There’s a 1 in 10 chance an invisible waterfall will destroy the world.

Do you like those odds?

S T A Y, C U R R E N T
|
SEP/OCT 2O24
CONTENTS PHOTOGRAPH BY TONJE THILESEN 32.O9

Features

P. 5 6
Þ p.34 The Hole in à p.56 Toward a More p.74 Priscila, Queen
the Map of the World Fantastic Plastic of the Rideshare Mafia

Beneath the waves lurks a To cure our addiction to She came to the US with a
massive waterfall. And in disposable crap, we’ll all dream. Using platforms like
its mysterious depths, the need to get a little loony. Uber, Instacart, and DoorDash,

The Earth fate of the world churns.

by Sandra Upson
by Clive Thompson she built a business empire up
from nothing.
by Lauren Smiley

Issue ß p.46 An Imperfect Þ p.66 Damage Control p.88 I Am Laura Kipnis-Bot,

Apologies to Musk et al., but Storm and I Will Make Reading
Turning off pipelines, Sexy and Tragic Again
we like it here! Yes, it can be a Can the UAE really make rain disabling reservoirs—these
plastic-strewn, climate-changing on demand—or is it selling are violent, criminal acts. I’ve agreed to be turned into an
mess. But as always, WIRED looks vaporware? According to Léna Lazare, AI reading companion by a little-
by Amit Katwala the 26-year-old face of the known company called Rebind.
to the horizon—and imagines a radical climate movement, A report from the inside.
better future for our little piece they’re also acts of joy. by Laura Kipnis
of the universe. by Morgan Meaker

0 0 1
CONTENTS

Issue 32.09 p.18

On the Cover p.22 p.24

When we asked regular WIRED

contributor Alvaro Dominguez
to illustrate our new climate
cover (he did the last one too,
in 2020), he sent us a mega-
batch of options. Fifty-one to
be exact. Here are just a few
of our other faves.

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: RETO STERCHI; DANIEL BERGER, GOOGLE RESEARCH AND LICHTMAN LAB; JOHANNA GOODMAN, GETTY IMAGES; NASA (COVER)
Start Gear
p.7 Robin Sloan p.20 THE L AST GOOD PL ACE p.26 The EV Special
Goes Meta A Strava-Fueled Sprint at by the WIRED Reviews Team
by Jason Kehe the Denver Airport
by David Howard
p.14 MACHINE READABLE Six-Word
The Eternal Truth
of Markdown
p.22 YOUR NEXT JOB
I Will Save You From
Sci-Fi
by Scott Gilbertson the Heat p.96 Very Short Stories
by Camille Bromley by WIRED readers
p.18 On the Road With
the Tornado Mobile p.24 A New View of (the
by Matt Giles Original) Neural Net
by Isabel Fraser

0 0 2
Business solutions so powerful,
you’ll make every move matter.

What would you like the power to do?®

Learn more at bankofamerica.com/bankingforbusiness

RANTS AND RAVES 32.O9

Readers
deliberate on
deception and
the morality
of immortality.
In our July/August issue, Brendan I. Koerner
discovered that some of OnlyFans’ big-
gest creators hire paid “chatters” to speak
(and have virtual sexytime) with subscrib-
ers on their behalf. Then he became one of
those chatters. And at WIRED .com, Ray Kurz-
weil made waves—and ruffled feathers—with
his eerie vision of a future when immortal
humans are deeply entwined with AI.

RE: “SHE CONTAINS RE: “IF RAY KURZWEIL IS

MULTITUDES” RIGHT (AGAIN), YOU’LL
MEET HIS IMMORTAL SOUL
It was easy for me to under- model again to voice their IN THE CLOUD”
stand why you felt conflicted concerns, and then they
about selling content to men believe it’s really her again. The most disturbing thing
while posing as some young, They’ll feel more comfortable about the singularity, for me,
attractive woman. When I did spending more money than is the notion that we’ll make
it, I felt bad too, especially they did before. “copies” of ourselves. That
when I realized that these I hope your article does a suggests the ability, and ulti-
marks were just normal peo- better job sowing the seeds mately the compulsion, to
ple who didn’t know any bet- of doubt in these people. tweak our personalities and
ter. They just wanted to spend —u/Popsodaa habits to become “perfect”
time talking to a beautiful and humans. Humans that fit the
fun woman, just like anybody The majority of creators are societal expectations of their
else. I received DMs on Reddit not using chatters. I don’t. times, in the same way we
from people who had grown I would never even consider have genetically engineered
suspicious of the models it, as I don’t think it would blemish-free fruit. Looks great
they had sent money to. I did feel entirely ethical, but so on the surface, but it’s bland,
my best to explain how the many guys assume that I do. tasteless, and less nutritious.
industry works behind the It’s annoying to get dozens of I am 100 percent in favor of
scenes, and I’ve even shared messages every day asking, living a long and robust life, as
screenshots with them of “Are you real?” long as it is filled with worthy
some of the chats, guides, —u/Pixxiprincess challenges and novel experi-
and spreadsheets. I thought ences. How we maintain that
that would surely save them The digital economy runs on in a lifespan of 300 to 500
from wasting hundreds, if exploitation and deception— years has yet to be defined.
not thousands, of dollars on on a bed of lack of account- —Scott Cochran
these scams … It didn’t help. ability. People tout that we’re
They open the chat with the living in the age of information After very thoughtful ques-
but fail to reckon with the fact tions from Mr. Levy that sur-
that “information” can be a faced deep contradictions
sword rather than a shield. and dystopian scenarios, the
RE: KURZWEIL —@neilturkewitz best we got was “things will
fix themselves.” Very much
in line with “the banks will
“His techno-optimism seemed regulate themselves.”
—Franco Potepan

harmless to me when I was 18,

EMILY LOPEZ; GETTY IMAGES

and now seems monstrous.” GET MORE WIRED

All WIRED stories can be found online, but only subscribers
get unlimited access. If you are already a print subscriber,
—@E_Baillieul, via X you can authenticate your account at WIRED .com/register.

0 0 4
 DATA
ANALYST
State-of-the art technology
means dairy farmers like
Tara in Eastern New Mexico
can now monitor their
environmental footprint
throughh field-by-field
performance data on
everything from water to
soil health, greenhouse gas
emissions reduction, nitrogen
management and more.

SEE DAIRY DIFFERENTLY

© 2024 Innovation Center for U.S. Dairy at usdairy.com
WIRED: Our new
11oz WIRED/TIRED
coffee mug.
TIRED: Everyone. CHECK OUT OUR
LATEST SELECTION
SHOP.WIRED.COM OF PRODUCTS
START BY JASON KEHE 32.O9

PHOTOGRAPH BY AMBER HAKIM

THE TECH WORLD’S

GREATEST LIVING
NOVELIST GOES META
In which Robin Sloan writes Moonbound—a science fiction book
about science fiction—and our writer writes his way into total insanity.
0 0 7
START 32.O9

true. How many other novelists do you the fact that the recorder stopped work-
know who live in the Bay Area, and used ing?” I ask. Sloan giggles and agrees.
to work at Twitter, and have extremely And as long as we’re on the subject, I
nerdy websites, and code for fun? And say, there’s always that moment in a pro-
don’t techies love his stuff? People book- file where the writer needs to describe
clubbed his first two books everywhere.) the physical appearance of the person

D
So you have a beginning, I say—again, being profiled. “Maybe it’d be even more
to myself, off in who-knows-where. But meta,” I suggest, “if you describe your-
you’ll need to do one more thing. You’ll self for me?” He thinks for a moment
need to establish, high up, that Sloan and says: “I mean, he’s tall, obviously.”
loves going meta. Does it constantly. “And,” he adds later, “bald.”
Said once: “The very best movies are This man is, I must say, terrific com-
about movies, the very best books about pany—goofy, game for anything, touchy-
books.” You’ll need to say that Sloan’s feely. If he’s an old-fashioned tech bro,
first book, Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour he’s the all-are-welcome kind, and not
Bookstore, was a book about books. terribly full of himself. When he tells
And that his new one, Moonbound, is a me, for instance, that he was into large
d e e p i n t o my many-hour hang with story about the way stories are told (and language models three or four years
the tech world’s greatest living novelist, narrated by a far-future descendant of before the AI band got cool, he’s quick
Robin Sloan, he says something profound the sentient sourdough starter from his to shrug and roll his eyes, which absolves
about science fiction. It’s the insight I’ve second book, Sourdough). him of any appearance of toolishness.
been waiting for, the key to understanding Because what this’ll do is, it’ll con- (Unless, and this is a big unless: You
not just him but maybe all of storytelling. vince the reader this isn’t fraudulent. Or don’t buy into this particular hackish
I glance down at my voice recorder, just to indulgent. Or some pathetic and elabo- quirk of self-awareness, wherein the
make sure it’s on. “Memory is full!” it says. rate excuse for reporterly negligence. It mere acknowledgement that something
Full! With that mocking little exclama- couldn’t possibly be any of those things! semi-shady’s going on is enough to pro-
tion point. I do not panic. Instead what It’ll be so much more: a profile about writ- tect one from criticisms of it.)
happens is: I simply go insane. Part of me ing a profile: in the self-aware style of the So, inevitably, we talk a lot more about
stays there with Sloan, chatting about person being profiled. It’ll loop. It’ll layer. AI—though Sloan doesn’t think it was
sci-fi. The rest of me is, I don’t know how Or it will spiral into unreadable obliv- inevitable that language would be the
else to put this, yanked, as if by some cos- ion. There’s only one way to find out. breakthrough technology. Could’ve been
mic cartoon cane, offstage, into the other- vision, he says; could’ve been something
dimensional wings of reality, where time else. But now that it is language, and now
is irrelevant and space sort of fizzles. In b y t h e t i m e I come to, I don’t know that it can write, he’s excited to be the
that realm, I know my task: to come up where I am. Sloan and I were at a restau- kind of writer the machines are not. Just
with a way to write this profile, or perish. rant, a Taiwanese spot near his office in take a look at Moonbound, which came
It’s fine, I say to myself. Everything is Berkeley. Now we’re walking outside, out in June and is Sloan’s first proper
fine. So what if you don’t have Sloan’s and it’s getting dark. I check my watch. work of science fiction. He thinks it’s
exact words? You can paraphrase. And I seem to have lost 30 minutes. his best-written, most human-sounding
you won’t even need to do that, at least Whatever, I’m back now, and I want book so far—by far. It’s certainly his most
not at first. In the intro paragraph, just to share my revelations. I tell Sloan that ambitious: thematically, characterolog-
say there IS a profound insight. Classic any piece I write about him will probably ically, even punctuationally. I point out
way to entrap the reader. be a piece about writing a piece about his creative devotion, in it, to colons: and
Well, unless the reader doesn’t know him, and who cares if the voice recorder he launches into a defense of sentences
who Robin Sloan is. But that’s an easy stopped recording, because—well, wait a that contain not one but two: which
fix too: Just give him some impressive- sec. “Shouldn’t the profile also be about ChatGPT, of course, would never. →
sounding title that can’t be ignored.
“The quintessential Bay Area author,”
say—but less local. Or “the programmer-
writer’s programmer-writer”—but less
esoteric. Oh, that’s it: He’s “the tech Isn’t self-awareness a cheat and a
world’s greatest living novelist.”
(Which is, maybe, actually perfectly cover-up, the thing you do when you
JASON KEHE is a features editor at
don’t have anything else to offer?
wired.

0 0 8
START 32.O9

EXPIRED TIRED WIRED

e a r l i e r t h a t d ay , at a nearby sal-
vage yard, in a section devoted to hun-
dreds of old doors, Sloan told me about Being terrified of AI Being amazed by AI Being over AI
the various paths his writing life could’ve
taken. (Surrounded, I repeat, by doors. Google Glass Meta Ray-Ban Wayfarers Micro-LED eye implants
Sliding doors. Narrow doors. Glass doors.
Meta doors, metaphors.) Back in 2010, the Data centers on land Data centers underwater Data centers in space
same year he started at Twitter, Sloan
Computer-generated
self-published three short stories on his A guy in a Godzilla suit Computer-generated Godzilla that looks like a guy
Godzilla in a Godzilla suit
website: one fantasy, one sci-fi, and one
set in San Francisco. The one that hap- Quiet quitting Quiet vacationing Being quiet
pened to take off—and then formed the
basis of Penumbra’s, which came out two
years later, shortly after Sloan left Twit- Arthur. It reads, fairly irresistibly, like a science fiction novel written as a
ter—was the nominally realist one. Sour- fantasy novel, or maybe vice versa, about how both genres are maybe the
dough, also set in SF, followed five years same genre. If it sells well enough, Sloan says, two sequels are planned.
after that. He gave a talk at Google some- Sloan insists that none of this recursive insanity was in the stars when
where in there, became kind of a thing in he wrote Penumbra’s more than a decade ago. A fastidious note-taker,
these parts, beloved by literate techies he even has proof that the germ of the idea that became Moonbound
who saw in him a writer who understood was written down two years after Penumbra’s came out. I don’t buy any
both the incredible happening-ness of of it, I tell him; nothing is linear, at least when it comes to the formless
tech culture and how to novelize it. realms of artistic creation. It’s no accident, I think, that Moonbound’s
But these were never exactly “realist” narrator creates for itself just such a place: a timeless place out of place
novels. Penumbra’s gets pretty techno- in which to come up with ideas, or perish.
mystical about books and the power of On the other hand, we’re all biased toward linearity, plot, chronology—
Google. The climax of Sourdough involves Sloan, me, possibly even LLMs. In Moonbound, the AI chronicler asks a
a massive bread monster at a futuristic single linear-minded question, again and again, for centuries. It haunts
food fair. There were, in other words, the pages of the book, just as it seems to haunt Sloan’s head. Maybe it
sci-fi stories in both straining to break haunts all of us, all the time. The question is, naturally:
free. In Penumbra’s, multiple characters What happens next?
read books about dragons, and there’s a
scene in which a character challenges
another to imagine a sci-fi story set many i t ’s m u c h l a t e r that night. I’m back at home now, trying to watch a
thousands of years in the future. new sci-fi blockbuster. I can’t concentrate on it. Something’s bothering me.
Moonbound is set many thousands of I pause the movie and think. I’ve just spent an evening with the tech
years in the future, and there are a num- world’s greatest living novelist, and my voice recorder failed me, but
ber of dragons in it. There are also wiz- that’s fine, because I have a plan to write my way around that. So what
ards, talking beavers, sentient swords. am I worried about? The ending? All I’ll need to do there is deliver on
Sloan’s hero, Ariel de la Sauvage (a “dorky the promise of the beginning and reveal the—
name,” Sloan writes; it’s self-aware- Ohhh. The profound insight. So that’s it. My memory. It’s too full!
ness all the way down) is an orphan boy But I don’t panic. I’ve been here before.
who lives in a castle and is destined to Your profile will be better than ever, I tell myself. Because now that you’ve
pull a sword from a stone. “I knew this completely forgotten the insight on which its existence depends, it’ll read
story,” says the AI narrator, but “it was as a meta commentary about the question of going meta in the first place!
different-shaped here, compressed and And isn’t this just right? At one point hadn’t you even mounted, straight
remade.” It loops. It layers. to Sloan’s face, an entire case against self-awareness? Hadn’t you called
Is it science fiction? Sloan certainly it a cheat and a cover-up, tedious and college-dorm-y, the thing you do
thinks so. “Hard” sci-fi, he insists, because when you don’t have anything else to offer, all the while convincing your-
everything in it is theoretically possible. self you’re really very clever? Hadn’t Sloan heard you out, and then com-
The narrator, which calls itself a chroni- pletely, jovially, as is his way, disagreed? Hadn’t he then said: The more
cler, was born many thousands of years we read books, or watch movies, or look at paintings, whatever, the more
ago; its great-great-great-grandLLMa we understand those art forms as forms; and therefore, art that is about
was basically ChatGPT (plus a sourdough its existence as an art form is the highest form of art?
starter, sexy). But Moonbound is pure fan- Yes. He said that. You will say that. You will write this profile. It will
tasy too: a compressed and remade King spiral into oblivion, and that will be the point.

0 1 0
 Welcome to nature

The lofoten collection Our mission is to create the greatest outdoor

Innovative features, bold colors, signature design. products and offer unique adventures. Crafted
with quality, function, design, and sustainability
through four generations since 1929.

Adventures: If you want to travel here or to one of our unique lodges, we offer great packages
or tailor-made adventures. Norrøna Stores: New York, Boston, Boulder, Castle Rock. norrona.com
 Learn more

UBS Financial Services Inc. is a subsidiary of UBS Group AG.

Member FINRA/SIPC. © UBS 2024. All rights reserved.
START BY SCOTT GILBERTSON ILLUSTRATION BY SAMUEL TOMSON 32.O9

If the robots take over, we should at least speak their language.

THE ETERNAL TRUTH

OF MARKDOWN

An exegesis of the most ubiquitous piece of code on the web.

i n t h e b e g i n n i n g was the Word, generated from the same plaintext. and note-taking apps built on its back.
and the Word was in plaintext, and the The people saw that in this form the Markdown is not just a piece of soft-
Word was in plaintext because plaintext Word was more flexible. It was good. ware. It’s also a markup language—
was the Way. It was good. The internet rejoiced and put Mark- it’s used to format plaintext, which
On the sixth day—I’m skipping ahead down in all the things. then appears the way you want it to
here—the internet was born. The Word This is where the real problems began. on, say, the internet. Markdown the
needed to be rewritten in HTML. Now markup language was designed to be
there were two Words. It was not good. “as easy-to-read and easy-to-write
On the eighth day, after a bit of rest, t o d ay, m a r k d o w n i s possibly the as is feasible,” according to creator
Markdown was born. Markdown made most ubiquitous piece of code on the John Gruber’s syntax guide. “A Mark-
it possible to bring forth the Word as web. Support for Markdown is embed- down-formatted document should be
HTML on the web, PDF in the library, ded in nearly every online text box publishable as-is, as plain text, without
LaTeX in the publishing house, even you’re likely to encounter, and there’s looking like it’s been marked up with
Microsoft Word DOC in the office—all an entire economy of mobile writing tags or formatting instructions.” →
0 1 4
HIS BIGGEST CHALLENGE?
DEADLINES.

OUR BIGGEST SOLUTION?

RELIABLE GROUND SHIPPING.

Turn shipping to your advantage.

Hit your delivery dates with the reliable
USPS Ground Advantage® service.
©2024 United States Postal Service®. Learn more at usps.com/reliable.
All rights reserved.
The Eagle Logo is among the many
trademarks of the U.S. Postal Service®. Simple. Affordable. Reliable.
For mailable items up to 70 lbs. Expected delivery in 2–5
business days. Packages going to certain places (including
Alaska, Hawaii, and offshore destinations), or containing
hazardous materials or live animals may receive slower service.
START 32.O9

throughout the Markdown documenta-

tion is on the syntax of Markdown, not—
say—the resulting HTML. His Perl script
does not support HTML class names or
This, I believe, is the cornerstone of IDs, for example, so you can’t add those
Markdown’s success (and why related to the generated HTML. By the logic of
projects from that era, like reStruc- the original Markdown script, if you want
turedText and Setext, remain largely complete control over the HTML output,
unknown): It looked at the world as it then you’d need to write in HTML.
actually was and built on the informal This situation is great for Markdown
conventions people were using. Mark- users: that is, writers. It’s less great for
down took common quirks of writing programmers. In fact, it drives them
plaintext emails or message-board crazy. Programmers do not like ambi-
posts—like wrapping a word in aster- guity. It goes against so much of what a b o u t a d e c a d e ago, there was an
isks to *emphasize* it—and extended programming is about. As a writer using effort to eliminate the ambiguities in
those formatting customs. It did not Markdown, I love that I can pick which- Markdown and bring it into line with
come in and declare an entirely new syn- ever particular version is best suited to coding dogma. Some programmers got
tax and ask people to adopt it. my needs. As a programmer, I hate that together and created CommonMark,
Of course, there are some important when I build something I have to make which makes the choices the original
assumptions behind Markdown. The big this same decision, which then affects Markdown script doesn’t and came up
one is that the ideal canonical format all the people who use my finished prod- with what its creators think is the One
for storing data long-term is plaintext. uct. Maybe I didn’t support some specific Right Way to Do It.
This is self-evident to any programmer. extension they were expecting because CommonMark offered comfort. It’s
Code is plaintext. Humans write in text— they’ve always used the same Mark- on Github. It has a discussion forum.
using text editors, some of which are down parser and assume that feature It seems to be an active project. I have
more than 40 years old—and we’ve even is available. never personally incorporated Common-
created entire operating systems (Unix) If this weren’t bad enough, there are Mark into a project, but its parsers are
built around the idea that the file system also some ambiguities in the syntax. what convert your Markdown to HTML
is a tree of plaintext files. Plaintext is For example, asterisks are used for ital- on such popular sites as Stack Overflow,
the alpha and the omega of digital files. ics when singular (*like this*) and bold Github, and Reddit. (To eliminate the
when doubled (**like this**). So far so asterisk ambiguity, for example, it pro-
good. But what should happen if you posed underscore for italics, asterisk for
i f i r s t e n c o u n t e r e d Markdown write **like* this**? Should that be ren- bold.) Presumably the developers behind
when Gruber posted something about dered like* this? Or maybe like this*? CommonMark consider it a success.
it to the BBEdit mailing list toward There’s no way to know; whoever is writ- But it’s not Markdown. Not in name,
the end of 2004. (At the time, most ing the parser has to make that decision. and I would argue not in spirit.
worthwhile discussions happened on What’s more, unlike most extremely suc- Around the time the CommonMark
BBSes or over email.) Like most people, cessful pieces of code, Markdown is not effort was happening, the software
I was able to memorize Markdown in publicly hosted on the code-sharing developer Dave Winer told me some-
an afternoon because we were already site du jour. It doesn’t have hundreds thing I still think about: Markdown
using half of it. of people contributing to it, and the belongs to everyone who uses it. This
I liked Markdown so much, I took the last time the original Perl script was is literally true because of the license.
parser and adapted it to spit out LaTeX, updated was 2004. This too rubs pro- But it also reminded me of the real point
a system for typesetting documents that grammers the wrong way. We’re a cliqu- of free software. We all have a say in
I could then convert to PDF and print. I ish bunch; things outside the clique are it: by using it, by adapting it, even by
had never written a line of Perl (the lan- viewed with suspicion. forking it.
guage Gruber wrote Markdown in), nor Whether Gruber intended it this way
had I ever attempted a regular expres- or not, Markdown does belong to every-
sion (which is the bulk of the code in the one, and there is no standard. I use a very
Markdown parser), but the code was out old version of Markdown for Python.
there, why not try? It worked. Gruber presumably still uses his Perl
Markdown became a core part of how script. Other people use other versions.
I wrote. The simplicity and flexibility It’s messy. It’s ambiguous. It’s human.
meant I would live the dream of write And this, in the end, is the Way.
once, run anywhere. It did lead to some
ambiguity, though. Gruber would prob- S C OT T G I L B E R T S O N is a senior writer
ably say this is by design. His emphasis for wired.

0 1 6
START

BY MATT GILES PHOTOGRAPH BY RETO STERCHI

SPIN CYCLE
To study tornadoes, it helps to wear
a skirt (and rocket launchers).

When the Dominator is about to intercept a tornado,

Timmer uses a two-prong system to anchor the vehicle.
Air compressors lower the car so its thick rubber skirt
nearly touches the ground, and spikes wedge 6 inches
into the earth to firmly prevent the vehicle from liftoff.

Timmer and ONeal have seen roughly 65 tornadoes in the

past six months. “It was a historic amount,” ONeal says. “A
lot of meteorological setups are busts, but every day we
drove out this year, we felt like we would see a tornado.”
 32.O9

r e e d t i m m e r h a s been chasing storms for more than two decades, since he intercepted his first
tornado in northern Oklahoma as an undergrad majoring in meteorology. During that time, Timmer,
who typically logs more than 50,000 miles on the road each year, has intercepted countless tornadoes,
each one helping to further his extreme-weather knowledge. “We still don’t completely know what hap-
pens inside a tornado,” says Edgar ONeal, a weather journalist who is Timmer’s chase partner. ¶ Enter
the Dominator. This is the third iteration of Timmer’s custom-built tornado mobile, which he initially
rolled out in the late 2000s. The current Dominator has the chassis of an F350 and weighs 10,000 pounds,
enabling it to withstand the debris, gorilla hail, and 150-mph winds that accompany the most powerful
of storms. According to Timmer, his “holy grail” is to drive the Dominator to within a quarter-mile of a
twister, then shoot a rocket loaded with sensors directly
into the heart of the tornado. Timmer has accomplished
this once: In May 2019, the rocket tracked the vortex’s
pressure drop and frigid air temperature. His team’s
hope in the coming year is to launch dozens of rockets
at the same time into the swirling updraft of a twist-
er’s “inflow notch.” But even if all those rockets fail,
the Dominator is full of its own sensors to capture
valuable scientific data. “That’s the whole point,” says
ONeal. “You can launch probes into a tornado, or you
can be the probe, and that’s the Dominator.”

The Dominator’s gull-wing doors weigh

800 pounds each and are coated in Kevlar-
based polyethylene, which is “basically a
bulletproof vest,” says Timmer.

0 1 9
START ↓
THE LAST GOOD PLACE There are still nice things on the internet.

TERMINAL
VELOCITY

i t wa s 2 a m at Denver International particular, he looked for segments: user-

THE PLACE Airport, and Jared Murphy was only a generated pathways, often with notable
Gate Change Gnar few hours into a planned 17-hour lay- features—a particularly hairy climb,
over. His options at this quiet hour, in for instance—where you can compete
THE PORTAL the expansive halls of the concourse, to have the best time and be crowned
Strava were pretty much nil. There would be no king or queen of the mountain.
nibbling on ahi tartare at the Crú Food Sitting in Terminal B, Murphy opened
THE PROMISE & Wine Bar for at least another seven up Strava on his phone and searched for
Race anyone, anytime hours, and the Rocky Mountain Choco- a segment at the airport. “Sure enough,”
late Factory’s signature caramel apples he recalls, the map showed a few of the
had long since been cached for the night. telltale orange icons.
Some may have looked upon this over- Even better: He was stoked to find
night interval as a welter of halogen-lit a segment right where he was. It was
misery. But Murphy, a competitive run- called Gate Change Gnar, a straight-
ner since high school, was an avid user away sprint of nearly 500 feet past the
of the exercise app Strava, and he fre- aforementioned fine-dining options and
quently checked the app while travel- eight gates. Murphy could see the cur-
ing to see where locals liked to run. In rent record holder had a time of 22 sec-

0 2 0
 BY DAVID HOWARD 32.O9

ILLUSTRATION BY MEGAN DU

onds. Respectable, but not blindingly favor: The crowds were minimal, and her
fast. Of course, the nation’s third-busiest mom was there to hold her backpack.
airport is normally full of shuffling trav- “The segment felt so much longer than
elers; sprinting carries a significant risk I thought it was gonna be,” she says. “I
of a high-speed pileup with some fraz- was dying.”
zled traveler towing an oversize roll- Westenfelder claimed the course
aboard. record—at 26 seconds—among women.
But given the hour—and that it was When the app notified her that someone
June 2020—Murphy was literally the broke it a couple of months later, she
only person in all of Terminal B. “I can’t didn’t mind. “Strava in general, it’s just a
resist a good segment when it’s there,” really good way to keep it fun,” she says.
he says. Even though he was taking some Murphy’s friends frequently blus-
time off with a lingering calf injury, he ter that they’re going to beat his time, Readout
headed to the starting line. but they keep showing up at the airport The world, quantified.
Strava serves as a communal hub for when it’s busy. And they fall short. Each
more than 100 million users. About 250 segment has a comments section where
of them have run Gate Change Gnar. It
started as part of someone’s “airport
walk” on October 10, 2012, a leisurely
users can throw down copious congrat-
ulatory fist bumps or trash-talk.
Murphy is quick to tell me that he too
96
86-second stroll. The leaderboard has considers the records a fun game, not Jettison bags left on the moon
by six Apollo missions. Nick-
gotten faster since then. Now someone something serious. Then again, last year named “poo bags,” each con-
gives the segment a go every few days. he noticed that someone had toppled his tains biological waste, like
The chance to win king of the mountain mark. When he looked closer, that run- urine and feces, from the 24
astronauts that achieved lunar
makes Strava a handy conduit for an ath- ner’s GPS data looked off—the route was touchdown.
lete’s amphetaminic energy output— bouncing all over the place, and coverage
even in the unlikeliest circumstances. is spotty in the airport—so he notified
That night in the dark Denver termi-
nal, Murphy, who happened to be wear-
ing a pair of Hokas, claimed the course
Strava to have it removed. “You know, I
want to make sure the leaderboard is as
accurate as possible,” he says, laughing.
$2.1M
Estimated total sales connected
record in 19 seconds. Then he bagged a And when he noticed that someone had to a West Coast bicycle theft
couple of others before heading to the topped his record again, this time with ring. The ring’s mastermind—
couches in Terminal A for some sleep. a working GPS, “I was like, well, I can’t the owner of a Mexican-based
architecture and construction
Tyler Swartz is another Strava user have that,” he says. So he went back. company—orchestrated the
who tackled the gnar. He’s the founder Murphy needed better running shoes theft of more than 600 bikes.
of Endorphins Running, a startup that to reclaim his title, so he laced up a pair
organizes group runs in a handful of of Sauconys after hopping off his flight.
American cities. During a March snow-
storm, at about 9:30 pm, he sprinted
This time he ran it in 16 seconds (for
those keeping track). “But,” he says, 4,000m
the segment half a dozen times after “they’re not fast shoes.” The depth at which Stockton
he missed a connecting flight. It was On April 10, 2024, a new record holder Rush, the CEO of OceanGate,
READOUT SOURCES: NASA HISTORY OFFICE; BIKE INDEX; OCEANGATE; WIRED

impromptu entertainment for an other- claimed to have ripped off the run in 10 was advised that his Titan
submersible would be at “high
wise grumpy crowd. “I was high-fiving seconds. That time is so fast, Murphy risk of a significant failure.”
people,” he says. “There were little kids says, it must be the result of glitchy data. The sub is believed to have
running with me. Some people recog- He’s OK with it either way. These days imploded around 3,500 meters.
READOUT ILLUSTRATION: ANJALI NAIR; GETTY IMAGES

nized me from TikTok.” He has more he no longer has long layovers in Denver
than 43,000 followers. An Instagram
reel of his sprints has 380,000 views.
and is more likely to fly through Las
Vegas. The good news: There are seg- 700
Elsa Westenfelder, an 18-year-old ments on the Strip. The number of longevity start-
cyclo-cross competitor from Missoula, ups that have been founded,
Montana, discovered Gate Change Gnar is working on a book
D AV I D H O W A R D and funded with billions of
dollars, to better understand
while heading home last year on spring about a notorious Louisiana hit man and aging and how to alter the pro-
break. She identified two factors in her the FBI agent who pursued him. cess of cellular aging.
START ↓
YOUR NEXT JOB A WIRED guide to work in the future.

COOLER
HEADS w h e n a t o r n a d o comes through,
you can see houses are ruined. With
heat the damage is not as visible. You
The deadliest environmental threat to city see it in the numbers. Everyone’s like
“dry heat this” and “dry heat that,” but
dwellers worldwide isn’t earthquakes, tor-
it’s dangerous.
nadoes, flooding, or fire. It’s heat. In Phoenix, I’m constantly trying to keep my body
ready for those higher temperatures.
Arizona, where almost 400 people died from
I drink electrolytes 24/7, year round.
heat exposure last year—and where falling I work outdoors or I hike during our
shoulder seasons to get ready. If you
on the pavement can leave a third-degree
slowly acclimatize yourself, the hope is
burn—the question isn’t whether this sum- that when it does hit those triple digits,
it won’t affect you too badly. And then
mer’s temperatures will kill people, it’s
when the summer is here, I make sure
how many. I’m wearing appropriate clothing, I’m
not taking in too much caffeine. I’m try-
The answer hinges, in part, on a small team
ing to get cool. I’m trying to keep my vol-
the city created in 2021 to deliver aid during unteers cool. I call myself Mama Heat.
I’m always asking people, have you been
heat emergencies: handing out supplies,
drinking water? They say they’re fine.
opening relief centers, and even driving No, you need to drink water, you need to
sit down for a moment, you’ve got to get
a bus to bring cool air to where it’s most
in the shade. If you start getting dizzy or
needed. The team is also trying to make nauseous or if you stop sweating, I need
you to go get some AC. Which is why we
Phoenix cooler over the long haul by finding
set up cooling centers around the city.
space for shade trees—which is a major chal- They’re open from May to September.
We’re constantly adding in new hydra-
lenge in the city center. As the adage goes,
tion stations and cooling centers, based
the best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. on where the need is.
I want to be where I know the prob-
So in the meantime, there’s triage.
lem is. If you’re out here battling the
Here, one member of the city’s Heat heat, I’m going to be out here battling the
heat with you. And we’re going to work
Response and Mitigation Office tells wired
through this together and try to get you
what it’s like to go out on the streets day somewhere safe. We use 911 data to find
out where the most vulnerable popula-
after day in temperatures that reach 110
tions are. We know that those experienc-
degrees or higher. ing homelessness are at a greater risk.
We see high numbers for those who are
GETTY IMAGES

elderly also. And we work very closely

with our airport and our communica-

0 2 2
 32.O9

ILLUSTRATION BY JOHANNA GOODMAN

calls were because it was close to a hos-

pital. You need to be able to pivot on a
dime. I’ll be honest, we had cooling cen-
ters previously that were just a little too
far for people to get to. So we brought
the cooling bus to them.
I think building out tree shade and
cool spaces is important for a more liv-
able, sustainable Phoenix. That’s what
our office’s mitigation team works on:
longer-term strategies for shade, plant-
ing trees. But what I have to focus on is,
how am I keeping someone safe? Plant-
ing more trees is amazing, but that’s not
going to save you today. And so that’s
where I come in.
I have people in tears thanking me,
because they see me out there every sin-
gle day. You know, I’m not going to give
up on you. It’s a life-or-death situation
sometimes for these people. It might
sound a little dramatic, but a bottle of
water in someone’s hand is life-saving.
And then there are people that I get into
a vehicle with our Office of Homeless
Solutions, and now they’re gonna go
into temporary housing. If we could
make more affordable housing, then I
wouldn’t be needed.
My favorite part of the day is going
down to the warehouse where we keep
the heat kits. I turn on some music, I get
into a zone, and start making kits. We
put hats in there, sunscreen, cooling
towels, and SPF liquid chapstick,
tions team to make sure that our visi- concrete, living in the urban heat island because tube chapstick will melt. Our
tors know, hey, your body’s probably not effect, you’re baking in that, whether wide-brim hats are extremely popular.
acclimatized to this, you’re not ready for it’s 90, 100, or 115. We need to have the People love the Hydro Flasks. We pro-
this. These are the symptoms that you same resources available. So we went vide shoes to people as they need it,
may experience. back to leadership and said we need to because we see a lot of people out there
What’s different this year is, we’re one have extended hours. in socks or bare feet. I know those kits
of the first cities to offer overnight cool- A lot of it is trial and error, which can are gonna go out the door and immedi-
ing centers. Last year most of our cool- be challenging. I might look at the data ately serve somebody who’s in need. I
ing centers closed at 5 or 6 pm, but that and say, OK, I see a lot of 911 calls hap- love to do that.
didn’t mean the heat was turning off. We pening over here, I’m gonna go do out-
were seeing high numbers of 911 calls reach. And so I go over there, and there’s As told to C A M I L L E B RO M L E Y , a writer
after hours. If you’re out there on the actually not a lot of need. It turns out the and editor based in New York.
 START 32.O9

BY ISABEL FRASER

PIECE OF
MIND
This diagram maps 1 cubic
millimeter of the brain—but its
unprecedented clarity deepens
the mysteries of cognition.

a l t h o u g h t h i s i m a g e wouldn’t
look out of place on a gallery wall along-
side other splashy works of abstract
art, it represents something very real: a
1-cubic-millimeter chunk of a woman’s
brain, removed during a procedure to
treat her for epilepsy. Researchers at
Harvard University stained the sam-
ple with heavy metals, embedded it in
resin, cut it into slices approximately
34 nanometers thick, then scanned
each slice with an electron micro-
scope. Machine-learning experts at Goo-
gle then used AI to turn the 2D images
into a 3D interactive “cell atlas.” Even
this small fraction of the 3D reconstruc-
tion is astonishing in its detail, reveal-
IMAGE: GOOGLE RESEARCH & LICHTMAN LAB (HARVARD UNIVERSITY). RENDERED BY DANIEL BERGER (HARVARD UNIVERSITY)

ing an estimated 57,000 cells and 150

million synapses. It shows cells that
unexpectedly wrap around themselves,
pairs of neurons that seem like mir-
ror reflections of each other, and egg-
shaped structures that, according to
the researchers, defy categorization.
“If we map things at a very high res-
olution, see all the connections between
different neurons, and analyze that at a
large scale, we may be able to identify
rules of wiring,” says Daniel Berger, one
of the project’s lead researchers. “From
this we may be able to make models that
mechanistically explain how thinking
works or memory is stored.”

I S A B E L F R A S E R is wired’s 2024
summer intern. She writes about politics
and technology.

0 2 5
GEAR BY CHRIS HASLAM

ELECTRIC
DREAMS
It’s time for WIRED to
celebrate the most
electrifying new
EVs. Even with a
few hybrid vehicles
in the mix, there’s
plenty to excite us.
 32.O9

Alpine A290
The French brand’s first new car in seven years, the A290 is
basically a sportified Renault 5—but with one enhancement
you probably won’t find anywhere else. Sure, there’s a 217-
hp motor and boosted arches to fit those 21-inch wheels, but
we’re most excited by the built-in series of 36 video-game-
like “missions” that measure and rank driver skill. $TBD

Rivian R3X
The first true performance offering from the California upstart
Rivian has an enviable mix of power, range, looks, and off-
road capabilities—that is if, like us, you are obsessed with the
hot hatches of the ’80s and ’90s. True, those distinctive light
clusters have strong droid energy, but this midsize crossover
promises to ruffle some EV feathers. It’s powered by a high-
performance tri-motor powertrain, with two motors on the
rear axle and one on the front, and its as-yet-undisclosed
horsepower could edge toward 1,000. There’s also a new, 4695
cell battery with more than 300 miles of range, impressive
sub-three-second zero-to-60 acceleration, and DC fast
charging that promises top-ups from 10 to 80 percent in less
than 30 minutes. That’s just enough time for a refreshing
snooze on the fold-flat seats. $TBD

Powered by Everrati
British EV-conversion pioneers Everrati specialize in retro-electrification
and concours-level restorations of classics like the 1970s Porsche 911 ST.
But now luxury and small-batch automakers can go EV with ease thanks
to Powered by Everrati, a scalable powertrain system with a range of 150
to 200 miles, regenerative braking, and 80-kilowatt fast charging.

Focal ISUB BMW 8 Scania Electric Truck

Focal has a roaring trade in OK, it’s not your average EV,
COURTESY RIVIAN, RENAULT, EVERRATI, FOCAL, SCANIA

affordable plug-and-play but electric trucks will soon be

car stereo components. This a more common sight. Scania’s
year, it has expanded its BMW EV trucks can run for 323 miles
and Mini speaker line with an carrying up to 29 metric tons,
8-inch, 180-watt neodymium and up to 198 miles lugging 64
subwoofer. Installing this bass- metric tons gross train weight.
booster is easy. Just swap it into Its Swedish-built batteries
your existing system; there are can be charged in less than 85
no wires to cut. $255 minutes at 375 kilowatts. $POA

0 2 7
GEAR AUTOPIA EV 32.O9

Nio Onvo L60

Camping in your car is cramped and uncomfortable. But EV
brands are convinced it’s the future, and they’re incorporating
outdoors-friendly modular seating, plus entertainment and
power-management options. Chinese EV brand Nio has
gone all in with its shamelessly Tesla-esque Onvo (that’s “On
Voyage”), which, besides folding its seats flat to accommodate
a mattress in Camping King mode, has configurations that
include Video Room, complete with footrests and a 17.2-inch
central screen, and Lunch Room, with a handy serving table.
$30,235

Snuuzu
Alternatively, if you are determined to make the most of
Tesla’s Camp mode, the Snuuzu double bed is specifically
made to fit the rear of your Tesla Model Y or Model 3. This
self-inflating (and deflating), self-leveling, 80- by 51-inch
mattress features an organic Lyocell topper and a memory
foam layer. Once you’ve enjoyed a decent nap, it squishes
down to a subtrunk-friendly size for easy storage. $630

Karoo Camper
At 16 feet long and just over 1,600 pounds,
this EV trailer can be towed by a regular car
and offers a versatile interior accessed via
a panoramic side door. It sleeps two adults
and two kids; one bed is stowed neatly
in the ceiling, the other converts into
general seating. You’ll also find a built-in
refrigerator, a compact kitchen that slides
out for alfresco meal prep, and a bathroom
with a shower, toilet, and clothes rack. It’s
all powered by roof-mounted solar panels
and an integral 6-kWh lithium-ion battery,
which can also charge your ebikes.
$32,400 and up

Traxxas XRT Ultimate

(Scale 1:6)
A far cry from the radio-controlled
cars of old that couldn’t outrun
a bike, the XRT Ultimate has a
blistering 60-mph top speed.
COURTESY NIO, SNUUZU, TRAXXAS, PEUGEOT

The shaft-driven 4WD is powered

by a 1,275-kV motor, while the
aluminum supported chassis,
drivetrain, and suspension ensure
it can handle the toughest terrain.
$1,500
31.4 inches

0 2 8
GEAR AUTOPIA EV 32.O9

DAB 1a
Built in Peugeot’s historic Beaulieu-Mandeure factory in France
(Peugeot acquired DAB in 2023), the 1a is a sleek, 276-pound electric
motorcycle with 11 kW of nominal power and 25.5 kW of peak power.
The French-made 72-volt battery is repairable, replaceable, and
upgradable and offers a 93-mile range. Luxe touches include Alcantara
upholstery on the seat, 17-inch spoked wheels with Pirelli Diablo Rosso
tires, and a front fender made of upcycled Airbus carbon. $16,250
 Porsche 911 Carrera GTS
The 911 has gone hybrid (sort of) with the new power without delay, while the electrically driven
“992.2” and its 3.6-liter combustion engine in turbocharger boosts performance and makes the
addition to two electric motors. Dubbed the throttle more responsive. The battery is just 1.9
T-Hybrid system, one motor on the PDK gearbox kWh—but at least you still get to enjoy that Porsche
offers higher torque at lower speeds, delivering vroom! $150,900 and up

Kia EV3 GT-Line Lambretta Elettra

Finally, an affordable EV we Synonymous with 1940s Euro-chic and British 1960s Mods,
actually want to drive! Standard Lambretta has struggled to escape the postwar nostalgia tag. But
and Long Range models use while the silhouette of its forthcoming EV scooter harks back to
one 198-hp motor and a battery those times, up close it’s all urban futurism. The Elettra has a 4.6-
of either 58.3-kWh capacity kWh lithium battery that pushes an 11-kW electric motor to a top
(255 miles of range) or 81.4 speed of 68 mph. The angular design is also littered with safety-
kWh (372 miles). Top speed first (but cool AF) LEDs, with white beams spilling onto the road and
is a breezy 106 mph. Inside, a illuminating the path ahead. $TBD
30-inch widescreen display,
lane-assist tech, an AI-powered
voice assistant, vehicle-to-load
charging, and a cabin crafted
from sustainable materials
make it feel anything but
budget. $38,400 and up

Electrogenic DeLorean DMC-12 Conversion Kit

There are maybe 5,000 DeLorean DMC-12s still in the world, and if one of the
two planned, currently-squabbling-over-the-name, all-electric iterations
don’t come to fruition, there’s another way to bring this iconic car, ahem, back
to the future. UK-based Electrogenic’s electrification kit drops a 160-kW motor
straight onto the existing engine mounts and swaps the fuel tank for a 42-kWh
battery. This Doc Brown–level tinkering creates a CCS rapid-charging vehicle
that goes from zero to 60 mph in five seconds—and all without affecting the
handling of the car or its iconic outward appearance. $83,000
 AUTOPIA EV 32.O9

Mercedes Benz Electric G-Class G580 With EQ Technology

From Arnold Schwarzenegger to the Pope via Britney Spears, the G-Wagon
is a celebrity stalwart. Famed for its power and pomposity, it’s now debuting
as an EV with four electric motors that pump out a combined 587 hp, as well
as 200-kW charging for the 116-kWh battery. This puts it on a par with its ICE
equivalents, with gonzo acceleration and a 112-mph top speed. But it’s the
tanklike steering that sets it apart from previous models; the wagon can spin
360 degrees, pivot in place, and drive in supertight circles. $168,000
COURTESY PORSCHE, KIA, LAMBRETTA, DELOREAN, MERCEDES

0 3 1
A WORLD WITHOUT JOURNALISM
IS A WORLD WITHOUT TRUTH
The Committee to Protect Journalists is an independent, nonprofit organization that
promotes press freedom worldwide. Show your support for the right of all journalists to
report the news safely and without fear of reprisal. Scan the QR code to get involved.
 FEATURES 32.O9

PHOTOGRAPH BY DAMIEN MALONEY

MAKEUP BY LUCA MACDOUGALL

0 3 3
by SANDRA UPSON
 orates. The atmosphere heats up. The water that’s left in the AMOC is now
colder and saltier—which is to say, it’s much denser than the surrounding
water. And if you’re a cod swimming west of Iceland, you’re in for an aston-
ishing show. Here the heavy AMOC water doesn’t merely sink, it plummets
nearly 3 kilometers down. (Two miles!) Some 3 million cubic meters of water
fall per second, in what amounts to the world’s most record-smashing,

OFF invisible waterfall. This cold river joins up

with other falling water—more underwater
cataracts—and crawls through the depths

THE of the ocean, following the topography of

the seabed, all the way to Antarctica. The
flow intersects other currents, things get

SOUTHWEST messy, and eventually the current rises to

the surface near South America and con-
tinues its loop.
TIP OF ICELAND, YOU’LL FIND WHAT’S OFTEN The big takeaway is a Europe that’s
called a “marginal” body of water. This part of the Atlan- cozier than geography says it should be.
tic, the Irminger Sea, is one of the stormiest places in the That warm gift—the one where the AMOC
northern hemisphere. On Google Maps it gets three stars: dumps much of its heat near Iceland—
“very windy,” says one review. It’s also where something helps, for example, the Norwegian city of
rather strange is happening. As the rest of the planet has Tromsø to enjoy temperatures as warm as
warmed since the 20th century—less in the tropics, more –1 degree Celsius in late January, while, at
near the poles—temperatures in this patch of ocean have the same latitude in Canada, Cambridge
hardly budged. In some years they’ve even cooled. If you Bay often gets down to –34 degrees Celsius
get a thrill from spooky maps, check out one that com- (or 30 degrees Fahrenheit and –30 degrees
pares the average temperatures in the late 19th century Fahrenheit, respectively). The heat deliv-
with those of the 2010s. All of the planet is quilted in ery is also why the northern hemisphere
pink and red, the familiar colors of climate change. But is a few degrees warmer than the south-
in the North Atlantic, there’s one freak splotch of blue. ern hemisphere and why Earth’s warm-
If global warming were a blanket, the Irminger Sea and est latitude is (on average) not the point
its neighboring waters are where the moths ate through. closest to the sun—the equator—but 5
Scientists call it the warming hole. degrees north of it.
The warming hole could be a very big problem. That’s But, that warming hole. This spot isn’t
because it’s a sign that something may be wrong with feeling the full kapow of rising global tem-
the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation. The peratures because, in recent years, less
AMOC is the main current system that crisscrosses the heat has been arriving from the tropics.
ocean. It flows like a big river up, down, and across the Which means the currents must be slow-
two hemispheres. All that moving water performs an ing. By some calculations, the AMOC’s
amazing service—it’s basically a supremely massive, flow has weakened by 15 percent since
1-petawatt heat pump for the North Atlantic. the middle of the 20th century. Looking
The mega-current hauls warm, salty surface water back further, it is the weakest it has been
from the tropics near the Americas up to northern in a millennium.
Europe. There the warm water meets cold air and evap- Which is alarming. To be sure, the worry
is not that the AMOC is on the verge of a
complete stop. The fear is that it will cross
Siblings and a pivotal threshold, and then begin a decline that is unstoppable.
scientists Peter At that point, it would take many decades for the currents to grind to a
Ditlevsen and halt. Even so, a shutdown would trigger, as one paper put it, “a profound
GETTY IMAGES (OCEAN); SHUTTERSTOCK (CARTOGRAPHY)

Susanne Ditlevsen global-scale reorganization” in Earth’s climate systems. The effects would
published their be devastating—plunging northern Europe into a deep cold spell, crushing
AMOC paper in July food systems, condemning big regions to drought. It’s so, so bad.
of 2O23. Their It follows, then, that you’d wonder how close we humans are to that
findings startled threshold. Perhaps you’d heard about the AMOC’s frailty; the shutdown
the world. threat; maybe even the decades of fighting among scientists as they try
to fathom this gigantic, interconnected, barely understood current. But
it was only rather recently that someone dared to go right to the core and
ask: How much time do we have left before the AMOC breaks?

0 3 6 PHOTOGRAPHS BY EMILIE LÆRKE

 “ Y O U M I G H T W A N T T O G R A B Y O U R C O A T,” P E T E R
Ditlevsen says as he strides across his office at the Niels
Bohr Institute, where the University of Copenhagen
houses its climate researchers. We’re headed to a walk-in
freezer in the basement. Dressed in a navy sport coat
and jeans, he plucks his own jacket off a black metal coat
stand and throws it on. Tall, thin, with short white hair
and a lilt to his speech, Ditlevsen is a climate physicist
who tried to do something bold. Some might even say
brash. He tried to answer the big AMOC question, the
“how much time” one. And it got him into a bit of trouble.
Ditlevsen started out in pure physics—first string the-
ory, then solid-state physics. Then, when Danish academic
jobs proved scarce, he took a gig at the Danish weather
office in Copenhagen. He’d spread printouts across his
desk to look busy and secretly binge-read meteorology
textbooks. When he finally found a job at the University
of Copenhagen, it was in a group studying Greenland
ice cores—cylinders up to 3 kilometers long that were
drilled and extracted from glaciers. The discipline was a
touch random, perhaps, coming from solid-state physics.
But the cores, they were magic, like finding the Rosetta
stone in a popsicle.
I scurry after Ditlevsen down a hall and two flights of
stairs. This building, one of many belonging to the insti-
tute, opened in 1932 as a research lab linked to the Carls-
berg brewing company. The beer folks were big on science
and invented the pH scale. (“You notice this?” Ditlevsen
asks, pointing at the ornate metalwork in the staircase
railings—the company’s logo, which it adopted in the timeters long. Along the opposite wall is a
19th century as a symbol of luck. Peering at the metal’s metal workbench with ice-cutting tools.
loops and bends, I spot it: a swastika. History in filigree.) Without thinking, I rest my hand on it. My
We head down a narrow basement hallway past old skin sticks to the metal.
cabinets and a giant, dusty globe. Ditlevsen pulls open This freezer holds a tiny subset of the
the heavy metal door of a walk-in freezer, and the air, at university’s massive ice core collection.
–20 degrees Celsius, slaps me in the face. On the right are It’s here thanks in large part to a geophys-
shelves containing large polystyrene boxes. Inside them icist named Willi Dansgaard, who, when he
are chunks of ice cores, cut into segments about 55 cen- arrived at the University of Copenhagen,
installed a mass spectrometer. One day
in June 1952—in what Dansgaard later
Peter found an described as “a minor, but to me, fateful miracle”—an epic downpour got
old yellowed map him pondering the composition of rain. He set out an empty beer bottle on
in the basement his lawn and put a funnel in it. The next day a warm front passed through
of the university and he brought out pots and pitchers. When he analyzed his samples with
and put it up in the mass spectrometer, he saw that rain from warmer clouds contained
his office. more of the isotope oxygen-18 than rain from higher, colder clouds. A nice
observation, but the real leap came when he started thinking about young
and old water. He realized he could get a glimpse of the climate at different
moments in history. All he had to do was look at oxygen-18 levels: More of it
meant warmer weather, less meant chillier. The best place to find old water,
of course, is inside a glacier. When Dansgaard finally got his hands on his first
ice core, he cracked open a much earlier chapter of Earth’s climate history.
He unlocked a trove of information—and work—for physicists like Ditlevsen
who could devote their careers to figuring out what the ice could tell us.
Ditlevsen lifts plastic-wrapped ice segments one by one and sets them
down with a light thud on the lid of another polystyrene box. “Aha, see here!”
he says, holding up one cylinder. Gray stripes divide clean white. “Those are
melt layers,” he says. For the gray to form, the temperatures must have gone

0 3 8
 like balmy spring. The heat blast wasn’t a fluke—abrupt,
giant swings had happened 25 times. Cooling events
took a bit longer but were still swift. As they worked,
scientists realized that the data in the ice was big, big
news: Greenland was revealing that the climate changes
not only gradually but also “in great leaps,” as the late
climate scientist Wallace Broecker wrote in 1987. Earth
isn’t so steady and reliable, as everyone assumed. Its cli-
mate has in fact been unstable throughout the millennia.
What triggered the jumps? As Broecker guessed in
the late ’80s and (after 30-some years of debate) many
scientists now agree: abrupt, dramatic changes in the
Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation.
That the climate could change violently had huge
implications. As more carbon was being released into the
atmosphere, Broecker and other scientists were getting
increasingly anxious that it wasn’t degrading the planet
in only the steady, humdrum, “up goes the heat” kind of
way. They worried that humans were pushing the cli-
mate toward a big jump. “Our climate system has proven
it can do very strange things,” he wrote in 1997. “We’re
entering dangerous territory and provoking an ornery
beast.” What remained was a very important question:
Could a leap be predicted?
In the 1990s, Ditlevsen found plain old climate change
kind of dull, but this—this was exciting. He started ana-
lyzing the ice core record in search of warning signs of a
coming jump. He was hunting for patterns that preceded
those 25 cataclysms—signatures in the oxygen-18 con-
above zero: “Very unusual for Greenland.” An ice core tent, say, or in calcium. Anything that reliably preceded
from this region can contain an almost annual, sometimes an abrupt change. But the hints, if they existed at all, were
even monthly, record of temperatures stretching back as easy to miss. Finding them was ultimately a problem of
far as 130,000 years. Each core, an ancient weather sta- statistics—what’s a real signal, what’s mere noise. At
tion that silently recorded dust storms, wildfires, heat times, Ditlevsen enlisted his dad, a math and engineering
waves, and cold snaps for a thousand centuries. Using professor at another Danish university. (The father-son
the layers, “you can count your way through the ice,” pair cowrote a paper in 2009 on rapid climate shifts.) In
Ditlevsen says. Not only by eyeballing the melt bands, all those years, Ditlevsen never found an early-warning
but with more precise measurements—oxygen isotopes, sign in the ice core data.
salinity, dust particles, more. All tiny samples of long- But elsewhere around the planet, scientists were amass-
ago atmospheres and the world in which they belonged. ing evidence that specific parts of the climate system were
It was in the 1970s, as Dansgaard and others studied nearing dangerous thresholds and big transitions of their
the ancient ice, that they made a wild, monumental dis- own: the melting of the Greenland ice sheets (7 meters of
covery. In the last glacial period, Greenland warmed up sea level rise) and the Antarctic ice sheets (another 60
to 16 degrees Celsius (61 degrees Fahrenheit) in a mere 50 meters), the death of the Amazon rainforest (incalcula-
years. That’s an astonishing, rapid jump, like a normally ble loss of biodiversity), the catastrophic disruption of
icy winter in Chicago or Vladivostok suddenly feeling monsoons (droughts affecting billions of people).
The International Panel on Climate Change, the 200-
or-so grand arbiters of the climate canon, was devoting
more pages in its reports to this type of risk. And scien-
tists were converging around language for what they
were seeing. They called the thresholds “tipping points.”

TIPPING POINTS ARE ABSOLUTELY EVERYWHERE.

Throw water on a fire, and the flames will shrink but
recover. Dump enough water on and you’ll cross a thresh-
old and snuff it out. Tip a chair and it’ll wobble before
settling back onto its four feet. Push harder, and it topples. Birth is a tipping
point. So is death.
Once you’ve pushed a system to its tipping point, you’ve removed all brakes.
No exit. As one 500-page report recently put it, climate tipping points “pose
some of the gravest threats faced by humanity.” Crossing one, the report goes
on, “will severely damage our planet’s life-support systems and threaten the
stability of our societies.”
In 2019 the European Union launched a project on climate tipping points.
Fifty-some scientists from 15 countries got involved. One big goal: to assess
the near-future risk of, say, an AMOC shutdown or the Amazon turning into a
savanna. Ditlevsen signed on as the project’s leader. His part-
ner was Niklas Boers, a climate physicist at the Technical Uni-
versity of Munich in Germany. and jotted down readings, either out of scientific
Back in his PhD days, Boers had been pursuing a pure math curiosity or as a potential navigational aid—to
degree before ditching it—“I don’t want to say it was meaning- identify a useful current or get a warning of ice-
less, but I wasn’t interested,” he says. The climate, though, had bergs ahead. They collected their data in many
real stakes. “The whole climate system is so complex that it’s different places, depths, times of day. They also
where the beauty of math, of probability theory and dynam- used all manner of buckets, thermometers, and
ical systems and complexity theory, can really play out.” He units of measurement (Centigrade, Fahrenheit,
had been investigating early warning signs in a variety of Réaumur). The data was a mess. A century later
datasets, and he decided to dig into the AMOC. a consortium of seafaring nations standardized
Much as you have a natural walking speed, the AMOC has a the method of measurement. But it was only in
preferred flow rate. It’s measured in Sverdrups, named after the 1970s, when instrument-packed drifting
the Norwegian oceanographer Harald Sverdrup, who in the buoys and weather satellites were deployed,
first half of the 20th century modernized the study of oceans that the temperatures of the seas were system-
with a sweeping textbook and curriculum. The rate varies by atically recorded.
location, but these days at a latitude of 26 degrees north, the Scientists and historians have spent decades
flow is 17 Sverdrups, or 17 million cubic meters per second. The cleaning and organizing all that data. Other
Sverdrups can swing up or down, but over time the flow returns researchers then took that information—hun-
to that preferred rate. When a system approaches a tipping dreds of thousands of temperature readings (and
point, though, the character of the fluctuations changes. With other measurements, namely salinity)—and
the AMOC, you might see the flow rate increasingly struggle used them to compute proxies for the AMOC’s
to regain its equilibrium. The rate might wander farther and strength. They called these measurements
farther away from the comfy baseline. And the system might “fingerprints.”
take longer to settle back into its routine state. These features— When Boers sat down with the data, in 2020,
the greater meandering, the slower return to home base—are he picked eight fingerprints from earlier research
an obsession of tipping-point mathematicians. If you were to and tried to spot meaningful changes in the pat-
plot the data for a system that’s about to tip, you’d see the data terns of temperatures and salinities over time.
points first follow a nice, predictable path; then the path gets He wrote up his results in a 2021 paper. In it, all
jittery, and then it goes off on wide, whiplashing swings. The eight fingerprints showed the same thing: The
system is becoming less stable, taking longer to recover. You AMOC was becoming less stable and looked to
can almost feel sorry for it. You can sense a sort of sickness. be “close to a critical transition.”
For people like Boers and Ditlevsen, though, there’s a prob- Ditlevsen, though, wasn’t sold on Boers’ meth-
lem: Continuous measurements of the AMOC’s flow rate go back ods. He felt Boers was using a statistical tool
to only 2004, when scientists installed monitoring stations at that was unnecessarily weak. Ditlevsen believed
sea. That’s nowhere near enough time for researchers to see, you could safely make more assumptions about
in the data, what the AMOC is truly up to. So Boers decided to the AMOC, use more powerful statistical tools,
use something AMOC-adjacent, which also happened to be the and see more clearly how the giant current was
only long-term dataset that has anything to do with the Atlan- changing. Boers didn’t like the trade-off, because
tic Ocean. He’d use sea surface temperatures. an assumption can of course be wrong. They
In 1749, an English slave trader who was sailing off the west- clashed. Ditlevsen decided to take his own whack
ern coast of Africa lowered a special bucket with valves and a at the data.
thermometer into the water. He did this again and again, haul-
ing up the bucket and noting the depths of the sample and the
water’s temperature. He was surprised to find that deep water
was always cold. His heat-weary crew immediately used the IN 2021, DITLEVSEN WAS TEACHING HIS
deep water to take baths and cool their drinks. From then on, classes online and living on a plot of land in the
other voyagers sporadically dropped buckets into the Atlantic Danish countryside, on the northern coast of
Zealand—another person who fled big-city she says, “I got some ideas.”
living when the pandemic flared up. “We all Susanne is a statistics professor and, like her brother, also works
thought we’d be the new Newton,” he recalls. at the University of Copenhagen. Their offices are a five-minute
The famous mathematician had, during the bike ride apart. They sometimes meet for lunch at the café in
Great Plague of 1665, retreated to the country Susanne’s building. She has striking blue eyes, thick, wavy white
and had his annus mirabilis, in which he basi- hair, and a strong voice that commands the room. After finishing
cally discovered gravity, calculus, and optics. high school in their hometown north of Copenhagen, Susanne
Ditlevsen, though, was building a house. studied acting. She fell in love with a Spanish theater director
He drew up the plans and got the materials. and left for Spain. “She ran off, like in the movies where the cir-
Giant panes of glass, skylights, tawny wood sid- cus comes through town,” her brother recalls. Susanne spent 10
ing. He worked on it all year, largely alone, in a years performing in plays across the country. She also had a baby.
country with an annual average of 170 days of It wasn’t long after that she realized she wasn’t living the life she
rain. (“You really want to get the roof up,” he wanted. “I was sitting and breastfeeding, and I started thinking, I
says.) As he measured, sawed, sanded, and ham- don’t want to do this for the rest of my life,” she says. She wanted
mered, he also thought about tipping points. to use her brain more. She’d always liked math, she was good at
He coded up a quick model of an AMOC-style it, so now she figured she’d do some for fun.
system, using math he felt was more useful than She signed up for distance classes from a school in Spain. “I was
what Boers had chosen. He would take it as a traveling on the tour bus with my math books,” she says. For five
given that the AMOC was a certain type of tip- years she worked as an actor, took care of her son, and studied. She
ping system. Then, knowing that these kinds of divorced the Spanish director and later returned to Copenhagen,
tipping systems follow certain universal rules, intent on earning her doctorate and being close to her mother, a
he could generate artificial data to fill in the retired schoolteacher. She got into a biostatistics graduate program
future. That would predict the date at which at the University of Copenhagen and in 2005 joined the faculty. She
the system would tip. He plugged in the water collaborated with neuroscientists and ecologists and spent 12 years
temperatures and let the code run. Now here studying narwhals. And she cowrote a paper with their father.
he was, staring at a rather remarkable number. While Peter was obsessing over tipping points, Susanne was on
2057. the cusp of a breakthrough. Nothing to do with narwhals or neurons.
The year when the AMOC might tip. A year It was pure stats. She had figured out a better way to make sense of
so close you can almost grasp it. You can plug it systems with a lot of randomness, that don’t follow straight lines,
into a retirement calculator. Or schedule-send and where the underlying rules are not well understood.
an email. Susanne realized that she could apply her method to her brother’s
Ditlevsen felt vaguely annoyed. The IPCC problems. “A tipping point, what is that? It’s something strongly
had just come out with a report that said the nonlinear. It is exactly that!” she says. The system has one way of
AMOC was “very unlikely” to shut down before behaving until, fwoop, suddenly it’s very different. “It is the most
2100. That time horizon gave people room to nonlinear thing you can even imagine.” To use her method, you had
breathe, figure things out, chart a different to make a few more assumptions about how the AMOC behaved,
course. Ditlevsen had been hoping to confirm the sure, but the payoff could be great. Using the temperature record,
panel’s estimate. How irritating that he hadn’t. she could estimate some basic parameters of how the world worked
One day, he gave an online talk on how to before humans started messing with its climate, and some for after
spot early warning signs in climate data. He the AMOC started looking sick, including the time of tipping. Peter
sent a link to his sister, Susanne Ditlevsen— suggested that they try out her method. They each wrote up some
four years younger, and with whom he grew code—he using Matlab and she in R—to test the technique.
up playing chess—and suggested she might The siblings spent two years refining their approach, doing more
find it interesting. While watching the video, tests. Across a thousand runs, the model cranked through the tem-
perature data and settled on a year. Sometimes
the model spat out later dates. Sometimes ear-
lier. The two scientists made a plot of the num-
bers and a neat cluster emerged. Yes—2057.
But that’s just the middle point: In 95 percent
of the model’s simulations, the AMOC tipped
sometime between 2025 and 2095.
They were excited. Their statistical method
was holding up. They got their paper ready
for publication. Peter came up with the title,
“Warning of a Forthcoming Collapse of the
Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation.”
Nice and direct.
They didn’t think that much about the audac-

0 4 1
 000

Scientists cut months since their paper came out, and they’re still gobsmacked.
off small “We did not even think nonscientists would ever see our paper,”
samples of ice she said. Nature Communications is a mid-tier journal and not to be
cores, melt them, confused with Nature, perhaps the most prestigious journal in the
and examine the world. But “Warning of a Forthcoming Collapse” has been viewed
water for clues more times than any other paper in either journal in 2023. By a lot.
to ancient Journalists besieged them with emails and phone calls. They
climate flips. gave interviews eight hours a day. “We were completely over-
whelmed by all the media attention, and then of course from all the
weirdos,” Susanne recalls. Some headlines claimed
that the AMOC (or as The Guardian incorrectly called
it, the Gulf Stream) could “cease to exist” or “col-
lapse” or “totally switch off” in 2025, with implica-
tions of human catastrophe within months—not at
all what the Ditlevsens had written.
A nonprofit media center in the UK compiled a
set of “expert reactions” to their paper, something
it does for only a few scientific studies out of the
tens of thousands published every week. Some of
the reactions were positive, others measured—and
some brutal. The paper, said one scientist, “had feet
of clay.” “No evidence of a slowdown,” said another
expert. Niklas Boers sent in his assessment: “I do not
agree with the outcome of this study.”
ity of proposing a year (so soon! a few decades away!). “They were really top experts,” Peter says. His
Mostly it was business as usual. They’d had an idea, tested eyes widened and he shook his head. “Shit, man!”
it out, and were preparing to share the results. Normal stuff. “I remember you sending me the link” to the expert
Still, Peter was a little worried, his mind returning to reactions, Susanne says, “and saying, this is what we
that whole not-in-line-with-the-IPCC business. But he should be reading carefully.” They combed through
reassured himself with fine print. In footnote 4 of the the responses together, some of them only a few
IPCC’s latest big report, “very unlikely” meant that, in the sentences and others running many paragraphs
panelists’ view, the AMOC had less than a 1-in-10 chance long. They figured out which ones they wanted to
of collapsing before 2100. One in 10. Those odds didn’t reply to directly.
strike him as “very unlikely.” Russian roulette is one in The day after the paper came out, Ditlevsen got an
six, and we all agree that’s a bad idea. Plus, the IPCC had email from Boers and one of his graduate students.
given its prognosis only a “medium confidence” rating. Attached was a 21-page refutation of their work.
To Ditlevsen, that sounded a lot like “we have no clue.” The basic issue—for Boers and several others—was
But the slight anxiety was there. Ditlevsen was squarely the sea surface temperatures. The problem wasn’t
a member of the climate community. If the paper pissed only that the dataset relied on random men in the
off other scientists, he would take more heat. He and his Age of Sail. A more fundamental concern was that
sister sent their final revisions to their journal editor and no one knows what temperatures near the ocean’s
waited for the article to drop. On July 25, 2023, their paper surface say exactly about the hemisphere-spanning,
appeared on the website of the journal Nature Commu- depths-traversing flow that is the AMOC. The tem-
nications. “That’s when …” Peter says, his voice trailing perature data was still worth examining, as Boers
off. “The shit hit the fan.” had done in his own paper, but, he argued, the uncer-
tainties are too large to ever pin down a specific
tipping-point year.
“We have a 3D ocean, three-quarters of our planet,
I’M SITTING WITH THE DITLEVSEN SIBLINGS and a circulation system in that ocean,” Boers tells
in Peter’s office at the university, at a worktable. Several me. “It physically does not make sense to model that
large paintings decorate the slate-blue walls, including as a one-dimensional time series” and try to pre-
one he painted himself, of abstract figures. Toward the dict the future. Perhaps his biggest gripe, though,
back of the room stands a large, yellowing map of the was with the Ditlevsens’ assumptions about the
world that he scavenged in the basement. AMOC’s character. For one thing, their mathematical
Susanne is at the head of the table. Her wavy hair is framework assumed that the AMOC will tip soon. Big
pulled into a low ponytail, and she’s dressed in a fisher- assumption. The equations behave differently when
man’s sweater in mazarine blue over jeans and sensible, a system is far from its tipping point.
gray, it’s-rainy-here ankle boots. It’s been almost eight The Ditlevsens agree with many of the critiques.

0 4 2
They tried to capture some of the uncertainties in the paper; others they considered less per-
tinent. In their view, the issue is too urgent to not try to find the date. And their assumptions
didn’t come from nowhere. They were based on other scientists’ work—ice core data, big model
runs, older theoretical models. “The dataset is the data that we have,” Susanne says. “Should
we not try to understand the AMOC in the last 150 years? When it’s so serious!”
Peter leans back in his chair and interlaces his fingers. He’s staring into the distance. Susanne,
though, is leaning forward on her elbows, back straight, unfazed. “We have really been scruti-
nized on a level that nobody is used to,” she says. “It’s a gift. It’s a gift to be scrutinized.”
In January 2024, Peter happened to be reading the Wikipedia article for the AMOC. About
two-thirds of the way down the page, he came across a few
lines critiquing his and his sister’s paper. The description
called their paper “very controversial.” There, again, was intense seasons, according to a 2021 report. A lot
the “feet of clay.” Annoyed, he logged in to Wikipedia under more snow. Much less rain. In the post-tipping
a pseudonym and started adding sentences. When he checked decades, many European cities might end up
back later, another editor, someone very steeped in this cor- colder by 5 to 15 degrees Celsius. In Bergen,
ner of science, had rejected his edits. He logged in again, now Norway, the temps could drop a whopping 35
under the name “pditlev,” and gave it another go. This time degrees Celsius. Sea ice in winter might extend
his account got banned. all the way down to the southern UK. The sum-
“Of course you want to be proven wrong,” Peter says to me, mers, meanwhile: hotter and drier.
“but you also don’t want to be a fool.” An AMOC shutdown would clobber the food
For the past several months, the two have been working system. The fraction of land suitable for grow-
urgently to complete the sequel to their original paper. Other ing wheat and maize—staple crops worldwide—
datasets. More statistics. “We have to clean up after our- would drop by roughly half. In an analysis of how
selves,” Peter says. an AMOC collapse would affect agriculture in the
“Clean up? I don’t think so,” Susanne replies, “Consolidate.” UK, the authors wrote there would be “a nearly
See if other AMOC-related data leads them to a similar date. complete cessation” of arable farming. Goodbye
Get at the truth of possible doom. Because if they’re right— oats, barley, wheat. A massive irrigation proj-
or even roughly right—we all might want to know a whole lot ect could salvage the land at a cost of roughly
more about what comes next. $1 billion a year, more than 10 times the yearly
profit from the crops. Food prices would spike.
Further north, in places like Norway and Swe-
den, food production would also plummet. Those
WITH ALL THE UNKNOWNS, IT IS OF COURSE DICEY countries would have to rely heavily on imports.
to project what happens after the currents stop. But let’s just, But perhaps not from the usual sources. The
for a moment, say the AMOC crosses its tipping point and powerhouses of Ukraine, Poland, and Bulgaria—
starts heading to collapse. Researchers have taken a stab at Europe’s breadbaskets—would also be dealing
modeling what that future might look like. with less rain, colder weather, and severe losses
First, the system would slow and slow until—well, nobody of income from the crash of their ag industry.
knows. It could be headed to a full stop. That would take about The worst effects, though, would be likely to
a century. Or it might settle into a much weaker flow. Both are hit the tropics. The Intertropical Convergence
bad. The AMOC transports a staggering amount of energy. Like Zone is the swath of atmosphere around the equa-
a million nuclear power plants. It is such a core element of the tor—centered at about 6 degrees north—with
Earth system that its collapse would radically alter regional little wind and lots of rain. Sailors called it the
weather patterns, the water cycle, the ability of every coun- doldrums. Season by season, that zone’s band
try to provide food for its inhabitants.
Below the surface of the ocean, the invisible
waterfalls near Iceland and Greenland would
peter out. That’s horrendous for creatures in the
deep who need the oxygen the AMOC delivers
to survive. Widespread die-off of marine life:
likely. Shutting off the current would also cause
the ocean’s surface to smooth out. The flattened
water level will be higher than it is now, which
will mean almost a meter of sea level rise along
the US northeast coast. (That’s in addition to
the sea level rise from melting glaciers.)
Without the big heat delivery that softens its
winters, Europe would end up with much more
of clouds migrates north or south, and those movements want the world’s best minds on the case. You
bring either extended dry periods or months of rain. An want them exploring every angle and ferret-
AMOC collapse would push the doldrums southward. In ing out the least-wrong explanation for what’s
the Amazon, the altered Intertropical Zone could cause happening in that big, dark area. “It’s important
the wet and dry seasons to flip to the opposite times of that things be put out there without 100 per-
year. The plants, insects, fungi, and mammals below the cent certainty,” Peter says. (He couldn’t resist
canopy would be forced to adapt at warp speed—or die adding that Albert Einstein had to wait eight
off. Not to mention the trees themselves, which, in addi- years, and fix his own mistakes, before general
tion to supporting an intricate ecosystem, absorb tons relativity was proven right.)
of carbon from the atmosphere. The Amazon, of course, I shouldn’t have been a bit surprised, then,
is being logged and overheated to its own tipping point, that the scientists were in good spirits. The
and an AMOC shutoff could be the final shove. paper Susanne wrote about her new statisti-
But that, one might argue, is the least of it. Research cal method, the one she used in the “Warning”
on these projections is scant, but some studies say if the paper, had been accepted in the top stats journal.
rain band scoots south, then India, East Asia, and West “What every statistician dreams of,” she says.
Africa would lose much or all of their monsoon seasons. Boers, meanwhile, had submitted his multi-
Two-thirds of Earth’s population depends on monsoon page rebuttal to “Warning” to a journal, where,
rain, in large part to grow their crops. These changes at press time, it was undergoing review. When
would happen over only a few growing seasons rather we spoke in late May, he was also remarkably
than over generations, giving little time to adapt. In the cheerful about the disputes. “It’s just absolutely
precarious Sahel region in Africa, subsistence farmers natural for science, and I’m enjoying that,” he
might find that sorghum, an essential, nutrient-rich told me. He seemed to relish being the voice of
cereal, becomes nearly impossible to grow. Tens of mil- uncertainty: tracking down every last source
lions of people might need to migrate to survive. of it, quantifying it, working it into his predic-
On the other hand, Australia might enjoy a little more tions of the future.
rain and crank out a few more loaves of bread per year. He brought a distinct caution to his work;
Peter, a certain audacity. But their goal was
basically the same—to find language for the
risks of extreme events. So that everyone can
THAT’S A LOT OF MIGHTS, COULDS, AND SHOULDS . talk about them more clearly, then plan, and
Extrapolations on top of educated guesses. As I spent with luck, avoid.
months reading the research and making calls, I found As for Boers’ big takeaway? He stumbled for
scientists disputing the details of nearly all things AMOC. a moment, clearly searching for the words that
Whether the warming hole around the Irminger Sea still would be the least contestable. “Regardless of
mattered (maybe global warming had swallowed it up), all the uncertainties and all the disagreements,”
whether the AMOC was actually slowing down (maybe he ventured, “99.99 percent of my colleagues
the flow naturally varies a whole lot), whether the AMOC and I are on the same page—increasing tem-
even exists (maybe it’s better understood as many smaller peratures further increases the likelihood of
current systems). For a reporter trying to tie together an AMOC tipping.”
these strings of evidence—self-doubt, befuddlement, That’s because—and we know this for sure—
despair. So I asked Peter Ditlevsen if it bothered him the extra heat in the air has effectively cranked
that data on the AMOC is so scarce. on a tap over the north Atlantic. It’s making
“Noooo, no,” he replied with a grin. “If I worked in more rain pour down on that area. It’s melting
black holes, I’d find it very exciting. We have two photos more of Greenland’s ice, which then drains into
of black holes, that’s it.” With the currents in the Atlan- the seas—right on top of the AMOC’s engine,
tic, he noted, “we have this big dark area, and we are the mega waterfalls. All that lightweight, salt-
approaching it from different sides.” free water makes it harder for the currents to
“From the point of view of climate change, we’re not overturn. Keep running the tap and the trou-
saying anything new,” Susanne adds. “We’re just saying, ble compounds. That’s why the threat of tip-
it’s serious. We have to do something now.” We have to ping seems so real. The waterfalls could indeed
cut down on emissions. Transition faster to renewable trickle to a stop. “And we just really don’t want
energy, EVs. Give the oceans a chance to recover. Push out that to happen,” Boers added.
the 2057 date. That forecast drew loads of attention not Besides, there’s another possibility. A remote
because it was a staggering intellectual feat but because it one, sure, but one that also can’t be ruled out:
had something most scientific papers lack, something pre- The AMOC might have already tipped. And we
cious: It had an emotional punch. As the siblings once put wouldn’t know it for years.
it, everyone knows someone who’ll be around in 30 years.
If the AMOC can possibly break in three decades, you SANDRA UPSON is a features editor at wifed.

0 4 5
 C A N T H E U. A . E . R E A L LY M A K E

RAIN ON DEMAND—OR IS IT

S E L L I N G VA P O RWA R E ?
 0 4 7

I L L U ST R AT I O N S B Y A N A M I M I N O S H V I L I
 Dry spells are getting longer and more severe: In
Spain and southern Africa, crops are withering
in the fields, and cities from Bogotá to Cape Town
have been forced to ration water. In the past nine
months alone, seeding has been touted as a solu-
tion to air pollution in Pakistan, as a way to prevent
forest fires in Indonesia, and as part of an effort to
refill the Panama Canal, which is drying up.
Apart from China, which keeps its extensive
seeding operations a closely guarded secret, the
UAE has been more ambitious than any other
country about advancing the science of making
rain. The nation gets around 5 to 7 inches of rain
a year—roughly half the amount that falls on
Nevada, America’s driest state. The UAE started
its cloud-seeding program in the early 2000s, and
in the skies over al ain, in the since 2015 it has invested millions of dollars in
United Arab Emirates, pilot Mark Newman waits the Rain Enhancement Program, which is funding
for the signal. When it comes, he flicks a few sil- global research into new technologies.
ver switches on a panel by his leg, twists two black This past April, when a storm dumped a year’s
dials, then punches a red button labeled FIRE. worth of rain on the UAE in 24 hours, the wide-
A slender canister mounted on the wing of his spread flooding in Dubai was quickly blamed on
small propeller plane pops open, releasing a plume cloud seeding. But the truth is more nebulous.
of fine white dust. That dust—actually ordinary There’s a long history of people—tribal chiefs,
table salt coated in a nanoscale layer of titanium traveling con artists, military scientists, and most
oxide—will be carried aloft on updrafts of warm recently VC-backed techies—claiming to be able
air, bearing it into the heart of the fluffy convective to make it rain on demand. But cloud seeding can’t
clouds that form in this part of the UAE, where the make clouds appear out of thin air; it can only
many-shaded sands of Abu Dhabi meet the moun- squeeze more rain out of what’s already in the
tains on the border with Oman. It will, in theory sky. Scientists still aren’t sure they can make it
at least, attract water molecules, forming small work reliably on a mass scale. The Dubai flood was
droplets that will collide and coalesce with other more likely the result of a region-wide storm sys-
droplets until they grow big enough for gravity to tem, exacerbated by climate change and the lack
pull them out of the sky as rain. of suitable drainage systems in the city.
This is cloud seeding. It’s one of hundreds of The Rain Enhancement Program’s stated goal is
missions that Newman and his fellow pilots will fly to ensure that future generations, not only in the
this year as part of the UAE’s ambitious, decade- UAE but in arid regions around the globe, have the
long attempt to increase rainfall in its desert lands. water they need to survive. The architects of the
Sitting next to him in the copilot’s seat, I can see program argue that “water security is an essen-
red earth stretching to the horizon. The only water tial element of national security” and that their
in sight is the swimming pool of a luxury hotel, country is “leading the way” in “new technologies”
perched on the side of a mountain below a sheikh’s and “resource conservation.” But the UAE—syn-
palace, shimmering like a jewel. onymous with luxury living and conspicuous con-
More than 50 countries have dabbled in cloud sumption—has one of the highest per capita rates
seeding since the 1940s—to slake droughts, refill of water use on earth. So is it really on a mission to
hydroelectric reservoirs, keep ski slopes snowy, or make the hotter, drier future that’s coming more
even use as a weapon of war. In recent years there’s livable for everyone? Or is this tiny petro-state,
been a new surge of interest, partly due to scien- whose outsize wealth and political power came
tific breakthroughs, but also because arid coun- from helping to feed the industrialized world’s
tries are facing down the early impacts of climate fossil-fuel addiction, looking to accrue yet more
change. Like other technologies designed to treat wealth and power by selling the dream of a cure?
the symptoms of a warming planet (say, pumping I’ve come here on a mission of my own: to find out
sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere to reflect sun- whether this new wave of cloud seeding is the first
light into space), seeding was once controversial step toward a world where we really can control
but now looks attractive, perhaps even imperative. the weather, or another round of literal vaporware.

0 4 8
 thought would fuse into water when it exploded.
(Skeptics pointed out that it would have been eas-
ier and cheaper to just tie a jug of water to the bal-
loon.) The group was beset by technical difficulties;
at one point, a furnace caught fire and had to be las-
soed by a cowboy and dragged to a water tank to
be extinguished. By the time they finished setting
up their experiment, it had already started raining
naturally. Still, they pressed on, unleashing a bar-
rage of explosions on the night of August 17 and
claiming victory when rain again fell 12 hours later.
It was questionable how much credit they could
take. They had arrived in Texas right at the start
of the rainy season, and the precipitation that fell
before the experiment had been forecast by the US
Weather Bureau. As for Powers’ notion that rain
came after battles—well, battles tended to start
in dry weather, so it was only the natural cycle of
things that wet weather often followed.
Despite skepticism from serious scientists and
ridicule in parts of the press, the Midland experi-
ments lit the fuse on half a century of rainmaking
pseudoscience. The Weather Bureau soon found
itself in a running media battle to debunk the efforts
of the self-styled rainmakers who started operat-
ing across the country.
The most famous of these was Charles Hatfield,
t h e f i r s t s ys t e m at i c at t e m p t s nicknamed either the Moisture Accelerator or the
at rainmaking date back to August 5, 1891, when a Ponzi of the Skies, depending on whom you asked.
train pulled into Midland, Texas, carrying 8 tons of Originally a sewing machine salesman from Cal-
sulfuric acid, 7 tons of cast iron, half a ton of manga- ifornia, he reinvented himself as a weather guru
nese oxide, half a dozen scientists, and several vet- and struck dozens of deals with desperate towns.
erans of the US Civil War, including General Edward When he arrived in a new place, he’d build a series
Powers, a civil engineer from Chicago, and Major of wooden towers, mix up a secret blend of 23 cask-
Robert George Dyrenforth, a former patent lawyer. aged chemicals, and pour it into vats on top of the
Powers had noticed that it seemed to rain more towers to evaporate into the sky. Hatfield’s meth-
in the days after battles, and had come to believe ods had the air of witchcraft, but he had a knack
that the “concussions” of artillery fire during com- for playing the odds. In Los Angeles, he promised
bat caused air currents in the upper atmosphere 18 inches of rain between mid-December and late
to mix together and release moisture. Powers fig- April, when historical rainfall records suggested
ured he could make his own rain on demand with a 50 percent chance of that happening anyway.
loud noises, either by arranging hundreds of can- While these showmen and charlatans were filling
nons in a circle and pointing them at the sky or by their pocketbooks, scientists were slowly figuring
sending up balloons loaded with explosives. His out what actually made it rain—something called
ideas, which he laid out in a book called War and cloud condensation nuclei. Even on a clear day, the
the Weather and lobbied for for years, eventually skies are packed with particles, some no bigger than
prompted the US federal government to bankroll a grain of pollen or a viral strand. “Every cloud drop-
the experiment in Midland. let in Earth’s atmosphere formed on a preexisting
Powers and Dyrenforth’s team assembled at a aerosol particle,” one cloud physicist told me. The
local cattle ranch and prepared for an all-out assault types of particles vary by place. In the UAE, they
on the sky. They made mortars from lengths of include a complex mix of sulfate-rich sands from
pipe, stuffed dynamite into prairie dog holes, and the desert of the Empty Quarter, salt spray from UAE OFFICIALS
draped bushes in rackarock, an explosive used in the Persian Gulf, chemicals from the oil refineries ESTIMATE THEIR
the coal-mining industry. They built kites charged that dot the region, and organic materials from as SEEDING EFFORTS
HAVE INCREASED
with electricity and filled balloons with a combi- far afield as India. Without them there would be no RAINFALL BY 10
nation of hydrogen and oxygen, which Dyrenforth clouds at all—no rain, no snow, no hail. TO 20 PERCENT.
 were ordered to stop talking
about cloud seeding publicly
and direct their efforts toward
a classified US military program
I’m sudden ly ver y awa re called Project Cirrus.
Over the next five years, Proj-
t h at I’m on a M I L I TA RY ect Cirrus conducted more than
250 cloud-seeding experiments
BA SE . Cou ld n’t t h i s g ia nt as the United States and other
countries explored ways to wea-
movable la ser BE USE D ponize the weather. Schaefer was
part of a team that dropped 80
A S A W E A P ON? pounds of dry ice into the heart
of Hurricane King, which had
torn through Miami in the fall
of 1947 and was heading out to
sea. Following the operation,
A lot of raindrops start as airborne ice crystals, the storm made a sharp turn back toward land
which melt as they fall to earth. But without cloud and smashed into the coast of Georgia, where it
condensation nuclei, even ice crystals won’t form caused one death and millions of dollars in dam-
until the temperature dips below –40 degrees Fahr- ages. In 1963, Fidel Castro reportedly accused the
enheit. As a result, the atmosphere is full of pockets Americans of seeding Hurricane Flora, which hung
of supercooled liquid water that’s below freezing over Cuba for four days, resulting in thousands of
but hasn’t actually turned into ice. deaths. During the Vietnam War, the US Army used
In 1938, a meteorologist in Germany suggested cloud seeding to try to soften the ground and make
that seeding these areas of frigid water with arti- it impassable for enemy soldiers.
ficial cloud condensation nuclei might encourage A couple of years after that war ended, more
the formation of ice crystals, which would quickly than 30 countries, including the US and the USSR,
grow large enough to fall, first as snowflakes, then signed the Convention on the Prohibition of Mil-
as rain. After the Second World War, American itary or Any Other Hostile Use of Environmental
scientists at General Electric seized on the idea. Modification Techniques. By then, interest in cloud
One group, led by chemists Vincent Schaefer and seeding had started to melt away anyway, first
Irving Langmuir, found that solid carbon dioxide, among militaries, then in the civilian sector. “We
also known as dry ice, would do the trick. When didn’t really have the tools—the numerical mod-
Schaefer dropped grains of dry ice into the home els and also the observations—to really prove it,”
freezer he’d been using as a makeshift cloud cham- says Katja Friedrich, who researches cloud phys-
ber, he discovered that water readily freezes around ics at the University of Colorado. (This didn’t stop
the particles’ crystalline structure. When he wit- the USSR from seeding clouds near the site of the
nessed the effect a week later, Langmuir jotted down nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl in hopes that they
three words in his notebook: “Control of Weather.” would dump their radioactive contents over Belarus
Within a few months, they were dropping dry-ice rather than Moscow.)
pellets from planes over Mount Greylock in West- To really put seeding on a sound scientific foot-
ern Massachusetts, creating a 3-mile-long streak ing, they needed to get a better understanding of
of ice and snow. rain at all scales, from the microphysical science
Another GE scientist, Bernard Vonnegut, had set- of nucleation right up to the global movement of
tled on a different seeding material: silver iodide. air currents. At the time, scientists couldn’t do the
It has a structure remarkably similar to an ice crys- three things that were required to make the tech-
tal and can be used for seeding at a wider range of nology viable: identify target areas of supercooled
temperatures. (Vonnegut’s brother, Kurt, who was liquid in clouds, deliver the seeding material into
working as a publicist at GE at the time, would go those clouds, and verify that it was actually doing
on to write Cat’s Cradle, a book about a seeding what they thought. How could you tell whether a
material called ice-nine that causes all the water cloud dropped snow because of seeding, or if it
on earth to freeze at once.) would have snowed anyway?
In the wake of these successes, GE was bom- By 2017, armed with new, more powerful com-
barded with requests: Winter carnivals and movie puters running the latest generation of simulation
studios wanted artificial snow; others wanted clear software, researchers in the US were finally ready
skies for search and rescue. Then, in February 1947, to answer that question, via the Snowie project.
everything went quiet. The company’s scientists Like the GE chemists years earlier, these experi-

0 5 0
menters dropped silver iodide from planes. The tion boom. Dubai and Abu Dhabi were a sea of
experiments took place in the Rocky Mountains, cranes; the population had more than doubled in
where prevailing winter winds blow moisture up the previous decade as expats flocked there to take
the slopes, leading to clouds reliably forming at the advantage of the good weather and low income
same time each day. The results were impressive: taxes. Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan, a
The researchers could draw an extra 100 to 300 member of Abu Dhabi’s royal family—currently
acre-feet of snow from each storm they seeded. both vice president and deputy prime minister
But the most compelling evidence was anecdotal. of the UAE—thought cloud seeding, along with
As the plane flew back and forth at an angle to the desalination of seawater, could help replenish the
prevailing wind, it sprayed a zigzag pattern of country’s groundwater and refill its reservoirs.
seeding material across the sky. That was echoed (Globally, Mansour is perhaps best known as the
by a zigzag pattern of snow on the weather radar. owner of the soccer club Manchester City.) As the
“Mother Nature does not produce zigzag patterns,” Emiratis were setting up their program, they called
says one scientist who worked on Snowie. in some experts from another arid country for help.
In almost a century of cloud seeding, it was the Back in 1989, a team of researchers in South
first time anyone had actually shown the full chain Africa were studying how to enhance the forma-
of events from seeding through to precipitation tion of raindrops. They were taking cloud mea-
surements in the east of the country when they
spotted a cumulus cloud that was raining when all
the other clouds in the area were dry. When they
sent a plane into the cloud to get samples, they
found a much wider range of droplet sizes than in
the other clouds—some as big as half a centime-
ter in diameter.
The finding underscored that it’s not only the
number of droplets in a cloud that matters but also
t h e ua e ’s n at i o n a l c e n t e r o f the size. A cloud of droplets that are all the same
Meteorology is a glass cube rising out of feature- size won’t mix together because they’re all falling
less scrubland, ringed by a tangle of dusty highways at the same speed. But if you can introduce larger
on the edge of Abu Dhabi. Inside, I meet Ahmad Al drops, they’ll plummet to earth faster, colliding and
Kamali, the facility’s rain operations executor—a coalescing with other droplets, forming even big-
trim young man with a neat beard and dark-framed ger drops that have enough mass to leave the cloud
glasses. He studied at the University of
Reading in the UK and worked as a fore-
caster before specializing in cloud-seed-
ing operations. Like all the Emirati men
I meet on this trip, he’s wearing a kandu-
ra—a loose white robe with a headpiece
secured by a loop of thick black cord.
We take the elevator to the third floor,
where I find cloud-seeding mission con-
trol. With gold detailing and a marble
floor, it feels like a luxury hotel lobby,
except for the giant radar map of the Gulf
that fills one wall. Forecasters—men in
white, women in black—sit at banks of
desks and scour satellite images and
radar data looking for clouds to seed.
Near the entrance there’s a small glass
pyramid on a pedestal, about a foot wide
at its base. It’s a holographic projector.
When Al Kamali switches it on, a tiny
animated cloud appears inside. A plane
circles it, and rain begins to fall. I start
to wonder: How much of this is theater?
The impetus for cloud seeding in the
UAE came in the early 2000s, when the
country was in the middle of a construc-
 and become rain. The South African researchers
discovered that although clouds in semiarid areas
of the country contain hundreds of water drop-
lets in every cubic centimeter of air, they’re less
efficient at creating rain than maritime clouds,
which have about a sixth as many droplets but
more variation in droplet size.
So why did this one cloud have bigger drop-
lets? It turned out that the chimney of a nearby the morning after my visit to
paper mill was pumping out particles of debris the National Center of Meteorology, I take a taxi to
that attracted water. Over the next few years, the Al Ain to go on that cloud-seeding flight. But there’s
South African researchers ran long-term studies a problem. When I leave Abu Dhabi that morning
looking for the best way to re-create the effect there’s a low fog settled across the country, but by
of the paper mill on demand. They settled on the time I arrive at Al Ain’s small airport—about
ordinary salt—the most hygroscopic substance 100 miles inland from the cities on the coast—it
they could find. Then they developed flares that has burned away, leaving clear blue skies. There
would release a steady stream of salt crystals are no clouds to seed.
when ignited. Once I’ve cleared the tight security cordon and
Those flares were the progenitors of what the reached the gold-painted hangar (the airport is also
Emiratis use today, made locally at the Weather used for military training flights), I meet Newman,
Modification Technology Factory. Al Kamali who agrees to take me up anyway so he can demon-
shows me a couple: They’re foot-long tubes a strate what would happen on a real mission. He’s
couple of inches in diameter, each holding a kilo- wearing a blue cap with the UAE Rain Enhancement
gram of seeding material. One type of flare holds a Program logo on it. Before moving to the UAE with
mixture of salts. The other type holds salts coated his family 11 years ago, Newman worked as a com-
in a nano layer of titanium dioxide, which attracts mercial airline pilot on passenger jets and split his
more water in drier climates. The Emiratis call time between the UK and his native South Africa.
them Ghaith 1 and Ghaith 2, ghaith being one of He has exactly the kind of firmly reassuring pres-
the Arabic words for “rain.” Although the lan- ence you want from someone you’re about to climb
guage has another near synonym, matar, it has into a small plane with.
negative connotations—rain as punishment, tor- Every cloud-seeding mission starts with a
ment, the rain that breaks the banks and floods the weather forecast. A team of six operators at the
fields. Ghaith, on the other hand, is rain as mercy meteorology center scour satellite images and data
and prosperity, the deluge that ends the drought. from the UAE’s network of radars and weather sta-

0 5 2
tions and identify areas where clouds are likely to to put into each cloud, one seeding operator told me.
form. Often, that’s in the area around Al Ain, where It depends on the strength of the updraft reported
the mountains on the border with Oman act as a by the pilots, how things look on the radar. It sounds
natural barrier to moisture coming in from the sea. more like art than science.
If it’s looking like rain, the cloud-seeding oper- Newman triggers one of the salt flares, and I twist
ators radio the hangar and put some of the nine in my seat to watch: It burns with a white-gray
pilots on standby mode—either at home, on what smoke. He lets me set off one of the nano-flares.
Newman calls “villa standby,” or at the airport or It’s slightly anticlimactic: The green lid of the tube
in a holding pattern in the air. As clouds start to pops open and the material spills out. I’m reminded
form, they begin to appear on the weather radar, of someone sprinkling grated cheese on spaghetti.
changing color from green through blue to yellow There’s an evangelical zeal to the way some of
and then red as the droplets get bigger and the the pilots and seeding operators talk about this
reflectivity of the clouds increases. stuff—the rush of hitting a button on an instrument
Once a mission is approved, the pilot scrib- panel and seeing the clouds burst before their eyes.
bles out a flight plan while the ground crew preps Like gods. Newman shows me a video on his phone
one of the four modified Beechcraft King Air C90 of a cloud that he’d just seeded hurling fat drops
planes. There are 24 flares attached to each wing— of rain onto the plane’s front windows. Operators LEFT TO RIGHT:
1. A plane flies near
half Ghaith 1, half Ghaith 2—for a total of 48 kilo- swear they can see clouds changing on the radar. a cloud that has
grams of seeding material on each flight. Timing But the jury is out on how effective hygroscopic been targeted for
is important, Newman tells me as we taxi toward seeding actually is. The UAE has invested millions seeding, searching
for updrafts of air.
the runway. The pilots need to reach the cloud at in developing new technologies for enhancing rain-
the optimal moment. fall—and surprisingly little in actually verifying the 2. The pilot activates
Once we’re airborne, Newman climbs to 6,000 impact of the seeding it’s doing right now. After ini- flares on the plane’s
wing, which spray
feet. Then, like a falcon riding the thermals, he goes tial feasibility work in the early 2000s, the next long- moisture-absorbing
hunting for updrafts. Cloud seeding is a mentally term analysis of the program’s effectiveness didn’t particles into the sky.
challenging and sometimes dangerous job, he says come until 2021. It found a 23 percent increase in
3. Water droplets
through the headset, over the roar of the engines. annual rainfall in seeded areas, as compared with form around the
Real missions last up to three hours and can get historical averages, but cautioned that “anomalies seeding particles,
pretty bumpy as the plane moves between clouds. associated with climate variability” might affect then collide with
other nearby
Pilots generally try to avoid turbulence. Seeding this figure in unforeseen ways. As Friedrich notes, droplets.
missions seek it out. you can’t necessarily assume that rainfall measure-
When we get to the right altitude, Newman ments from, say, 1989 are directly comparable with 4. When the drop-
lets become heavy
radios the ground for permission to set off the those from 2019, given that climatic conditions can enough, they fall
flares. There are no hard rules for how many flares vary widely from year to year or decade to decade. as rain.
 The best evidence for hygroscopic seeding, (He could not be reached for an interview.)
experts say, comes from India, where for the past The UAE has even started exporting its
15 years the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology cloud-seeding expertise. One of the pilots I spoke to
has been conducting a slow, patient study. Unlike had just returned from a trip to Lahore, where the
the UAE, India uses one plane to seed and another Pakistani government had asked the UAE’s cloud
to take measurements of the effect that has on the seeders to bring rain to clear the polluted skies.
cloud. In hundreds of seeding missions, researchers It rained—but they couldn’t really take credit.
found an 18 percent uptick in raindrop formation “We knew it was going to rain, and we just went
inside the cloud. But the thing is, every time you and seeded the rain that was going to come any-
want to try to make it rain in a new place, you need way,” he said.
to prove that it works in that area, in those particu-
lar conditions, with whatever unique mix of aerosol
particles might be present. What succeeds in, say,
the Western Ghats mountain range is not even appli-
cable to other areas of India, the lead researcher tells
me, let alone other parts of the world.
If the UAE wanted to reliably increase the amount
of fresh water in the country, committing to more
desalination would be the safer bet. In theory, cloud
seeding is cheaper: According to a 2023 paper by
researchers at the National Center of Meteorology, from the steps of the emirates
the average cost of harvestable rainfall generated Palace Mandarin Oriental in Abu Dhabi, the UAE cer-
by cloud seeding is between 1 and 4 cents per cubic tainly doesn’t seem like a country that’s running out
meter, compared with around 31 cents per cubic of water. As I roll up the hotel’s long driveway on
meter of water from desalination at the Hassyan my second day in town, I can see water features and
Seawater Reverse Osmosis plant. But each mission lush green grass. The sprinklers are running. I’m
costs as much as $8,000, and there’s no guarantee here for a ceremony for the fifth round of research
that the water that falls as rain will actually end up grants being awarded by the UAE Research Pro-
where it’s needed. gram for Rain Enhancement Science. Since 2015,
One researcher I spoke to, who has worked on the program has awarded $21 million to 14 proj-
cloud-seeding research in the UAE and asked to ects developing and testing ways of enhancing
speak on background because they still work in the rainfall, and it’s about to announce the next set
industry, was critical of the quality of the UAE’s sci- of recipients.
ence. There was, they said, a tendency for “white In the ornate ballroom, local officials have loosely
lies” to proliferate; officials tell their superiors what segregated themselves by gender. I sip water-
they want to hear despite the lack of evidence. The melon juice and work the room, speaking to pre-
country’s rulers already think that cloud seeding vious award winners. There’s Linda Zou, a Chinese
is working, this person argued, so for an official to researcher based at Khalifa University in Abu Dhabi
admit otherwise now would be problematic. (The who developed the nano-coated seeding particles
National Center of Meteorology did not comment in the Ghaith 2 flares. There’s Ali Abshaev, who
on these claims.) comes from a cloud-seeding dynasty (his father
By the time I leave Al Ain, I’m starting to suspect directs Russia’s Hail Suppression Research Center)
that what goes on there is as much about optics and who has built a machine to spray hygroscopic
as it is about actually enhancing rainfall. The UAE material into the sky from the ground. It’s like “an
has a history of making flashy announcements upside-down jet engine,” one researcher explains.
about cutting-edge technology—from flying cars Other projects have been looking at “terrain
to 3D-printed buildings to robotic police officers— modification”—whether planting trees or build-
with little end product. ing earthen barriers in certain locations could
Now, as the world transitions away from the encourage clouds to form. Giles Harrison, from the
fossil fuels that have been the country’s lifeblood University of Reading, is exploring whether elec-
for the past 50 years, the UAE is trying to position
itself as a leader on climate. Last year it hosted the
WINNERS OF annual United Nations Climate Change Conference, A MIT K ATWAL A is a features editor at wired and the
A GRANT FROM
THE UAE RESEARCH and the head of its National Center of Meteorol- author, most recently, of Tremors in the Blood: Murder,
PROGRAM FOR RAIN ogy was chosen to lead the World Meteorological Obsession, and the Birth of the Lie Detector. He is based
ENHANCEMENT Organization, where he’ll help shape the global in London.
SCIENCE RECEIVE
$1.5 MILLION PER consensus that forms around cloud seeding and
YEAR FOR 3 YEARS. other forms of mass-scale climate modification.
 up the size of the laser and the
power, and you can actually set a
small part of the atmosphere on
fire. Man-made lightning. Obvi-
For t he UA E , it ’s a l most ously my first question is to ask
what would happen if I put my
i r releva nt whet her hand in it. “Your hand would turn
into plasma,” another researcher
c loud seed i n g work s. says, entirely deadpan. I put my
hand back in my pocket.
There ’s SOF T P OW E R i n Matras says these laser beams
will be able to enhance rainfall in
bei n g seen to be able to three ways. First, acoustically—
like the concussion theory of
BE N D T H E W E AT H E R old, it’s thought that the sound
of atoms in the air being ripped
TO YOU R W I L L . apart might shake adjacent rain-
drops so that they coalesce, get
bigger, and fall to earth. Second:
convection—the beam will create
heat, generating updrafts that
trical currents released into clouds can encour- will force droplets to mix. (I’m reminded of a never-
age raindrops to stick together. There’s also a lot realized 1840s plan to create rain by setting fire
of work on computer simulation. Youssef Wehbe, to large chunks of the Appalachian Mountains.)
a UAE program officer, gives me a cagey interview Finally: ionization. When the beam is switched
about the future vision: pairs of drones, powered off, the plasma will reform—the nitrogen, hydro-
by artificial intelligence, one taking cloud mea- gen, and oxygen molecules inside will clump back
surements and the other printing seeding material together into random configurations, creating new
specifically tailored for that particular cloud—on particles for water to settle around.
the fly, as it were. The plan is to scale this technology up to some-
I’m particularly taken by one of this year’s grant thing the size of a shipping container that can be
winners. Guillaume Matras, who worked at the put on the back of a truck and driven to where it’s
French defense contractor Thales before moving needed. It seems insane—I’m suddenly very aware
to the UAE, is hoping to make it rain by shooting that I’m on a military base. Couldn’t this giant mov-
a giant laser into the sky. Wehbe describes this able laser be used as a weapon? “Yes,” Matras says.
approach as “high risk.” I think he means “it may He picks up a pencil, the nib honed to a sharp point.
not work,” not “it could set the whole atmosphere “But anything could be a weapon.”
on fire.” Either way, I’m sold. These words hang over me as I ride back into
So after my cloud-seeding flight, I get a lift to the city, past lush golf courses and hotel fountains
Zayed Military City, an army base between Al Ain and workmen swigging from plastic bottles. Once
and Abu Dhabi, to visit the secretive government- again, there’s not a cloud in the sky. But maybe that
funded research lab where Matras works. They doesn’t matter. For the UAE, so keen to project its
take my passport at the gate to the compound, technological prowess around the region and the
and before I can go into the lab itself I’m asked to world, it’s almost irrelevant whether cloud seed-
secure my phone in a locker that’s also a Faraday ing works. There’s soft power in being seen to be
cage—completely sealed to signals going in and out. able to bend the weather to your will—in 2018, an
After I put on a hairnet, a lab coat, and tinted Iranian general accused the UAE and Israel of steal-
safety goggles, Matras shows me into a lab, where ing his country’s rain.
I watch a remarkable thing. Inside a broad, black Anything could be a weapon, Matras had said. But
box the size of a small television sits an immensely there are military weapons, and economic weapons,
powerful laser. A tech switches it on. Nothing hap- and cultural and political weapons too. Anything
pens. Then Matras leans forward and opens a lens, could be a weapon—even the idea of one.
focusing the laser beam.
There’s a high-pitched but very loud buzz, like
the whine of an electric motor. It is the sound of
the air being ripped apart. A very fine filament,
maybe half a centimeter across, appears in midair.
It looks like a strand of spider’s silk, but it’s bright
blue. It’s plasma—the fourth state of matter. Scale

0 5 5
TOWARD A MORE

Illustrations by Cody Feder

Photographs by Tonje Thilesen
disposable crap, we’ll all
need to get a little loony.
by Clive Thompson
Some years back, I stopped by a French deli to buy some hoods. A significant chunk also ends up in the ocean, which
big chunks of cheese and carried them home in a plastic has already amassed as much as 219 million tons of the stuff—
bag. The cheese was so heavy that the bag stretched and wrappers washing up on shorelines, chunks eaten by fish,
bulged, and the handle dug painfully into my hands. But the islands of plastic forming in watery gyres at sea.
bag didn’t break. That’s because of the magical chemistry It’s a lot. Too much, many of us agree. And if we want to
of plastic—essentially, oil turned solid, with carbon and begin unwinding the plastic revolution? One good place to
hydrogen atoms that line up in repeating units to form long, start is all those single-use products—because, according
noodle-like molecules. to the UN Environment Programme, they make up fully 36
These molecules are pliable and strong, which is what percent of the plastics we use every year.
makes plastic so widely useful. And so durable: I unpacked They’re not easy to walk away from, in part because we
the hunks of Camembert and Havarti and shoved the bag into use so many types in so many places. We’ve got “thin films”
the back of a kitchen drawer. When I stumbled upon it a few like bags, thicker plastics in take-out bowls, multilayered
weeks ago, it was still pristine. Of course it was. Plastic bags plastic containers for grocery store meat, and see-through
can last, intact and usable, for decades. polyethylene terephthalate bottles for soda and water. Each
Which is … nuts, right? We create a bag rugged enough to has its own chemical properties, molecular makeup, and
span decades and then use it for minutes before shoving it in performance specs. A single replacement for all that pack-
a drawer or, more likely, sending it off to a landfill, where it aging? It doesn’t exist.
might break into fragments that stick around for hundreds of What does exist, though, is a set of promising develop-
years. Like I said: the most overengineered object in history. ments in the management, as it were, of single-use stuff.
The environmental problem of “single-use plastics” haunts It’s a war on three fronts: Replace some of our single-use
the public imagination like a spectral wolf. And no wonder— plastics with truly compostable materials. Replace another
the sheer welter of everyday objects we make from plastic is chunk with reusable containers, like metal or glass. And,
astonishing. There’s plastic in grocery bags, obviously, but finally, tweak the economic incentives so plastic recycling
also in yoga pants and car tires and building materials and actually works. This isn’t my battle plan; it’s a theme I heard
toys and medical products. The transition came on quickly: over and over as I spent the past year talking to scientists,
Plastic use was comparatively small until the 1970s, when it inventors, entrepreneurs, and policy folk.
exploded, tripling by the 1990s. Then it went into overdrive, None of these ploys is a slam dunk. They’ll need not only
and in the next 20 years we used as much plastic as we had innovation but also binders full of smart government incen-
in the previous 40. We now crank out more than 500 million tives and regulation—all of which, of course, will be resisted
tons of plastic waste a year. Globally, only 9 percent of plas- by petroleum firms. But if you add up all these unplastic devel-
tics are recycled. The rest go into landfills or get incinerated, opments, you’ll find grounds for cautious optimism: We’ve got
pumping toxic fumes into the air, usually in poor neighbor- a path to a world less littered with deathless plastic waste.
 seaweed was a better building block for a bioplastic. It’s got
nice gelling properties that are suited to making films. Indeed,
seaweed is often used to give toothpastes and cosmetics their
gluey texture. Better yet, seaweed “regenerates really quickly,”
her sun-drenched lab in San Leandro, California, Julia Marsh she noted, so you’d get crops fast while using less space than
grabbed a small see-through bag and handed it to me. It was corn. She ticked off the other benefits: “Requires virtually zero
shiny like cellophane, the sort of thing a company might use inputs to grow. Really low carbon usage, really low energy. No
to package a set of earrings or some candies. Bags like this? fertilizer, no arable land—no fresh water! And seaweed farms
“They’re absolutely ubiquitous,” Marsh said. serve as water filtration systems. They provide habitat for
As I opened the pouch and turned it over in my hands, I biodiversity.” And seaweed was becoming kind of hot. A few
realized it was a little stiffer than I expected. That’s because startups in Europe were already using it to make everything
it was made of seaweed and composed of the plant’s poly- from the lining for take-out containers to little water-filled
saccharides, long chains of carbohydrate molecules. gel balls that athletes could use to rehydrate.
So, not quite the same performance as a plastic bag, but with Back in New York, she set about doing some experiments
a better trade-off: You can throw it on a regular home com- in her kitchen. After poking around on YouTube, she learned
posting heap, Marsh said, and in a few weeks you’ll find only she could order powdered seaweed polysaccharides online,
scraps of it. In six months, it’ll be an organic part of the soil. then mix them with hot water to make a gooey gel that cools
“Bioplastics” aren’t new; over the past few decades, engi- into a plasticky material. Pulling out her phone, she showed
neers have made plastic alternatives from sugarcane, corn, me pictures of her results: lumpy, malformed green dishes
and more. The hardest part has been making sure they actu- and a bowl.
ally return to nature. Most bioplastics need to be shipped to “Really horrible, ugly, disturbing-looking prototypes,” she
an industrial composting facility (designed to break down said. But she learned that bioplastics were “not necessarily
organic materials faster), and few American towns possess about super complicated science” but rather the patience for
one. Some bioplastics contain additives that don’t break years of tinkering. Hire some serious materials engineers,
down at all. she figured, and they could make real progress on the poly-
Marsh wants to fix that. A 30-year-old with a surfer-like vibe, bag problem.
she grew up playing in the water along the central California
shores. She marveled at the coast’s riot of natural beauty and
sea life—and became increasingly horrified by the deluge of
plastic ocean pollution and the dead whales found with bellies
full of the stuff. Marsh moved to New York to pursue a career
in design—branding, packaging, that sort of thing. But after
seeing up close how wasteful companies could be in wrap-
ping and delivery, she balked. She didn’t want a career where
she’d be cranking out so much trash.
Marsh decided instead to tackle the plastics packaging prob-
lem. The fashion industry uses billions of thin plastic “poly-
bags” every year to ship its articles. What if she could make
them out of something that could actually be composted?
She didn’t want to work with a feedstock like corn, though.
To make tons of bioplastics out of those materials, you’d need
to grow so much of them that you’d wreck the soil and emit
lots of CO2. Marsh’s partner, Matt Mayes, was doing a mas-
ter’s degree in sustainable development, which brought him
to Indonesia. She joined him for a visit and toured some of
the country’s seaweed farms. That got her thinking: Maybe
RIGHT: GETTY IMAGES. OPENER: GETTY IMAGES; REUSABLES; SWAY

0 5 9
 0 6 0
was hard to melt. That’s a big deal when you’re manufacturing
plastic bags at scale. To make plastic sheets, manufacturers
typically melt down plastic pellets, known as nurdles, and
blow the resulting goop into a huge bag “like two stories tall,”
as Catarino told me. Oil-based plastics melt readily; seaweed,
in contrast, hates the heat. “It just kind of burns,” he added.
So they tried adding other organic compounds to make the
polysaccharide chains meltier. Near one wall of the Sway lab,
bright metal racks held rows of numbered containers and
She and Mayes founded Sway in the early months of Covid; dishes filled with nurdles, the results of their experiments.
their first hire was Matt Catarino, a materials engineer who’d When I visited they were up to 144 and were finally getting
worked for six years in Big Plastic (as he calls it) and engi- it to melt pretty well. I’d love to tell you how the Sway team
neered everything from medical waste bags to protective is cracking this puzzle, but they wouldn’t fully explain their
film for cars. But he’d had enough. Over the next few months, chemistry—state secrets.
Catarino produced a crude thin-film prototype that got the If Sway’s bioplastic is going to replace polybags, it also has
startup $2.5 million in investment. Sway poured the money to be stretchy—and here the team was still struggling. Guan
into more hiring and renting a lab in San Leandro. led me over to a corner of the lab, where she clipped a Band-
When I visited last year, Marsh shooed me over to a rack Aid-sized piece of their film between two robotic pinchers.
with four thick rolls of their “flagship” plastic. She unspooled The arms pulled from both ends and measured how many
a bit; it was clear and thicker than Saran Wrap. One version newtons of force could be applied before the material broke.
was a pretty light green mottled with darker green dots—bits The pieces snapped after only a few seconds.
of “less refined kelp” for aesthetic effect, Marsh said. I held “That was pretty bad,” Guan said sheepishly.
it up to the light like stained glass. “The jewelry folks really “Test a good one, Amanda,” Marsh said, with a laugh.
like that one,” she said. Still, the team isn’t too bothered. As Marsh said, for the
Behind her was another shelf with dozens of cups filled unplastic revolution to take off, people’s expectations for
with dirt. Amanda Guan, a materials engineer, had buried in how plastic behaves will have to change. Not every plastic
each cup a piece of bioplastic 2 centimeters square, to test bag should be perfectly stretchy, strong, and durable for the
how the material decomposes. She pulled a cup out and dug ages. Those specs were bonkers to begin with.
into the dirt. When she finally located a fragment of plastic, I kept in touch with Marsh over the following months, and
it measured 1 centimeter on each side. “This has only been in last fall she showed me a video of Sway’s bioplastic in pro-
there for two weeks,” she noted, seeming pleased. duction at a manufacturing plant. The first batches scorched,
The members of Marsh’s lab group were like a team from producing a sort of “black goo,” Marsh told me, until they
the Marvel Universe: There was Guan, who’d recently gotten dialed in the processing conditions. Their films were becom-
her master’s degree, in a white lab coat, gray turtleneck, and ing softer too. When Marsh shipped me some samples in April
plastic safety goggles that somehow managed to look hip; 2024, they were silky to the touch, and I could stretch them
Joakim Engström, a boisterous Swedish polymer scientist a bit. (My teenage son was impressed; he also, before I could
with a bushy mustache and a wool hat; and Catarino, the Big say I don’t think you’re supposed to do that, ripped off a small
Plastics escapee, reserved beneath his baseball cap. chunk and chewed on it. “It tastes like seaweed,” he said.)
One of the lab’s biggest challenges was that their bioplastic Critics of bioplastics abound. Many doubt that they can
ever be reliably composted. Historically those people have
been right, of course—and Sway and other companies like
it have yet to prove them wrong. Marsh told me the startup
had submitted its materials to TÜV, an Austrian firm that
can certify whether they actually compost. Then there’s the
question of whether highly scaled, mass seaweed farming
would have unwanted side effects—which, fair enough. Marsh
knows these critiques and shares many of them, particularly
about whether bioplastics are genuinely compostable. The
whole point of Sway, she says, is to produce a product that be tempted to dismiss his pro-plastic stance, except that he
addresses the concerns. runs one of the most successful plastic-recycling operations
Her corporate clients, at least, are excited. One, Eco- on the planet. In Norway, his company Infinitum manages a
Enclose—a firm that makes “sustainable packaging”—is using system to collect and recycle bottles made of polyethylene
Sway’s thin films to make see-through windows on card-stock terephthalate, or PET, the sort that holds soda or water. PET
boxes for brands like Smartwool. Burton, the snowboarding is one of the easier plastics to recycle; it melts and reforms
company, wants to use Sway’s material to wrap products pretty readily. Even so, in the US, only a minority of PET bot-
during shipping. And the J.Crew Group, which has made a tles get recycled. The main PET industry association puts the
pledge to stop using virgin plastic by 2025 and currently buys recycling rate at 29 percent, while Greenpeace says it’s 20.9
polybags made from recycled materials, intends to switch to percent. In Norway, though, Infinitum recycles nearly every
Sway’s bioplastics. (I had expected that the corporate impetus damn bottle. How the heck did they achieve this?
to use less oil-based plastic came from conscientious custom- With a combo of clever technology and deft public policy.
ers, but the pressure is also from staff members. This makes As is often the case, the policy was the prime mover. Running
a sort of psychological sense: A customer encounters only a recycling program requires a lot of expensive labor and sys-
one bag at a time, but employees can be hip-deep in them.) tems. You have to collect the plastic and separate it by type,
A true stress test of the new materials is coming up. In which is expensive.
shipping, polybags get tossed around on conveyor belts and So in the late ’90s, Norway passed a law that forced some-
can rip. This year, Sway’s bioplastic bags will “go through our body to pay for it—specifically, companies such as Coca-Cola
machinery in real time,” Doug Forster, chief sourcing officer that make plastic PET containers. Firms got hit with a new
for J.Crew Group, told me this spring. tax if they didn’t pay to collect and recycle used bottles. If the
As a science nerd, I dug the prospect of perfecting this beverage companies can prove they’re recycling 95 percent
new chemistry. But it was also clear that even if Marsh and as many bottles as they sell, they pay no tax. Otherwise, the
her team were maximally successful, Sway’s materials would less they recycle, the more they owe—until they’re paying
solve only some of our single-use problem. Stores would still “hundreds of millions of Norwegian kroner,” Maldum said
be choked with other plastics, particularly for food products— (tens of millions of US dollars).
zillions of bottles, sporks, take-out containers, peanut butter The bottle makers snapped to attention and began develop-
jars. Was there any way, right now, to unplasticize all that? ing a system to get their used bottles back. In 1999, the com-
panies founded Infinitum to manage collection. Maldum has
been its CEO for the past 16 years. The company rolled out
a wide network of “reverse” vending machines: Customers
shove bottles in and earn a few coins back. Every bottle has a
barcode specific to its maker. The machine scans the code and
the shape of the bottle to track which company gets credit.
(This labeling system is also why Norway has such reliable data
on its recycling levels.) The bottles are squished and dropped
into huge bags, and Infinitum hauls them to a sorting facility.
a good idea to talk about single-use plastics around The clear and colored bottles are sorted, crushed, and sold
Kjell Olav Maldum. to a recycling firm, which processes the materials for other
He gets deeply annoyed by the term—because as far as companies to then shape into new bottles.
he’s concerned, not a single plastic molecule should ever be Perfecting the system took years. Infinitum also demanded
used just once. “It’s not single-use! Just collect and recycle changes to bottle design that simplified recycling. A bever-
it, and this will be useful plastic!” he said when we first spoke age company might, for example, attach its label with a stub-
on Zoom. Indeed, he considers traditional, petroleum-based born glue that is hard to wash off. If Infinitum finds a bottle’s
plastics a critical part of modernity. “Try to run a hospital design is causing problems, it can deny the company credit in
without plastic. Try to run a society without plastic. It’s not its system. To avoid getting hit with the tax, companies now
possible!” He’d rather we all focus on making sure almost none run their bottle designs by Infinitum and fix any unrecycla-
winds up in the garbage, the ocean, or the soil. ble elements before they begin production. To recycle well,
Maldum is a strange blend of personalities—part bom- you need standardization. The tax gives Infinitum the power
bastic prophet, part matter-of-fact bureaucrat. One might to enforce simplicity.
 There’s a term of art for this whole system: reverse logis- is energy-intensive. Plastic would be recycled, sure, but it
tics. For the first 100 years of the plastics revolution, com- would cost a lot and emit mountains of CO2, trading one envi-
panies essentially sprayed products at customers—it was a ronmental problem for another.
one-way movement of atoms. Successful recycling requires Maldum is more optimistic. He thinks Infinitum’s strategy
doing this process in reverse, an entirely new set of skills. for PET recycling could work for all plastics. The trick is to
How do you get stuff back? What new economics, technolo- redesign the packaging so just about anything can be tossed
gies, and policies do you need? into a reverse vending machine. “Why do you need to use a
And what social engineering? Customers might decide, Eh, tray for meat? You can use a tube,” he said. It was an intrigu-
who cares about the 20 cents, and throw their bottles away. So ing idea, but I couldn’t quite picture the wild welter of food
Infinitum runs playfully encouraging ads. One shows a tennis wrappers all somehow reconfigured for a vending machine.
player in a locker room hurling a bottle in the trash. A voice- Would people be as willing to carry empty tubes with raw-
over notes that making a new one takes as much energy as meat residue to the grocery store to shove in a machine?
running a ball machine for an hour-plus. Suddenly he’s pelted What’s more, recycling of any sort has its own searing
with balls as he runs and ducks for cover. critics. Some American environmental groups regard plas-
Altogether, the strategy has worked. In Norway consumers tic recycling as a naked form of greenwashing. They doubt
are now so environmentally conscious that they’ve started recycling rates will ever escape the low digits in the US and
actively choosing to buy beverages made from recycled bot- outside Europe—because most politicians won’t enact seri-
tles. Even though recycled PET costs anywhere from 1.5 to ous penalties, and the quality of recycled plastics will be too
1.75 times more expensive than virgin plastic, bottle makers low. And because plastic might be a big market for petroleum
buy it up and use it. companies in the future, those corporations will likely fight
I wondered: Would it be possible to turn plastic bottles hard to keep society hooked on it.
into a completely closed loop? Let’s imagine every country For straight-edge enviros, then, the only serious way to
pulled a Norway—a politically hallucinogenic “if,” sure, but reduce single-use plastics is to just stop. Stop. Using. Them.
let’s go there. Could bottle makers keep on reusing those plas- Entirely.
tic molecules over and over, and never need virgin plastic?
Not entirely. When PET molecules are repeatedly recycled,
they start “yellowing and darkening,” Michael Joyes, the sus-
tainability director for Petainer, a European bottle maker,
said. Eventually they turn black. You can lighten the stuff with
“anti-yellow” chemicals or mix it with virgin materials. Or you
can use these older plastics to bottle up drinks like Coke. “The
inside’s dark too, so people don’t mind so much,” Joyes said.
Even so, repeatedly recycled PET becomes less useful over
time. The polymer chains in the plastic get shorter. Clever Jason Hawkins at Field & Social, a lunch joint in downtown
chemistry hacks can lengthen them, and some recyclers pre- Vancouver, British Columbia, known for its salad bowls. He
dict recycled PET can be used up to eight times. EU legislation picked the spiced Thai bowl; I chose the Thai peanut and
is mandating that by 2030, 30 percent of PET in bottles be chicken bowl. We ordered them to go.
recycled—and Joyes predicts that some countries and brands Normally, of course, takeout is served in a plastic or paper
will push much higher, to 70 or even 100 percent recycled PET. container. Field & Social, though, uses a service offered by
I was impressed by Infinitum’s success. But PET bottles Hawkins’ “circular economy” startup, Reusables. Custom-
are, chemically and structurally, the easiest plastic to recy- ers can ask to get their food in a stainless steel bowl or cup
cle. They basically want to be reborn (until they don’t). Many with a sleek silicone lid. When they’re done, they can drop it
other forms are more truculent. Consider food containers: off—unwashed!—at any store that participates in Reusables’
They can consist of several plastics with different recycling network. (There are currently 75.) Each container has a QR
processes. Pricey! Recyclers are experimenting with “chem- code, so Reusables can track which customer has which con-
ical” recycling, where a bunch of different plastics are tossed tainer. If they don’t return it, they have to pay for it. Charges
into a vat and the various molecules separate out like the lay- are up to $25 per unreturned container, though customers
ers in a salad dressing. Thus far, though, chemical recycling get refunded if they later bring it back. But in the 150,000
meals Reusables had served by the time Hawkins and I met,
more than 98 percent of the containers ultimately came back.
The trick behind getting people to truly reuse things? Mak-
ing it as easy as possible. “People have a lot of things going
on in their life,” he told me as he tucked into his meal. “You’re
hungry, you want a salad, you should just get a salad! It’s not
GETTY IMAGES; INFINITUM

up to people to be sustainable—it’s up to businesses and gov-

ernment to create the right infrastructure.”
0 6 3
Tall and angular, Hawkins has a jittery energy and a broad
grin behind his scruffy blond beard. He got the idea for
Reusables during the Covid pandemic, as everyone hunkered
at home and the use of takeout exploded, producing a moun-
tain of waste. Hawkins was working at an online organic-food
grocery-delivery service called Spud and talked about the take-
out boom with Anastasia Kiku, a college-student intern who’d
immigrated from Russia. Both were repelled by how much
plastic takeout was generating. It made them think: Maybe the
best way to cut back on single-use garbage is just to rewind.
Before plastic came along, our forebears used sturdy bowls
and plates and washed and reused them. They “wasted noth-
ing,” as Hawkins said. Maybe our grandparents had it right.
The duo concocted the idea of Reusables, and in late 2021
quickly built a prototype system. Customers would pay $5 a
month to use as many containers as they wanted, and restau-
rants would pay a fee too. Hawkins and Kiku hired a company
to pick up the dirty dishes from restaurants and clean them.
By early 2023, they’d signed up more than 100 restaurants
and food stores in Vancouver and Seattle.
Early users loved it. Many restaurant owners, it seems, truly
loathe single-use take-out containers. Often it’s because, like
those store employees at J.Crew, they hate being neck-deep in
waste. When I spoke to Stewart Boyles, Field & Social’s director
of operations and regional chef, he described attending con-
ventions to scout new take-out containers. “You go to these
expos where it’s just, like, a showroom for garbage. ‘Let’s have
an event where we show future garbage to people!’”
Nonetheless, by last fall, Hawkins and Kiku were finding
it harder to get new customers. Sure, die-hard environmen-
talist diners loved Reusables and were happy to pay for the
service. But they were only a tiny minority of the population.
The lesson, Hawkins concluded, is that the only way to force create an automated return bin, Reusables hired Jack Gralla,
a mass change in behavior—and you could see this coming, I a lanky self-taught hardware hacker—he’d worked on every-
guess—is with regulation. A community has to first get seri- thing from “solar roadways” to robotics. Gralla showed me
ous and ban single-use take-out containers. the prototype, a bin with a lid crammed with microcontrollers
So the founders pivoted to the communities that were, in (“There’s three computers inside”). It opens only if it detects
fact, doing that: universities. an RFID chip, to prevent people from dropping in, say, trash
Simon Fraser University, a 37,000-student institution on or dog poop.
the outskirts of Vancouver, banned single-use plastics in 2021. By the spring of 2024, the new system was working smoothly
It needed a system for students who wanted to grab a meal at Simon Fraser. Three return bins had collected containers
from the cafeteria and eat it in their dorm room. Sid Mehta, from 7,389 meals. The university funds the system, and stu-
the university’s senior director of ancillary services, knew dents only pay a penalty if they fail to return a dish. (So far, 97.5
about the Reusables system; he called up Hawkins to hire them. percent have been returned.) Mehta has ordered more smart
“The students,” Mehta told me, are hungry for this sort of return bins to scatter around campus, and he expects they’ll
system: “They’re already there.” For a simplified checkout sys- process tens of thousands of meals in the next academic year.
tem, Hawkins’ team attached a rugged RFID chip to each con- Hawkins has inked deals with Pomona College and the Uni-
tainer: Presto, students could now check one out by waving it versity of Victoria and is in talks with a dozen others. With
near a checkout terminal. Returning would be just as easy. To 27 million students, universities spend $24 billion a year on
food. They can quickly establish their own no-plastics policy.
A college, Hawkins notes, is its own fiefdom—“literally like
its own city, right?”
A few other places are following suit. In June 2022, Canada
passed a ban on many types of single-use plastics, including
hot-food takeout from major grocery chains. A fight over the
ban is playing out in the courts.
Jo-Anne St. Godard was watching this with interest; she’s the
head of the Circular Innovation Council, a nonprofit that advo-
0 6 4
cates for reducing single-use materials in Canada. She began
talking to Ottawa’s major grocers and persuaded three—includ-
 CO2 balance evens out, it appears, only when these systems
are in wide use. An analysis last year by McKinsey estimated
that one might need to reuse a takeaway food container 200
times before its emissions are equal to those from creating
and using 200 one-shot containers.
But of all the ways I saw to reduce single-use plastics, proj-
ects like Reusables had the fewest technical pitfalls. They don’t
require major breakthroughs, just clever patching-together
of existing tech. And I have little doubt society could adapt to
reusable packaging. Hell, when our grandparents did it, they
didn’t have RFID tags and micropayment systems. They just
put the milk bottles back on the front porch. Surely modern
technology is up to the challenge.

it would be easier to imagine an unplastic future if we

could point to one clear answer and one way forward. But,
as some anti-plastic advocates told me, the diversity of these
approaches is actually good. It spreads our bets. Plus, the solu-
tions interlock. Of course, this plan is only a partial solution.
Some plastics may be especially hard to quit, like the thin
films that keep medical products sanitary. And then there’s
the plague of microplastics, those infinitesimal bits that end
ing Walmart—to try out the Reusables system for two years. up in our bodies, the soil, everywhere. A big chunk of them
They’re rolling it out this summer to several grocery stores. come from car tires and synthetic clothing—a whole other
Godard regaled me with the hurdles of getting the system cluster of headaches. But the point is to move on all fronts
designed: The grocers had to agree to standardized containers. toward fewer and fewer.
(“Herding cats,” she says.) Everyone’s intense about ensuring What’s next is, really, up to us: pressure on our elected
the containers are meticulously cleaned. (“We get one person officials, from presidential candidates on down to local city
sick, this is over.”) And grocers wanted the containers to be council members, to set up concrete targets and bans. Firm
microwavable, because people like to heat up their meals at rules, market signals—that’s what will push companies to
home. RFID tags would get nuked, though, so Hawkins went stop relying so heavily on one-time packaging, and let inno-
back to Reusables’ QR code system. vative projects and alternatives grow until they’re part of
Both Godard and Mehta argue that systems like Reusables’— the fabric of daily life.
companies like it are popping up worldwide—will be a staple We may be up for that task. A survey last year by the con-
of the future. Like every other system for reducing plastics, servation group Oceana found that strong majorities of Amer-
though, they will really take off only if policy pushes it along. icans—affiliated with both major parties—supported
“The conversation is shifting from shaming and blaming bad reducing all single-use items, from bags to bottles to straws
behavior to, ‘Oh, this is an economic development opportu- and more. No matter how many times or ways the people
nity, and there’s money to be made,’” Godard said. The setup were asked, the majority always agreed: It’s time.
is basically the same as for the universities—Ottawa retail-
ers and the Canadian government pay to run the system,
and customers pony up only if they fail to return a container.
Will retailers stay invested in the long run? Godard believes
so. After all, they’re currently paying $700 million in annual
fees to support the recycling program, so in the long run, “the
more you put into reuse, the less you have to pay” for that
very expensive service.
It’s not like reuse systems are perfect, mind you. A ton of
GETTY IMAGES

electricity goes into making all those aluminum containers, CLIVE THOMPSON is the author of Coders: The Making of
and then some more goes into cleaning them every week. The a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World.
 Ripping out pipelines, destroying gas pumps—these are violent, criminal acts.

According to Léna Lazare, the 26-year-old face of the radical climate movement, they’re also acts of joy.

by Morgan Meaker Photographs by Roberto Frankenberg

 cisely the wrong way. In response to intensifying
droughts, French authorities have carved giant
water storage systems into the countryside for large
farms to draw down in dry months. Critics say these
mega-basins—which can hold up to 720 million
liters, the equivalent of nearly 300 Olympic-sized

GETTY IMAGES; ALAMY

uncovered. That’s important, she says. It adds a sense of

legitimacy to what she’s about to do. She drives the pickax
into the ground as the crowd around her looks on. Again and
again she strikes at the hard, dry earth. When she can’t dig
any more, another person emerges from the huddle to take
over. Several meters down, they find what they’ve been look-
ing for: pipes. Beneath the field is a network designed to carry
water to a new “mega-basin”—a giant reservoir being built
near the village of Épannes. The group is here to rip one of
those pipes out of the ground.
In other parts of the world, environmentalists target oil
giants, airports, and banks to throw sand in the gears of
companies they believe are actively warming the globe. For
activists in France, mega-basins have become a symbol of
how the government is adapting to climate change in pre-
 In the past few years, activists have smashed
bank windows, attacked gas stations, broken into
oil-pipeline control stations, deflated hundreds of
SUV tires, and, just this summer, doused Stonehenge
with temporary orange paint. They do this for dif-
ferent aims—to attract media coverage, to argue
their case in front of a jury, or to make business
untenable for companies they see as responsible
for loading the atmosphere with carbon dioxide,
driving calamitous weather events, and courting
mass extinction.
If Greta Thunberg was emblematic of an earlier
stage of the global climate movement, Léna Laz-
are signals what comes next. Today’s activists are
wrestling with deep disappointment that 2019’s
mass climate demonstrations didn’t portend big alongside, fellow student activists. Then, one day in
changes, and a certainty that they are running out the spring of 2018, she watched police fire tear gas
of time to prevent climate catastrophe. A combi- at environmentalists squatting on an abandoned
nation of urgency and despair is pushing them to airport in western France, and she began to feel that
actions previously seized by only the most radical protests alone were not enough. That year, Thun-
fringe of the environmental movement. berg started the peaceful school strike that made
her famous, and Lazare launched her own group.
Paris Environmental Disobedience, or Désobéis-
sance Ecolo Paris, was about figuring out ways to
be strategically disruptive. The group tried out a
few small, risk-averse actions like daubing banks
s a b o t a g e h a s b e e n a strand of the mod- in a type of easy-to-remove black paint, says Laz-
ern environmental movement for half a century. In are, but they ended up talking about breaking the
1975, two homemade bombs exploded in a yet-to-be law a lot more than actually breaking it.
opened French nuclear power station, delaying its At around the same time, the mainstream climate
construction by several months. In 1986, activists movement was starting to gain momentum with
sank two roughly 430-ton Icelandic whaling ships peaceful tactics. Millions of young people began
and used sledge hammers and acid to destroy pro- marching in capital cities across the world, making
cessing equipment in the country’s only whale oil it clear they did not want to inherit a ruined planet.
plant. In 1998, the year Lazare was born, a group When the protests arrived in Paris in early 2019,
associated with the Earth Liberation Front caused Lazare joined them. She became a national coor-
more than $12 million in damage when it torched dinator for Youth for Climate, the French equiva-
a mile-long strip of a Colorado ski resort that had lent of Thunberg’s Fridays for Future, appearing
been planning to expand into an area considered a on TV and in newspapers talking about the climate
potential habitat for a threatened lynx. crisis and her decision to stop traveling by plane.
Growing up, Lazare’s family—her father was All the while, she was restless. “It wasn’t mov-
the director of an art house movie theater, and her ing fast enough,” she remembers. By the end of
mother worked in film communications—had friends that year, Lazare had dropped out of university.
in Japan, and she felt a strong connection with the “We must reinvent ourselves, lead people toward
Protesters in Paris country. In 2011, when she was 12, a tsunami triggered civil disobedience, mount more radical actions,”
rally to support Les a major disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear
Soulèvements de plant. Lazare spent days afterward obsessively read-
la Terre after the ing about leaking radiation and the 15,000 people
government tried forced to evacuate their homes. She also read reports
to ban the group. claiming those in charge of the plant had cut corners
with safety measures in part to save money. And that
introduced her to a tension—between what is best
for business and what is best for the local environ-
ment—that she now finds ubiquitous. “Everything
was done to prioritize economic interests before the
well-being of the population,” she says.
Seven years after Fukushima, Lazare moved to
Paris to study physics at the prestigious Sorbonne
University. There she met, and began protesting 0 6 9
she told the French magazine Politis. She was trying to get gist Lars Werner was trekking through the German
her comrades to take the leap toward sabotage. “It was about countryside, a portable ladder stashed in his bag. It
daring to damage material stuff,” she explains. Until then, she was the culmination of months of poring over maps,
says, that was a line the mainstream climate movement had looking for places where oil pipelines were likely to
not been ready to cross. jut out of the ground in his home country.
Then the pandemic distracted the world from the climate. Werner was part of Letzte Generation (Last Gen-
France went into lockdown. Lazare was in Japan, taking a break eration), a climate-activist group best known for
from protesting, and couldn’t get home for six months. When its road blockades, where members sit and refuse
she finally made it back she got her hands on a book about envi- to let traffic pass until they are arrested. A veteran
ronmental protests that had just been released, called How to of those protests, Werner and his colleagues were
Blow Up a Pipeline. “ready to go to prison,” he says, to grab the pub-
A few years earlier, its author, the Swedish academic and lic’s attention. Now, he wanted to apply that idea to
activist Andreas Malm, had been working on a book about sabotage. The plan wasn’t to damage the pipeline
ancient Egypt when his country experienced its worst wild- permanently; he just wanted to break into a control
fires in modern history. Upwards of 60 fires were burning, station and stop the flow of oil. A photo from that
from the Arctic north to the southern island of Gotland. And day, posted on Instagram, shows Werner grasping
it wasn’t just Sweden: parts of Greece, California, and the UK a black emergency valve and looking solemnly into
were all burning too. the camera through small round glasses. That spring,
Malm could no longer justify “geeking out on this moldy he says, the group broke into a total of 35 pipeline
old historical stuff while the world was literally on fire,” so he control stations around the country. (Response to
forgot the book on ancient Egypt and instead wrote a treatise the pipeline protests was tepid, Werner says. Media
coverage was sparse—not helped by the fact that
the company that owned the pipelines, refinery PCK
Raffinerie, refused to say whether the oil supply had
been disrupted.)
Not long after Werner’s first pipeline protest, a
mate movement needs to develop a radical flank— British doctor named Patrick Hart joined a new UK
one that will also apply pressure on policymakers group called Just Stop Oil, which called for “bold
and politicians to work more closely with moderate action” until the government pledged to stop licens-
activists. In How to Blow Up a Pipeline, he compared ing new fossil fuel projects. Before sunrise one day
this dynamic to the US Civil Rights Movement. In in August 2022, Hart arrived at a gas station on
his telling, it was the threat of Malcolm X’s growing the outskirts of London and started smashing the
price screens on each pump using a hammer and
chisel. Then he sat down and waited for the police
to arrive. Hart chose the fuel pump’s screens, he
says, because they were the only part of the gas
station he believed he could damage without risk-
ing a spill or harming another living being. In addi-
cated,” he says, “is when you have cops protecting the things tion to gas stations, Just Stop Oil members have
you want to destroy.” Police, in other words, may be an excep- attacked famous paintings, stormed sports venues,
tion to the rule. and sprayed powdered paint on Stonehenge to send
Lazare isn’t fully aligned with Malm, who has advocated an the public a message: You might want to forget that
“ecological Leninism” of top-down state intervention in the climate change is happening, but its most dramatic
economy. “We don’t agree at all politically,” she says. But his consequences are yet to come.
book had a profound impact on her—in an Instagram post from As he talks, Hart returns to variations of the same
2021, she poses for the camera with the words “Let’s Blow Up refrain: The world is on course for catastrophe, and if
Pipelines” across her shoulders. Malm, for his part, has been we continue to rely on fossil fuels, billions of people
to Les Soulèvements de la Terre’s protests and expresses an will die. “I don’t know how many times I need to say
ideological affinity. “Sabotage is a French term,” he says. “I this, but like, we are so fucked.” Getting more oppor-
think Les Soulèvements de la Terre are the cutting edge of the tunities to convey this message is, to him, the whole
climate movement in Europe right now.” point. His actions generate a lot of press interest,
which in turn gets him a lot of interviews—like this
one. “Every time I get an interview, I say humanity is
headed for annihilation,” he says. “If we don’t change
now, then we have absolutely no hope.”
When I meet Hart in London, he’s wearing a
s a b o t a g e m i g h t b e a French term, but it is a tactic smart blue suit. He’s on his way to court for releas-
that is spreading across Europe. Around the same time Lazare ing plumes of orange powder onto the pitch at a
was digging up pipes in early 2022, the 30-year-old psycholo- rugby game at Twickenham Stadium. At the time,
 their faces, to explain that what they’re doing is a
Police fired 5,000 rational response to the current crisis. We’re not the
violent ones, they say. Real violence is committed by
tear gas canisters in companies that are wrecking our planet for profit.

just under two hours. Sabotage must target property, never people. The
environment must not be permanently harmed.
Soon protesters were Of course, the bombs placed in the French power
station in the 1970s didn’t stop the country from
covered in blood. growing into Europe’s biggest generator of nuclear
power. Whaling continues in Iceland. The Colorado
ski resort burned by the Earth Liberation Front was
rebuilt. Oil still flows through the German pipelines
shut off by Werner, and gas through the English
pumps smashed by Hart.
But Lazare claims her actions are causing real
disruption. By last spring, she had taken part in
three acts of sabotage against the mega-basins: in
this is just one of four cases he’s fighting—it’s unclear Cram-Chaban, in Épannes, and in Sainte-Soline.
whether any will end in jail time, but if they do, he Les Soulèvements de la Terre is doing more than
says he’s prepared. “People are desperate,” he says. just attracting media attention, she argues. The
“The more desperate people get, the more extreme group has inspired copycat attacks that have van-
tactics they will use.” dalized mega-basins throughout western France.
She claims this has pushed up the cost of building
mega-basins; construction companies now have
to pay for security guards and motion detectors to
guard against people like her. And it’s not just the
owners of the mega-basin that are keeping an eye
t h i s c a s t o f climate saboteurs live in differ- on Les Soulèvements de la Terre.
ent countries and speak different languages, but In March 2023, Lazare helped organize a second
they have so many similarities. They want to show protest at the mega-basin under construction near
Sainte-Soline in western France. At least 6,000 protesters were
met by some 3,000 French gendarmes in full riot gear, creating
a barrier between the crowd and the half-built reservoir. Some
demonstrators turned back; others attempted to push through
the cordon, trying to reach and sabotage the site. i n a u g u s t 2 0 2 3 , exactly one week after the
The ensuing violence shocked France. Police fired 5,000 court intervention, I cycle for two hours through
tear gas canisters in just under two hours. Soon protesters the sweltering countryside of western France to
were covered in blood; according to Les Soulèvements de la meet Lazare. Activists are gathering in the vil-
Terre, more than 200 people were injured. Two people were lage of Lezay, a few miles from Sainte-Soline, for
left in a coma. Organizers claim someone lost an eye. Police a 10-day bicycle convoy to Paris, partly to protest
say 47 officers were hurt and four vehicles burned. “A lot of the mega-basins and partly to express their support
us felt completely traumatized about what happened,” says for Les Soulèvements de la Terre after its brief ban.
Lazare, who says she stayed behind the front line helping to This corner of rural France is bracing for a new heat
look after the injured. A friend of a friend had been hit in the wave; the geological research office is warning of
leg by a tear gas stun grenade. The open wound was stream- another summer of record-breaking drought. Vil-
ing with blood. It took the ambulance hours to arrive; Lazare lagers stare as I pass, perhaps assuming I’m one
felt totally overwhelmed. of the people the government calls ecoterrorists.
Andreas Malm was in the crowd that day too—watching By the time I arrive in Lezay my clothes are damp
a real-world exploration of the limits of violence cited in his with sweat, my head foggy. I find hundreds of Les
book as demonstrators clashed with police. “I think this was Soulèvements de la Terre’s supporters in a field on
the right thing to do,” he says of the activists’ decision to try to the outskirts of town in a victorious, yet cautious,
push through police lines. “It would have been a surrender to mood. People carry flags that read: “We are all Les
the armed forces of the state to just say, ‘OK, you are protect- Soulèvements de la Terre.” The police are there but
ing this piece of property with overwhelming military force, keeping their distance. A helicopter circles above.
so we’re just giving up and going home.’” Lazare emerges from the crowd, clutching a
The day became known as the Battle of Sainte-Soline. Media half-eaten sandwich and wearing bright silver
coverage brought Les Soulèvements de la Terre a new level of shoes. When we finally find a patch of field that is
notoriety. And surveys showed that the public blamed both the not carpeted in sheep droppings, she kneels in the
protesters and the police for the violence. (Lazare says a small grass and in her soft, methodical way explains why
minority of protesters threw Molotov cocktails.) it’s time for the climate movement to take more
Then, in June 2023, the French government used the violent radical action.
event as justification to ban Les Soulèvements de la Terre. Two Part of Lazare’s job is to soften Les Soulève-
months later, a court intervened, giving the group permission ments de la Terre’s image. For years she appeared
to continue operating until its case could be properly reviewed. in French magazines as the new face of radical
eco-activism, but she became Les Soulèvements
Above: Activists protest the government’s decision to dissolve de la Terre’s official spokesperson only when the
GETTY IMAGES

Les Soulèvements de la Terre. Right: Protesters face anti-riot group faced the prospect of being shut down. Now
police officers in December 2023. Lazare is among a small band of people who deliver
speeches at protests or explain their motives to the press.
“The government tries to say Les Soulèvements de la Terre
is one of these dangerous ultraleft groups,” she says, twist-
ing blades of grass between her fingers as she talks. They
want the public to picture violent men, she explains. Lazare
knows she does not conform to that image. And neither do
her supporters, lying in the grass with their bikes, behind
us. There are children, gray-haired hippies, a contingent of
tractors, dogs, and even a donkey. A big white horse pulls a
cart in circles, a speaker inside vibrating with music.
Later that day, I join around 700 Les Soulèvements de la
Terre supporters cycling along quiet country roads, weaving
our way past sunflower fields, wind turbines, and rivers that
have run dry. Each time we reach a small town, the streets
are lined with people, sometimes hundreds, clapping and
cheering as we pass. Owners of small farms open their gates,
welcoming us in to refill our water bottles and use the facil-
ities. There is a DJ on wheels who blasts The Prodigy as we son are due in court for refusing to attend a parlia-
roll toward the next town. Three months later, in November mentary inquiry into the 2023 protests, including
2023, that same top court in France overturns the govern- the Battle of Saint-Soline. They face two years in
ment’s decision to ban the group, ruling it disproportionate. jail. The same month, Patrick Hart comes before
That is a brief respite in the legal onslaught facing the move- a tribunal to decide whether he should lose his
ment, as European authorities formulate their response to medical license as a result of his activism. Last
the wave of sabotage sweeping the continent. In November, year in Germany, Letzte Generation’s members
Lazare and a fellow Les Soulèvements de la Terre spokesper- were subjected to police raids, and in May 2024,
the public prosecutor’s office in the German town
of Neuruppin charged five of the group’s mem-
bers with forming a criminal organization, citing
in part the 2022 pipeline protests. Werner hasn’t
been charged, surprisingly, but he hopes a public
trial of his fellow activists will spark a countrywide
reckoning over Germany’s use of fossil fuels and
finally give his sabotage of pipelines the impact
he wanted all along.
As their members are dragged through the
courts, it seems more important than ever for
these groups to have public support. That’s why
the people lining the small country roads are so
important to Lazare. She needs their blessing.
“Radicalism must always be supported by a mass
of people to be victorious,” she tells me. Sabotage
needs to inspire copycats, which means it needs to
shake off its reputation as a sinister, criminal act.
After the first long day of cycling, we pull into
a field. Activists have set up a campsite with a bar,
a pay-what-you-can canteen, a stage for climate
lectures, and live music. There is the accordion
again, that festival atmosphere. “I think it’s import-
ant for activists to go sometimes by night, masked,
and commit sabotage,” says Lazare. “But in Les
Soulèvements de la Terre, we want to do this in
the middle of the day, not anonymously, but col-
lectively, with joy and music.” Joyfulness, she says,
is key to the whole idea.

M O RG A N M E A K E R is a senior European busi-

ness writer at wired.

0 7 3
 Photographs by
Tony Luong

Illustrations by
Michelle Mildenberg

She came to the US with

a dream. Using platforms
like Uber, Instacart,
and DoorDash, she built
a business empire up
from nothing.

There was just one problem …

by Lauren Smiley
 over in a new country and, with a whiff
of class judgment, insinuated that immi-
grating was not something their social
circle really did.
What now?
Well, Barbosa has a phoenix tattooed
on her back. She radiates a game sense
of What can I say yes to today? The type
of person who, when she and a pal don’t
want to splurge on a fancy hotel during
a girls trip, swipes right on every guy on
Tinder until one joins their bar-crawl
and invites them to sleep on his boat.
(Says a friend: “Priscila is craaaazy.”)
The US government would one day
put it more grandly, speaking of Bar-
bosa’s “unique social talents,” calling
her “hard-working,” “productive,” and
“very organized.”
She knew there was no going back
to Brazil but also, deep down, that she
didn’t want to, that opportunity was
here. “I loved this place”—the US—from
nearly the moment she stepped off the
plane, she declares. She was 32 years
old, college educated, and spoke decent
English. She had no choice but to work
her way out of this mess.
Barbosa couldn’t have predicted
where her striving would end: that she’d
become the heavy in a web of fraud. That
TO UNDERSTAND Priscila Barbosa—the she’d expose the gig economy’s embar-
pluck, the ambition, the sheer balls—we rassing blind spot. That, one day, multi-
should start at the airport. We should billion-dollar companies like Uber and
start at the precise moment on April 24, DoorDash would cry victim. Her victim.
2018, when she concluded, I’m fucked. Or that she’d fall so far, or that her rela-
Barbosa was just outside customs at tionship with Uncle Sam would grow so
New York’s JFK International Airport, deeply twisted and codependent.
5-foot-1, archetypally pretty even with- She did know, that day at JFK Airport,
out her favorite Instagram filter. She was that her doubters back in Brazil would
flanked by two rolling suitcases stuffed only see one plotline on Instagram: Pris-
with clothes and Brazilian bikinis and cila’s march to victory. Taking a $10 Lyft
not much else. The acquaintance who to a bus station, eyes still puffy from her
had invited her to come from Brazil on airport cry, Barbosa aimed her iPhone
a tourist visa, who was going to drive at the traffic speeding across the Throgs
her to Boston? The one who promised Neck Bridge on a clear spring day. She
to help her get settled, saying that she labeled the video “New York, New York,”
could make good money like he did, driv- and uploaded it onto her Story, ripe with
ing for Uber and Lyft? the promise that she was heading some-
He’s not answering her texts. where big.
Barbosa was stranded. She cried.
She took stock of her belongings: the
suitcases, her iPhone, 117 bucks not
just in her wallet, but total. She called
her mom back in Brazil, but she already
knew that her family couldn’t pay for a
ticket home. No way was she asking her
friends, who had doubted this plan all
along; one said she was too old to start
 schools, and digitized records at the city Brazilian guy from Boston whom she’d
health department. She also became a met years before on vacation in Miami.
gym rat (“I’ve had to fight for the perfect Miraculously, he not only answered but
body my whole life”) and started cooking met her at South Station, let her stay the
healthy recipes. In 2013, she spun this night, and ferried her the next morn-
hobby into a part-time hustle, a delivery ing to the pizzeria, where she aced the
service for her ready-made meals. When cooking test.
orders exploded, Barbosa ramped up to The first night at the flophouse, Bar-
full-time in 2015, calling her business Fit bosa slept on the floor. The second, a
Express. She hired nine employees and Walmart air mattress. She shoved mag-
was featured in the local press. She was azines below the door to keep out the
making enough to travel to Walt Disney rats (“Disgusting!”). Without a car, she
World, party at music festivals, and buy walked an hour to the pizza joint, past
and trade bitcoin. She happily imagined strip malls and Brazilian bakeries. On
opening franchises and gaining a solid the way, she’d stop at Planet Fitness to
footing in the upper-middle class. lift weights and use the shower. (She
But Brazil was in the middle of a reces- welcomed the side effect of all the sur-
sion, and after a few years, her custom- vival schlepping: “The most skinny I
ers started disappearing. Trying to stay ever got!”)
afloat, Barbosa cashed out her bitcoin Barbosa was earning about $800 in
and, when that wasn’t enough, took out cash a week at the pizzeria. Aiming to
high-interest loans (“What a stupid idea, pay down her debts and build her new
by the way”). She closed Fit Express. Her life quickly, she looked for a second part-
younger sister had just graduated from time job. One restaurant manager said
college, and her parents had lost their he needed her to have a Social Security
bakery, their retirement gig. Barbosa number, and handed her the number
felt it was up to her to pull everyone out. of a guy who could make her fake work
She texted that Boston-area acquain- documents, but Barbosa didn’t dare call.
tance about her desperation, and he “When you first get here,” she explains,
answered: Why didn’t she move to “you think ICE is going to be waiting for
the US and drive for Uber and Lyft? you on every single corner.” She tried
N REAL LIFE, Barbosa is can- He sent her screenshots of what he cleaning houses but lasted exactly two

I did (“I’m a bad liar”). She drops

self-deprecating jokes and lets
loose big, jagged laughs that sound like a
was making—$250 a day, better than
attorney-level money in Brazil. He said
undocumented people could live like
days, loathing every second. Then the
pizzeria got slow for the summer and
laid her off. Scrolling Facebook in bed
car trying to start. She grew up in Soro- normal citizens. She already had a tour- one morning, she saw a post in a Brazil-
caba, an industrial city of 723,000 peo- ist visa. With her family broke and her ian group asking: Do you want to work
ple about two hours west of São Paolo. job search going nowhere, “I couldn't for Uber/ Lyft and be your own boss?
Her dad was an electrician, mom a postal see any other option,” she says. Barbosa quite enjoyed being her own
worker. They set their eldest daughter A one-way ticket to JFK cost nearly boss. Working for other people since
on a path “to be a very educated and $900. She sold a ring from her grandpa arriving in the States had felt like a nec-
polite person”—English lessons and bal- for $1,000. At the airport, her father tried essary but major downgrade. She also
let classes. Barbosa loved to mess around to cut through the family’s gloom, say- finally had a car, having financed a used
on computers. As a teen, she kitted out ing, “Rock out, and get a Mustang for Jeep Liberty after a couple months of
her home PC with a terabyte of memory Dad!” work. When she called the listed num-
OPENER PHOTO: HAIR AND MAKEUP BY ROSE FORTUNA; OPENER TEXTURE: GETTY IMAGES

and an Nvidia processor so she could A flight across the equator later, and ber in the ad, the guy who answered told
play Counter-Strike and World of War- the momentary meltdown at JFK shaken her that, for $250 a week, she could rent
craft. She also hung out at a local cyber off, Barbosa hurtled north from New an Uber driver account. It would have
café, where she and a few other gamers York City to Boston on a Peter Pan bus, Barbosa’s photo, her car, and her bank
formed a tournament team called the fervidly scrolling through Facebook account, but would use another name.
BR Girls (“BR” for Brazil). Offscreen, groups dedicated to Massachusetts' Barbosa didn’t ask any questions. She
high school was miserable. She was bul- large Brazilian community, tapping out says she didn’t know exactly how she was
lied for being a teacher’s pet, for being DMs and dialing numbers. A Brazilian skipping right over the app’s onboard-
“chunky,” for being terrible at sports. pizzeria owner told her to come in for ing requirements: a US driver’s license,
When a few boys showed romantic inter- a try-out the next day. A Brazilian land- a year of driving experience in the US,
est in her, she turned them down for fear lord, who had a tiny room in a flophouse a Social Security number, and a back-
it was a prank. in the western burb of Framingham, said ground check. She did know that she
Barbosa studied IT at a local college, he would take the $400 rent once Bar- cleared $2,000 in her first week, enough
taught computer skills at elementary bosa got paid. A shot-in-the-dark call: a to stop worrying about another job.

077
 brag on Instagram to mark six months
in the US: “Thankful every day that I
had such courage and audacity.” She
had reasons to be proud: From being
stranded with $117 at JFK, she’d moved
into a better apartment and had already
sent enough money back to Brazil to pay
her parents’ bills and nearly clear her
own debts. She was buying clothes at TJ
Maxx, perfume at Macy’s, restarting her
regimen of technicolor manicures and
wrinkle-busting Botox (“a priority”). In
another Instagram photo, she was hold-
ing her cocktail aloft and dancing with a
giant furry bear at a club, kissing toward
the camera. The post quoted the iconic
Apple ad: “Here’s to the crazy ones, the
misfits, the rebels …”
The six-month anniversary also meant
Barbosa was officially overstaying her
OT LONG AFTER she started, tourist visa. The grind continued. She

N Uber deactivated Barbosa’s

account out of the blue. So she
switched to renting one on Lyft from
was clocking 14-hour days on Uber. She
was also still paying a middleman just to
use an account. Then, that fall, Barbosa
the same guy. Now she drove as “Sha- stumbled on a way out.
kira.” When the Lyft app prompted Bar- One of her customers left their wal-
bosa to confirm her identity by scanning let in her car. She followed the wom-
her license, she texted the guy she was an’s convoluted instructions to return
renting from: What now? He sent back it, driving to two far-flung locations over
a photo of Shakira’s ID. Oh. She was real. two hours. Miffed, at one point Barbosa
He paid Shakira a fee each week. opened the wallet. She looked at the
Driving without a license, under the woman’s license, blonde with blue eyes.
table on a tourist visa, loaded Barbosa Barbosa snapped a picture. She thought
with stress. One night, Barbosa picked the woman might tip her or at least say
up a passenger at 2 am and he tried to “thank you” for having wasted two
kiss her. She had to fight him off and left hours, unpaid, to do her a favor. Instead,
him one star on the app; she didn’t want the woman was rude and short, giving
to risk calling the cops. Another time, she Barbosa the push she’d been looking for.
was pulled over for having her lights off. “I said, yeah, now I’m going to use this.”
Barbosa froze as the officer strode up to Over the next few weeks, she would
her window, worried she might get her click through the driver onboarding
car towed and end up in jail, or even— process on both Uber and Lyft, reading
who knows?—deported. She showed over the steps to create her own account,
the cop her Brazilian driver’s license, mulling the risk. Finally, lying in bed
and said she’d left her American one at on Christmas night, the first one she’d
home. He let her go. spent without her family, it was time:
In WhatsApp groups, and while wait- She opened her phone and scrolled to
ing for riders at Logan Airport, Barbosa the blonde woman’s license. Barbosa
chatted up other Brazilian drivers also uploaded the license to the Uber app.
renting accounts. They traded tips about She used the woman’s name but her own
driving without papers, the nuances insurance and registration. She entered
of the fuzzy don’t-ask-don’t-tell sta- her own iCloud email and phone number
tus quo in a country that hasn’t passed and set her own picture—brown hair,
comprehensive immigration reforms in brown eyes—on the driver profile. She
more than three decades. Far from an ICE made up a Social Security number, sub-
officer on every corner, she heard, if you mitted the application, and went to sleep.
kept your head down, didn’t drink and The next day, Uber approved the
drive or pick fights, you could manage. account. Like that, Barbosa was in busi-
In October, Barbosa posted a humble- ness for herself.
 LOOOVE TO PARTY,” Bar- rity numbers issued after June 2011, ents once they Venmoed or Zelled her

“I bosa once wrote me during

the year and a half that we
talked and emailed. For her, going out is
when the Social Security Administra-
tion changed the way it assigned the
numbers.
the weekly rent.
“It never, never crossed my mind that
I was, like, being a criminal,” Barbosa
less a dalliance than a birthright, Bar- After the party, Barbosa couldn’t says. Sure, she would learn that her sup-
bosa’s wildly extroverted brand of self- resist; she plugged a few random pliers were getting the driver’s license
care. “I’m a human being, too,” she says, sequences into ssn-verify.com, a website photos on the dodgy down-low. One guy
“I deserve to have fun.” that shows when a number was issued. was sneaking pictures of customer’s IDs
On Fridays, as other drivers shared She tried one that started 776-94. Bingo. from his job at a car dealership. Other
their earnings in the WhatsApp group, Maybe assigned after 2011. She entered pictures were bought off the dark web.
she’d post a pic of her fresh pineapple the combination while making a new Some people in the underground driver’s
vodka cocktail and invite them to join driver account. When Checkr, a com- license economy in Maryland or Califor-
her at happy hour. Barbosa headed to pany that does background checks for nia would snap a photo of the licenses
bars and clubs several nights a week— Uber, emailed asking for her to verify before mailing them to their out-of-
the Grand, Scorpion Bar, the Harp, Ned the number, Barbosa says she simply state immigrant clients, and then rent
Devine’s, Royale—and threw parties at plugged it in again. Then Checkr sent or sell those photos to people like Bar-
her apartment. She thrived on meeting whatever information it gathered to bosa. Somehow (“my naive concept,” she
other Brazilians (“I hate to be alone”), Uber, and Uber approved the account. says), uploading doctored documents
plugging their numbers into her phone, (A source close to Checkr insists that the onto an online platform seemed a lesser
asking what they did for work. company could, in fact, do background transgression than buying fake work
A few incident-free weeks after Bar- checks using numbers assigned after documents IRL.
bosa started driving with the Uber 2011, and Social Security numbers are Barbosa rationalized that she wasn’t
account she’d made, a new business just one data point they use to find infor- stealing money, and she had certain
opportunity arose. An acquaintance mation. All Barbosa knows is, in that era, standards. She didn’t buy licenses off
asked Barbosa to find a renter for his her trick worked.) a guy who reportedly dinged his car into
Uber and Lyft accounts, which he wasn’t Barbosa also met people with pictures people’s bumpers and photographed the
using. (Some undocumented drivers of real licenses to sell, and she spotted victim’s ID in the post-crash exchange.
traveled to states like Maryland and another opportunity: By buying a license To Barbosa, that seemed truly beyond
California, which would issue licenses and adding in her simple Social Security the pale.
to residents regardless of immigration trick, Barbosa could create new driver Mostly, she felt like an entrepre-
status. Barbosa would soon get her own accounts on Uber and Lyft en masse. She neur, supplying the demand. Undocu-
license, using a friend’s address in Cali- set rent at the price she’d previously mented immigrants wanted to drive in
fornia.) She scouted a candidate, and the paid, $250 a week. Business took off. the gig economy, and with the system
acquaintance gave her a cut of the rent, Word got around; more people pinged that existed, they legally could not. Peo-
$50 a week. She soon did the same for her WhatsApp, wanting their own pro- ple like Barbosa—with no family in the
a few other people she knew who also files. By late summer, with some eight States to sponsor them for green cards
wanted to rent out their accounts—a renters bringing her $2,000 a week, Bar- and their undocumented status preclud-
popular side hustle among expats, she bosa stopped driving. Now she spent her ing them from applying for many other
quickly realized. Voilà, $300 in passive days at her dining table on her laptop, types of visas—were short on options.
income a week. concocting accounts. “If the US gave more opportunities for
One day, while chatting over barbe- Barbosa figured she had gotten lucky immigrants to be able to work legally and
cue and Mike’s Hard Lemonade at one on her own slapdash Uber account that honestly here,” she says, “nobody would
of her house parties, a friend mentioned she’d hatched on Christmas. Now, look for something like this.”
that for whatever reason, the onboard- when she found a client, she registered It wasn’t just about business, though.
ing process for ride-sharing accounts a burner phone number on TextNow Barbosa readily admits she enjoyed not
seemingly couldn’t verify Social Secu- and an encrypted email with Pro- just the challenge but the ego boost of
ton Mail. Uber seemed to have gotten beating powerful Silicon Valley com-
more discerning, so if her customer panies on their own platforms. “I feel
looked nothing like the person on the pride in breaking their stupid systems,”
driver’s license, she photoshopped the she wrote me. “These companies are all
customer’s face in place of the origi- about money. They don’t care for the
nal. That way, when the app prompted drivers (we are just numbers for them).”
them to take a selfie as a security spot So she held open yawning security loop-
check, they would pass. She also photo- holes and waved undocumented driv-
shopped the name from the license onto ers in. “I never had evil intentions,” she
the customer’s insurance documents. explains. “I always thought I was help-
Ever organized, Barbosa kept an Excel ing my people.”
spreadsheet with each account’s details. Of course, Barbosa was poking the
In her Apple Notes, she checked off cli- rideshare industry’s weak spot: The

079
companies sometimes had no idea who Barbosa tried to do her own vetting bers. She searched the dark web for the
was driving. Uber and Lyft, vying for of drivers, for safety and business. She numbers belonging to the people on the
supremacy and scale, competed to add texted the potential customers: Did they licenses she bought, but struck out. So
drivers as fast as possible. Onboarding have a driver’s license in Brazil? Did they Barbosa started purchasing stolen num-
was optimized for ease and speed, done have a car? How often do they plan to bers from a contact, $100 a pop. She ner-
remotely, via the app. Both companies work? Dilettantes, she learned, tended vously created a few new accounts with
outsourced criminal background checks, to stop paying rent, wasting an account. the real numbers, but didn’t feel com-
but they didn’t catch everything. (That She started to become well known fortable repeating that at scale; it felt,
led to a torrent of lawsuits, regulator in Boston’s Brazilian community she says, like she’d “crossed the line.”
spats, and bad press about Uber– and (“famous,” she calls it) as, paradoxi- Barbosa was wondering whether she’d
Lyft–approved drivers who’d commit- cally, an honest broker. All over social need to leave her Uber business alto-
ted robbery, sex offenses, and assault.) media were warnings about scammers gether, when one of her customers gave
A year before Barbosa arrived in Massa- preying on undocumented drivers, tak- her an idea. Alessandro Da Fonseca was
chusetts, the state had tried to wrangle ing advantage of the fact they wouldn’t an amiable guy in his twenties who’d
the chaos with its own background check go to police or the courts. Some vendors recently emigrated from a shantytown
for drivers, the toughest oversight in the charged exorbitant rent or would take district of Rio de Janeiro. He rented one
country at the time. An audit later found money upfront and never give someone of Barbosa’s cars for a pizza delivery job
that program severely lacking, too. an account. Others siphoned the drivers’ and a Lyft gig, where he could get along
Background checks, of course, are earnings to their own wallets. with just a few words of English and an
useless if the person being vetted is The good faith Barbosa showed to her animated “Yeah!” as customers chat-
not actually the driver. As Barbosa customers paid off. Soon she was raking ted him up. He’d also started driving
was finding, in that era, verifying the in about $10,000 a month and was pair- for DoorDash. (“I prefer food, because
driver’s identity was a Swiss cheese of ing up with business partners to help food doesn’t talk,” he told me.) Door-
flaws to exploit. In 2019, London regu- make and manage some accounts. In Dash incentivized drivers to invite new
lators reported 43 unauthorized drivers the summer of 2019, she bought a used workers to the app by dangling a refer-
who had simply uploaded their photo black Mustang. (She posted on Insta- ral bonus, which would be paid out after
to another Uber worker’s account to gram, “Dad, this is for you.”) She shared the first-time driver made a set num-
give some 14,000 rides. Officers at San her #route66roadtrip, the Grand Can- ber of deliveries. The setup was ripe for
Francisco International Airport were yon, a crowded Vegas pool party. From exploitation.
ticketing Lyft and Uber drivers after dis- Epcot, she and a friend posted cocktail At the time, DoorDash required a driv-
covering people who didn’t match their toasts from a whirlwind of Disneyfied er’s license number but no picture of
app profiles. Industry observers called countries. She posed in front of a Beverly the actual card. Barbosa tried making
the issue of drivers sharing or renting Hills sign and on Rodeo Drive. Her fol- an account, reusing a number from a
accounts an open secret. (The companies lowers were paying attention. On a pic- license she had on hand. Success. Fon-
claim to have ramped up security since, ture of Barbosa wearing a faux fur coat in seca started driving—as her “new” refer-
but the American Immigration Council New York City, one person commented, ral—on this account. She offered him a
says that, in its analysis of 2022 census “She’s Hollywood now!” In phone calls, 50-50 split of the bonus. Barbosa and
data, undocumented workers are very her mom asked, “What do you do for Fonseca got into a routine: She created
much still a part of this sector.) work, Priscila?” She answered vaguely, new accounts to refer, and he typically
“Making accounts.” cleared enough deliveries to earn the
Then, the fall brought a nearly exis- bonus on two accounts he worked under
tential blow: Uber asked drivers on simultaneously (also against the rules)
profiles with fake Social Security num- every two weeks.
bers—about 35 of Barbosa’s clients at While waiting for orders at McDon-
that point, she estimates—to present alds, Chipotle, or Burger King, Fonseca
their documents in person. (“We’re would chat up other Brazilian delivery
committed to constantly improv- workers. Some were getting kicked only
ing our detection capabilities to pro- 20 percent of the referral bonus from
tect against fraudsters’ ever-evolving their account maker. Fonseca pitched
schemes,” said Heather Childs, chief his contact and her 50-50 split.
BARBOSA WENT trust and security officer at Uber.) Bar- Thanks to her previous business, Bar-
bosa and her drivers had no choice but bosa was sitting on a stack of IDs, and
INTO OVERDRIVE, to walk away: a loss, she says, of around her old Uber customers who’d lost their
$30,000 a month in rent. Until this point, accounts now wanted in. She could push
CHURNING OUT she recalls, account deactivation had out a DoorDash account in five minutes.
been rare. Pretty soon, she says, she had 10 cus-
ACCOUNTS “AS Now Barbosa knew that if she wanted tomers. Fonseca found Barbosa to be a
to keep making lucrative Uber accounts, showboat on Instagram, sure, but also
FAST AS I COULD.” she’d need real Social Security num- unfailingly polite and generous. She
 invited him to her house parties and
dispensed recommendations on any-
thing from a good car dealer to a Jap-
anese restaurant. In business, she was
demanding, prodding him when his
referrals were dallying in reaching the
bonus. Sometimes she’d give Fonseca
a laggard’s login, and he would ask the Barbosa went into overdrive, churn-
driver whether he could finish the jobs ing out accounts “as fast as I could.”
himself. (A spokesperson for DoorDash For friends, or people whose situations
said, “We’ve made huge strides on tack- sounded especially grim, she’d some-
ling fraud, and the fact is, what we did times make them for free.
five years ago is not what we do today.”) On Instacart, she’d scan the front of
Barbosa started making Instacart her own California license, so she could
accounts, too, and soon she was again then take a selfie to pass the platform’s
minting money, to the tune of some face-recognition test. She says she did
$12,000 a month. The week before this on hundreds of accounts. For the
Christmas 2019, Barbosa posted on license’s backside, she photoshopped
Instagram a picture of her in New York on a barcode that she generated with
City, grabbing the charging Wall Street software, using the identity information
bull by its enormous bronze balls. from her existing stockpile of drivers’
IDs. When she needed more licenses, she
bought fresh ones off Instacart workers
who were using a new harvesting tech-
nique: While scanning the back of a cus-
tomer’s ID into the app during alcohol
deliveries, the worker would sneak a
photo of the front.
On DoorDash, a few zealous drivers
were nabbing the referral bonus in a sin-
gle day and coming back the next day for
another account. Sometimes, Barbosa
had up to 20 new accounts on various
platforms going through background
checks; at her Covid apex, she says, she
raked in about $15,000 in one week.
Barbosa—always a “materialist,” she
concedes—catapulted to a new realm
ISTRACTED BY HER burgeoning of buying power. She flaunted her

D delivery app business, Barbosa

mostly stopped thinking about
Uber and Social Security numbers. Then
acquisitions on Instagram: a Sea-Doo
($7,000, used), Louboutin heels, Gucci
sunglasses, a Louis Vuitton purse. She
Covid struck and cratered ride-sharing upgraded her cross necklace to a 24k
overnight. gold one with 18 inset diamonds (not
A mother lode of food delivery surged religious, just superstitious), and her
in its place. DoorDash and Instacart bed to a California king. With most clubs
cranked up their referral bonuses to lure shuttered, Barbosa outfitted her latest
more drivers to the road. At one point, rental upgrade, a three-story townhome
she recalls, it was $2,000 on DoorDash, in Saugus, with a karaoke machine and a
$2,500 on Instacart. Immigrants ineli- keg tap, plus a hot tub and a firepit in the
gible for unemployment or Covid relief backyard. She adopted a Yorkie named
texted Barbosa with a new level of des- Bailey, for whom she bought so many
peration. They needed to make rent, toys that house visitors asked whether
to feed their kids. Now she was hear- she had kids (no, and no thanks). She
ing from Brazilians all over the United posted an Instagram Story that some-
States. Spanish-speaking immigrants one had filmed of her standing out of the
too. Even some US citizens who couldn’t sunroof of her gleaming white Porsche
GETTY IMAGES

drive because of DUIs or reckless driv- Macan, hair whipping. (For extra money,
ing tickets. she rented out the Porsche and her Mus-

081
tang on Turo.) She dropped $13,000 to Over time, Barbosa invited a small known back in Brazil when her meal
rent an event hall in the Boston burbs group of compatriots in the business business was booming. She felt smart,
for her 35th birthday bash, with a band into a WhatsApp group that she cheek- and needed: She’d kept scores of immi-
and 50 guests. The next day, she was ily named Mafia. (An unfortunate choice, grants working during the pandemic;
awed but not stressed by an additional in hindsight: “I should have put ‘People she’d helped get people food as a deadly
$12,000 charge on her credit card for From Church.’ ”) The Mafia shared tips virus menaced. If she blurred the details,
the open bar. She bought a plot of land and problems and agreed on account she could feel good about all of it.
outside of Fort Myers, Florida, that she prices, with plenty of banter to enliven The glow was short-lived. As the year
saw advertised on Facebook for $5,000. the drudgery of the digital assembly line. wound down, a vague rumor hit one of
(“I’m like, that’s so cheap!”) She planned By the fall of 2020, drivers were ask- her WhatsApp groups: Police might be
to someday build a house there and move ing for Uber Eats accounts. If Barbosa investigating the fake accounts biz.
in with her boyfriend, a Brazilian house wanted their business, she would again Already uneasy about buying Social
painter whom she hoped to marry. have to face the Social Security num- Security numbers, Barbosa says she
Barbosa also had enough money to ber dilemma. She mulled it over. It had didn’t want to be caught flat-footed if
solve what she thought was her biggest been months since she’d queasily made the rumor turned out to be true. She
problem: She couldn’t go home to see her first accounts using the real num- hustled around her apartment, grab-
her family, because she needed a green bers, which she’d bought off a contact. bing Instacart, DoorDash, and Grub-
card to leave and reenter the US. So a cou- Nothing bad had happened. She’d since hub bags, logo stickers, and app-issued
ple of months into Covid, she flew to LA found the right dark-web site to pur- debit cards. Outside, she placed several
and flipped through a binder full of pic- chase them directly. Why ease off now? phones under her Porsche’s wheels and
tures of potential husbands in an office “I was already so involved in this,” she drove over them. She threw all the evi-
on Wilshire Boulevard. A sham marriage wrote me. dence into garbage bags and, that night,
would cost some $28,000—$18,000 to So Barbosa decided to wade back into chucked them into several dumpsters in
the agency and $10,000 to the husband, the Uber biz. She bought a batch of Social various parking lots.
paid out in $350 monthly chunks to keep Security numbers off the dark web with She’d long taken comfort that
him cooperative throughout the process. bitcoin. WhatsApp and Proton Mail, the email
She felt zero guilt: At least she wasn’t By then, Uber seemed to be wising up. service she’d used for the apps, were
feigning romance with a citizen. Cleaner Accounts would be deactivated after a encrypted. She used an alias, Carol, on
for it to be a business transaction. week, a month at most. Then Barbosa her work phone so clients couldn’t eas-
Barbosa bought a white sundress at would noodle a workaround, and the cat- ily snitch on her. Now the physical evi-
a boutique and a crown of white flow- and-mouse game would continue. But in dence was gone too. (“Sweet illusion,”
ers and drove to a park, where a Covid- late 2020, after a wallop of new deacti- she wrote me.) For a couple of weeks
masked officiant married her and a man vations, the Mafia seemed to finally hit after the purge, Barbosa forced herself
named Mario by a flowering jacaranda a wall. For days, then weeks, they tried to stop making accounts.
tree. An agency staffer snapped pics for to figure out a new method that would She spent New Year’s in Miami Beach,
evidence, and Mario’s real girlfriend get an account approved. No luck. Bar- where she posted a photo of herself
looked on. Barbosa’s family, who knew bosa recalls someone texting, chagrined, wearing Gucci sunglasses and holding
the drill, FaceTimed in on her phone. “The Titanic is sinking.” a frozen mai tai the size of her head. She
Her Instagram post from the day doesn’t Then, one Mafia member mentioned shared the pic with the Mafia.
mention what was really happening; it that Uber kept metadata on the accounts. Someone quipped back, “Find me,
shows her alone in her sundress on the Barbosa noticed that all of her axed FBI.”
beach. Caption: “The sky is the limit!” accounts had, in fact, been created on
Throughout the pandemic, Bar- her phone—iPhone de Priscila Barbosa.
bosa was a digital nomad tending her What if she made her computer look
accounts mill. From a water park, she’d like a different device each time? She
call DoorDash customer service to clear restarted her laptop, accessed the web
up a flubbed delivery from one of her through a VPN, changed her computer’s
workers who didn’t speak English. Pool- address, and set up a virtual machine,
side in Vegas, she’d log in to a client’s inside which she accessed another VPN.
Instacart to snap a selfie for a face rec- She opened a web browser to create an
ognition spot-check. (Some custom- Uber account with a real Social Security
ers kept a printout of Barbosa’s photo number bought from the dark web. It
on hand for the checks. Instacart says worked. Barbosa delivered a few orders
those tricks would not work today.) herself. The account held.
When Instacart deactivated some 85 She texted the Mafia, “Guys, this is
percent of her accounts—a particularly working.”
dire crisis—she ignored her boyfriend’s They exploded in texts of relief and
protests and hunkered down in a Florida joy: “If Priscila can’t figure it out, no one
hotel room for days to remake each one. can!” Barbosa felt a pride she had only

082
 In April 2021, while Barbosa was cook-
ing dinner, a text pinged her phone. Her
green card had been approved. Barbosa
screamed; she called her parents in tears.
Then she threw together a party for the
next night to celebrate. When Fonseca
S 2020 TURNED to 2021 and arrived, he squeezed through the loud,

A Barbosa continued making

accounts, a low hum of dread
invaded her idle moments. She started
packed house and grabbed some Brazil-
ian barbecue. Outside on the back porch,
he found Barbosa, in cut-off shorts and a
to ponder an exit. halter top, swigging overflowing cham-
She confided to a Mafia pal that she pagne from the bottle.
was scared of losing everything. News If you ask Barbosa when she was hap-
in February didn’t help: A 30-year-old piest, she’ll say it was that moment:
Brazilian named Douglas Goncalves “Everything was perfect.” She had a
had been arrested for working under a green card. She had the house and the
stolen identity on Instacart. It was the (real) boyfriend and the Porsche that she
first time Barbosa had heard of criminal wanted. She booked a round-trip ticket—
consequences for a fake profile, and she first class—to visit her family in Brazil
recognized the suspect’s name: Gon- for two weeks in late May. She bought
calves, she says, had texted her a cou- Versace sneakers, because why not. She
ple of weeks earlier about getting an was going to open her steakhouse, marry
account. His long-winded answers to her boyfriend, and, down the line, move
her usual vetting questions annoyed her, into the house she’d build in Florida. Just
and she ghosted him, she recalls. But the three years after landing at JFK, she had
texts might still be sitting on his phone. risen to the top of a shadow Silicon Val-
Fonseca, Barbosa’s DoorDash partner, ley gig economy. She’d hacked her way
also started to worry. Too many peo- to the American Dream.
ple were hawking accounts, licenses, On May 6, 2021, a new Instagram Story.
and Social Security numbers in his Among the vacation bacchanalia and
WhatsApp groups. “Everybody knew designer haul videos, this one stood out.
this bomb would explode someday,” he Barbosa filmed ahead, over handlebars
said. “People are stupid and don't take as she pedaled a bike through her sunny
care.” townhouse complex. No humblebrag, or
Barbosa thought about going legit, even brag-brag. Carefree.
getting back into the food business, The next morning, she woke up at
opening a Brazilian steakhouse. She dawn to her Yorkie barking. A banging on
figured startup costs at about $50,000; the front door. A booming voice, order-
she had that amount many times over. ing her to come downstairs.
She googled around to see what kind of Find me, FBI. They did.
permits she’d need.
Still, her frauds kept compounding.
Uber was now rejecting the doctored ID
photos; she bought a printer to create
physical fake licenses. She had more than
50 customer accounts active on various
platforms, and new people kept texting
her, often with a woeful tale. To calm her
fraying nerves, she told herself that with
so many people in the accounts trade,
some doing more audacious things than
she was, why would she get in trouble?
One Mafia member, she says, was run-
ning a team that spoofed DoorDash
deliveries for food that, in reality, was
never picked up or delivered.
“I had so many chances to stop, but I
GETTY IMAGES

didn’t,” she wrote me. “It looked like an

addiction you know.”
 ATER THAT DAY, crying in the

L back seat of an unmarked car en

route to a Rhode Island prison,
Barbosa recalls an FBI agent trying to
calm her down. He complimented her
apartment, which she admits, even
given the circumstances, pleased her
just a little.
As it turns out, in late 2019, right
about the time Barbosa was grabbing
the Wall Street bull by the balls, Uber did
know something was off. The company
detected a ring of people bypassing its
background checks in Massachusetts
and California, and tipped off the FBI in
Boston. Investigators served a warrant
to Apple; they wanted to see the iCloud
account of a Brazilian guy named Wem-
erson Dutra Aguiar who, after getting
Barbosa still holds on to some of the clothes
she wore in prison, as well as the items hurt at his job in construction, started
she crocheted while serving her sentence. driving for apps and later dealing fake
 identity theft, for making and renting table garden in the yard. She aced law
fake accounts over the prior two-plus clerk and English composition classes.
years. She picked up crochet, writing down
Barbosa was accused of being a heavy pages of instructions that her sister had
in the case: The government said she emailed: a headband, glittery unicorn
pushed out some 2,000 accounts, using slippers, a Christmas tree, stockings,
hundreds of driver’s licenses, and prof- and snowmen to deck out the unit for
ited more than $780,000. Barbosa says the holidays. She conquered a 2,000-
about half of that was her actual take. piece puzzle of jellyfish and whales, then
The rest she either split with her busi- a 5,000-piece world map. She did daily
ness partners or sent along to the immi- squats and jumping jacks. She watched
grants who didn’t have their own bank Orange Is the New Black and declared
accounts and used hers. (The govern- it somewhat accurate. She watched a
ment conceded in court filings that Bar- TV commercial for WhatsApp’s “pri-
bosa did let other people use her bank vate” texting and declared it a lie. When
account.) she entered a room, she says that some
For the next two weeks, Barbosa inmates, resentful, would snipe, “Here
says, she sat alone in her jail cell for 23 comes the princess.” Upon hearing about
hours a day—for a mandated Covid- her crime, one woman called her “Bra-
era quarantine—suffering from panic zilian Robin Hood.”
attacks and spiraling self-loathing. “I The name was snappy, but an awk-
was feeling that my life was over,” she ward fit. Barbosa hadn’t stolen money
wrote me. “I fucked up everything.” from the rich as much as identities from
Her attorney mailed her a flash drive of ordinary people. Now sitting in jail, she
the government’s evidence: her bank says, she finally thought about them.
statements, the contents of her iCloud “This is going to sound awful,” she
account, her Excel spreadsheet, some warns, but here goes: “I feel bad that I
Mafia WhatsApp chats. Barbosa cringed caused some emotional distress to peo-
upon reading “Find me, FBI.” (“I bet the ple. But at the same time, I did it in peace,
FBI agent’s face, when they read that, because I never took money from any
they said hahaha, like, stupid woman!”) of those people. It wasn’t victimless,
While Barbosa was in jail, her sis- because I used people’s identity. But
ter traveled to Boston and packed four nobody really got damaged.”
suitcases full of Versace and Louboutin None of the three identity-theft vic-
shoes and LV purses, then took them tims who spoke to me—a Harvard pro-
back to Brazil. Barbosa had a contact fessor and two tech workers—knew how
transfer $30,000 back to Brazil before it or when their identity had been stolen.
could be seized. (The feds did later grab None had experienced financial harm.
accounts. Barbosa didn’t know Aguiar, approximately $55,000 in bitcoin.) On a They felt unnerved because their infor-
but a Mafia member had once asked video call, her sister showed her stories mation was exposed, but they were also
her to email him a Connecticut driver’s in the Brazilian press. “My name was in curious about, and even showed a degree
license template. She did. By February everyone’s mouth in my city,” she says. of empathy for, the thieves. One victim
2021, law enforcement had circled in on The former teacher’s pet from Sorocaba mused to me, “It’s kind of a sad crime in
her, and served Apple a search warrant who taught computers to kids, now an a way, isn’t it? Obviously, it’s a crime and
for her iCloud too. In early April, the alleged felon with some Mafia texting they shouldn’t have done it, but sad that
FBI had tracked Barbosa’s location via group in the US. Her mom was devas- people have to do stuff like this to get by.”
her T-Mobile cell number. Investigators tated. For months and months, the legal In prison, the crime was regarded as
staked out her apartment and watched process dragged on. rather pathetic. Alessandro Da Fonseca,
her come and go. So, question: Did you think Priscila Barbosa’s DoorDash ally (arrested on
All this time, Barbosa had worried Barbosa, queen of accounts, was going the same day), was waiting out the legal
that getting caught could mean the gov- to sit idle in jail? At the Gloria McDonald process with many other defendants in
ernment would seize her money and Women’s Facility in Rhode Island, she a Rhode Island detention center, and
property—to her, disaster enough. She morphed into Barbosa, Star Inmate. She found that more serious fraudsters were
was shocked that the FBI raided her cooked for more than 100 prisoners in baffled. With all the personal informa-
house, “like arresting a murderer.” All the cafeteria and shared Brazilian reci- tion the ring had access to—enough to
this for me? Then she was locked in a pes with fellow kitchen staff. That earned open bank accounts, credit cards—their
prison cell and charged, along with 18 her $3 a day. (“Ridiculous,” she says, only con was to … create Uber profiles?
other Brazilian nationals, with conspir- but she enjoyed the work.) She joined Fonseca shrugged it off. “We are not
acy to commit wire fraud and aggravated inmates in planting an organic vege- criminals, with a criminal mind,” he told

085
me in a jail call. “We just want to work.” happened to Priscila Barbosa?’” Her use
Uber disagreed. During the legal of technology—the dark web, bitcoin,
wranglings, the company accused the Photoshop—constituted “sophisticated
ring of stealing money and tallied its means,” a sentencing enhancement,
losses: some $250,000 spent investigat- he added.
ing the ring, around $93,000 to onboard When Barbosa spoke, she cried. She
the fraudulent drivers, plus safety risks said she was ashamed. She apologized
and damage to its reputation. Defense “from the bottom of my heart” to the
attorneys shot back that no one lost people whose identities she used. Then
money at all: The jobs were done. The the judge read out her sentence: three
food was delivered. People got their years, just what the assistant US attor-
rides. The gig companies, in fact, prof- ney recommended. Barbosa exhaled.
ited off the undocumented drivers, taking With the two years she’d already served
their typical hefty cut—money that, once in prison, and with time shaved off for
the fraud was discovered, there was no good behavior, she’d be released within
evidence they’d refunded to customers. a few months. For that last stretch, she
In February 2022, Barbosa sat in her was shipped off to Aliceville federal
Rhode Island prison cell, reading two prison in Alabama.
packets of papers: one agreement to Then, late in the hot summer, she got
plead guilty to felony identity theft a visit from federal immigration offi-
and conspiracy to commit wire fraud, cers. After she finished her sentence,
another to cooperate with the US gov- they told her, she’d be taken to depor-
ernment. She had already done the latter tation proceedings. (“It looks like this
in two hours-long interviews, in hopes nightmare never ends,” she wrote me.)
of a lighter recommended sentence. She As the months ticked by, Barbosa’s
signed both agreements with a star in hopes of being able to stay in the US
the P of Priscila (a sort of watermark, had grown. Now, crestfallen, she slipped
she says, in case the government tried into depression. She also decided that
to use her signature elsewhere). she would not fight it. She’d pay for her
A year later, in June 2023, Barbosa own ticket to Brazil so she’d be free as
walked into her sentencing inside the soon as possible. With the weeks dwin-
red-brick federal courthouse along Bos- dling, she typed me a very un-Barbosa
ton’s waterfront. It felt nice to be back in message:
civilian clothes—a white flouncy blouse “Too bad they got me too, it is what
and black pants—but she was still afraid. it is.”
The government was recommending
three years for her, given her coopera-
tion. Other defendants, whose alleged
profits were lower, had been sentenced
to that or more.
In court, assistant US attorney David
Holcomb told the judge that Barbosa
was the “most prolific creator” of the
accounts, a “central figure” in the net-
work, “highly effective” at this kind
of fraud, with “unique social talents”
bringing together ex-boyfriends, social
contacts, and competitors. Barbosa’s
attorney argued that her intentions
were mostly good. “She is a very intel-
ligent woman,” he said, who “put her
intelligence to use in an extraordinary
way,” helping immigrants work. (Bar-
bosa enjoyed that part.) The judge
wasn’t convinced. Her intelligence was
all aimed at defrauding people, he said,
and he had to set an example: “I hope
those chat rooms are now filled with
chats about ‘Did you hear about what

086
T
HAT, YOU MIGHT have guessed,
was never how the story of Pris- THIS TIME, SHE HAD
cila Inc. was going to end.
Remember Barbosa’s sham marriage MORE THAN $117,
in LA? The government found out about
it too, while raiding her apartment. AND HER FAMILY HAD
Along with her laptops and phones and
driver’s license printer, investigators SHIPPED BACK HER
took an album of wedding photos and a
receipt for the $28,000 “Package Plan.” DESIGNER CLOTHES.
They asked her about it during those
interviews while she was in jail.
In October, as Barbosa’s deportation
drew nearer, she heard from her attor-
ney. Thanks in part to the intel from the
apartment raid and her interviews, the other fraudsters were counting the days pending, and her English skills, bur-
government had busted the 11-person until their deportations or still living on nished by constant use in prison, got
ring. Now she was being subpoenaed the lam, she was walking out of a Boston her part-time gigs translating medical
to testify at one person’s trial. courthouse’s front door. appointments and home-renovation
Barbosa didn’t want to take the stand, Barbosa was 37 years old. Fluent in sales pitches. But frankly, neither felt
but given her cooperation agreement, English. Still wearing her gray Alabama like Barbosa-sized jobs. Her boyfriend
she had little choice. So on November prison sweatsuit. A bulky GPS cinched on had moved on while she was in prison, so
15, 2023, the day before she had been her ankle. She breathed in the autumn she moved into a studio apartment alone.
scheduled to be taken into ICE custody, air, along with a surreal feeling of once She hit the old clubs and parties with a
Barbosa was on a commercial plane, again being in charge of her own day. “I smaller circle of friends—her closest
flying back to Boston with two US Mar- don’t have even a toothbrush!” she told one had been deported, others distanced
shals, hiding her handcuffs from other me over the phone the next day, giddy. themselves. At times, depression sank in.
passengers inside her hoodie’s kangaroo “It is incredible to feel free again.” Sitting in her quiet living room in Jan-
pocket. At the federal courthouse, she Two weeks later, she’d stride into the uary, she said, “Maybe this is me adjust-
was (technically) rearrested, this time trial and recount the meeting at the mar- ing to the world again.” As she spoke, she
as a material witness. A magistrate judge riage agency’s office on Wilshire, the wobbled between the versions of herself.
released her with an ankle monitor to binder of potential spouses, the wed- The Barbosa who meant well but, yes,
await the trial. ding by the jacaranda tree. The defen- did bad … but had been quite good at it,
To understand Priscila Barbosa—the dant’s attorney, while cross-examining hadn’t she? The Barbosa vowing to never
pluck, the sheer balls—consider that as Barbosa, would rub in just how much go anywhere near a gig app ever again,
she was benefiting from testifying: that then the one who could still, when asked,
she’d helped herself by telling the gov- recount every fraudulent keystroke. The
ernment about others (“I was just being repentant Barbosa who was glad getting
truthful,” she retorted), that her prison caught forced her to quit. The pragmatic
sentence had been shorter (“Who wants Barbosa who knew she would never have
to be in jail?” she replied). made a single fake profile had she just
Her deportation had been temporarily been legally allowed to work. With her
halted for her testimony, but she would future suspended between two coun-
still need a permanent immigration rem- tries, she wondered what was next.
edy to stay long-term. Barbosa says she So that’s it. Barbosa wanted you to
applied for asylum late last year, claim- know the full story, “the real Priscila,”
ing that she fears retribution from the the complex one. For the easy plot with
associates of the wedding agency and a clean ending, there’s Instagram.
some people in the Uber case. In December, Barbosa put up her first
As the rush of freedom subsided, Bar- after-prison post, picking up her victory
bosa faced the sobering task of another march where she’d left off. She stood in
new start. At least she had more than $117 front of a suburban Boston ballroom’s
this time, and her family had shipped Christmas tree in pleather bell bottoms,
back her designer clothes. Solving one forehead newly Botox-smoothed, Louis
immediate problem, she could get a legit- Vuitton purse dangling from her wrist.
imate driver’s license now; Massachu- She typed out a fresh bio: “Brazilian Liv-
LAUREN SMILEY writes about setts had started issuing them regardless ing in USA … Grateful for Life. Paralegal.
humans in the tech age and is a of immigration status. She could also MasterChef. IT Professional.”
regular contributor to wifed. work while her asylum application was All of it more or less true.
BY
LAURA KIPNIS

PHOTOGRAPHS BY
SAHAR RANA
MARGARET ATWOOD, MARLON JAMES, LENA DUNHAM, ROXANE GAY:

WE’VE ALL AGREED TO BE TURNED INTO AI READING

COMPANIONS BY A MYSTERIOUS COMPANY CALLED REBIND.

I REPORT FROM THE INSIDE.

 16—we’re not precisely told) would risk
being called a predator.
A bunch of decidedly illustrious par-
ticipants, known as “Rebinders,” had
apparently already signed on: the Irish
Booker Prize winner John Banville on
James Joyce’s Dubliners, best-selling
writer Roxane Gay on Edith Wharton’s
The Age of Innocence, also Bill McKib-
ben, Elaine Pagels, Garth Greenwell …
And bringing up left field, Lena Dunham
on E. M. Forster’s A Room With a View,
a quirky prospect.
Clancy further explained that some-
one named John Dubuque, who’d sold
a business for “umpteen million dol-
lars,” had gotten the idea for this venture
after spending several months working
through philosopher Martin Heideg-
ger’s notoriously difficult Being and Time
with a tutor. His hope, Clancy said, was
to make this kind of (doubtless expen-
sive) one-on-one reading experience
available to everyone. I googled John
WHEN A FLATTERING EMAIL ARRIVED Dubuque. Nothing came up. How do you
inviting me to participate in an AI ven- sell a company for umpteen millions
ture called Rebind that I’d later come to and leave no trace? My scam antennae
think will radically transform the entire vibrated again. I figured I’d next be asked
way booklovers read books, I felt pretty to invest in the company, probably in the
sure it was a scam. For one thing, the form of Apple gift cards.
sender was Clancy Martin, a writer and I did agree to a phone call with Clancy
philosophy professor I didn’t know per- and, soon after hellos, pressed for fur-
sonally but vaguely recalled had written ther details about Dubuque, whom I
about his misspent youth as a small- wasn’t sure really existed. “He sounds
time jewelry-biz con artist, also being kind of Gatsbyish,” I said, suavely veil-
a serial liar in his love life. For another, ing my skepticism in a literary allusion.
they were offering to pay me. “Clancy 0 9 0 Clancy claimed to have met him—a
up to his old ways!” I thought. “wonderful fellow” from the Midwest,
My role, the email explained, would really nice guy—and then got down to
involve recording original commentary business. If I signed on, Rebind would
on a “great book”—Clancy suggested first record a handful of short videos of
Romeo and Juliet, though it could be any me chatting about the play, any aspect
classic in the public domain. This com- that interested me—these would be
mentary would somehow be implanted embedded in various places through-
in the text and made interactive: Read- out the text. And then I and an interloc-
ers would be able to ask questions and utor (probably Clancy), known in-house
AI-me would engage in an “ongoing con- as a “Ghostbinder,” would record 12
versation” with them about the book. (or more!) hours of conversation—
We’d be reading buddies. Proposing these would be used as the basis for
me for Romeo and Juliet did strike me AI-Laura’s commentaries. The conver-
as subversively funny—my “expertise” sation could be about Romeo and Juliet
on romantic tragedy consists of having THE NIHILIST IN ME but also related subjects: Is love at first
once written a somewhat controversial sight trustworthy? Is 13 too young to
anti-marriage polemic titled Against THINKS IF HUMANS ARE get married? The content was entirely
Love. I’ve also written, a bit ironically, up to me: My job wasn’t to be a Shake-
GOING TO PERISH, WE
about the muddle of sexual consent speare expert, it was to be interest-
codes, which I supposed could prove MIGHT AS WELL PERISH ing. As Rebind users read the play, chat
relevant. Juliet was, after all, only 13. windows would open in which they’d
These days, Romeo (probably around READING THE CLASSICS. write journal-type responses, to which
AI-Laura would respond, drawing on ish reading the classics. I downloaded shirt—had never been interviewed
and remixing the recordings I had made. a free copy of Romeo and Juliet from before, which made me feel unaccus-
Even if it was technically feasible and the internet. tomedly powerful.
Dubuque was legit, did I really want to Next: getting to the bottom of the
be involved in this? I have all the usual money. Behind every great fortune
anxieties about AI—that it will usher in MY FIRST QUESTION TO JOHN DUBUQUE, lies a great crime, Balzac said. Behind
the end of human history; that under the who not only exists but lives in a sprawl- Dubuque’s was … wholesale plumbing
hood it’s a charming sociopath who tries ing mansion near Santa Barbara, was supplies. His great-grandfather started
to get tech reporters to ditch their wives; how there could be absolutely nothing the company, literally called Plumbers
that even its inventors don’t understand about him online. “How do you even Supply, in 1924 in St. Louis, and when
how it works; that it’s so ruthlessly intel- manage that?” I demanded. We’d set- Dubuque graduated from college in 2006
ligent we’ll soon be working for it while tled on white canvas couches near the his father said, “You can put in 10 or 15
believing it’s working for us. infinity pool, on one of numerous tiered years now and you’ll be glad you did, or
Less amusingly, that it’s being inte- verandas overlooking the Pacific. The you can do it 10 or 15 years from now.”
grated into drone warfare and given panoramic view was breathtaking. A Which is how Dubuque became CEO of a
autonomous capabilities. Sure, new waterfall burbled nearby. 48-person company in his mid-twenties
technologies always prompt trepida- He took the question in stride. “Yeah, and, over the next decade-plus, quadru-
tion, but the rapid and cavalier adoption I’m a really private person!” The idea of pled it in size.
of this one—certain to be life-altering speaking to the general public, let alone By 2021 the construction industry
on an unimaginable scale—is uniquely a writer, horrified him. I’d heard from was booming; Plumbers Supply was hav-
terrifying. There’s also no standing in its Clancy that Dubuque—fortyish and wiry, ing record month after record month.
way. The nihilist in me thinks if humans unpretentiously friendly, unremarkably But looking ahead, where was it going
are going to perish, we might as well per- dressed in chinos and a button-down to go? It was a regional operation. Fig-
uring the company wouldn’t
be worth as much for decades,
and knowing the markets were
awash in cash—he was hearing
crazy pandemic-era things—
Dubuque looked into selling.
Within six months a deal was
signed with a national outfit. He
was 38 and sitting on an “undis-
closed sum” of money, mean-
ing a lot. As Dubuque graciously
adjusted a gargantuan canvas
porch umbrella to shade my East
Coast pallor from the blinding
California rays, I gazed out at
the azure Pacific and resolved to
cultivate a better understanding
of market cycles.
“Everyone joked, ‘You’re
retired, why don’t you chill
out?’” Dubuque said. “But I
would go nuts.” He obviously
didn’t need to make more
money. He waved an arm
toward the house. “Like, I’ve
made it.” Having fallen in love
with philosophy as an under-
grad at USC, he’d promised him-
self he’d someday return to it.
Being and Time had been sit-
ting on his bookshelf forever;
not long before he sold his com-
pany, he’d flipped it open and
realized, “There’s no way I’ll
ever get through this book.”
So he hired an Oxford profes-
 let’s say Moby-Dick. “You read the first 40 own, was a substitute English teacher. At
pages and you put it on the shelf, right?” age 12 he was a bad reader with a stut-
By then he was reading William James’ ter; his mother would sit with him at the
The Varieties of Religious Experience kitchen table and they’d read through his
and loving it, and thought: Who’s the assignments together—essentially an
William James guy? It turned out to be Oxford-style tutorial. It’s what he tried
John Kaag, who’d written a book called to replicate with his own commentary
Sick Souls, Healthy Minds: How William for Rebind on Thoreau’s Walden: relat-
James Can Save Your Life, a mashup of ing the book to his own experiences and
memoir and philosophy. Which is exactly difficulties, which include a heart attack
what Dubuque thinks people want: not at age 40 followed by bypass surgery.
scholasticism, but to know how to con- (Thoreau, who died of tuberculosis at
nect great books to our lives. age 44, wrote movingly about fearing
that bad health had prevented him from
leading a meaningful life.) If a reader
journals about their own life
difficulties in the chat, AI
finds the places where Kaag
shares something similar.
Now the two are in conver-
sation. Seeing that back-and-
forth happen as they tested
sor to meet with him twice a week, turn- out the prototype, Kaag and
ing an impenetrable treatise into the Dubuque got really excited—
most meaningful thing he’d ever read. I SUSPECT REBIND WILL BE they were creating, they
He remembers thinking, “Boy, it’s too thought, a new way to read.
A BOON FOR THOSE WITH A
bad more people can’t experience this!” The ideal Rebinder, then,
When I asked how, specifically, his world LOW TOLERANCE FOR THE is someone with experience
had been reshaped, he tried to explain talking to the general public—
(“Being is so close to us that we look NEUROSES AND PASSIVE- not necessarily the world’s
right through it!”) and I tried to under- foremost expert, but some-
stand (“OK, right!”). AGGRESSIONS THAT BOOK one who knows how to make
Then about a year later—when books come alive. Only a few
CLUBS INVARIABLY INCITE.
Dubuque was in the middle of a sec- people they’ve approached
ond tutorial, this time on Alfred North have turned them down.
Whitehead’s Process and Reality, When I asked Kaag who’d said
another weighty, conjunctively titled no, he laughed and said that
book that was once again changing the novelist Andre Dubus III,
everything for him—ChatGPT came out. a good friend, had told him he
Dubuque was skeptical, having long ago was “dancing with the devil.”
read a convincing anti-AI argument by “Reading is meant to be a pri-
the Berkeley professor Hubert Dreyfus, vate experience!” Dubus had
a famous Heideggerian who thought said. “You’re supposed to lose
human intelligence was too embod- yourself in a book!” There was
ied and situated to ever be replicated WHEN KAAG GOT AN EMAIL FROM no way he’d participate.
by machines. Nevertheless, Dubuque Dubuque, he almost didn’t answer, but The Rebind catalog is evolving by the
started playing around with the app, they eventually talked on the phone and day: James Wood (Chekhov), Margaret
pasting in passages from Whitehead hit it off, as Kaag told me over Zoom: “He Atwood (Tale of Two Cities), and Mar-
and asking it to summarize them. He turned out to be one of the most curi- lon James (Huck Finn) have recently
was amazed at the results. ous, thoughtful people that I’ve ever been added. Dubuque and Kaag had
He also suspected there were a lot of encountered.” The two joined forces to been thinking mainly about philosophy
people who, like him, wanted to read hard develop Rebind. Kaag brought on his titles, until they realized how many dif-
books—maybe not Being and Time, but friend Clancy Martin. They have similar ferent kinds of books and conversations
profiles: untraditional philosophy pro- there could be. Which was when they
fessors who’ve written eclectic books, realized how big Rebind could be: “Not
including about their struggles with just big,” Dubuque said, “but a land-
depression. (Clancy’s most recent book mark event.” The spiritual category
is titled How Not to Kill Yourself.) will be especially huge, he thinks: Cur-
Kaag’s mother, who raised him on her rently contracted luminaries include
Deepak Chopra and Bessel van der Kolk, said. He seemed pretty sanguine about it himself. He’s the sole investor; they’re
the trauma expert who wrote The Body it. (I’d pressed Kaag too on this demon in not looking for others. When I asked what
Keeps the Score—five years on the best- the machine that apparently likes to fuck his initial outlay had been, he declined to
seller list. They will also, of course, things up a little: “Yes, there’s going to be say. And what about other routes to prof-
Rebind the Bible, probably from mul- a little wiggle room between what a user itability, like selling users’ data? (Which
tiple vantages. gets and what a commentator said.”) could be pretty fertile stuff for market-
Dubuque added: “The kind of comput- ers—all your questions and desires about
ing these LLMs are doing, this kind of life, love, and existence.) Dubuque was
I KNEW I’D HAVE TO ASCERTAIN FROM intelligence, is just different. Is that an adamant. “One hundred percent never.
Dubuque how exactly the app worked existential risk? Well, I come back to the It will be in writing. Never going to do it.”
and steeled myself for an explanation I’d fact that we have no idea how the human
only half understand, so I was relieved to brain works.” It’s easier to imagine cat-
hear him say that developing it was less astrophic things than see the opportu- THIS APP ISN’T FOR EVERYONE,
of a technical challenge than a creative nities, he points out. Dubuque stressed. College students can
one. The innovation, as he explained, Plus, there are built-in guardrails— use it, obviously, but the target audience
was making the Rebinder’s commen- places the AI simply refuses to go. I is adults, or at least the book-loving sub-
tary “chattable.” It’s designed to “meet was interested to learn from Ty Rol- set. (Five million people in the United
the user where they are,” which also lin, Rebind’s chief technical officer, that States are in book clubs, Kaag had men-
means, as Dubuque enthuses, “it’s going suicide is an issue many LLMs will not tioned.) “You read all these wonderful
to sound like nothing else you’ve ever discuss, which might be a problem when books as an undergrad,” Dubuque said,
heard before!” talking about, say, Anna Karenina. (Or “and then you graduate and you read
Achieving this is the job of Rebind’s Romeo and Juliet.) One of the reasons newsletters.” The big thing a user has
discussion engineer, Martin Zirulnik, LLM apps like Rebind have been slow to understand is that Rebind is designed
an English lit PhD (not, Dubuque points to come out, Dubuque thinks, is that to be an active experience. “If you’re not
out, an engineer by training; he doesn’t it’s so exasperating to wrangle them. responding to these questions and think-
think they’re sufficiently attuned to the They have a life of their own, with per- ing deeply, you’re not going to have as
nuances of language). A subject of fre- sonal quirks and occasionally defiant much fun.” Kaag too had stressed that
quent jokes between Dubuque and Zir- inclinations. the more a reader puts of themselves
ulnik is that one of the large language And they keep getting more and more into the chat windows—highlighting and
models they’re testing won’t stop say- powerful. Any of the commercially avail- reacting, producing “marginalia”—the
ing “indeed.” “I’ll pay you $500 not to able LLMs can be swapped in and out for more interesting the conversations are
say indeed!” Dubuque will say. Back Rebind’s purposes—Musk’s xAI, Google’s going to become.
it comes with “indeed.” It also favors Gemini—though Dubuque thinks OpenAI I suspect Rebind will be a boon for the
pseudo-profundities like “delve” and is a bit ahead of everyone. Each time shy and those with a low tolerance for
“dive,” the unfortunate machines hav- Rebind passes content back and forth, the the neuroses and passive-aggressions
ing apparently been trained to regard company charges them a fee, but those that book groups invariably incite.
delving and diving as signifiers of human costs are going to keep plunging, he pre- Dubuque emphasized that users will
depth. (Avoid being seated next to one dicts. As I was completing this article, have to realize that Rebind isn’t an “Ask
at a dinner party after the singularity.) GPT-4o was released, which, Dubuque Me Anything” experience, though he
Whether to put the AI-generated told me by email, was not only twice as figures, as with ChatGPT, people will
commentaries in the voice of the actual fast but dropped the price per word by 50 initially want to test its limits, try to
Rebinder (based on the prerecorded percent: GPT4-o currently costs $5 per “break it.”
videos embedded in the text) had been million tokens input—a token is roughly Which is exactly what I did when I
a subject of debate. “There’s something 0.75 words—and $15 per million tokens got access to a beta version of the app
really magical about the way someone output. (Coincidentally, Dubuque went to and clicked on The Great Gatsby, with
speaks, something compressed inside high school with Sam Altman, OpenAI’s New York Times journalist Peter Cata-
people’s voices that brings language to CEO. They weren’t close friends but did pano as the Rebinder. “Was Gatsby just
life,” Dubuque thinks, though he’s also play intramural soccer together.) a rich jerk?” I asked AI-Catapano: “Gats-
concerned about the “ick factor”—are Rebind does have to be profitable to by’s character is complex and multi-
voice clones creepy? Dubuque is con- grow, Dubuque said; he can’t keep funding dimensional, not easily reduced to the
vinced that retaining the human ele- label of a ‘rich jerk,’” he (it?) chided
ment, wherever possible, is crucial. “It me. “In fact, Gatsby also enters the
comes back to authenticity,” he said. “If book as a very soft-spoken and rather
you just had the bot, you’d lose that con- humble-seeming person. He’s perhaps
nection.” For now, Rebind has decided 0 9 3 flashy with his home, his parties, and
to send in the clones. his belongings but seems relatively sub-
Dubuque knows the machines are dued in his appearance and manner of
going to be, at times, unpredictable. speaking.” The cadences were slightly
“Oh, it will definitely hallucinate,” he stiff—Dubuque said that as the models
get faster and smarter, the responses experience as a Rebinder—“I can’t pre-
are getting more creative and conversa- tend to understand the thing, I’m an old
tional—but having my admittedly dumb guy you know”—by way of an anecdote.
question pondered seriously in real time He’d agreed to participate because he
did feel engaging, and made me want to thought it was a wonderful democrati-
keep reading and chatting. zation of high literature: “I don’t think
I also started to wonder how much I’m being too lovey-dovey here, but I
this app, by putting users into a sort of would hope that it would demystify great
imaginary intimacy with the Rebinder, books for readers who, you know, might
will facilitate us projecting our fantasies feel intimidated.”
onto writers we admire. Especially the His anecdotes were mostly about
kind of reader prone to literary crushes Joyce, with whom he enjoys a com-
(that would be me), or with celebrity plexly tormented relationship: fraternal,
Rebinders like Lena Dunham, who’s sub- admiring, competitive. He’d read Dub-
ject to so much crazy projection as it is. liners countless times and it remained
To be honest, I was already savoring the astonishing, despite how
idea of us reading Room With a View young Joyce was when
together, not because I suppose she’s he wrote it: “What was I
some sort of expert on it, but for her doing at that age? Writing
weird and fearless sensibility. I imag- bad imitations of Joyce!”
ined our back-and-forth—me impress- Though I could have hap-
ing her with my originality, us giggling pily listened to Banville all
together at her offbeat answers. Since day, I attempted to right the
her commentary wasn’t yet up on the ship of the interview by put-
prototype, I seized the opportunity to ting to him the question I’d
get in touch with the person herself. asked Dunham: Did he have
Lena turned out to be in production any qualms about AI? About
for a new series and too slammed to being cloned?
Zoom, but did agree to answer some “But I think that is the
questions by email. Searching for one case already,” he chortled. “I
that would cement our future bond, I have always felt that there is
settled on asking whether she had any no John Banville. He ceases
qualms about being cloned. “The fact to exist the moment I stand
is, all of us can be mimicked by AI,” she up from my desk. I don’t
wrote back, in a somewhat more dec- know who he is—I find him
orous tone than I’d anticipated. “Any- a very strange creature. My
one can make anyone else say whatever strange dark brother. So,
they want in a voice frighteningly close there’s really nobody in
to the real thing, which is an existential there, just this artistic sen-
threat not just to celebrities or political sibility, creating stuff. I’m
figures but to all of us.” And why Room already a clone of myself. I’m
With a View? Having long been privately sure you think the same,” he
obsessed with English and Irish litera- added genially.
ture from between 1850 and 1920, she
said, getting to do commentary on For-
ster’s novel was “a surreal gift.” She’d SO FAR THERE’S NO REBIND SUBSCRIP-
definitely be a Rebind user herself—the tion plan; each title will go for about the
platform had stunned her with how “per- price of a new hardcover book—$30 or
sonal, connected, and frankly cozy” it so. And the app, which will soon go live,
was. I knew she was trying to be helpful, will keep evolving. A reader’s chat his-
but she didn’t seem entirely present— tory from previous books will, in theory,
the human element that Dubuque kept eventually become part of the mashup:
talking about was missing. I’d have to 0 9 4 If you read Thus Spoke Zarathustra with
wait for our Rebind conversation. Clancy and then read Walden with Kaag,
John Banville, a writer I’ve read and it will be like Kaag had watched your
long found intriguing, did agree to Zoom responses to Zarathustra. Dubuque
from Ireland. He proved to be roguishly thinks that’s what people will like most
charming and a dedicated raconteur, about the app: “It’s going to know what
answering every question about his you do and don’t understand, which will
make your future reading experiences
even better.”
Which brought to mind my upcoming
role as Romeo and Juliet commentator. Tipping Points That Helped Get
“THERE’S REALLY
Not being a Shakespearean, I’d obvi- This Issue Out:
ously been worried about my qualifi- NOBODY IN THERE.
cations for the task, though I did some Learning about the benefits of native plants,
stopped mowing the lawn; cutting most of
years ago briefly date a Shakespearean I’M ALREADY A CLONE my hair off after a week of 90-plus-degree
who used to say that Shakespeareans heat; an off-key karaoke rendition of the
weren’t that smart. He considered them OF MYSELF.” Chicks’ “Not Ready to Make Nice”; giving
the robot cars a chance; the new track from
the bottom rungs of academic intelli- Robyn and Jamie xx; one episode of Only
Murders in the Building; the Broadway pro-
gence. Nevertheless, I’d been putting duction of Illinoise (and subsequent existen-
myself through reams of criticism and tial spiral); Unstable Neighbourhood Rabbit,
by Mikko Harvey; the last glass of champagne
scholarly lit about the play. Most of it at a wedding; the arrival of actual summer
reassured me by being—sure enough— commentary. When I asked Dubuque in San Francisco; downloading Hinge after
a decade of celibacy; deleting Hinge after a
not all that interesting. (Light/dark sym- whether they’d be copyrighting it, given decade of venery.
bolism: got it!) that everything about copyright and
WIRED is a registered trademark of Advance
A few weeks after I got back from AI is up in the air, he himself seemed Magazine Publishers Inc. Copyright ©2024
Southern California, I took the train unsure. “Not sure what further protec- Condé Nast. All rights reserved. Printed
in the USA. Volume 32, No. 9. WIRED (ISSN
from Manhattan to Concord, Massa- tions we get by doing so? Would have to 1059–1028) is published bimonthly by Condé
chusetts, where Kaag lives, as did Ralph check with an attorney,” he wrote. (He Nast, which is a division of Advance Mag-
azine Publishers Inc. Editorial office: 520
Waldo Emerson and Thoreau. This was added shortly later that Kaag thought Third Street, Ste. 460, San Francisco, CA
the first step of a two-part process: the commentaries were copyrighted.) 94107-1815. Principal office: Condé Nast, 1
World Trade Center, New York, NY 10007.
I’d written scripts for 10 filmed seg- What was fun about being on the ground Roger Lynch, Chief Executive Officer;
ments, around 45 minutes total, and floor was that they were basically invent- Pamela Drucker Mann, Global Chief Rev-
enue Officer & President, US Revenue &
still had another 12 hours of extempo- ing it as they went along. All that was International; Jackie Marks, Chief Finan-
raneous audio commentary to record in missing was a garage. cial Officer. Periodicals postage paid at New
York, NY, and at additional mailing offices.
the upcoming weeks. The filming was The next morning I got up early(ish) Canada Post Publications Mail Agree-
taking place in the Special Collections to walk around Walden Pond while lis- ment No. 40644503. Canadian Goods and
Services Tax Registration No. 123242885
Room of the historic Concord Free Pub- tening to Thoreau’s Walden on audio RT0001.
lic Library—Emerson had delivered the before getting the train back home. It
POSTMASTER: Send all UAA to CFS (see
keynote address when it opened in 1873. was a misty overcast day, perfect for a DMM 707.4.12.5); NONPOSTAL AND MILITARY
While the lighting crew was setting up, pilgrimage—a word that brought to mind FACILITIES: Send address corrections to
WIRED, PO Box 37617, Boone, IA 50037-0662.
the archivist kindly brought out a binder Romeo’s line to Juliet, one of my favor- For subscriptions, address changes, adjust-
of faded handwritten manuscript pages ites: “My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ments, or back issue inquiries: Please write
to WIRED, PO Box 37617, Boone, IA 50037-
of Thoreau’s essay “Walking” for me to ready stand … ” Then Thoreau said some- 0662, call (800) 769 4733, or email sub-
peruse, but I was too keyed up about thing through my earbuds that felt both [email protected]. Please give both
new and old addresses as printed on most
the filming to devote my full attention. timely and piercing, given my recent recent label. First copy of new subscrip-
I’d been revising until a few days ear- angst over what to wear for the shoot: tion will be mailed within eight weeks after
receipt of order. Address all editorial, busi-
lier—the scripts had already been fed “Beware of all enterprises that require ness, and production correspondence to
into the teleprompter, or else I’d still be new clothes.” I’m not generally a big dev- WIRED Magazine, 1 World Trade Center, New
York, NY 10007. For permissions and reprint
scribbling additions. otee of humanist reverie, but I felt a sud- requests, please call (212) 630 5656 or fax
Love, passion, death, fate: There was den flash of connection to this eccentric requests to (212) 630 5883. Visit us online
at www.WIRED.com. To subscribe to other
no shortage of stuff to talk about. As guy, and happy to be reminded—even in Condé Nast magazines on the web, visit
someone who tends toward mordant this technology-sullied way—how much www.condenastdigital.com. Occasionally,
we make our subscriber list available to
humor about the tedium of long-term weird ornery imagination has seeped carefully screened companies that offer
coupledom—from Against Love: “Never into the cultural record, despite a world products and services that we believe would
interest our readers. If you do not want to
too early to make a down payment on that conspires to tame it. receive these offers and/or information,
those matching cemetery plots!”—I nat- please advise us at PO Box 37617, Boone, IA
50037-0662, or call (800) 769 4733.
urally had some thoughts on double sui-
cide as a proactive solution to potential WIRED is not responsible for the return or
loss of, or for damage or any other injury to,
future domestic misery. I wasn’t sure unsolicited manuscripts, unsolicited art-
how the LLM would handle irreverence work (including, but not limited to, draw-
ings, photographs, and transparencies),
on the subject—what about those guard- or any other unsolicited materials. Those
rails? Or what if AI-Laura mangles the submitting manuscripts, photographs, art-
work, or other materials for consideration
irony or hallucinates something in my should not send originals, unless specifically
voice that ends up getting me—human- LAURA KIPNIS is a cultural critic and requested to do so by WIRED in writing. Man-
uscripts, photographs, artwork, and other
Laura—canceled? I suppose I can always the author, most recently, of Love in the materials submitted must be accompanied
blame Rebind, who in any case owns the Time of Contagion. by a self-addressed, stamped envelope.
SIX-WORD SCI-FI: STORIES BY WIRED READERS ILLUSTRATION BY YIRAN JIA 32.O9

THE ASSIGNMENT: IN SIX WORDS, SOLVE THE FERMI PARADOX.

DO NOT DISTURB THE HUMAN EXPERIMENT.

—@almguedes, via Instagram

Honorable The simulations run in separate

containers.
We aren’t ready for harvest yet.
—Paul Gazis, via Facebook
Want to submit a six-word
story for us to consider? Look
Mentions —Charles Mallio, via email They downloaded our experience for the latest story prompt on
They’ve gone foraging for and left. Facebook, X, Instagram, and
mushroom clouds. —@42andprime, via Instagram WIRED .com/six-word, where

—@zyanmc, via Instagram Most species invent the couch first. you can also see how we have
Visit Earth. Wipe memory. Rinse. —Antti Karjalainen, via Facebook illustrated past favorites.
Repeat. We live in a bad neighborhood.
—@jayhawk, via Instagram —Angelo J. Falanga, via Facebook

0 9 6
Learn how today’s tech shapes our lives.
LISTEN AND FOLLOW
WHEREVER YOU
GET YOUR PODCASTS