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CONTENTS PHOTOGRAPH BY HELYNN OSPINA 32.O5

Features

P.
Women
at the
Bottom of
the World
They go to Antarctica
5 0
P.36 Can Reddit’s
Authenticity Machine
Survive Wall Street?

Thousands of subreddits
P.60 The Fateful
Eight

The story behind the

most consequential
P.68 Russian,
Go Home

When my country went

to war, I faced a choice:
P.78 The Nerd-King
Vibes of Jensen Huang

The Nvidia CEO turned a

graphics-card company
with dreams of studying went dark in protest last technological paper in Flee to a world where the into a trillion-dollar AI
the unknown. What summer, laying bare the recent history. truth might kill me—or behemoth. Now he wants
they discover there is tension inside the company by Steven Levy seek peace and familiarity to transform the rest of
the stuff of nightmares. before its IPO. in censored oblivion. the world.
by David Kushner by Robert Peck and by Vadim Smyslov by Lauren Goode
Paresh Dave

0 0 3
 CONTENTS
Issue 32.05
On the Cover
For the cover of this issue,
we hired Los Angeles–
based Ryan Young to
photograph Jensen Huang.
The Nvidia cofounder and
CEO has a reputation
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: SHIRA INBAR; SHAYAN ASGHARNIA; NADA HAYEK; ANNA ALEXANDER
for shying away from the
camera. He told Young, “I’d
rather have open-heart
surgery.” On the set, Young
mentioned to Huang that
he looks a little bit like the
photographer’s father.
Over the next 20 minutes,
the conversation turned
to hometowns and families.
p.16
p.18 p.20
Start Gear
p.7 WTF p.16 THE L AST GOOD PL ACE p.28 Productive
The Secret History of the This Discord Is Haunted Products: Get More
Slack Huddle Hold Music by Camille Butera Done With Less Effort
by John Gravois by the WIRED staff
p.18 CL OUD SUPPORT
p.12 YOUR NEXT JOB My Boyfriend Won’t
So You Want to Rewire Stop Meditating Six-Word
Brains
by Caitlin Kelly
by Meghan O’Gieblyn
Sci-Fi
p.20 BIG INTERVIE W
p.88 Very Short Stories
p.14 MACHINE READABLE The Unnerving Presence
of Javier Bardem by WIRED readers
How I Became a
Python Programmer by Hemal Jhaveri
by Scott Gilbertson
0 0 4
Business solutions so powerful,
you’ll make every move matter.

What would you like the power to do?®

Learn more at bankofamerica.com/bankingforbusiness

 START ↓ BY JOHN GRAVOIS 32.O5

We looked into it. PHOTOGRAPH BY SHAWN MICHAEL JONES

FOR GIANT
LIZARDS,
PLEASE HOLD
GETTY IMAGES

The sounds of Slack have a secret history.

0 0 7
START WTF
T
t h e f i r s t t i m e someone invited
me to a Slack Huddle—an audio call that
happens inside the app—I didn’t know
that I had to hang up at the end of it. I
heard a series of descending bloops after
my coworker signed off, so I assumed
the huddle was over and moused away
into the sad forest of a thousand open
browser tabs on my computer.
Then, after about 15 seconds, I started
to hear something waft up from my Mac-
Book speakers. A very gradual fade-in.
Jazz guitar and a vibraphone—maybe
a fake vibraphone?—with a saxophone
improvising between phrases. Sampled
drums, vaguely Latin. Synth strings. Such
comically blatant muzak that I laughed
out loud.
The guffaw was followed by confusion.
Where the heck was this music coming
from, and why didn’t I hate it? On some
instinctive level, I could tell—as I hunted
through Chrome tabs one by one—that
whatever circumstances normally pro-
duce elevator music had not produced
this. This music wasn’t canned; it was
uncanny.
0 0 8
I’d scanned all my tabs twice, across
two browser windows, before I real-
ized the tune was coming from Slack.
(By now an electric organ had replaced
the vibraphone, and the sax seemed to
be winking at how cheesy it was getting.
Was this music … looking at me?) When
I finally toggled the track into silence,
I’m not going to say I felt bereft. But it
wasn’t long before I figured out how to
play it again.
I went to the internet to see if anyone
else had perked up at the Slack Huddle
hold music. Sure enough, I found several
uploads of it on YouTube, including one
that looped it for 60 minutes. If anything,
judging from comments, my reaction had
been understated: “This has no right to
be as good as it is.” (211 likes.) “Absolute
banger.” (25 likes.) “So chill. After a long
stressful discussion with my coworkers,
I listen to this song to relax!” (59 likes.)
“Emerges from the silence like a beacon
of hope, a buoy in the choppy seas of cor-
porate tedium.” (55 likes.)
What was the deal with this music? A
minimal amount of internet sleuthing
turned up an answer: It wasn’t a glitch in
the simulation. It was a simulation from
something called Glitch. In September
2021, Slack founder Stewart Butterfield
responded to someone who was gushing
over the hold music on Twitter. “Funny
detail,” he wrote: “That was composed/
performed by @DannyboySimmons for
the failed MMO Glitch, the original proj-
ect of the team that made Slack.” I knew
“MMO” meant “massively multiplayer
online game,” but the rest of Butterfield’s
tweet made no sense. He said the track
had something to do with a “waiting
quest” and a “Bureaucratic Arts skill.”
I decided I needed to get in touch with
this composer. I pictured @Dannyboy-
That snick popopop noise
that gives you a cortisol spike?
That’s Simmons running his
thumb over a toothbrush.
32.O5
Simmons as some kind of game-music
auteur with electronic blips in his veins
and rings on all his fingers, which was
intimidating to me—I’m a musician
myself, but I mainly play bluegrass in
people’s backyards. Still, it was time to
get off hold and try to get Simmons on
the phone.
o h e n da n n y s i m m o n s finished his
first Slack Huddle, the same thing hap-
pened to him as did me: He didn’t hang
up, the music faded in, and he went hunt-
ing for the source. Only he wasn’t look-
ing for a random auto-playing browser
tab. He was trying to figure out how a
long-ago basement recording session
from his old house in Toronto was pip-
ing into his ears.
Simmons is a lanky sound designer
and—I truly didn’t see this coming—a
mainly bluegrass musician based in Hal-
ifax, Nova Scotia. He and Butterfield met
back in college, when they were both
in a band called Tall Guy Short Guy.
(“I came in to replace the tall guy,” Sim-
mons explains.)
After graduation, Simmons became
a gigging musician and Butterfield
embarked on a failed career as a video
game designer. Except Butterfield had
a funny way of failing. He kept trying
to build games and then accidentally
building the internet instead. His first,
Game Neverending, never ended up →
Learn how today’s tech shapes our lives.
LISTEN AND FOLLOW
WHEREVER YOU
GET YOUR PODCASTS
START WTF
making much money but did include an
infrastructure for sharing photos that
became the basis for Flickr. (And Flickr—
with its open API, its use of tags, its social
networking functions—became the basis
for much of the social web.)
Flickr sold to Yahoo for about $25 mil-
lion in 2005, and a few years later But-
terfield tried his sorry luck again, setting
out to build a lighthearted, esoteric, and
surreal new game: Glitch. To do it he got
the old band back together, not just from
Flickr but from Tall Guy Short Guy too.
Simmons came aboard to write a score—
to invent a folk music for all the geog-
raphies in the game, and the requisite
“bloops and bleeps and alerts.”
In Glitch, as one of the game’s devel-
opers describes it, players “planted and
grew gardens and milked the local but-
terflies. They collected pull-string dolls
of modern philosophers—including plau-
sible Nietzsche and Wittgenstein quo-
tations. They climbed into enormous
dinosaurs, passing through their rep-
tilian intestines and out of their help-
fully sign-posted butts. It was, in a word,
preposterous.”
Early on in the game, Glitch encour-
aged you to do certain things—like
build a house or take the subway—that
required permits and identification
papers. To get them, you had to visit a
beige room called the Bureaucratic Hall.
“It was just a waiting room, a purgatory
with these lizard bureaucrats walking
around,” says Simmons. “They’re walk-
ing back and forth with piles of paper,
and, you know, just looking busy behind
their desks.”
And this, dear reader, is the phantom
context of the Slack Huddles hold music;
it was playing in the Bureaucratic Hall. To
exit this limbo, you had to do something
very precise: nothing. A timer started
counting down, and if you moved your
avatar at all, the counter would start
over. That was the “quest.” You just had
to sit still, watch the lizards work, and—
can you hear that slow fade-in?—listen
to the muzak.
0 1 0
32.O5
EXPIRED TIRED WIRED
Chatbots that forget Chatbots that remember Chatbots that anticipate
Pivot to video Blame Facebook Pivot to video
Artisan coffee Mushroom coffee Diner coffee
The Olympic Games The Hunger Games The Enhanced Games
Everything is real Nothing is real What is real?
For the waiting-room soundtrack, Simmons played the guitar and
synths himself, despite mainly being a banjo guy. Through Toronto’s
bluegrass scene, he knew a “really good left-handed guitar player” who
dabbled in saxophone. So one day in 2012, Simmons invited the guy over
to record a bunch of improvised sax fills, with instructions to make them
“as cheesy as possible.”
In October 2012, Ali Rayl joined the Glitch team as a quality engineer.
Just six weeks later an executive pulled her aside. He said they were
shutting down the game, and he asked Rayl if she wanted to stay and
“help build our next thing.” When she asked what the next thing was,
the exec said it would probably have something to do with workplace
communications.
As had happened before with Game Neverending, there were some
pretty cool spare parts underneath all the ethereal ambitions of Glitch—
like the internal messaging system the team had built. Rayl was one of
only eight core people who kept their jobs in the transition to Slack. On
the conference call where everyone else was laid off, Rayl felt overcome
with survivor’s guilt. “I decided, I’m going to do everything that I can to
support these people, to uphold their legacy and get their work out in
the public sphere,” she says. And Rayl wasn’t alone in wanting to pre-
serve Slack’s glitchy DNA.
That’s why the company came to use not just the waiting room muzak
but also the “bloops and bleeps and alerts” that Simmons created for
Glitch. In fact, Simmons made nearly all the sounds that Slack’s 32 million
active daily users hear. That snick popopop noise that gives you a cortisol
spike every time? That’s Simmons running his thumb over a toothbrush
and making “that sound where you kind of separate your tongue from
the roof of your mouth,” he says. There’s a phantom context for all of it.
So next time you hear the Slack Huddles hold music, remember what
you have to do: Sit still. Watch the lizards. The timer is counting down.
J O H N G R AV O I S is a features editor at wifed.
START ↓
YOUR NEXT JOB A WIRED guide to work in the future.
SO YOU
WANT TO
REWIRE
BRAINS
There’s a lot to like about brain-computer
interfaces, those sci-fi-sounding devices
that jack into your skull and turn neural sig-
nals into software commands. Experimental
BCIs help paralyzed people communicate,
use the internet, and move prosthetic limbs.
In recent years, the devices have even gone
wireless. If mind-reading computers become
part of everyday life, we’ll need doctors to
install the tiny electrodes and transmit-
ters that make them work. So if you have
steady hands and don’t mind a little blood,
being a BCI surgeon might be a job for you.
Shahram Majidi, a neurosurgeon at Mount
Sinai Hospital in New York, began oper-
ating in clinical trials for a BCI called the
Stentrode in 2022. (That’s “stent” as in a
tube that often sits inside a vein or artery.)
Here he talks about a not-too-distant future
where he’s performing hundreds of similar
procedures a year.
0 1 2
b r a i n - c o m p u f e r i n f e r fac e s
have been around for a few decades, and
there are different kinds of implants now.
Some have electrodes attached to your
brain with wires sticking out of your
head and connecting to a computer. I
think that’s great as a proof of concept,
but it requires an engineer sitting there
and a big computer next to you all the
time. You can’t just use it in your bed-
room. The beauty of a BCI like the Sten-
trode, which is what I’ve worked with,
is that nothing is sticking out of your
brain. The electrodes are in blood ves-
sels next to the brain, and you get there
by going through the patient’s jugular.
The receiver is underneath the skin in
their chest and connected to a device
that decodes the brain signals via Blue-
tooth. I think that’s the future.
It’s a minimally invasive surgery. You
don’t have to open the skull. You don’t
have to violate the anatomy of the brain.
Deploying a stent into a blood vessel in
the brain is something I’ve done thou-
sands of times for other procedures, but
this time I’m deploying a device that will
record specific signals coming from a
very specific location of the brain. For it
to work correctly, I’ll have to make the
most precise delivery of an implant I’ve
ever learned to do. From the time we
enter the room to when we have finished
surgery and checked the device, it’s usu-
ally less than three hours.
The patients we enroll in these tri-
als are severely disabled. They’re par-
alyzed from diseases like ALS. They’re
bedbound; even bringing them to the
hospital could be a monumental task. So
I’ve been able to visit all my BCI patients
in their homes to talk about the device

ILLUSTRATION BY JOHANNA GOODMAN
and how it works. It’s an exciting moment
for the patients and their families, but
you also have to set expectations.
The surgical planning that goes into a
BCI implant is very sophisticated com-
pared to other daily procedures that I do
as a neurosurgeon. Before the surgery,
my team and I practice on a model to
make sure we understand all the steps
and protocols. Literally, the room for
32.O5
mistakes is very, very narrow. (Neura-
link is building robots to install their
BCIs, but I’m not worried about robots
coming for my job. You’re always going
to need human surgeons and scientists
to advance the field and do precise pro-
cedures.)
I regularly see my patients for sched-
uled follow-ups, especially during the
months after surgery. We are always
present when they first use the device.
After two weeks of training, they can
use it independently. It’s the first time
the patient is able to connect to the out-
side world without any assistance, with
only thinking. They can start texting and
using their cell phone again. Then you
see that beautiful smile on their face. The
patients are passionate about advancing
the science, to help others like them in
the years and decades to come. That is
really humbling to witness.
Since doing my first surgery, not a
single week goes by that my clinic
doesn’t get a phone call from someone
asking to be evaluated for a BCI. There
is a massive patient population that will
benefit from this technology. In 10 years,
if you and I sit down and talk, I’ll tell you
that, yes, this week I have five BCIs
scheduled and I do them routinely, every
day. Not every endovascular neurosur-
geon will do them, but I’m sure there
will be several centers of excellence
around the country. We’ll start explor-
ing smaller veins in the brain, trying to
understand other functions, whether
that’s treating patients with intractable
seizures, depression, mood disorders,
or even eating disorders. A decade from
now, BCI devices will look very different
from what we have today. This is just
the beginning.
As told to C A I T L I N K E L LY , a features
editor at wired , in February 2024.
START
If the robots take over, we should at least speak their language.
THE MYTH
OF METAL
How I became a Python programmer—and learned to love our abstract world.
t h e g e r m a n h i s t o r i a n Oswald
Spengler considered our age the age
of abstraction. Nowhere is this more
apparent than in programming, where
abstraction isn’t just a conceptual con-
venience but an absolute necessity. Pro-
grammers like to talk about their tools
(rather abstractly) as a “stack.” At the
top of the stack—the surface most of
us encounter first—are simple markup
languages, HTML being the best known.
At the bottom are the “bare metal” lan-
guages of the machine. Thus there is a
hierarchy, and the further down in the
stack you go, the less abstract—and, in a
way, more difficult—programming gets.
It’s not really metal down there, of
course. It’s sand—impossibly thin layers
↓
of silicon dioxide that conduct electrical
impulses in ordered patterns we experi-
ence as a screen showing us a rectangle
with text on it, flickering images, and
so on. Still, you can see how Spengler,
though he died before the era of digital
computing, was onto something. None
of us are keeping 1s and 0s etched in sand
in our head, and yet we all manipulate
them every day using friendly, high-level
abstractions.
The danger of living in this Spengle-
rian moment is that it’s easy to mis-
take such abstractions for the world as
it really is. This, I think, is why program-
mers often dive deeper into the stack
as they progress through their careers.
We think that maybe when we reach
bare metal our world will finally be real.
I started, like most, at the top of the
stack. HTML. 1995. Geocities. Angel-
fire. Blink tags. Marquee. I’ll admit it:
I loved me some marquee tag, which
scrolled text across the screen. I loved
marquee so much I ran straight out of
HTML and into the welcoming arms of
Flash. Blame the Matrix website. Cool-
est animation ever.
Flash was not really programming.
Or, it didn’t start that way. It was an ani-
mation app. You drew shapes on a stage,
dragged them around, and set keyframes
like animated film. A UI abstraction
descended from Looney Toons. But then
someone shoehorned a scripting lan-
guage in there, and next thing you know
BY SCOTT GILBERTSON
ILLUSTRATION BY SAMUEL TOMSON
I was writing quadratic easing equations
to control the shapes. (Turns out my high
school trig teacher was right—I really
was going to use this stuff one day.)
I was drawn to the elegance and sim-
plicity of writing code in a text file rather
than clicking and dragging things around.
This felt like the way it should be: Write
code; things happen. But with Flash there
was a very limited amount of things that
could happen. I wanted to go lower in the
stack. I wanted fewer abstractions.
Back then, my escape from the world
of programming was a day job running
a restaurant kitchen. There’s nothing
abstract about the Friday night rush.
Oddly enough, that was where I was
when I figured out how to get closer to
the machine.
It was 2004 when my best dishwasher,
Aaron, a young man who enjoyed solv-
ing unsolved math theorems in his spare
time (yes, it was a lot like working with
Good Will Hunting), told me, “If you want
to go deeper in the stack, learn Python.”
He was smarter than me, so I wrote it
down. Learn Python.
The difficulty with any new program-
ming language is the sharp learning
curve, all that drudgery and bashing
your forehead into the keyboard. There
was no Codecademy or Stack Overflow
in those days. We bought books from
the likes of O’Reilly and No Starch
Press. I bought Learning Python and
skimmed the first few chapters, but I
had no project to motivate me. With-
out something that obsesses you, you’ll
never learn to program.
Programmers often dive deeper into
the stack as they progress through
their careers. We think that maybe
when we reach bare metal our world
will finally be real.
I also didn’t have much time. Running
a restaurant kitchen is an all-consuming,
life-sucking thing to do. After another
year I burned out. I scraped together
what money I had, bought a plane ticket,
and headed off to lose myself in Asia.
Hey, it worked for the Beatles. Sort of.
One day, I decided I needed some more
music by the great jazz guitarist Django
Reinhardt. I went down to the internet
café below my guest house in Bangkok
to search for it. The problem was that
the keyboard, naturally enough, was
Thai. I could change the layout in Win-
dows settings, but the symbols on the
keys were still Thai. I figured “Django”
was a distinctive enough name that that
was all I needed. (This was before the
Tarantino movie existed.) I typed it in
and, sure enough, Reinhardt was right
there in the first couple of results.
But what caught my eye was a website
for something called Django, “the web
framework for perfectionists with dead-
lines.” I didn’t have any deadlines, but
perfectionist? I can’t tell you how many
times I messed with tabs and spaces to
make sure my handwritten HTML was
properly indented when you viewed the
source. Was there, possibly, a web frame-
work for people like me? Tell me more.
Django, it turned out, was a Python
framework. If this were a movie, there
would have been a badly animated
sequence here where Aaron’s face cut
through a cloud of Southeast Asian trav-
eler haze, saying, Learn Python. Learn
Python. Six months later, back in Los
Angeles, a friend asked me to build a
32.O5
website for a bike charity, Wheels4Life.
I agreed to do it, on the condition that I
use Django. I had a project.
That website turned out well. It led to
another. And another. Eventually I had
a small business building Django-based
websites. It took a couple of years, but
I wrapped my head around Python and
got to the point where, given a prob-
lem, I could work out a way to solve it.
But here’s what surprised me: I never
went any deeper. Never wanted to.
Python falls about midway down the
stack, but it’s unique in its ability to move
in either direction. You can work at the
highest levels of abstraction and spit out
HTML websites (Django’s specialty), but
you can also get closer to the machine
through an API that lets you import C
modules. Working in Python, I could
build anything I ever wanted to build.
At a certain point, I realized I wasn’t even
thinking about the stack anymore. I was
just thinking about the possibilities.
I went to the first Django conference,
ostensibly covering it for wired, but I
was also there to meet the founders and
learn from the community. What I found
was a welcoming group of fellow nerds
and programmers all working together
to solve problems and build cool stuff.
It was all very concrete. Tangible. Even
as it arose from abstractions.
To say that we live in an age of
abstraction can be pejorative. The word
implies an excessive distance from the
bedrock truth of things, and we tend to
view that—often rightly—with suspi-
cion. But it seems to me, now, that the
quest to de-abstract everything, to get
to the bottom of the stack, is an urge
born of bygone times. The bare metal
can be wherever you find yourself, your
language of choice, your community.
That’s where you build your world.
S C OT T G I L B E R T S O N is a senior writer
for wired.
0 1 5
START ↓
THE LAST GOOD PLACE There are still nice things on the internet.
HAPPY
i n a c h a r m i n g game called This
THE PLACE Discord Has Ghosts in It, up to 15 partici-
This Discord pants at a time gather in a Discord server
Has Ghosts in It that has been reimagined as a haunted
house. (Of course.) Inside lies a maze of
THE PORTAL (chat) rooms where each player takes the
Discord role of either an eponymous spirit or a
paranormal investigator. Each charac-
THE PROMISE ter has a secret motivation, chosen at
An enjoyably the start of the game: For investigators,
their secret is the reason they are in the
creepy connection
house; for ghosts, it’s what pins their
shade to the mortal realm. Your MO is
not to win but to “give away the game,”
as the very purple game manual states.
That means figuring out a way to com-
municate your secret to the other team.
The problem is, you’re not allowed
to just say it. Ghosts can interact with
0 1 6
the game only via text-based chat. They
can type descriptions of their hauntings,
share images and GIFs, link to songs and
videos, and add new rooms to the house.
Meanwhile, investigators are confined to
Discord’s voice call function. Like inves-
tigators on TV, they narrate the haunts
they see and the rooms they enter to the
other investigators wandering other
corners of the house, all while trying to
stay in character.
Like any bit of technologically medi-
ated communication, this gets messy. In
one game, I was Alicia Macready, a fool-
hardy investigator on a mission to cap-
ture hair-raising footage from inside a
haunted house and land a TV deal. At the
start of gameplay, I had Alicia meander
into the basement. There, she ran into
 BY CAMILLE BUTERA 32.O5

ILLUSTRATION BY SHIRA INBAR

about the others. The others chime in

the ghost of Buried Ben. Ben had died
in an unfortunate accident involving
a pile of boxes. He also held a grudge
over being cut out of his family’s for-
tune, which kept him stuck in the house.
My character, Alicia, didn’t know any of
that. In an attempt to show Alicia how
he died, Buried Ben played a YouTube
video of objects being crushed. “The
doors slam shut,” he typed into the chat.
“The walls start closing in on you.” But
Alicia read what was happening and saw
only a horrible trap.
The fear this inspired in Alicia set
the tone for the rest of the game. Ben
wrote about doors to new rooms in the
house, pulling Alicia deeper inside. I
got more scared. I whispered into my
headset, describing the way I rattled
at door handles and actively tried to
flee the house. Through increasingly
frantic sequences—videos of hydrau-
lic presses smashing Technicolor plas-
tic toys, audio files of shuffling paper
and falling shelves—Ben led Alicia to a
READOUT SOURCES: THE MARKUP; NEBOJŠA VUJINOVIĆ VUJO; INSIDE CLIMATE NEWS; AMERICAN FARM BUREAU FOUNDATION FOR AGRICULTURE
with any missing details. Together, the
group decides their characters’ fates. So
what became of Alicia and Ben? At the
séance, she was able to encourage him
to let go of the past—to pass on, so to Readout
speak. As they said their goodbyes, she The world, quantified.
acquired the footage that she so des-
perately wanted: a glimpse of Ben flick-
ering at the door of the house, finally
able to leave.
And then I logged off.
Pretty much every day on the inter-
net, tone gets lost in a swirl of digital
text. Context is endlessly eroded, and
typos and barely considered missives
get immortalized, become infamous.
It’s a brittle way to connect with people.
But after playing This Discord Has
1%
Ghosts in It, I felt a jolt of dopamine, the Percentage of more than
thrill of calling out and finding a kind 23,000 crimes anticipated by
predictive policing software
of clarity in all the noise. Rather than in New Jersey that were found
encourage quick and pithy exchanges, to be accurate.
the game asked me to take time to reach
consensus, something that digital spaces
don’t often reward.
The designers of This Discord Has 2,000+
Ghosts in It, Will Jobst and Adam Vass, Number of “zombie” web-
set out to re-create a specific kind of sites—including the women’s
detritus that shapes our experience and lifestyle blogs The Hairpin and
The Frisky—currently owned
communication on the internet: the IRC by a Serbian DJ who fills them

storage room, home to a cabinet full of
scrapbooks. There, I finally learned Bur-
ied Ben’s real name—Benjamin Arling-
ton!—and narrated finding a slip of paper
folded inside one of the books. Ben’s
player latched on to this moment and
transformed the paper into a document
that proved his right to the fortune, help-
ing to settle the question that had kept
him on earth.
The game’s final ritual is a séance,
which the ghosts begin by summoning
all the players together into one room.
The ghosts are still confined to the chat
READOUT ILLUSTRATION BY ANJALI NAIR; GETTY IMAGES
messages, the C-boxes, the replies and
DMs that linger online long after a con-
versation is done. The game leaves a
similar footprint: I can look back on the
abandoned haunted house channels and
see the ghosts’ side of the conversation.
Sometimes, as an outsider, I can only
guess at their meaning, like reading an
annotation scrawled inside a second-
hand book. Seeing other messages, like
the YouTube link that set off my story,
still brings me joy.
So much of the internet is miserable
these days: harassment, bad faith, cru-
with AI-generated clickbait.
25M
Gallons of fresh water per day
that an ExxonMobil plastics
plant in Texas is authorized
to consume—a quarter of
the drought-stricken region’s
summertime water demand.
$800K

box and investigators to the audio chan-
nel, but it’s the first time everyone is
allowed to communicate clearly about
their secrets. In the room, each player
shares what they believe they know
elty. A haunted Discord server, of all Funds allocated by a US
things, becomes a space to remember beef-industry group in 2024
how to build understanding together. to encourage a “more
positive perception” of beef
To practice saying, “This is how I see among American teachers
things. How about you?” and schoolchildren.

CAMILLE BUTERA is a writer, social scientist, and artist

based in Boston.
START ↓
Spiritual troubleshooting for the everyday user.

Dear Seeking,

I think it’s pretty obvious. On the one

hand, meditation is the most self-
centered, antisocial habit there is—
or one of them, at least. (I can think
of another intensely solitary act that
some people insist they “must” do
daily to maintain a clear head.) Its
motives are usually brazenly egotisti-
cal: personal productivity, sleep hack-
ing, enhanced creativity. On the other
hand, it is also a spiritual discipline whose
highest aim, traditionally, is ego death,
self-transcendence, and the eventual
enlightenment of the entire world. The
contradictions pile up. No wonder med-
itation is so popular in tech, an industry
in which the persistent effort to increase
market share often sails under utopian
language about connecting the world,
obliterating human limitations, and mak-
ing life for all beings unimaginably great.
I’m not saying that you should tell
him this, of course. If your boyfriend
is far enough along his path to enlight-
enment (God help him), he will likely
point out that such “contradictions” are
actually paradoxes, koans, the highest
form of spiritual truth. The dualistic
mind is clouded by either/or thinking,
you see, a kind of binary logic that can-
not yet glimpse that loftier plane where
all 0s are simultaneously 1s and appar- The bug is actually a feature. The flaws
ent hypocrisies synthesize into unified in our loved ones are inseparable, in the
Truth. I’m sure you’ve gotten this lecture end, from their strengths.
before, and as tiresome as it is, he’s not All of which is to say: Be grateful that
entirely wrong. We waste so much of your boyfriend is not yet so evolved that
our lives trying to fix the frictions and he eludes all inconsistencies. The only
logical oppositions that make our world thing more annoying than human contra-
meaningful in the first place. The thorn dictions is the person who has success-
is necessary to the beauty of the rose. fully transcended them.

0 1 8
BY MEGHAN O’GIEBLYN
ILLUSTRATION BY NADA HAYEK
Why is it that when a
friend asks to take a photo
of me it’s fine, but when
my beloved mom does it
I want to scream? —Brat
This question might actually be above
my pay grade, Brat. A certain kind of
psychotherapist would tell you that
any photo is an act of acquisition—the
photographer is trying to possess, to
capture, to make static—and that the
shutter-happy mom embodies the arche-
type of the Oedipal Mother, who is try-
ing to devour her own children. Maybe
your hostility stems from your confla-
tion of the camera with the maternal
gaze, the ever-present eye that threat-
ens to obliterate your own point of view.
Or maybe the violent language of pho-
tography (to shoot, to capture) evokes,
on some unconscious level, the subli-
mated aggression of the mother-child
relationship that must be repressed to
maintain a viable family life.
You probably don’t find these expla-
nations very convincing. I don’t either.
The truth is that I could probably list
dozens of activities—asking about
your day, checking in about your health,
buying unsolicited gifts—that operate
according to the same double standard:
fine when it’s a friend, annoying as hell
when it’s a parent. The problem has noth-
ing to do with photos and everything
to do with proximity. It’s easy to resent
your mom precisely because she is your
mom, an all-purpose dispenser of love
and support whose sole purpose is to
be obsessively attentive to your needs
and sensitive to what irks you. It’s easy
to forget that she is also an autonomous
being who is probably entering the sec-
ond half of her life and simply trying to
To open a ticket, please email cloudsupport@WIRED .com. Be advised that Cloud is
experiencing higher than normal wait times and appreciates your patience.
document, in some small way, the fleet-
ing moments of happiness that seem
to be passing more quickly every year.
I say “it’s easy” just to stress that it’s
entirely natural to forget these things—
that it requires deliberate effort to
detach from your emotions and see
things from another point of view. The
intimacy of family life often distorts our
thinking, preventing us from seeing the
motives of our loved ones clearly. As any
good photographer will tell you, things
lose focus when you zoom in too close.
* virtuous in conditions of scarcity—it’s
My partner constantly
texts me “hilarious”
TikToks I completely
ignore. Am I a bad person?
—Did Not Receive
Forgive me for asking the obvious: Given
that you “completely ignore” the Tik-
Toks, how do you know they’re not
legitimately hilarious? But maybe that
question is beside the point. Maybe your
reluctance to engage has less to do with
your doubts about your partner’s come-
dic taste than a total exhaustion with
hilarity, full stop. There are only so many
times in one day a person can lol, lolz,
and ijbol, and if you have a job or school
or other obligations, a point comes when
you must disengage if you want to pre-
serve your laugh reflex and some sem-
blance of self-respect.
I’m sure your partner means well. See-
ing as we’re all taught, as children, the
value of “sharing,” privately enjoying
something that brings you joy can easily
32.O5
seem like a form of selfishness, or hoard-
ing. The problem is that sharing is only
polite to split your cookie with some-
one if there aren’t enough cookies to
go around. In information economies,
however, where all of us are drowning
in an endless sea of content, the only
true “scarcity” is time. Sharing content is
less an act of generosity than a tiresome
ask—a request for attention and valida-
tion from someone who is already taxed
to the gills with liking, responding, and
reacting to the infinite scroll.
So no, you’re not a bad person for
needing to disengage. But I don’t think
ignoring the texts is the best way to do
so. Unlike the faceless algo that’s respon-
sible for so much of your personalized
content, there is, after all, someone—
hopefully someone you love—on the
other end of this feed. If the psychic toll
I described rings true, try to communi-
cate this to your partner, preferably in
a pithy way. (You could defer to the old
group therapy slogan: “Part of sharing
is sharing time.”) You are not obligated
to spend your precious hours respond-
ing to every unsolicited TikTok that’s
sent your way, but our loved ones do, in
fact, deserve to be given the time of day.
Faithfully,
Cloud
M E G H A N O ’ G I E B L Y N is the author,
most recently, of God, Human, Animal,
Machine.
START
PHOTOGRAPHS BY SHAYAN ASGHARNIA
The Unnerving Presence
of Javier Bardem
He’s known for playing fanatics
and murderous psychopaths.
In real life, he loves his wife (and
Brad Pitt) and cries during E.T.
m y g u e s s i s that most employees at the Beverly Hills
Hotel know who all the big-name movie stars are, but when
I arrive at the hotel restaurant and there’s some confusion
about the reservation, I find myself unable to say the rele-
vant name. A simple “I’m here to meet Javier Bardem” would
instantly clear things up, but the name-drop feels … entitled?
Arrogant, somehow? I wait at the bar, worried I’ve soured the
interview before it even starts. I’m expecting Bardem to be
intense and demanding. He is, after all, scarily good at play-
ing scary people.
Silly me. When Bardem arrives a few minutes later, he puts
the lie to all that life-imitating-art nonsense. If I feel any unease
at all, it’s because I’m naively surprised at how deferential,
how accommodating, he is to me. Table or booth? Inside or
outside? Heat lamp or no heat lamp? “Please, whatever you
like,” Bardem says, in that distinctive baritone. “However
you are comfortable.”
We end up on the chilly but sun-dappled patio, in a mint
green booth under reams of ivy. His publicist has warned me
that Bardem doesn’t like to talk about his family, but within
minutes he’s mentioning his wife’s recent trip to India, for a
documentary she’s filming. When I note that he talks about
his wife as if I don’t know who she is, a sly smile brightens his
face. “Well, you never know,” he says. We all know who she
is. (Don’t we? She’s Penelope Cruz.)
In person, Bardem is light, funny, playful with his words
and expressions. He uses hand gestures to make up for the
occasional English word he can’t quite find. As we talk, it
becomes clear he’s also a man of commitment. This is evi-
dent in his decades-long body of work, from his early per-
formance as Cuban author Reinaldo Arenas in Before Night
H E M A L J H AV E R I is wired’s managing editor.
0 2 0
BY HEMAL JHAVERI 32.O5
Falls to his chilling, Oscar-winning por-
trayal of Anton Chigurh in No Country
for Old Men. Although his latest role—as
Stilgar, a Fremen tribal leader in Denis
Villeneuve’s Dune: Part Two—isn’t a
starring one, it still packs a Bardemian
wallop. Stilgar didn’t have much to do
in part one, but in Two, he’s the steady
drumbeat behind Paul Atreides’ messi-
anic rise to power on the scorching des-
ert planet Arrakis.
Bardem’s commitment, I learn, doesn’t
stop at acting—it stretches all the way
into our lunch. I don’t know how else to
say it, but this man is committed to sit-
ting here, in this booth, with me, having
a conversation. It’s not intensity, per se,
but presence. What some people these
days call mindfulness. Bardem’s eyes
don’t skip around the patio or wander
away; his hands don’t absently fum-
ble to check his phone. His focus is so
all-consuming that we forget we’re at
a restaurant and fail to order food. He
anticipates questions before I can ask
them. He knows just when to tell a story.
His favorite themes seem to be family
and faith, and when we realize we’ve
both lost our mothers, the conversation
takes a hard pivot to grief. If he believes
in anything, he says, it’s in the power of
people to help and heal each other.
At one point, Bardem has an elbow
propped up on the banquette, his head
resting against an open palm, the ivy min-
gling unnoticed in his hair. He’s describ-
ing a guided meditation he did years
ago, during the filming of Biutiful, that
brought him real peace and insight. His
voice is hushed and his eyes are locked
GROOMING: KRISTEN SHAW/THE WALL GROUP; ARSON DIRECTOR: JENA JENKINS
on mine. At this moment, it feels like the
story he’s telling is an extension of his
acting practice. Later, it occurs to me he
brought it up to soothe our shared loss.
Near the end of our not-quite-lunch,
I realize I’m in a kind of daze—as if I’ve
been wandering the desert myself, with-
out a stillsuit. We are both, in fact, quite
parched, but getting another drink
would be committing to time Bar-
dem doesn’t have. He makes moves to
leave, but lingers at the booth. There
are always more stories to tell. →
START THE BIG INTERVIEW
“Any fanaticism is bad. But it’s very appealing
to play a character like that because there’s a
moment where there’s no logic in it. There’s
no common sense anymore.”
HEMAL JHAVERI: We were originally
supposed to meet in Daytona, where
you were shooting an F1 film.
JAVIER BARDEM: Yeah. That film was
supposed to finish last year, but then the
strike happened.
Are you an F1 fan?
Not really. I’m not very much into cars
myself. They asked me to read a script
and I thought, “Hmm, that’s interest-
ing,” because it’s really heavy on the peo-
ple that are driving those cars. They’re
risking their lives, no doubt, but that
pressure, I was fascinated by it. How
brutal it is in the sense that you either
win or you fucking lose and you’re out,
with these people that are mostly in their
early twenties.
They’re very young.
I started to dig into this Netflix series,
Drive to Survive. And then I was hooked
on it. Then we went to Silverstone to
shoot and I was starstruck. And Brad
[Pitt] is driving a real car, an F2 car. An
F2 car goes fast.
You’ve never worked with Brad Pitt
before, right?
I knew him a little bit, but not much. I
grew up watching Brad Pitt, and I think
he’s an amazing actor. We had so much
fun. He’s so open, he’s so in the game. He
doesn’t care, he is like, “Bring it on.” And
we played tennis and it was fantastic.
Every time someone talks about Brad
Pitt, they go on and on about how hand-
some he is.
0 2 2
I mean, he’s 60 years old, and you can-
not believe it. He’s handsome, but he’s
more—of course he’s handsome, but it’s
about—well, you know what it is? It’s
the energy. The behavior, the action, the
feeling, the vibe. He comes to a set and
everybody’s comfortable. He made me
feel relaxed, like, in a second.
We’re already off-topic. We’re here to
talk about Dune: Part Two. What was
the process of shooting the movie like?
This one was different because the first
one, it was a little role for me. The sec-
ond one, it was more like being on the
set and being with everyone and being
there for a long time.
It always amazes me the amount of
work and effort and sacrifice a lot of peo-
ple are putting in for me to be able to say
that line in that moment. For me to be
able to just play a scene with Timothée in
the middle of the dunes in Abu Dhabi, the
amount of people putting themselves
under the heat, constructing roads. A
lot of people are putting themselves into
very hard circumstances and situations
for us to just be able to go there, step on
the sand, and say the line.
But you do a good job of saying the line.
Well, if after all that you fuck it up, it’s
like, “Man, you should be fired imme-
diately.”
What about your relationship with your
costars? You spent a lot of time with
Timothée Chalamet, Zendaya.
Well, there’s a generational gap there.
I’m 54, they’re, what, 27?
32.O5
They’re in their twenties, yeah.
I was closer to Josh [Brolin], who I’ve
known for longer. With Timothée, Zen-
daya, Florence, and Austin, I was always
a spectator of their beautiful energy,
of their beautiful commitment, of the
way they were bonding with each other
through their joy. I was a witness to that
strength of spirit that all the youth can
give you. And you go, “Wow, I love that.
I can take a little bit of that.”
You share a lot of screen time with Tim-
othée, particularly.
I’m always saying that Timothée must
have a very high IQ. He’s so smart. The
way he behaves on set and with others,
the way he carries his own weight, it’s
very healthy. It’s very inspiring in the
sense that I don’t see confusion, I don’t
see manipulation. In Zendaya too, by the
way. I don’t see any of the dark sides of
the coin that success at that level brings.
Your character, Stilgar, is a devout man
of faith. Almost a zealot.
He’s a fanatic. He really focuses on want-
ing to create this figure [of Paul], so his
people, his tribe, his village, his group,
can have something to hope for and fight
for, because they feel abandoned.
He’s almost fabricating it. He’s almost
willing it into existence.
Yes. And I don’t agree with that. That’s
the terms of fanaticism, and any fanat-
icism is bad. But it’s very appealing to
play a character like that because there’s
a moment where there’s no logic in it.
There’s no common sense anymore.
START THE BIG INTERVIEW
I’m not sure we’re even rooting for Paul
throughout the entire film.
I think the story goes to that place of,
is the messiah real or is the messiah
constructed, tailored to our needs? Is
it because we have such a strong need
that we create somebody to hold our hope
with? That’s a good question about reli-
gion in itself.
Religion, faith—it’s such a through line
in this movie. What about your faith?
For me, faith would be in each other. Faith
would be, “I’m here for you, you’re there
for me, and we better do this together
because otherwise we’re not going to
make it.” I’ve never been religious, but
what I’ve seen very closely is my mom,
who I was raised by. She was a divorced
mother in the time where divorce was not
allowed in Spain, an actress when being
an actress was a little less than being a
prostitute—with all the respect to the
prostitutes. We had no money. I saw her
working so hard and making sure that we
have what we need. Not what we wanted,
but what we need. There were hard times,
but we survived because of her. That’s my
faith. That’s what I believe in.
Your mother was a very famous Span-
ish actress.
I was very, very, very close to my mom. My
mom passed away two years ago.
Oh, she did? I’m so sorry.
Yeah. It’s hard.
My mom passed away seven years ago.
Were you close to her?
We were very close.
Can you feel how close she is to you now?
Yes.
Even closer, right?
Yeah, I do feel like she’s still very close.
My father died when I was 26. And my
mother died in 2021. It’s going to be three
years in July. And when both your parents
die, especially when your mother dies,
you do go to a different level of orphan-
age. Like, “OK, I’m on my own.”
0 2 4
It doesn’t matter if you’re middle-aged.
It doesn’t matter if you’re 55. I’ve been
lucky that in both cases, there was not a
disease that made them go very slow. I
was lucky. I’m not religious, but I believe.
I believe she’s out there. I believe in the
spirits. I believe in the energies.
And you believe, as you said, in people.
It’s more in the will of people. I said many
years ago, sometimes religion is a manip-
ulation of feelings based on fear. I respect
every kind of ideology and religion, as long
as you respect mine or my lack of religion.
You mentioned shooting on location
for Dune. Was it hard to be away from
your family?
Penelope and I, we are very hands-on
with the kids. It’s the most important
thing. Right now, we calibrate our times
of working. So, there’s always one of us
with the kids. In my case, I never stay
longer than two weeks out of the house.
Never, never, never, never. Not even in
Covid. I don’t ask for more money, I don’t
ask for a bigger trailer, I ask, like, “I want
to be with my family.”
Are your kids creative?
They are very creative. And no wonder.
I mean, Mom and Dad doing what they
do. They are really open to artistic stim-
ulus. Painting, music, dancing, acting,
and sports, as well. It’s in our DNA. It’s
not just something that they do for fun.
It’s something that it’s part of them. At
the same time, if you ask me, “Would I
like them to be actors?” I’m conflicted.
Would you like them to be actors?
It’s a tough one. I mean, Mama and Daddy
have been, and are still, very, very blessed
and lucky. There was a study done last
week where only 7 percent of the actors
in Spain can make more than … What was
it? 10,000 euros per year.
Oof.
Only 7 percent. That’s a tough one.
Yeah, but they have nepotism in their
favor.
What?
Nepotism? Like, with—
Upotism?
Nepotism. Mom and Dad are famous, so
the kids have a little advantage.
Oh, yeah, yeah. Nepo babies. Yes.
Exactly.
Which in a way, I am. My mother was very
recognized when I started as an actor.
And also, my uncle was a legendary direc-
tor in Spain and Europe. So, I had that, and
that gave me the chance to meet people.
Is it going to be easy for my kids to meet
people and to have some chances? Maybe,
maybe. More than other ordinary people
from the street, sure. But then, the exam
they’re going to go through is going to be
very thorough.
Is it about being able to make a living
that makes you apprehensive? Or is it
more about the industry and where
it’s going?
No, the living. The living, the living. The
rest, you cannot control. I mean, you can-
not control shit. In life, it’s there, and then
you, as they say, you make your plans
while God is … while life happens.
But the industry is changing so quickly.
How do you feel about your craft in this
digital environment? Does AI scare you
at all?
I don’t know what it’s going to be like, but
that’s why I was supporting very much
the SAG strike, because we have to make
sure that there is some control over it. I
mean, where is the artistry in it? Where
is the creativity? Where is the humanity
in it? I don’t know what’s going to happen
and what my kids are going to face when
they grow up. Would it be a world that
would allow someone to act? I don’t know.
There’s also streaming to contend with
and being able to watch, like, five-
second TikToks on your phone. Does
the movie feel like an archaic format?
Sitting down through a whole movie on
a movie screen in a movie theater, it’s a
challenge for many people. We have to be
able to sit down and be patient, and go
through an experience that needs time

to develop, that needs time to progress,
for you to breathe in something that is
going to make you feel that way or the
other, rather than wanting to have the
feeling immediately, right now. Do you
know what I’m saying?
Very much. I have a hard time with it.
The movie theater experience is like the
paper book experience, as well. You can
always leave the theater or close the
book. But give it a chance. Give yourself
a chance to go through that. And again,
I see that in my kids. My kids don’t have
cell phones. They won’t have cell phones
until very late.
How old are they now?
He’s 13, she’s 10 and a half. Even though
they don’t have cell phones, the other
“My kids don’t have cell phones. They won’t
have cell phones until very late.”
32.O5
people have. And what they watch on TV
is not movies anymore. It’s short videos.
Boom, boom, boom, boom.
You’ve worked a lot with your wife. Do
you talk craft with each other?
It’s funny, we don’t talk much about the
work at home. If you go to our house, you
won’t see posters or photos of our work
on the walls. Why? Because I guess we
both are, in different ways, very aware of
what it means. We go there to do a job. We
are very blessed, very thankful for that.
And we don’t want our kids to be taken
by what it means to do a job. You know
what I’m saying?
It’s like a safe space, right? The home
is a safe space.
Yes. It’s a shrine. That being said, some-
START THE BIG INTERVIEW
times it’s fucking crazy, because she’s
doing an accent, I’m doing another
accent, and we are practicing the accents
with our kids. Or we are having lunch and
then the daughter will come and show us
something and she will start dancing,
and then I’ll stand up and [here he mimes
dancing] that’s beautiful. But when you
have two kids and you are doing what any
father and mother should do, you are on
their schedule. You are a little bit of a—
nothing more than an assistant.
You’re taking them to soccer practice,
school …
You don’t have a life anymore. And that’s
the challenge. You have to make room for
your own life. You have to make room for
your own life as a couple.
How do you and Penelope do that?
We don’t know how to do that, Penelope
and I. We always, we are so happy-feeling
with the kids, and we are so much into
it. But then we realize things like, Hey,
how long since we’ve seen a movie? I’m
so grateful and thankful and blessed to
be with my wife, for the woman she is,
but also because of how much she has
helped and helps every day to make me
become a better man and a better father.
What’s your favorite part about being
a father?
That’s a beautiful question. I don’t know
the answer to that. Wow. What’s my
favorite part about being a father? Oh,
wow. There are so many things, and there
are some that are so tough.
I guess one that is not the most pleas-
ant, which is to rediscover yourself and to
restructure your knowledge and thoughts
and way of thinking, and yeah, based on
the mirror you have in front of you that
is reflecting the pure spitting image of
yourself. And you go, “Oh, shit. OK.” You
have to reevaluate yourself. So that asks
for a flexibility, an emotional and intel-
lectual flexibility that is very demanding
and hard. But when you feel that you’ve
made some progress and you took a little
step towards something that is health-
ier for everybody, wow! That is success.
That is parenting.
0 2 6
You’re talking about fatherhood in a
way that seems similar to acting. As
an internal evaluation of growing and
stretching.
Yeah. At the same time, it is the only
thing that I have. I mean, I’m not very
smart. It’s fine, I can live with that. I’m
not very smart.
No negative self-talk at this table.
[Laughs] OK. Good, good. I mean, I don’t
know much about anything, and that
includes acting. The only thing that I
can promise I can give you is commit-
ment.
Your career is like a wave pattern.
Some big Hollywood movies, small
Spanish films, kind of driven by what-
ever artistic impulse I think you’re
feeling at the time. Is there something
that you’ve, not so much that you’ve
considered a failure, but something
that didn’t meet your expectations?
Yeah, I mean, one thing that I’ve learned
is that you never fucking know what’s
going to happen. When I did No Coun-
try for Old Men, it was a year where I
had two projects. One, it was called No
Country for Old Men; one, it was called
Love in the Time of Cholera, based on an
amazing Gabriel García Márquez book,
which I loved. I went to do No Country
for Old Men because I wanted to work
with the Coens, but I wasn’t sure of it.
I thought, it’s too American for me. I’m
playing a psycho killer with that hair-
cut. I’m in the middle of Texas. I don’t
know shit about this culture. It’s going
to be a disaster. I swear to God that’s the
way I felt all the way, even knowing that
I was in the great hands of the Coens.
But again, I never saw Tommy Lee Jones
or Josh Brolin on set. It was just me
killing people. Then I went to Colom-
bia to shoot Love in the Time of Chol-
era, which I have to play this character
from the age of 19, 20 to 70s. And I loved
it, and I was putting everything into it,
and I really poured myself into it. The
two movies came out at the same time.
You won an Oscar for one of them.
Who remembers the other one?
32.O5
Nobody. So you never know.
You’ve worked with so many great
directors. The Coens, Denis Villeneuve,
Sam Mendes. Who’s on the list of direc-
tors you might want to work with?
If I have to choose one, I would say Ste-
ven Spielberg. I watched E.T. 24 times.
My parents split up when I was little. My
father was pretty much absent. I felt like a
very abandoned kid in some ways. Beyond
my mother’s love and my brother and sis-
ter love, I felt there was a part of me that
was no longer nurtured. I guess when I
saw that movie, I was 14. I connected so
deeply with Elliott and with E.T., because
he’s abandoned as well. There are two
abandoned souls trying to find love to
hold together, to belong to a family. And
at the same time, how hard it is for love
to say goodbye to the other, for the bet-
ter of the other, you know? [At this point,
Bardem is tearing up. So am I.]
I’m going to cry talking about E.T.
I cry every time I watch that movie. I cry
to the point where my kids sometime put
on the movie and I go, “No, I don’t want
to watch it.”
It’s just devastating.
Around the time of my first [Oscar] nomi-
nation for Before Night Falls, Steven calls
me to talk about Minority Report, and I go
to his office, and I sit down, and the first
thing I see was E.T. on the bicycle. The real
one. Then of course, tears went down my
cheeks and I said, “Hold it together, moth-
erfucker. He cannot see you like that.”
What role was he considering you for?
That was the role that Colin Farrell did,
but it happened to be at the same time
that I was doing a Spanish movie and I
couldn’t do it.
I don’t think I’ve seen you do any come-
dic acting. Is that something that you
want to do?
I would love to do a romantic comedy.
Yes! You should star as an F1 driver who
finds love.
Exactly. And he’s Brad Pitt!
 ®

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GEAR

BY THE WIRED REVIEWS TEAM PHOTOGRAPHS BY WILSON HENNESSY

EFFICIENCY EXPERTS
From do-it-all multitaskers to essentials that perform one thing perfectly,
this gear will help you get more done with less effort.

Nike Alphafly 3 Adidas Adizero Adios Pro Evo 1

With a time of two hours, 35 seconds, the late Kelvin Kiptum
held the world marathon record; Eliud Kipchoge had previously
managed 1:59:40 in unofficial conditions. Both wore a version
of Nike’s Alphafly 3 training shoe. With a carbon-fiber plate, Air
Zoom units, and chunky ZoomX foam midsole, this is the lightest
(7.7 ounces), fastest, and most performance-focused shoe Nike
has ever made available to the public. $285
Adidas however, leads the pack with its Adizero Adios Pro Evo 1.
The 4.9-ounce shoe is 40 percent lighter than any of Adidas’
previous race shoes, and it helped Tigst Assefa knock two
minutes, 11 seconds off the women’s marathon world record,
with a finish time of 2:11:53. Its featherweight mesh is combined
with Pro Foam and a first-of-its-kind forefoot rocker that’s been
lab-tested to improve running economy. $500

0 2 8
 PERSONAL BESTS 32.O5

CLMBR Connected 02
There’s something of
the medieval torture
device about this exercise
machine—and in truth, if
used correctly, it will leave
you begging for mercy.
The CLMBR is a next-gen
high-intensity, low-impact
vertical climbing machine
that blends both cardio
and strength in one. Unlike
rowing machines and
spin bikes, this full-body
workout requires less than
CRYONiQ CRYO XC 3 square feet of floor space.
Cold-water therapy guru Wim Hof has nothing on At 7 feet, 4 inches tall, it’s
CRYONiQ. This 815-pound cryotherapy chamber will not one for the attic, but
expose your body to the much-lauded health benefits if you’re looking to smash
of extreme cold, no frozen lake required. It uses liquid 650 calories in 30 minutes
nitrogen to create a frigid vortex down to a bone- using guided classes, virtual
chilling –150 degrees Celsius, colder than anywhere on summit climbs, and fierce
earth. Why? There’s evidence that cold therapy may community competition, this
reduce migraines, alleviate pain, have a positive effect device is difficult to beat.
on depression, and even improve skin conditions and $3,995 (plus a $40 per month
reduce symptoms of dementia. Priced as quoted membership)

Community Clothing collection, made with zero

Organic Athletic Shorts
Synthetic-based performance
sports clothing has a serious
environmental problem.
British sustainable-fashion
house Community Clothing’s
answer is a 13-piece plant-
based Organic Athletic
Sennheiser Momentum
Sport Headphones
First teased at CES, Senn-
heiser’s partnership with
the health-tracking experts
at Polar has yielded wire-
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plastic or oil-based materials.
Five years in development and
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Rep Fitness
Adjustable Kettlebell
This multiweight kettlebell
saves floor space and

less sports earbuds that also maximizes the range of muscle

log heart rate and body tem- groups you can target. Rep
perature. They’re the first kettlebells come in three
non-Polar product to be fully sizes—16 kg, 24 kg, and (oddly)
integrated with its ecosys- 40 pounds—and each hides five
tem, and alongside the heart- increments: the 24 kg houses
rate and temperature sensors 16-, 18-, 20-, 22-, and 24-kg
there’s a three-axis acceler- steps that can be adjusted with
ometer, touch gesture con- barely a break in your stride,
trol, adaptive noise canceling, thanks to a quick and easy
and a respectable six hours of push-and-twist of the handle.
battery life. $329 From $165
GEAR

1. Brilliant Labs Frame 2. Loupedeck CT 3. DJI Mic 2 4. Espresso 17 Pro + Stand

Weighing just 40 grams, these
smart glasses feature a micro-
OLED 640 x 400-pixel display
bonded to a thin geometric
prism, plus a camera and mic.
Pair it with the Noa app to use
OpenAI for visual analysis,
Whisper for translation, and
Perplexity for web search.
$349
The CT—aka Creative Tool—
is a computer add-on that
mixes physical keys with six
programmable dials and a
touch display. What they do is
entirely up to your own work-
quirks, but it also has more
than 250 profiles and plug-ins
for leading creative software.
$559
Improving on its superb all-
in-one wireless microphone
system, DJI’s Mic 2 has a 1.1-
inch OLED touchscreen and
a new thumb dial, plus 820-
foot wireless range, 18-hour
battery life, and 8 GB of audio
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spikes. $349
This elegant tablet features
a 17.3-inch 4K display that
reproduces 100 percent of the
DCI-P3 color range. (Any pro
can tell you, that’s excellent.)
It also offers silky touchscreen
scrolling with both pen
($89) and fingers, plus easy
connectivity via a single
USB-C connection. $898

5. Moscot Lemtosh
With Blue Light Filter
Of all Moscot’s unisex retro
frames, Lemtosh is perhaps
the most famous. This non-
prescription pair has blue-
light filter lenses to reduce
eye fatigue and strain, but
a sunglasses-style clip-on
filter is also available for full-
timers. $440

6. Twelve South Butterfly

2-in-1 MagSafe Charger
This aluminum clamshell has
a MagSafe charger on one
side and Apple Watch charger
on the other, linked by a soft
vegan leather hinge, and it can
be used in Nightstand and
StandBy modes. $129
7. Luxafor Mute Button
Instantly mute or unmute your video
calls with this neat USB button, while also
telegraphing whether you’re uninter-
ruptible or available with its simple “traffic
light”—making it blindingly obvious if you’re
green for Go! or red for No! $27

8. Charcoal Standing Desk

Finally, a sit-stand desk that’s tuned to
the way we work. This acrylic-topped
motorized workhorse doesn’t just raise
and lower at the touch of a button—
it can calculate the optimum time for
you to indulge in a “natural restorative
break” by using sensors that track
your work patterns, and then alert
you via an LED light or a haptic buzz.
And if tearing yourself from the screen
remains a fanciful notion, the desk can
be synced to your calendar and will
helpfully vibrate to remind you of your
next Zoom. $1,199

0 3 0
 SAFE FOR WORK 32.O5

9. Montblanc Heritage
Collection Rouge et Noir Baby
Jotting stuff down as it pops into
your head is an efficient route
to killer ideas—and this update
to Montblanc’s Baby pens of
the 1920s makes impulsiveness
a pleasure, with its Au 585 gold
nib, long-life-ensuring iridium
ball tip, and patented ink-flow
capillary. $765

11. Asus ZenBook Duo

With two 14-inch, 3K OLED touchscreens, a detachable
Bluetooth keyboard, and an Intel Core Ultra 9 processor,
this is a hybrid’s hybrid of a computer. The dual screens
can be used vertically, horizontally (like a book), or in
10. Native Union Laptop
an ingenious mirror mode, so those sitting in front of
Stand and Desk Mat
you can read and contribute to what’s on your screen.
Strained shoulders and tight
The separate keyboard (below) slots neatly on top of
necks are the enemy of
the second screen, so it can even be used like a (gasp!)
productivity. This aluminum
regular laptop. At 3.6 pounds, it’s no MacBook Air, but it
laptop stand lifts your screen
still remains impressively portable. $1,500 and up
to eye level (max 24 inches),
and is sturdy enough for
machines up to 11 pounds—
even a whopping Alienware
m18 R2. Complete the pro look
with a double-sided matching
desk-mat made from durable
and stain-resistant alt-
leather. Stand $80; mat $50

12. Moft Snap

9.
Phone Tripod Stand
This 1⁄4 -inch-thick, origami-
style vegan leather MagSafe
tripod unfolds to create a
surprisingly secure stand. At
full height your phone is 7.8
inches above the desk—great
for minimizing double-chin
selfies—and the hinges help
you work your angles. $40
PHOTOGRAPHS: WILSON HENNESSY
GEAR

Baby Brezza Formula

Pro Advanced
The equivalent of a bean-
to-cup coffee machine for
hungry babies, the Baby
Brezza automatically mixes
formula and water to the
perfect consistency and
without air bubbles—which, as
any parent will tell you, is more
an art than a science when
exhausted adult humans are
involved. The airtight hopper
Petlibro Granary Wi-Fi Pet Feeder has capacity for 1.5 pounds of
Pet parents need time-saving tech too, powder and can dose formula
and this chunky little silo delivers up to in 1-fluid-ounce increments
5 quarts of dried pet food in doses of (maxing out at 10 ounces), then
anywhere between 0.3 and 17 ounces bring the mixture to body,
up to 10 times every 24 hours. Use the room, or warmer-than-room
companion mobile app to program a temperature in mere minutes.
feeding call so that your pet will hear the All of the parts are BPA-free
sound of your voice each time dinner’s and the formula bottles are
up. It’s also available with a wide-angle dishwasher safe—just think
web camera, but we feel uneasy endorsing of how much time you’ll save
that particular model, because watching not having to wipe up spilled
your fur babies remotely is the complete formula powder from all over
opposite of efficiency. $90 the countertop. $230

Nanit Pro Plus Camera

Earning a solid 8/10 from
WIRED ’s parenting-tech

expert Nena Farrell, the Nanit

Hatch Rest Go
Gentle noise is a tried-and-
tested way to help a grumpy
tot catch up on a nap, and
there are countless apps that
will pump soothing repetitive
sounds from your phone. But
for those moments where you
features 1080p HD video, plus
access to your complete video
history, while split-screen
action on the app means
two kids can be monitored
simultaneously. There’s
sleep tracking, sensor-free
breathing-motion detection
(for kids 0-3 months), plus
options for table, wall, or floor
stands. Nanit claims parents
get 36 more nights of sleep per
year, which, even as a placebo,
COURTESY OF PETLIBRO, BABY BREZZA, EMBER, HATCH, NANIT, DOONA

actually need to be productive is worth a shot. From $249

Ember Baby and Tumbler while also keeping the baby
These two options from Ember both have the time-starved asleep, the Rest Go mini
parent in mind. The Baby Bottle System warms 6 ounces of milk speaker is a godsend. Clip it to
or formula, while a sleeve cover keeps it at the ideal temperature the stroller, cot, or carrier and
for up to four hours. It also uses premium BPA-free materials and it will play one of 10 snoozy
has enough battery for two full charges. A smartphone app keeps sounds, from plain old white
tabs on the temp. But in truth, it’s the promise of actually being noise to a calming ocean and
able to finish a hot drink before it goes cold that has our attention. even a tumble drier, without
Ember’s 16-ounce Tumbler can keep your beverage at a set heat the need for an app, Wi-Fi, or
level for up to three hours. Baby $399; Tumbler $199 Bluetooth. $35

0 3 2
PARENTAL GUIDANCE 32.O5

Doona Liki Trike S3

Designed for tykes from 10 months to 3
years old, this trike can transform from a
stroller with reclining backrest, footrest,
canopy, and parental push-bar into a
pedal-powered trike—with or without
adult control—and it all folds down to a
compact carry-on size (14.8 pounds) at
the click of a button. Made from fiber-
reinforced polymer, it’s reassuringly
durable and will take the strain out of day
trips for many years to come. From $250

Low-key swag babies

can upgrade to an
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wood or faux-leather
grips and a cup holder.
 Why choose a
Sleep Number smart bed? ®

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FEATURES 32.O5

ILLUSTRATION BY SHAWNA X

0 3 5
 Can the Internet’s Greatest
Authenticity Machine

When thousands of
subreddits went dark
in protest last summer, it
exposed the tension at the
core of Reddit—on the eve of the
company’s IPO. Now that synthetic
media is flooding the internet, does the
web’s most reliably human forum represent a gold
mine for investors, or an old-fashioned dumpster fire?
BY
ROBERT PECK AND
PARESH DAVE

Survive Wall Street?

0 3 7

ILLUSTRATIONS
BY
SEAN DONG
A LYS S A V I D E LO C K WA S 1 1
years old when she started searching for
people like her on the internet. What she
found, back in the early 2000s, was not
at all what she’d hoped for. “Being trans
online was not really a thing,” she says.
“There was fetish stuff for it, and there
were stories about transformation. But
it was either porn or … porn.”
So Videlock was especially grateful,
about a decade later, when she started
exploring Reddit. She was still closeted
to her family and friends, and finding a
place where she could speak with other
trans people kept her sane, she says. On
Reddit, trans people had strength in
numbers and power against the aggra-
vation of trolls. Through an elaborate
system of volunteer moderators, Red-
dit allows its communities—called
subreddits or subs—to cultivate their
own rules, cultures, and protections. The
subs that Videlock frequented, such as
r/asktransgender and r/MtF, were par-
ticularly good at fencing out harass-
ment. “It felt like I could make myself
known there,” she says.
For Videlock, lurking on Reddit became
a prelude to posting every now and
then—which ultimately became a pre-
lude to making herself known in the real
world, and in 2017 she started to transi-
tion. A couple of years later, she tuned in
to a video of a trans woman playing piano
on Reddit’s livestreaming service, r/pan,
and was moved to watch as moderators
shot down one vicious comment after
another. The spectacle inspired her to
become a moderator herself.
The 33-year-old software developer,
who lives in New York, went on to volun-
teer about five hours a day, seven days
a week—exorcising spam, breaking up
fights, and removing hateful slurs on a
handful of subreddits, including r/lgbt,
one of Reddit’s larger subs. She joined
the ranks of more than 60,000 mods who
manage subreddits ranging from the cre-
ative (r/nosleep, a community of people
who write first-person horror fiction)
and the supportive (r/REDDITORSIN-
RECOVERY) to the predictably crass
(r/ratemypoo) and the unpredictably
disgusting (r/FiftyFifty, a 2.2 million–
member community for sharing blind
links, where about half lead to some-
thing stomach-turning).
For good and for ill, Reddit has long
been an island of authenticity in an
increasingly artificial world: a place
where real people, hiding behind the
privacy of fake names, share their rabid
enthusiasms, expertise, and morbid
thoughts; where viral memes and move-
ments bubble up from a primordial soup
of upvotes and chatter; where a million
users each donate $1 to a stranger just to
make a millionaire for the fun of it; and
where people with drinking problems,
parenting crises, crushing debt loads, or
gender confusion can find one another
and compare notes on the struggle. (Red-
dit, by the estimate of an adult industry
expert, also has more porn than Porn-
Hub—an assertion Reddit disputes.)
After years as a relatively quiet user,
Videlock gained a whole new apprecia-
tion for Reddit as a volunteer. She had
also moderated on Discord, but there
was no comparison: Reddit mods shared
tools and tricks that empowered them
to be far more preemptive and stra-
tegic. Sometimes, for example, trolls
 post vicious comments and then quickly
delete their account or the comment
itself—a drive-by tactic that helps them
evade detection and penalties. As a Red-
dit mod, Videlock had a free third-party
app at her disposal that allowed her to
hunt down those deleted comments
retroactively.
Being a Reddit mod also, Videlock
realized, gave her the ear of a major
social media company. For a website
with 73 million daily users and more
than 100,000 subreddits, Reddit’s paid
staff is remarkably small—about 2,000
employees and a few hundred contrac-
tors in San Francisco, New York, and a
handful of cities outside the US. When-
ever staff asked moderators for feed-
back, Videlock stepped up: She got on
phone calls, took surveys, answered
repeated questions about her experi-
ence. What keeps you here? How do
you identify bad apples? When Reddit
rolled out new features, Videlock always
offered to give them a try.
And so it was that in early June 2023,
a staffer on Reddit’s community man-
agement team—the part of the company
that deals most directly with modera-
tors—asked Videlock and a few other
volunteer leaders to join a video call
with Reddit cofounder and CEO Steve
Huffman. The executive wanted to
smooth over fast-spreading concerns
about a recently announced policy
change. For the first time, the company
would charge for access to its applica-
tion programming interface, or API,
the system by which software devel-
opers from outside the company had
been pulling content from Reddit for
nearly 15 years.
On the call, Huffman told Videlock
and the other moderators that Reddit
had no choice but to charge for access;
he later said it was losing tens of mil-
lions of dollars to support companies big
and small that were dipping into its 17
billion forum posts and comments for
free. Reddit wanted to start extracting
fees from entities like OpenAI and Goo-
gle, which had scraped the site’s data to
train large language models that power
generative AI programs like ChatGPT
COURTESY OF ALYSSA VIDELOCK
and Gemini.
In a sense, Huffman’s plan got at the
crux of Reddit’s value to the internet.
Alexis Ohanian, who founded Reddit
with Huffman in the mid-2000s but sev-
ered ties with the company years ago,
argues that Reddit’s status as an island
of wild authenticity will only become
more precious and sought after as
ChatGPT and Dall-E flood the world with
machine-made content. Now here was
Huffman with an idea that would har-
ness some of that value—and in his view,
secure Reddit’s survival—by charging
admission to the machines.
Videlock and the other mods didn’t
see it that way. In fact, Huffman’s call lit
the fuse on a rebellion that would rage
across Reddit for weeks.
To the mods, it was fine if Reddit
wanted to prevent itself from being
cannibalized by the likes of OpenAI.
But API fees were also bound to canni-
balize Reddit’s own community. Thou-
sands of apps had evolved over the years
to serve the needs of millions of users
and mods, often built by solo develop-
ers to compensate for what they felt
were inadequacies of Reddit’s own sys-
tems. Reddit’s new policy, mods wor-
ried, could lay that ecosystem to waste.
Within five days, moderators in charge
of thousands of subreddits launched a
protest, blocking access to their forums
for days, confusing oblivious users,
endangering millions in ad revenue,
and igniting a PR crisis big enough to
light the sky.
Ohanian calls the 2023 rebellion “big-
ger and longer” than any conflict the
platform had seen before. And its tim-
ing was disastrous. Reddit was—and, as
of press time, still is—on the brink of an
initial public offering. The imposition
of API fees was meant to demonstrate
that Reddit could establish a substan-
tial new revenue stream. It also showed
something else: that the risk of future
mod uprisings was an enduring threat
to Reddit’s ads business, which drove 98
percent of the company’s $804 million in
revenue last year. “That’s why the ran-
cor for the past year has been a big deal,”
says Jeremy Goldman, who analyzes
social media for the market research
firm Emarketer. Reddit’s “whole strat-
egy,” he says, is dependent on the loy-
alty of mods.
In the months since the rebellion,
wired has spoken with more than
60 people—moderators and Reddit
employees or contractors, both cur-
rent and former, across engineering,
sales, policy, security, partnerships,
product, recruiting, and data science—
most of whom requested anonymity to
protect job prospects and reveal con-
fidential information. While many of
them respect Huffman and love Reddit,
these sources question the company’s
capacity to satisfy the lofty expecta-
tions for sales and user growth that Wall
Street has imposed on recent tech IPOs.
Documents released on the eve of
Reddit’s IPO add some shading to the
picture: The company’s revenue growth
slowed in the past two years and aver-
age daily users worldwide fell in three
of the past 12 quarters. Several years
ago, the company projected it would
top $1 billion in ad revenue by 2023,
but it fell short by roughly 20 percent.
The company also lost about $91 mil-
lion last year. But the same documents
also make the case for Reddit’s deeper
value. In a recent letter to potential
investors, Huffman cast Reddit’s efforts
WHENEVER REDDIT
STAFF ASKED FOR
FEEDBACK FROM MODS,
ALYSSA VIDELOCK
STEPPED UP.
0 3 9
to generate revenue as being in the early
stages, and highlighted ongoing efforts
to make the platform faster and easier
to use, including with the help of AI.
The 40-year-old said he is particularly
proud of the way Reddit comes to the
aid of users in difficult moments, when
they may not be comfortable turning
to anyone else but a crowd of strang-
ers. More than four years ago, he said,
he himself turned to r/stopdrinking
for help.
The question, in other words, isn’t
just whether Reddit can meet the expec-
tations of investors. It’s whether a vast
and beloved institution can survive to
guide the next Alyssa Videlock—or Steve
Huffman—to the other side of a crisis.
0 4 0 called NSFW, or not safe for work. On
O N E DAY I N T H E S PR I N G
of 2005, Huffman and Ohanian—then a
pair of college housemates at the Uni-
versity of Virginia—traveled to Bos-
ton to attend a lecture by tech investor
Paul Graham. They were hoping Gra-
ham would autograph a copy of his book
and—pressing their luck—that they’d
be able to pitch him over coffee. When
Graham agreed to hear them out, the
two fourth-years told him their big idea:
a mobile platform that would allow cus-
tomers of places like Sheetz, the mid-
Atlantic convenience store chain, to
order sub sandwiches from their phones
while, say, pumping gas.
Graham was about to launch a startup
incubator called Y Combinator, and he
was impressed by the young undergrads.
But to secure a spot in Y Combinator’s
first class of startups, Graham told them,
they needed a new idea. He even crys-
tallized it for them: They should create
a “front page of the internet,” a real-
time forum for links to satisfy the curi-
- open a subreddit, and by January 2011,
politics, and programming—and one
all these subreddits, people whose posts
garnered significant upvotes built up
“karma,” a publicly visible but secretly
calculated measure of someone’s con-
tribution to Reddit, inspired by scoring
systems in video games.
On Halloween 2006, just 16 months
after they founded the company, Huff-
man and Ohanian sold Reddit to Condé
Nast in a deal worth $10 million and
agreed to stay on as leaders for at least
three years. (Condé Nast, which is owned
by Advance Magazine Publishers, is the
publisher of wired). Condé viewed Red-
dit as a place to experiment and where
the magazine company could build out
new ideas online.
But by 2009, according to users,
Reddit’s website was as bare-bones as
before the sale. Ohanian and another
person familiar with the corporate
politics say the site’s growth was
stymied by Condé Nast’s uncertain
desires for the property and Ohanian’s
self-acknowledged mismanagement.
Reddit was awash in half-baked pur-
suits—including a short-lived iPhone
app, iReddit—and a path to sustain-
able revenue wasn’t yet evident. After
the cofounders’ three-year contracts
expired on Halloween 2009, Huffman
and Ohanian left for new pursuits.
Slowe and the handful of other staff-
ers left behind at Reddit—now con-
tending with the fallout from a global
recession—stumbled through exper-
iments with selling ads and subscrip-
tions. Neither Condé execs nor users
were pleased. But they managed to keep
the website alive. Anyone could now
Reddit had 57,000 of them. That year the
company began operating as a subsid-
iary of Condé Nast’s parent, Advance,
which let it function more like a startup.
(Advance still owns a 30 percent stake.)
Amid the changes, Ohanian came back
via a seat on Reddit’s board.
Unfortunately, in what would become
a recurring theme, Reddit’s small staff
had trouble keeping up with the explo-
sion of new, toxic subreddit communi-
ties. In September 2011, CNN’s Anderson
Cooper aired a segment about a subred-
dit called r/jailbait that was associated
with unconscionable images of children.
Reddit soon banned the community.
r/jailbait didn’t stand alone. Media
outlets, civil rights groups, and some

users called out communities that traf-
ficked in misogynist conspiracy theories,
intimate images stolen off celebrities’
emails and iCloud accounts, and actual
AR-15s that had Snoo emblazoned on
them with Reddit’s permission. Racist,
bigoted comments often spilled out from
these toxic hotbeds into other subred-
dits. For the mods, the work of keeping
their spaces welcoming, not hateful,
grew exhausting.
Mods and users were also frustrated
at times with buggy experiences on Red-
dit’s mobile website (its own in-house
app was years away from relaunching).
So several developers created surrogate
mobile apps, which pulled content via
the free API. One of them, made by a
developer named Andrew Shu, was an
Android app called RIF (for Reddit is
fun) that packaged up Reddit content
and drew millions of downloads. Red-
dit even licensed its name to RIF for a
few years, for a fee. The independent
apps kept users engaged but left Red-
dit proper with fewer eyeballs to sell
to advertisers.
Investors didn’t seem to mind the
bleeding at the margins. In 2014, Alt-
man, rich from selling his Y Combinator
startup Loopt, led a $50 million infusion
of funding for Reddit, along with con-
tributions from celebrities including
Snoop Dogg and Jared Leto. Two months
later, Reddit’s CEO, Yishan Wong, quit—
worn out, citing “significantly detrimen-
tal effects” the job had on his personal
In what would be their first big show
of power, pissed off volunteers
essentially shuttered hundreds of
communities dedicated to the likes
of cats, movies, and Metallica.
life. Altman and the board promoted
Ellen Pao, then the head of strategic
partnerships, to interim CEO, making
her Reddit’s fifth leader in five years.
She instantly became an ally to users
and mods who had railed against the
horrid subreddits, and an instant enemy
to those who wanted to troll.
Pao banned porn sharing that didn’t
have subjects’ consent and closed sev-
eral subreddits that targeted Black,
trans, and larger-bodied people. Unsur-
prisingly, one flank of Reddit’s user and
moderator base loved this. The other
decried the actions as censorship.
Soon after that decision, Pao lost the
support of both flanks. It happened,
many volunteers say, when Reddit let go
of a beloved communications employee
named Victoria Taylor who was a liaison
to many mods. In what would be their
first big show of power, pissed-off vol-
unteers essentially shuttered hundreds
of communities dedicated to the likes of
cats, movies, and Metallica.
The protest cowed Reddit’s bosses.
Ohanian, who had recently become
Reddit’s executive chair, conceded to
the mods in a public post: “Your mes-
sage was received loud and clear. The
communication between Reddit and
the moderators needs to improve dra-
matically.” It had become evident that
volunteers, who were providing what
would become millions of dollars in free
labor to Reddit annually, truly shared
control of the service.
Huffman, who had gone on to cofound
a travel startup called Hipmunk, watched
these events and fumed. He had had
an experience on psychedelic mush-
rooms, he later revealed in a podcast,
that opened his eyes to the diversity of
humankind. Now, he didn’t want protest-
ers, trolls, anyone destroying the struc-
ture that Reddit provided to legitimate
countercultures, and he felt he could cor-
ral the miscreants. Huffman also feared
that without him, Reddit would over-
react and then fail, just like its one-time
rival Digg, which had never fully recov-
ered after a redesign stripped users’ vot-
ing power and drove them away.
Reddit’s board had their own con-
cerns. The website now had upwards
of 200 million regular visitors but had
begun stagnating. “The saying was,” a
former senior executive put it, “‘You’re
growing slower than the internet.’ ”
Reddit needed direction. Huffman felt
compelled—and supported by board
members Ohanian, Altman, and Bob
Sauerberg, then the president of Condé
Nast—to run toward fire. “I’ve gotten the
increasingly strong feeling that Red-
dit needs me more than ever,” Huffman
told The New York Times. “We have an
opportunity to be this massive force of
good in the world.” By July 10, 2015,
Pao was out, Huffman was back—and
now he was facing an audacious goal
that had been set by the board, one that
would open advertisers’ wallets: Get to
1 billion users.
 R E D D I T ’S M O D E R ATO RS
each come to the task differently. Power
can be a big draw; u/N8theGr8 grew his
flock until he was moderating subreddits
that had, all told, 301 million members,
making him the most prolific mod ever.
Some want to share their expertise, like
the team of history-buff moderators at
r/AskHistorians, or the scientific illus-
trator u/TinyLongwing who helps ama-
teur birders on r/whatsthisbird. Others
are super-users who’ve spent enough
time on Reddit to get wise to its faults.
u/RamsesThePigeon started out by post-
ing absurdist fiction (about, say, honey
badgers or Ouija boards) to the com-
edy subreddit r/funny. As he read the
room, he noticed groups of users that
commented only on each other’s posts,
often using similar or verbatim language.
He had discovered “spambot rings,” a
persistent scam on Reddit. “The more I
posted, I started recognizing patterns in
the way the site worked,” he says.
After reporting spambot rings to
mods for months, they suggested he
switch to acting on them. He began mod-
erating huge communities, including
r/funny, which, at 57 million members,
is now Reddit’s biggest.
Volunteer moderators don’t just
enforce the rules. Apart from eight site-
wide principles set by Reddit—“Every-
one has a right to use Reddit free of
REDDIT GROWS UP ↓
june 2005
Reddit launches with
$12,000 in seed funding
from Y Combinator.
october 2006
The company is sold
to Condé Nast in a
deal worth $10 million.
0 4 2 the page.
harassment,” “Do not cheat or engage
in content manipulation”—the mods
make the rules in their subreddits.
They’ve turned the platform into one
of the world’s most inventive laborato-
ries for online content moderation, with
approaches as diverse as the trouble-
makers they counter. For example, on
r/TwoXIndia, Reddit’s community for
Indian women, men are allowed to com-
ment on Wednesdays only, and just in one
section of content. The r/trans subreddit,
where Videlock is a moderator, lists 14
march 2008
taining
october 2011
Cofounders Steve Huffman After a CNN report about
and Alexis Ohanian r/jailbait—a subreddit sharing
announce they are leaving photos of underage girls—
the company. generates huge controversy
for the company, Reddit bans
detailed rules, from the simple (no hate
speech) to the community-specific (no
sharing hate speech posted by others,
even in mockery). “We spent a lot of time
making sure as much of our community
can ask a question without fear of rejec-
tion,” Videlock says.
From Reddit’s earliest days, there have
also been moderators who build tools to
make the work easier, like u/creesch, who
saw, early in his tenure as a mod, that
Reddit’s mod tools were woefully under-
developed. The site, for example, had
simple buttons to remove posts or ban
users, but it couldn’t track rule breakers
or efficiently notify people whose posts
had been pulled. creesch launched what
he called Mod Tools Enhanced in early
2013. Then, with help from other coders,
he upgraded anew. Mod Toolbox, as they
called it, swelled in popularity, becom-
ing the premier add-on suite for mods.
Most mods channel their zealotry into
keeping Reddit friendly. Some do the
opposite. In one subreddit that Ellen Pao
banned in 2015, r/fatpeoplehate, mods
had posted a step-by-step guide on com-
menting anonymously. One tip was to
write comments from burner usernames
because “using your main account … can
leave hams with a trail of cookie crumbs
that they eat up and find out who you are.”
Such was the ornery, dedicated land-
scape of moderators that Huffman
inherited upon his return. He assigned
september 2014
Reddit raises $50 million
from Sam Altman, Andrees-
sen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital,
Peter Thiel, Ron Conway,
Paul Buchheit, Jared Leto,
Mariam Naficy, Josh Kushner,
and Snoop Dogg.
july 2015
Steve Huffman
returns as CEO.
 a handful of community managers to
work on pacifying the company’s rela-
tionships with mods. He went on a hiring
spree, bringing the size of the staff from
80 people to about 350. In doing so, he
hired about 20 employees from his for-
mer startup (Reddit staff called them the
“Hipmunk bros”) to oversee technology,
product, marketing, and what he labeled
“anti-evil operations,” or the corporate
enforcement of Reddit-wide rules.
Almost as soon as Huffman took the
reins, a huge moderation challenge
tested his playbook. Founded in 2015,
r/The_Donald, or T_D, flouted Reddit’s
policies and norms around hate and accu-
racy and became a now infamous hub of
avid Trump supporters. For months, T_D
mods used their expertise in Reddit’s vot-
ing system to flood Reddit’s homepage
with posts favorable to Trump and con-
servative views of the time, frustrating
other users. Mods demanded Huffman
take drastic action. Many employees also
wanted the subreddit banned.
Huffman, though, had warned upon his
return that cracking down on one com-
munity threatened frank exchange in all
of them. He’d say in a later interview that
censorship needs to be approached cau-
tiously. “A lot of bad ideas are not nec-
essarily bad ideas. Or they might just be
undecided ideas,” he said. “The ability
to argue and have differences of opin-
ion and debates, even if it’s not perfectly
SOURCES: CRUNCHBASE, NEWS REPORTS, WIRED REPORTING, USER COMMENTS, AND SITE HISTORIES
july 2017
Reddit raises $200 million from
Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia
Capital, Coatue Management,
Vy Capital, Fidelity, Sam Altman,
and Ron Conway, valuing the
company at $1.8 billion.
february 2019
Reddit raises $300
million from Tencent,
Sequoia, Fidelity, and
GETTY IMAGES
Andreessen Horowitz,
valuing the company
at around $3 billion.
friendly and professional at all times, is
really important.”
Huffman preferred to assert control
over T_D through a stunt reminiscent
of Reddit’s early days, when he used his
superadmin access to alter posts that
used a gay slur to say “fog” instead. This
time, when T_D users invoked his Reddit
username, “spez,” in insults, Huffman
edited their comments to cut out his user-
name and replace it with the names of
T_D mods, making it look like they were
mocking themselves.
The CEO’s surprise intervention
enraged T_D’s mods and users, not to
mention staff, who were left doing dam-
age control over the 2016 Thanksgiving
holiday in the US. Employees called the
incident “Spezgiving,” and not fondly.
Soon after, Huffman wrote an apol-
ogy that started, “tl;dr: I fucked up.”
Of course, his self-described prankster
side had benefits. He could be warm,
approachable, and informal, employ-
ees say; he once let a community manager
launch a pie in his face to celebrate the
team clearing a support-ticket backlog.
When there were complaints about col-
leagues arriving late and leaving early,
Huffman sent out an email saying no one
should be criticized as long as they com-
pleted their work. In some ways, Huff-
man’s return was a reminder of what had
enabled the free-spirited vibe that drew
users to Reddit in the first place.
june 2020
Alexis Ohanian leaves
by a Black person.
february 2021
Reddit starts a $518 mil-
lion raise from Tencent,
Vy Capital, Andreessen
Horowitz, and Sequoia
Capital, valuing the com-
pany at $6 billion.
AS THE WEIGHT OF RE ACHING
a billion users pressed down on him,
many staffers believe, Huffman began
to lose some of that free spirit. There’s
no way to grow by a factor of five, of
course, without alienating some loyal
diehards. But Reddit kept falling into
patterns that aggravated core users with-
out netting many gains: playing catch-up
with trends, vacillating over priorities,
and struggling over when to follow the
guidance of people in the company who
knew the mods best.
Early on, for instance, Huffman
launched a new app for Reddit to draw
in users directly. But because some users
had become attached to variants such as
RIF, he rejected his lieutenants’ advice to
cut off the user-made apps, even though
they cost the company advertising reve-
nue. He also set out to modernize what
he jokingly called Reddit’s “dystopian
Craigslist” user interface, and the com-
pany’s head designer drew inspiration
from Twitter for a new homepage look.
But when millions of users and mods
turned out to prefer dystopia, Huffman
ended up committing to maintaining the
old interface alongside the new one—
stretching thin his engineers.
Later, Reddit turned its envious eyes to
Twitch, imitating it with the livestream-
ing platform r/pan, or “public access net-
work.” More than a dozen engineers were
august 2021 february 2024
Reddit raises $410 Indicating that it plans to go
million, led by Fidelity, public within weeks, Reddit
valuing it at over $10 publishes its pitch to Wall
billion. It raises an Street, which shows a deal
additional $315 million worth $67 million in annual
the next month. revenue from data licensing.
april 2023
Reddit says it will charge for
access to its API, shutting
out many app developers
and toolmakers, leading to
moderator protests.
 originally dedicated to the project. The
dream was that users would stream their
own videos, and major events like tennis
championships and Apple product debuts
would come to r/pan. With a core user
base accustomed to hiding behind pseud-
onyms, employees never quite under-
stood how to encourage people to go live.
Plus, sources say tools for moderators
lagged. (Reddit disputes this.) Some-
times offensive comments remained tem-
porarily visible even after they’d been
removed. Even the most senior techni-
cal staff struggled to fix the bugs, which
were buried within hundreds of thou-
sands of lines of hastily written code,
one of those top programmers says. The
new service did foster a legion of amateur
musicians and comedians with decent
audiences. But big-name partnerships
never materialized. Huffman pulled the
plug on r/pan just over three years after
it launched. (Some Reddit engineers say
they celebrated as the long and fast-built
r/pan code disappeared.)
Then, about a year into the pandemic,
REDDIT COFOUNDER AND to get in on the popularity of the live audio
CEO STEVE HUFFMAN app Clubhouse, the company launched
ONCE LET A COMMUNITY
MANAGER LAUNCH A PIE Reddit Talk. Dozens of staffers joined
INTO HIS FACE. the project. “You could hear a collective
groan,” a manager of another team says
of the internal reaction. Reddit’s commu-
nity managers tried to sound the alarm as
yet another new feature went live without
what they believed were adequate mod-
eration capabilities, one such staffer says.
If a host of a talk was allowing people to
break the rules, only a mod could stop it.
In a memorable incident during a Talk
session on r/australia, a user began to
rant about killing Indigenous Australians.
A mod was there, a person who followed
the situation says, and acted swiftly, but
if they hadn’t been in the room, the hate
speech could have continued. Advertis-
ers demanded more oversight for the
product. Reddit Talk attracted speak-
ers like director Guillermo del Toro and
reached 15 million users, but it was shut
down after two years.
In 2020, Reddit acquired Dubsmash,
an early TikTok rival, with an eye toward
absorbing its creative tools to encourage
users to post more videos. This worked
for a while; Reddit saw a nearly 70 per-
cent increase in hours watched in just
under a year. Dubsmash engineers deliv-
ered editing tools that felt appropriate
for Reddit, including a filter that made
users look like Snoo. But according to an
analysis by Emerge Tools, a service for
mobile developers, the size of Reddit’s
GETTY IMAGES
iOS app grew by about a third. Reddit
executives believed the download bloat
jeopardized user growth in emerging
markets where there were high data fees,
those familiar with the discussions say.
Leadership also worried about videos
sucking people away from engaging with
comments, even though the new prod-
ucts were having a positive impact on
sales. Eventually the filters and some
advanced editing tools that Dubsmash
had helped engineer got the boot, and
Huffman announced plans to shutter
Dubsmash’s own app.
Reddit also built a program called Col-
lectible Avatars that would let artists sell
digital characters—and launched it into
a market that was already collapsing,
spectacularly. (Employees say Huffman
insisted that they never use the term
NFT.) Reddit put an estimated 20 staff-
ers from the company’s secretive R&D
division on the Avatars project and pro-
moted it on a massive billboard in New
York’s Times Square. Sources say it has
been lucrative for artists. The company
describes sales to date as “immaterial.”
These scattered pursuits, some
employees note, siphoned resources
away from core teams like the engi-
neers who made the site reliable. For
years, Reddit suffered so many outages
that users made a sport of drawing on
bananas while the site was down and
posting the masterpieces on r/down-
timebananas when it returned online.
Similarly, Reddit’s ad-buying system
was so onerous that staff handled the
grunt work of uploading ads to the
site, so as to shield advertisers from
the system’s shortcomings. One ad
account manager lost a Thanksgiving
weekend struggling to upload a series
of 15-second video ads for a major cli-
ent, because inexplicably, the tool kept
rebooting, over and over. Though sig-
nificantly improved, the ads system
today is still riddled with outdated,
erroneous, and limited options.
Aside from new products, Huff-
man also grew increasingly focused
on another frontier for growth: over-
seas expansion. Starting in 2021 Reddit
brought on local community manag-
ers, translators, and salespeople to win
over the world. Meta and Google each
generate more than half of their reve-
nue outside the US. Reddit was nowhere
close to that—in part because 90 percent
of new content is still in English. But
the familiar tendency to take the quick
route afflicted Reddit’s global push. To 0 4 5
gin up activity in France and Germany,
Reddit staffers quietly scraped popu-
lar English-language submissions and
translated them. Some users and mods
thought a spambot ring had infected
their communities. (Reddit declined to
comment on this episode.)
Reddit prioritized growing in India
but struggled to overcome tax and legal
issues to hire staff there. That disap-
pointed volunteer mods in the country,
who begged the company for reinforce-
ments as Islamophobia, casteism, and
other bigotry ran rampant in big local
communities. They were concerned
about the US-centric staff’s inability
to understand the cultural nuances of
content that was being escalated to
them—a feeling shared by some mods
across Asia and the Pacific. “They pooh-
pooh us,” says one of the Indian mods,
u/neoronin. Only recently have the vet-
eran Indian mods felt heard. Today some
top Indian subreddits have exponentially
more members than they did four years
ago, and some have more than a million
members, but the goal of further expan- The company had amassed, says one
sion in the region falls to a vice president former employee, “an embarrassing
of international growth based in Singa- number” of survey results showing
pore who, as of last year, didn’t have any mods repeatedly asking for guardrails
staff directly reporting to him. to safely launch new products. Feeling
About half of Reddit’s overall daily ignored, key volunteers started calling
users are from outside the US—the same it quits. While six developers worked in
as three years ago—and just 18 percent earnest on Mod Toolbox over the years,
of ad sales are from foreign advertis- only two—u/creesch, the founder, and
ers. Over the past year, the company has a newcomer, Erin, a college student—
shelved some plans to expand in Latin were left by 2021. That number went up
America and canceled even some of its after colleagues found out how much
successful marketing campaigns else- work the two were tackling; even so,
where, narrowing priorities to the UK, creesch was winding down. His inter-
France, Spain, and a few others. est “didn’t just suddenly fall off a cliff,”
All of these starts and stops, mild suc- Erin says. “The direction the site has
cesses, and costly disappointments took been going has had an impact on us.”
a toll on the volunteer workforce. By The sheer volume of vitriol and crap
many accounts Huffman truly does care kept beating mods down too. During the
about moderators. He has said that it’s pandemic, one mod, u/N8theGr8, the
his “literal dream” to find some genu- guy in charge of those 301 million sub-
ine way to reward them: He supported scribers, grew furious with r/NoNew-
a project, which ultimately didn’t work Normal, a prominent antivax page. Its
out, to let mods sell merchandise in their users would spill what he considered
communities, and extended an unusual disinformation into other subreddits
offer to let users buy shares in the IPO. he worked on, including the cute ani-
According to some sources who work mal community r/aww. Reddit stopped
closely with mods, though, Huffman and promoting NoNewNormal to users who
other execs had simply paid too little weren’t members but didn’t shutter it.
attention to moderators’ needs recently, Frustrated by the limited action, N8 took
and in so doing inadvertently fanned the a new approach: He banned NoNew-
embers that would ignite a fire. Normal users from most communities

he controlled. He and other mods also
asked Reddit staff to ban communities
that spread disinformation. N8 also cre-
ated a new page where volunteers could
coordinate to expand the cordon against
NoNewNormal, r/ModCoord. If Reddit
wouldn’t ban the users outright, volun-
teers would do it piecemeal.
In a further escalation, N8 rallied his
coalition of mod allies to lock the more
than 125 subreddits they managed, func-
tionally taking sections of Reddit offline,
just as mods had done during the Ellen
Pao protests years before. Protesting
mods wrote to users that the “volume of
blatant misinformation is problematic
and dangerous.” The company main-
tained that a NoNewNormal ban would
stifle contrasting viewpoints—but it
eventually took the page down follow-
ing media reports of the protest. Reddit
cited the subreddit’s continued interfer-
ence in other communities as the rea-
son. Left in the wake of that event was
an infrastructure for mass collective
action and a playbook for how to wield
it. It wouldn’t be long before the mods
would use both again.
0 4 6 health and wellness fund known as “up to
The developer of RIF—the app
that millions of users preferred
to the company’s official one—
announced that he would be
shutting it down because the
new terms would bar him from
making money off ads and
displaying porn from Reddit.
I N M AY 2 0 2 2 , A S T H E
pandemic started to loosen its grip,
Reddit spent millions to host more than
1,000 of its employees in New York City
for two days of hot dogs, pizza, drink-
ing, concerts, and karaoke. They gath-
ered on the rooftop of a building on a
pier along the East River and in Queens
at a former door factory turned party
space. DJs spun from a platform that
held a giant neon sign reading front
stafe of the internet. There were
subreddit-themed areas: One, a church
set up for r/onetruegod —dedicated
to Nicolas Cage—was full of pillows
featuring the actor’s face. The Snoo
Summit was the company’s first big
gathering since Covid; the celebration
was, in part, meant to coincide with
Reddit’s plans to go public. But amid
the war in Ukraine and a tumbling stock
market, Reddit decided to hold off on
the IPO—which lent the event the qual-
ity of a garish head fake, some staffers
say. In the end, the event turned out
to be not only a money-suck but also a
Covid super-spreader.
Despite the IPO delays, Huffman
repeatedly assured workers that Red-
dit was in good financial shape—with
over $1 billion available in cash—and he
led them to believe no jobs would be cut.
But in the fall of 2022, events at another
tech giant appeared to alter Reddit’s
personality. Watching Elon Musk take
over Twitter, according to some former
Reddit employees, appeared to fuel a
grim change in Huffman. Some staff-
ers began to call their CEO Stelon Husk.
Around the time Musk laid off
roughly half of Twitter’s employees and
demanded that his remaining staffers be
“extremely hard core,” Huffman began
to outline a plan that would cut perks
for Reddit employees. Benefits that had
once been valued at around $9,000 a
year—work-from-home and profes-
sional development allowances and a
snoo”—would shrink in value and eligi-
bility. On a company Slack channel, some
workers alleged that the cutbacks would
disproportionately hit groups such as
overseas workers and those with dis-
abilities. Former employees recall that in
a meeting and subsequent memo, Huff-
man described his detractors’ behavior
as entitled and ungrateful, and told them
to come to him privately with criticism.
Many viewed this approach as an affront
to the company’s value of “default open.”
(The company later made adjustments
to perks.)
Around that same time, Huffman
embarked on something the company
called a “talent density review”—by
which employees understood people
were about to lose their jobs. They
gaped at the bizarre euphemism, to
say nothing of Huffman’s reversal
after months of assurances, as Red-
dit set about letting go of what would
eventually total 10 percent of its work-
force. Sources say Huffman has since
expressed regret over how the job
losses were handled
Huffman’s next big move would,
again, be Muskian. In February 2023,
the Twitter CEO posted a bombshell.
“Free API is being abused badly right
now,” Musk tweeted. “Just ~$100/month
for API access with ID verification will
clean things up greatly.” Weeks later,
word of an impending change to Red-
dit’s own API fees started to trickle out
from Huffman’s office.
R E D D I T ’S C O M M U N I T Y
management team warned executives
that a change to their API policy might
set off another uprising. Leadership,
sources say, took few steps to prepare.
When Huffman got on that June con-
ference call with Videlock and other
moderators and tried to sell the fees as
a way to defend Reddit’s value against
the rampant parasitism of AI companies,
the mods were aghast. They had no idea
how Huffman could justify charging for
the data that was needed for the tools
they used every day. Toolbox developer
Erin was incensed: “You’re going to start
making some of us pay for the privilege
of untangling this mess into something
useful to our users?”
Videlock and other volunteers relayed
their worries to Huffman, but by the very
next morning, their fears started turn-
ing into reality. Third-party apps that
mods used for their work were sud-
denly in jeopardy. BotDefense, a track-
ing program that found spambots and
banned them across multiple subreddits,
needed API access to process account
data. If BotDefense went down, spam-
mers could run rampant. Another tool at
risk was Unddit, a comment archive that
needed API access to troves of deleted
comments so mods could see, for exam-
ple, if users were hiding rule-breaking
posts. Even smaller tools like r/audio-
phile’s tech support and purchase advice
bot, Transducer Bot, could be broken
without API access.
What’s more, apps that were simply
popular among users and mods started
falling. In early June, Andrew Shu, the
developer of RIF—the Android app that
millions of users preferred to the compa-
ny’s official one—announced he would
be shutting down because the new terms
barred him from making money off ads
and displaying porn from Reddit. To sur-
vive, he would have to charge users and
offer less. “I didn’t want to fuck over my
entire user base,” Shu says. That same
day, Christian Selig, a software engineer
who ran a similar Reddit-clone mobile
app for iOS called Apollo, which earned
him a handsome living through subscrip-
tion fees, also announced that he was
closing up shop.
According to call transcripts that
Selig shared with us, Reddit platform
and business development staff had
promised him in January to “expect no
change” and then in April that the com-
pany had no plans to “blow anyone out
of the water.” And yet here was Apollo
in June, in Selig’s view, blown out of the
water. (Reddit declined to comment on
these calls.)
In a Q and A on Reddit the following
day, Huffman walked back the new API
policy a few inches: Some tools wouldn’t
have to pay as long as they didn’t earn
money, which spared open source apps
like RedReader, which helps low-vision
users, and several mod tools from col-
lapse. But apps like Apollo and RIF would
still have to pay up, starting that July.
“Reddit needs to be a self-sustaining
business,” Huffman wrote.
Moderators weren’t appeased.
“Those working on r/lgbt were pretty
much like, ‘What the fuck?’” Videlock
says. In five days, the gears were set in
motion to re-create and surpass the pro-
tests of 2015 and 2021. N8 had stepped
back from moderating by then, but he
pointed volunteers to the subreddit
he’d built to deal with NoNewNormal,
r/ModCoord. “They flocked to it,” he
says. u/yellowspaces, a moderator of
r/pokemon, a 4.4 million–strong hub
for fans of the TV and game series, says
his colleagues had long resisted partic-
ipating in previous Reddit-wide pro-
tests. This time, after debate, they were
in: The mods agreed to block visitors
to r/pokemon from June 12 to June 14.
Anyone visiting would be redirected
to a message about the ongoing pro-
test. Secret peer-to-peer discussions
exploded as the most angered mods
worked to rally more support.
On the morning of June 12, thousands
of subreddits went dark.
That afternoon, in an internal memo
to staff, Huffman offered zero concilia-
tion. “Like all blowups on Reddit, this
one will pass,” he wrote. But by June
14, the day many subreddits had agreed
to reopen, the number of unreachable
communities had swollen to more than
8,000. The protest was a media fiasco
too. In an interview for NBC News four
days into the blockade, Huffman praised
Musk for showing, through his acqui-
sition of Twitter and subsequent mass
layoffs, how a business could survive
bold changes. He also insulted Reddit’s
volunteers, comparing them to “landed
gentry” unaccountable to their users,
squatting on land they hadn’t earned.
The troll in him should have known mods
would love the phrase. They made it into
a rallying cry. (Medieval-themed jokes
about the landed gentry grabbing power
littered the r/memes subreddit, as did
posts in which moderators invited other
users to join the gentry’s ranks.) A few
advertisers temporarily suspended their
ad buys, and for weeks ad salespeople
found potential clients more hesitant
than ever to purchase ad space, accord-
ing to people involved in the discussions.
Earlier that year, inside the company,
a product leader floated the argument
that Reddit should simply replace pro-
testing mods. Sources say they thought
such a nuclear option was never really up
for consideration. But on June 16, Red-
dit staff sent a message to the mods of
shuttered pages, which the mods took to
mean: Open up, or risk losing your posi-
tions. A pseudonymous message went
out to multiple volunteers from the cor-
porate account u/ModCodeOfConduct
saying, “If there are mods here who are
willing to work towards reopening this
community, we are willing to work with
you.” It also said the company would
“handle” any “retaliation attempts” by
protesters against cooperative mods.
That strike-breaking tactic ignited
frantic discussion among volunteers.
If even one volunteer on any subreddit
gave in, the company could take con-
trol of the community and force out all
others. On r/pokemon, u/yellowspaces
described the atmosphere as emo-
tional—and tense. “We all had to play a
balancing game between keeping admin
happy and doing what we felt was mor-
ally right,” he said, adding, “I also felt
frustrated. We wouldn’t be in this posi-
tion at all had staff not made the deci-
sions they did.” r/pokemon volunteers
were still in the middle of debating when
one mod—since resigned—broke ranks,
messaging the company that they would
reopen the subreddit. When other vol-
unteers saw the message, they rushed to
reopen and preempt their own removal.
On the 23 million–member photo-
sharing community r/mildlyinterest-
ing, a poll drawing more than 40,000
votes called for a partial reopening with
modified rules. Moderators followed
through by reopening and mislabeling
the subreddit as NSFW, which prevented
Reddit from showing ads and poten-
tially generating revenue off the com-
munity. The company didn’t appreciate
the tactic. It started suspending mods
one by one. “I was eating dinner and sud-
denly I saw the message that I had been
removed,” moderator u/TheHammer34
says. Soon, the entire team got the axe.
Confusingly, u/TheHammer34 says Red-
dit returned all the r/mildlyinteresting
mods to power the next day.
On r/pics (30 million members),
u/RamsesThePigeon and other volun-
teers looked for a strategy to reopen
the page while still garnering media and
user sympathy. “We wanted to high-
light the absurdity” of the API changes,
he said. “We wanted a way to entertain
people while also informing them.” He
came up with the idea to allow mem-
bers to submit only photos of John Oli-
ver, the comedian and host of Last Week
Tonight. Bemused users were directed
in droves to a post written by Ramses
about the API protests. When Oliver’s
TV series resumed in fall last year, his
first segment included a sympathetic
spotlight on the mods. “It was a pretty
inspiring act of malicious compliance,”
A LT H O U G H T H E M O D S A R E
Oliver said, showing user-made images
from the protests onscreen.
But, as June wore on, the mods were
losing steam. More subreddits reopened,
often at the behest of users wanting
their community support systems or
entertainment outlets back. Meanwhile,
Reddit staffers restored access to more
pages, often by force. Huffman and Red-
dit’s response also shifted. The company
said it understood the motivation for
the protests but defended the fees. Red-
dit’s community vice president assured
mods that they would maintain a voice
in decisionmaking. “There will be cases
when our decisions don’t fully align,” she
wrote. “But we won’t stop seeking out
your input. It does matter, it does change
things, and we do respect and value it.”
Reddit also restored API access to
some developers who produced mod-
made tools, and Huffman vowed to
accelerate work on other long-desired
moderator features. He promised mod-
erators that he would work in their
shoes as a mod for the popular subred-
dit r/AmItheAsshole—which he did for
a couple of months. As the fight drew
to a close, volunteers’ options were all
but exhausted, and they were tired.
By the time the API fee became effec-
tive on July 1, Huffman had ultimately
been right; the protest had effectively
died out.
burned out, and even a little jaded, all of
those we spoke to—from N8 to Ramses
to Videlock—say they aren’t ready to
give up on Reddit. They still want what
they’ve asked for all along: the ability to
help more. “The people who care need
to be empowered,” Ramses says.
Videlock is determined as ever to
work with Reddit staff. “It’s easy for
some people to see those mods as loud
dissenting voices,” she said not long ago.
“I see them as building the communities
people come for.”
When July rolled around, a lot of
third-party apps started charging fees
or subscriptions and lost significant
numbers of users. Millions of users also
began shifting, however grudgingly,
to the company’s native app. The mod
tool BotDefense is gone for good. So is
 0 4 9 Unddit. Smaller tools like Transducer
Bot are still working because they still
have access to the API for free. As pain-
ful as all this has been, though, unifying
users on one platform will make it sim-
pler for Reddit to grow the business.
In the IPO pitch, Huffman outlined
a trio of trillion-dollar markets in his
sights—ads, data licensing, and ecom-
merce. For advertisers, Reddit has
always been a tough sell. To really suc-
ceed on the platform, ads have to speak
in the voice of the Reddit community
they are targeting; like anyone, they
must abide by the “vibes of the tribe”
to gain traction, as one digital ad exec-
utive puts it. The company has warned
that ad sales growth is expected to keep
slowing this year. In January, 100 con-
tractors working for Reddit lost their
jobs, which had been focused on diver-
sifying the platform’s advertiser base.
In its initiative to make a buck off the
AI boom through API fees, Reddit says
it counts a “small number” of wins—
including one big deal to license data to
Google—which collectively should bring
in roughly $67 million annually through
2026. But three other major develop-
ers of AI systems say they can proba-
bly do without Reddit data and aren’t
interested in paying for it, according
to sources involved in the discussions.
Huffman’s plan to grow an ecommerce
platform is even more nascent. The idea
is that subreddits could become mar-
ketplaces where users buy and sell all
manner of stuff. This already happens to
a degree: Users have sold about 20,000
watches on r/Watchexchange and com-
missioned more than 60,000 images on
r/PhotoshopRequest. With a little more
infrastructure, the thinking goes, Red-
dit might be able to convene more sales
and take a cut of the action.
R O B E R T P E C K teaches All those plans leave out another big
at the Univerity of Iowa potential source of revenue for Reddit.
and was a longtime con- A thousand popular NSFW subreddits
tent moderator. He is at drew about 14 million unique visitors
work on a book about in the US alone in February, according
online volunteerism in to digital intelligence platform Similar-
the age of fake news. web. “Nsfw” was the most-searched
term on Reddit last year by a wide mar-
gin, according to research firm Datos.
Yet since 2019, Reddit hasn’t run ads
is a senior
PA R E S H D AV E against NSFW content.
writer for wifed. He cov- Reddit made no mention of the reve-
ers the inner workings of nue potential of NSFW content in its IPO
big tech companies. filing. But sources say that over the past
few years, staffers have studied the sub-
scription service OnlyFans. To distance
this potential economy for the comfort
of some users and advertisers, Reddit
has considered moving NSFW commu-
nities to a different nomenclature (say,
x/porn instead of r/porn). Reddit dis-
putes this characterization.
Of course, there’s no guarantee that
this attempt to imitate a rival platform
will ever be pursued or that it wouldn’t
drum up another round of protest and
new headaches for mods. But it’s in
everyone’s interest for Reddit to find
some way to make profits that preserves
its character.
There’s also no getting around that
IPOs force technology companies to
change. And the coming shifts could be
particularly wrenching for a volunteer-
powered, community-centered platform
like Reddit. Huffman, for all his faults,
has heretofore been staunch about pro-
tecting users’ data privacy and has, in his
way, been loyal to the “vibes of the tribe.”
Soon his first loyalty will be to share-
holders. So it’s no surprise that users
and mods are worried that this beauti-
ful, messy, maddening thicket of human-
ity is going to disappear in one way or
another—whether by becoming mono-
cultural and lame and boringly profitable
or by turning into a capitalist scammer
hellscape that eats through communi-
ties like battery acid. In some ways, it’s
as if Wikipedia had an IPO. Nobody can
imagine what their favorite hangout
will become.
In recent weeks, volunteers have been
wondering whether to buy into the IPO
(“Aside from the fact I could potentially
turn a quick buck, I don’t want any of it,”
says Videlock), and employees have pon-
dered whether to dump their shares. In
the end, a number of our sources have
come to the same conclusion: Too many
people are passionate about Reddit for
it not to hold significant value. “The
best businesses to invest in are the
ones everyone seems to hate, but they
keep using,” says Noor Al, a mod for the
stock tips forum r/wallstreetbets—the
subreddit of self-described “degen-
erates” that famously brought Wall
Street titans to their knees by driving
up the share price of retailer
GameStop in 2021. He adds
that he plans to scoop up as
many IPO shares as he can.
 Photographs by Helynn Ospina and Adam Gibson

They go to Antarctica with dreams of studying the unknown.

What they discover there is the stuff of nightmares. by David Kushner
with additional reporting by Meghan Herbst
C O N T E N T W A R N I N G : This article includes scenes of alleged physical and sexual harassment and assault.
T H E T RO U B L E I N A N TA RC T I C A
started in Boston. It was August 1999,
and Stanford geologist Jane Willenbring
was then a 22-year-old self-described
“country bumpkin.” She had just arrived
to start her master’s in earth science at
Boston University. As an undergrad with
an oboe scholarship at North Dakota
State University, she’d studied beetle
fossils found in Antarctica and learned
how, millions of years ago, the now fro-
zen continent once pooled with fresh-
water lakes. “That’s not so different
from the conditions we might expect
in the future,” she says. She wanted to
explore this critical science. “It seemed
really important for future global cli-
mate change,” she says.
Of all the geologists, few were more
renowned than the one Willenbring had
gone to Boston to study under: 37-year-
old David Marchant. Marchant, a scruffy
professor at BU, was a rock star of rock
study. He was part of a research group
that rewrote Antarctic history by dis-
covering evidence of volcanic ash, which
showed that Antarctica had been sta-
ble for millions of years and was not as
prone to cycles of warming and cooling
as many thought. To honor his achieve-
ments, the US Board on Geographic
Names approved the naming of a gla-
cier southwest of McMurdo Station,
the main research base on Antarctica,
after him.
Willenbring says Marchant had
insisted on picking her up at the air-
port, an offer she thought was nice but
strange. It got stranger when he
started making her feel bad for
his gesture, which she hadn’t
asked for. “I’m missing a Red
Sox game,” she recalls him chid-
ing her. “You really should have
picked a better time to fly.” He
asked whether she had a boy-
friend, how often she saw him,
and whether she knew anyone
in Boston or would be alone. In
a few months, she’d be heading
with him on a research trip to
Antarctica and the region with
his big chunk of namesake ice.
“It was almost like a pickup line,”
she recalls, “ ‘I have a glacier.’ ”
But it’s what happened in the
glacier’s shadow that led Willen-
bring to take on Marchant and
become the first to expose the
horrors faced by women at the
bottom of the world. A report
released in August 2022 by the
National Science Foundation,
the main agency funding Ant-
arctic research, found that 59
percent of women at McMurdo
and other field stations run
by the US Antarctic Program
said they’d experienced sexual
harassment or assault. A central
employer, Leidos, holds a $2.3
billion government contract to
manage the workplaces on the
ice. One woman alleged that a
supervisor had slammed her
head into a metal cabinet and
then attacked her sexually. Britt
Barquist, a former fuel foreman
at McMurdo, says she had been forced
to work alongside a supervisor who had
sexually harassed her. “What was really
traumatic was telling people, ‘I’m afraid
of this person,’” she says, “and nobody
cared.”
With a congressional investigation
underway, Willenbring is sharing her
full story for the first time with the hope
of inspiring others to come forward and
claim the justice they’ve long deserved.
But even now, decades after she first got
into Marchant’s car, she can’t help ask-
ing herself how, and why, the nightmare
happened in the first place. “You never
hear a women-in-science panel where
people are talking about stuff like I do,”
she says, “because they’re smart enough
to fucking run.”
 As a newbie “on the ice,” as locals put
it, Willenbring had to complete survival
camp before heading into the field. She
excelled at making a fire in the snow,
tying the correct knots to secure a tent,
and building an igloo, in which she had
to sleep for a night. There was one other
newbie in the Boston group who was
I N N O V E M B E R 1 9 9 9, W I L L E N - even less experienced than Willen-
bring flew to New Zealand and boarded bring, and certainly less qualified: Jef-
the large militaristic plane arranged frey Marchant. To her surprise, David
by the NSF for the eight-hour flight to Marchant had brought along his older
McMurdo Station. She was heading brother. Jeffrey wasn’t a scientist; he was
there with Marchant and another grad a research assistant professor at Tufts
student, Adam Lewis, for her first trip University’s medical school who, Willen-
to the continent. They’d be collecting bring recalls, had tagged along for fun. It
samples from a plateau where glaciers seemed outrageous to her that Marchant
had drained through the ice. This would would disrupt their work like this. But
help them understand when glaciers he just laughed when she questioned
had eroded and would give insight into him, and he told her to call his brother
future climate change scenarios. “I really by his field nickname: Ken Tonka. The
wanted to go to Antarctica, hike around, name had come up when the group was
dig holes, collect samples. That kind of playing the “porn star name” game of
thing,” she says. pairing a team member’s middle name
It didn’t take long for Willenbring to with their favorite childhood toy. But
notice that there might be unexpected she recalls Marchant telling her that
challenges ahead. The plane didn’t have “Tonka” was also “because his penis
a private toilet. Instead, at the back, was like a Tonka truck.”
there was essentially a bucket partially
concealed by a curtain that didn’t reach
the floor. “This is fine for guys, because
they just stand and pee into the bucket,”
Willenbring says. “But I would have to
hold on to my pants, and you could see T H E FOU R O F T H E M —THE
my butt.” On other occasions women Marchant brothers, Willenbring, and
resorted to using “pee funnels,” she Adam Lewis—took a helicopter more
later learned, but no one had ordered than 70 miles to the desolate Dry Val-
one for her. Marchant told her he chose leys region, where they’d be spending
not to order one, she recalls, because weeks doing research. Most field sci-
he thought it was “gross having women entists flew back now and then, but
stand up while they pee.” Marchant had told Willenbring that he
After landing on the ice shelf airfield, believed in toughing it out in the bitter
Willenbring felt “totally spellbound,” cold: no showers, no bathrooms, and,
with her boots slipping on the icy sur- as she learned, no privacy. “He views
face and the cold crisp snap of Antarc- himself as the second coming of Ernest
tic air in her lungs. She rode in a giant Shackleton,” Lewis recalls, so much so
bus as she got debriefed, she says, on that Marchant asked to be called by the
the dos and don’ts of life in the delicate nickname Shack.
ecosystem she’d come to study: how to Marchant seemed to have no patience
sort garbage, what to keep in bottles for anyone slowing him down, especially
or bags. McMurdo Station itself wasn’t women. Lewis told Willenbring that on a
much to look at—just a jumble of build- previous expedition, Marchant had bul-
ings and construction vehicles. At that lied a high school teacher, Hillary Tul-
time of year, the research station housed ley, who’d joined them to participate in
around 1,000 people, including scien- their work. On one of the group’s first
tists and crew. Many liked to go to the days there, “he marched up the side of
annual kegger in the helicopter hangar a mountain as fast as he possibly could
or to gather at Gallagher’s, the station’s for no other reason than to make Hillary
watering hole. tired,” Lewis says (and Tulley confirms).
“He would say things to her like, ‘You’re
not gonna make it. You’re slowing us
down, Hillary. I don’t know even know
why the hell you’re here.’” Tulley recalls
that “it was a big clusterfuck from the
jump … It was all just not good.”
When they’d pause out in the field
to talk, “Marchant would always stop
at the place where there was a big rock
so he could stand on it to be the tallest,”
Tulley says. “One day, I stood on the rock
first, and the way he looked at me … I
just thought it was so easy to bait this
guy. To establish dominance.”
Willenbring had her own trouble to
face. Marchant had brought three tents
for the four of them. He said she would
be sharing with his brother. “Why don’t
you stay with your brother?” she asked
Marchant. “Because Jeff likes you,” he
told her, suggestively. (Jeffrey Marchant
declined to comment for this article.)
As they spent their days digging for
volcanic ash and carefully collecting
samples of sediment and rocks found
in glacial ice, Marchant would talk up
his brother to Willenbring. He said
Jeffrey played oboe, just like her, and
asked whether she’d seen his brother’s
penis yet. She had. She would be sleep-
ing in their tent when sometimes she
would hear him wake up, and then see
him standing there, peeing into a bottle
with an erection.
As disgusted and nervous as this
made Willenbring feel, she also felt
afraid to challenge Marchant. Like any
grad student, she needed her adviser’s
approval and support to advance in her
field—to get a thesis approved, receive
a recommendation, get referrals for a
job. “He definitely had the power,” she
says. Willenbring stuck it out.
But as the days passed and the polar
sun beamed over them around the clock,
Willenbring’s research mission became
increasingly dark. On some days, March-
ant made them hike for 13 hours while
collecting samples. During the long jour-
neys over the unforgiving rocks, Willen-
bring feared they’d hit an ice storm, or
go so long without a snack that Lewis,
who was diabetic, would go into insulin
shock. (Lewis says he packed an abun-
dance of snacks to ward off the risk.)
Marchant tried to run them like a boot
camp. “He made us all do push-ups. You 0
know, ‘Gimme 50!’ ” Lewis says of at 5
least one occasion. The few times Lewis 3
mustered the nerve to speak up—warn-
ing Marchant that he might be crossing a
line—he says Marchant laughed him off.
Even if Willenbring had gathered the
courage to call for help, there was only
one way to do it. The group had a radio
that they used to call back to base and
deliver a daily check-in message, alerting
McMurdo personnel that they were safe.
But, Willenbring says, Marchant never
let it out of his control. Every morning,
he’d call back to McMurdo: “Four souls
in camp, and all is well.”
Willenbring’s feelings of isolation
grew. Then, one day, while digging into
the gravelly sediment off on her own,
amid the sandstone and dolerite, she
found a big piece of granite. “It was ser-
endipitous,” she says. “This was some-
thing new.” The presence of granite
suggested an unexpected twist in the
historical record—and in assumptions of
when ice had deposited sediment at that
location. But when she showed Marchant
the dark jagged samples, he dismissed
her as “a dumb fucking whore,” she says.
“I was like, ‘I just can’t win,’” she recalls.
As repulsed and angry as she felt, Wil-
lenbring knew her findings were valu-
able, no matter what Marchant said.
It became clear that belittling her had
become a sport for him, whatever the
circumstance. He would chastise her
for carrying heavy equipment and for
not carrying any at all. Sometimes it
would get to be too much, and she would
break down. “He hated when I’d cry,” she
recalls. “He’d laugh and then get mad at
me for crying. It was just the ultimate
fucking with my head.”
One day, Marchant asked her to look
closely at a sediment sample he held in
a small bent spoon, then blew the crys-
talline shards into her eyes. Another
time, she says, he grabbed her by her
backpack and pushed her down a loose
gravel hill she was struggling to climb.
She resolved that she would fight back if
she needed to. She had already told him
that she was a black belt in tae kwon do.
“I don’t know how to put this in a way
that doesn’t make me sound totally psy-
cho,” she tells me, “but if it had gotten
super bad, I would’ve just beaten him
with my hands or by smashing him in
the face with a shovel.”
Marchant didn’t relent. He pushed
her down and taunted her. She fanta-
sized about punching him in the nose.
Midway through the field season, he
started pelting her with rocks whenever
he caught her urinating—easy for him to
do since there were no bushes or trees.
Willenbring began drinking less water
so she wouldn’t have to go to the bath-
room. She got a bladder infection. It got
so bad that she started urinating blood.
GETTY IMAGES; SARAH CONOLLY
When she told Marchant, he told her to
drink cranberry juice. Throughout it all,
Marchant would radio each day and give
the OK message back to base. “Four souls
in camp,” he would say, “and all is well.”

AFTER THE TEAM RETURNED
to Boston, a faculty member asked Wil-
lenbring to write a tenure recommenda-
tion letter for Marchant. She felt she had
no choice, so she did it. She recalls that
he’d made it clear she was not to speak
of their time on the ice—that if she did,
she’d be branded a liar. In other words,
she believed he would ruin her career.
When he tried to enlist Willenbring
in hazing a younger student and deni-
grating their work, she refused. But the
stress was taking a toll. “I would try to
push it far, far down,” she tells me. “You
try not to think about it, that it’s there.
Otherwise it’ll drive you crazy.” After
more than two years at BU, Willenbring
left with her master’s degree.
Opener image: Jane
Willenbring was the first
to come forward with her
experiences of harassment
in Antarctica.
Left to right: Staff on a
research trip set up camp on
the Shackleton Glacier in the
Transantarctic Mountains.
Meredith Nash in Neko
Harbour, in West Antarctica,
during her voyage with
Homeward Bound.
She moved to Halifax, Nova
Scotia, to work on a PhD in earth
sciences at Dalhousie University.
After finishing, she landed a cov-
eted position as an assistant pro-
fessor in the Department of Earth
and Environmental Science at
the University of Pennsylvania.
It was a joyous moment—the
great payoff after many difficult
years. But Willenbring says the
bad behavior resumed. She says
male colleagues made degrad-
ing remarks—about her cloth-
ing, about her nipples, about her
being too fat to fit behind semi-
nar desks. (She was pregnant.)
One day, when her child was 3,
Willenbring was without child-
care and brought her daughter
along to the lab. She set her up
in an observation room with a
window so the little girl could
watch. Willenbring went into
the adjacent room and waved as
she suited up in a white coat and
goggles. For the first time, her
daughter seemed to understand
that her mom was a real-life sci-
entist. “I want to be a scientist
just like you!” she exclaimed.
Willenbring responded by
bursting into tears. “I was imag-
ining her going through what I
did,” she tells me. When her
daughter asked her why she was cry-
ing, she reassured her, though it felt like
a lie. “Sometimes mommies do happy
tears,” she said, “because it makes me
so happy that you want to be a scientist.”
That night, Willenbring went home
on a mission. She decided it was time to
finally speak out. She opened her laptop
and wrote up a draft of her complaint
against David Marchant. But then she
got scared. She didn’t have tenure. Her
academic career still felt insecure. She
set the draft aside.
A few months later, in 2016, Willen-
bring moved with her daughter across
the country to become a professor at
the Scripps Institution of Oceanogra-
phy at the University of California, San
Diego. It had been nearly two decades
since she escaped her time with March-
ant on the ice, but her experiences left
her both psychologically and physically 0
damaged. (She has fought bladder prob- 5
lems since her infection in the field.) She 5
 also carried an intense sense of shame
for not having spoken out, one way or
another, despite her fear at the time. She
felt sick imagining Marchant harassing
other students with impunity. But now,
in her new job, she finally had tenure.
In October of that year, Willenbring
filed a Title IX complaint about March-
ant. When Boston University officials
assured her that they would look into
the matter, she felt hopeful. “I actually
thought they would be happy to know
about this,” she says, “because what a
horrible liability, having this guy as a
professor.”
David Marchant did not respond to
wired’s request to comment.
Following Willenbring’s complaint,
two other women joined the action:
“Deborah Doe,” who alleged that March-
ant had called her a “cunt” and a “bitch”
and had threatened her PhD funding—
she had been so traumatized that she left
higher education—and Hillary Tulley,
the high school teacher from the earlier
trip with Marchant. “His taunts, degrad-
ing comments about my body, brain, and
general inadequacies, never ended,” as
Tulley put it.
Around the time, the Me Too move-
ment was gaining momentum. The
Harvey Weinstein sexual abuse scan-
dal broke, and the monstrous behavior
in Antarctica went viral. Samantha Bee
joked about it on her show Full Fron-
The reign of male
expeditioners
in the region
and the isolation
of the harsh
environment
made it all the
MORE INSIDIOUS.
tal, saying, “You can’t even go to the
most remote part of the planet without
some dude swinging his cold, shriveled
dick your way.” It felt cathartic for Wil-
lenbring, but it also brought new chal-
lenges—starting with the death threat
she found written on her office door.
In November 2017, the university
concluded its investigation and deter-
mined that Marchant had in fact sexu-
ally harassed Willenbring and that the
case warranted the start of termina-
tion proceedings. Marchant appealed,
and a group of faculty recommended
that he merely be suspended for three
years without pay. After that, he was
free to return. It seemed that despite
Willenbring’s effort, more needed to be
done to finally bring justice, and light, to
the horrors at the bottom of the earth.
Three months later, that’s exactly what
happened.
I N F E B R U A R Y 2018 , T H E
environmental news site Grist published
an account from five women who alleged
sexual harassment, sexual coercion, and
bullying on the inaugural Homeward
Bound, a leadership-development voy-
age to Antarctica for women in science
and technology fields. One claimed to
have woken up next to a naked
crew member with “no memory
of what had happened.”
Founded by Australian leader-
ship expert Fabian Dattner, the
voyage had a tagline: “Mother
Nature needs her daughters.”
Seventy-six women had paid
about $15,000 each for the three-
week trip, which included work-
shops on the boat and scientific
tours in Antarctica, where the
voyagers focused their research.
University of Tasmania sociolo-
gist Meredith Nash boarded the
ship as a researcher studying
leadership programs for women
in science and tech. What she
discovered on the expedition
shocked her.
One night on the ship, Nash, a
native Chicagoan with tattooed
arms and a crest of blond hair on
her close-shaved head, attended
a group party that quickly devolved into
a drunken bash, with the captain wear-
ing a dress and another crew member
being led around on a leash. (Nash says
there’s “a long Antarctic tradition for
men to cross-dress.” A Homeward Bound
representative noted, “On every voyage
at the midway point of the journey we
have a costume party which is a cele-
bratory experience for all the women
to join and participate.”)
Nash, as part of her study, had col-
lected video diaries from women on the
journey. She was going through them
back in Tasmania when she found a video
of a woman crying in the ship’s dining
room because a crew member, she said,
had just followed her back to her room
and tried to hold the door open and enter
without her permission. Nash, horrified,
emailed and then called the woman to
see whether she was OK. “She said she’d
already talked to the faculty about what
happened,” she says, “and that was that.”
The woman in the video was Nicole
Hellessey, a PhD student at the Univer-
sity of Tasmania who had joined the
Homeward Bound program to connect
with other women scientists. Recalling
the incident, Hellessey says that she
alerted members of the voyage’s fac-
ulty while still on board, but no one fol-
lowed up or checked in on her before
or after Nash’s phone call. “I dealt with
that trauma alone,” she says. (Home-
ward Bound says that “if participants
raised any concerns … this information
was shared with the Homeward Bound
leadership team.”)
“This was a voyage for women to go
to Antarctica and break boundaries, and
instead, the few men on board made
this experience feel like a microcosm
of the real world,” Hellessey adds. “I
felt unsafe, and what happened to me
brought me back to reality.”
According to Dattner, two crew mem-
bers lost their jobs following the voyage.
After the trip, many of the women sent
the Homeward Bound organizers a list
of recommendations, which included
developing a code of ethics and closing
the bar by midnight. About a quarter of
the women thought the list didn’t go far
enough, and sent a second letter urging
the program to, among other things, hire
an independent clinical psychologist and
foster an environment free from offen-
sive and intimidating language.
 “A lot of mistakes were made
on the first trip that some of us
fought very, very hard to rem-
edy for future expeditions,” says
Sea Rotmann, who participated
in the Homeward Bound trip.
The program implemented some
of the ideas and dozens of oth-
ers to improve safety. (In 2018,
a New Zealand magazine had
been reporting on the allega-
tions of abuse and harassment
when lawyers representing
Homeward Bound threatened
the publication with the possi-
bility of a lawsuit. Lacking the
financial resources to deal with
litigation, the magazine killed
the story.)
Stunned by what had hap-
pened on the Antarctica expe-
dition, Nash dug further. She
continued interviewing and col-
lected surveys from more than
150 women scientists about the
treatment they faced while con-
ducting remote field work in Ant-
arctica. Sixty-three percent of
them reported being harassed,
and about half said they’d never
spoken up about what had hap-
pened. The harassment ranged
from physical assault to micro-
aggressions: “PhD supervisors
withholding data,” Nash says,
“or preferencing the male mem-
bers of a research team over the
women.”
In 2020, the Australian Ant-
arctic Division commissioned
her to lead a government-funded
review of diversity, equity, and
inclusion at its programs. “When
I first started,” she tells me, “one
of the scariest moments I had
was when one of the people I was
working with said, ‘See that guy there? suggested to the director of the Austra-
He raped that woman over there 10 years lian Antarctic Division, Kim Ellis, that
ago on station.’” he immediately launch a more specific
During her nearly two years work- investigation into sexual misconduct.
ing on that review, Nash learned about That didn’t happen, but Ellis says
widespread incidents of harassment he met with Nash monthly and imple-
and assault. The reign of male expedi- mented many of her other recommen-
tioners in the region and the isolation dations, including hiring three women
of the harsh environment made it all the to roles within the previously all-male
more insidious. “Women have to work in Meredith Nash helped executive team, providing menstrual
the field with their abusers for weeks at reveal widespread sexual health products in all bathrooms at Ant- 0

a time because they simply can’t leave,” misconduct in Australia’s arctic division offices, and improving 5

as she puts it. In the spring of 2021, she Antarctic programs. training on sexual misconduct. 7
 Nash says there’s more to be done.
And it starts with more women speak-
ing out. “The only reason we know about
David Marchant is because Jane Willen-
bring had the courage to talk about her
experiences.”
O N A P R I L 12, 2019, B OSTO N
University finally fired David Marchant
for sexually harassing Willenbring. (The
university said it could not corroborate
her claims of physical and psychological
abuse.) Marchant released a statement,
which the journal Science quoted as vow-
ing that he had “never” sexually harassed
anyone, “not in 1998 or 1999 in Antarc-
tica or at any time since.” But because of
Willenbring, the word was out.
Reeling in the wake of this scandal,
the National Science Foundation com-
missioned an outside study on sexual
assault and sexual harassment at the
Antarctic research facilities. The lengthy
report, made public in August 2022, had
shocking allegations of assault, stalking,
and harassment. Britt Barquist, the for-
mer fuel foreman, was on contract at
McMurdo with a company now called
Amentum. She oversaw a crew of about
20 who did the dangerous work of han-
dling and cleaning diesel and gasoline
fuel tanks. One day in late November
2017, she tells me, she was sitting at a
table alongside a man who held a senior
position at Leidos, the company manag-
ing the Antarctic research stations. He’d
been running a briefing for the staff when
he groped her in plain view.
When she talked about it with her
supervisor, he said he’d witnessed some
of the incident himself. His boss reported
it to the human resources department at
Amentum. “I told HR that I don’t want
to be anywhere around him ever again. I
am scared of this person,” Barquist says,
“And they said, ‘OK.’ ”
is the author of
D AV I D K U S H N E R
Masters of Doom and other books.
M E G H A N H E R B S T is a senior
research editor at wired.
But in 2020, during another stint
working with the McMurdo contractor,
she was told she’d be attending weekly
virtual meetings with that same senior
official. Barquist, who needed the job,
downplayed it to herself. “It was just
disgusting and awful to have to look at
his face and listen to him talk,” she says,
“just to see him treated as a normal guy,
when in my head I’m like, ‘This guy is a
predator. Why is everyone just acting
like he’s some normal person?’”
The next year, toward the end of
nearly three weeks of Covid quaran-
tine with a crew in New Zealand, she’d
scanned the manifest for an upcoming
flight to Antarctica and saw the senior
official’s name on it. When she called
her HR department over a spotty con-
nection to complain, she says she was
met with obstinance by two officials,
one of whom had been introduced as a
victim’s advocate.
“I said I still don’t want to be around
this guy,” she tells me, “but they said,
‘So how do you suggest we deal with
this?’” Barquist gets emotional as she
recalls her conversation with the two
women from her employer. “I thought
they were going to be on my side,” she
says. Instead, they kept pressing her as
to how afraid she felt to be around him.
“I finally was like, ‘Yes,’” she says, “‘I
feel unsafe being alone in a room with
him!’ ” Then the signal dropped, she
says, and she never managed to recon-
nect with them. Barquist flew back to
Antarctica, where she tried to avoid the
senior official. But as her team’s safety
depended on her communicating with
him on a nearly daily basis, she eventu-
ally relented.
Amentum would not answer spe-
cific questions about Barquist’s case
but did say that the company had “zero
tolerance for harassment” and, once
informed of an allegation, “cooperates
with investigation requests and, where
appropriate, conducts its own inter-
nal investigation.” Leidos, meanwhile,
said that it has “zero tolerance for such
behavior.”
Jennifer Sorensen, a food steward
and janitor at McMurdo, felt from the
start that she’d arrived on an island
of men. Women, she sensed, “weren’t
going to necessarily be seen as human.”
Sorensen fell into what locals call an
“ice relationship” with a man while
they were stationed together. But the
day after Christmas, she says, her “ice
boyfriend” raped her. Two years later,
she reported it to a communications
specialist at Leidos as well as the HR
department and president of GHG, the
company that employed the individual.
She was stunned when, following a four-
day investigation, GHG told her that the
attack was not an assault. Instead, a GHG
executive told her, “We have concluded
that a sexual incident took place that
resulted in feelings of humiliation and
extreme discomfort for you.”
The company informed her that it was
sexual harassment, which meant the
most that could be done was for GHG
not to hire her alleged rapist back. “It
just felt like this bizarre game of tele-
phone, where I was truthful,” she says,
“and then they tried to repeat it back to
me like, ‘No, that’s not it at all.’” (GHG
ultimately did not view this incident
as a violation of the NSF’s Polar Code
of Conduct.)
AF TER THE NSF RELEASED
its August 2022 report on sexual harass-
ment and assault at McMurdo and the
other US stations in Antarctica, Leidos
submitted a statement to the US Con-
gress claiming it had received “zero alle-
gations” of sexual assault in the past five
years. “Either they’re straight-up lying,”
Barquist says, “or somehow they put
what happened to me into some weird
bucket of ‘not sexual assault.’” As part
of a 2023 investigation by the Asso-
ciated Press, other women came for-
ward, including a woman who alleged
she was choked and assaulted by a col-
league at McMurdo in November 2022.
(The accused was later found not guilty
in a jury trial.) Women at the station
formed a group, Ice Allies, to support
and educate one another.
In a statement to wired, the NSF
says it has “been grappling with this
challenge for many years” and that the
report prompted the agency “to take
quick and deliberate action” to improve
the safety and culture of Antarctica’s
research bases. According to a spokes-
person, “These are only our initial steps
in Antarctica. We will continue to make
changes as part of an ongoing effort to
address the community’s needs.”
Two months after the NSF report
came out, the Australian government
finally released Nash’s study to the pub-
lic, though it published only seven of her
42 pages and redacted specific individ-
uals’ accounts. Tanya Plibersek, Aus-
tralia’s minister for environment and
water, whose office in part oversees the
country’s Antarctic programs, said she
was “gobsmacked” by what she read.
“There is no place for sexual harassment
or inappropriate behavior in any work-
place,” she said. Kim Ellis, the Antarc-
tic division director, issued a statement
saying he was “deeply concerned” and
“accepted all the recommendations.”
Nash’s report hinted, however, at a
larger problem—lack of trust. Women
felt the program’s leadership lacked
the “deep knowledge” required to
take meaningful steps, and doubted
HR’s ability to properly handle formal
complaints. Three months later, Ellis
announced his resignation.
Nash’s work also prompted Austra-
lia’s Antarctic leaders to commission a
more comprehensive review. Released
in spring 2023, it included a survey of
nearly 250 people and found that “a sig-
nificant number of participants do not
believe” the Antarctic division “is psy-
chologically safe, and there are negative
consequences for speaking up.” The divi-
sion says that it has since expanded its
leadership training programs.
As in the US, however, the problem
down under hasn’t gone away. At the
end of 2023, a leaked survey of women
in the Australian Antarctic program
showed that nearly one-third of sur-
vey respondents reported seeing or
experiencing bullying or harassment in
the previous two months but felt afraid
to speak up about it. “The reason why
women don’t want to talk,” Nash says, “is
because they’ve been gaslit this whole
time, where everyone’s saying, ‘It didn’t
happen. I don’t want to hear it. I don’t
believe you.’”
The NSF has since announced changes
at McMurdo, including banning the sale
of alcohol at Gallagher’s and appointing
a woman as special assistant to the NSF
director focusing on sexual assault and
harassment prevention and response.
Leidos told a congressional commit-
tee that it would require more security
clearances for those wielding
master keys that open mul-
tiple dorm rooms and that it
would install peepholes so peo-
ple inside can see who’s at the
door. The company also prom-
ised to give field teams addi-
tional satellite phones—the
sort of thing Willenbring could
have used when she was stuck
with Marchant. “We take sexual
harassment and assault allega-
tions seriously,” a spokesper-
son for Leidos told wired in
a statement. “We also strictly
enforce our policies prohibiting
retaliation against employees
who raise concerns. At Leidos,
we expect a safe and respectful
environment for everyone.” Until
recently, however, the individ-
ual who Barquist said harassed
her had remained employed by
the company.
Representative Zoe Lofgren, the rank-
ing member of the US House Committee
on Science, Space, and Technology, which
is conducting the congressional investi-
gation into Leidos and the NSF, says that
such slow-walking should never take
place. “Leidos has maintained a willful
ignorance to the situation on the ice.”
Willenbring tells me she believes the
response from the NSF and others has
been sluggish at best. It took six years
from when she filed her complaint with
Boston University for the NSF to come
out with fixes. With two dozen other
countries, including Russia, the UK, and
Brazil, having at least one base on Ant-
arctica, it’s likely only a matter of time
before more stories emerge. Only two
other countries have guidelines in place
for reporting sexual assault and harass-
ment in their programs. Many nations
with a presence in Antarctica don’t have
workplace harassment laws at all. As
Nash puts it, some of those other coun-
tries “are going to have to have their
own moment of reckoning.”
In November 2023, another Home-
ward Bound expedition set off for Ant-
arctica with dozens of women on board.
Fabian Dattner, the organizer, tells me
that more than 60 new rules have been
put in place to ensure a safe and pro-
ductive environment. In addition to a
prohibition against crew mingling with
scientists, the voyage now has a psy-
Many countries with
bases in Antarctica
don’t have workplace
harassment laws.
As Nash puts it, some
of those countries
“are going to have
their own M O M E N T O F
RECKONING.”
chologist and psychiatrist on board and
the ship’s bar closes as early as 9:30 pm.
The harassment of female scientists
in Antarctica has another consequence:
the impediment of the work of women
such as Willenbring who have devoted
their lives and research to better under-
standing climate change. There will be
plenty of work that has to be done. A
report published online in October in
the journal Nature Climate Change doc-
umented an alarming trend. Some of the
waters around Antarctica glaciers are
projected to warm at a pace three times
faster than that of the previous century.
This will cause “widespread increases
in ice-shelf melting, including in regions
crucial for ice-sheet stability,” the study
determined. This could contribute to
devastating sea level rise—between 1
and 3 feet—by 2100.
One glacier is no longer listed on the
map: the one named for David Marchant.
Two years after Willenbring filed her
complaint, the US Board on Geographic
Names voted unanimously to strip
Marchant’s name from his coveted berg.
Willenbring posted the news on Twitter
along with the hashtag #MeTooSTEM.
The 7-mile-long glacier, which drains the
slopes of the Rampart Ridge, is now
called Matataua, after a nearby moun-
tain peak. It rises far beyond McMurdo
Station—a reminder of the men who 0
claimed the ice and the women taking it 5
back before it’s gone. 9
ILLUSTRATIONS BY MAGDA ANTONIUK
 THE STORY BEHIND THE
MOST CONSEQUENTIAL
TECHNOLOGICAL PAPER IN
R E C E N T H I S T O R Y.

BY STEVEN LEVY
 0 6 2 The story of transformers begins
paper, they ultimately decided to “sab­
otage” the convention of ranking con­
tributors. They added an asterisk to each
name and a footnote: “Equal contribu­
tor,” it read. “Listing order is random.”
The writers sent the paper off to a pres­
tigious artificial intelligence conference
just before the deadline—and kicked off
a revolution.
Approaching its seventh anniversary,
the “Attention” paper has attained leg­
endary status. The authors started with
a thriving and improving technology—a
variety of AI called neural networks—
and made it into something else: a digi­
tal system so powerful that its output
can feel like the product of an alien intel­
ligence. Called transformers, this archi­
tecture is the not­so­secret sauce behind
all those mind­blowing AI products,
including ChatGPT and graphic gener­
ators such as Dall­E and Midjourney.
/ Shazeer now jokes that if he knew how
NAME: NOAM SHAZEER famous the paper would become, he
OCCUPATION: “might have worried more about the
COFOUNDER AND CEO OF CHARACTER AI author order.” All eight of the signers
are now microcelebrities. “I have peo­
ple asking me for selfies—because I’m
on a paper!” says Llion Jones, who is
(randomly, of course) name number five.
Eight names are listed as authors “Without transformers I don’t think
on “Attention Is All You Need,” a sci­ we’d be here now,” says Geoffrey Hin­
entific paper written in the spring of ton, who is not one of the authors but
2017. They were all Google researchers, is perhaps the world’s most promi­
though by then one had left the company. nent AI scientist. He’s referring to the
When the most tenured contributor, ground­shifting times we live in, as
Noam Shazeer, saw an early draft, he OpenAI and other companies build sys­
was surprised that his name appeared tems that rival and in some cases sur­
first, suggesting his contribution was pass human output.
paramount. “I wasn’t thinking about All eight authors have since left
it,” he says. Google. Like millions of others, they are
It’s always a delicate balancing act now working in some way with systems
to figure out how to list names—who powered by what they created in 2017. I
gets the coveted lead position, who’s talked to the Transformer Eight to piece
shunted to the rear. Especially in a case together the anatomy of a breakthrough,
like this one, where each participant left a gathering of human minds to create a
a distinct mark in a true group effort. As machine that might well save the last
the researchers hurried to finish their word for itself.
with the fourth of the eight names: Jakob
Uszkoreit.
Uszkoreit is the son of Hans Uszkoreit,
a well­known computational linguist. As
a high school student in the late 1960s,
Hans was imprisoned for 15 months in
his native East Germany for protesting
the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.
After his release, he escaped to West
Germany and studied computers and
linguistics in Berlin. He made his way
to the US and was working in an artifi­
cial intelligence lab at SRI, a research
institute in Menlo Park, California, when
Jakob was born. The family eventually
returned to Germany, where Jakob went
to university. He didn’t intend to focus
on language, but as he was embarking
on graduate studies, he took an intern­
ship at Google in its Mountain View
office, where he landed in the compa­
ny’s translation group. He was in the
family business. He abandoned his PhD
plans and, in 2012, decided to join a team
at Google that was working on a system
that could respond to users’ questions on
the search page itself without diverting
them to other websites. Apple had just
announced Siri, a virtual assistant that
promised to deliver one­shot answers
in casual conversation, and the Google
brass smelled a huge competitive threat:
Siri could eat up their search traffic. They
started paying a lot more attention to
Uszkoreit’s new group.
“It was a false panic,” Uszkoreit says.
Siri never really threatened Google. But
he welcomed the chance to dive into sys­
tems where computers could engage in a
kind of dialog with us. At the time, recur­
rent neural networks—once an academic
backwater—had suddenly started out­
performing other methods of AI engi­
neering. The networks consist of many
layers, and information is passed and
repassed through those layers to iden­
tify the best responses. Neural nets were
racking up huge wins in fields such as
image recognition, and an AI renaissance
was suddenly underway. Google was
frantically rearranging its workforce
to adopt the techniques. The company
wanted systems that could churn out
humanlike responses—to auto­complete
sentences in emails or create relatively
simple customer service chatbots.
But the field was running into limita­
tions. Recurrent neural networks strug­
 gled to parse longer chunks of text. Take a
passage like Joe is a baseball player, and
after a good breakfast he went to the park
and got two hits. To make sense of “two
hits,” a language model has to remem­
ber the part about baseball. In human
terms, it has to be paying attention. The
accepted fix was something called “long
short­term memory” (LSTM), an innova­
tion that allowed language models to pro­
cess bigger and more complex sequences
of text. But the computer still handled
those sequences strictly sequentially—
word by tedious word—and missed out
on context clues that might appear later
in a passage. “The methods we were
applying were basically Band­Aids,” Usz­
koreit says. “We could not get the right
stuff to really work at scale.”
Around 2014, he began to concoct a
different approach that he referred to
as self­attention. This kind of network
can translate a word by referencing any
other part of a passage. Those other
parts can clarify a word’s intent and help
the system produce a good translation.
“It actually considers everything and
gives you an efficient way of looking at
many inputs at the same time and then
taking something out in a pretty selec­
tive way,” he says. Though AI scientists
are careful not to confuse the metaphor
of neural networks with the way the bio­
logical brain actually works, Uszkoreit
does seem to believe that self­attention
is somewhat similar to the way humans
process language.
Uszkoreit thought a self­attention
model could potentially be faster and
more effective than recurrent neural
nets. The way it handles information
was also perfectly suited to the power­
The document ended with
a cartoony image of six
Transformers I N M O U N T A I N O U S
T E R R A I N , zapping lasers at
one another.
GETTY IMAGES
ful parallel processing chips that were
being produced en masse to support the
machine learning boom. Instead of using
a linear approach (look at every word
in sequence), it takes a more parallel
one (look at a bunch of them together).
If done properly, Uszkoreit suspected,
you could use self­attention exclusively
to get better results.
Not everyone thought this idea was
going to rock the world, including Usz­
koreit’s father, who had scooped up two
Google Faculty research awards while
his son was working for the company.
“People raised their eyebrows, because
it dumped out all the existing neural
architectures,” Jakob Uszkoreit says.
Say goodbye to recurrent neural nets?
Heresy! “From dinner­table conversa­
tions I had with my dad, we weren’t nec­
essarily seeing eye to eye.”
Uszkoreit persuaded a few col­
leagues to conduct experiments on
self­attention. Their work showed prom­
ise, and in 2016 they published a paper
about it. Uszkoreit wanted to push their
research further—the team’s experi­
ments used only tiny bits of text—but
none of his collaborators were inter­
ested. Instead, like gamblers who leave
the casino with modest winnings, they
went off to apply the lessons they had
learned. “The thing worked,” he says.
“The folks on that paper got excited
about reaping the rewards and deploy­
ing it in a variety of different places at
Google, including search and, eventually,
ads. It was an amazing success in many
ways, but I didn’t want to leave it there.”
Uszkoreit felt that self­attention could
take on much bigger tasks.
There’s another way to do this,
/
NAME: JAKOB USZKOREIT
OCCUPATION:
COFOUNDER AND CEO OF INCEPTIVE
he’d argue to anyone who would listen,
and some who wouldn’t, outlining his
vision on whiteboards in Building 1945,
named after its address on Charleston
Road on the northern edge of the Goo­
gle campus.
One day in 2016, Uszkoreit was having
lunch in a Google café with a scientist
named Illia Polosukhin. Born in Ukraine,
Polosukhin had been at Google for nearly
three years. He was assigned to the team
providing answers to direct questions
posed in the search field. It wasn’t going
all that well. “To answer something on
Google.com, you need something that’s
very cheap and high­performing,” Polo­
sukhin says. “Because you have milli­
seconds” to respond. When Polosukhin
aired his complaints, Uszkoreit had no
problem coming up with a remedy. “He
suggested, why not use self­attention?”
says Polosukhin.
Polosukhin sometimes collaborated
with a colleague named Ashish Vaswani.
Born in India and raised mostly in the
Middle East, he had gone to the Univer­
sity of Southern California to earn his
doctorate in the school’s elite machine
translation group. Afterward, he moved
to Mountain View to join Google—spe­
cifically a newish organization called
Google Brain. He describes Brain as “a
radical group” that believed “neural net­
works were going to advance human
understanding.” But he was still look­ Using what team members
ing for a big project to work on. His team
worked in Building 1965 next door to
Polosukhin’s language team in 1945, and
would later describe W I T H W O R D S
he heard about the self­attention idea.
Could that be the project? He agreed to L I K E “magic” and “alchemy”
work on it.
Together, the three researchers drew
up a design document called “Transform­
and “bells and whistles,” he
ers: Iterative Self­Attention and Process­
ing for Various Tasks.” They picked the had taken the system to a
name “transformers” from “day zero,”
Uszkoreit says. The idea was that this
mechanism would transform the infor­
new level.
mation it took in, allowing the system eventually landed in Google Research, learning group—Geoffrey Hinton’s lab.
to extract as much understanding as a where his manager was Polosukhin. One He began contacting people at Google
human might—or at least give the illu­ day, Jones heard about the concept of who had written interesting papers,
sion of that. Plus Uszkoreit had fond self­attention from a fellow worker with ideas for extending their work.
childhood memories of playing with named Mat Kelcey, and he later joined up Kaiser took the bait and invited him
the Hasbro action figures. “I had two with Team Transformers. (Later, Jones to intern. It wasn’t until months later
little Transformer toys as a very young ran into Kelcey and briefed him on the that Gomez learned those internships
kid,” he says. The document ended with transformer project. Kelcey wasn’t buy­ were meant for doctoral students, not
a cartoony image of six Transformers in ing it. “I told him, ‘I’m not sure that’s undergrads like him.
mountainous terrain, zapping lasers at going to work,’ which is basically the Kaiser and Gomez quickly understood
one another. biggest incorrect prediction of my life,” that self­attention looked like a prom­
There was also some swagger in the Kelcey says now.) ising, and more radical, solution to the
sentence that began the paper: “We are The transformer work drew in other problem they were addressing. “We had
awesome.” Google Brain researchers who were a deliberate conversation about whether
In early 2017, Polosukhin left Google also trying to improve large language we wanted to merge the two projects,”
to start his own company. By then new models. This third wave included says Gomez. The answer was yes.
collaborators were coming onboard. An Łukasz Kaiser, a Polish­born theoreti­ The transformer crew set about build­
Indian engineer named Niki Parmar had cal computer scientist, and his intern, ing a self­attention model to translate
been working for an American software Aidan Gomez. Gomez had grown up in text from one language to another.
company in India when she moved to a small farming village in Ontario, Can­ They measured its performance using
the US. She earned a master’s degree ada, where his family would tap maple a benchmark called BLEU, which com­
from USC in 2015 and was recruited by trees every spring for syrup. As a junior pares a machine’s output to the work
all the Big Tech companies. She chose at the University of Toronto, he “fell in of a human translator. From the start,
Google. When she started, she joined love” with AI and joined the machine their new model did well. “We had gone
up with Uszkoreit and worked
on model variants to improve
Google search.
Another new member was
Llion Jones. Born and raised
in Wales, he loved computers
“because it was not normal.”
At the University of Birming­
ham he took an AI course and
got curious about neural net­
works, which were presented
as a historical curiosity. He
got his master’s in July 2009
and, unable to find a job during
the recession, lived on the dole
for months. He found a job
at a local company and then /

applied to Google as a “hail NAME: ILLIA POLOSUKHIN

Mary.” He got the gig and OCCUPATION:

COFOUNDER OF NEAR

/
NAME: ASHISH VASWANI
OCCUPATION:
COFOUNDER AND CEO OF
ESSENTIAL AI
from no proof of concept to having some-
thing that was at least on par with the
best alternative approaches to LSTMs
by that time,” Uszkoreit says. But com-
pared to long short-term memory, “it
wasn’t better.”
They had reached a plateau—until
one day in 2017, when Noam Shazeer
heard about their project, by accident.
Shazeer was a veteran Googler—he’d
joined the company in 2000—and an
in-house legend, starting with his work
on the company’s early ad system. Sha-
zeer had been working on deep learning
for five years and recently had become
interested in large language models.
But these models were nowhere close to
producing the fluid conversations that
he believed were possible.
As Shazeer recalls it, he was walking
down a corridor in Building 1965 and
passing Kaiser’s workspace. He found
himself listening to a spirited conver-
sation. “I remember Ashish was talking
about the idea of using self-attention,
and Niki was very excited about it. I’m
like, wow, that sounds like a great idea.
This looks like a fun, smart group of peo-
ple doing something promising.” Sha-
zeer found the existing recurrent neural
networks “irritating” and thought: “Let’s
go replace them!”
Shazeer’s joining the group was criti-
cal. “These theoretical or intuitive mech-
anisms, like self-attention, always require
very careful implementation, often by a
small number of experienced ‘magicians,’
to even show any signs of life,” says Usz-
koreit. Shazeer began to work his sorcery
right away. He decided to write his own
version of the transformer team’s code.
around in his mountain expedition truck.
The last two weeks before the deadline
were frantic. Though officially some of
the team still had desks in Building 1945,
they mostly worked in 1965 because it
had a better espresso machine in the
micro-kitchen. “People weren’t sleep-
ing,” says Gomez, who, as the intern,
lived in a constant debugging frenzy
and also produced the visualizations
and diagrams for the paper. It’s common
in such projects to do ablations—taking
things out to see whether what remains
is enough to get the job done.
“There was every possible combina-
tion of tricks and modules—which one
helps, which doesn’t help. Let’s rip it
“I took the basic idea and made
the thing up myself,” he says.
Occasionally he asked Kaiser
questions, but mostly, he says,
he “just acted on it for a while
and came back and said, ‘Look,
it works.’” Using what team
members would later describe
with words like “magic” and
“alchemy” and “bells and
whistles,” he had taken the
system to a new level.
“That kicked off a sprint,”
says Gomez. They were moti-
vated, and they also wanted
to hit an upcoming dead-
/
line—May 19, the filing date
NAME: NIKI PARMAR
for papers to be presented
OCCUPATION:
at the biggest AI event of
COFOUNDER OF ESSENTIAL AI
the year, the Neural Infor-
mation Processing Systems
conference in December. As
what passes for winter in Sil-
icon Valley shifted to spring, out. Let’s replace it with this,” Gomez
the pace of the experiments picked up. says. “Why is the model behaving in this
They tested two models of transformers: counterintuitive way? Oh, it’s because
one that was produced with 12 hours of we didn’t remember to do the masking
training and a more powerful version properly. Does it work yet? OK, move on
called Big that was trained over three to the next. All of these components of
and a half days. They set them to work what we now call the transformer were
on English-to-German translation. the output of this extremely high-paced,
The basic model outperformed all iterative trial and error.” The ablations,
competitors—and Big earned a BLEU aided by Shazeer’s implementations,
score that decisively shattered previous produced “something minimalistic,”
records while also being more compu- Jones says. “Noam is a wizard.”
tationally efficient. “We had done it in Vaswani recalls crashing on an office
less time than anyone out there,” Parmar couch one night while the team was
says. “And that was only the beginning, writing the paper. As he stared at the
because the number kept improving.” curtains that separated the couch from
When Uszkoreit heard this, he broke out the rest of the room, he was struck by
an old bottle of champagne he had lying the pattern on the fabric, which looked

/ ulous. Now the conventional wisdom is
NAME: LLION JONES
OCCUPATION:
COFOUNDER OF SAKANA AI
to him like synapses and neurons. Gomez
was there, and Vaswani told him that
what they were working on would tran­
scend machine translation. “Ultimately,
like with the human brain, you need to
unite all these modalities—speech,
audio, vision—under a single architec­
ture,” he says. “I had a strong hunch we
were onto something more general.”
In the higher echelons of Google, how­
ever, the work was seen as just another
interesting AI project. I asked several
of the transformers folks whether their
bosses ever summoned them for updates
on the project. Not so much. But “we
understood that this was potentially
quite a big deal,” says Uszkoreit. “And
it caused us to actually obsess over one
of the sentences in the paper toward the
end, where we comment on future work.”
That sentence anticipated what might
come next—the application of trans­
former models to basically all forms
of human expression. “We are excited
about the future of attention­based
models,” they wrote. “We plan to extend
the transformer to problems involving
input and output modalities other than
text” and to investigate “images, audio
and video.”
A couple of nights before the deadline,
Uszkoreit realized they needed a title.
Jones noted that the team had landed on
a radical rejection of the accepted best
practices, most notably LSTMs, for one
technique: attention. The Beatles, Jones
recalled, had named a song “All You Need
Is Love.” Why not call the paper “Atten­
tion Is All You Need”?
The Beatles?
“I’m British,” says Jones. “It literally
0 6 6
took five seconds of thought. I didn’t think
they would use it.”
They continued collecting results from
their experiments right up until the dead­
line. “The English­French numbers came,
like, five minutes before we submitted the
paper,” says Parmar. “I was sitting in the
micro­kitchen in 1965, getting that last
number in.” With barely two minutes to
spare, they sent off the paper.
Google, as almost all tech companies
do, quickly filed provisional patents on
the work. The reason was not to block
others from using the ideas but to build
up its patent portfolio for defensive pur­
poses. (The company has a philosophy of
“if technology advances, Google will reap
the benefits.”)
When the transformer crew heard back
from the conference peer reviewers, the
response was a mix. “One was positive,
one was extremely positive, and one was,
‘This is OK,’” says Parmar. The paper was
accepted for one of the evening poster
sessions.
By December, the paper was gener­
ating a buzz. Their four­hour session
on December 6 was jammed with scien­
tists wanting to know more. The authors
talked until they were hoarse. By 10:30
pm, when the session closed, there was
still a crowd. “Security had to tell us
to leave,” says Uszkoreit. Perhaps the
most satisfying moment for him was
when computer scientist Sepp Hoch­
reiter came up and praised the work—
quite a compliment, considering that
Hochreiter was the coinventor of long
short­term memory, which transform­
ers had just booted as the go­to hammer
in the AI toolkit.
Transformers did not instantly
take over the world, or even Google. Kai­
ser recalls that around the time of the
paper’s publication, Shazeer proposed
to Google executives that the company
abandon the entire search index and
train a huge network with transform­
ers—basically to transform how Google
organizes information. At that point,
even Kaiser considered the idea ridic­
that it’s a matter of time.
A startup called OpenAI was much
faster to pounce. Soon after the
paper was published, OpenAI’s chief
researcher, Ilya Sutskever—who had
known the transformer team during his
time at Google—suggested that one of
its scientists, Alex Radford, work on the
idea. The results were the first GPT prod­
ucts. As OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told
me last year, “When the transformer
paper came out, I don’t think anyone at
Google realized what it meant.”
The picture internally is more com­
plicated. “It was pretty evident to us
that transformers could do really mag­
ical things,” says Uszkoreit. “Now, you
may ask the question, why wasn’t there
ChatGPT by Google back in 2018? Realis­
tically, we could have had GPT­3 or even
3.5 probably in 2019, maybe 2020. The
big question isn’t, did they see it? The
question is, why didn’t we do anything
with the fact that we had seen it? The
answer is tricky.”
Many tech critics point to Google’s
transition from an innovation­cen­
tered playground to a bottom­line­fo­
cused bureaucracy. As Gomez told
the Financial Times, “They weren’t
modernizing. They weren’t adopting
this tech.” But that would have taken
a lot of daring for a giant company
whose technology led the industry
and reaped huge profits for decades.
Google did begin to integrate trans­
formers into products in 2018, start­
ing with its translation tool. Also that
year, it introduced a new transformer­
based language model called BERT,
which it started to apply to search the
year after.
But these under­the­hood changes
seem timid compared to OpenAI’s quan­
tum leap and Microsoft’s bold integra­
tion of transformer­based systems into
its product line. When I asked CEO Sun­
 Their four-hour session on
December 6 was jammed
with scientists W A N T I N G T O K N O W
more. The authors talked
until they were hoarse.
dar Pichai last year why his company
wasn’t first to launch a large language
model like ChatGPT, he argued that in
this case Google found it advantageous
to let others lead. “It’s not fully clear to
me that it might have worked out as well.
The fact is, we can do more after people
had seen how it works,” he said.
There is the undeniable truth that all
eight authors of the paper have left Goo-
gle. Polosukhin’s company, Near, built a
blockchain whose tokens have a market
capitalization around $4 billion. Par-
mar and Vaswani paired up as business
partners in 2021 to start Adept (esti-
mated valuation of $1 billion) and are
now on their second company, called
Essential AI ($8 million in funding). Llion
Jones’ Tokyo-based Sakana AI is val-
ued at $200 million. Shazeer, who left
in October 2021, cofounded Character
AI (estimated valuation of $5 billion).
/ STE V E N L E V Y
NAME: LUKASZ KAISER
OCCUPATION:
RESEARCHER AT OPENAI
/
NAME: AIDAN GOMEZ
OCCUPATION:
COFOUNDER AND CEO OF COHERE
Aidan Gomez, the intern in the
group, cofounded Cohere in Toronto in
2019 (estimated valuation of $2.2 bil-
lion). Jakob Uszkoreit’s biotech company,
Inceptive, is valued at $300 million. All
those companies (except Near) are based
on transformer technology.
Kaiser is the only one who hasn’t
founded a company. He joined OpenAI
and is one of the inventors of a new tech-
nology called Q*, which Altman said last
year will “push the veil of ignorance back
and the frontier of discovery forward.”
(When I attempted to quiz Kaiser on this
in our interview, the OpenAI PR person
almost leaped across the table to silence
him.)
Does Google miss these escapees? Of
course, in addition to others who have
migrated from the company to new AI
startups. (Pichai reminded me, when I
asked him about the transformer depar-
is editor at large
at wired.
tures, that industry darling OpenAI also
has seen defections: “The AI area is very,
very dynamic,” he said.) But Google can
boast that it created an environment
that supported the pursuit of unconven-
tional ideas. “In a lot of ways Google has
been way ahead—they invested in the
right minds and created the environment
where we could explore and push the
envelope,” Parmar says. “It’s not crazy
that it took time to adopt it. Google had
so much more at stake.”
Without that environment: no trans-
former. Not only were the authors all
Google employees, they also worked out
of the same offices. Hallway encounters
and overheard lunch conversations led
to big moments. The group is also cul-
turally diverse. Six of the eight authors
were born outside the United States; the
other two are children of two green-card-
carrying Germans who were temporar-
ily in California and a first-generation
American whose family had fled perse-
cution, respectively.
Uszkoreit, speaking from his office in
Berlin, says that innovation is all about
the right conditions. “It’s getting people
who are super excited about something
who are at the right point in their life,”
he says. “If you have that and have fun
while you do it, and you’re working on
the right problems—and you’re lucky—
the magic happens.”
Something magical also happened
between Uszkoreit and his famous father.
After all those dinner table debates, Hans
Uszkoreit, his son reports, has now
cofounded a company that is building
large language models. Using transform-
ers, of course.
 RUSSIAN, GO HOME

WHEN MY COUNTRY WENT TO WAR, I FACED A CHOICE:

Flee to a world where the truth might

kill me—or seek peace in censored oblivion.

by
VADIM SMYSLOV
 Translated by
ISABEL STOKHOLM
ROMANOVA

Photographs by
VLADIMIR DOLOTOV

Artwork by
MICHELLE THOMPSON
C O N T E N T W A R N I N G : This article contains a scene including a graphic sexual assault.
ONE
My friend sets aside his cocktail, its foamy
top sprinkled with cinnamon in the shape of a
hammer and sickle, to process his disbelief at
what I’ve just told him. “ Y O U W A N T T O R E T U R N T O R U S S I A? ”
he asks.
I met Enrico when I arrived in Stockholm eight months ago.
He understands my situation as well as anyone. He knows
that I fled Moscow three days after Russia invaded Ukraine;
that my name, along with the names of other journalists who
left, has fallen into the hands of pro-Kremlin activists who
have compiled a public list of “traitors to the motherland”;
that some of the publications where I’ve worked have been
labeled “undesirable organizations”; that a summons from
the military enlistment office is waiting for me at home; that
since Vladimir Putin expanded the law banning “gay propa-
ganda,” I could be fined up to $5,000 merely for going on a
date. In short, Enrico knows what may await if I return: fear,
violence, harm.
He wants me to explain why I would go back, but I can’t think
of an answer he’d understand or accept. Plus, I’m distracted by
the TV screens in the bar. They’re playing a video on loop—a
crowd in January 1990 waiting to get into the first McDonald’s
to open in Russia. The people are in fluffy beaver fur hats, and
their voices speak a language that, for the past year, I’ve heard
only inside my head. “Why am I here?” a woman in the video
says in Russian. “Because we are all hungry, you could say.”
As the doors to McDonald’s open and the line starts to move,
I no longer hear everything Enrico is saying (“You could live
with me rent-free …” “You could go to Albania. It’s cheaper
than in Scandinavia ...” “We could get married so you can live
and work here legally …”).
Part of me had planned this meeting in hopes that Enrico
would persuade me to change my mind—and he did try. But
0 7 0
I’ve already bought the nonrefundable plane tickets, which
are saved on my phone, ready to go.
A week later, I spend a night erasing the past year from my
life—a year of running through Europe as if through a maze.
I clear my chats in Telegram and unsubscribe from channels
that cover the war. I wipe my browser history, delete my
VPN apps, remove the rainbow strap on my watch, and tear
the Ukrainian flag sticker from my jacket. The next day—
March 29, 2023—I fly to Tallinn, Estonia, and ride a half-
empty bus through a deep forest to the Russian border. The
checkpoint sits at a bridge over the Narva River, between two OPENING SPREAD COURTESY OF VLADIMIR DOLOTOV (PROTEST IMAGE) AND DARIS GRYAZNOVA (PORTRAIT)
late-medieval castles. German shepherds keep watch, and an
armed soldier patrols the river by boat.
“What were you doing in the European Union?” the Rus-
sian guard asks.
“I was on vacation,” I say.
“You were on vacation for more than a year?” she asks.
I reply that I have been very tired. She stamps my passport
and the bus moves on.
What I didn’t tell the guard, and what I couldn’t tell Enrico,
is that I’m tired of hiding from my country—and that I want to
trade one form of hiding for another. I have conducted my adult
life as if censorship and propaganda were my natural enemies,
but now some broken part of me is homesick for that world.
I want to be deceived, to forget that there is a war going on.
“Start from the beginning,” my mother would say when
I couldn’t figure out a homework problem. “Just start all
over again.”
 TWO
I WOKE UP ON FEBRUARY 24, 2022, TO A MESSAGE
from a friend that read: “The war has begun.” At the time, I
was an editor at GQ Russia, gathering material for our next
issue on Russian expats who had moved back home during
the pandemic. I was also editing a YouTube series called
Queerography. For a blissful moment, I took my friend’s text
for a joke. Then I saw videos from Ukrainian towns under bom-
bardment. Russian forces had encircled most of the country.
My boyfriend was still asleep. I wished I could be in his place.
A few months earlier, American intelligence had informed
Ukraine and other countries in Europe of a possible offensive.
But Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, had responded:
“This is all propaganda, fake news and fiction.” While I didn’t
necessarily believe the truth of Lavrov’s words, I doubted the
regime could afford to tell a lie so big. Vladimir Putin’s approval
rating was near its lowest point since he gained power. On
the eve of the attack on Ukraine, only 3 percent of my fellow
citizens thought the war was “inevitable.”
After the invasion, I spent three days in silence. I couldn’t
sleep, and I had no appetite. My hands trembled so badly that I
couldn’t hold a glass of water still. When I visited friends, we’d
sit in different corners of the room scrolling through the news,
occasionally breaking the silence with “This is fucked up.”
In Moscow, armed police patrolled the streets to deter pro-
testers. Soon, the press reported that a man was arrested in
a shopping mall for an “unsanctioned rally” because he was
wearing blue and yellow sneakers, the colors of the Ukrainian
flag. News media websites were blocked in accordance with
the new law on “fake news” about Ukraine. People stood in
line to empty the ATMs. “War” and “peace”—two words that
form the title of Russia’s most celebrated novel—were now
forbidden to be pronounced in public. Instagram was filled
with black squares, uncaptioned, seemingly the only form of
protest that remained possible. The price of a plane ticket out
of Russia soared from $100 to $3,000, in a country where the
minimum wage was about $170 a month.
If I waited another day, it seemed, the Iron Curtain would
descend and I would become a hostage of my own country.
So on the morning of March 1, my boyfriend and I locked the
door to our Moscow apartment for the last time and made for
the airport. In my backpack were warm clothes, $500 in cash,
and a computer. We were leaving for nowhere, not knowing
which country we would wake up in the next day.
VA D I M S M Y S L O V
is a writer based in Paris.
THREE
AT THE INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT IN YEREVAN,
Armenia, flights arrived every hour from Russia and the United
Arab Emirates, another route along which people fled. Once
we were there, we boarded a minivan to Georgia, the only
country in the South Caucasus with which Russia no longer
maintained diplomatic ties. The van was packed with fami-
lies and their pets. From one of the back seats, a girl asked
her mother: “Mama, are we far away from the war now?” A
night road through mountain passes and volcanic lakes took
us to the border. I asked a guard there to share a mobile hot
spot with me so I could get online and retrieve coronavirus
test results in my email. “Of course,” he replied, “though you
don’t deserve it.”
In Tbilisi, the alleys were lit up at night with blue and yel-
low. On the city’s main hotel hung a poster that read “Russian
warship, go fuck yourself.” Fresh graffiti on walls around the
city read: “Putin is a war criminal and murderer.”
At an acquaintance’s apartment, we shared a room with
two other men who had fled. “The most important thing is
GETTY IMAGES
that we’re safe,” we reassured each other if one of us began
to cry. “I’m not a criminal,” said one of the guys. “Why should
I have to run from my own country?” None of us
had an answer.
In Russia I was now labeled a “traitor and fugi-
tive.” The Committee for the Protection of National
Interests, an organization associated with Putin’s
United Russia party, had stolen a database con-
taining the names of journalists who had left the
country and distributed it on Telegram. Liberal
journalists in Moscow had begun to find the words
“Here lives a traitor to the Motherland” scrawled on
their doors. One critic was sent a severed pig’s head.
My fellow fugitives and I started looking for
somewhere more permanent to live, but most rental
ads in Tbilisi stipulated “Russians not accepted.”
We tried to open bank accounts, but when the bank
employees saw our red passports they rejected our
applications. Like so many other companies, Condé
Nast—which publishes GQ and wired, among other
magazines—pulled out of Russia. I was without a
job. The YouTube show I edited closed down soon
after, its founder declared a foreign agent and later
added to the Register of Extremists and Terrorists.
Foreign publications told me that all work with
Russian journalists was temporarily suspended.
Soon signs began to appear outside bars and
restaurants in Tbilisi saying that Russians were
not welcome inside. I decided to sign in to Tinder
to try to meet people in this new city, but most
men I chatted with suggested that I go home and
take Molotov cocktails to Red Square. “the ne ws in russ ia is onpy e ve r good ne ws . e ve n if pe oppe
I placed a Ukrainian flag sticker on my unde r stand that the y’r e B E I N G B R A I N W A S H E D , in the e nd the y give
breast pocket and wandered the city in
silence, ashamed of my language.
My boyfriend and I finally found a
room in a former warehouse with no
windows, the furniture covered in construction dust. The
owner was an artist who was in urgent need of money. To
pay the rent, I sold online all my belongings from the Mos-
cow apartment: a vintage armchair from Czechoslovakia,
an antique Moroccan rug, books dotted with notes, a record
player given to me by the love of my life. Ikea had closed its
stores in Russia, and customers wrote to me: “Your stuff is
like a belated Christmas miracle.”
One day in mid-spring, I left the warehouse for an anti-
war rally that was being held outside the Russian Federation
Interests Section based in the Swiss Embassy. The motley
throngs of people chanted “No to war!” In the crowd I glimpsed
the familiar faces of journalists who had left Russia like me.
“Why did you come here?” a stranger asked me in English.
“To us, to Georgia. Do you really think your cries will change
anything? You shouldn’t be protesting here. You should be
outside the Kremlin.”
I wanted to tell him that I grew up in a country where a
dictator came to power when I was 6 years old, a man who
up. be caus e the y s imppy have nowhe r e to run.”
has his enemies killed. I wanted to say: One time, when I was
an editor at Esquire, my boss denounced an author I worked
with to Putin’s security service, the FSB, and the FSB sent
agents to interrogate me, and when I warned the author, the
FSB came for me again, threatening to arrest me and listing
aloud the names of all my family members. I wanted to tell
the stranger on that street in Tbilisi that I’d had to disappear
for a while, and that when I felt brave enough, I had gone to
protests and donated money to human rights organizations.
That I had fought but, it seemed, had lost. That I just wanted
to live the one life I’ve got a little bit longer. But at the time I
couldn’t find the words.
A month later, the world saw images of mass graves in the
Kyiv suburb of Bucha, dead limbs sticking out of the sand.
Outside our building one morning, on an old brick wall that
was previously empty, was a fresh message, the paint still
wet: “Russians, go home.” My boyfriend went back to Russia
so he could obtain a European visa, promising he would be
back in a month, but he never returned.
0 7 3

FOUR
I SPENT THE REST OF THE YEAR ON THE MOVE:
Cyprus, Estonia, Norway, France, Austria, Hungary, Sweden.
I went where I had friends. The independent Russian media
that I’d always consumed went into exile too, setting up oper-
ations where they could. TV Rain began broadcasting out of
Amsterdam. Meduza moved its Russian branch to Europe.
The newspaper Novaya Gazeta, cofounded by the Nobel
Peace Prize laureate Dmitry Muratov, reopened in Latvia.
Farida Rustamova, a former BBC Russia correspondent, fled
and launched a Substack called Faridaily, where she began
publishing information from Kremlin insiders. Journalists
working for the independent news website Important Sto-
ries, which published names and photos of Russian soldiers
involved in the murder of civilians in a Ukrainian village, went
to Czechia. These, along with 247,000 other websites, were
blocked at the behest of the Prosecutor General’s Office but
remained accessible in Russia through VPNs.
“During the first days of the war, everything was in a fog,”
says Ilya Krasilshchik, the former publisher of Meduza, who
went on to found Help Desk, which combines news media
and a help hotline for those impacted by war. “We felt it our
duty to inform people of what the Russian army was doing
in Ukraine, to document the hell that despair and powerless-
ness leave in their wake. But we also wanted to empathize
with all of the people caught up in this meat grinder.” Taisiya
Bekbulatova, a former special correspondent for Meduza and
the founder of the news outlet Holod, tells me, “In nature you
find parasites that can force their host to act in the parasite’s
own interest, and propaganda, I believe, works in much the
same way. That’s why we felt it was our duty to provide peo-
ple with more information.”
I wanted to continue my work in journalism, but the pub-
lications that had fled Russia weren’t hiring. My application
for a Latvian humanitarian visa as an independent journalist
was rejected, and I didn’t have the means to pay the fees for
US or UK talent visas.
The panic attacks began in the fall, during my first stay
in Stockholm. Red spots, first appearing around my groin,
started to take over my body, creeping up to my throat. I’d get
sick, recover, and then wake up with a sore throat. In Octo-
sofetifes in checkout l ines at the s upe r far ke t
i g l ifp sed M E R C E N A R I E S I N B A L A C L A V A S , ne wly r e tur ne d
f rof or p repa ring to g o to the fr ont.
ber, I learned that my boyfriend had married someone else.
The next day, my mother called to tell me that a summons
from the military enlistment office had arrived.
I was in Cyprus when, at 3 am one February morning, I
woke to the sound of walls cracking and the metal legs of my
bed knocking on marble. Fruit fell to the floor and turned to
mush. The tremors of a magnitude-7.8 earthquake in Gazian-
tep, Turkey, had passed through the Mediterranean Sea and
reached the island. I didn’t scramble out of bed. I hoped
instead that I would be buried under the rubble—a choice
made for me by fate. Later that month, my friends in Stock-
holm insisted that I come stay with them again. I wandered
the streets on a clear winter day, buying up expired food in
the stores. The blue and yellow flags of Sweden shone bright
in the sun, but I saw in them the flag of another country. Back
in the apartment, I slept all the time, and when I did wake I
lulled myself with Valium. One day I felt the urge to swallow
the whole bottle.
Frightened by my own thoughts, I felt how much I wanted
to be back in Russia. In my mother country, all the tools of
propaganda would keep painful truths at bay. “The news in
Russia is only ever good news,” Zhanna Agalakova, a former
anchor on state TV’s main news show, later told me. Agala-
kova quit after the invasion began and returned the awards
she had received to Putin. “Even if people understand that
they’re being brainwashed, in the end they give up, and
propaganda calms them down. Because they simply have
nowhere to run.”
Masha Borzunova, a journalist who fled Russia and runs
her own YouTube channel, walked me through a typical day
of Russian TV: “A person wakes up to a news broadcast that
shows how the Russian military is making gains. Then Anti-
Fake begins, where the presenters dismantle the fake news
of Western propaganda and propagate their own fake news.
Then there’s the talk show Time Will Tell that runs for four,
sometimes five hours, where we’ll see Russian soldiers bravely
advancing. Then comes Male and Female—before the war
it was a program about social issues, and now they discuss
things like how to divide the state compensation for funeral
expenses between the mother of a dead soldier and his father
who left the family several years ago. Then more news and
a few more talk shows, in which a KGB combat psychic pre-
dicts Russia’s future and what will happen on the front. This
is followed by the game show Field of Miracles, with prizes
from the United Russia party or the Wagner Private Military
Company. And then, of course, the eve-
ning news.”
I had gone from being infuriated by
this kind of hypnosis to envying it. The
free flow of information had become for
me what a jug of water is to a severely
dehydrated person: The right amount
can save you, but too much can kill.
0 7 5
 FIVE

“WELCOME TO RUSSIA,” THE BUS DRIVER SAID

as we crossed the border from Estonia. I was nearly home.
There was no particular reason for me to return to Moscow, so I
made for St. Petersburg, where some friends had an apartment
that was empty. I used to look after it before the war, coming
over to unwind and water the flowers. It was a place of peace.
All my friends had left Russia too, so I was the first person
to set foot in the apartment in a year. Black specks covered
every surface—midges that had flown in before the war and
died. I scrubbed the place through the first night, starting to
cry like a child when I came across ordinary objects I remem-
bered from peacetime: shower gel, a blender, a rab-
bit mask made out of cardboard. Over the next few
weeks, I tried to return to the past as I remembered it.
I went to the bakery in the morning. I exercised, read,
wrote. At first glance, the city seemed unchanged.
There were the same boatloads of tourists on the
canals, tour groups on Palace Square, overcrowded
bars in Dumskaya Street. But more and more, St.
Petersburg began to feel to me like the backdrop of
a period film: impeccably executed, the gap between
the past and the present visible only in the details.
One day I heard loud noises outside my window, as
if all the TVs in town had suddenly started emitting
the sound of static. The next day the headline read:
“Terrorist Suspected of Bombing St. Petersburg Café Detained
and Giving Testimony.” The café had hosted an event honoring “You’re kidding.”
the pro-war military blogger Vladlen Tatarsky, and a bust of his “No, bro. But I won’t go back to Ukraine again. It’s fucking
likeness had blown up, killing him and injuring more than 30 terrifying.”
people. But life went on as if nothing had happened. St. Peters- This was a rare admission. The horror of the war’s casual-
burg was plastered with posters for an upcoming concert by ties—zinc coffins, once prosperous cities turned to ruins—
Shaman, a singer who had become popular since the invasion were otherwise hidden behind the celebrations for City Day,
thanks to his song “I’m Russian.” (He would later release “My the opening of the St. Petersburg International Economic
Fight,” a song that seemingly alludes to Hitler’s Mein Kampf.) Forum, and marathons held on downtown streets.
In a candy store I noticed a chocolate truffle with a portrait After a week or so in Russia, feeling very alone, I went on
of Putin on the wrapper. “It’s filled with rum,” the clerk said. Tinder. One evening I invited a man I hadn’t met over to the
Sometimes in checkout lines at the supermarket I glimpsed apartment. I placed two cups of tea on a table, but when the
mercenaries in balaclavas, newly returned from or preparing to man arrived he didn’t touch his. He threw me to the floor,
go to the front. On the escalator down to the subway, where clas- unbuttoned his pants, and inserted his dry penis inside me.
sical music usually floated from the speakers, Rachmaninov’s “I know you want it,” he whispered, covering my mouth. “I
Second Piano Concerto was interrupted by an announcement: can tell from your asshole.”
“Attention! Male citizens, we invite you to sign a contract with I bit him and squirmed, trying to get him off me. After he
the military!” In the train car, I saw a poster that read: “Serving left, my legs kicked frantically and I couldn’t breathe. I knew
Russia is a real job! Sign a military service contract and get a that the police wouldn’t help me. I contacted Tinder to tell
salary starting at 204,000 rubles per month”—about $2,000. them that I had been raped and sent them a screenshot of the
One afternoon, as I stood on the platform next to a train bound man’s profile, but no one answered. That evening I bought a
for a city near the Georgian border, I overheard two men talking: ticket for a night train to Moscow. More than ever, I wanted
“I earned 50,000 in a month.” to see my mother.

0 7 6

SIX
“YOU MUST HAVE FROZEN OVER THERE,” MY MOTHER SAID
as she met me at the door to her apartment outside Moscow.
Putin had said that, without Russian-supplied gas, “Europe-
ans are stocking up on firewood for the winter like it’s the
Middle Ages.” People were supposedly cutting down trees
in parks for fuel and burning antique furniture. Some of the
only warm places in European cities were so-called Russian
houses, government-funded cultural exchanges where peo-
ple could go escape the cold as part of a “From Russia with
Warmth” campaign. When I told my mother that Sweden recy-
cles waste and uses it to heat houses, she grimaced in disgust.
Thirteen months earlier, when I had left the coun-
try, my mother called to ask me why. I told her that
I didn’t want to be sent to fight, that I couldn’t work
in Russia anymore. “You’re panicking for no rea-
son,” she said. “Why would the army need you?
We’ll take Kyiv in a few days.” After the horrors in
Bucha, I had sent her an interview with a Russian
soldier who admitted to killing defenseless people.
“It’s fake,” she responded. “Son, turn on the TV for
once. Don’t you see that all those bodies are mov-
ing?” She was referring to optical distortions in a
certain video, which Russian propagandists used
to their advantage.
After that, we had agreed not to discuss my deci-
sion or views so that we could remain a family. Instead, we
talked about my sister’s upcoming wedding, my aunt’s pro-
motion at a Chinese cosmetics company whose products were
replacing the brands that had quit the country. My uncle, a
mechanic, had finally found a job that would get him out of
debt—repairing military equipment in Russian-occupied ter-
ritories. My mother was planning to take advantage of falling
real estate prices to buy land and build a house. In their real-
ity, the war was not a tragedy but an elevator.
I had arrived on Easter Sunday, and the whole family gath-
ered at my mother’s house for the celebration. My aunt told
me she was worried that I might be forced to change my gen-
der in the West; she had heard that the Canadian government
was paying people $75,000 to undergo gender-affirming sur-
gery and hormonal therapy. My stepfather was interested in
the availability of meat in Swedish stores. Someone asked
whether it was dangerous to speak Russian abroad, whether
Ukrainians had assaulted me. I kept quiet about the fact that
the only person who had attacked me since the invasion was
a Russian man, that the real threat was much closer than my
family thought. The TVs in each of the three rooms of the
apartment were all switched on: They played a church ser-
vice, then a film called Century of the USSR. There were news
broadcasts every two hours and the program Moscow. The
Kremlin. Putin—a kind of reality show about the president.
“Do you know what this is?” my mother said as she placed
a dusty bottle of wine without any labels in the middle of
the festive table. “Your uncle gave it to us,” my stepfather
chimed in. “He brought it from Ukraine.” A trophy from a
bombed-out Ukrainian mansion near Melitopol, stolen by
my uncle while Russian soldiers helped themselves to elec-
tronics and jewelry. “Let’s drink to God,” said my stepfather,
raising his glass. “You can’t raise a glass to God,” my mother
answered. “That’s not done.” “Let’s drink to our big family,”
he said. The clinking of crystal filled the room; to my ears it
sounded like cicadas.
Suddenly I felt sick and locked myself in the bathroom. I
tried to vomit, but my stomach was empty, bringing up only
a retch. “What’s wrong?” my mother asked, standing outside
the door. “Drink some water, rest, sleep.” I tried to lie down.
My skin began to itch. My friend Ilya Kolmanovsky, a science
journalist, once told me: “Did you know that a person can-
not tickle himself? Likewise you cannot deceive a mind that
already knows the truth.” Self-deception is dangerous, he said:
“Just as your immune system can attack your own body, your
mind can also engage in destroying you day by day.”
That evening I left my mother’s apartment for St. Peters-
burg and made an appointment with a psychiatrist. I told the
doctor that I felt like the past had been lost and I couldn’t find
a place for myself in the present. She asked when my prob-
lems began. “During the war,” I answered, careful to keep my
face expressionless. The psychiatrist noted my response in
the medical history. “You’re not the only one,” she said. She
diagnosed me with prolonged depression and severe anxiety
and prescribed tranquilizers, an antipsychotic, and an anti-
depressant. “There are problems with drugs from the West,”
she said. Better to take the Russian-made ones. If the West-
ern pills were like Fiat cars, then these would be the Russian
analog, Zhigulis: “Both will bring you closer to calm, but the
quality of the trip will differ.”
Though the drugs seemed to help, I began to realize over
the next several weeks that no amount of pills could change
this fact: The home I was looking for in Russia existed only
in my memories. In June, I decided to emigrate once again.
At the border in Ivangorod, spikes of barbed wire pierced
the azure sky and smoke from burning fuel oil rose from the
chimneys of the customs building. This time, as I left, I felt
that I had no reason to return. My home was nowhere, but I
would continue searching for one.
With financial help from a friend, I moved to Paris and
signed a contract with a book agent. I made an effort not to
read the news. Still, from time to time, I came across stories
about Putin’s increasing popularity at home, how foreign
nationals could obtain Russian citizenship for fighting in
Ukraine, how the regime passed a law that would allow it to
confiscate property from people who spread “falsehoods
about the Russian army.” One day, when air defense systems
shot down a combat drone less than 8 miles from my moth-
er’s home, she called me and asked: “Why did you leave? Who
else will protect me when the war comes to us? Who if not my
son?” I didn’t have an answer. “I love you, Mama”—that was
the only truth I could tell her.
 9
7
Now he wants to transform the rest of the world—health care, robotics, autonomous driving, the works.

0
Photographs by R Y A N Y O U N G
b y L AUREN GO ODE
THE BIG INTERVIEW_

The Nvidia CEO turned a graphics-card company into a trillion-dollar AI behemoth.


t a l k i n g t o j e n s e n h u a n g should come with a warn-
ing label. The Nvidia CEO is so invested in where AI is headed
that, after nearly 90 minutes of spirited conversation, I came
away convinced the future will be a neural net nirvana. I could
see it all: a robot renaissance, medical godsends, self-driving
cars, chatbots that remember. The buildings on the compa-
ny’s Santa Clara campus weren’t helping. Wherever my eyes
landed I saw triangles within triangles, the shape that helped
make Nvidia its first fortunes. No wonder I got sucked into a
fractal vortex. I had been Jensen-pilled.
Huang is the man of the hour. The year. Maybe even the
decade. Tech companies literally can’t get enough of Nvidia’s
supercomputing GPUs. This is not the Nvidia of old, the sup-
plier of Gen X video game graphics cards that made images
come to life by efficiently rendering zillions of triangles.
This is the Nvidia whose hardware has ushered in a world
where we talk to computers, they talk back to us, and even-
0 8 0
tually, depending on which technologist you talk to, they
overtake us.
For our meeting, Huang, who is now 61, showed up in his
trademark leather jacket and minimalist black sneakers. He
told me on that Monday morning that he hates Monday morn-
ings, because he works all day Sunday and starts the official
work week already tired. Not that you’d know it. Two days
later, I attended a health care investment symposium—so
many biotech nerds, so many blazers—and there onstage
was Huang, energetic as ever.
“This is not my normal crowd. Biologists and scientists,
it’s such an angry crowd,” Huang said into a microphone,
eliciting laughter. “We use words like creation and improve
and accelerate, and you use words like target and inhibit.” He
worked his way up to his pitch: “If you want to do your drug
design, your drug discovery, in silicon, it is very likely that
you’ll have to process an enormous amount of data. If you’re
having a hard time with computation of artificial intelligence,
you know, just send us an email.”
Huang has made a pattern of positioning Nvidia in front
of every big tech trend. In 2012 a small group of researchers
released a groundbreaking image recognition system, called
AlexNet, that used GPUs, instead of CPUs, to crunch its code
and launched a new era of deep learning. Huang promptly
directed the company to chase AI full-steam. When, in 2017,
Google released the novel neural network architecture known
as a transformer—the T in ChatGPT—and ignited the current
AI gold rush, Nvidia was in a perfect position to start selling
its AI-focused GPUs to hungry tech companies.
Nvidia now accounts for more than 70 percent of sales in the
AI chip market and is valued at nearly $2 trillion at the time of
writing. Its revenue for the last quarter of 2023 was $22 bil-
lion—up 265 percent from the year prior. And its stock price
more than tripled in the past year. Huang is either uncannily
good at what he does or ridiculously lucky—or both!—and
everyone wants to know how he does it.
But no one reigns forever. He’s now in the crosshairs of
the US-China tech war and at the mercy of regulators. Some
of Huang’s challengers in the AI chip world are household
names—Google, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft—and have
the deepest pockets in tech. In late December the semicon-
ductor company AMD rolled out a large processor for AI
computing that is meant to compete with Nvidia. Startups
are taking aim too. In last year’s third quarter alone, venture
capitalists funneled more than $800 million into AI chips,
according to the research firm Pitchbook.
So Huang never rests. Not even during interviews, as I
learned when, to my surprise, he started interviewing me,
asking me where I was from and how I ended up living in the
Bay Area.

JENSEN HUANG: You and I are both Stanford grads.
LAUREN GOODE: Yes. Well, I went to the journalism pro-
gram, and you did not go to the journalism program.
I wish I had.
Why is that?
Well, somebody who I really admire, as a leader and a person,
is Shantanu Narayen, the CEO of Adobe. He said he always
wanted to be a journalist because he loved telling stories.
It seems like an important part of building a business, being
able to tell its story effectively.
Yes. Strategy setting is storytelling. Culture building is story-
telling.
You’ve said many times you didn’t sell the idea of Nvidia
based on a pitch deck.
That’s right. It was really about telling the story.
So I want to start with something that another tech exec-
utive told me. He noted that Nvidia is one year older than
Amazon, but in many ways Nvidia has more of a “day one”
approach than Amazon does. How do you maintain that
outlook?
That’s really a good phrase, frankly. I wake up every morn-
ing like it’s day one, and the reason is there’s always some-
thing we’re doing that has never been done before. There’s
also the vulnerable side of it. We very well could fail. Just
now, I was having a meeting where we’re doing something
that is brand-new for our company, and we don’t know how
to do it right.
What is the new thing?
We’re building a new type of data center. We call it an AI fac-
tory. The way data centers are built today,
you have a lot of people sharing one clus-
ter of computers and putting their files in
this one large data center. An AI factory is
much more like a power generator. It’s quite
unique. We’ve been building it over the last
several years, but now we have to turn this
into a product.
What are you going to call it?
We haven’t given it a name yet. But it will
be everywhere. Cloud service providers
will build them, and we’ll build them. Every
biotech company will have it. Every retail
company, every logistics company. Every
THE BIG INTERVIEW_
car company in the future will have a factory that builds the
cars—the actual goods, the atoms—and a factory that builds
the AI for the cars, the electrons. In fact, you see Elon Musk
doing that as we speak. He’s well ahead of most in thinking
about what industrial companies will look like in the future.
You’ve said before that you run a flat organization, with
between 30 to 40 executives who report directly to you,
because you want to be in the information flow. What has
piqued your interest lately, that makes you think, “I may
need to bet Nvidia on this eventually?”
Information doesn’t have to flow from the top to the bottom of
an organization, as it did back in the Neanderthal days when
we didn’t have email and texts and all those things. Informa-
tion can flow a lot more quickly today. So a hierarchical tree,
with information being interpreted from the top down to the
bottom, is unnecessary. A flat network allows us to adapt a
lot more quickly, which we need because our technology is
moving so quickly.
If you look at the way Nvidia’s technology has moved, clas-
sically there was Moore’s law doubling every couple of years.
Well, in the course of the last 10 years, we’ve advanced AI by
about a million times. That’s many, many times Moore’s law. If
you’re living in an exponential world, you don’t want informa-
tion to be propagated from the top down one layer at a time.
But I’m asking you, what’s your Roman Empire? Which is a
meme. What’s today’s version of the transformer paper?
What’s happening right now that you feel is going to change
everything?
There are a couple things. One of them doesn’t really have a
name, but it’s some of the work that we’re doing in founda-
tional robotics. If you could generate text, if you could gen-
erate images, can you also generate motion? The answer is
probably yes. And then if you can generate motion, you can
“HOW DO YOU ORCHESTRATE
THE HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS,
NOW COMING UP TO BILLIONS,
OF LITTLE TINY PROCESSORS
THAT ARE IN OUR GPUS?
THAT’S A VERY HARD
PROBLEM.”
understand intent and generate a generalized version of
articulation. Therefore, humanoid robotics should be right
around the corner.
And I think the work around state-space models, or SSMs, Jensen Huang predicts that robotics is on
that allow you to learn extremely long patterns and sequences
without growing quadratically in computation, probably is
the next transformer.

What does that enable? What’s a real-life example?

You could have a conversation with a computer that lasts a
very long time, and yet the context is never forgotten. You
could even change topics for a while and come back to an ear-
lier one, and that context could be retained. You might be able
to understand the sequence of an extremely long chain, like a
human genome. And just by looking at the genetic code, you
understand its meaning.

How far away are we from that?

In the recent past, from the time that we had AlexNet to super-
human AlexNet, that was only about five years. A robotic foun-
dation model is probably around the corner—I’ll call it next
year sometime. From that point, five years down the road,
you’re going to see some pretty amazing things.

Which industry stands to benefit the most from a broadly

trained model for robot behavior?
Well, heavy industries represent the largest industries in
the world. Moving electrons is not easy, but moving atoms
is extremely hard. Transportation, logistics, moving heavy
things from one place to another, discovering the next drug—
all of that requires an understanding of atoms, molecules,
proteins. Those are the large, incredible industries that AI
hasn’t affected yet.

You mentioned Moore’s law. Is it irrelevant now?

Moore’s law is now much more of a systems problem than a
chip problem. It’s much more about the interconnectivity of
multiple chips. About 10, 15 years ago, we started down the
journey of disaggregating the computer so that you could
take multiple chips and connect them together.

Which is where your acquisition of the Israeli company Mel-

lanox comes in, in 2019. Nvidia said at the time that modern
computing has put enormous demands on data centers and
that Mellanox’s networking technology would make accel-
erated computing more efficient.
Right, exactly. We bought Mellanox so that we could take an
extension of our chip and make an entire data center into a
super chip, which enabled the modern AI supercomputer. That
was really about recognizing that Moore’s law has come to

0 8 2
 THE BIG INTERVIEW_

the cusp of a major breakthrough.

an end and that if we want to continue to scale computing we
have to do it at data center scale. We looked at the way Moore’s
law was formulated, and we said, “Don’t be limited by that.
Moore’s law is not a limiter to computing.” We have to leave
Moore’s law behind so we can think about new ways of scaling.
Mellanox is now recognized as a really smart acquisition
for Nvidia. More recently, you attempted to acquire Arm,
one of the most important chip IP companies in the world,
until you were thwarted by regulators.
That would’ve been wonderful!
I’m not sure the US government agrees, but yes, let’s put a
pin in that. When you think about acquisitions now, what
specific places are you looking at?
The operating system of these large systems is insanely com-
plex. How do you create an operating system in a computing
stack that orchestrates the tens of millions, hundreds of mil-
lions, and now coming up to billions of little tiny processors
that are in our GPUs? That’s a very hard problem. If there are
teams outside our company that do that, we can either part-
ner with them or we could do more than that.
So what I hear you saying is that it’s crucial for Nvidia to
have an operating system and to build it into more of a
platform, really.
We are a platform company.
The more you become a platform, the more problems you
face. People tend to put a lot more onus and responsibil-
ity on a platform for its output. How the self-driving car
behaves, what the margin of error is on the health care
device, whether there’s bias in an AI system. How do you
address that?
We’re not an application company, though. That’s probably the
easiest way to think about it. We will do as much as we have
to, but as little as we can, to serve an industry. So in the case
of health care, drug discovery is not our expertise, computing
is. Building cars is not our expertise, but building computers
for cars that are incredibly good at AI, that’s our expertise. It’s
hard for a company to be good at all of those things, frankly,
but we can be very good at the AI computing part of it.
Last year reports emerged that some of your customers
were waiting several months for your AI GPUs. How are
things looking now?
Well, I don’t think we’re going to catch up on supply this year.
Not this year, and probably not next year.
What’s the current wait time?
0 8 4
I don’t know what the current lead time is. But, you know, this
year is also the beginning of a new generation for us.
Do you mean Blackwell, your rumored new GPU?
That’s right. It’s a new generation of GPUs coming out, and
the performance of Blackwell is off the charts. It’s going to
be incredible.
Does that equate to customers needing fewer GPUs?
That’s the goal. The goal is to reduce the cost of training mod-
els tremendously. Then people can scale up the models they
want to train.
Nvidia invests in a lot of AI startups. Last year it was reported
that you invested in more than 30. Do those startups get
bumped up in the waiting line for your hardware?
They face the same supply crunch as everyone, because most
of them use the public cloud, so they had to negotiate for them-
selves with the public cloud service providers. What they do get,
though, is access to our AI technology, meaning they get access
to our engineering capabilities and our special techniques for
optimizing their AI models. We make it more efficient for them.
If your throughput goes up by a factor of five, you’re essen-
tially getting five more GPUs. So that’s what they get from us.
Do you consider yourself a kingmaker in that regard?
No. We invest in these companies because they’re incredible at
what they do. It’s a privilege for us to be investing in them, not
the other way around. These are some of the brightest minds
in the world. They don’t need us to support their credibility.
What happens as machine learning turns more toward infer-
ence rather than training—basically, if AI work becomes less
computationally intensive? Does that reduce the demand
for your GPUs?
We love inference. In fact, I would say that Nvidia’s business
today is probably, if I were to guess, 40 percent inference,
60 percent training. The reason why that’s a good thing is
because that’s when you realize AI is finally making it. If
Nvidia’s business is 90 percent training and 10 percent infer-
ence, you could argue that AI is still in research. That was the
case seven or eight years ago. But today, whenever you type
a prompt into a cloud and it generates something—it could
be a video, it could be an image, it could be 2D, it could be
3D, it could be text, it could be a graph—it’s most likely that
there’s an Nvidia GPU behind it.
Do you see demand waning at any point for your GPUs for AI?
I think we’re at the beginning of the generative AI revolution.
Today most of the computing that’s done in the world is still
 THE BIG INTERVIEW_

retrieval-based. Retrieval means you touch something on
your phone and it sends a signal out to the cloud to retrieve
a piece of information. It might compose a response with a
few different things and, using Java, present it to you on your
phone, on your nice screen. In the future, computing is going
to be more RAG-based. [Retrieval-augmented generation is
a framework that allows a large language model to pull in
data from outside its usual parameters.] The retrieval part
of it will be less, and the personalized generation part will be
much, much higher.
That generation will be done by a GPU somewhere.
So I think we’re in the beginning of this retrieval-
augmented, generative computing revolution, and generative
AI is going to be integral to almost everything.
semiconductor processing technology they have, but they’ll
still be able to build very large systems by aggregating many
of those chips together.
How concerned are you in general, though, that China will
be able to match the US in generative AI?
The regulation will limit China’s ability to access state-of-the-
art technology, which means the Western world, the countries
not limited by the export control, will have access to much
better technology, which is moving fairly fast. So I think the
limitation puts a lot of cost burden on China. You can always,
technically, aggregate more of the chipmaking systems to do
the job. But it just increases the cost per unit on those. That’s
probably the easiest way to think about it.

The latest news is that you’ve been

working with the US government to come
up with sanctions-compliant chips that
you can ship to China. My understanding
is that these are not the most advanced
chips. How closely were you working
with the administration to ensure that
you could still do business in China?
“I’LL TRY TO DO 40 PUSH-UPS
Well, to take a step back, it’s an export
control, not sanctions. The United States
A DAY. THAT DOESN’T TAKE
has determined that Nvidia’s technology
and this AI computing infrastructure are
ANY LONGER THAN A COUPLE
strategic to the nation and that export
control would apply to it. We complied
OF MINUTES. I’M A LAZY
with the export control the first time—
EXERCISER.”
In August 2022.
Yes. And the United States added more
provisions to the export control in 2023,
which caused us to have to reengineer our
products again. So we did that. We’re in
the process of coming up with a new set
of products that are in compliance with
today’s export control rules. We work closely with the admin- Does the fact that you’re building compliant chips to keep
istration to make sure that what we come up with is consis- selling in China affect your relationship with TSMC, Taiwan’s
tent with what they had in mind. semiconductor pride and joy?
No. A regulation is specific. It’s no different than a speed limit.
How big is your concern that these constraints will spur
China to spin up competitive AI chips? You’ve said quite a few times that of the 35,000 compo-
China has things that are competitive. nents that are in your supercomputer, eight are from TSMC.
When I hear that, I think that must be a tiny fraction. Are
Right. This isn’t data-center scale, but the Huawei Mate 60 you downplaying your reliance on TSMC?
smartphone that came out last year got some attention for No, not at all. Not at all.
its homegrown 7-nanometer chip.
Really, really good company. They’re limited by whatever So what point are you trying to make with that?
I’m simply emphasizing that in order to build an AI super-
computer, a whole lot of other components are involved. In
fact, in our AI supercomputers, just about the entire semi-
conductor industry partners with us. We already partner
very closely with Samsung, SK Hynix, Intel, AMD, Broadcom,
Marvell, and so on and so forth. In our AI supercomputers,
when we succeed, a whole bunch of companies succeed with
us, and we’re delighted by that.
How often do you talk to Morris Chang or Mark Liu at TSMC?
All the time. Continuously. Yeah. Continuously.
What are your conversations like?
These days we talk about advanced packaging, planning for
capacity for the coming years, for advanced computing capac-
ity. CoWoS [TSMC’s proprietary method for cramming chip
dies and memory modules into a single package] requires
new factories, new manufacturing lines, new equipment. So
their support is really, really quite important.
I recently had a conversation with a generative-AI-focused
CEO. I asked who Nvidia’s competitors might be down the
road, and this person suggested Google’s TPU. Other peo-
ple mention AMD. I imagine it’s not such a binary to you,
but who do you see as your biggest competitor? Who keeps
you up at night?
Lauren, they all do. The TPU team is extraordinary. The bot-
tom line is, the TPU team is really great, the AWS Trainium
team and the AWS Inferentia team are really extraordinary,
really excellent. Microsoft has their internal ASIC develop-
ment that’s ongoing, called Maia. Every cloud service provider
in China is building internal chips, and then there’s a whole
bunch of startups that are building great chips, as well as exist-
ing semiconductor companies. Everybody’s building chips.
That shouldn’t keep me up at night—because I should
make sure that I’m sufficiently exhausted from working that
no one can keep me up at night. That’s really the only thing
I can control.
But what wakes me up in the morning is surely that we have
to keep building on our promise, which is, we’re the only com-
pany in the world that everybody can partner with to build
AI supercomputers at data-center scale and at the full stack.
I have some personal questions I wanted to ask you.
[Huang to a public relations representative.] She’s done her
homework. Not to mention, I’m just enjoying the conversation.
I’m glad. I am as well. I did want to—
By the way, whenever Morris, or people who I’ve known a long
time, ask me to be the moderator of interviews, the reason
0 8 6
for that is because I’m not going to sit there and interview
them by asking them questions. I’m just having a conversa-
tion with them. You have to be empathetic to the audience
and what they might want to hear about.
So I asked ChatGPT a question about you. I wanted to know
if you had any tattoos, because I was going to propose that
for our next meetup, that we get you a tattoo.
If you get a tattoo, I’ll get one.
I already have one, but I’ve been looking to expand.
I have one too.
Yes. This is what I learned from ChatGPT. It said Jensen
Huang got a tattoo of the company logo when the stock
price reached $100. Then it said, “However, Huang has
expressed that he’s unlikely to get any more tattoos, not-
ing the pain was more intense than he anticipated.” It said
you cried. Did you cry?
A little bit. My recommendation is you should have a shot
of whiskey before you do it. Or take Advil. I also think that
women can take a lot more pain, because my daughter has a
fairly large tattoo.
So if you were down to get a tattoo, I was thinking a triangle
might be nice, because who doesn’t like triangles? They’re
perfect geometry.
Or the silhouette of Nvidia’s building! It’s composed of tri-
angles.
That’s a commitment. I was wondering, how often do you
personally use ChatGPT or Bard, or the like?
I’ve been using Perplexity. I enjoy ChatGPT as well. I use both
almost every day.
For what?
Research. For example, computer-aided drug discovery. Maybe
you would like to know about the recent advancements in
computer-aided drug discovery. And so you want to frame the
overall topic so that you could have a framework, and from
that framework, you could ask more and more specific ques-
tions. I really love that about these large language models.
I heard you used to lift weights. Do you still do that?
No. I’ll try to do 40 push-ups a day. That doesn’t take any lon-
ger than a couple of minutes. I’m a lazy exerciser. I’ll do squats
while I’m brushing my teeth.
Recently you made a comment on the Acquired podcast
that went viral. The hosts asked, if you were 30 years old
 THE BIG INTERVIEW_
today and were thinking about starting a company, what
would you start? And you said you wouldn’t start a com-
pany at all. Do you have any amendments to that?
That question could be answered in two ways, and I answered
it this way, which is: If I knew then all the things that I know
now, I would be too intimidated to do it. I would be too afraid.
I wouldn’t have done it.
You have to be somewhat delusional to start a business.
That’s the advantage of ignorance. You don’t know how hard
it’s going to be, you don’t know how much pain and suffering
is involved. When I meet entrepreneurs these days, and they
tell me how easy it’s going to be, I’m very supportive of them,
and I don’t actually try to burst their bubble. But I know it in
the back of my mind, “Oh, boy, this is not going to turn out
anything like they think.”
What would you say is the biggest sacrifice that you’ve had
to make in running Nvidia?
The same sacrifices other entrepreneurs make. You work
really, really hard. And for a long time, nobody thinks you’re
going to succeed. You’re alone in believing that you’re going
to make it. The insecurities, the vulnerability, sometimes
humiliation, it’s all true. Nobody talks about it, but it’s all
true. CEOs and entrepreneurs are human like anybody else.
And when they fail publicly, it’s embarrassing.
So when somebody said, “Jensen, with everything you have
today, you wouldn’t have started it?” Like, “No, no, no, of
course not.” But if I had known then that Nvidia would become
what it is today, would I have started the company, are you
kidding me? I would’ve sacrificed everything to do it.
L AUREN G O O D E is a senior writer at wired. She covers Big
Tech and Silicon Valley’s most interesting people.
Acquisitions That Helped
Get This Issue Out:
A 1973 issue of Ramparts with Kurt Vonne-
gut on the cover; sweaters via Instagram ads;
multiple heads of butter lettuce and an Apple
Vision Pro (which I returned); Jonathan Ros-
en’s The Best Minds; my very precious—and
misplaced for years—vintage strategy guide
for The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time;
another Diet Coke; a vinyl copy of Perfor-
mance, produced by Jack Nitzsche; a drawer
I can’t figure out how to install, though it’s a
nice distraction; a Hobonichi Techo note-
book to organize my brain; a New York City
library card; someone else’s lunch.
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HOLOGRAM FLICKERS. HE WAS NEVER ABOARD.

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