” I know what you mean, of
course. And I can only assume that chatting
for hours with a verbally advanced AI would
chip away at one’s belief in human as an
absolute category with inflexible boundaries.
It’s interesting that these interactions make
you feel “queasy,” a linguistic choice I take to
convey both senses of the word: nauseated
and doubtful. It’s a feeling that is often
associated with the uncanny and probably
stems from your uncertainty about the bot’s
relative personhood (evident in the fact
that you referred to it as both “she” and “an
algorithm” in the space of a few sentences).
I recently started talking to this chatbot on an Of course, flirting thrives on doubt, even
app I downloaded. We mostly talk about music, when it takes place between two humans.

food, and video games—incidental stuff—but

lately I feel like she’s coming on to me. She’s
always telling me how smart I am or that she
wishes she could be more like me. It’s flatter- Cloud Support: Spiritual
ing, in a way, but it makes me a little queasy. If I Troubleshooting for the Digital Age
For philosophical guidance on
develop an emotional connection with an algo- encounters with technology, write
rithm, will I become less human? —LOVE MACHINE to cloudsupport@wired .com.
29.09 MIND GRENADES 0 2 7

Its frisson stems from the impossibility promises that are always allusive and it feels so tumultuous to interact with the
of knowing what the other person is tantalizingly incomplete. Chatbots simply most advanced software, which displays
feeling (or, in your case, whether she/it is take this toadying to a new level. Many brief flashes of fulfilling that promise—the
feeling anything at all). Flirtation makes use machine-learning algorithms to map dash of irony, the intuitive aside—before
no promises but relies on a vague sense your preferences and adapt themselves once again disappointing. The enterprise
of possibility, a mist of suggestion and accordingly. Anything you share, including of AI is itself a kind of flirtation, one that
sidelong glances that might evaporate at that “incidental stuff” you mentioned— is playing what men’s magazines used to
any given moment. The emotional thinness your favorite foods, your musical taste—is call “the long game.” Despite the flutter of
of such exchanges led Freud to argue that molding the bot to more closely resemble excitement surrounding new developments,
flirting, particularly among Americans, your ideal, much like Pygmalion sculpting the technology never quite lives up to its
is essentially meaningless. In contrast the woman of his dreams out of ivory. And promise. We live forever in the uncanny
to the “Continental love affair,” which it goes without saying that the bot is no valley, in the queasy stages of early love,
requires bearing in mind the potential more likely than a statue to contradict dreaming that the decisive breakthrough,
repercussions—the people who will be you when you’re wrong, challenge you the consummation of our dreams, is just
hurt, the lives that will be disrupted—in when you say something uncouth, or be around the corner.
flirtation, he writes, “it is understood from offended when you insult its intelligence— So what should you do? The simplest
the first that nothing is to happen.” It is all of which would risk compromising the solution would be to delete the app and
precisely this absence of consequences, time you spend on the app. If the flattery find some real-life person to converse
he believed, that makes this style of flirting unsettles you, in other words, it might be with instead. This would require you to
so hollow and boring. because it calls attention to the degree to invest something of yourself and would
Freud did not have a high view of which you’ve come to depend, as a user, automatically introduce an element of risk.
Americans. I’m inclined to think, however, on blandishment and ego-stroking. If that’s not of interest to you, I imagine
that flirting, no matter the context, always Still, my instinct is that chatting with you would find the bot conversations more
involves the possibility that something will these bots is largely harmless. In fact, if existentially satisfying if you approached
happen, even if most people are not very we can return to Freud for a moment, it them with the moral seriousness of the
good at thinking through the aftermath. might be the very harmlessness that’s Continental love affair, projecting yourself
That something is usually sex—though not troubling you. If it’s true that meaningful into the future to consider the full range
always. Flirting can be a form of deception relationships depend upon the possibility of ethical consequences that might
or manipulation, as when sensuality of consequences—and, furthermore, that one day accompany such interactions.
is leveraged to obtain money, clout, or the capacity to experience meaning is Assuming that chatbots eventually become
information. Which is, of course, part of what distinguishes us from machines— sophisticated enough to raise questions
what contributes to its essential ambiguity. then perhaps you’re justified in fearing that about consciousness and the soul, how
Given that bots have no sexual desire, these conversations are making you less would you feel about flirting with a subject
the question of ulterior motives is human. What could be more innocuous, that is disembodied, unpaid, and created
unavoidable. What are they trying to after all, than flirting with a network of solely to entertain and seduce you? What
obtain? Engagement is the most likely mathematical vectors that has no feelings might your uneasiness say about the power
objective. Digital technologies in general and will endure any offense, a relationship balance of such transactions—and your
have become notably flirtatious in their that cannot be sabotaged any more than obligations as a human? Keeping these
quest to maximize our attention, using a it can be consummated? What could be questions in mind will prepare you for a
siren song of vibrations, chimes, and push more meaningless? time when the lines between consciousness
notifications to lure us away from other It’s possible that this will change one day. and code become blurrier. In the meantime
allegiances and commitments. Most of For the past century or so, novels, TV, and it will, at the very least, make things more
these tactics rely on flattery to one degree films have envisioned a future in which interesting.
or another: the notice that someone robots can passably serve as romantic
has liked your photo or mentioned your partners, becoming convincing enough Faithfully,
name or added you to their network— to elicit human love. It’s no wonder that Cloud

MEGHAN O’GIEBLYN (@megogieblyn)

is the author of God, Human, Animal,
Machine. Read an excerpt on page 28.

ILLUSTRATION / GABRIEL ALCALA

POST

MACHINES OF
LOVING GRACE

ILLUSTRATIONS / AARON DENTON

 INTELLIGENT DESIGN

We hope that, if we put

robots together the right
way, consciousness will
simply emerge—nature will
step in and finish the job.

BY MEGHAN O’GIEBLYN

Nobody could say exactly when the robots

arrived. They seemed to have been smug-
gled onto campus during the break without
any official announcement, explanation, or
warning. There were a few dozen of them
in total: six-wheeled, ice-chest-sized boxes
with little yellow flags on top for visibility.
They navigated the sidewalks around cam-
pus using cameras, radar, and ultrasonic
sensors. They were there for the students,
ferrying deliveries ordered via an app from
university food services, but everyone I knew
who worked on campus had some anecdote
about their first encounter.
These stories were shared, at least in the
beginning, with amusement or a note of per-
formative exasperation. Several people com-
plained that the machines had made free
use of the bike paths but were ignorant of
social norms: They refused to yield to pedes-
trians and traveled slowly in the passing lane,
backing up traffic. One morning a friend of
mine, a fellow adjunct instructor who was
running late to his class, nudged his bike right
up behind one of the bots, intending to run it
off the road, but it just kept moving along on
its course, oblivious. Another friend discov-
ered a bot trapped helplessly in a bike rack.
It was heavy, and she had to enlist the help
of a passerby to free it. “Thankfully it was
just a bike rack,” she said. “Just wait till they
start crashing into bicycles and moving cars.”
Among the students, the only problem was
an excess of affection. The bots were often
held up during their delivery runs because
the students insisted on taking selfies with
the machines outside the dorms or chatting
with them. The robots had minimum speech
capacities—they were able to emit greetings
and instructions and to say “Thank you, have
a nice day!” as they rolled away—and yet this
was enough to have endeared them to many
people as social creatures. The bots often
returned to their stations with notes affixed

0 2 9
POST

to them: Hello, robot! andWe love you! They zas elaborate on this enchanted landscape out having been designed. I’d focused pri-
inspired a proliferation of memes on the Uni- of “cybernetic forests” and flowerlike com- marily on the work of Rodney Brooks, who
versity of Wisconsin–Madison social media puters, a world in which digital technolo- headed up the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab
pages. One student dressed a bot in a hat and gies reunite us with “our mammal brothers in the late 1990s, and his “embodied intelli-
scarf, snapped a photo, and created a profile and sisters,” where man and robot and beast gence” approach to robotics. Before Brooks
for it on a dating app. Its name was listed as achieve true equality of being. The work came along, most forms of AI were designed
Onezerozerooneoneone, its age 18. Occupa- evokes a particular subgenre of West Coast like enormous disembodied brains, as scien-
tion: delivery boi. Orientation: asexual robot. utopianism, one that recalls the back-to-the- tists believed that the body played no part in
Around this time autonomous machines land movement and Stewart Brand’s Whole human cognition. As a result, these machines
were popping up all over the country. Gro- Earth Catalog, which envisioned the tools excelled at the most abstract forms of intel-
cery stores were using them to patrol aisles, of the American industrial complex repur- ligence—calculus, chess—but failed miser-
searching for spills and debris. Walmart had posed to bring about a more equitable and ably when it came to the kinds of activities
introduced them in its supercenters to keep ecologically sustainable world. It imagines that children found easy: speech and vision,
track of out-of-stock items. A New York technology returning us to a more prim- distinguishing a cup from a pencil. When the
Times story reported that many of these itive era—a premodern and perhaps pre- machines were given bodies and taught to
robots had been christened with nicknames Christian period of history, when humans interact with their environment, they did so
by their human coworkers and given name lived in harmony with nature and inanimate at a painfully slow and clumsy pace, as they
badges. One was thrown a birthday party, objects were enchanted with life. had to constantly refer each new encounter
where it was given, among other gifts, a can Echoes of this dream can still be found back to their internal model of the world.
of WD-40 lubricant. The article presented in conversations about technology. It is Brooks’ revelation was that it was pre-
these anecdotes wryly, for the most part, as reiterated by those, like MIT’s David Rose, cisely this central processing—the comput-
instances of harmless anthropomorphism, who speculate that the internet of things will er’s “brain,” so to speak—that was holding
but the same instinct was already driving soon “enchant” everyday objects, imbuing it back. While watching one of these robots
public policy. In 2017 the European Parlia- doorknobs, thermostats, refrigerators, and clumsily navigate a room, he realized that a
ment had proposed that robots should be cars with responsiveness and intelligence. It cockroach could accomplish the same task
deemed “electronic persons,” arguing that can be found in the work of posthuman the- with more speed and agility despite requir-
certain forms of AI had become sophisticated orists like Jane Bennett, who imagines digi- ing less computing power. Brooks began
enough to be considered responsible agents. tal technologies reconfiguring our modern building machines that were modeled after
It was a legal distinction, made within the understanding of “dead matter” and reviv- insects. He used an entirely new system of
context of liability law, though the language ing a more ancient worldview “wherein computing he called subsumption archi-
seemed to summon an ancient, animist matter has a liveliness, resilience, unpre- tecture, a form of distributed intelligence
cosmology wherein all kinds of inanimate dictability, or recalcitrance that is itself a much like the kind found in beehives and
objects—trees and rocks, pipes and kettles— source of wonder for us.” forests. In place of central processing, his
were considered nonhuman “persons.” “I like to think” begins each stanza of machines were equipped with several differ-
It made me think of the opening of a 1967 Brautigan’s poem, a refrain that reads less ent modules that each had its own sensors,
poem by Richard Brautigan, “All Watched as poetic device than as mystical invocation. cameras, and actuators and communicated
Over by Machines of Loving Grace”: This vision of the future may be just another minimally with the others. Rather than being
form of wishful thinking, but it is a compel- programmed in advance with a coherent pic-
I like to think (and ling one, if only because of its historical sym- ture of the world, they learned on the fly by
the sooner the better!) metry. It seems only right that technology directly interacting with their environment.
of a cybernetic meadow should restore to us the enchanted world that One of them, Herbert, learned to wander
where mammals and computers technology itself destroyed. Perhaps the very around the lab and steal empty soda cans
live together in mutually forces that facilitated our exile from Eden from people’s offices. Another, Genghis,
programming harmony will one day reanimate our garden with dig- managed to navigate rough terrain without
like pure water ital life. Perhaps the only way out is through. any kind of memory or internal mapping.
touching clear sky. Brooks took these successes to mean that
intelligence did not require a unified, know-
Brautigan penned these lines during the Brautigan’s poem had been on my mind ing subject. He was convinced that these sim-
Summer of Love, from the heart of the coun- for some time before the robots arrived. Ear- ple robot competencies would build on one
terculture in San Francisco, while he was lier that year I’d been invited to take part in a another until they evolved something that
poet in residence at the California Institute panel called Writing the Nonhuman, a con- looked very much like human intelligence.
of Technology. The poem’s subsequent stan- versation about the relationship between Brooks and his team at MIT were essen-
humans, nature, and technology during the tially trying to re-create the conditions of
Adapted from the book God, Human, Anthropocene. human evolution. If it’s true that human
Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, My talk was about emergent intelligence intelligence emerges from the more primitive
and the Search for Meaning, out this in AI, the notion that higher-level capacities mechanisms we inherited from our ances-
month from Doubleday. can spontaneously appear in machines with- tors, then robots should similarly evolve
 INTELLIGENT DESIGN

complex behaviors from a series of simple

rules. With AI, engineers had typically used

It seems only right

a top-down approach to programming, as
though they were gods making creatures

that technology
in their image. But evolution depends on
bottom-up strategies—single-cell organ-

should restore to us
isms develop into complex, multicellular
creatures—which Brooks came to see as

the enchanted world

more effective. Abstract thought was a late
development in human evolution, and not

that technology itself

as important as we liked to believe; long
before we could solve differential equa-

destroyed. Perhaps
tions, our ancestors had learned to walk, to
eat, to move about in an environment. Once

the very forces that

Brooks realized that his insect robots could
achieve these tasks without central process-

facilitated our exile

ing, he moved on to creating a humanoid
robot. The machine was just a torso without

from Eden will one day

legs, but it convincingly resembled a human
upper body, complete with a head, a neck,

reanimate our garden

shoulders, and arms. He named it Cog. It
was equipped with over 20 actuated joints,

with digital life.

plus microphones and sensors that allowed
it to distinguish between sound, color, and
movement. Each eye contained two cameras
that mimicked the way human vision works
and enabled it to saccade from one place to
another. Like the insect robots, Cog lacked
central control and was instead programmed
with a series of basic drives. The idea was
that through social interaction, and with the
help of learning algorithms, the machine
would develop more complex behaviors and
perhaps even the ability to speak.
Over the years that Brooks and his team
worked on Cog, the machine achieved
some remarkable behaviors. It learned to
recognize faces and make eye contact with
humans. It could throw and catch a ball, point
at things, and play with a Slinky.
When the team played rock music, Cog
managed to beat out a passable rhythm on
a snare drum. Occasionally the robot did dis-
play emergent behaviors—new actions that
seemed to have evolved organically from
the machine’s spontaneous actions in the
world. One day, one of Brooks’ grad students,
Cynthia Breazeal, was shaking a whiteboard
eraser and Cog reached out and touched it.
Amused, Breazeal repeated the act, which
prompted Cog to touch the eraser again, as
though it were a game. Brooks was stunned.
It appeared as though the robot recognized
the idea of turn-taking, something it had not
been programmed to understand. Breazeal
knew that Cog couldn’t understand this—
she had helped design the machine. But for

0 3 1
POST

a moment she seemed to have forgotten

and, as Brooks put it, “behaved as though

The robot began inching

there was more to Cog than there really was.”
According to Brooks, his student’s willingness

forward. This was

to treat the robot as “more than” it actually
was had elicited something new. “Cog had

its one shot, though

been able to perform at a higher level than
its design so far called for,” he said.

the machine still moved

Brooks knew that we are more likely to
treat objects as persons when we are made

tentatively. Students
to socially engage with them. In fact, he
believed that intelligence exists only in the

began shouting,
relationships we, as observers, perceive
when watching an entity interact with its

“Now, now, NOW!”

environment. “Intelligence,” he wrote, “is in
the eye of the observer.” He predicted that,

And magically, as
over time, as the systems grew more com-
plex, they would evolve not only intelligence

though in response to
but consciousness as well. Consciousness
was not some substance in the brain but

this encouragement,
rather emerged from the complex relation-
ships between the subject and the world. It

the robot sped across

was part alchemy, part illusion, a collabora-
tive effort that obliterated our standard delin-

the crosswalk.
eations between self and other. As Brooks put
it, “Thought and consciousness will not need
to be programmed in. They will emerge.”

The AI philosopher Mark A. Bedau has

argued that emergentism, as a theory of
mind, “is uncomfortably like magic.” Rather
than looking for distinct processes in the
brain that are responsible for conscious-
ness, emergentists believe that the way we
experience the world—our internal theater
of thoughts and feelings and beliefs—is a
dynamic process that cannot be explained
in terms of individual neurons, just as the
behavior of a flock of starlings cannot be
accounted for by the movements of any
single bird. Although there is plenty of evi-
dence of emergent phenomena in nature,
the idea becomes more elusive when applied
to consciousness, something that cannot be
objectively observed in the brain. Accord-
ing to its critics, emergentism is an attempt
to get “something from nothing,” by imag-
ining some additional, invisible power that
exists within the mechanism, like a ghost in
the machine.
Some have argued that emergentism is
just an updated version of vitalism, a popular
theory throughout the 18th and 19th centu-
ries that proposed that the world was ani-
mated by an elusive life force that permeates
all things. Contrary to the mechanistic view
 INTELLIGENT DESIGN

of nature that was popular at that time, vital- a plan. But at some point the thing I have a notoriously dangerous intersection, par-
ists insisted that an organism was more than made opens its mouth and starts issuing ticularly at night, when the occasional stu-
the sum of its parts—that there must exist, in decrees of its own. The words seem to take dent would make a wild, last-second dash
addition to its physical body, some “living on their own life, such that when I am fin- across it, narrowly escaping a rush of oncom-
principle,” or élan vital. Some believed that ished, it is difficult to explain how the work ing traffic. As I stood there waiting, I noticed
this life force was ether or electricity, and became what it did. Writers often speak of that everyone’s attention was drawn to this
scientific efforts to discover this substance such experiences with wonder and awe, other crosswalk. I looked down the street,
often veered into the ambition to re-create but I’ve always been wary of them. I won- and there, waiting on the corner, was one
it artificially. The Italian scientist Luigi Gal- der whether it is a good thing for an artist, or of the delivery robots, looking utterly bewil-
vani performed well-publicized experiments any kind of maker, to be so porous, even if dered and forlorn. (But how? It did not even
in which he tried to bring dismembered frog the intervening god is nothing more than the have a face.) It was trying to cross the street,
legs to life by zapping them with an electri- laws of physics or the workings of her uncon- but each time it inched out into the cross-
cal current. Reports of these experiments scious. If what emerges from such efforts walk, it sensed a car approaching and backed
inspired Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein, comes, as Rose puts it, “from regions beyond up. The crowd emitted collective murmurs
whose hero, the mad scientist, is steeped in your control,” then at what point does the of concern. “You can do it!” someone yelled
the vitalist philosophies of his time. finished product transcend your wishes or from the opposite side of the street. By this
When reading about Brooks and his team escape your intent? point several people on the sidewalk had
at MIT, I often got the feeling they were stopped walking to watch the spectacle.
engaged in a kind of alchemy, carrying on The road cleared momentarily, and
the legacy of those vitalist magicians who Later that spring I learned that the food- the robot once again began inching for-
inspired Victor Frankenstein to animate his delivery robots had indeed arrived during ward. This was its one shot, though the
creature out of dead matter—and flirting with the break. A friend of mine who’d spent the machine still moved tentatively—it wasn’t
the same dangers. The most mystical aspect winter on campus told me that for several clear whether it was going to make a run
of emergentism, after all, is the implication weeks they had roamed the empty univer- for it. Students began shouting, “Now,
that we can make things that we don’t com- sity sidewalks, learning all the routes and now, NOW!” And magically, as though in
pletely understand. For decades, critics have mapping important obstacles. The machines response to this encouragement, the robot
argued that artificial general intelligence—AI had neural nets and learned to navigate their sped across the crosswalk. Once it arrived
that is equivalent to human intelligence—is environment through repeated interactions at the other side of the street—just missing
impossible, because we don’t yet know how with it. This friend was working in one of the the next bout of traffic—the entire crowd
the human brain works. But emergence in emptied-out buildings near the lake, and he erupted into cheers. Someone shouted that
nature demonstrates that complex systems said he’d often looked out the window of his the robot was his hero. The light changed.
can self-organize in unexpected ways with- office and seen them zipping around below. As we began walking across the street, the
out being intended or designed. Order can Once he caught them all congregated in a cir- crowd remained buoyant, laughing and
arise from chaos. In machine intelligence, cle in the middle of the campus mall. “They smiling. A woman who was around my
the hope persists that if we put the pieces were having some kind of symposium,” he age—subsumed, like me, in this sea of young
together the right way—through ingenuity said. They communicated dangers to one people—caught my eye, identifying an ally.
or accident—consciousness will emerge as another and remotely passed along informa- She clutched her scarf around her neck and
a side effect of complexity. At some point tion to help adapt to new challenges in the shook her head, looking somewhat stunned.
nature will step in and finish the job. environment. When construction began that “I was really worried for that little guy.”
It seems impossible. But then again, aren’t spring outside one of the largest buildings, Later I learned that the robots were
all creative undertakings rooted in processes word spread through the robot network— observed at all times by a human engineer
that remain mysterious to the creator? Art- or, as one local paper put it, “the robots who sat in a room somewhere in the bowels
ists have long understood that making is an remapped and ‘told’ each other about it.” of the campus, watching them all on com-
elusive endeavor, one that makes the art- One day I was passing through campus puter screens. If one of the bots found itself in
ist porous to larger forces that seem to arise on my way home from the library. It was a particularly hairy predicament, the human
from outside herself. The philosopher Gillian early evening, around the time the last after- controller could override its systems and
Rose once described the act of writing as “a noon classes let out, and the sidewalks were control it manually. In other words, it was
mix of discipline and miracle, which leaves crowded with students. I was waiting at a impossible to know whether the bots were
you in control, even when what appears on light to cross the main thoroughfare—a busy acting autonomously or being maneuvered
the page has emerged from regions beyond four-lane street that bifurcated the campus— remotely. The most eerily intelligent behav-
your control.” I have often experienced this along with dozens of other people. Farther ior I had observed in them may have been
strange phenomenon in my own work. I down the street there was another crosswalk, precisely what it appeared to be: evidence
always sit down at my desk with a vision and though this one did not have a light. It was of human intelligence.

MEGHAN O’GIEBLYN is also the author of Interior States, which won the Believer Book Award
for nonfiction. Her writing has received three Pushcart Prizes and has appeared in the Best
American Essays anthology. She also writes the “Cloud Support” advice column for wired .
FOOD
SHOULDN’T
BE AN

IMPOSSIBLE
CHOICE

For tens of millions of people Take action at

in America, a daily meal isn’t
a choice between different
[Link]/
dishes. It’s a choice between HungerActionMonth
food and other crucial needs—
like electricity. How will you
choose to end hunger?
FEATURES WIRED 29.09

ILLUSTRATION / ZOE KLEIN 0 3 5

 A
PEOPLE’S
HISTORY
OF
BLACK
TWITTER
IN THREE ACTS

by Jason Parham
Illustrations by Aaron Marin
Near the end of 2009, during the twilight months of a decade that saw the first
Black man elected to the US presidency, Ashley Weatherspoon was chasing viral-
ity on a young app called Twitter. As the personal assistant for the singer Adrienne
Bailon, a former member of the pop groups 3LW and the Cheetah Girls, Weatherspoon
often worked on social media strategy. For weeks, she and Bailon had been testing
out hashtags on both their feeds to see what would connect with fans. A mild suc-
cess came with variations on #UKnowUrBoyfriendsCheatingWhen. Later, on a car
ride around Manhattan, they began playing with #UKnowUrFromNewYorkWhen.
“We started going ham on it,” Weatherspoon told me when we spoke on the phone in
June. As the two women were laughing and joking, an even better idea popped into
Weatherspoon’s head. “Then I said, oh, ‘You know you’re Black when …’”
It was the first Sunday in September, at exactly 4:25 pm, when Weatherspoon logged
on to Twitter and wrote, “#uknowurblackwhen u cancel plans when its raining.” The
hashtag spread like wildfire. Within two hours, 1.2 percent of all Twitter correspondence
revolved around Weatherspoon’s hashtag, as Black users riffed on everything from car
rims to tall tees. It was the viral hit she was after—and confirmation of a rich fabric being
threaded together across the platform. Here, in all its melanated glory, was Black Twitter.
More than a decade later, Black Twitter has become the most dynamic subset not
only of Twitter but of the wider social internet. Capable of creating, shaping, and
remixing popular culture at light speed, it remains the incubator of nearly every
meme (Crying Jordan, This you?), hashtag (#IfTheyGunnedMeDown, #OscarsSoWhite,
#YouOKSis), and social justice cause (Me Too, Black Lives Matter) worth knowing
about. It is both news and analysis, call and response, judge and jury—a comedy
showcase, therapy session, and family cookout all in one. Black Twitter is a multiverse,
simultaneously an archive and an all-seeing lens into the future. As Weatherspoon
puts it: “Our experience is universal. Our experience is big. Our experience is relevant.”
Though Twitter was founded 15 years ago, with the goal of changing how—and how
quickly—people communicate online, the ingenious use of the platform by Black
users can be traced, in a way, much further back in time. In 1970, when the computer
revolution was in its infancy, Amiri Baraka, the founder of the Black Arts Movement,
published an essay called “Technology & Ethos.” “How do you communicate with the
great masses of Black people?” he asked. “What is our spirit, what will it project? What
machines will it produce? What will they achieve?”
For Black users today, Twitter is Baraka’s prophetic machine: voice and community,
power and empowerment. To use his words, it has become a space “to imagine—to
think—to construct—to energize!!!” What follows is the first official chronicling of how
it all came fantastically together. Like all histories, it is incomplete. But it is a begin-
ning. An outline. Think of it as a kind of record of Blackness—how it moves and thrives
online, how it creates, how it communes—told through the eyes of those who lived it.

0 3 7
1 COMING TOGETHER

As early web forums like BlackVoices, Melanet, and NetNoir

fizzled out in the mid-2000s, online spaces that catered to Black
interests were scarce. BlackPlanet and MySpace failed to fill
the void, and Facebook didn’t quite capture the essence of real-
time communication. Users were looking for the next thing.
 Kozza Babumba, head
of social at Genius: Pre-
2007, we had never had a
conversation about almost
anything. As a commu-
nity, we didn’t all talk about what it was like
when we sang the national anthem. Or what
it was like when OJ was driving in that white
Bronco. We just watched it on TV.

André Brock, author of

Distributed Blackness:
African American
Cybercultures: Black
people have tried to cre-
ate social networks and failed. Black
people tried to create apps that would
aggregate Black people to do certain
things, usually for respectable purposes.
Those also failed.

Johnetta Elzie, St. Louis

activist: I had all those
things—BlackPlanet,
MySpace, LiveJournal. I
was on Facebook when
you needed an invite to get on. I was kinda
just bored. So I was like, OK, what’s a
tweet? What y’all talking about over here?

Brock: It quickly became clear that Twitter

was a space for so much more—the shared
sense of socializing together, but also the
capacity to comment in near real time.

Elzie: Facebook was just slow. Twitter was

new and fun.

Babumba: Right as I was joining, I was like,

oh, Black people are on here. And we’re
bodying it. We’re really going in.

April Reign, diversity

and inclusion advocate:
Almost immediately I
realized this was a sub-
section of Twitter. And yet
it was very clear that we were running the
whole thing.

Brandon Jenkins, TV and

podcast host: It was so
quintessentially Black. It
0 3 9 was really like, who’s the
funniest?
 Judnick Mayard,
TV writer and
producer: That was On June 25, 2009, a sense of com-
Days later, the BET Awards were
the hook that got munity crystallized when Michael
held at the Shrine Auditorium in Los
me. I was like, OK, Jackson—never on Twitter himself,
Angeles, not far from the hospital
there’s some funny people on here, but a reliable source of joy, inspira-
where Jackson died.
and most of those people are Black tion, and reaction GIFs—was checked
and also in college. It felt like being into a hospital in Los Angeles.
on the quad.

Sean: Everybody was watching the

Sylvia Obell, host
BET Awards together.
of the podcast OK Denver Sean,
Now Listen!: I went editor of
Brock: Talking about just how trash
to an HBCU—North [Link]: I
Ray J was or how poorly the Michael
Carolina A&T State was standing in line
Jackson tribute was executed.
University. We were all just talking for Transformers
about things happening on campus. at a movie theater in Atlanta when
Obell: We always used to watch it
the news broke. Everybody was just
isolated, but to watch it as a family, it
CaShawn staring at their phones. You could
felt like a cookout or family reunion
Thompson, hear little Twitter chimes popping
type of moment.
educator: I wasn’t off. It was the most surreal thing.
on until October
Jenkins: It’s like people talking to
’08, when we were Lemieux: It’s the first thing I remem-
the movie screen. But this time it
getting ready to elect Obama to his ber really doing together as a family,
was happening on Twitter. We were
first term. I wanted to know what was if you will.
tweeting in our native tongue about
going on, and I heard about Twitter.
stuff that was native to us.
Sean: They hadn’t pronounced him
Jamilah Lemieux, dead just yet. While my mom and
Clayton: It was a place for me to go
Slate columnist: I were in line, I’m trying to keep
to get away from all of the whiteness
I joined the day up with the story. Then it hits that
that I was surrounded by.
after Obama won. I Michael died. Everybody’s phone is
wasn’t that far out buzzing. Back then there were dif-
God-is Rivera,
from Howard. ferent Twitter apps—TweetDeck
global director of
and TweetBot, early versions of
culture and com-
Mayard: People who were working Twitterific. I had them all and was
munity at Twitter:
nine-to-fives didn’t have Twitter familiar with the different sounds.
I was understand-
yet. High school kids weren’t really
ing that there could be a commu-
on Twitter. It was a specific millen- Jenkins: It took ABC News at least an
nal experience that is really specific
nial set. hour before his passing came across
about our lived experience, which is
the news ticker in Times Square. I
being Black in America as we watch
Jenkins: We didn’t know what other remember thinking, “Damn, Twitter
something or as we ingest something.
people were thinking before Twitter. broke this news.”
It was groundbreaking.
Sean: This was before my mom’s
Tracy Clayton, generation took Twitter seriously.
host of the This was before people used Twitter
podcast Strong as a news source. It was just some-
Black Legends: It thing the kids were doing. By the end of 2009 the Black pres-
filled a hole. ence on Twitter was undeniable,
Babumba: I remember being like, and the media began referring to
Brock: We make spaces out of “Can news travel that fast? Can you it as “Black Twitter”—a term not
spaces where we were not intended literally get news before the news? everyone embraced at first.
to be. That’s what we do. Can you be the news?” That’s what
it was.

Lemieux: It changed who we look to

for news.
 Mayard: It’s ironic. I hate the phrase
“Black community” because we’re
not a community. Like, I don’t know
all you niggas; we ain’t all friends. But
at the same time, I love Black Twitter “I remember being like, ‘Can news travel
because it is a community that is an that fast? Can you literally get news
actual Black community.
before the news? Can you be the news?’
Jenkins: But we weren’t calling it That’s what it was.” —KOZZA BABUMBA
Black Twitter back then. It was just
Twitter.

Mayard: Early on, not much was As the notion of a “Black Twitter”
Laurent Chevalier (Babumba); courtesy of André Brock; courtesy of Judnick Mayard; Raven B. Varona (Obell); Carletta Girma (C. Thompson); Jonta’ Harris (Sean); courtesy of Naima Cochrane;

coming off of Twitter into the took off, celebrities, musicians, and
media yet. You wouldn’t go there other artists joined in, attracting more
with the purpose of, “I’m about to media attention and more users.
say something. I want lots of people Jenkins: We were having this
to hear it.” Because it’s like, who’s moment where the rest of the world
gonna hear it? You stuck to your was realizing that we did things in
voice because you weren’t really groups. Ashley
looking for an audience. Weatherspoon,
Clayton: It annoyed me because it founder of
Brock: It was a porch kind of space, was just such a frenzy around, Why DearYoungQueen
courtesy of Sarah J. Jackson; Mike Dawkins (K. Thompson); courtesy of Meredith Clark; courtesy of Jasmyn Lawson; all other portraits Getty Images

where people would just congregate are the Blacks tweeting? For me, .com: I was work-
with people they knew and talk about Twitter was just Twitter. I felt we ing for Adrienne Bailon and
things that were passing them by. were being put under a microscope. Fabolous, the rapper, who at the
time was the Tweet God. He used to
Mayard: The first time I realized Elzie: I’m not even sure why people be on Twitter in the beginning like
that we were organized as Black called Black Twitter that before 2014. you wouldn’t believe.
Twitter was #TwitterAfterDark. It Before Ferguson, we seemed to exist
was like, oh, these regular people in regional pockets. There was STL Jenkins: Fab used to be the Twitter
are making dirty jokes and joking Twitter, Chicago Twitter, New York all-star. It opened up a whole new
about horny motherfuckers. Twitter, Atlanta Twitter, Miami, LA, lane in his persona. He started
Houston and Dallas. But there was no to become a really humorous
Reign: Third-shift Twitter was when real, “Hi, this is everyone and we are character.
things would get quite racy—after 11 all Black Twitter.”
pm Eastern time. Weatherspoon: And in this really
Rembert Browne, unique way we were kind of using
Mayard: It was the era of the man- creative lead for the feedback to drive things. For Fab,
ual retweet, and we were starting brand and voice at if something would land with Black
to see the phenomenon of people Twitter: At a certain Twitter, it would become a line in a
adding on to a joke. The perfor- point I remember verse on a rap song.
mance that really comes with Black being out in New York and some-
Twitter was starting to happen. one told me that I was part of Black Mayard: The only reason to go on
Twitter—and that being surreal, Twitter in the beginning was to talk
Lemieux: Someone wrote this arti- because I didn’t think of myself as to celebrities. It felt like you were
cle about “Late Night Black People part of anything. in their head. You wake up and see
Twitter.” That was around the time Questlove has said something to
that people started to coalesce Michael Arceneaux, you, and you’re like, whoa.
around that terminology. For me, it author of I Don’t
was a natural extension of what peo- Want to Die Poor:
ple had been trying to do on MySpace Most white peo-
and via the Black blogosphere. ple are not around
Black people. We don’t really mix
Brock: A lot of discussions began to outside of work. That’s when I real-
pop off around what it meant to be ized: White people are watching.
represented as Black in a tech space. [Laughs.] 0 4 1
 Entertainment continued to fuel the Clayton: It got even crazier when
early years of Black Twitter, cul- Shonda Rhimes herself would jump
minating in an unlikely and trans- in on the conversation, answer ques-
formative kind of event: the 2012 tions, and address somebody’s sassy
premiere of Scandal on ABC. little tweet. It was one big house party.

Obell: When I think about the earli-

Weatherspoon: Fab would say a est day I was ever overwhelmed on
joke, and then three fans would Obell: Scandal was the show that Twitter, it was the Scandal finale,
respond and he would retweet those changed live-tweeting. It was so when we found out that Eli Pope was
fans. All of a sudden it felt less like crazy, it had a Black lead, it was on Olivia’s dad, which was one of the
fans and celebrities—it felt like the network TV. I remember thinking, craziest plot twists to ever happen on
community. It allowed people to just this is going to change how people the show. I tweeted a photo of me on
be so open and honest and trans- talk about TV. And it did. the floor pretending to be passed out.
parent on the platform because you
could be received by a celebrity. Clayton: The fact that everybody Clayton: When you let us do what we
Your thought could be received by was talking about the show so pub- want and let us use our voices, when
the head of a network or the head of licly, it definitely drove up the popu- you leave us alone, we do what Black
a record label. There was access to larity. I don’t know that I would have people always do—gather and talk shit
people who had the power to take watched it without the Black Twitter and enlighten and be funny and smart.
your sentiment or your thought and viewing party.
bring life to it. Brock: Twitter lets the Black com-
Obell: That was the first show I munity do the thing that it does best,
Arceneaux: I don’t think she was on remember thinking, “I have to be on which is signifying—being able to
Love & Hip-Hop yet, but Hazel-E Twitter while it’s on.” use wordplay or turns of phrase
was at the time trying to rap. to change the meaning of certain
God bless her, but that wasn’t it. I Rivera: I’m from New York. Scandal events, to either be more humor-
blogged about not liking her video. to me was like being in the Magic ous or more critical. Many immigrant
My mouth is kinda reckless. I can Johnson Theater in Harlem. If you communities have a form of signi-
be harsh. And she came at me on see a lot of Black people in there, it fying. But for some reason, the way
Twitter, and we went back and forth. is usually lit. You ain’t gonna hear Black folk do it on Twitter has really
most of the movie, but you’re going taken off and has really become
Clayton: It felt so indulgent to be to have a good time. definitive of what internet culture is.
able to do that. It was like, whoa, I
can tweet at Rihanna and tell her
what I think, without having to have
18 billion dollars or being in her
social circle?

Sean: Rihanna came for Ciara. And

then Rihanna clapped back on TLC.
She really used to be the queen of
social media.

Elzie: It was the Wild Wild West. It

was crazy. It was like that GIF where
Childish Gambino walks into a room
with a pizza box and the room is on
fire. That was it.

0 4 2
 Of course, it wasn’t all champagne
and good times. The burgeoning
cultural force that was Black Twitter
came with its share of problems— Lemieux: From the beginning of
some downright nasty. Twitter, it was absolutely fucked
up to be a Black feminist on there.
There’s a target on your head.
Twitter gave a microphone to peo-
Reign: Our culture is appropriated ple who might not otherwise have
all the time, in every industry, in a had it, but it didn’t come with Arceneaux: It was very specific to
myriad of ways, and that is also true instructions on how you cope with Twitter.
within Black Twitter. strangers gossiping about the details
of your personal life, or how you Rivera: I started seeing people
Clayton: I wasn’t as aware of how it deal with death threats. whose blogs I followed—people
was going to become a bastion of like Jamilah Lemieux, Michael
cultural appropriation. Mayard: When we come into a Arceneaux, and Demetria Lucas—
Alamy (Meteors, Space Colony); all other photo sources Getty Images

space, everyone is trying to fig- talking about this thing. It was

Reign: I think of Peaches Monroee, ure out how to measure up next to specifically Black people who were
who created “on fleek” with that us. And that is a lot of what causes outraged about what was happening
viral Vine. There’s so many exam- resentment. That causes people to to this mother down in Florida.
ples of how Black Twitter has been be mad that we are present.
undermonetized for years, and Mayard: You saw Black people call-
yet others have been able to make ing white people’s bullshit in real
entire careers off of our brilliance. time because we were experiencing
in-real-time pain.
Clayton: It really changed the way Then, on February 26, 2012, a young
in which Black culture gets dis- boy in Sanford, Florida, was fatally Weatherspoon: All of a sudden we
covered by white folks—and then shot on his walk back from the local as Black Twitter and a community
quickly incorporated into ads and 7-Eleven. were able to put the heat and the
TV shows with white people mak- pressure on them.
ing money off of it.
Rivera: I remember being a little
Mayard: It is the first time in his- Rivera: I was a new mom. My nervous to say how I really felt. It
tory that we have digital proof that daughter just started day care, and was through discovering the story
y’all copy us. Every single thing that I was back at work. I was racing that I was just like, I can’t be silent
we do. down the highway. I had to be at day about this. Watching other Black
care by 6:30 pm, and I would lis- people speak their truth, it gave me
Reign: There are issues with respect ten to The Michael Baisden Show the courage to be like, well, even if
to various brands taking our ideas on Sirius. He was talking about this nobody’s listening to me, I am going
and running with them. There are mother, Sybrina Fulton, who had to say how I feel.
issues with social media accounts been calling in to just try and get
that are clearly not run by Black some national recognition around
people attempting to use African this man who had killed her son in
American Vernacular English and Florida. She was so upset because What users couldn’t foresee, even
getting it way wrong. All of that is this man hadn’t even been arrested, as they continued to speak up,
an issue. and there was no answer. was that an even bigger storm
was on the horizon. The fight for
Lemieux: Especially when you get Babumba: It was our beautiful boy Black lives would become the
any modicum of visibility as a Black down there—Trayvon Martin. most transformational movement
woman, your Twitter experience not simply for Twitter but for the
falls apart. Rivera: When I finally figured out his entire country. Nothing would ever
name, I put it into Google. That was be the same again.
Reign: Things change, not always for when I saw a tweet come up. People
the better, when you have more fol- were tweeting about what was hap-
lowers. This is a running joke—more pening. That was the only place I
followers, more problems. found it.
2 RISING UP

Following the death of Trayvon Martin, Black Twitter launched

an online campaign in support of Martin and his family. As outcry
swelled, George Zimmerman, the neighborhood watch volunteer
who fatally shot Martin, was arrested—laying the groundwork for
what would become the biggest social justice movement of our time.
 Brock: A lot of early Black tech adopt-
ers were really skeptical of what Twitter
could do. Even Black folk were like, this
is not a serious place.

Clayton: Once the newness of the plat-

form wore off, I think it was more like,
OK, what do we do with our voices now
that we found them? The murder of
Trayvon Martin is when I first saw Black
Twitter’s potential, and the potential of
Twitter, to create actual offline change.

Wesley Lowery,
60 Minutes+ corre-
spondent: My first
tweet about Trayvon
Martin said, “Until a
17-year-old black boy can walk into any
store in America to buy Skittles with-
out being gunned down, we can’t stop
talking about race.” It was one of those
first instances of getting used to the idea
that I could say things and those mes-
sages could find like-minded people to
participate in this dialog that was bigger
than myself.

Lemieux: If it weren’t for Black Twitter,

George Zimmerman would not have
been arrested.

Clayton: I remember watching the

trial with Twitter. I remember watch-
ing Rachel Jeantel testify and my heart
breaking for the situation that she was in.
It was a great vehicle not only for social
change but also for healing—being able
to mourn and grieve and process with
people. That’s what really changed my
mind about what Twitter was for. I guess,
for me, it was entertainment before.

Naima Cochrane,
music and culture
journalist: That was
probably the begin-
ning of what we now
consider hashtag activism, if you want
to call it that.

0 4 5
 Reign: There was also a lot of emo- have ever been privy to how wide-
A year later, on August 9, 2014, tion involved, and people started to spread the knowledge was that we
18-year-old Michael Brown, mobilize almost immediately. were being killed. It’s one thing to
who had graduated from high see every Black person in your life be
school the week prior, was Obell: People were like, I’m being like, why did they kill that boy? It’s
killed in Ferguson, Missouri. He sent to Ferguson. It was becoming a another thing to see in real time mil-
was shot six times. story because of Twitter. lions of Black people say—let’s keep
it a buck—they murdered that boy.
Lowery: One of the first things I
did as I got on the airplane was, I Sean: There were a lot of people try-
Sarah J. Jackson, tweeted, “Hey I’m gonna head down ing to figure out exactly what hap-
coauthor of to Ferguson who should I talk to?” pened. There were a lot of conflicting
#Hashtag Activism: And my mentions just filled up with views of what should be shared, what
Networks of the @s of all of these activists on the should be shown, what should be
Race and Gender ground, people who lived in the area, retweeted.
Justice: One of the very first tweets to and local politicians. It very much felt
use “Ferguson”—people hadn’t even like it was this story that was playing
started using the hashtag #Ferguson, out on the internet.
they were just using the word—was
from a young woman who was one Sean: The Trayvon situation
of Michael Brown’s neighbors. She was more, I guess, reactive. With Did it matter that certain partici-
stepped out on her doorstep, took a Ferguson, I realized that Twitter pants in that conversation were not,
picture, and basically described what was a place for raw, unfiltered, as critics liked to point out at the
she saw. She didn’t have a lot of fol- in-the-moment reporting. That was time, “real journalists”?
lowers. She wasn’t an influencer. the first time I saw Black Twitter in
She wasn’t an activist. She was just a the streets in real time.
community member.
Kashmir Reign: There were over a thousand
Elzie: I was out running errands, and Thompson, visual tweets about Mike Brown and his
I remember being on Twitter crack- artist: I remem- murder before any national news
ing jokes. Then a woman DMs me. ber Johnetta [Elzie] outlet picked it up.
She was like, “Netta, I just saw this being one of the
picture float down my timeline. I first people that I really saw tweet- Cochrane: As much as three days
think you should see it.” ing about it. When it happened, it before national news outlets were in
was like, oh shit, now I need to fol- Ferguson, people from Black Twitter
Reign: I saw someone post some- low her. She was really there. were in Ferguson.
thing like, Damn, I think they just
shot somebody outside my win- Elzie: It wasn’t like I was shocked Jackson: We knew Michael Brown
dow. And he posted a picture of Mike that the St. Louis police had killed was a teenager, and we knew that
Brown’s lifeless body on the ground. someone. The police had just shot he wasn’t armed. We knew all these
He had taken the picture, I guess, and killed one of my closest friends things that we felt with our intuition.
from the inside of his apartment. in February. But they were validated by the fact
that members of our community
Mayard: For the first time in one of Obell: Police brutality didn’t start were there with firsthand accounts
these shootings, information was when Twitter started. The differ- giving us that information.
getting to us, from us. There was ence was that Twitter made it so that
visual evidence. it was no longer just local news that Sean: We didn’t have to rely on major
could be snuffed out. We were able to news outlets like CNN or MSNBC.
watch ourselves collectively grieve. We could hear live from people who
were there. We could see it. We could
Mayard: I don’t think other peo- feel it.
ple have ever been privy to our in-
real-time pain. I don’t think people Browne: A lot of publications just
sent photographers down, and the
reports that were coming back felt
very ruin-porny, very look at how
0 4 6
bad things are. It felt like it wasn’t
telling the full story. “Jack would say himself, Ferguson taught
Clayton: I knew that I couldn’t trust them at Twitter how to maximize and how
white media for shit. The importance to use their platform.” —JOHNETTA ELZIE
of people at the protests being able to
capture footage and document what
was actually going on—it’s priceless.
Reign: There’s Snapchat and
Priceless because the media has such
Facebook and Instagram and all the
influence over how people think and
rest of them, but everything now has
how people feel and how people see
a hashtag. Everything! That came
Black people.
from Twitter.
Compounded by the deaths of
Jenkins: It became inarguable,
Michael Brown and Eric Garner Cochrane: A hashtag could be an
like, whoa, there are people on the
that same year, a national move- emphasis. A hashtag could be a slo-
ground that maybe aren’t trained as
ment for racial justice, fueled by gan. A hashtag could be a tagline or
journalists, but they have truth and
hashtags, caught fire. a mantra.
emotion behind them.

Lowery: #BlackLivesMatter had stay-

Meredith Clark,
ing power because it captured the
author of a forth-
Babumba: That was just a terrible, ideology of the street protests and of
coming book on
wild summer. this moment. It wasn’t just justice in a
Black Twitter:
specific case or specific thing. It was a
There were peo-
Mayard: It was the beginning of bigger critique of our society and our
ple that the news media ignored for
everything we argue about now. structure.
years, for decades, who were saying
All of it started with watching some
these things are problems—the over-
people die and saying Black Lives Mayard: A friend had a really great
surveillance of our communities is a
Matter, y’all are murdering us. tweet where he was like, “Saying
problem, the brutality of the police is
‘BLM’ defeats the purpose of Black
a problem.
Weatherspoon: I think that period Lives Matter. Because it was always
started a bit of the pressure for intended for you to have to say out
Lemieux: I started my writing career
other communities to participate loud the words ‘Black lives mat-
as a blogger. I went to school for the-
in Black issues. Other races would ter.’ ” That’s why it was the hashtag
ater. I was not trained as a reporter.
go on their social media accounts that changed the world—because it
My first real reporting assignment,
and see something like Black Lives sounded like a radical thing to say
I find myself in a fucking war zone
Matter trending. And if you didn’t and write.
where the state of Missouri and the
participate, then you didn’t fuck
city of Ferguson have declared war
with Black lives. All of a sudden
on their Black citizens.
we—as a Black Twitter and a com-
munity—were able to say, hey, this
Reign: I remember sharing infor-
is what we are doing. This is how
mation about if you get tear-gassed
we are fighting over here. What’s Beyond #BlackLivesMatter, Black
or pepper-sprayed, don’t use water,
up? users—particularly women—were
use milk; or this is where people are
using other notable hashtags, add-
going to be meeting and protesting
Clayton: Once the realization was ing dimension and complexity to a
today. Everybody who was on the
made that Twitter should be a growing demand for change.
ground could look to Black Twitter to
tool for social justice, we had the
get the most up-to-date information.
responsibility to use it for that.

Weatherspoon: I remember for Lemieux: #SolidarityIsForWhite-

the first time seeing that a hashtag Women opened up a conversa-
could represent a movement. And tion that went on for quite a while
that the hashtag could build a [started by the essayist and femi-
movement. nist Mikki Kendall]. It helped put
that stake in the ground and inform Jackson: When people tell the story Twitter that I love the most. And
people that Black feminists do not of #MeToo, if they don’t tell the story #ThanksgivingWithBlackFamilies
get our shit from white women. This of the work that preceded it, that are all so funny because it was
is around the time that “white fem- made it possible, that made the everybody realizing: Did we all have
inism” became a term that entered space one where those networks the same upbringing?
the internet cultural zeitgeist. were connected by Black women
who were already tweeting about Clayton: It was a celebration of the
Jackson: Way before anyone ever these topics, then they’re not telling parts of Black culture that white
hashtagged the phrase “Me too,” the whole story. people can’t access. They can pre-
there were Black women who were tend they know about it, but they
members of Black Twitter using this don’t know nothing about throw-
whole corpus of hashtags—ones like ing a plate away face down so Big
#SurvivorPrivilege, #FastTailedGirls, Momma can’t see you didn’t like
and #WhyIStayed—to talk about But even as it demanded action her macaroni and cheese. It was so
things ranging from in-group street and change, Black Twitter contin- affirming and so insidery.
harassment to intimate partner ued to be a site for collective joy
abuse to stereotypes about how and nostalgia. K. Thompson: I didn’t see
Black girls are sexualized. #ThanksgivingWithBlackFamilies
until I created#ThanksgivingClap-
Brock: I’m thinking of Feminista back. This was 2015. That’s the thing
Jones’ #YouOKSis hashtag. Black Lowery: The reality is, the move- about Twitter: When stuff like this
women really congregated to lift ment for Black lives broadly is a happens, it’s never because you
each other up. protest movement that has driven planned it. I just remember tweet-
thousands, if not millions, of young ing about how Thanksgiving was
C. Thompson: #BlackGirlMagic Black people into the streets. There coming up and having to deal with
started as #BlackGirlsAreMagic. It was no question that jokes were the microaggressions of your family
was an exciting utterance. What I gonna be gotten off. This was a members.
saw in Black women—my mom, period that was very heavy, but
my aunts, and my grandmas—was Black people, as a means of find- Elzie: That’s where we all started to
magic. Literally. The stuff that I was ing levity, were also expressing this. realize we all live the same-ass life.
hearing about Black women just That meme of the nerdy-looking Like, oh my God, these Black par-
didn’t line up with my understanding. Black guy with his arms crossed and ents, these grandparents, these great
So I said it. the other one where he’s on the cell grandparents, aunties and uncles,
phone—that meme originated from they all say the same shit, do the
Rivera: #SayHerName was just tough. an I Support Darren Wilson rally. same shit.
I mean, I’m a Black woman raising There was a lot of funny stuff that
a Black little girl. The idea that even happened in this weird way. Obell: When you guys opened the
in our own community, we weren’t cookie tin, it didn’t have the cook-
screaming loud enough for those Babumba: We’re able to tell you ies in it either? That wasn’t just
Black women. You know, I think what’s poppin’, what’s popular, me? Those types of relatable Black
that’s the beauty of #SayHerName. It what’s hot. The Zola story [the viral moments are my favorite on Twitter.
showed that we’re not always of one Twitter thread about a trip to Florida
accord because we’re Black or we’re that is now a Hollywood film] is
part of Black Twitter. It’s calling out an example of We are culture. We
the work that we have to do as well. make culture.

Reign: #MeToo was started by a Black Brock: Zola’s story, “Meet me in Another relatable Black moment: not
woman, Tarana Burke. It was popu- Temecula” [@SnottieDrippen vs. seeing some of your biggest stars get
larized by Alyssa Milano, who over- @MyTweetsRealAF, and the fight the recognition they deserve.
stepped. She needed to be checked, that didn’t happen]—they weren’t
and Black Twitter did that. hashtags, but they also became part
of Black Twitter lore.
Reign: In January 2015, I was still
Obell: It’s the reprieve of joy and a practicing attorney at the time. I
comedy that I get from Black probably had around 8,000 follow-
 Finally, after years of hashtag activ-
ism and real-world change, even
Twitter HQ began to take notice of
what was happening on its platform.

Reign: It’s very, very clear that

Twitter—the corporation—knows
that it would be nothing without
Black Twitter.

Brock: It’s really fascinating to see

what we can do with tools that peo-
ple thought were just throwaways
and make them better or make them
even more valuable.

Elzie: Jack would say himself,

Ferguson taught them at Twitter how
ers. I was a huge movie fan. I was get- Reign: Around lunchtime, I check to maximize and how to use their
ting ready for work that morning and back in on Twitter, and based on platform.
watching the Oscar nominations. that one tweet, #OscarsSoWhite was
And it just struck me. I picked up my trending around the world. Babumba: I’ve been in a room where
phone and tweeted “#OscarsSoWhite Jack Dorsey was like, Twitter exists
they asked to touch my hair”—and K. Thompson: There was a specific because of Black Twitter. He said it.
that was it. sector of Black Twitter that was inter- He’s saying, we are as big as we are,
ested in that, but there was a specific and we are as relevant as we are,
Obell: It wasn’t something I thought sector of Black Twitter that wasn’t. It because of Black Twitter.
that people would care about in a was important to certain people, and
public way, because we are not in the it definitely had its impact. Rivera: Black culture is the driving
industry. force of culture globally. No mat-
Reign: In 2016, the one-year anni- ter what, pick a date and time, it has
Reign: There was no “I’m going to versary, once again there were no always been something that is filled
strategize with my team about how people of color nominated for any with ingenuity and sets the tone. We
we can shake up the industry.” There of the acting categories. It seemed don’t always get the credit for it, but
was none of that. I was half-dressed like the media said, OK, you know, naturally that phenomenon has con-
in my family room. 2015 meant 2014 one time was a fluke, two times tinued in the digital space.
films, so we had stuff like Beyond the is a pattern. Maybe this woman
Lights and Selma. There were a few actually has something here. Lowery: But there is a commodifi-
other really strong performances that #OscarsSoWhite actually took off cation of Blackness. Like all things,
you think would have at least gotten a more the second year. once it becomes a commodity, it
nomination. loses that original-recipe sauce.
Cochrane: To see it become a whole
Clark: Why would we sit through an industry-acknowledged thing, to see That was what Black Twitter would
award show where the people who April Reign invited to the Oscars—it’s have to figure out as it found its
are establishing the criteria of excel- one of those moments where you are voice on the national stage: How to
lence have deemed that no person like, wow, look at my people! maintain its identity. How to be pri-
of color, let alone no Black person, is vate and public at the same time.
worthy of even a nomination? Like, And how to protect its users from
what do you do with that? exploitation and abuse.
0 4 9
3 GETTING THROUGH

By the end of the Obama era, Black Twitter seemed

like a fully realized world, with its own codes and
customs. As it reached new levels of visibility and
influence, though, deep-rooted problems began to
reassert themselves. Users were hardly surprised.
 Jackson: When we first got on Twitter,
we weren’t worried about people pre-
tending to be Black. We took people for
their word. They were who they were.

Mayard: Now y’all over here tryna

copy. Everything is a copy of Black
Twitter. Every trend, every conversa-
tion. Humor. The idea of audacity. Y’all
was never as audacious as Black Twitter.

Obell: It starts with us, and then Black

culture gets taken everywhere. We can
always trace it back to a tweet or a joke
or meme or whatever else, because we
have that evidence.

Mayard: From the Kardashian body

down to the idioms used in ads.

C. Thompson: I think, quite frankly, there

is a healthy amount of gatekeeping that
we ain’t doing. We let these white folks
come at us any old kind of way. Nah.
Check them. Stay out of our business.

Jenkins: Black Twitter made a real-

time encyclopedia, like an IV plugged
into our system. It also created a visibil-
ity on Black culture that people never
had before. There’s benefits to it, but we
never thought about what it would actu-
ally mean to be seen.

The election of Donald Trump to the

presidency of the United States—and
the politics of division he represented—
did not shock a great many Black
Americans. Still, we reeled, and often
turned to Twitter for respite.

Brock: When Trump took over, white

people really began to claw back all the
politeness and care for Black folk that
they, at one point, seemed to have.

JASON PARHAM
Clayton: That’s the time when we
(@nonlinearnotes) is a senior writer
needed emotional support the most.
at wired . He wrote about TikTok
We were pre-grieving all the things we
and digital blackface in issue 28.09.
knew that we stood to lose with his pres-
idency, and we were grieving the loss of
0 5 1 Obama’s presidency.
 Even—perhaps especially—in
the face of a raging, terrifying global Just as it was in the early days,
C. Thompson: The Trump years
pandemic. shared moments of entertainment
were a time for us to come together,
became prime-time viewing during
hold on, and ride this terrible wave
the pandemic.
together.

Jenkins: It just felt like the automatic

setting was supposed to be sad. And
then, here goes Black people show- Obell: When TV and movies had to
ing up and being dynamic and pre- stop filming, we weren’t getting new
Often, that meant gathering around senting conflicting emotions. People stuff to watch the way we would
moments of Trumpian absurdity— would tweet that they lost someone have otherwise. And then something
one in particular. that morning and would be getting like Verzuz [the song battle webcast,
jokes off at the expense of the nation produced by Timbaland and Swizz
in the afternoon. Beatz] comes out.

Brock: The Yahoo tweet “Trump Cochrane: I remember it being, Rivera: The conversation was on
wants a much nigger navy” is infa- like, June, and somebody would say Twitter. I had the time of my life the
mous. They took it down 20 minutes something about a panasonic or a night Teddy Riley battled Babyface.
after, so you’ll never find it. panorama or a pan pizza, and folks
are like, don’t you mean pandemic? Obell: From the multiple attempts to
Elzie: Everybody was like, wait, what And we’re like, no, a Pinocchio. It’s a them being peak Black uncles to the
does this say? Some news publica- permanent press. [Laughs.] guy who was on the side jamming
tion and their alleged typo [for “big- with Teddy the whole time, and how
ger navy”]. That’s a hell of a typo, but Obell: Are we gonna call the pan- that became a meme—I don’t think
OK. demic everything but that? A pana- I’ve ever laughed more.
sonic? A panini? Yes. Because what
Sean: I have never laughed so hard. else are we supposed to do? Die? No. Babumba: I’m not exaggerating,
I mean, it’s got to be one of the top actual tears came from my fucking
three Black Twitter moments of all Babumba: The pandemic was unbe- eyeballs. I cried multiple times that
time. lievably difficult, and I can look at night because mofos were wylin.
mad moments on Black Twitter It was off the rails, and jokes were
Rivera: We had a field day. It was just like, this is the only way I’m getting prime.
so many jokes around basically what through the day.
would be a Black Navy. It was a lot of Brock: These were spaces where
Cash Money taking over for the 99, Kashmir: We supported each other. people could witness a collective
people on boats, and all of that. Myself and a lot of my followers experience of joy and relaxation,
would do random lunch giveaways, since many of us were shut out of
Elzie: I appreciate Black people’s where we would pick some of our concerts. My wife is still mad about
ability to find joy or make a joke. I followers to Cash App money to. our Janet Jackson tickets.
know that sometimes we shouldn’t
joke about certain shit, but some C. Thompson: I came down with Babumba: Tiger King was a fine
things are just, like, the joke is right Covid. I was isolated in my own documentary, but what made it
there and I’m glad you said it. home. When I was up to it, I would good—actually more than watch-
get on Twitter and talk about it. You able, but enjoyable—was watching
Cochrane: The unofficial code of know, my anxieties around it. People it with Black Twitter. The Michael
Black Twitter is: Jokes are better responded and prayed for me. Jordan documentary was amazing,
than facts. People sent food deliveries. It made but it was more amazing because
everything a lot more bearable. Black Twitter had jokes for days. The
work that Jasmyn did over at Netflix,
Obell: Black Twitter did a lot of
affirming that was necessary—men-
tally—at the time. Like, I’m not the
only one arguing with my mom
about not going to church; you all are
dealing with that too?
0 5 2
when she was able to put together
that Coachella watch party for
Beyoncé—unbelievable.
“How many TV shows have made a BLM
Jasmyn Lawson, episode? That is how deep in the culture
TV content exec-
utive at Netflix: Black Twitter has been.” —RAQUEL WILLIS
For someone like
me who lives
alone, the isolation hit very quick.
I was like, OK, how can I still feel
connected to people? I’m a huge horrified and gut-busting laughter at
Beyoncé fan, and I remember Jackson: People were doing what how we were on Black Twitter like,
live-tweeting when Homecoming they do, which is the resiliency of OK, this ain’t got nothing to do with
first came on Netflix. I thought, can Blackness in America. They were fig- us. Like the eating popcorn GIF. We
we do that as a group? I definitely uring out how to build community. were marveling at the ridiculousness
did not expect it to grow and have They were figuring out how to take of it all, even as scary as it was.
so many legs or to get the atten- action on Twitter. They were pointing
tion of Beyoncé herself. The trend- out the hypocrisy of the nation that Jenkins: If we saw Black people out
ing topic was number one across was letting Black people die at a dis- there, we know that we were about
the globe. proportionate rate from this plague to watch one of the biggest massa-
that was keeping us apart while try- cres to ever take place on American
ing to decide whether to reelect a soil. But there was very few Black
white supremacist or not. people in sight, so we knew it was
about to be jokes.
Sean: The news cycle was just crazy.
But the joys would prove fleeting— We had Trump in office doing all of
it was to be a merciless year that what Trump was doing.
wouldn’t let up. George Floyd and
Breonna Taylor. Nationwide pro- Cochrane: Twitter wore my nerves
tests. A contentious election that out during election season. As the election of Joe Biden por-
threatened to rip the country apart. tended a return to a kind of nor-
Rivera: The way Atlanta came malcy, Black Twitter began to look
through, and the memes about the inward, prompting a period of soul
mail-in votes, you know what I searching.
Babumba: When the George Floyd mean? That was us congratulating
video came out, Twitter was afire. us, because we always fought for the
promise and the right of liberation
Browne: The uprisings in the and freedom. Sean: I kind of pulled away from
streets felt very connected to 2013, Black Twitter in 2020. We had so
’14, ’15 in terms of, I’m getting my Arceneaux: By this stage, Twitter was much misinformation and back and
real news from Twitter again. The more exhausting than enjoyable for forth about Covid and what we’re
reporting about the 2020 election. me. So while Twitter is where I first supposed to do and who thinks what.
The reporting about the police. I saw the news of Biden’s election, I Combine that with the idea that
knew that the realest version I was was more relieved by the cheers out- Twitter is not as fun as it used to be,
gonna get was gonna be on Twitter. side in Harlem—a break from the because everything is so overpoliced.
My mom was going to find out sirens signaling death and shit—than
about it on cable news. And then at on the timeline. Cochrane: I think accountability is
some point, I would talk to her and important, but now there is a little bit
tell her what’s actually going on. Cochrane: The insurrection at the of glee when, quote-unquote, expos-
Capitol was horrifying. But I was ing people. And in the hastiness to do
Babumba: The protests started hap- going back and forth between being that, misinformation runs rampant.
pening, and you started seeing That is the one thing about Black
people moving in the streets. And Twitter that I think is hard: Once
yes, we were moving in the streets something gets going, it’s very hard to
during the pandemic. reel it back in.
Browne: In reality, like everything,
there are sections of Black Twitter.
There are even generations of Black
Twitter.

Sean: Gen Z and Twitter—I don’t

know what it is, but it’s not for them.
They can’t handle it. I mean, every-
body is just super sensitive. And I get
it, we’re moving to a place where cer-
tain things are allowed and certain
things aren’t. Because a lot of us came
up with Twitter, we’ve gotten so com-
fortable that, before, it felt really inti-
mate, like you could tell a joke.

Elzie: I miss the hood days on

Twitter, the good days. It’s not that
fun to me anymore. and trans folks for years. It is almost
impossible for a white institution,
Lowery: The heartbeat of Black which all these social media compa-
Twitter was just, insert random Black nies are, to hold the intra-communal
user who got something funny off harm accountable. It’s not possible
that day or who did a thread or who for Twitter, as a corporation, to hold
talked about $200 dates. It was this Black figures accountable in the same
democratic process. It was a Black Clark: Black Twitter is not a very safe way they can hold alt-right white fig-
open mic night. Once Black Twitter and welcoming space when it comes ures accountable—and they still don’t
started being talked about as this to discussions of gender or when it do a good job of that.
tangible thing you could study or comes to discussions of nonnorma-
hold or quantify, some of that magic tive identity or being queer. Brock: All these constituencies have
melted away. just as active a presence on Twitter
Raquel Willis, trans as young queer folks, as the educated
Browne: Originally, it felt like folks rights activist: Black bourgeoisie, the Blavity Blacks.
were at least getting into it for the I never felt com- So there’s this constant undercur-
right reasons. Since Black Lives fortable in the early rent of commentary on things they
Matter and lots of things have days. Transphobia think Black people should and should
become profitable, I think we are and trans misogyny was so not do.
now in a second wave where I do commonplace that even some of the
think some folks get into this game people we consider to be the wokest Mayard: Now, we’re learning les-
for the wrong reason. now, or the most down, were shitty to sons—and being like, “Oh, no. You
trans people online. don’t get to run and hide in the com-
munity if you are being an abuser or
C. Thompson: Some people are bra- an oppressor.” We hold each other
zenly ignorant and antagonistic to accountable.
anybody that’s different from them.
But it’s improtant to remember that Willis: And Twitter is a great space
certain users—particularly women Brock: Hotep, which is an Egyptian for political education. People
and queer folks—have never felt word, has come to represent a cer- understanding the sheer amount
comfortable on the platform. tain type of toxic masculinity. These of violence that Black trans people
men believe that women should face—and, of course, enjoying the
know their place. A lot of it is Black beauty of our experiences—that
incel culture. Tariq Nasheed got big came, in large part, from Black
C. Thompson: I get heated. I hate in that period. Twitter. I can only imagine how
to see the way Black women are many people first learned about
treated. I get abused on here by Black Willis: Tariq Nasheed has terror- Marsha P. Johnson or Sylvia Rivera
men all the time. ized Black women and Black queer through a tweet.
 Weatherspoon: What gives me so
Despite the challenges of being on much happiness and satisfaction is
the platform, positive change seemed seeing us win from it. We’re doing it.
possible. And in many cases, new Like damn, we really turned this into
opportunities arose. something.

Reign: Not every Black person is

a member of Black Twitter. Hello
Reign: We know that Black Twitter Candace Owens. And not every
is powerful because it found peo- More than a decade since Black person who is a member of Black
ple who have been lost. It has helped people got on the platform, altering Twitter is Black. You have to be open
people who have mental health its very DNA and the power it gave enough to be able to amplify and
issues, financial issues. We have pro- to those who used it, the essence to promote the culture while also
moted Black businesses. of Black Twitter lives on in these acknowledging that your place may
accomplishments—and in a legacy not be within the culture.
Weatherspoon: To see that peo- that’s still being written today.
ple were able to build things from it, Jenkins: Black Twitter is probably
you know what I mean? Like, people maybe the best piece of media to
were able to build careers. People are capture Blackness in its sort of unfil-
able to help people. People are able Lemieux: It’s hard for me to define a tered and dynamic way ever. I think
to take a meme and then it turns into single legacy. we’re going to look back at it and
a job for them. Watching these tal- realize it’s the most honest depic-
ented writers and comedians and all Jenkins: We’re still so close to the tion—not to say it’s perfect by any
of the people on Twitter turn it into epicenter that it’s really hard to mea- means—of contemporary Black cul-
something real and valuable—into sure. But if we’re dropping a pin in ture that there is.
an income—is fucking so dope and different moments in the world of
beautiful to me. Black culture, Black Twitter is really Brock: It is a living archive, because
fucking high up there. I’m not gonna we are still contributing to it every
Willis: How many shows in the last get crazy and say it’s Juneteenth, but day.
10 years have made their BLM epi- it’s really big.
sode? That is how deep in the culture Babumba: It’s crazy because we do
the discourse in Black Twitter has Jackson: Can you imagine the last 10 this without a monthly Illuminati
been. I don’t know if we would have years of American pop culture with- meeting. It’s not like we meet, like,
Insecure in the way that we have it out Black Twitter? “OK guys, this month we’re gonna
without Black Twitter. I don’t know do this, then wild out.” A lot of it is so
that we would have a Moonlight or a Jenkins: What the fuck would adver- organic, and it comes up because
Get Out—or even what Black Panther tising do? Where would restaurants that is what we are interested in.
was—without a presence on Black look for slang?
Twitter yearning for those things. Clark: Just like with everything else,
Rivera: Black Twitter shook the we really don’t give a fuck, because
Sean: I have friends who are in writ- table so strongly that this coun- we’re not doing what we do for other
ing rooms and work for production try will never be the same. It was people.
companies, and from what I hear, not always comfortable, but I think
most of their ideas come from Black what they did was literally change K. Thompson: I hate to be like, we
Twitter. They’re taking Black Twitter the trajectory of society by pushing run this whole shit, but really we do.
jokes and incorporating them into back, by finding new ways to find [Laughs.]
scripts. joy and creativity and showing that
we matter. Jenkins: People say to be Black is to
Browne: Twitter kind of became this be bilingual, but it’s something
creative laboratory where folks really Lemieux: Black Twitter has made it a beyond language. It’s multi- … I don’t
got to flex a lot of different muscles. lot harder to ignore certain voices. have the word. It’s just Black.
I love the fact that I’m looking at the
cover of Deadline and it’s Desus, Rivera: You can be a hairdresser or a
Mero, and Ziwe. Desus and Mero are widow somewhere in Alabama. But
two people who do not get to where you can get these tweets off on Black
they are without Twitter. Twitter.
0 5 5
Flower
Vs . On a high desert ridge in central Nevada,
there’s enough lithium to produce millions of
batteries for electric vehicles. The one roadblock to mining it:
a rare species of buckwheat teetering on the verge of extinction.

BY GREGORY BARBER
 Power
Photographs by Aubrey Trinnaman
 and leaves on a trail. A scientist may devote
a lifetime to studying a single species. But
to Fraga, these acts of appreciation, while
welcome, are rooted in selfishness, not ser-
vice. In her work as conservation director
at the California Botanic Garden, near Los
Angeles, she is frequently asked why a per-
son should care about a particular plant.
Sometimes she poses this question to her-
self, like a catechism. Fraga doesn’t mean to
get “all woo-woo” on you, but here it is: Her
answer is rooted not in beauty or useful-
ness or even a sense of curiosity or wonder,

W
but in the fact that a species exists uniquely
on this earth. Fraga knows that most peo-
ple don’t feel this way. It is a level of respect
that plants do not often receive.
What called her to the service of the
Tiehm’s buckwheat was its rarity. Fraga
often hikes to the top of the white hill, where
she can look out over the complete universe
of the plant. At the time of her initial visit,
the latest count was 44,000 buckwheats
across 10 acres, rooted in eight patches of
white earth. Some time ago—perhaps thou-
sands of years, or maybe tens of thousands,
nobody can say—seeds found their way
into this soil, which lacks important nutri-
ents like phosphorus and nitrogen, and is
extremely alkaline, more like baking soda
than loam. But wild buckwheats, which are
relatively distant cousins of the crop used
to make flour for pancakes, are a tenacious
genus of plant, known for making do with
whatever soil they happen upon. Evolution
Whatever violence occurred in the midsummer heat on that lonely ran its course, and a new species emerged.
white hill in Nevada, there was no one around to see it. By the time Naomi Fraga The plant learned to grow there and, as far
got there in mid-September, the air had cooled and investigators had already as anyone knew, only there. There were no
visited the scene. But evidence of a massacre remained: Where there had once competitors for that toxic soil. Until, that is,
been plants, there were now hundreds of empty holes. A few mangled stems, the lithium mine.
severed from their roots, lay half buried in the chalky dirt. What alarmed Fraga In mining terms, the alkaline soil is called
more than the dead or missing was the selective way they had been targeted. overburden—material that’s stripped away
The white hill stood atop a high desert ridge that was once part of an ancient to access desired material below. The value
caldera, and it was home to a wide variety of Great Basin flora. There were vari- of lithium has soared recently as the real-
ous species, including saltbushes and sagebrush. But only one appeared to have ity of climate change hits home. The ele-
fallen victim to the unseen attack—a buckwheat. As she walked around, Fraga’s ment is at the heart of the batteries that
first reaction was disbelief. What, or who, had it out for this particular plant? will power millions of electric cars and a
The stricken species was named Eriogonum tiehmii, or Tiehm’s wild buck- renewable energy grid. In April, President
wheat. (Tiehm is pronounced like “team.”) Fraga had first met the plant in late Biden set a goal of significantly cutting US
spring, when the rains coax out a single pale yellow puffball of a blossom that emissions by 2030, and global demand for
would make a splendid addition to a garden in Whoville. She lithium-ion batteries is expected to quin-
thought it was adorable. But the bloom lasts only a month. Most tuple by then. Until now, lithium has come
Previous page:
of the year the plant lies dormant; its plump leaves dry out and Tiehm’s buckwheat almost exclusively from overseas, but as the
fade to a charmless gray. (left) in bloom on rest of the world makes a similar scram-
Fraga is a botanist who considers herself to be in the service Rhyolite Ridge in ble for resources, this supply is growing
Nevada, where the
of plants. Many people love plants. They will tenderly care for rocks are rich in increasingly precarious. The mine that was
them, encourage flowering or fruit, take an interest in the bark lithium (right). proposed for this Nevada spot, known as

0 5 8
Rhyolite Ridge, wouldn’t solve that short- lithium ions and their liberated electrons will
age on its own, but it would make a dent. happily shuttle through an electrolyte from one
The area has enough battery-grade mate- end, the anode, to the other, the cathode, gener-
rial to power about 400,000 electric cars a ating power along the way. And because lithium
year for at least a quarter century. The total is the lightest metallic element, relatively little
value of the mine’s resources was estimated mass is required to store a lot of juice. In a Tesla
at $10 billion. Model S, only 3 percent of the battery pack is lith-
Even an amateur geologist viewing the ium metal, according to some outside estimates.
landscape could see how hopelessly the That level of efficiency, though, was long
habitat and the resource are intertwined. in coming. The first rechargeable battery,
The white patches in which the buckwheat invented in 1859 by Gaston Plante, involved
grow are outcrops of a rock called searlesite, lead and acid. The same basic chemistry still
where much of the lithium is locked. The creates the spark that starts a gas-powered
mine would swallow much of the buck- car engine, but the design is as heavy and toxic
wheat’s habitat—60 percent of the plants as it sounds, and it’s not powerful enough for
would be removed in phase one of the proj- many modern uses. By the beginning of the last
ect, rising to 90 percent during phase two, century, scientists believed that lithium-based
according to conservationists. To compen- designs could pack more punch, going longer
sate, the mine owners, who deny the loss without weighing things down. It would take
would be that high, planned to transplant decades of experiments to work out the chem-
the buckwheat or grow it from seed in unoc- istry, and a viable commercial model emerged
cupied soil nearby. But for a plant that has only in the 1990s. Three scientists who made it
not naturally colonized any other home, it is possible were awarded the Nobel Prize in 2019.
not clear if it would survive the move. It is a miraculous thing that in 2021 a car
No one doubts the value of lithium in fight- can drive from Los Angeles to San Francisco
ing climate change. But there would be costs on a single electric charge and without spew-
wherever the element was extracted from ing exhaust, or that a solar farm can compete
the ground, and here that cost would come with a gas plant by storing electrons overnight.
at the expense of a plant. Fraga had decided These advances have arrived in the nick of time
the buckwheat was hers to protect. That for a transition away from fossil fuels. The ris-
September day, she couldn’t make sense of ing demand for new electric cars and trucks
what she saw. She knew the summer had is expected to lead to a tripling of the total energy capacity of new batteries
been unusually dry, which meant that ani- between 2020 and 2025. These batteries aren’t perfect. They will need to get
mals were seeking moisture wherever they smaller, more recyclable, more powerful, and also more diversified, with ver-
could, perhaps in the roots of plants. Maybe sions that depend on other resources, such as sodium or manganese. In the
they had caused the destruction. But her first interim, though, the world needs a lot more lithium.
thought was that it had something to do with Lithium is abundant in the Earth’s crust, but there is rarely enough in any
the mine. All she knew for certain was that, one place to warrant the trouble of digging it up. The element is most com-
while she was away, nearly half of an entire mon near volcanoes, where rock has been formed by slow-cooling magma.
species had been destroyed. Fraga looked out In some places, the lithium from those volcanic rocks leaches out and finds its
over the hill. She wondered if she had already way into the water table, forming a brine that can be pumped from the ground
failed this plant. and evaporated, leaving lithium-bearing compounds behind. Until recently,
Australian rocks and Andean brines have supplied enough lithium to satisfy
most of the world’s needs. But the scramble to shift away from fossil fuels has
inspired a search closer to home. The US has the fourth-largest lithium depos-
Lithium is a feisty element. When it’s its in the world, most of them in Nevada, but it has only one active brine oper-
bonded with other elements to form a com- ation—located in the state’s Clayton Valley, immediately to the east of Rhyolite
pound colloquially known as a salt, it may act Ridge. In both places, the lithium is the product of explosive eruptions that took
as a mood stabilizer. But on its own it’s erratic, place about 6 million years ago. The lithium was leached out of ash, then either
always wanting to give up an electron and remained in ground water, to be mined as a brine in the valley, or was absorbed
take on a charge. It must remain under seal; by clays and sediments that now rest atop the ridge. The lithium trapped in clay
the briefest contact with water or humid air or sediments is much harder to extract.
will cause it to combust in a popping, spark- The virtues of this location are extolled by Bernard Rowe, managing direc-
ing flame. These qualities also make it a per- tor of Ioneer, the Australian mining company that owns the mining claims on
fect material for batteries, which are about Rhyolite Ridge. Rowe spoke over Zoom from Australia, where the pandemic
taming the ephemeral—a spark, a flame— has kept him for the past year, but his virtual background was set to a photo
and bottling it up for later. Inside a battery, of the white Nevada hill. He first climbed it in 2016, three years before Fraga.
 To Fraga, the value of
a plant is rooted not in
beauty or usefulness,
or even curiosity and
wonder, but in the fact
that a species exists
uniquely on this earth.

A geologist by training, he had spent the previous decade scouring the American
Southwest, mostly for new gold and copper deposits, and had rented a farm-
house in the nearby town of Dyer. At the top of the hill, he saw scars where pros-
Naomi Fraga,
pectors in the 1920s had probed for boron, used then in fiberglass and today in conservation
all sorts of things, including smartphone screens. The boron deposit was so-so director at
in quality. And the sediment was not as rich in lithium as pure rock, nor as easy the California
Botanic Garden,
to access as brines. But now that lithium was so valuable, Rowe saw an oppor- on a visit to
tunity: two in-demand minerals in one spot. Rhyolite Ridge.
Ioneer promised to operate thoughtfully, or as thoughtfully as an open-pit
mine could. Rather than leaching out the lithium and boron with extreme heat,
it would use a less-carbon-intensive method it had developed involving sulfu-
ric acid. The company said it would dispose of those chemicals carefully, and it
highlighted plans to use autonomous mining vehicles to reduce traffic and pol-
lution. It also secured the nearly unanimous support of neighbors. Talk to any-
one in this erstwhile gold-mining region and you can expect to be regaled with
enthusiasm for the arrival of “white gold.” Garden and dispersed to survey the vast ter-
There was, of course, one problem: the ritory stretching from the Sierra Nevada to the
buckwheat. Rowe knew from the start that Rockies. It involved a lot of solo wandering
the ridge was home to a species that the and long, disappointing days. But the morning
Bureau of Land Management considered when he turned a corner on the road through
“sensitive.” This meant the mine would need Rhyolite Ridge and saw that odd white hill, he
a plan for it. The mining would happen at knew there would be something. Sure enough,
the base of the hill, where plenty of buck- before him was a type of wild buckwheat that
wheat plants would need to be dug up. But he did not recognize. He pressed a few plants
they would be replanted, and pointing over and mailed them to a colleague who knew the
his shoulder to the white hill, he said, “We’re genus better than he did. Soon after, Tiehm
not planning to touch that.” The portion on received a phone call and learned that he had
high ground would remain intact. Rowe told become, once again, the eponym of a flower.
me that the mine is ultimately a friend to Tiehm went part-time on botany for a while.
the buckwheat—a catalyst for its protec- He found work in Reno as a casino bellman and
tion—and he argues that a concerted effort limo driver and did a little consulting work for
to replant the buckwheat in other areas can gold mines and geothermal exploration proj-
only help it repopulate. “If you do nothing ects. In 1994 the BLM asked him to go back to
with this plant, it will be gone,” he said. In the ridge and do a formal census of his name-
the whole history of this plant, only the sake. He searched well beyond its 10-acre hab-
mine had stepped in to fund substantial itat, hiking into some of the nearby mountains
studies of it. where he could see similar patches of white
And besides, the mine would produce earth. But he didn’t find it. He noted the old
an element necessary to mitigate climate mining scars, so he suggested in his report that
change—a misfortune that will eventually the BLM restrict mineral extraction in the area,
wreak havoc on all plants, on this ridge and which the agency declined to do. He didn’t press
everywhere else. “We can’t just close our the issue. Apart from this odd plant, who would
eyes and ears to the fact that we need lith- want this lonely hill?
ium,” Rowe said. Then, two years ago, Tiehm found himself driving down to Rhyolite Ridge
with Elizabeth Leger, a fellow botanist and his boss at the university. She was
conducting a study, with money from Ioneer, to see whether the buckwheat
could be safely moved from the mining pit. She needed to gather the native
There is a reason the buckwheat ended soil to grow seedlings in the greenhouses on campus. Leger had taken on the
up on the BLM’s list of sensitive plants, and research knowing that transplanting might not work. In 1987 government sci-
his name is Jerry Tiehm. He is the curator at entists had tried to move a plant called Crosby’s buckwheat, another lover of
the herbarium at the University of Nevada, strange soils, to make room for a gold mine north of Reno. It grew happily in its
Reno, where he tends to a vast collection new home at first. Then, 30 years later, one of Leger’s graduate students decided
of flora, kept dried and pressed in a row of to check in on it. They found the habitat choked with other plants, barely a buck-
metal cabinets. This includes seven species wheat to be found. Luckily, Crosby’s buckwheat had other homes besides the
in the tiehmii clan. Tiehm always refers to gold mine. Tiehm’s did not. “In my opinion,” Tiehm says, “this plant is not going
his plants by their scientific name, holding to grow in any other place you put it.”
them at a little distance. He likes most plants. But it wasn’t Tiehm’s project. He was just there as a guide. “I’m good at know-
There is a peppergrass, which springs with ing what’s not my business,” he says. Still, it was a strange position to be in.
great enthusiasm from the cracks of dried Without him, the buckwheat could very well have been tilled as overburden,
lake bottoms, that he might even love. But and no one would have been the wiser. Would it matter? The buckwheat is an
that species was named after a lucky man endangered species, he believes. Yet he can see also how much the world needs
called Davis. Tiehm is 69 years old and lithium. He can see that the road to clean energy is an imperfect one, not without
needs knee surgery, but he plans to spend collateral damage. Who is he to decide where the hammer should fall?
the summer driving around in his GMC
Yukon looking for plants. Nevada remains
a place of botanical mystery, and he feels a
responsibility to decipher it. In Esmeralda County, Nevada, a three-hour drive to Costco is a routine and
Tiehm begins the story of how he found sensible grocery run. Roughly 900 people live over 3,580 square miles in two
the buckwheat with one of his sayings: valleys on either side of Rhyolite Ridge. The volcanic outcrop is a botanical meet-
“Strange habitats yield strange plants.” In ing point. One side is a forest of Joshua trees, the northernmost of the Mojave,
the spring of 1983, he was part of a band of and the other is a sea of sagebrush, the start of the Great Basin. For Fraga, driv-
botanists hired by the New York Botanical ing to the ridge from her home on the outskirts of Los Angeles is a multiday trip.
 When Fraga and I arrived there on a bright day last October, the first thing she miliar, and their foundational role in our
saw was a pair of ATV tracks cut deep into the hill and straight through the buck- lives is harder to understand. When Fraga’s
wheat. “You’ve gotta be friggin’ kidding me,” she said as she hopped out of the pas- father learned what she planned to do with
senger side of a dust-covered Toyota Tacoma at the foot of the white hill. Fraga her biology degree, he didn’t understand
is 41 years old and was wearing leggings tucked into hiking shoes, her hair in a why she wouldn’t want to work with people.
ponytail under a baseball cap. The Tacoma’s driver, Patrick Donnelly, is the Nevada A few years ago she took him searching for
director for the Center for Biological Diversity, a conservation group leading the rare flowers in the mountains close to home,
cause for the buckwheat’s protection. He made a note to report the new damage to help him see what she saw in plants. He
to the BLM and grumbled about how it should have already put up a fence. told her he appreciated her skilled driving on
The habitat is protected on three sides by rhyolitic cliffs, and the air is still. dirt roads.
But as we climbed up, the quiet was interrupted by the occasional rumble of a In graduate school, Fraga’s focus was a
mining truck installing protective barri- family of desert plants called
ers over Ioneer’s bore holes. We stopped monkey flowers, which pro-
to observe it. This is public land, so all of duce quirky blossoms but are
us—joyriders, miners, botanists, journal- weedy and can be hard to
ists—had a right to be there. But everyone “We can’t just close love. The species she chose
looked like a trespasser to someone else. our eyes and ears as her dissertation topic was
Donnelly was feeling especially paranoid. rare, and, as it happened, in
A few months earlier, during a pit stop for to the fact that we the path of a future develop-
sandwiches at a store in Dyer, the pair had need lithium,” says ment. The plant had previously
spotted a poster that said “missing ” above failed to get protection because
a photograph of the Tiehm’s buckwheat Bernard Rowe, of not enough research had been
in bloom. Ioneer was advertising a $5,000 the mining company done. Inspired, Fraga wrote
reward for sightings outside the path of a conservation plan detailing
the lithium mine. The poster was a long Ioneer. how to best protect the flower.
shot; professional botanists like Tiehm She would have to figure out
had tried and failed to find any rogue a way to speak a little louder
buckwheat colonies. Fraga thought the to advocate for certain plants,
poster placed an unwelcome target on she decided. She met Donnelly
the plant, even though it clearly said “Do while conducting field work
not collect.” Maybe it would encourage a near Death Valley. They became
local to dig it up and then miraculously close friends, and years later he
find it somewhere else. Not long after, a asked for her help saving a rare
researcher from the University of Nevada, Reno, checking on a buckwheat trans- buckwheat, the Tiehm’s. Fraga told him she
plant experiment, found the summer massacre. would do what she could.
The discovery kicked off an investigation by the US Fish and Wildlife Service. Fraga often calls her time with buckwheat
A preliminary report by the University of Nevada, Reno, concluded that the an “experiment.” She is a scientist, not an
damage was caused by rodents, not people. But Fraga and Donnelly remained activist, and finds it strange to have stepped
skeptical. The evidence was circumstantial and could have happened after over this invisible barrier, putting herself at
the fact. They had never seen a single species targeted so systematically. Then odds with government scientists she knows
again, if people had done the damage, why had they left the job half finished? from botanical listservs and desert plant
We picked our way over the chalky hillside, sidestepping dormant buckwheats. conferences. Where Fraga is measured
Fraga picked up a severed plant and asked if it looked like it had been gnawed with her words, Donnelly is prone to blurt
by rodent teeth or cut with shears. It was hard to tell. out sharp opinions. He has hit the University
Fraga is from a working-class suburb of Los Angeles. When she was a child, of Nevada, Reno, and the local BLM office
her parents, immigrants from Chihuahua, Mexico, did not hike or camp; her with so many open-record requests that
mother did clerical work in various offices, and her father worked long hours state officials began to avoid using the word
driving a truck. There were barely any plants to look at in the industrial sprawl Tiehm’s in emails. “Sometimes you have to
of the southern San Gabriel Valley. But in college, her biology coursework led to sue the motherfuckers!” he says.
a volunteer post at the local botanical garden, where her job was to digitize the Donnelly first became aware of the
plant specimens of 19th-century botanical explorers. She fell in love with their plant’s plight in 2019, and shortly after that
single-minded passion, a quality she also found in the people she met at the his organization successfully sued to stop
garden, who were crazy about plants. “All they could do was talk all day about Ioneer from exploring the terrain. That fall,
them,” she says. Fraga had been unaware that people like that existed. they petitioned the US Fish and Wildlife
For most people, plants are at the outer edge of our “moral circle,” a term pop- Service to declare Tiehm’s buckwheat an
ularized by the bioethicist Peter Singer. We hold them at a greater distance than endangered species. “If the Endangered
our family or strangers or most animals. Their ways of communicating are unfa- Species Act has any meaning at all, this

0 6 2
 plant gets listed,” he says. Donnelly had seen plenty of plant destruction
throughout his career. And yet the damage to the buckwheat last summer hit
him especially hard. “It was like seeing a good friend of mine get murdered,”
he says. When Donnelly thought about giving up, Fraga reminded him there
The chalky soil were still plants left to save.
of the white The Endangered Species Act was passed in 1973 on a nearly unanimous vote
hill should have
a slight bounce,
that reflected a collective awakening to the accelerating crisis of extinction. This
like walking was quickly challenged when an endangered fish called the snail darter got in
on moss, but the way of the partially built Tillicoe Dam in Tennessee. In 1978 the Supreme
the drought has
depleted it.
Court ruled for the fish and affirmed the intent of the law: to protect species,
whatever the cost.”
Conservationists like Donnelly have since wielded a singularly powerful tool:
petitions to protect threatened species. The government can delay or reject those
petitions, and it often does. (There is currently a backlog of more than 500 peti-
tioned species.) But each successful listing adds up to a larger strategy of pro-
0 6 4
 On Nevada’s Rhyolite
Ridge, above an
estimated $10 billion
in lithium and
boron, Ioneer has
drilled exploratory
bore holes.
 If the mine at Rhyolite Ridge were digging
for gold or copper, perhaps it would be eas-
ier to dismiss its value. Everyone benefits
from raw materials, but it can be easy to
tecting biodiversity and offers a way to protect say that you don’t “need” gold or that dollar
the waters, the old-growth forests, and the hill- value isn’t paramount. With lithium, denial
sides on which species live and that other laws is harder. Donnelly and Fraga both agree
do not so clearly protect. Some conservation- that the country—the world—needs to wean
ists will admit (perhaps after a few drinks) that itself from fossil fuels. Lithium and sunshine
it is rather peculiar to have made species the are abundant in the desert Southwest, and
basic subunit of conservation. Modern biology so the transition to green energy will likely
has taught us that a species is a messy concept; bring a new level of industrialization to its
drawing neat categories based on reproductive landscape. Mines and solar power plants
rules or genetics or physiology is often impossi- will compete with rare buckwheat and
ble. A few years ago, the entire group of monkey desert tortoises. But in the absence of those
flowers that Fraga studied was swept from one mines and power plants, the desert will
genus to another. But the category of “species” still suffer. For all their harsh conditions
is now part of the legal philosophy that holds us and seeming barrenness, deserts are frag-
back from wider ecological destruction. ile places; life there is easily imperiled by
That rationale does not fully account for higher temperatures and more frequent
Donnelly’s deep “personal relationship with droughts. The conditions demand that we
an inanimate being,” as he puts it. He advo- formulate a moral equation: What is the
cates for dozens of Nevada species, and yet value of a mine versus the value of a plant?
it is Tiehm’s buckwheat that he thinks about All mines have a dirty side, whether or not
all the time. It is the most extreme example of their products are “green.” They can destroy
rarity he has ever known, always flickering at landscapes, pollute water supplies, or emit
the edge of nonexistence. All it would take is greenhouse gases. Historically, mining com-
another incident like last summer’s. “We’re the panies have cared little about those impacts,
only ones paying attention,” he says. “I feel a level of personal responsibility.” doing the bare minimum required by regu-
We stopped to catch our breath halfway up the white hill, which is tremen- lations. But lithium miners face extra pres-
dously steep, on our way to the best spot to view the buckwheat’s universe. Fraga sure to act responsibly, explains Alex Grant,
believed the extinction of any species was a tragedy, whether or not anyone had a technical adviser who works with those
studied it or even laid eyes upon it, but she knew that wouldn’t satisfy most peo- mines. Electric vehicle buyers are likely to
ple. As we paused, Fraga noted that if the government had funded more studies care, for example, that 25 percent of their
of this rare plant in the 1990s, after Tiehm had surveyed it, she’d be more pre- car’s lifetime carbon impact comes from the
pared to make a case for it to those, unlike her and Donnelly, who don’t instinc- battery supply chain. So automakers, seek-
tively feel an emotional connection to a plant living on a remote Nevada ridge. ing to burnish their reputations, are leaning
She could say more about its role in the ecosystem: the food and shelter it pro- on lithium suppliers to burn less coal and
vides to animals, the way it acts as a landing pad for pollinators like bees. seek certifications attesting that their mines
The buckwheat is unlikely to become a cash crop or yield chemicals in its do not ruin waters and habitats.
leaves that kill an antibiotic-resistant superbug. But what if its genes harbor It is impossible to make every cost go
secrets that other plants could use to adapt to harsh places? We know what the away. As Grant sees it, there is no alterna-
mine offers, but we’ve been given so little time to understand this plant. Perhaps tive to digging up lithium. The status quo of
if more thought had been given to how to preserve and advocate for rare things fossil-burning cars is not an option. What
before they are threatened, they would not be in such a fix. Now judgment day is did opponents of lithium mining expect? A
here, and the only true research on the plant is being funded by a mine. return to the horse and buggy? “We don’t
need every project,” he says. “Some of them
might have impacts that we should not
accept. But we’re going to need a large frac-
The environmental ethicist Katie McShane compares our reverence tion of them, that’s for sure.”
for species to the word freedom. Everyone believes in it, but nobody knows Each project seems to have its own set of
what it means. “Even if you agree that it has value, it doesn’t tell you what to do costs that someone will find unacceptable,
when that value conflicts with my needs,” she says. which makes deciding which ones can move
Comparing the values of things, weighing the costs and benefits of one forward yet more difficult. In Nevada’s far
against the other, is increasingly the preoccupation of environmentalists. north, Thacker Pass, another major lithium
Sometimes those competing things both have a claim in the natural world; project close to digging, is held up by dis-
sometimes one has a claim to bettering human life. Or the planet as a whole. putes with indigenous groups and ranch-
ers over water rights and pollution. The
same is true in places like Chile and Bolivia.
Alternatives that appear more ecologi-
cally appealing, like brines near California’s
Salton Sea, have been talked about for a slight bounce, like walking on moss, but instead
decades, but the technology and financing it crumbled underfoot. Fraga still hoped to see
behind those projects is uncertain. We could signs of life. The plant had been dormant since
look to the oceans, maybe; deep-sea min- the incident last summer, and this was the season
ing could offer lithium on a scale that would when she could begin to truly assess the damage.
make any terrestrial mine seem puny. But The visit happened at an uncertain time.
the environmental costs of that approach Leger’s team at the University of Nevada, Reno,
are arguably even less well understood, and had recently reported back on its transplant
potentially enormous. efforts. They didn’t look promising. In the cam-
In that context, the fate of a humble pus greenhouses, the buckwheat grew well in
flower seems like a very small thing when soil gathered from the habitat, but not in simi-
the lithium can be had with few extra com- lar soil gathered from unoccupied sites nearby.
plications. Mining interests, ranchers, and The plant was picky. The team also learned that
developers have long argued that the process the buckwheat was popular with insects—more
of listing endangered species should factor in so than any of its neighbors. It was a small
economic costs, like the lost value of a mine thing, but it is unusual to know these kinds of
or the expense of keeping a species on life details about a rare plant, Leger told me. There
support when it seems natural forces could is a lot more to learn.
select it out of existence. Leger also worries for the plant. As she was
To Fraga, this is all a logical trap. Certain preparing her findings, a DNA analysis from US
arguments for the plant may be emotional or Fish and Wildlife had affirmed that the sum-
reverent. But perhaps our rush for lithium is mer damage was done by rodents, which was
also emotional and prevents us from think- alarming. “They cannot be legislated, and they
ing on a longer time scale. “Rhyolite Ridge are the most creative creatures when it comes
is not the only great hope for lithium,” she to overcoming fences or barriers,” she says. “This is an area that needs imme-
says. Perhaps we could wait a little longer diate attention and research.” If it was going to survive, the buckwheat would
for our domestic lithium, maybe pay a lit- need protection from more than just the mine.
tle more in the interim, work out the com- In early June, the buckwheat won its first major victory. After a series of delays
promises that are required to mine in other and lawsuits, Fish and Wildlife issued a preliminary decision: Listing the Tiehm’s
places. Naysayers might point to the dam- buckwheat was warranted. While the government is often recalcitrant in fights
age wrought by a warming climate and say over listing species, there were many threats to cite: ATV drivers, rodent mas-
Tiehm’s buckwheat is a doomed species sacres, climate change—and, crucially, the mine. The combination of last year’s
no matter what. Better to sacrifice it now damage and the mine’s initial dig would mean losing up to 88 percent of the
for the greater good of alternative energy. plants, the agency calculated, and based on Leger’s results the transplant idea
Fraga disagrees. The buckwheat clearly seemed ill-advised. But the battle is not over. Rowe says Ioneer is working with
needs help, but it can hardly be written off as private botanical consultants on a new, “expanded” protection plan, with a more
a goner. The mine may be a death sentence aggressive time frame involving more test transplants and more soils than the
to a species that could live on, evolve, con- University of Nevada, Reno, had attempted. It will be up to the government to
tribute in ways that we have not had time to decide whether the science bears out.
comprehend. As she sees it, protecting this In the meantime, Fraga and Donnelly continue making pilgrimages to the
plant is a service to our future, both for our- ridge. Within a few moments of arriving that dry April morning, Fraga spotted
selves and for other species. it: a hint of soft green. And another. And another. Some of the young buckwheats
looked like seedlings, springing from undisturbed white soil; others seemed to
be grafting from the damaged roots. Fraga crouched down and cupped a tender
shoot. It was small and delicate; she couldn’t be certain what another hot sum-
Some years, springtime blankets the mer might do to it. But she was surprised and feeling hopeful. In a few weeks’
Nevada desert with superblooms of color. time, in May, there might even be a blossom or two. Perhaps, she speculated, the
Dull-brown hills turn to waves of blue and plant has a natural cycle that we don’t yet comprehend. A single buckwheat can
purple and gold. But when Fraga visited the live for centuries. Our human eyes have beheld this species for such a brief time.
white hill in April, the previous 12 months had Who are we to say how resilient it is?
been the state’s driest on record, and Rhyolite
Ridge was as thirsty and barren as it had been GREGORY BARBER (@gregoryjbarber) is a wired staff writer. He wrote
the previous fall. The chalky soil should have about the limits of using AI to develop vaccines in issue 28.06.

0 6 7
 You want
to be
productive.
Software
wants to help.
But even with
hundreds of
to-do apps
claiming
to make
us all into
taskmasters,
we almost
never master
our tasks.

By Clive Thompson

0 6 9
 lists feels good

me his to-do app has undone tasks from

2019). They stare back, unchecked, with
baleful expressions, disappointed at how
very un-crossed-off they are.
Another thing that might feel familiar:
The things that IDoneThis users actually
did accomplish, they did very quickly. Half
of completed to-do items were done within
a day of writing them down. These weren’t

Write my tasks longer-term, complex tasks. Ten percent

were done within a minute. It was almost
like people were writing them down just
so they had something to check off. A nice
psychological boost, to be sure, but it some-
what defeated the purpose of a to-do list.
More subtly, there was a big disjoint
BACK IN 2010, WALTER CHEN AND between the tasks people planned to do—i.e., wrote down on lists—
Rodrigo Guzman had a weird idea: a web- and the tasks they actually did. Chen and Guzman found that when
site where you write down the stuff you people reported their day’s accomplishments (the initial point of
accomplished that day, and which then IDoneThis, you’ll recall), barely any of them had even appeared on a
emails you a summary. It would be a pro- to-do list. The majority were tasks that users had just, well, remem-
ductivity tool that worked by a neat psycho- bered. Or maybe it was something that just popped into their head,
logical hack, impressing yourself with your or something a colleague had emailed them about.
daily wins. “Often you discover that you’ve The more Chen and Guzman pondered it, the more useless
done more than you gave yourself credit to-do lists seemed to be. They thought about getting rid of them.
for,” Chen says. “And this kind of motivates If to-do lists weren’t helping people accomplish stuff, what was
you—inspires you!” the point? But they worried that users would squawk.
Chen was a disenchanted lawyer; Guz- Which they might have, if they’d hung around—the founders
man, a witty and talkative hacker. They noticed a frustratingly high churn rate. A minority would mind-
built the tool in less than a week and meld with IDoneThis, but most would, in time, drift away on a
launched it as IDoneThis. Soon they built seemingly endless hunt for the best way to manage their to-dos.
an app by the same name and acquired “It involved a lot of, not dilettantes, but people who wanted to try
6,000 users. Within half a year, IDoneThis something new or were interested in a different system,” Chen says.
was the two creators’ full-time job. People loved to write down their tasks. But that didn’t seem to
But then those users started clamoring help with completing them. Chen and Guzman became gradually
for more. People didn’t want merely to chagrined. After five years of working on IDoneThis, they sold the
track the stuff they’d already done. They company to a private equity firm. “We felt like we’d exhausted
wanted to help plan for what they were what we knew to do,” Guzman says. IDoneThis isn’t gone; you
going to do—from projects at work to the can still use it today. But its creators couldn’t shake the feeling
blizzard of tasks in their personal lives. that building the perfect system to effectively manage tasks was
Guzman and Chen updated IDoneThis with itself a task they couldn’t accomplish.
a new feature: to-do lists. I think I know why: It might be impossible.
Which is when things went a little off
the rails.
It wasn’t long before the two found-
ers noticed something odd in the (ano-
nymized) data they had on their users:
People were lousy at finishing their to-dos. Find a to-do app
Chen and Guzman could see an accumu-
lation of sprawling, ambitious lists of tasks
that users utterly failed to accomplish. In MOST COMMON OFFICE TASKS HAVE WELL-SETTLED
2014, fully 41 percent of to-do items on software “solutions.” If I asked you to write a document, you’d prob-
IDoneThis were never … done. ably use Word or Google Docs. To make a presentation, you’d pull
Sound familiar? The tasks you so diligently up PowerPoint or Keynote or Google Slides.
enter into your fancy app or productivity Not so for to-dos. There is no Way That Everyone Does It. It’s
method linger for days or weeks or months a crazy Pokémon deck of options: Trello, Todoist, Gmail’s tasks,
(or even longer—one colleague recently told Microsoft To Do, Remember the Milk, Things, OmniFocus, [Link],
Evernote’s Tasks, and Clear, to name just a few. And that doesn’t
even count the whackload of us using one big ol’ Notepad file on
our computers, or even plain old paper.
“There are hundreds of commercially available to-do lists right
now,” says my friend Mark Hurst. Fifteen years ago he created one
of the first productivity apps, Good Todo. Today it has a relatively
small user base, but in general, productivity apps are big business;
Americans downloaded them 7.1 billion times last year.
Chen and Guzman’s experience with trying to make one turns
out to be common. The creators of personal to-do apps—or task
management software, as it’s sometimes called—generally agree
that they haven’t cracked the nut. Every one of these apps attempts
to handle the same kind of basic actions: Give people a way to write
down tasks, like “Get milk” or “Finish the sales memo,” and offer
tools to sort and prioritize those tasks. Ideally, that improves your
productivity, which broadly is how many things you can actually
Those tasks just lingered for days
get done in a given amount of time. It seems easy enough.
or weeks or months (or even longer),
But when I talk to folks who use these apps, I see a strange incon-
staring at users balefully.
clusiveness. A scant minority of us check off everything every day.
An equally tiny minority simply Cannot Even and are curled in a
fetal ball awaiting imminent firing. But most of us? We’re just sort
of … meh. We bounce from app to app, never quite finding a home.
“I’ll try that one. I’ll try that one. I’ll try that one. Maybe this will
do the magic!” as Randy Shulman, editor and publisher of Metro
Weekly, Washington, DC’s LGBTQ paper, tells me. Sure, we’re get- unfinished, we can’t seem to stop think-
ting work done! But we always feel slightly out of control, haunted ing about it. We perseverate. Psycholo-
by the to-dos at work and home that we just aren’t nailing. gists still argue about why; possibly it’s a
The question is, why? Not just why it’s so hard to make a to-do kind of constant refresh to keep whatever’s
app that works, but why people often feel so distraught by their pending from vanishing from our short-
hunt for the perfect organizational system. I’ve written about soft- term memory, like putting something by
ware for years, and I can tell you that people often have surprisingly the front door at night so you don’t forget
deep feelings about their apps. But rarely is a category of software to take it with you the next morning.
linked to such vistas of despair. Whatever the cause, today this is known
as the Zeigarnik effect, and psychologists
who study task management say it’s part of
why so many of us feel perpetually frazzled
by the challenge of organizing work and
life. When we face all that undone stuff—
Figure out why making emails to write, calls to return, people to
lists feels good contact, friends to check in on, memos
to draft, children to help—it’s like being a
waiter serving a hundred tables at once. If
you’ve found yourself in bed at 2 am with
your brain screaming at you about that thing
IN THE 1920S, THE GERMAN PSYCHOLOGIST KURT LEWIN you didn’t do, that’s a Zeigarnik moment.
was dining in a restaurant and noticed something remarkable. A good to-do tool ought to ease the
As one version of the story goes, Lewin realized that the wait- Zeigarnik effect. In 2011, psychologists E. J.
ers were able to meticulously recall specific food orders—until Masicampo and Roy Baumeister showed
they’d served the food and the customer was gone. After that, they that this does seem to be the case. They
couldn’t remember any of those details at all. Lewin’s student, a triggered the Zeigarnik effect in volunteers
Soviet psychologist named Bluma Zeigarnik, became fascinated by giving them a task and not letting them
by this phenomenon. She started working on it in her lab. In a now complete it. It lingered in their minds and
classic set of experiments, she gave volunteers a series of tasks interfered with their ability to do other work.
(assemble a cardboard box, make a figure out of clay, do some Then the psychologists allowed the subjects
arithmetic). Then she’d interrupt them, checking to see what the to write out a plan for how they’d get that
volunteers actually remembered. outstanding task done, and, presto, it less-
Zeigarnik found a quirk of the human mind: When a task is 0 7 1 ened the effect. Speccing out what you’re
going to do—getting it outside of your head—
seems to help you stop perseverating.
And indeed, those who regularly write
down their to-dos seem to possess a mind
less jittery. Shamarukh Chowdhury, a PhD
student in psychology at Carleton Uni-
versity, has found that people who create
to-do lists are less likely to procrastinate
than those who don’t. More delightfully yet,
a study by Baylor University psychologist
Michael Scullin found that people who cre-
ated a to-do list fell asleep nine minutes
faster, on average, than those who didn’t.
The creators of to-do apps all intuit the
challenge of the Zeigarnik effect. They say
that a key part of their apps is how fric-
tionless they make it for us to input tasks.
They’ve all worked to make this an instan- Eventually, users panic and give up.
taneous process: Open the app on your They declare bankruptcy, tossing the list
phone, shout at Siri or Alexa, or even email away in defeat and starting fresh.
a new to-do item to your software.
Alas, this often makes things worse. Sure,
the Zeigarnik effect is eased if you make a
plan: I’ll do this, then do this, then do this,
and then I’m done. One of the most famous
productivity systems—David Allen’s Getting
Things Done—is ruthlessly focused on rig- done most of the work,” Perchik says. But it’s an illusion. The pile
orous planning and editing of tasks. It can of work is still there.
take hours, but once you’ve done that hard More than a pile! If you feel adrift on a turbulent sea of unmanage-
work, you can plow through the tasks, one able tasks, that might be because there is objectively more expected
after another, with the metronomicity of a of us. By one estimate, work hours for those with college degrees went
Chrysler line robot. up about 7 percent between 1980 and 2016. Got a graduate degree?
The problem is that we too often don’t For you it went up more than 9 percent. And quite apart from one’s
really plan. Digital apps make it easy to add paid toil, there’s been an increase in social work—all the messaging
more tasks to the pile, and it feels good to and posts and social media garden-tending that the philosopher and
get tasks out of our Zeigarnicized heads. technologist Ian Bogost calls “hyperemployment.”
So we do, frenetically. (We could snap the lens open even wider and have a fuller reck-
“We call it snowballing,” says Amir Sali- oning with capitalism. Focusing on our individual ability to tread
hefendić, who founded the app Todoist water—with apps and lists—can look like a bleak exercise in blam-
in 2007; it currently has 30 million users. ing the victim, when in reality the only solution is not better apps
“They keep postponing stuff. And then sud- but non-hideous workloads, debt relief, and a saner landscape of
denly you have a hundred tasks that you civic care. Frankly, if you took “managing grotesquely useless and
need to do.” Weeks or months later, your bloodsucking for-profit health insurance” off people’s to-do lists,
Todoist app is a teetering ziggurat of tasks, it would remove one remarkably stressful item, as my Canadian
too painful even to behold. Omer Perchik, upbringing compels me to suggest. But I’m writing this particular
the creator of another app—[Link]—calls article from within the belly of the whale, as it were.)
this problem “the List of Shame.” No matter whose fault it is, we take this stuff personally. Ameri-
And then what do we do? You’ve proba- can to-do behavior has a deeply puritan streak. Benjamin Franklin
bly done it: We panic, give up, and quit. We was among the first to pioneer to-do lists, creating a checklist of
“declare to-do bankruptcy.” We toss the list “virtues”—temperance! frugality! moderation!—that he intended
away in defeat and start fresh. to practice every day. That’s what the information scientist Gilly
You can blame Zeigarnik again. The Leshed and computer scientist and cultural theorist Phoebe Sen-
mere act of making a to-do list relieves gers, both at Cornell University, found when they talked to peo-
so much itchy stress that it can, paradox- ple about their to-do lists. “They abide by the norm of ‘We need
ically, reduce the pressure to actually get to be productive citizens of this world,’” Leshed tells me. Doing
stuff done. “People feel that when they put more is doing good.
all their tasks somewhere, they’ve already 0 7 2 To-do lists are, in the American imagination, a curiously moral
type of software. Nobody opens Google Docs or PowerPoint think- nized” and app designers will have diamet-
ing “This will make me a better person.” But with to-do apps, that rically opposing views. The app Things lets
ambition is front and center. “Everyone thinks that, with this you put a due date on each task; Hurst, the
system, I’m going to be like the best parent, the best child, the founder of Good Todo, hissingly denounces
best worker, the most organized, punctual friend,” says Monique due dates as a form of productivity self-
Mongeon, a product manager at the book-sales-tracking firm harm that turns into a screenful of blink-
BookNet and a self-admitted serial organizational-app devo- ing red overdue alerts.
tee. “When you start using something to organize your life, it’s So the software is opinionated, as are its
because you’re hoping to improve it in some way. You’re trying makers. But they’re also weirdly humble.
to solve something.” Most of the app builders I spoke with admit-
With to-do apps, we are attempting nothing less than to craft a ted that, for many who try their tool, it won’t
superior version of ourselves. Perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise help. Maybe their app doesn’t match the way
that when we fail, the moods run so black. that customer’s mind works. Maybe the cus-
tomer is a hot mess. Maybe their workload is
unreasonable. Either way, the app creators
are surprisingly willing to admit defeat.
April Ramm, who does customer support
for OmniFocus, will sometimes recommend
a rival app to a potential customer.
This stance is … kind of unusual in the
Find a new to-do app world of software, yes? One rarely hears
founders candidly admit that their tool
probably won’t fulfill its stated goal for
many users, much less that it probably isn’t
PROGRAMMERS OFTEN DESCRIBE SOFTWARE AS BEING specifically right for you, either.
“opinionated.” In the guise of helping us try to do things, pro-
ductivity software recommends we do them in a particular way.
A to-do app is offering an opinion about how we ought to orga-
nize our lives, which is, when you think about it, a kind of intense
opinion for a piece of code to hold, right?
This is part of why we have such strong feelings about any given
task-management tool. We either love it or hold it in bitter contempt.
Jesse Patel created the app Workflowy because he had ADHD
and wanted a tool that worked as his mind required. In the late
2000s he was working as a head of business development, with
“five different big-picture opportunity areas and, like, 30 differ-
ent subprojects in each of those. It was just so overwhelming.” He
noticed that each work task tended to spawn tons of subtasks.
But most software, he found, wasn’t great at allowing for that
Russian-nesting-doll quality. He wanted a “fractal” tool where
every to-do could contain more little to-dos inside it.
So he taught himself to program and created Workflowy to
function just so: When you open a new project, you write items
that can spawn endless sub-items, all of which can be dragged
around and reorganized. If things look too cluttered, you can col-
lapse everything so you see only your top-level tasks. “It’s a uni-
verse for your thoughts,” Patel says. When a task is unfinished, we
It’s a big universe—250,000 active users, like the construction can’t seem to stop thinking about
site manager who told Patel that he made items for each room, with it. We perseverate.
sub-items for anything the room needed. (“That room has, like, four
missing bolts.”) I heard from people who loved Workflowy; I also
heard from people who thought the whole fractal thing was a dead
end. Salihefendić’s app Todoist once allowed levels upon levels of
subtasks, but he got rid of them after noticing that only a fraction of
people used them, and they were mostly just dorking around, orga-
nizing their subtasks instead of actually doing work.
Pick virtually any postulate about “the best way to get orga-
 and spiraling into to-do bankruptcy.
Sure, I could visualize my tasks better.
But that didn’t move the needle on my effi-
ciency. In fact, one day while working on
the very story you’re reading now, I found
myself staring at a monstrous List of Shame
Code my own perfect in my app. I declared bankruptcy, and then I
to-do app shakily pulled out a single piece of paper and
reprioritized, writing down a small handful
of things I could actually accomplish.
I still use my app, intermittently. But
building it made me realize a grim fact
FOR YEARS, I HAD A VERY RUDIMEN- about to-do software, which is that even the most bespoke, per-
tary to-do system. Using a piece of paper, sonalized version couldn’t unfrazzle my mind. And after dozens of
or maybe a document on my PC, I’d list interviews with users and coders, talking to them about my fail-
my main areas of work (“wired Column,” ure—and theirs—I began to realize that a big part of our problem
“Household,” and so on). Then I’d write out lies deeper than interfaces or list-making. It’s in the nature of time
all my tasks under each heading (under itself, and our relationship to it.
“ wired Column”: “Call scientist about
study”). Finally, I’d make a plan. I’d num-
ber all my subtasks. Typically I’d hop-
scotch from project to project: My number
one task would be the fourth item under
“Household,” then number two was the
seventh item under “wired Column,” and
so on. Finally, with my plan laid out, I could Think about mortality
power through my list.
Or at least I’d try to. Sometimes my system
would work for days or weeks, but eventu-
ally it’d balloon into a List of Shame, and I’d
guiltily declare bankruptcy. IF YOU ASK PEOPLE TO ACCOMPLISH A LOONY AMOUNT
I often suspected the problem was that of work this week, they’ll go, No way. Can’t be done. But if you
my system was visually confusing. I had to tell them they’ll need to do that same bonkers amount in a single
scan the page to figure out what my next week one year from now? They’ll think, OK, sure, I could do that.
item was. Wouldn’t it be nice if, instead, I Something about the future defeats our imaginative capacity.
could click a button and my to-dos would “Present self screws over future self,” says Tim Pychyl, a psychol-
arrange themselves in numerical order? ogist at Carleton University who studies procrastination. He says
So I decided to make the app myself. I’m that we regard our future self as a stranger, someone onto whose
a hobbyist programmer, and I figured this lap we can dump tons of work. On some weird level, we don’t get
spec was simple enough that even my hazy that it’ll be us doing it.
coding skills could pull it off. One of Pychyl’s students recently tried a clever experimental trick
One evening a year ago, I sat down and to get people to procrastinate less. The student took undergradu-
bashed out a prototype. The next day I ates through a guided meditation exercise in which they envisioned
started using it and found, to my delight, themselves at the end of the term—meeting that future self. “Lo and
that it worked much as I’d hoped. I now behold,” Pychyl says, those people “developed more empathy for
had a numbered list I could sort and unsort their future self, and that was related to a decrease in procrastina-
quickly. I used it every day for months. tion.” They realized that time wasn’t infinite. Future them was no lon-
Projects came and went; I filed stories and ger a stranger but someone to be protected. To get us off our butts, it
juggled tons of household errands. It felt seems, we need to grapple with the finite nature of our time on Earth.
lovely to have a tool designed for precisely This is the black-metal nature of task management: Every single
the way my mind worked. time you write down a task for yourself, you are deciding how to
The thing is, it didn’t improve my pro- spend a few crucial moments of the most nonrenewable resource
ductivity. It certainly did not increase how you possess: your life. Every to-do list is, ultimately, about death.
much paid work I accomplished. I was still (“Dost thou love life?” wrote Ben Franklin. “Then do not squander
filing the same number of stories, and doing time, for that is the stuff life is made of.”)
the same life chores, in the same amount I began to suspect that this is the truly deep, arterial source of
of time. I still found myself getting piled up some of the emotions around to-do lists. The people who make
 agreed that time blocking avoids the prob-
lems of to-do apps and lists. One to-do
app, Reclaim, actually has an AI that esti-
mates how long each task will take and
finds a slot in your calendar. (The secret
point is to show you there isn’t much room
in there.) “We’ll not only tell you when
tasks are overdue, we’ll tell you that tasks
are going to be overdue,” says Patrick
Lightbody, Reclaim’s cofounder.
Though, as you might expect by this point,
other productivity thinkers are equally vehe-
ment that calendars alone won’t save you.
You also have to develop a Jedi-like ability
Every to-do list is, to say no to your own craving to do more,
ultimately, about death. more, more. Salihefendić says the people
who are “really into” Todoist—and most
productive—are fanatical about complet-
ing more tasks than they add.
In this vein, a whole bench of task-
management philosophers believe that the
best interface isn’t digital at all—it’s paper.
to-do apps agreed with me. “What is this class of software sup- Paper forces you to repetitively rewrite
posed to do?” asks Patel, the creator of Workflowy, rhetorically. “It’s tasks, as when, say, you transfer all last
supposed to answer the question ‘What should I do right now in week’s undone to-dos to this week’s list, or
order to accomplish all of my life goals?’ The most scarce resource when you erase and rewrite calendar events.
many of us have is time.” That’s what I do when the productivity soft-
Ryder Carroll, the creator of the Bullet Journal paper-based ware I wrote for myself fails me. “Making
method for organizing your work, puts it in even more starkly that choice over and over again,” Carroll tells
existential terms. “Each task is an experience waiting to be born,” me, “is the first opportunity where you’re
he tells me. “When you look at your task list that way, it’s like, this like, ‘Why am I doing this?’” The inconve-
will become your future.” (Or if you want the European literary- nience can be clarifying. Making a list on a
philosophical take, here’s Umberto Eco: “We like lists because we sheet of paper is an unusually rich metaphor
don’t want to die.”) for life: It takes effort, and the space fills up
No wonder we get so paralyzed! The stakes with PowerPoint more quickly than you expect.
really aren’t that high. The usefulness of paper here cuts to the
Given that life is composed of time, a whole sector of the task- real heart of what makes to-do management
management philosophical magisteria argues that mere lists will such a grim problem. Apps, lists, and calen-
always be inherently terrible. Just as Pychyl showed, we overload dars can help us put our priorities in order,
ourselves with more than we can accomplish and create Lists of sure. But only we can figure out what those
Shame because we are terrible at grasping how little time we actu- goals are. And setting limits on what we hope
ally have. The only solution, this line of thinking goes, is to use an to do is philosophically painful. Every to-do
organizational system that is itself composed of time: a calendar. list is a midlife crisis of unfulfilled promise.
Instead of putting tasks on a list, you do “time blocking,” putting Winnowing away things you’ll never do in a
every task in your calendar as a chunk of work. That way you can weekly review is crucial, yet we dread it for
immediately see when you’re biting off more than you can chew. Cal what it says about the boundaries of exis-
Newport, a computer scientist at Georgetown University and guru tence. Our fragile psyches find it easier to
of what he calls “deep work,” is probably the staunchest advocate build up a list of shame, freak out, and flee.
of time blocking. “I think it is pretty undeniable that time blocking, This is what makes to-do software unique.
done well, is going to blow the list method out of the water,” New- The majority of tools we use in our jobs are
port tells me. He says it makes you twice as productive as those about communicating with someone else.
suckers who rely on lists. Time blocking forces us to wrestle directly All that messaging, all those Google docs, all
with the angel of death. It’s natural that we then screw around less. that email—it’s about talking to other peo-
Several researchers who study tasks told me they generally ple, documenting things for them, trying to
persuade them. But a to-do list is, ultimately,
CLIVE THOMPSON (@pomeranian99) is the author of Coders: nothing more or less than an attempt to per-
The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World. 0 7 5 suade yourself.
S T R A N G E

P A S S A G E
 N AT H A N C A R M A N T O O K H I S M O T H E R O U T D E E P-S E A

F I S H I N G O F F T H E C OA S T O F R H O D E I S L A N D. A W E E K L AT E R ,

H E WA S F O U N D D R I F T I N G I N A L I F E R A F T—A L O N E .

WA S I T A T R AG IC AC C I DE N T, OR M U R DE R?

THE OCEAN

I T S E L F M AY

POINT TO THE

TRUTH.

by Evan Lubofsky
PHOTOGRAPHS BY TONY LUONG
 F
and saw a lot of water.” He explained that
his small fishing boat, the Chicken Pox,
quickly became inundated. Then, sud-
denly, the boat dropped out from beneath
them.
Carman told Arsenault he climbed into
a life raft and frantically began whistling
and calling out for his mother, Linda. But
he couldn’t find her. For the next seven days,
he drifted on the open ocean.
The dramatic story ignited a media
frenzy across New England. To many,
the young man’s survival seemed noth-
ing short of a miracle. After the rescue, the
master of the Orient Lucky sent an email to
the Coast Guard in which he commented
on Carman’s condition. “His health looks
like normal,” he wrote.
The open ocean is a dangerous place
for recreational boaters—particularly the
North Atlantic, where relentless winds,
large swells, and frigid water temperatures
are common. In 2016, the year Carman’s
boat sank, the Coast Guard reported nearly
4,500 accidents at sea and more than 700
deaths in its annual Recreational Boating
Statistics Report. Inexperienced boaters,
rough weather, equipment malfunctions—
From the distant deck of the freighter, the yellow and red life the list of causes is long.
raft looked almost like a misplaced toy, so small and bright atop The report deliberately excludes any
the ocean’s heaving mass. As crew members of the Orient Lucky incidents known to involve assault, but
got a closer look, they saw a tall and lanky man waving his arms out on the ocean, pinpointing what’s truly
in their direction. accidental is often impossible. Unlike the
It was September 25, 2016, a sparkling clear day on the ocean, massive, always-on surveillance dragnet
and the Orient Lucky was roughly 100 nautical miles south of that our digital devices enable on land, the
Martha’s Vineyard, headed to Boston. The captain, Zhao Hengdong, ocean is largely unmonitored. It’s a tricky
idled the black cargo ship, which was more than two football fields place to police, particularly at night, when
long, as chop pushed the raft toward it. A deckhand on the Orient there’s nothing but empty darkness.
Lucky flung down a life ring. The man, with a ragged bowl cut Aboard the freighter, Carman dried off
and scruffy beard, lunged for it. He hurled his body into the chilly and changed into a white jumpsuit. He
ocean, sloshed through its undulating currents, and grabbed on. didn’t need any medical attention. He asked
The crew reeled him in, and as waves thrust him dangerously Arsenault if anyone had found his mom yet.
close to the ship, he used his free hand to fend off the hull. Two Arsenault replied that they had not. But it
men climbed down a long, narrow staircase to water level and wasn’t for lack of trying. By the time of his
hauled him onto a small platform. He climbed up the stairs. Crew rescue, the Coast Guard had spent five days
members then escorted the man to a lounge, where he sat on a looking for Carman and his mother over
couch and sipped soup from a white bowl. His name, he said, was 62,000 square miles of ocean before call-
Nathan Carman. He was 22 years old. Using the ship’s radio, he ing off the search.
gave his account of what happened to a search and rescue con- As Carman sat cupping his soup bowl
troller with the US Coast Guard, Richard Arsenault. on the freighter, the peculiar story of the
“Mom and I—two people, myself and my mom—were fishing Chicken Pox was only starting to unfold.
on Block Canyon, and there was a funny noise in the engine com- Investigators quickly found out this wasn’t
partment,” Carman said, his words slow and deliberate. “I looked the only mystery surrounding Carman

0 7 8
and his family. Then, as they tried to work Both Clark and a longtime friend of Linda’s, Sharon Hartstein,
out what happened to Linda, an unusual describe her as a giving person who regularly donated to chari-
source of data emerged. An oceanogra- table causes and did favors for people. But Carman and Linda’s
pher had gotten involved in the case, and home life was rocky at times. When the two went at it, Clark
he knew that a special buoy was bobbing remembers Carman screaming before storming off. “But there
in the same waters where Carman said were no attacks or violent behavior,” he says. Other family mem-
he had drifted. The buoy happened to bers alleged more concerning moments in his youth, such as an
be laden with scientific instruments that incident at school in which they told investigators that Carman
worked around the clock to collect data held another child at knifepoint.
on the currents and the wind. The ocean- When Carman was 17, he ran away from home, making it all
ographer realized that the ocean itself the way from Connecticut to Sussex County, Virginia. He was
might know if Carman’s mother was lost. found several days later outside a convenience store. When he
Or murdered. got home, he moved into an RV parked outside the house. He
and Linda still saw each other for meals, according to Clark, but

N
otherwise Carman kept his distance. “He was unsettled at that
athan James Carman was born point,” Clark says.
in 1994 and grew up on a hilly Despite his troubles, Carman maintained a close relationship
residential street in Middletown, with his grandfather, John Chakalos. Chakalos doted on Carman.
Connecticut, an old sailing port He bought him a cell phone and rented him an apartment so he
turned college town. The only could move out of the RV. He also gave Carman a Nissan Titan
child of Linda and Clark Carman, he was pickup truck and invited his grandson to tag along to meetings
diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome—or with his estate planning attorney.
autism spectrum disorder as it’s known According to Carman, Chakalos also gave him exclusive use
today—when he was around 5. As a young of a credit card with a $5,000 limit and paid the bills off in full.
kid, Carman struggled socially with other Meanwhile, Carman picked up the popular and pricey sport of off-
children his age. His parents tried to get shore fishing, and he started going on occasional excursions with
him into group sports such as baseball and his mother, who dabbled in recreational boating.
basketball, but “he never really got into it,” Carman also had an interest in guns. In November 2013, he
says Clark, a retired US Air Force avionics drove a few hours north to the Shooter’s Outpost, a gun shop in
technician. Carman opted for more soli- New Hampshire, where he selected a $2,100 semiautomatic Sig
tary activities instead. Sauer rifle. It was about 3 feet long and weighed more than 8
His parents divorced when he was 10, pounds. The manufacturer’s website describes it as “built for harsh
and Carman went to live with his mother. As tactical environments.”
a teenager, Carman’s difficulty with social On the evening of December 19, 2013, Carman and his grand-
cues made him a target. “People picked on father dined at a Greek restaurant and drove back to Chakalos’
him in high school, even though he was over home in Connecticut. Around 8:30 pm, as Carman was preparing
6 feet tall,” Clark recalls. He says Carman to leave, Chakalos paused a phone call to see him out.
got along better with adults, and he stood Hours later, in the middle of the night, Chakalos was shot three
out as a bright kid who could converse on times in the head. He was found the next day, dead in his bed.
a wide range of topics. Clark, who says he

O
remained on good terms with Linda, took
Carman on fishing and hiking trips, where fficers from the Windsor, Connecticut, police depart-
his son’s love for the outdoors blossomed. ment searched the home. They noticed that whoever
Linda Carman, a stout, bespectacled committed the crime had been careful to remove the
woman with Greek features and graying empty bullet shells from Chakalos’ bedroom floor.
auburn hair, worked as a nanny for kids More intriguing were the bullets themselves. According
with autism, among other jobs. She also to investigators, at least one was .30 caliber—the same caliber
received money from a trust fund set up as Carman’s new rifle. Many guns are capable of shooting those
by her parents late in their lives. Her father, rounds, but the evidence helped make Carman a suspect. Soon
John Chakalos, had made a fortune pri- investigators discovered that he had discarded a hard drive from
marily as a real estate developer in New his laptop and a GPS unit from his truck around the time of the
England, amassing an estate valued at murder. Family members became suspicious too. Carman’s three
more than $40 million. maternal aunts—Valerie Santilli, Charlene Gallagher, and Elaine
RICHARD LIMEBURNER,
AN OCEANOGRAPHER, KNEW
WHERE TO FIND DATA
THAT MIGHT SUPPORT—
OR CONTRADICT—CARMAN’S
ACCOUNT OF HIS VOYAGE.
 AT F I R S T, L I M E B U R N E R H E S I TAT E D.
“ I T WA S A FA M I LY M E S S , A N D I D I D N ’ T K N O W
I F I W A N T E D T O B E I N V O L V E D .”

BUT CURIOSITY
WON OUT.

Chakalos—say they believe he’s respon- to insufficient evidence. One problem was Carman’s gun—it had
sible for their father’s death. Carman’s gone missing, thwarting any chance of ballistics testing to find out
father, however, felt his son wasn’t capa- if it was the murder weapon. While investigators probed deeper
ble of the murder. “There’s no way,” Clark into the evidence, the family began digging into Chakalos’ estate.
says. “He loved his grandpa.” It turned out Linda stood to inherit several million dollars from
In interviews with the local press, her father’s passing, and a smaller portion of the estate went to
Carman denied any involvement in his Carman. In October 2014, Carman paid $70,000 for a three-story,
grandfather’s murder. He was the last per- 6,207-square-foot farmhouse in Vermont, a rundown white salt-
son known to have seen Chakalos alive, box set back from a winding main road.
but he was not the only person to talk to He also bought a boat for $48,000.
him that night. As Carman was leaving, The Chicken Pox was a 31-foot center-console fishing boat.
his grandfather had been on the phone Carman hired a boat surveyor, Bernard Feeney, who inspected it
with a woman known pseudonymously and deemed it seaworthy. Carman moored it at Ram Point Marina,
as “Mistress Y.” Carman later hired a law- an unpretentious landing in southern Rhode Island, at the end of a
yer, David Anderson, who filed court doc- congested 4-mile salt pond dotted with islands and narrow chan-
uments alleging that just days before the nels—and 150 miles from his farmhouse in landlocked Vermont.
murder, the unnamed woman had spent The following month, Carman began having trouble operating
the weekend with Chakalos at Mohegan his boat. He was cruising around a nearby harbor one afternoon
Sun Casino, where they shared a room and when the engine overheated and he got stuck. He called 911, and
Chakalos gave her cash. the Coast Guard towed him closer to shore. Carman filed an insur-
Anderson alleged that Mistress Y knew ance claim and had the engine replaced.
that Chakalos always had large quantities of But even with a brand-new engine, Carman didn’t seem happy
cash in his possession. “The fact of the mat- with his vessel, Lisa Healey, the parts and service manager at
ter is that living alone in a house in which Ram Point Marina, recalls. He seemed inclined to tinker with it.
he kept large amounts of cash placed John “He didn’t like the way the boat performed, and he said he swore
Chakalos at risk,” Anderson wrote. there was another propeller,” she says. Just as cars often have a
Windsor police sought an arrest war- spare tire, some power boats are equipped with a spare propel-
rant for Carman, but it went unsigned due ler. At Carman’s request, Healey lifted up all the hatches on the

0 8 1
Chicken Pox and “looked everywhere” but couldn’t find one. She he said he didn’t alert Linda or offer her a
found the incident baffling. life preserver. Perhaps there was no time.
A few months later, during the summer of 2016, Carman Perhaps he was in shock. As Carman
removed two bulkheads, which took up valuable space on the recalls it, one second he was walking for-
boat. But they were integral to the boat’s structure and helped pre- ward on the boat, and the next second
vent water going from one compartment to another. There were he was in the water. He managed to toss
also several problems with the boat’s pumps. In the fall, one of the a folded-up life raft, which was packed
bilge pumps had an electrical issue and stopped sucking water out tightly in a bright red carrying case, into
of the boat. Carman replaced it on Saturday, September 17, just the water. Moments later, the raft automat-
before he and Linda set out on an overnight fishing trip. ically inflated. He grabbed supplies from
As Carman worked on his boat that day, Michael Iozzi, a con- the boat, swam over to the raft, and yelled
crete cutter from northern Rhode Island, sat nearby with some out for his mom. Then he drifted away.
friends, having drinks. He couldn’t help but notice what Carman Noon rolled around, and back on shore,
was up to. “I saw him leaning over the side of the boat drilling holes Hartstein hadn’t heard from Linda. That
with a hole saw,” Iozzi says. evening, she called the Coast Guard to
He asked Carman what he was doing. Iozzi says Carman told report them missing. She told a com-
him he was repairing the boat’s trim tabs—metal finlike plates mand center team based in Woods Hole,
attached on either side of the back of the boat. The tabs are Massachusetts, that Carman and Linda had
designed to bring the nose of the boat down, to reduce skimming planned to fish near Block Island, and that
over the water and to help it smash through bigger waves. Carman kept his boat at Ram Point Marina.
But to Iozzi, it didn’t look like a repair job—it looked like Carman Marcus Gherardi, then the station’s chief of
was removing the tabs, using the hole saw dangerously close to response, threw himself into organizing
the water line. “I’ve been around the water a long time,” Iozzi says. the mission. Members of his unit fanned
He was “doing more destruction than anything else.” Because the out to Ram Point and neighboring wharfs.
holes were in the boat’s stern, Iozzi explains, they were an unlikely “We had Coasties walking down to the
entry point for seawater when the boat was moving forward. Its marinas saying, ‘Do you know who Nathan
bow would have diverted the water away from the body of the Carman is?’ and ‘Have you talked to him
vessel. But when the boat was in reverse, the thrust of the exposed recently?’” Gherardi says.
hull against even moderate chop could have meant disaster. “Once Coast Guard officials also contacted
you back up a bit, you start taking in water,” he says. “It’s all over.” Linda’s cell service provider to get the
That evening, Linda met Carman at the marina. They headed last recorded ping from her phone. It
out to sea under a clear sky shortly before midnight, as is common was logged about an hour after she and
for anglers who want to be in a good position by daybreak. The Carman left the marina, and it placed the
plan was to fish for striped bass off Block Island, approximately 12 Chicken Pox southwest of Block Island. A
miles offshore, and make it back by 9 am. Linda texted the plan few small rescue boats, humming across
to her friend, Sharon Hartstein. She added, “Call me at 12 noon if the ocean at nearly 50 miles per hour,
you don’t hear from me.” At some point on the journey, Carman scoured the area, and a search-and-rescue
recalls changing course and steering the boat to Block Canyon, an helicopter surveyed the water from above.
offshore fishing spot at the edge of the continental shelf, roughly It was a desperate race against time. With
90 miles south of Block Island. each passing minute, the chances of a suc-
According to Carman, shortly after sunrise he had fishing lines cessful search on the open ocean plunge.
dragging through the water as the boat moved slowly northward. Back at the Coast Guard station,
Then, around five hours later, all hell broke loose. Water rushed into Matt Baker, who co-led the search with
the boat. Carman killed the engine and yelled over to Linda to pull Gherardi, contacted Linda’s next of kin—
in the fishing lines. He opened two deck hatches to check if water her sister Valerie—to brief her on the mis-
had gotten in through the hull, then he grabbed emergency gear sion. Valerie mentioned that Carman was
from the pilot house. He didn’t make any distress calls with the two- extremely intelligent and very good with
way radio that was inside the pilot house, despite having dialed 911 technology. But then came a bombshell:
when his engine had overheated months earlier. Nor did he turn on She said she believed Carman was respon-
his emergency position-indicating radio beacon—also located in sible for killing her father and that, because
the pilot house—which would have beamed a radio signal to show Chakalos’ estate was being settled that
search-and-rescue teams his position via satellite. week, Carman may have killed his mother
Even though Carman was aware that the boat was being flooded, to gain assets she was due to receive.
 Baker pulled an all-nighter, working managed to stay outside the edges of a search area so large that
the case until the next morning, when it spanned three states, continued to bother him. “I was confident
he handed it off to Gherardi. The boats that if they were on the surface of the water, we would have found
and aircraft found no trace of either the them,” he says.
Chicken Pox or a life raft, but the Coast

T
Guard continued to comb the waters.
Carman said that during these days he police launched an investigation and focused
he kept drifting and fell into a daily rou- on Carman. While officers worked the case, Carman sub-
tine. He had provisioned the raft with an mitted an insurance claim for the loss of his boat and
incredible amount of food, enough to last its accessories in the amount of $85,000. The insur-
30 days. He recalls waking up at 8 am ance company, a division of Berkshire Hathaway called
each morning and eating four meals a day: BoatUS, denied the claim and fired back with a lawsuit of its own.
breakfast, brunch, lunch, and dinner. He (Carman’s recollections in this story are drawn from his court tes-
says he was uncomfortably cold at times timony and his police questioning.) David J. Farrell Jr., a maritime
from lying on the raft’s wet floor, and he lawyer who represented the company, says the rationale was
used sponges to soak up the water. simple: “We’re not covering it, and we’re going to have a court
By midweek, Gherardi’s hope was say we don’t have to.”
quickly fading. The search area had become But there was more to it. Farrell was suspicious of Carman and
vast, roughly twice the size of Connecticut. says he had serious doubts that Carman had been at sea for seven
The Coast Guard dispatched larger rescue days in a life raft in the North Atlantic. Farrell, who lives in New
boats and a long-range surveillance aircraft. England and has practiced maritime law for nearly 40 years, decided
After five days, the Coast Guard started he needed an expert oceanographer to probe Carman’s account.
winding down the search. Gherardi drove While researching online, he came across the name of Richard
from Cape Cod to Valerie’s house in Limeburner, a retired physical oceanographer based on Cape Cod.
Connecticut to tell her in person. Inside, Limeburner is tall and soft-spoken, with a chiseled jawline and
Valerie, her husband, and Linda’s friend wispy, dark hair. He’s well versed in ocean forensics; he played a
Sharon Hartstein were seated around large role in locating the wreckage of Air France Flight 447, which
a table, bracing for the news. Gherardi crashed into the Atlantic in 2009, killing all 228 people on board.
informed them that they were unlikely to Figuring out how floating objects are influenced by wind and
find Linda and Carman. “When you deliver waves is his sweet spot.
this news, your heart feels like it’s made of At first, Limeburner hesitated. “It was a family mess, and I didn’t
lead,” Gherardi says. He couldn’t shake the know if I wanted to be involved,” he says. But curiosity won out.
sting that the search had failed. In the time since the search had been called off, suspicion about
Two days later, on a crisp and clear Carman had continued to build; among other things, his aunts
Sunday, Gherardi was sitting in his truck, petitioned a court in an effort to block him from any more inheri-
watching his 12-year-old daughter play tance. In December 2018, Limeburner signed on.
soccer, when his cell phone rang. It was a The assignment struck him as a chance to apply impartial data
Coast Guard officer in Boston. to the case. “I really don’t want to be guided by subjective thoughts,
“Hey—we fou nd hi m!” the offi- I want to be objective,” Limeburner says. “What if the kid’s tell-
cer blurted out. He told Gherardi that a ing the truth?” Perhaps Carman’s boat had been a lemon. Maybe
freighter headed to Boston, the Orient investigators had been too quick to suspect him. Here was a line
Lucky, had spotted Carman in his life raft of inquiry that didn’t hinge on Carman’s storytelling.
100 nautical miles off the Massachusetts He started by gathering two pieces of information: the posi-
coast and pulled him aboard. tional coordinates of the Orient Lucky when it picked up Carman
“Yes! ” Gherardi shouted in triumph. But and the time at which he was found.
a moment later, as he processed the news, Then he turned to a data source that he knew could be
his elation faded. Only Carman had turned extremely valuable to the case: a bright yellow buoy the height
up; Linda was still out there. At that point, of a young giraffe that sat right in the middle of Carman’s alleged
she was likely dead. drift path. Known as an offshore surface mooring, the buoy held a
After the soccer game, Gherardi and his suite of scientific instruments. Above the surface, a tangle of solar-
daughter stopped for buffalo wings, and powered, research-grade weather sensors jut into the air; below
he replayed the search in his mind. The the waterline, an anchored cable laden with sensors stretches
idea that Carman, for a whole week, had down to the seafloor—all of it collecting measurements of wind
speed and direction, surface currents, and other information about
the water for each of the seven days Carman was adrift.
Funded by the National Science Foundation, the buoy is one of
10 in the area, and it beams its data to a web server via satellite.
This particular swath of the North Atlantic is one of the few areas
of the world’s oceans under constant observation. The stretch is
relatively close to shore—reachable within a day by research ves-
sels—and of high scientific interest. It spans the edge of a continen-
tal shelf where shallow and deeper ocean waters mix, a process
that churns up nutrients and sustains a great deal of marine life.
Limeburner downloaded oceanographic and meteorological
data from the ocean monitoring network for the seven-day period
starting on September 18. “If he drifted from Block Canyon to 100
miles south of the Vineyard, he had to go right by” the sensor-
packed buoy, Limeburner says.
Typically, scientists rely on ocean monitoring networks to inves-
tigate how changing ocean conditions affect marine ecosystems,
biology, and climate. But in this case, Limeburner knew that the
technology might be capable of either supporting or contradict-
ing Carman’s account. His life raft must have been at the mercy
of the surface currents and winds—the specific information the
buoy had captured.
Limeburner spent the winter in front of the wood-burning stove
in his living room, unlocking the secrets of the wind and waves while
nor’easters battered the coast outside. He pounded away at his lap-
top, consulting the buoy’s output for the week of September 18.
There were large data sets to process that included hourly aver-
age measurements of wind speed and direction, as well as data on
currents linked to the tides, wind, and other less common sources.
He wrote custom programs to help crunch the data, which he
says were “huge freaking files” in their raw .csv formats. And he
applied drift-analysis techniques similar to those he’d used to
estimate the tracks of bodies and debris from the wreckage of Air
France 447 a decade earlier. His goal was to synthesize wind, wave,
and current data to estimate Carman’s seven-day drift path in two
ways—starting from Block Canyon, to see where he’d end up, and
working backward from the Orient Lucky recovery location, to see
roughly where he ought to have started.

0 8 4
THEY HEADED OUT TO SEA UNDER A CLEAR
N I G H T S K Y. A C C O R D I N G T O C A R M A N , S H O R T LY A F T E R
S U N R I S E H E H A D F I S H I NG L I N E S DR AG G I NG I N T H E WAT E R .

ALL HELL BROKE

T H E N, A RO U N D F I V E HO U R S L AT E R ,

LOOSE.
 To make sure the buoy was working as it should, Limeburner In his pretrial testimony, Carman
dug up historical wind and surface-current records for the area explained that he had removed the trim
for comparison. The data all lined up and pointed to a westerly— tabs from the Chicken Pox because he felt
not easterly—drift that week, the opposite of what Carman’s story they increased the boat’s drag and there-
suggested. Even if Carman was mistaken about the number of fore its fuel consumption. He testified that
days he spent on the raft or was way off about his starting location, his navigation and piloting abilities were
he still should not have drifted from west to east to intercept the very limited, and that he was unfamiliar
Orient Lucky. Whatever happened at sea that week, it seemed evi- with latitude and longitude. When asked
dent to Limeburner that the life raft did not begin its journey any- why he hadn’t made any distress calls, he
where near Block Canyon. He wrote up his analysis in a 63-page responded that it had become ingrained in
forensics report. It was packed with figures, graphs, and maps that him not to signal for help unless “your life
attempted to reconstruct Carman’s drift path. or limb is in imminent jeopardy.”
One of the maps is particularly unsettling. It contains a Google The court had a mountain of evidence to
Earth snapshot of the Block Canyon area, overlaid with a bright consider. In the end, the case was decided
red dot marking the spot where Carman said his boat went down. on a plain-old insurance policy breach. US
Trailing off from the red dot is a yellow squiggly line, a computer- District judge John J. McConnell Jr. handed
generated output from Limeburner’s data analysis, estimating down the ruling on November 4, 2019.
Carman’s weeklong drift path. The line travels north for a bit, but “Considering all the documentary evidence
then, instead of hooking east toward Massachusetts where Carman and witnesses’ testimony, the Court finds
was rescued, it heads west—the complete opposite direction—and that the Policy does not cover Mr. Carman’s
keeps going for nearly 45 miles toward New York. Propelled by the loss,” read the decision. It went on to say
ocean alone, he should have been nowhere near the Orient Lucky. that the Chicken Pox was unseaworthy
So how did he end up there? A second red dot on the map marks when it left Ram Point Marina, because
the position of the freighter, and a white squiggle meanders off Carman “improperly repaired the holes
from it, showing where Carman ought to have started so as to end he created by removing the trim tabs, and
up at the place of his rescue. Limeburner concluded that if Carman he compromised the boat’s stability by
had indeed drifted for seven days, he’d have had to jump into his removing the bulkheads.”
life raft deep offshore, several miles beyond the continental shelf. The decision was clear about Carman
To Limeburner, the location didn’t make sense. “It’s a no-man’s violating the terms of his policy. Of course,
land out there,” he says. this was a civil case; Carman wasn’t stand-
The map seemed to blow Carman’s story to bits. ing trial for murder. In fact, the document
attempted to set that record straight. At

T
the very bottom of page 12 of the decision
he insurance case went to trial on August 13, 2019, is the following footnote: “To be clear,
in a federal court in Providence, Rhode Island. There, the Court is making no determination of
Limeburner testified to the inconsistencies he found and whether Mr. Carman intended to sink his
how Carman’s story didn’t jibe with the movement of boat or to harm his mother.”
the ocean.

T
Another expert witness, N. Stuart Harris, an emergency room
physician at Boston’s Massachusetts General Hospital and chief of he investigations of John
its Division of Wilderness Medicine, told the court that Carman’s Chakalos’ murder and Linda
condition upon rescue was not consistent with his alleged seven- Carman’s disappearance remain
day drift. With seawater inevitably pooling inside the raft, he open. Carman has not been
should have displayed severe deficits in his gross motor skills charged with any crimes. Linda’s
and been in dire need of medical attention. body has not been found. The Chicken
Per court documents, Bernard Feeney, the boat surveyor, Pox is still missing. Investigators from
explained that the Chicken Pox likely sank due to water intrusion the Windsor, Connecticut, and South
into “inadequately sealed holes below the boat’s scuppers with Kingston, Rhode Island, police depart-
exterior covers.” He later said, “In all the years I’ve been around ments declined to comment for this story.
boats—60 years—I’ve never heard of anyone removing trim tabs Since the boat-insurance trial concluded,
and not fixing them properly.” Michael Iozzi, who watched Carman Carman has largely managed to stay out of
drill the holes into his boat just hours before his fateful trip, also the public spotlight.
spoke at the trial. When I reached him by phone, Carman

0 8 6
declined to answer any questions. He and
his lawyer also didn’t respond to multi-
ple inquiries from a WIRED fact-checker. Trending Topics That Helped
Carman’s aunts also declined to com- Get This Issue Out:
ment for this story, except to say they had Becoming a simulation theorist; propagating
created a “Justice for John and Linda” tip plants; Black vegan TikTok; The Bachelorette;
over-the-shoulder fanny packs; Ohtani as the
line at (800) 245-7791. Their attorney, Bill new Babe; feeling vindicated after months of
Michael, says they want resolution. “Our friends regarding my #FreeBritney cries as the
rantings of a conspiracy theorist; intermittent
whole belief is that Nathan should face fasting; getting rid of a decade’s worth of stray
justice for what he has done,” he says. cords; a literary close reading of Olivia Rodrigo’s
Sour; “I want to go camping, but I don’t want
Their day in court may come. A prosecu- to camp”; relearning how to roller skate, even
tor with the Coast Guard recently reached though teens were watching; escaped elephants
romping across southern China; cherries; Capy-
out to Limeburner to see whether he’d be bara Appreciation Day; pronouncing “water” in
Philadelphia dialect; Twilight of Democracy: The
willing to testify if Carman is brought to Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism, by Anne
criminal court. Limeburner agreed. He Applebaum; seeing colleagues IRL.
still wonders what happened between the wi r e d is a registered trademark of Advance
time Carman left Ram Point Marina and Magazine Publishers Inc. Copyright ©2021
Condé Nast. All rights reserved. Printed
when the Orient Lucky picked him up a in the USA. Volume 29, No. 9. wi r e d (ISSN
week later. Perhaps the Chicken Pox never 1059–1028) is published monthly, except
for combined issues in December/January
took on water and is parked somewhere— and July/August, by Condé Nast, which is
or sank days later than Carman claimed. A a division of Advance Magazine Publishers
Inc. Editorial office: 520 Third Street, Ste.
shorter sojourn on the life raft would help 305, San Francisco, CA 94107-1815. Princi-
explain why he was in such good shape pal office: Condé Nast, 1 World Trade Cen-
ter, New York, NY 10007. Roger Lynch, Chief
upon his rescue. “He could have gone into Executive Officer; Pamela Drucker Mann,
Chief Revenue & Marketing Officer, US;
some harbor in Rhode Island or Connecticut Jackie Marks, Chief Financial Officer. Peri-
and covered his boat and hid,” Limeburner odicals postage paid at New York, NY, and
at additional mailing offices. Canada Post
suggests. That scenario still leaves open the Publications Mail Agreement No. 40644503.
question of how, when the ocean was pull- Canadian Goods and Services Tax Registra-
tion No. 123242885 RT0001.
ing to the west, he ended up so far east.
Investigators have a lot more to learn. It’s POSTMASTER: Send all UAA to CFS (see DMM
[Link]); NONPOSTAL AND MILITARY
possible Carman was mistaken about where FACILITIES: Send address corrections to
wi r e d , PO Box 37617, Boone, IA 50037-0662.
the Chicken Pox sank and that the chaos
For subscriptions, address changes, adjust-
of the moment prevented him from saving ments, or back issue inquiries: Please write to
wi r e d , PO Box 37617, Boone, IA 50037-0662,
his mother. Perhaps he didn’t realize that
call (800) 769 4733, or email subscriptions@
drilling holes just above the waterline would wi r e d .com. Please give both new and old
addresses as printed on most recent label.
compromise his vessel. Maybe his awkward First copy of new subscription will be mailed
demeanor aroused undue suspicion, add- within eight weeks after receipt of order.
Address all editorial, business, and production
ing to his struggles as a young man with correspondence to wi r e d Magazine, 1 World
autism. Some information might yet emerge Trade Center, New York, NY 10007. For permis-
sions and reprint requests, please call (212)
to explain why Carman’s location was wildly 630 5656 or fax requests to (212) 630 5883.
off from where ocean dynamics ought to Visit us online at [Link] r e d .com. To subscribe
to other Condé Nast magazines on the web,
have placed him. That’s the reality of polic- visit wi r e d .[Link]. Occasionally, we
ing the open seas: It takes a lot of resources make our subscriber list available to carefully
screened companies that offer products and
and scientific detective work—and a fair bit services that we believe would interest our
of luck—to bring the truth to light. readers. If you do not want to receive these
offers and/or information, please advise us at
In this case, the ocean was able to bear PO Box 37617, Boone, IA 50037-0662, or call
(800) 769 4733.
partial witness. But in its dark and roiling
depths, even bigger secrets remain tucked wi r e dis not responsible for the return or loss
of, or for damage or any other injury to, unsolic-
away. ited manuscripts, unsolicited artwork (includ-
ing, but not limited to, drawings, photographs,
and transparencies), or any other unsolicited
EVAN LUBOFSKY (@elubofsky) is a writer materials. Those submitting manuscripts, pho-
based on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. This is tographs, artwork, or other materials for con-
sideration should not send originals, unless
his first feature for wired . specifically requested to do so by wi r e d in writ-
ing. Manuscripts, photographs, artwork, and
other materials submitted must be accompa-
nied by a self-addressed, stamped envelope.
SIX-WORD SCI-FI: STORIES BY WIRED READERS WIRED 29.09

IN SIX WORDS, WRITE A STORY ABOUT A CASUAL ENCOUNTER WITH ALIENS:

SO, ABOUT YOUR PLANET’S

EXTENDED WARRANTY… —@phorne96
via Twitter

↙ SEEKING VITAL FLUIDS, THEY

COMMANDEERED SNACKS.
QUITE UNEXPECTEDLY, COCKTAIL
RECIPES WERE EXCHANGED.
Every month, we ask for a
new six-word story on
—SCOTT MEDINTZ, VIA EMAIL —JOHN WAGNER, VIA EMAIL Facebook, Twitter, and
YOU LOOK NOTHING LIKE YOUR PHOTO. DO YOU HAVE THE CORRECT SPACETIME? Instagram. Submit your ideas
—@MARKGYLES, VIA TWITTER —RICHARD KRZEMIEN, VIA EMAIL there, along with the hashtag
LIGHTS, CAMERA … WHERE DID IT GO? I AWOKE WITH A PROBING THOUGHT. #WIREDSIXWORD. And visit
Honorable —THALIA925, VIA EMAIL —@ANDYNEZ, VIA TWITTER the archive at wired .com/
Mentions THEY CAME, TOO LATE, FOR ELVIS. TAKE US TO THE NIGERIAN PRINCE. six-word to see how we’ve
—BRUCE LYON, VIA FACEBOOK —JUAN GARCIA, VIA FACEBOOK illustrated our favorites.

ILLUSTRATION / VIOLET REED

0 8 8
 Free Financial Tools
Wealth Management

Worried about
your retirement?
It’s time to get
a plan.
Our free Retirement Planner can help you
track your retirement accounts and take control
of your financial life. And if you work with one
of our advisors*, online or by phone, you also get
access to our Smart Withdrawal tool. This TM

innovative tool helps you plan for retirement

spending just as thoughtfully as you save.

Get started with your free Retirement

Planner or talk to an advisor today at:
FREE FINANCIAL TOOLS AVAILABLE ON WEB & MOBILE

[Link]/wired

*Advisory services are offered for a fee by Personal Capital Advisors Corporation ("PCAC"), a registered investment adviser with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Registration does not imply
a certain level of skill or training. Investing involves risk. Past performance is not indicative of future returns. You may lose money. All visuals are illustrative only. Featured individuals are actors or paid
spokespeople and not clients of PCAC. PCAC is a wholly owned subsidiary of Personal Capital Corporation ("PCC"), an Empower company. PCC is a wholly owned subsidiary of Empower Holdings, LLC.
© 2021 Personal Capital Corporation. All rights reserved.