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 J U N E 2021
| SEE YOU IN COURT

It created the internet.

It’s ruining the internet.
It protects free speech.
It threatens democracy.
It must be preserved.
It should be repealed.

Everything You’ve Heard About

Section 230 Is Wrong

BY GILAD EDELMAN
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FEATURES WIRED 29.06

P.60 NO ONE COULD He was a sweet-natured 10-year-old one day and a disturbed,
obsessive stranger the next. But when doctors can’t agree on
DENY TIMOTHY the cause of the illness, what happens to the patient?
by Seema Yasmin

WAS SICK

P.32 SACRED
COMMANDMENT/
FALSE IDOL
The true story of
Section 230 of the
Communications
Decency Act.
by Gilad Edelman

P.48 SOFT-SERVE
HARDBALL
How one couple built a
device to fix the notori-
ously broken McDonald’s
ice cream machines—
and how the fast-food
giant froze them out.
by Andy Greenberg

P.70 EXPOSED
A family-run psycho-
therapy startup grew
into a health care giant.
Then a hacker started
posting patients’ most
intimate secrets on the
internet. What hap-
pened at Vastaamo?
by William Ralston

P.80 A GIGANTICAL TALE

OF LAFFERVESCENT
GENIUS
Nobody has heard
of the sci-fi writer
R. A. Lafferty—except
for all of your favorite
sci-fi writers.
by Jason Kehe

0 0 3
CONTENTS WIRED 29.06

ELECTRIC MIND
WORD GRENADES

P.6 Rants & Raves

ON THE
P.8 Physicists, Poets, and

COVER Hints of Immortality

by Virginia Heffernan

P.14 Where’s My Jetpack Insurance?

by Paul Ford

P.18 How to Escape

Surveillance Capitalism
by Clive Thompson

P.22 Autonomous Bots Get a Helping

(Human) Hand
by Will Knight

P.24 Coder Dee Tuck Wants to Fix

Hollywood’s Diversity Problem
by Angela Watercutter
Section 230 of the Communica-
P.26 Facebook’s Wrist Wearable Taps Into
tions Decency Act has shaped the
a New Level of Personal Data
internet so profoundly that some
by Lauren Goode
people practically put their hand
over their heart when it’s dis- P.28 Cloud Support: Can a Robot Cop
cussed. The wired art department Be the Boss of Me?
chose this cover design because by Meghan O’Gieblyn
sacred symbols are made to be
reconsidered.

SIX-WORD
SCI-FI

P.88 Very Short Stories

by WIRED readers

0 0 4
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ELECTRIC WORD WIRED 29.06

RANTS AND RAVES

In the May issue, Lauren Goode wrote about
how social platforms wouldn’t let her forget
the wedding she’d called off. On wired .com
and in this issue (page 70), Seema Yasmin
recounts a couple’s quest to identify their
son’s rare disease, even as doctors dismissed
their hunches. Also on wired .com, Jesse
Jarnow dug into new AI software that remixes
and upgrades, or “upmixes,” vintage music.

reminded of it, especially not resolve the reasons behind

↙ RE: “ALWAYS A BRIDE” by surprise. —Erin “Folletto”
Casali (@Folletto), via Twitter
their afflictions. But at the
same time, I agree with Tim-
Over the weekend, my phone othy’s observation that some
pushed an “on this day in We are just beginning to see doctors “are clueless.” With all
Readers 2020” photo of me in my New
York apartment, drinking a
the effects of our digital his-
tories. I’d bet that in only a
their education and acumen,
doctors are not gods.
share their beer, waiting for a video call decade or so our phones will —Rudy Schneider, via mail@
painful with friends to start. I felt so be able to record every real- wired .com

memories, ambushed and overwhelmed I

thought I might cry. This piece
life conversation and com-
bine that with location data, To read this story, turn to
medical explores so much more than so they will be able to record page 70.
mysteries, why tech companies won’t quit a second-by-second diary of
and musical sending you unrequested digi-
tal memories, but that part
our lives that we can flip back
through. I don’t know if that’s
RE: “HOW AUDIO PROS
dreams: alone was comforting enough horrifying or something that ‘UPMIX’ VINTAGE TRACKS
to reassure me I’m not losing I would love. (“No, actually AND GIVE THEM NEW LIFE”
my mind. —Gyan Yankovich you said orcas weren’t dol-
(@GyanYankovich), via Twitter phins! Phone, recall conversa- This article struck a chord
tions with Sarah from April 16, with me. I grew up in a house
This story really captures the 2031.”) —Vicefox, via Reddit without television. Records
nuance of our digital memories and reel-to-reel tapes, played
and the unintended side effects RE: “NO ONE COULD on a Heathkit system built by
of algorithms that resurface my older brothers, kept me in
them without understand- DENY THAT TIMOTHY tune with the world. —Rick,
ing that a contextual shift has WAS SICK.” via mail@wired .com
occurred. Thanks for writing it
in such a personal way. I’m the mother of an 11-year- This is the first big step toward
—David O’Brien old daughter with PANS. We my old dream of altering
(@d_obrien), via Twitter went from having a funny, whip- old music. The catch is that,
smart, and loving little girl to, mechanically, a lot of songs
I’ve now a constant reminder overnight, having an obsessive, have stems that bleed into
from many services of who I was paranoid, sleepless, and even- each other. AI that isolates
pre-transition. I don’t hate that tually extremely aggressive vocals will often miss some
past, but I also don’t want to be child. Almost four years later, echoes or overdubbed stuff,
RE: “ALWAYS A BRIDE” we found a pediatric immunol- or accidentally catch anything
ogist who recognized her as that sounds like a vocaliza-
a PANS kid and treated her. tion, whereas our brains (for
Within two weeks, she was the most part) can pick out
a different child. A child who any sound that’s obviously a

Technology makes for three years wouldn’t allow

me out of her sight went to
human voice. Or guitar. Or syn-
thesizer. Or drum. So we’ve

healing from old

sleep-away camp for a week still got a long way to go, but
and loved every minute of it. no journey starts at the end.

wounds incredibly
But my daughter can’t get her —Yuli-Ban, via Reddit
childhood back. Since there is
no cure, I have yet to know a

difficult. And it’s happy ending, just occasional

glimpses of the child I know GET MORE WIRED
really hard to opt out.
until the next flare-up. —Anon-
ymous, via mail@wired .com All wired stories can be found
online, but only subscribers
—@ameliaboone, via Twitter This article was uplifting and get unlimited access. If you are
frustrating. I am thrilled that already a print subscriber, you
Timothy and others have med- can authenticate your account
ical advocates working to at wired .com/register.

0 0 6
POW ER E D BY N AT UR E
C RA F T ED FOR YOU

T I S S OT WATC H E S . C O M
TISSOT, INNOVATORS BY TRADITION
 BY VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN MIND GRENADES 0 0 9

ALL PEOPLE WANT to enact a paradigm shift,

don’t they? Even if it’s not mRNA, or Lego,
we want at least, on our one chance on
Earth, to make a meme happen.
So imagine the excitement on April 7,
To model the universe as precisely when more than 200 physicists from seven
as possible is to try to see the countries convened on a Zoom call for a
one thing that even the strictest kind of nonexplosive gender-reveal party.
atheist agrees is immortal. What was to be disclosed was not a baby’s
sex but the fate of particle physics.
While the rest of the world has spent
more than a year preoccupied with epide-
miology, this team of physicists has

ILLUSTRATIONS / KATE DEHLER

0 1 0 IDEAS MIND GRENADES

spent three years collecting data for some- by us but by the whole international phys-
thing called the Muon g-2 experiment, a ics community.”
much anticipated project headquartered The known universe seemed, briefly,
at Fermilab, a physics and accelerator lab- muonstruck. But it took only 12 days for
oratory in Batavia, Illinois, that is overseen another Italian physicist to throw cold
by the Department of Energy. The physi- water on the bliss. Carlo Rovelli, a founder
cists had done their work half in the dark, of loop quantum gravity theory, which
with a key variable concealed. If you want seeks to combine quantum mechanics and
a eureka badly enough, after all, you might general relativity, and the author of Helgo-
be tempted to help the data along. Now the land: Making Sense of the Quantum Rev-
lights were coming on. olution, which was published in English in
“We had no idea” of the outcome, May, wrote in The Guardian, “Physicists
Rebecca Chislett, a physicist at University love to think of themselves as radical.”
College London, told Scientific American. This self-conception, Rovelli went on, is
“It was exciting and nerve-racking.” understandable, especially among physi-
Eureka. cists, who make their names in the outer
The experiment had aimed to determine, reaches of human understanding. But it
to the finest measurement, the strength of also leads labs to overhype their findings.
the internal magnetic field generated by a He cited examples of would-be “discover-
muon, a particle similar to an electron but ies” in supersymmetry that initially seemed
200 times more massive and supremely groundbreaking but didn’t live up to the
unstable, with a lifetime of 2.2 microsec- hype. Rovelli especially zeroed in on the
onds. Muons rain down on us all the time, word “hint,” which appeared in that Fermi-
the indirect product of cosmic rays collid- lab press release. “I do not remember a
ing with particles in Earth’s atmosphere. time without some colleague talking about
But Fermilab’s accelerator makes its own. ‘hints’ that new supersymmetric particles
Many subatomic particles act like mag- had been ‘nearly discovered.’” The nearlys
nets, and the so-called Standard Model and hints, presumably, are often at a value
predicts the strength of their magnetism that, unlike Fermilab’s 0.0000002 percent,
with great exactitude. To test the model, may not be statistically significant.
the team watched muons as they wobbled In 1807, William Wordsworth published
in a magnetic field and clocked whether the an ode that was to Romantic poetry as the
wobble deviated from what theory had pre- discovery of quarks was to particle phys-
dicted it would be. Indeed, it did. As Galileo ics in 1964: a breakthrough. “Intimations
might have said: Eppur si deviare. of Immortality from Recollections of Early
In the journal Physical Review Letters, Wordsworth’s Childhood” chronicles the poet’s emotional
the researchers reported that the infinites-
imal deviation—0.0000002 percent away poem doesn’t just detachment from nature; his blissful redis-
covery of it in memories of childhood; and
from what theory stipulated—was highly concern the fate his bittersweet resolution that, though the
significant. In its press release, Fermilab
even suggested that the discovery could of humans and the Earth will die, the suggestions of death-
lessness in the present moment will sus-
force us to revise our basic model of how blue planet. Its tain him in his grief.
subatomic particles work.
“The strong evidence that muons devi- subject is also inti- Though nothing can bring back the hour
ate from the Standard Model calculation mations—what the Of splendour in the grass, of glory in
might hint at exciting new physics. Muons
act as a window into the subatomic world physicists on the the flower;
We will grieve not, rather find
and could be interacting with yet undis- Muon g-2 project Strength in what remains behind;
covered particles or forces,” read the press
release. Graziano Venanzoni, a physicist at call “hints.” In the primal sympathy
Which having been must ever be;
the Italian National Institute for Nuclear In the soothing thoughts that spring
Physics in Pisa, called the findings “an Out of human suffering;
incredible result … long awaited not only In the faith that looks through death …
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0 1 2 IDEAS MIND GRENADES

An intriguing approach to literature called

ecocriticism, pioneered in the 1990s by the
English philosopher Jonathan Bate, argues
that Romantic poetry like this ode can sug-
gest ways to conceive of our dying planet
as one that we must save—or perhaps, in
sorrow, and maybe love, allow to die. But
Wordsworth’s poem doesn’t just concern the
fate of humans and the blue planet. Its sub- can one achieve the kind of immortality that
ject is also intimations—what the physicists dends and ravages of carbon. They don’t live, scientists get, the glory of someone like Ein-
on the Muon g-2 project call “hints.” so they don’t die. To model the universe as stein or Heisenberg.
As it happens, they are hints of the same precisely as possible is to try to see the one But to keep looking, as Rovelli has, as
thing: immortality. thing that even the strictest atheist agrees Fermilab has with this study on the muon’s
The central contention of physics has it is everlasting—to try to achieve, in a lab, an magnetism, is also to apprehend hints. To
that the building blocks of the universe will intimation of immortality. follow hints. In that way, the physicist’s work
endure even if, or even when, the humans Back to the living world that’s under our and the poet’s are the same. And if
who tally them, and the planet we live on, feet. Rovelli is right to caution against the Wordsworth is right, immortality can be
all die. To see into the deathless universe potential delusions of those who are greedy found, of all places, in the hint—the stagger-
is to try to see nothing so flamboyant as for eurekas. But, as a fellow physicist with ing proposition by nature itself that, in spite
Wordsworth’s favorite daffodils and walnut a radical streak, he is also sympathetic to of all the dying around us, something of all
groves, but to peer into the coldest spaces, their ambitions, a drive to “learn something we love might be imperishable, might still
the black holes and the fractional electric unexpected about the fundamental laws flicker or shine or wobble when the rest of
charge of theoretical subatomic particles. of nature.” To Rovelli, whose latest book our world is gone.
These entities have no blood flow, of course, describes quantum mechanics as an almost
but also no DNA; they’re not susceptible to psychedelic experience, a truly radical dis- VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN (@page88) is a
pandemics, however virulent, or the divi- covery entails the observation of phenomena regular contributor to wired .

CHARTGEIST by Jon J. Eilenberg

Tech Releases Flying Objects Netflix Play Something

Charmin BRB Apple Aerosolized Mars Ingenuity Opt-in only Immediately

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Scientific Importance

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Facebook what Netflix Eliminates
Live Audio Delta 3606 thinks you’ll “decision
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Copycatness Wow! Factor Problem Solving

 BY PAUL FORD IDEAS 0 1 4

We tend to predict the future through our own narrow lens—

and we’re always wrong. True vision lies in seeing connections.

THE BOOK OF PREDICTIONS is a 500-page with its bright-yellow slipcover, one forbid- squint and see Spotify. Or someone else
anthology from 1980, assembled by the same den commute away. I could have ordered describes wrist phones. My favorite was
people who gave us The People’s Almanac. another copy, but you should have limits. Erskine Caldwell, known as the author of
It’s a simple conceit: They asked various So two weeks after my second shot, in I tragic-but-comic sex satires like Tobacco
experts and sci-fi types (with the occasional went on the express bus to the frozen-in- Road, who perfectly predicted Bitcoin,
psychic or spoon-bender) to imagine the next time office, where a jacket still hung over the except he expected it for 1990. No, really.
50 years. I bought the book years ago, left it back of a chair, and hair gel and dress shoes He wrote: “A different kind of money will
on the shelf at the office, and never read it. sat under my desk, as if we’d fled a war. I be in circulation. Not gold and not paper.
If anything was predicted, it was this pan- puttered around the office alone, the last It will be a computer type of exchange
demic. And yet somehow we didn’t believe man on Earth, and when the workday was of credits and debits.” This is the firmest
it was happening. Many still don’t. I found done I grabbed the book and started to read. evidence produced so far that Erskine
myself thinking often in the past year about Here is my review: All of the predictions Caldwell, author of God’s Little Acre,
predictions, long- and short-term, and read- are wrong. Every now and then someone who died in 1987, is Satoshi Nakamoto.
ing up on predictive frameworks and fore- writes something like “By 2000 you’ll be Caldwell also said that the capital of the
casting methods (i.e., browsing Wikipedia). able to listen to any album in a record US would move to Minneapolis in 1999,
My mind kept wandering back to this volume store through a data service,” and you can including the “spies, and call girls.”

ILLUSTRATIONS / ELENA LACEY

 Socially
Responsible

® is a way

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0 1 6 MIND GRENADES 29.06

When you aggregate hundreds of pre- the video game streaming platform. How
dictions, the result is a special, concen- could you have predicted Twitch 40 years
trated kind of wrong. Everyone was trying ago? It’s a child with so many parents: It
their best, and everyone missed. And these required alchemy between the internet,
40-year-old predictions don’t seem wrong the AAA video game industry, special-
in the fun, steampunk way that, say, late Vic- ized 3D computer chips, low-cost camera
torian predictions of personal blimps or hot- equipment, and a thousand other ancillary
air-ballooning robots might seem wrong. industry-scale things that seem obvious
They’re just saggy middle-aged predictions. in hindsight. You’d need to predict all of
In 1980, nuclear war was right next door those things to predict Twitch. Of course,
and space was salvation. Many people in it also required Amazon to buy it and host
this book believed that the next 50 years it and build it ever larger, so now you need
would give us people on Mars, and millions to predict Amazon too.
more in orbit. The mistake was assum- Try to go in the other direction and ret-
ing that the rate of progress would keep con the concept of Twitch to 1980: It comes
accelerating until we left the planet. Con- out like, “A new cable TV station will launch
sider: The Soviet Union shoots a tin can into that shows live video of people playing Space
orbit with Sputnik. Twelve years later, in Invaders at arcades, and Sears will buy it for
1969, the USA sends another tin can to the $370 million.” (Frankly, I’d watch it.) Imagin-
moon—and, more impressively, sends it ing jetpacks is the easy part; imagining the
back without murdering its contents. That is multitrillion-dollar personal-jet refueling
a very rapid rate of change. It’s also roughly industry is less exciting; imagining the lia-
the same amount of time that Microsoft bility and insurance products required to
took to go from Windows 95 to Windows deal with malfunctioning-jetpack lawsuits
Vista Service Pack 1. is harder still. And where will they park?
Each correspondent in this volume has The future is messy. There are still law-
their own personal definition of progress, yers. It’s no surprise that billionaires like
and they are pessimistic or optimistic in Jeff Bezos (and Elon Musk too) keep fund-
direct correlation to that definition. The ing space exploration. It’s a way to pick up
Catholic priest predicts the return of tradi- where the world left off, take the old future
tional sexual mores; the sci-fi writer has us out for a spin, and force the old predictions
renting asteroids; the CIA guy says the Sovi- into coming true. The best way to predict
Retcon the ets will rule the world; the dentist predicts the future is to spend billions of dollars
concept of Twitch increased use of dental lasers.
I started to see each prediction as a little
reinventing it. What, then, for mortals?
What I took away from The Book of Pre-
to 1980 and it work of literature, almost painfully reveal- dictions, 40 years later, is to watch for the
comes out like, ing. To ask someone to predict is invariably
to ask them to prioritize, and then fantasize.
curious and interesting intersections
between very large things. Look for points
“A new cable TV Sportswriter Martin Abramson predicted that of contact or points of conflict. Pick two
station will launch by 2030 a 3,000-pound fish would be caught
in Alaska with a rod. Here was a man who,
enormous forces and wonder how they
connect. Climate and transit. Software-as-
that shows live when asked to paint a portrait of the future a-service and protest movements. Pandem-
video of people a half-century away, imagined a very large
and wonderful fish. We talk about “progress”
ics and entertainment. You can’t predict the
future. You can only better understand the
playing Space like it’s a vast, shared contract between our layers and let your mind wander over them
Invaders at era and future generations, signed in hope-
ful ink. But progress is individual, personal,
until you find a connection worth making
and a new thing worth building, even if
arcades, and and in the eye of the beholder. you’re the only one who sees it. You can give
Sears will buy it People could imagine a future for their
disciplines, a future with wars, a future on
it a name and believe in it, and try to make
it come true. That’s progress.
for $370 million.” Mars, or a future with laser dentistry. What
no one could see was the potential of all PAUL FORD (@ftrain) is a programmer,
the layers of infrastructure coming into essayist, and cofounder of Postlight, a
being right around them. Think of Twitch, digital product studio.
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BY CLIVE THOMPSON IDEAS
29.06 MIND GRENADES 0 1 9

ILLUSTRATION / YANN BASTARD

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BY WILL KNIGHT BUSINESS

Remote
DAVID TEJEDA HELPS deliver food and drinks of art on the wall, to get his own bearings,
to tables at a small restaurant in Dallas. enabling him to maneuver the machine to
And another in Sonoma County, California. the right spot.
Sometimes he lends a hand at a restaurant Tejeda is part of a small but growing

Control
in Los Angeles too. All at the same time. He shadow workforce. Robots are taking on
does this work from his home in Belmont, all sorts of blue-collar work, from driving
California, by tracking the movements and forklifts and toting freshly picked grapes to
vital signs of robots that roam each estab- stocking shelves and, yes, waiting tables. Yet
lishment, bringing entrées from kitchen to behind many of these droids are humans
As robots take on more table and shuttling dirty dishes back. Once in who help them perform difficult tasks or
challenging work, a growing a while he needs to help a lost robot reorient take over when they get confused. Like
industry is giving them a itself. “Sometimes it’s human error, someone Tejeda, these bot valets work from bed-
helping (human) hand. moving the robot or something,” Tejeda says. rooms, couches, and kitchen tables, remote
In that case, he looks through the bot’s cam- laborers who reach into the physical world.
era to find a landmark, like a certain piece The need for this kind of human help high-
29.06 MIND GRENADES 0 2 3

lights the limits of artificial intelligence and ics at Google, left to found a company called
suggests that people may serve as crucial Formant in 2017, when he realized that more
cogs of automation for quite some time. remote supervision would be needed. “There
“The more automation you inject into are all sorts of applications where a robot can
a scenario, the more, at least for now, you do 95 percent of the mission, and a person
need those humans there to handle all the can pick up that slack,” he says. “That’s our
exceptions and just watch and supervise,” thesis.” Formant’s software combines tools
says Matt Beane, an assistant professor at for handling fleets of robots with others for
UC Santa Barbara who studies robotic auto- setting up teams of remote operators. “The
mation of manual work. Despite impressive only way you get to an economy of scale over
progress in recent years, figuring out how the next decade is to have a human behind
to navigate environments that change, and it, managing a fleet,” he says.
change often, is still an unsolved problem Even network providers are looking to
in AI and robotics. capitalize on the trend. At its Newlab “inno-
Human operators have been helping vation center” in New York, Verizon is help-
robotic systems in hospitals for more than ing startups test robots using 5G wireless
a decade. A few years ago, as robots started technology. With faster speeds and lower
being used in more workplaces—hotels, latency, 5G will allow robotics companies to
restaurants, supermarkets—it seemed as if run more powerful AI software in the cloud
human aides might be just a stopgap, helping instead of on their robots, potentially making
until AI improves enough for the machines to them smarter and more reliable. In February,
go it alone. Now, Beane says, it seems that a Verizon acquired a startup called Incubed
living, breathing workforce will continue to IT, which makes software for managing and
grow. “They’re cleaning up after the robot,” controlling robots.
he says. “They are the human glue that allows Some of the technology used to operate
that system to function at ‘99.96 percent reli- robots from afar comes from the world of
ability,’ according to reports given to some VP self-driving cars, which often need some
of automation somewhere.” form of human assistance when a vehicle
Beane says the smartest companies will gets confused and grinds to a halt. The com-
use input from human operators to improve pany Phantom Auto makes software that
the algorithms that control their robots. Each helps remote workers control autonomous
time a person labels an object in an image—a cars, delivery robots, and forklifts. Accord-
chair, for example—it can help train the ing to the startup’s cofounder and chief busi-
machine-learning algorithm that the bot uses ness officer, Elliot Katz, companies have
to navigate. But training AI this way requires been drawn to remote operation because
vast amounts of carefully labeled data to be it removes humans from dangerous situa-
effective, and there seems to be no shortage tions, provides access to new pools of work-
of new tasks for people to do. Beane has yet ers, and boosts the ability to scale capacity
to come across a company that has success- up and down. The pandemic has accelerated
fully replaced human operators by having all that, he adds: “Our customers are focused
them train an AI. on, how do we drastically reduce the number
Tejeda works for a company called Bear of workers in our facilities?”
Robotics. Its cofounder and chief operating Katz deflects the obvious problem this
officer, Juan Higueros, says the company raises by suggesting that those who have
is ramping up production to meet grow- recently become unemployed may find
ing demand and plans to hire dozens more remote robot work an attractive option.
human helpers. “This is going to become a “You have so many people, mainly due to
very important aspect of how robotics com- the pandemic, that are home, unemployed,”
panies will have to operate,” Higueros says, he says. “We can train people who are will-
adding that Bear has had no trouble finding ing to do this job.” Help wanted: outboard
people willing to do the work. brain for robots.
Another sign that robot wrangling is tak-
ing off is the rise of startups focused on the Senior writer WILL KNIGHT (@willknight)
problem. Jeff Linnell, who worked on robot- covers artificial intelligence for wired .

ILLUSTRATION / SEAN DONG

 BY ANGELA WATERCUTTER CULTURE 29.06

Hire Calling
possible: alphabetically. Hiring managers
can sort by first or last name or those most
recently added, but from there it’s up to
them to pick a team.
Zooming from her Atlanta home, wear­
At Ava DuVernay’s Array film collective, coder Dee Tuck is ing a sweatshirt from her alma mater,
on a mission to help Hollywood find a diverse workforce. Tuskegee University, Array’s CTO speaks
pointedly about the best ways to remove
barriers. Tuck has witnessed roadblocks to
hiring throughout her career, and from the
DEE TUCK HAS heard all the excuses. “I want each studio,” says Kevin Hamburger, head beginning her team was intentional about
to hire more women, but I just don’t know of production at Warner Horizon Televi­ spotting and eliminating them. “We have
where they are.” Yep. “I want to hire more sion. Array Crew, which debuted online in conversations about the smallest things,”
people of color, I just don’t know anybody.” February and will be available as a mobile she says. Like that search function. Array
That too. She’s been working in tech for app in June, allows job seekers to create a could have made every field on a user’s
more than a decade and has often been profile that includes their résumé, location, profile searchable, but doing so might have
the only Black female engineer on her images, reels, and contact information so left someone out of the results just because
team. She has reviewed company hiring that line producers can pull up every can­ they didn’t include a certain keyword. “We
practices and pointed out that “maybe didate near their film set; it also has tools realized that could’ve created some type of
you’re weeding out a lot of people who to help managers keep track of the people barrier to entry for people,” Tuck says. That
can’t code with eight non­people­of­color they hire for each shoot. puts an onus on the line producer to look
watching them on Zoom.” Tuck doesn’t want On its face, there’s a tension in how through the list of candidates. But that’s
to hear the excuses anymore. Array is using technology to solve Holly­ the point—to make them look somewhere
Last November she was tapped to be wood’s inclusivity problem. We now have they hadn’t been looking.
chief technology officer at Array, the search engines optimized to find every­ Born and raised in Cincinnati, Tuck
film collective founded by director Ava thing from adoptable pets to dinner (for started trying to figure out Windows 95 at
DuVernay. Her main objective: launch­ better or worse), but leaving something her uncle’s house when she was about 11
ing Array Crew, a database of women and as complicated as workplace diversity to years old. “A few times,” she laughs, “he had
people of color that studios can use when machines is far more tricky. Which might to call me and be like, ‘What did you do?
staffing up for movies and TV shows. The be why Array’s fix is purposefully simple. I can’t get in.’” She spent time at IBM and
goal is to see if the industry will diversify The database’s results are organic; there worked on missile defense at Lockheed
its ranks when the “We can’t find any­ aren’t algorithms boosting some folks and Martin. By the time Tuck got to GitHub in
body” barrier is removed. “When we really not others. Someone crewing up a movie 2020, she was making sure every job she
diagnosed the issue, it wasn’t that people can search for certain positions (makeup took gave her a say in hiring decisions. “I
weren’t willing to do it, it was that people artist, grip), locations (Los Angeles, New really do believe in building diverse teams,
weren’t willing to be inconvenienced to York), names, trade union membership, because we ship better products that way,”
do it,” DuVernay says. “So what we tried to and experience level, but that’s it. Unlike, Tuck says. “If you just have one demo­
do is create a platform that made it really say, Google results, Crew’s list of candi­ graphic building a thing, you’re not going
easy. And so now we’re in a space where, dates comes up in the most analog way to end up with the best solution.”
to be frank, if you still don’t do it, you never
really wanted to.”
Hollywood has been in the midst of a
yearslong reckoning with its overabun­
dance of white male directors and stars.
But less noticed is how few women and The list of candidates comes up in
people of color appear in what are known the most analog way: alphabetically.
as below­the­line jobs—the ones on the
bottom half of the production budget. There are no algorithms boosting
For decades, the industry has relied on some folks and not others.
people hiring the folks they already know
for these gigs, leaving out swaths of qual­
ified applicants. “It’s harder to manage on
the production side, because hundreds of
productions come and go each year within

ILLUSTRATION / JIAQI WANG

 When Tuck and I spoke, Array Crew had One function Tuck’s team is working on notes that it’s been a week of questions
more than 5,000 verified users. It’s free is the ability to provide demographic and requests from partners wanting more
for work­seekers; studios pay an annual breakdowns for each production. DuVer­ from the Crew database, like support and
fee. “This is an investment. It’s incumbent nay notes that she doesn’t want Crew to help desk functions. A lot of these wants
upon us to make sure this works,” says Jen­ become just a “report card” for whether will be fulfilled by the new mobile app. “I
nifer Lynch, who oversees corporate social studios keep their promises, but Tuck sees love a deliverable,” she laughs.
responsibility at Paramount Pictures, one other benefits: “We have to be able to tell But there’s something else they want. Hol­
of several studios, including Netflix and a story of how we impacted the industry.” lywood’s push for diversity goes far beyond
Disney, that signed on to be a Crew launch As we’re wrapping up our Zoom, Tuck’s LA. Could Crew release an international ver­
partner. “We’re in this for the long haul.” team jumps on. She opens the conversa­ sion? Tuck says it’s at the top of her to­do
That footslogging is key. Too often diver­ tion by asking everyone to name the song list and promises there’s “more to come on
sity efforts fail when old habits creep back they currently have on repeat. (Bill With­ that.” So, yes, she’s on it. No excuses.
in. Studios must buy in, because for the ers, Big K.R.I.T., and “Baby Shark” are all
effort to succeed it’s essential that their represented.) Kelsey Kearney, who han­ Senior editor ANGELA WATERCUTTER
employees and partners use the service. dles Array’s relationships with studios, (@WaterSlicer) covers pop culture for wired .
 BY LAUREN GOODE GEAR

Thought
Experiment
Facebook wants to improve human-computer interactions—
by getting access to a whole new level of personal data.

THE DEVICE FIRST appeared on March 9 grasp virtual objects, but you
in an Andrew Bosworth tweet. Bosworth, lose the ability to take notes
the head of Facebook’s augmented- and or draw with precision. Some
virtual-reality research labs, had just AR or “mixed-reality” headsets,
shared a blog post outlining his group’s like Microsoft’s HoloLens, use tiny
vision for the future of human-computer cameras to track hand gestures. (This
interaction. Then he tweeted a photo of a works … sometimes.) Facebook’s hope
wearable—something that looks like an is that its wearable would enable more
iPod Mini mounted on a thick wristband. accurate hand-computer interactions.
Facebook already owns our social Bosworth says the company’s vision
experience and some of the world’s most for the wrist tech extends beyond AR and
popular messaging apps. So anytime the VR. “If you had access to an interface that
company dips into hardware, whether that’s allowed you to type or use a mouse—
a VR headset or a video-chat device with a without having to physically type or use
camera that follows you around the room, a mouse—you could use this all over the
it inevitably sparks questions about Face- place.” He also suggests the microwave as a
book’s intentions. In this case, the ques- use case: Why not program the wearable to
tions are less about the hardware and more sense that you want to cook something for
about whether the interactions the wear- 10 minutes on medium? (Bosworth clarifies
able is designed to enable will only deepen that Facebook is not building kitchen appli-
our ties to Facebook. (Answer: probably.) ances, but we do hope the company is not
So what is this thing? It’s an electro- spending billions to give us telepathic con-
myography device, which means it trans- nections with something as already intui-
lates electrical motor nerve signals into tive as a microwave.)
digital commands. To put it plainly, it’s a In a virtual demo, a person was shown
new way for humans to control computers. wearing the wrist device and playing a
When it’s on, you can just flick your fingers in video game without moving their fingers.
space to manipulate virtual inputs, whether These kinds of demos tend to (ahem) gesture
you’re using a VR headset or interacting with toward mind-reading tech, but Bosworth
the real world. You can also “train” it to sense insists it is not that. Here, he says, the wear-
the intention of your fingers, so that actions er’s mind is creating signals identical to those
happen even when your digits are at rest. that make the thumb move, without moving
The nameless device is just a concept, and the thumb. The device records an intention
Bosworth says the technology could become to move the thumb. “We don’t know what’s
widely available in five to 10 years. happening in the brain,” he says, “until some-
Such technology could do wonders for one sends a signal down the wire.”
the AR/VR experience, which can leave the Bosworth also emphasizes that the wear-
user feeling a distinct lack of agency when able is different from the invasive implants
it comes to their hands. Slip on a VR head- used in a 2019 brain-computer inter-
set and your hands disappear. Picking up face study that Facebook was involved in
a pair of controllers lets you play games or or Elon Musk’s Neuralink tech. In other
 29.06 MIND GRENADES 0 2 7

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trends for wired . She wrote about why the
internet won’t let us forget in issue 29.05. For the full reviews of these products and more, visit WIRED .com/gear.

ART / ALYSSA WALKER

BY MEGHAN O’GIEBLYN ADVICE

DEAR CLOUD SUPPORT:

Does a Robot
Get to Be the
Dear Suspect,
Hollywood has not been particularly opti-
mistic about robots in positions of authority.

Boss of Me?
RoboCop is just one example of the broader
sci-fi canon that has burned into our minds
the tragic consequences of relinquishing
critical tasks to inflexible machines—robots
whose prime directives are honored with a
literalism that can turn lethal, who can blast
a person to death but are confounded by a
set of stairs. The message of these films is
clear: Rigid automatons are incapable of
the improvised solutions and moral nuance
that’s so often required in moments of crisis.
It may have been this stereotype that led
Boston Dynamics, some of whose robots
are being incorporated into police depart-
ments, to release a video last December of
its models dancing to the 1950s Contours
hit “Do You Love Me.” Maybe you saw it?
The robots included Atlas, an android that
resembles a deconstructed storm trooper,
and Spot, which served as inspiration for
the killer dogbots in the “Metalhead” epi-
sode of Black Mirror. Neither machine
seems to have been designed to quell
fears about a robot takeover, so what bet-
ter way to endear them to the public than
to showcase their agility? And what bet-
ter test of said agility than a skill consid-
ered so uniquely human that we invented
a move designed to mock an automaton’s
inability to do it (the Robot)? Watching the
machines shuffle, shimmy, and twirl, it’s
difficult to avoid seeing them as vibrant,
I’m disturbed by the fact that law enforcement embodied creatures, capable of the same
flexibilities and sensitivities as ourselves.
agencies are increasingly using robots for Never mind that Spot’s joints can slice
neutralizing threats, surveillance, and hostage off your finger or that police robots have
situations. Maybe I’ve just seen RoboCop too
many times, but I’m wary of machines making
crucial, life-or-death decisions—especially given Cloud Support: Spiritual
Troubleshooting for the Digital Age
how often actual human officers abuse their For philosophical guidance on
authority. Do I have any kind of moral obligation encounters with technology, write
to cloudsupport@wired .com.
to obey a police robot? —SUSPECT
29.06 MIND GRENADES 0 2 9

already been used to exercise deadly force. at a location that has been flagged as ripe film during the George Floyd protests was
One way to answer your question, Suspect, for crime are primed to discover one.) These a video showing members of the National
without any appeals to moral philosophy, tools, in other words, do not so much neu- Guard dancing with protesters in Atlanta,
might be in terms of pragmatic conse- tralize prejudice as formalize it, baking only days after the streets had been filled
quences. If you have plans, as most of us existing social inequities into systems that with tear gas. The dance they were doing—
do, to remain alive and well, then yes, you unconsciously and mechanically perpetu- the Macarena—was somewhat mechani-
should absolutely obey a police robot. ate them. As professor of digital ethics Kevin cal, more simple than many of the moves
But I sense that your question is not Macnish notes, the values of the algorithm’s the Boston Dynamics robots are capa-
merely practical. And I agree that it’s makers “are frozen into the code, effectively ble of executing. And yet the moment
important to consider the trade-offs institutionalizing those values.’’ itself demonstrated an agility that is not
involved in handing policing duties over At present, the officers who act on algo- merely physical but spiritual. It was one
to machines. The Boston Dynamics video, rithmic recommendations are still human, of those outflashings of grace that some-
incidentally, was posted at the tail end of but it’s easy to envision a not-so-distant times appear when people let their guard
2020 as a way “to celebrate the start of future where policing decisions are not only down and improvise, breaking through the
what we hope will be a happier year.” One informed but carried out by machines—a rigidity of choreographed social roles and
week later, insurgents stormed the Capitol, day when some Atlas-like robot will show long-standing tensions.
and images proliferated of police officers up on a street that a predictive model has One protester, Amisha Harding, told
showing little resistance to the mob— identified as high-risk and, with the help reporters that the dancing opened up
photos that were strikingly juxtaposed, of its “fine motor-skills capabilities” and a space for dialog with the officers. “In
on social media, against the more severe “28 degrees of freedom,” arrest the first talking to them,” she said, “I realized that so
responses to the Black Lives Matter pro- likely candidate. Perhaps it’s a sign of the many of them believe in what we’re fight-
tests last summer. times that such dystopian scenarios are, if ing for as well.” Although the officers could
At a moment when many police depart- still undesirable, beginning to look not cat- not, being subject to their own prime direc-
ments are facing a crisis of authority due to egorically worse than our current state of tives (the oath of duty), publicly express
racial violence, the most compelling argu- affairs. The actions of Derek Chauvin alone their support for the movement, many
ment for robotic policing is that machines stand as a reminder that humans can be just revealed to the protesters that their hearts
have no intrinsic capacity for prejudice. To as coldhearted and unfeeling as a machine. were at odds with the tasks they’d been
a robot, a person is a person, regardless of Still, the fact that the officer was human asked to perform. In the movies, it’s pre-
skin color, gender, or cause. As the White is, in part, what provoked public outrage. We cisely this dissonance that marks a robot’s
House noted in a 2016 report on algorithms react viscerally to the sight of people abus- acquisition of consciousness. The machine
and civil rights, new technologies have the ing their power—far more so than we do to that develops a conscience and becomes
potential to “help law enforcement make cases of machine malfunction, even when troubled by the actions it’s been hardwired
decisions based on factors and variables that it can be traced back, through the shadowy to carry out has transcended its status as a
empirically correlate with risk, rather than byways of bureaucracy, to human error. As tool and has become, essentially, human.
on flawed human instincts and prejudices.” the criminal justice system automates more Perhaps one day our machines will
Of course, if current policing technology and more of its operations, its actions are achieve that level of complexity. Until
is any evidence, things are not that sim- becoming increasingly opaque, shellacked then, moral flexibility—the willingness
ple. Predictive policing algorithms, which in a detached objectivity that risks obscuring to change, to break the rules, to abandon
are used to identify high-risk persons and acts of injustice. As the writer Jackie Wang beliefs and practices that are no longer
neighborhoods, are very much prone to points out in her book Carceral Capitalism, serving the public good—is something we
bias, which the roboticist Ayanna Howards personification is a necessary component of alone can enact. I realize, Suspect, that it’s
has called the “original sin of AI.” Because moral indignation. “‘All police databases are difficult these days to believe that people,
these systems rely on historical data (past bastards’ makes no sense,” she writes. Nei- let alone systems, are capable of change.
court cases, previous arrests), they end up ther does “All police robots are bastards,” But it’s also true that humans maintain
singling out the same communities that regardless of how human they appear or more than 28 degrees of freedom, and at
have been unfairly targeted in the first how well they can dance. least some of those choices might be worth
place and reinforcing structural racism. I would add to this that if personifica- preserving.
Automated predictions can become self- tion is crucial to cultivating outrage, it’s
fulfilling, locking certain quadrants into a also necessary for countering it. Among Faithfully,
pattern of overpolicing. (Officers who arrive the many remarkable images caught on Cloud

MEGHAN O’GIEBLYN (@megogieblyn)

will publish her book God, Human, Animal,
Machine with Doubleday in August.

COLLAGE / SAM WHITNEY

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FEATURES WIRED 29.06

ART / NOTPAULSIMON 0 3 1
AR T B Y
ZAK TEBBAL
 T H I S L AW
KE EP S I N TE RN E T CO M PA N I E S
F RO M B E I N G H E L D
R E S P O N S I B L E F O R W H AT
PEOPLE POST AND SHARE.

I T H AS VAST CO NS E QU EN CE S
F O R CI V I L I Z AT IO N I N T H E
D I G I TA L AG E .

SO M E P EO P L E WA NT TO G ET
RI D O F I T BU T DO N ' T
U N D ERSTA N D HOW IT WO RKS .

OTH ERS SAY T HAT A LT ERI NG IT

WOU L D BRI N G T H E W H O L E
I NTERN ET CR ASH I NG DOWN.

HERE'S THE TRUE

STORY OF

SECTION 230
OF THE
COMMUNICATIONS
DECENCY ACT.

BY GILAD EDELMAN
T HE L IE WA S
S OR T O F F U N N Y,
UNTIL IT WASN'T. In the weeks after the on January 6, when a mob of Trump sup-
2020 election, as Donald Trump’s quest to porters, urged by the outgoing president
remain in office met one courtroom defeat to “stop the steal,” violently stormed the
after another, his shrinking legal team con- US Capitol.
cocted a baroque conspiracy theory to They say a lie gets halfway around the
explain how the presidency had been sto- world while the truth is still tying its shoes.
len. At a surreal press conference in late In this case, the lie seemed to have circled
November, Trump’s lawyers, Sidney Pow- the globe, gotten the truth in a headlock,
ell and Rudy Giuliani—the latter dripping and then plowed it backward across the
with mysteriously brown-tinged sweat— National Mall.
explained that Dominion Voting Systems But then something unexpected hap-
was secretly linked to rival voting machine pened: The truth got a lawyer. In February,
company Smartmatic, both of which, they Smartmatic filed a defamation lawsuit for
said, had been created in Venezuela under more than $2.7 billion against Fox, Giuliani,
the direction of Hugo Chávez for the pur- and Powell. Dominion filed suits of its own
pose of systematically rigging elections. seeking more than $1 billion each from
George Soros and the Clinton Foundation Fox News, Giuliani, Powell, and Trump
were possibly in on the scheme as well. mega-supporter Mike Lindell, the CEO
This performance was met with wide- of MyPillow, who had helped spread the
spread derision; on Twitter, Trump’s own vote-fixing claim. Suddenly, with money
recently fired election security czar, Chris- on the line, the TV networks grew more
topher Krebs, called it “the most dangerous circumspect. Fox and Newsmax ran awk-
1hr 45 minutes of television in American ward disclaimers renouncing their own
history.” But among millions of Trump sup- hosts’ coverage. Fox Business canceled Lou
porters, the allegations of electoral fraud Dobbs Tonight, its highest-rated show, a
caught fire. Newsmax, One America News day after Smartmatic named Dobbs as a
Network, and Fox broadcast the claims to defendant. A Newsmax anchor tried to cut
their cable TV audiences, with Lou Dobbs off Lindell when the pillow tycoon began
referring to Smartmatic as “a company that veering into Dominion territory during
was founded in 2005 in Venezuela for the an on-air interview; the host eventually
specific purpose of fixing elections.” In walked off the set in frustration.
no time the conspiracy theory was racing America is a liar’s paradise. The First
through the right-wing precincts of social Amendment gives wide berth to huck-
media, where it erupted into bizarre memes sters, charlatans, and gaslighters under the
and frenzied calls to action. The journey wise premise that the government gener-
from farce to tragedy reached its nadir ally shouldn’t get to decide what’s true and

0
what isn’t. But the legal system does impose opinions about it have multiplied—as have some other Republican provocateurs, most
certain limits on speech. The Smartmatic threats to repeal it from both sides of the notably senators Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley,
and Dominion lawsuits showed that there aisle in Washington. who have popularized a theory that Sec-
can, in fact, be a significant cost associated Democrats argue that Section 230 lets tion 230 gives social media platforms legal
with inventing, popularizing, and perhaps companies get away with doing too little cover to discriminate against conservatives.
profiting off of such a Big Lie. moderation; Republicans tend to say it lets Heading into the November presidential
Not for everyone, though. As some com- them get away with too much. Still, there election, hostility toward the law grew into
mentators noted, one group was conspic- may be just enough bipartisan overlap one of Trump’s favorite talking points. “Big
uously absent from the cast of defendants for reform legislation to emerge from the Tech, Section 230, right?” he mused to an
accused of amplifying the voting machine gauntlet of Congress. So far, there is no con- Ohio crowd in October. “Big Tech is corrupt.”
myth: social media companies. Unlike tra- sensus on what that reform should look like. Trump’s opponent was not much friend-
ditional publishers and broadcasters, which The resolution of this tangled debate could lier to the statute. In January 2020, then
can be sued for publishing a defamatory have massive consequences for the inter- candidate Joe Biden, in response to a gen-
claim, neither Facebook nor YouTube nor net, not only in the US, but in every coun- eral question about the power of tech
Parler nor Gab had to fear any legal jeop- try where online discourse takes place on platforms, blurted out that “Section 230
ardy for their role in helping the lie spread. platforms that are subject to American law. should be revoked, immediately should be
For that, they have one law to thank: Section This reckoning has all the makings of revoked.” The comment seemed to stem
230 of the Communications Decency Act. a barbarians-at-the-gate moment for the from Biden’s lingering anger over a mis-
Passed in 1996, Section 230 provides companies that benefit from Section 230’s leading attack ad against him that Facebook
that online platforms—or “interactive com- protections. But not only for them. Over the had refused to block.
puter services,” in the legislative argot of years, Section 230 has attracted a small but Neither man’s beef with the law is terri-
the time—generally can’t be held legally ardent following of people who view it with bly coherent. Section 230 shields platforms
responsible for material posted by users. the kind of idealistic veneration more often from legal liability, but there isn’t anything
Among the public, this sweeping indemni- reserved for the First Amendment. Accord- unlawful in the first place about a sharp-
fication remained a pretty obscure fact of ing to its admirers, Section 230 is the well- elbowed attack ad that bends the truth.
life on the internet for the first two decades spring from which everything good about Ditto for Trump’s complaints: Even if social
of the law’s existence. But in the past few the modern internet emerged—a protector media platforms did discriminate against
years, amid a general fit of panic over of free speech, a boon to innovation, and a conservative viewpoints, it’s perfectly legal
today’s platform giants and their possible cornerstone of the American economy. The to have a partisan bias, as every waking sec-
incompatibility with civilization, democ- oft-quoted title of a book by the lawyer Jeff ond of American life makes clear. More gen-
racy, and human flourishing, Section 230 Kosseff captures this line of thinking well. It erally, politicians and pundits often seem to
has fallen under a cloud of scrutiny. Strong refers to the law’s main provision as “the 26 blame Section 230 for whatever they hap-
words that created the internet.” pen to dislike about the internet, whether
Another article of faith among Section or not it really applies—or they lash out at
230’s champions? That people who crit- the law simply because they know it’s pre-
icize the law have no clue what they’re cious to companies they loathe.
talking about. Section 230 recently turned So, yes, a lot of people who complain
25 years old, and the occasion was cel- about Section 230 don’t know what they’re
ebrated by a virtual event whose spon- talking about. And yet the story told by the
sors included Twitter, Amazon, and Yelp. pro-230 camp contains its share of mythol-
Senator Ron Wyden and former con- ogy as well. Section 230 is not the bogey-
gressman Chris Cox, the authors of the man of Trump’s stump speeches, but neither
Section 230 is statute, fielded questions from the audi-
ence, typed into a chat window. The most
is it the pixie dust making the internet a
magical place for free speech and inno-
not the bogeyman upvoted question was, “How best can we vation. To understand the law, you have to
of Trump’s stump get folks to properly understand Sec 230?
Particularly when it seems that many
know not just what it says but how it came
to be and how it has been interpreted—
speeches, but are either reluctant to realize they don’t and sometimes misinterpreted—by judges
neither is it the understand or, even worse, they don’t
want to understand?”
during its 25-year existence. Once you do
that, the picture that emerges is very differ-
pixie dust making Exhibit A for these Section 230 advocates ent from the one painted by either side of
the internet a is the moment in May 2020 when Trump
started publicly attacking the law, thrusting
the kill-it-or-keep-it debate.
In fact, Section 230 may be more like
magical place for it into the national shouting match. Trump’s Dumbo’s supposedly magic feather: a tal-
free speech and preferred platform, Twitter, had recently
had the temerity to fact-check one of his
isman the internet has been clutching for
dear life for 25 years, terrified of finding out
innovation. tweets. Trump’s response took a cue from whether online discourse could fly without it.

3 5
 be held liable if it did moderate its platform?
Four years later, a state judge on Long
Island answered that question in the affir-
mative. This time the defendant was Prod-
igy, another giant online service provider in
the early internet era. An anonymous user
on Prodigy’s Money Talk bulletin board had
posted that the leaders of an investment
banking firm called Stratton Oakmont were
a bunch of liars and crooks. Stratton Oak-
mont sued for $200 million, arguing that
Prodigy should be treated as a publisher.
Unlike CompuServe, Prodigy proudly
advertised its ability to screen content to
preserve a family-friendly environment.
Judge Stuart Ain held that fact against the
company. He seized on comments in which
Prodigy’s head of communications com-
pared the company’s moderation policies
to the editorial decisions made by a news-
paper. “Prodigy’s conscious choice, to gain
THE the benefits of editorial control, has opened
M O D E R AT O R ’ S D I L E M M A it up to a greater liability than CompuServe
and other computer networks that make no
such choice,” he wrote in his opinion. The
company could be held liable as a publisher.
It was just one case, in one New York
state trial court, but it put the fear of God
SECTION 230 IS OFTEN In the early days of the internet, it wasn’t into the tech industry. Ain’s logic set up
described as a law about free speech—a clear how judges would apply the republi- the ultimate perverse incentive: The more
sort of First Amendment for cyberspace. cation rule to online platforms. The first case a platform tried to protect its users from
But it’s really about a much less glamorous to test the waters was Cubby v. CompuServe, things like harassment or obscenity, the
area of law: torts. decided in 1991 in a federal district court. greater its risk of losing a lawsuit became.
Tort law is how the legal system holds CompuServe was one of the first major US This situation, sometimes referred to as the
people responsible when they wrong some- internet service providers, and it hosted a moderator’s dilemma, threatened to turn
one else. (Tort is French for “a wrong.”) It is number of news forums. A company called the growing internet into either an ugly
part of the common-law tradition stretch- Cubby Inc. complained that someone had free-for-all or a zone of utter blandness.
ing back to medieval England, when judges, posted lies about it on one of those forums. Do nothing and filth will overrun your plat-
weighing in on a single dispute at a time, It wanted to hold CompuServe liable under form; do something and you could be sued
gradually shaped the law of the land. One the republication rule, on the theory that for anything you didn’t block.
area of tort doctrine—defamation—is par- hosting a forum was analogous to publish- To counteract Ain’s decision, a pair of
ticularly relevant to Section 230. A defa- ing a newspaper. But the judge disagreed. congressmen, Republican Chris Cox and
mation case is when you sue someone who CompuServe, he observed, didn’t exercise Democrat Ron Wyden, teamed up to find
told a lie that hurt your reputation. Or, even any editorial control over the forum. It was a legislative solution to the moderator’s
more relevantly, someone who published basically a passive host, more like a distrib- dilemma. At the time, Congress was working
that lie. Under the so-called republication utor than a publisher. “CompuServe has no on something called the Communications
rule, if I falsely claim that you committed a more editorial control over such a publica- Decency Act, a censorious law that would
crime, and a newspaper prints that claim, tion than does a public library, book store, criminalize spreading “indecent” material
you can sue both the newspaper and me. So or newsstand, and it would be no more fea- online. Cox and Wyden came up with lan-
news organizations have to be very care- sible for CompuServe to examine every pub- guage that was inserted into the bill, and that
ful about reporting incendiary accusations. lication it carries for potentially defamatory became Section 230 of the act. Much of the
(If the accusation concerns a public figure, statements than it would be for any other rest of the decency law would be struck
American publications can be a little less distributor to do so,” he wrote in his opinion. down almost immediately by the Supreme
careful. The Supreme Court ruled in the The Cubby decision was a relief to the Court on constitutional grounds, but Sec-
1960s that public figures can win a defa- nascent internet industry. But if CompuServe tion 230 survived.
mation suit only if they can prove the lie was avoided liability because it didn’t moderate For such a consequential statute, Section
made deliberately or recklessly.) its forums, did that mean a provider would 230 is unusually concise. There are two key

0
provisions. The second, subsection (c)(2),
says, “No provider or user of an interactive
computer service shall be held liable on
account of any action voluntarily taken in
good faith to restrict access to or availabil-
ity of material that the provider or user con-
siders to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy,
excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise
objectionable, whether or not such material
is constitutionally protected.”
Translation: Forget the Stratton Oakmont
case. A platform can protect its users without
putting itself in legal jeopardy.
But it’s the first part of the law, subsec-
tion (c)(1), that has proven more conse-
quential. Cox and Wyden understood that
the potential volume of content on interac-
tive platforms was so immense that internet
companies could never exercise the same
level of control as traditional media. Treating
internet providers as publishers could make
them too cautious, stifling the potential of
the internet as a medium for free expression.
And so Cox and Wyden decided to establish
FULL IMMUNITY
a baseline degree of legal immunity for plat-
forms, regardless of whether they engaged
in content moderation. They did this in the
famous 26 words: “No provider or user of an
interactive computer service shall be treated ON APRIL 19, 1995, TIMOTHY Prodigy and CompuServe had taken their
as the publisher or speaker of any informa- McVeigh detonated a bomb in front of the turns on the witness stand. Now the last of
tion provided by another information con- Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Okla- the old Big Three online service provid-
tent provider.” homa City, killing 168 people in the deadliest ers would get its moment, and this time
One part of Section 230 got rid of the single act of domestic terrorism in US his- the outcome would cement the future of
moderator’s dilemma. The other, however, tory. Six days later, some very strange posts internet law.
would end up creating dilemmas of its own. began appearing on an AOL bulletin board, AOL raised the brand-new statute in its
advertising “Naughty Oklahoma T-Shirts” defense, arguing that it couldn’t be held
that featured phrases mocking the victims responsible for posts by its users. Zeran’s
of the bombing. The ads, posted by a user lawyers countered that their case didn’t
with the handle KEN ZZ03, listed a phone actually rely on the republication rule. They
number to call to order the shirts. sued AOL for negligence, and as a distrib-
That phone number belonged to Kenneth utor, not a publisher. Once AOL was put on
It was the Zeran, a Seattle-based TV producer and art- notice, they argued, it had a duty to try to
ultimate perverse ist. Zeran did not post the ads and had no
idea who had. (To this day, the identity of
block the posts.
Zeran’s case was the first crucial test of
incentive: The more the poster remains a mystery.) Before long how Section 230 would be interpreted by
a platform tried he was inundated with threatening phone
calls from people understandably outraged
judges. The text said that an interactive
computer service couldn’t be treated as
to protect its by the tastelessness of T-shirts with slogans the publisher of information provided by
users from things like “Visit Oklahoma … It’s a blast!!!” Things
got even worse when a radio host encour-
someone else. But did that mean it couldn’t
be held responsible at all? Or were other
like harassment aged his listeners to call Zeran and give him forms of liability, like negligent distribu-
or obscenity, the a piece of their minds. According to Zeran,
AOL didn’t do nearly enough to deal with
tion, still on the table?
They were not. In an opinion for the Court
greater its risk of the problem, despite his repeated requests of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, Judge J.
losing a lawsuit for help. Eventually, he got a lawyer, and in
April 1996—two months after the passage of
Harvie Wilkinson III, a prominent conser-
vative, ruled in favor of AOL. Section 230,
became. Section 230—he sued AOL in federal court. he noted, was designed for exactly this type

3 7
of situation. It might make sense to hold a
traditional distributor liable for defamatory
material once it’s put on notice, Wilkinson
reasoned, but “the sheer number of postings
on interactive computer services would cre-
ate an impossible burden.” The ruling went
further than protecting platforms from def-
amation suits. Section 230, Wilkinson held,
“plainly immunizes computer service pro-
viders like AOL from liability for informa-
tion that originates with third parties.” What
kind of liability? What kind of information?
Any kind, apparently.
Wilkinson’s use of the word “immunity,”
which isn’t in the statute itself, was key. A legal
immunity allows a defendant to swat away a
lawsuit with a minimum of time and money—
even if every fact the plaintiff alleges is true.
Because it was the only case interpret-
ing this brand-new law about this brand-
new domain called the internet, Wilkinson’s
decision assumed the status of a quasi–
Supreme Court precedent. Courts around
the country immediately began citing
B A D S A M A R I TA N S
Wilkinson’s “immunity” line to dismiss
cases brought against internet companies
at the earliest stage of litigation. They often
did this grudgingly, essentially conclud-
ing that the law forced their hand. “While IF THERE WAS ONE MOMENT Cremers, however, wasn’t a tech company
Congress could have made a different pol- when Section 230 started revealing its poten- sitting atop a tsunami of user-generated
icy choice, it opted not to hold interactive tial to make things really weird, it was in content. He was a guy who forwarded and
computer services liable,” noted one early 2003, in a case called Batzel v. Smith. Ellen published an email. Batzel wasn’t suing him
decision citing Zeran. Batzel was a successful lawyer. Robert Smith for failing to take something down; she was
Wilkinson’s ruling revealed a paradox at was a handyman she’d hired to do some suing him for choosing to put something up.
the heart of Section 230. The law was sup- work on her house. They seem to have had And yet Cremers’ lawyers raised the stat-
posed to encourage online service provid- some kind of falling out. In 1999, possibly ute in his defense. They argued that because
ers to police their platforms without fear. to get revenge, Smith sent an email to Ton the email from Smith was technically “infor-
It was, after all, part of a statute called the Cremers, the Dutch publisher of a listserv mation provided by another information
Communications Decency Act. And yet the called Museum Security Network, claiming content provider,” Cremers couldn’t be sued
first part of the law, the part Wilkinson now that Batzel’s house was full of art that had for spreading it online. The case went up to
interpreted as an immunity, removed a major been stolen from Jews during World War II. the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. In 2003
legal incentive for them to police their plat- He also wrote that Batzel had bragged about the court sided with Cremers. “Because
forms at all. With a few exceptions (most being Heinrich Himmler’s granddaughter. Cremers did no more than select and
notably copyright infringement and child Cremers’ interest was piqued. He forwarded make minor alterations to Smith’s e-mail,
pornography), providers would never be held Smith’s email to his listserv audience and Cremers cannot be considered the content
responsible for material posted by users, no posted it on the MSN website. provider of Smith’s email for purposes of
matter how clearly false or harmful. Even if Batzel, understandably, was not amused. §230,” wrote judge Marsha Berzon, a prom-
they were put on notice, could easily fix the The allegations, she said, were a pack of inent liberal, for the majority.
problem, and simply chose not to. lies. She sued Smith for writing the email, How did the court come to that decision?
It must have been hard to see at the time arguing that it had ruined her professional Simple. The judges did what US judges
how consequential that position would reputation. But she also sued Cremers for often do: They read the statute extremely
become. Zeran was decided in 1997. Just 2 publishing it to his audience. literally. Section 230, remember, says
percent of the world’s population was online. At first glance, these facts don’t look like that “no provider or user of an interactive
Over the subsequent decades, the internet a Section 230 situation. Recall the law’s computer service shall be treated as the
would spread into more and more aspects underlying theory: The scale of the internet publisher or speaker of any information
of daily life. Section 230 and its peculiar set prevents online platforms from moderat- provided by another information content
of incentives would spread with it. ing every word or image uploaded by users. provider.” And it defines an “information

0 3 8
content provider” as “any person or entity each day, and founder Nik Richie or his staff place, Armslist.com, found a private seller,
that is responsible, in whole or in part, for would read them and select 150 to 200 to and bought a semiautomatic handgun from
the creation or development of information publish, often with some added commentary. a guy in a McDonald’s parking lot. The next
provided through the Internet or any other It was, obviously, a publication that relied on day, he went to the salon where his wife
interactive computer service.” Put those outside submissions. And yet, following the worked and shot her to death, along with
pieces together and it does kind of sound literal logic of Batzel, the court held that Sec- two of her coworkers, before turning the
like you can’t get in trouble for publishing tion 230 shielded it from liability. gun on himself. The wife’s daughter sued
something someone else emailed you. Section 230 was supposed to protect Armslist for negligence and wrongful death,
This outcome, however, seems so far from websites that wanted to do the right thing. among other claims. Her lawyers argued
the law’s original intent that even Section The very heading of the statute reads, “Pro- that the company had essentially set itself
230 coauthor Chris Cox believes Batzel was tection for ‘Good Samaritan’ blocking and up to facilitate illegal gun sales. It allowed
wrongly decided. Cox says that Section 230 screening of offensive material.” (This is an users to filter their searches to show only
was never supposed to let people on the echo of a common concept in tort law. All private sellers, who don’t have to run back-
internet get away with the exact same behav- 50 states have some kind of Good Samar- ground checks. And it allowed anyone to
ior that would land them in trouble offline. itan law that protects people who help in buy or sell guns, taking no steps to screen
But if Cremers had done what he did using an emergency from being sued if things go out people barred from owning one.
a bunch of envelopes and stamps, instead wrong.) But cases like the lawsuit against None of that mattered to the Wisconsin
of email, he wouldn’t have been able to hide The Dirty show how easy it is for the stat- Supreme Court. Even if the claims in the
behind the statute. As the torts scholar Benja- ute’s immunity provision to accomplish lawsuit were true—that is, even if it could
min Zipursky has observed, in an article crit- precisely the opposite result. As the legal be proven that Armslist intentionally facil-
icizing the logic of Batzel, “Anyone wishing to scholars Danielle Citron and Ben Wittes itated illegal gun sales—Section 230 immu-
hurt another person by damaging her or his put it, Section 230 has become a law that nity applied. As long as Armslist didn’t help
reputation is free to do so without account- ensconces protections for “bad Samaritans.” create posts itself, it was in the clear. That
ability by finding a defamatory statement At least one company relies so heav- doesn’t mean the company would necessar-
that someone else has made and broadcast- ily on Section 230 that its website has an ily have lost the case otherwise, or that it will
ing it to the world over the Internet.” entire section dedicated to explaining the never have to worry about federal criminal
Nevertheless, the decision in Batzel v. law. RipoffReport.com is a repository of prosecution. But it does mean, at a mini-
Smith has been cited and followed by courts horror stories about businesses and indi- mum, that thanks to Section 230, the fam-
around the country, perhaps because it viduals, like a Yelp that specializes in one- ilies of people murdered with guns bought
seems to follow the straightforward text of star reviews. It has a policy of never taking on Armslist can’t even force the site’s owners
Section 230. One particularly galling exam- a post down, which it says is to preserve to defend their business practices in court.
ple involves a website called The Dirty. The its credibility. But the site also encour- The Armslist case is also telling for
Dirty is a gossip site in the style of TMZ— ages businesses marred by bad reports to another reason: It was about commerce, not
except its subjects are ordinary people, not pay several thousand dollars for its Cor- self-expression. In this respect, it is part of
celebrities. A typical post involves a picture porate Advocacy Program. That fee buys a robust line of Section 230 decisions that
of a woman, often scantily clad, along with those businesses a new, positive post if they invoke the law to protect platforms devoted
her full name and detailed allegations that pledge to make things right, which the site to business transactions. Free trade, not just
she’s a cheater, a gold digger, or worse. promises will appear more prominently free speech. Craigslist has used the law to
In 2009, the victim of several such posts, in Google results than the original review. ward off liability for hosting racially dis-
a schoolteacher and Cincinnati Bengals Though Ripoff Report disputes the char- criminatory housing ads. Companies like
cheerleader, brought a lawsuit against the acterization, its business model appears to StubHub, eBay, Amazon, and Airbnb regu-
website’s parent company and founder after be: Nice reputation you’ve got there; shame larly invoke the statute as a defense against
posts appeared on The Dirty accusing her of if anything were to happen to it. (A recent lawsuits and to avoid complying with reg-
sleeping with the entire football team and investigation by The New York Times found ulations. They all describe themselves as
spreading sexually transmitted diseases— a whole ecosystem of websites whose own- platforms that host content—ticket offer-
rumors that she said went viral at the high ers profit by selling “removal” services to ings, apartment listings, products—created
school where she taught. the people being maligned on them.) Ripoff by third parties. These arguments don’t
The case made it all the way to the federal Report has been sued repeatedly for def- always succeed, but sometimes they do. One
Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, which amation. But because it doesn’t create the court recently ruled that Section 230 pro-
held in 2014 that Section 230 protected The content of the posts itself, courts have con- tects Amazon from liability for false adver-
Dirty because the posts were submitted by sistently held that Section 230 protects it. tising. Airbnb’s and HomeAway’s efforts to
users. The logic is a direct descendant of The same theory protects the Craigs- use Section 230 to stop municipalities from
Batzel; indeed, the ruling cited Batzel eight list of guns. In October 2012, a Wisconsin regulating them failed in San Francisco, but
times. As the opinion itself laid out, The Dirty man who was barred from owning a gun they worked in Anaheim. “After consider-
wasn’t a message board or a social network (because his estranged wife had taken out ing federal communications law, we won’t
where users could upload whatever they a restraining order on him) found an easy be enforcing parts of Anaheim’s short-term
wanted. It received thousands of submissions workaround. He went to an online market- rental rules,” a city spokesperson said.

0
 “He’s had extraordinary influence,” says
Mary Anne Franks, a law professor at the
University of Miami and the president of
the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative (where Cit-
ron is vice president). “In part because he’s
a very smart person and he’s a scholar. It’s
one thing when you’ve got people who are
quite obviously tech lobbyists or part of
the industry—that will only carry you so
far. It really does mean something when
you convince people in the scholarly com-
munity.” Goldman’s impact has been even
greater in the media. He has for years been
journalists’ go-to source on all things Sec-
tion 230. He’s a reporter’s dream: ency-
clopedically knowledgeable, articulate,
personable, and easy to get on the phone.
But Goldman is not only Section 230’s
most up-to-speed observer; he may also
be its biggest fan. When reporters call him
for an expert quote, they get a very particu-
“BETTER THAN lar perspective—one capably summarized
THE in the title of his 2019 paper, “Why Section
230 Is Better Than the First Amendment.”
FIRST AMENDMENT” In Goldman’s view, the rise of platforms
featuring user-generated content has been
an incredible boon both to free speech and
to America’s economic prosperity. The
YOU MIGHT THINK, GIVEN as Congress debated amending the law to #MeToo movement; the more than $2 tril-
the facts of some of these Section 230 cases, carve out an exception for lawsuits based lion combined market cap of Facebook and
that the law would have become rather on sex-trafficking allegations. This was Alphabet; blogs, customer reviews, online
controversial. In fact, within the world of also around the time when Ted Cruz, cru- marketplaces: We enjoy all of this thanks
internet lawyers and academics that would sading against the alleged scourge of anti- to Section 230, Goldman argues, and any
usually debate such things, and certainly conservative bias in Silicon Valley, started reduction in the immunity the law provides
within the tech industry, Section 230 was insisting falsely that Section 230 required could cause the entire fortress to crum-
for years considered “a kind of sacred social media platforms to maintain a “neu- ble. No domain of user-generated content
cow—an untouchable protection of near- tral public forum.” The law had entered the would be safe. If the law were repealed,
constitutional status,” writes Danielle Citron, zeitgeist, or at least a small corner of it. But he recently told the Committee to Protect
a law professor at the University of Virginia. as journalists started writing about Section Journalists, “comments sections for news-
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, 230, we tended to describe it in the same papers would easily go.”
for example, calls Section 230 “the most reverent tones that Citron encountered at Other guardians of 230 sound even more
important law protecting internet speech.” the 2008 conference. “Lawmakers Don’t apocalyptic notes when the law comes up
So does Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. Grasp the Sacred Tech Law They Want to for debate. After a group of Democratic
Citron, who won a MacArthur Fellow- Gut,” read a wired headline in 2018. senators proposed a bill to limit the law’s
ship in 2019, recalls giving a talk at a 2008 One man who has had an outsize effect protections in early February, Mike Mas-
conference in which she proposed amend- on the way Section 230 is treated in public nick, founder of the venerable policy blog
ing Section 230. She was just starting her discussion is Eric Goldman, a professor at TechDirt, wrote that the changes could
career as an academic, and a well-known Santa Clara University School of Law, where force him to shut down not just the com-
older professor approached her afterward. he codirects the High Tech Law Institute. ments section but his entire website. Sec-
“Danielle, really happy to meet you, but He is also a prolific blogger, keeping seem- tion 230 coauthor Ron Wyden, now a US
you basically want to jail communists,” she ingly exhaustive tabs on the latest devel- senator, said the bill would “devastate
recalls him saying. “Your challenging Sec- opments in internet law, including rulings every part of the open internet.”
tion 230 is like stabbing the First Amend- involving Section 230. Goldman has been The stakes for online discourse, these
ment in the heart.” writing about this area for so long that the arguments suggest, simply couldn’t be
Discussions about Section 230 began Stratton Oakmont ruling, which Section 230 higher. You may be horrified by situations
to creep beyond the esoteric boundaries was created to overturn, cites a paper he like the Armslist case or The Dirty, or any
of internet-law conferences in late 2017, published in 1993 while still in law school. number of cases we don’t have room to talk

4 1
about in which victims of harassment, bul- com company: Just as you can’t sue AT&T
lying, and revenge porn have been unable when someone impersonates you over the
to force internet platforms to take action. phone, the teenager’s parents couldn’t hold
But would you be willing to trade every- Prodigy liable for someone spoofing their
thing you love about the online world to son over email.
try to address those problems by reform- It didn’t rule that a company like Prod-
ing Section 230? igy could never be held liable for some-
These apocalyptic arguments are only thing involving user-generated content.
powerful, however, if they’re true. So let’s But, the court said, “if circumstances could
ask the question: What would the world be imagined in which an ISP would be lia-
look like if Section 230 had never been ble for consequences that flow from the
passed? opening of false accounts, they do not pres-
ent themselves here.”
The Lunney ruling is like a peek into an
alternate timeline in which courts did what
courts are expected to do: apply familiar
principles of the law to new situations
and changing circumstances. This process
would not have been perfect; we’ve already
seen how judges can screw things up. But
in the long run, there’s no reason to think
the legal system couldn’t have adapted tort
law to the digital world.
Companies that perform infrastructure-
like functions, like today’s Cloudflare or
Amazon Web Services, or that provide neu-
tral communication technology, like email,
almost certainly wouldn’t have had to worry
about what kind of behavior their clients
allowed. As in Lunney, traditional standards
of liability and causation would have pro-
tected them. (You can’t sue Xerox for sell-
A LT E R N AT E H I S T O RY ing a copier to someone who sends you a
blackmail letter; you can’t sue Comcast for
providing Wi-Fi to the hacker who drained
your bank account.) Meanwhile, the courts
gradually would have developed a more
ONE THING'S FOR SURE: In fact, another New York case against richly textured body of law around the legal
Today’s social media giants could not exist Prodigy that was initiated before Section responsibilities of the platforms that directly
under the version of libel law applied in 230 was passed offers an example of what host user-generated content.
the Stratton Oakmont case. That deci- this judicial path might have looked like. Maybe, as Lunney suggests, the common
sion, remember, said that a platform In Lunney v. Prodigy Services Co., a father law would have developed something sim-
assumes the same liability as a publisher if sued Prodigy after someone opened up fake ilar to the immunity provided by Section
it engages in any moderation whatsoever. accounts impersonating his teenage son, 230. But courts also could have come up
But it’s almost unimaginable that one New then used those accounts to post vulgar with rules to take into account the trou-
York trial judge’s ruling, which sparked an comments on a bulletin board and send a bling scenarios: bad Samaritan websites
immediate backlash, would have become threatening email in the son’s name. Prod- that intentionally, rather than passively, host
the law of the land. Recall that defamation igy had already deactivated the accounts, illegal or defamatory content; platforms that
falls under common law, which is developed but the family wanted monetary damages. refuse to take down libel, threats, or revenge
by judges over time as they apply prece- Midway through the case, Congress passed porn, even after being notified. They might
dents to new situations. For torts involv- Section 230, and Prodigy asked for the new have realized that the publisher-distributor
ing user-generated content, Section 230 law to be applied retroactively. But the Court binary doesn’t capture social media plat-
aborted that process before it could begin. If of Appeals of New York, the state’s highest forms and might have crafted new stan-
the law hadn’t passed, judges in other juris- court, said this was unnecessary. It had no dards to fit the new medium. Section 230,
dictions would have gotten the opportunity problem applying common law principles with its broad, absolute language, prevented
to craft more reasonable applications of tort to find that Prodigy wasn’t liable. The court this timeline from unfolding.
law to the new digital world. ruled that Prodigy was analogous to a tele- This hypothetical scenario isn’t even all

0
that hypothetical. The United States is the about reforming tech laws in the first place
only country with a Section 230, but it’s is that “the internet as we know it” often
not the only country with both a common seems optimized less for users than for the
law tradition and the internet. Canada, for shareholders of the largest corporations. It’s too late to
example, has nothing analogous to Section
230. Its libel law, meanwhile, is more pro-
Section 230’s defenders may be right that
without it, Facebook and Google would
scrap Section 230
plaintiff, because it doesn’t have the strong not be the world-devouring behemoths completely.
protections of the First Amendment. Despite
all that, user-generated content is alive and
they are today. If the law had developed
slowly, if they faced potential liability for
The question is
well north of the border. News sites have user behavior, the impossibility of careful how to change the
comments sections; ecommerce sites dis-
play user reviews. Neutral providers of host-
moderation at scale might have kept them
from growing as quickly as they did and
law to address its
ing or cloud storage are not hauled into spreading as far. What would we have got- worst side effects
court for selling their services to bad guys.
Yes, websites with user-generated content
ten in their place? Perhaps smaller, more
differentiated platforms, an ecosystem in
without placing
do have to be more careful. Jeff Elgie, the which more conversations took place within internet companies
founder of Village Media, a network of local
news sites in Canada, told me that the possi-
intentional communities rather than in a
public square full of billions of people, many
under impossible
bility of getting sued was one thing the com- of them behaving like lunatics. legal burdens.
pany had to take into account when building
its comments system, which combines AI
with human moderation. But it’s hardly the
extinction-level threat that Section 230 die-
hards warn about. (Elgie said that, overall,
only around 5 to 10 percent of comments
get blocked on Village Media sites, and only
a small subset of those are for legal reasons.)
It is simply not true that “the internet” relies
on Section 230 for its continued existence.
In response to this observation, staunch
supporters of Section 230 generally pivot.
They concede that other countries have
blogs and comments sections but point
out that these countries haven’t produced
user-generated content juggernauts like
Facebook and YouTube. (Set aside China,
which has a totally different legal system, a
closed internet, and private companies that
are more obedient to the state.) Section 230
might not be responsible for the internet’s “REASONABLE STEPS”
literal existence, they say, but it is necessary
for the internet as we know it.
There are a few ways to respond to this.
One is that it’s hard to prove Section 230 is AS I SAID, THAT' S AN even bipartisan, legislation. And they vary
the reason for the success of American social alternate timeline. From the vantage point according to what problem the authors are
media giants. The internet was invented in of 2021, it’s probably too late to ditch Sec- most interested in solving.
the US, which gave its tech sector an enor- tion 230 and let the courts figure it all out The most sweeping piece of legislation
mous head start. America’s biggest tech suc- from scratch. Only Congress can scrape introduced to date, a bill called the Safe
cesses include corporate titans whose core away the decades of judicial interpreta- Tech Act, reads like a point-by-point rebut-
businesses don’t depend on user-generated tions that have attached like barnacles to tal to some of the most controversial judi-
content: Microsoft, Apple, Amazon. Tesla the original legislation. The question is how cial applications of Section 230. It would
didn’t become the world’s most valuable car to change the law to address its worst side remove protections from specific categories
company because of Section 230. effects without placing internet companies of civil claims, including wrongful death
Another response is that even if Face- under impossible legal burdens. (like in the Armslist case), cyberstalking and
book does owe its wild success to Sec- There are a number of ideas on the harassment (as in an infamous New York
tion 230, perhaps that’s not a reason to table, ranging in concreteness from op-eds stalking case involving the gay dating app
pop champagne. The reason we’re talking to white papers to proposed, sometimes Grindr), and civil rights law violations (as

4 3
when Craigslist was sued unsuccessfully “Airbnb is a travel company. Google is an Congress trying to enumerate every sit-
for hosting discriminatory housing ads). advertising company,” says Matt Stoller, the uation in which Section 230 should and
The bill, proposed by Democratic senators organization’s director of research. “You shouldn’t apply, judges would have flexi-
Mark Warner, Mazie Hirono, and Amy Klo- should be regulated not based on whether bility to develop different standards for dif-
buchar, also swaps the word “speech” in for you have a website but based on how you ferent contexts—including technologies and
“information,” to try to refocus the law’s make money. If you make your money on harms that don’t even exist yet.
protection on self-expression rather than travel, you should be regulated like a travel The dominant platforms, like Facebook,
commercial transactions. When I asked company. If you make your money from Twitter, and YouTube, already have rela-
Warner if all the carve-outs are a round- advertising, you should be regulated like tively robust policies and procedures for
about way to limit Section 230 immu- a publisher.” dealing with some types of illegal mate-
nity to defamation cases, he laughed and This proposal would pull mega-platforms rial. But a “reasonable steps” requirement
said, “Let the record reflect that Senator like Facebook and Google out from under would finally force them to take seriously
Warner made no comment in response.” Section 230’s shield almost entirely, on the some categories of harm that they currently
(This proposed bill, incidentally, is the one theory that companies that profit by sell- get a free pass on, most notably defama-
that Wyden said would “devastate every ing ads against user content should have to tion. Under the law now, platforms have no
part of the open internet.”) bear the full cost of policing that content, incentive to do anything about defamatory
Another school of thought holds that or else change their business model. This posts—and so they generally don’t. Face-
the solution is to apply Section 230’s pro- change, the report argues, “would also help book’s voluminous, searchable community
tections only to hands-off conduits for restore a level playing field for publishers, standards never mention the words def-
communication—things like newsletter dis- who are legally responsible for the content amation or libel. Twitter’s do, but only to
tribution services and blogging platforms, they publish.” absolve itself of liability. (YouTube at least
or nonprofit-owned sites like Wikipedia or A more modest approach would be to has a mechanism for reporting defamatory
the Internet Archive that provide a neutral grant immunity only to those compa- videos, to its credit.) This poses a particularly
architecture for users to develop content. nies that can show they’re not abusing it. acute problem if the defamer is anonymous
Once a platform starts to curate, amplify, Danielle Citron has proposed amending and can’t be tracked down: The victim can’t
or monetize user-generated content, how- Section 230 to make its protections from hold anyone responsible. If Section 230 were
ever, some form of liability would kick in. liability conditional on whether a platform revised to impose a standard of care, these
One of the more aggressive suggestions “takes reasonable steps to address unlawful companies would have to build in some kind
along these lines comes from the Ameri- uses of its service that clearly create seri- of process to deal with defamatory posts or
can Economic Liberties Project, an anti- ous harm to others.” This would elegantly else risk being sued themselves.
monopoly think tank. In a statement to the solve the bad Samaritan problem: A site that Now, a reality check: This would not
Federal Communications Commission, the actively encourages people to humiliate magically fix social media. Fake news, big-
organization has proposed limiting Section women with revenge porn, smear enemies, otry, and your cousin Steve’s idiotic Face-
230’s protections to companies that make or make illegal business transactions would book memes will generally continue to be
their money by literally “selling access to not be able to satisfy the test. protected by the First Amendment, as they
the internet or a computer server.” Citron’s proposal would also open a should be. And the big platforms deserve
window for the common law to step back credit for making some progress on con-
in, striking a middle ground between full tent moderation after years of withering
repeal and the automatic immunity com- criticism. If they had to worry about defa-
If the big platforms panies currently enjoy. To qualify for safe
harbor, a defendant would have to con-
mation suits, however, they would finally
have a strong incentive to act on at least
had to worry about vince a judge that it has a reasonable the most extreme cases of disinformation
defamation suits, approach to dealing with a given category
of harm—even if it has screwed up in a par-
before they become national scandals. A
lot of the wildest conspiracy theories that
they would finally ticular instance. (That’s important, because infect American politics are straightfor-
have a strong as Section 230’s supporters rightly point
out, no system of online content moder-
wardly defamatory. QAnon posts have
accused specific individuals of killing and
incentive to act ation at scale will ever be perfect.) Each abusing children, for example. The Stop the
on some of the defendant, each category of harm, would
be judged on its own terms.
Steal movement that ultimately led to vio-
lence at the US Capitol on January 6 was,
most extreme cases “A reasonable approach to sexual-privacy you’ll recall, built on specific lies about
of disinformation invasions would be different from a reason-
able approach to spam or fraud,” Citron and
Dominion and Smartmatic, ones that have
landed a few cable networks in court. But
before they Franks have written. “A blog with a few post- because of Section 230, these individuals
become national ings a day and a handful of commenters is
in a different position than a social network
and companies can’t sue Facebook, Twit-
ter, or YouTube for allowing, and perhaps
scandals. with millions of postings a day.” Instead of helping, the bullshit to spread.

0 4 5
 Foundation declares “did far more to pro-
tect billionaires and entrenched incumbent
firms than it did to protect the little guy.”
Federal food safety rules, fuel economy
standards, campaign spending limits: Pick
a regulation and a free-market advocate
can explain why it kills competition and
protects the already powerful.
In fact, a lot of the most passionate pro-
230 discourse makes more sense when
you recognize it as a species of garden-va-
riety libertarianism—a worldview that, to
caricature it only slightly, sees any govern-
ment regulation as a presumptive assault
on both economic efficiency and individ-
ual freedom, which in this account are
pretty much the same thing to begin with.
That spirit animated Section 230 when it
was written, and it animates defenses of
the law today. So you have Cathy Gellis,
a lawyer who blogs ardently for TechDirt
in support of Section 230’s immunity, fil-
CHANGE IS GOOD ing an amicus brief in the Armslist case
insisting that a post listing a gun for sale is
speech that must be protected. And Gold-
man in The Wall Street Journal last year
arguing that Amazon should not be held
liable for dangerous products sold by ven-
REFORMING SECTION 230 standard of care would make litigation dors on its platform. It should “probably”
faces all the familiar obstacles to getting more complicated. The company would try harder to protect customers, he wrote,
anything done in Congress: partisanship, have to submit and gather evidence. That but “any steps the company takes should
bureaucratic inertia, and, of course, fero- would require more attention and, most be voluntary.”
cious lobbying from an industry that is importantly, money. In this version of laissez-faire capitalism,
quite happy with the status quo, thank you Perhaps the biggest companies could the best regulation is self-regulation. But
very much. handle this, Goldman said, but the bur- today, that idea no longer receives as much
The biggest barrier, however, may be den would crush smaller upstarts. Tweak- automatic deference as it did in the ’90s.
the philosophical resistance to change— ing Section 230 this way, in other words, It is, in fact, the precise idea the techlash
any change—among Section 230’s intel- would actually benefit monopolies while is lashing against.
lectual and legal defenders, a group that stifling competition and innovation. Faced Government intervention can and does
cuts across party lines and can’t be written with a deluge of defamation lawsuits, the go wrong, of course. Big corporations do
off as industry shills. large platforms would err on the side of indeed try to hijack the legislative pro-
You might think, for example, that some- caution and become horribly censorious. cess and capture regulators. In March,
thing like Citron’s proposed “reasonable- Smaller platforms or would-be challengers for example, Mark Zuckerberg publicly
ness” standard would be widely seen as would meanwhile be obliterated by expen- declared his support for reforming Sec-
a commonsense, compromise reform. sive legal assaults. As Ron Wyden, Section tion 230—with a set of proposed changes
In fact, even this suggestion draws fierce 230’s coauthor, puts it, Citron’s proposal, that, while vague, seem designed to allow
opposition. Eric Goldman, the influential though “thoughtful,” would “inevitably Facebook to leave its existing policies more
law professor, told me it would be tanta- benefit Facebook, Google and Amazon, or less untouched.
mount to repealing the entire law. which have the size and legal muscle to So no, it’s not surprising that an $800
“A key part of 230’s secret sauce comes ride out any lawsuits.” billion company facing potential new
in its procedural advantages,” he said. The thing about this argument is that regulations would try to turn them to its
Today, the law doesn’t just help compa- a version of it gets trotted out to oppose advantage. But to acknowledge that fact
nies defeat lawsuits; it helps them win absolutely any form of proposed corpo- is not to make an argument for inaction. If
fast, at the earliest possible step, without rate regulation. It was made against the anything, it suggests that the danger lies in
having to rack up legal bills on discovery, post-recession Dodd-Frank Wall Street doing too little, not too much. Because for
depositions, and pretrial filings. Forcing Reform and Consumer Protection Act of all the hypothetical little guys who might
defendants to prove that they meet some 2010, which the conservative Heritage get harmed according to some economic

0
theory, there are plenty of real, known really hard to win a defamation action.
little guys who are being abused by the Companies have many ways to toss out
status quo. That includes not just individu-
als like Kenneth Zeran and Ellen Batzel but
weak cases besides Section 230. Remem-
ber the Stratton Oakmont case? The one Imagine:
whole segments of society. Discrimina- where Prodigy was being sued for $200 Companies
tion in housing and job ads denies oppor-
tunities to Black people. Cyberstalking
million for hosting a message that called
an investment firm’s leaders a bunch of could get
and harassment disproportionately drive liars and crooks? In the end, Prodigy never rich by
women and members of other vulnerable
groups off of social media. This is why sup-
paid Stratton Oakmont a cent. After losing
the preliminary ruling, Prodigy announced making the
porters of the Safe Tech Act include orga- that it would raise a truth defense. (It ain’t internet
nizations like the NAACP Legal Defense
and Educational Fund, Muslim Advocates,
defamation if it’s true.) A few months later,
Stratton Oakmont agreed to drop the case less toxic.
Color of Change, and the National His- in exchange for an apology. In hindsight,
panic Media Coalition. this is anything but shocking: Stratton Oak-
OK, but what about the economic little mont is the company featured in The Wolf
guy? Here, too, the case for doom and of Wall Street. Its founders, Jordan Belfort
gloom is thin. The George Mason economist and Daniel Porush, were sent to prison in
Alex Tabarrok, himself a prominent libertar- 1999 for securities fraud and money laun-
ian, has found, to his surprise, that federal dering. They really were liars and crooks.
regulation cannot be blamed for reduced Sometimes companies make money
startup growth or job creation. One reason by doing bad things. Other times, compa-
could be that while regulations and liabil- nies merely allow bad things to happen,
ity rules impose costs on some parts of the because it’s cheaper than preventing them.
economy, they also open opportunities and Either way, the basic premise of tort law
spur innovation elsewhere. Magic happens is that when someone is responsible for
when money’s on the line. a bad thing, they should have to pay, or
There is already a small market for at least make it stop. You can think of this
third-party moderation software: In Ire- as a form of justice: forcing wrongdoers
land, a startup called CaliberAI, founded to make their victims whole. Or you can
by a father-son pair of former journalists, think of it as a form of deterrence, in which
has developed an AI system for flagging the point is to prevent bad behavior. But
potentially defamatory comments. (The civil liability, especially corporate liabil-
posts apparently tend to have certain lin- ity, can also be understood in economic
guistic hallmarks.) In the US, companies terms: a question of who should have to
like Sentropy and Sendbird offer moder- pay the costs that certain activities impose
ation tools for site administrators. If Sec- on everyone else.
tion 230 were rolled back, you can bet that The reality of Section 230 is that it has
venture capital would rush into that sec- allowed digital platforms to externalize
tor. That would, in turn, help social media some of the costs of their business mod-
startups scale up without having to invent els. Other industries generally don’t get to
their own systems for dealing with ille- do this. Chemical companies can be sued if
gal user content from scratch. Sid Suri, they poison the local water supply. Retail-
Sendbird’s head of marketing, predicts ers can be sued for putting defective items
that companies like his would shift engi- on their shelves. Working to prevent these
neers to spend more time on moderation outcomes costs corporations money. But
products—because that’s where more of it doesn’t stop them from making Teflon
the money would be. “An ecosystem will pans or stocking Tostitos. Once the creation
always develop around the need,” he says. myths and apocalyptic talk are set aside,
Imagine: companies getting rich by mak- it’s clear that the online world needn’t be
ing the internet less toxic. so completely different—and that an intel-
It’s important to keep in mind that, even ligent reform of Section 230 won’t stop dig-
without Section 230’s blanket immunity, ital platforms from creating the internet.
companies would not be forced to go to
trial every time someone gets Mad On
the Internet. It’s already incredibly diffi- GILAD EDELMAN (@GiladEdelman) covers tech and politics for wired .

cult to sue corporations in America. It’s

4 7
0 4 8
 Secret codes.
Private
investigators.
Betrayal.
How one
couple built a
device to fix
the notoriously
broken ice cream
machines at
McDonald’s—
and how the
fast-food giant
froze them out.
by Andy Greenberg

Photographs:
GABRIELA HASBUN

Lettering:
LEANDRO ASSIS
Of all the mysteries and
injustices of the McDonald’s
ice cream machine, the one
that Jeremy O’Sullivan insists
you understand first is its
secret passcode. .

Press the cone icon on the screen of the Taylor C602 digital ice profit from the repairs. “It’s a huge money maker to have a customer
cream machine, he explains, then tap the buttons that show a snow- that’s purposefully, intentionally blind and unable to make very fun-
flake and a milkshake to set the digits on the screen to 5, then 2, then damental changes to their own equipment,” O’Sullivan says. And
3, then 1. After that precise series of no fewer than 16 button presses, McDonald’s presides over all of it, he says, insisting on loyalty to its
a menu magically unlocks. Only with this cheat code can you access longtime supplier. (Resist the McDonald’s monarchy on decisions
the machine’s vital signs: everything from the viscosity setting for its like equipment and the corporation can end a restaurant’s lease
milk and sugar ingredients to the temperature of the glycol flowing on the literal ground beneath it, which McDonald’s owns under its
through its heating element to the meanings of its many sphinxlike franchise agreement.)
error messages. “No one at McDonald’s or Taylor will explain why So two years ago, after their own strange and painful travails with
there’s a secret, undisclosed menu,” O’Sullivan wrote in one of the Taylor’s devices, 34-year-old O’Sullivan and his partner, 33-year-
first, cryptic text messages I received from him earlier this year. old Melissa Nelson, began selling a gadget about the size of a small
As O’Sullivan says, this menu isn’t documented in any owner’s paperback book, which they call Kytch. Install it inside your Taylor
manual for the Taylor digital ice cream machines that are standard ice cream machine and connect it to your Wi-Fi, and it essentially
equipment in more than 13,000 McDonald’s restaurants across hacks your hostile dairy extrusion appliance and offers access to
the US and tens of thousands more worldwide. And this opaque its forbidden secrets. Kytch acts as a surveillance bug inside the
user-unfriendliness is far from the only problem with the machines, machine, intercepting and eavesdropping on communications
which have gained a reputation for being absurdly fickle and frag- between its components and sending them to a far friendlier user
ile. Thanks to a multitude of questionable engineering decisions, interface than the one Taylor intended. The device not only displays
they’re so often out of order in McDonald’s restaurants around the all of the machine’s hidden internal data but logs it over time and
world that they’ve become a full-blown social media meme. (Take even suggests troubleshooting solutions, all via the web or an app.
a moment now to search Twitter for “broken McDonald’s ice cream The result, once McDonald’s and Taylor became aware of Kytch’s
machine” and witness thousands of voices crying out in despair.) early success, has been a two-year-long cold war—one that is now
But after years of studying this complex machine and its many turning hot. Kytch’s creators believe that Taylor even hired private
ways of failing, O’Sullivan remains most outraged at this notion: detectives to obtain their devices. Taylor recently unveiled its own
that the food-equipment giant Taylor sells the McFlurry-squirting competing internet-connected monitoring product. And McDonald’s
devices to McDonald’s restaurant owners for about $18,000 each, has gone so far as to send emails to its franchisees, warning them
and yet it keeps the machines’ inner workings secret from them. that Kytch devices breach a Taylor machine’s “confidential informa-
What’s more, Taylor maintains a network of approved distributors tion” and can even cause “serious human injury.”
that charge franchisees thousands of dollars a year for pricey main- Having endured the efforts of McDonald’s and Taylor to decimate
tenance contracts, with technicians on call to come and tap that their business over the five months since those emails, O’Sullivan
secret passcode into the devices sitting on their counters. and his cofounder are now on the counterattack. The Kytch
The secret menu reveals a business model that goes beyond couple tells wired they’re planning to file a lawsuit against some
a right-to-repair issue, O’Sullivan argues. It represents, as he McDonald’s franchisees who they believe are colluding with Taylor
describes it, nothing short of a milkshake shakedown: Sell fran- by handing over their Kytch devices to the ice cream machine giant
chisees a complicated and fragile machine. Prevent them from and allowing them to be reverse-engineered—a violation of the
figuring out why it constantly breaks. Take a cut of the distributors’ franchisees’ agreement with Kytch. (Taylor denies obtaining Kytch

0 5 0
Taylor’s notoriously fragile ice cream machines are used by most of the 13,000-plus McDonald’s restaurants in the US.
devices but doesn’t deny trying to gain posses-
sion of one or that a Taylor distributor did ulti-
mately access it.) The lawsuit will likely be only
the first salvo from Kytch in a mounting, messy
legal battle against both Taylor and McDonald’s.
But in his initial messages to me, O’Sullivan
mentioned none of the details of this escalat-
ing conflict. Instead, with Hamburglar-like
slyness, he dared me to pull on a loose thread
that he suggested could unravel a vast con-
spiracy. “I think you could blow this story open
by just asking a simple, very reasonable ques-
tion,” O’Sullivan’s first text messages concluded:
“What’s the real purpose of this hidden menu?”

The standard Taylor digital ice cream

machine in a McDonald’s kitchen is “like an
Italian sports car,” as a franchisee who uses the
Twitter nom de guerre McD Truth described it
to me.
When the hundreds of highly engineered
components in Taylor’s C602 are working in
concert, the machine’s performance is a smooth
display of efficiency and power. Like other ice
cream machines, it takes in liquid ingredients
through a hopper and then freezes them in a
spinning barrel, pulling tiny sheets of the fro-
zen mixture off the surface of the barrel’s cold
metal with scraper blades, mixing it repeatedly
to create the smallest possible ice crystals, and
then pushing it through a nozzle into an await-
ing cup or cone.
But what makes the machine special is that it
has two hoppers and two barrels, each working
independently with precise settings, to produce Just as O’Sullivan and Nelson’s ice-cream-machine-hacking gadget
both milkshakes and soft serve simultane- began to gain customers, McDonald’s warned its franchisees
ously. It uses a pump, rather than gravity like that Kytch breached the machines’ “confidential information.”

many other machines, to accelerate the flow

of McFlurries and fudge sundaes. McD Truth
describes selling 10 ice cream cones a minute
during peak sales periods, an impossible feat
with other machines.
And while other ice cream machines have to be disassembled much better designed. But given that its replacement parts can take a
and cleaned daily—and any leftover contents discarded—the week to arrive from Italy, far fewer restaurants buy it.)
Taylor machines at McDonald’s use a daily “heat treatment” pro- Every two weeks, all of Taylor’s precisely engineered compo-
cess designed to jack up their contents’ temperature to 151 degrees nents have to be disassembled and sanitized. Some pieces have to
Fahrenheit, pasteurize them for a minimum of 30 minutes, and then be carefully lubricated. The machine’s parts include no fewer than
refreeze them again in a once-a-night cycle, a modern marvel of two dozen rubber and plastic O-rings of different sizes. Leave a
hygiene and cost savings. single one out and the pump can fail or liquid ingredients can leak
In keeping with McD Truth’s Italian sports car analogy, these out of the machine. The tech manager for one McDonald’s franchi-
machines are also temperamental, fragile, and overengineered. “They see told me he has reassembled Taylor’s ice cream machines more
work great as long as everything is 100 percent perfect,” McD Truth than a hundred times, and had them work on the first try at most 10
writes. “If something isn’t 100 percent, it will cause the machine to of those times. “They’re very, very, very finicky,” he says.
fail.” (McDonald’s franchisees are also allowed to use an actual Italian The machine’s automated nightly pasteurization process, rather
machine, sold by Bologna-based Carpigiani, that McD Truth says is than making life easier for restaurant managers, has become their

0 5 2
 where they might ultimately be run by a bored
teenager whose fast-food career is measured
in weeks. So perhaps it’s no surprise that many
McDonald’s restaurants’ ice cream machines
seem to be as often broken as not. The website
McBroken.com, which uses a bot to automat-
ically attempt to place an online order for ice
cream at every McDonald’s in America every
20 to 30 minutes and measure the results,
reveals that at any given time over the past three
months, somewhere between 5 and 16 percent
of all US McDonald’s stores are unable to sell ice
cream. On a typical bad day as I reported this
piece, that included one out of five McDonald’s
stores in Los Angeles, Washington, DC, and
Philadelphia, one out of four in San Francisco,
and three out of 10 in New York City.
Plenty of companies have fought against their
own customers’ right-to-repair movements,
from John Deere’s efforts to prevent farmers
from accessing their own tractors’ software to
Apple’s efforts to limit who can fix an iPhone.
But few of those companies’ products need to
be repaired quite so often as McDonald’s ice
cream machines. When wired reached out to
McDonald’s for this story, the company didn’t
even attempt to defend the machines’ sham-
bolic performance. “We understand it’s frus-
trating for customers when they come to
McDonald’s for a frozen treat and our shake
machines are down—and we’re committed to
doing better,” a spokesperson wrote.
On social media, meanwhile, the McDonald’s
ice cream meme has come to represent every-
thing disappointing about modern technol-
ogy, capitalism, and the human condition. In
2017, when three women in Florida attacked
a McDonald’s employee after learning the ice
cream machine was down, many people on
Twitter sided with the attackers. McDonald’s
itself tweeted from its official account last
August: “We have a joke about our soft serve
machine but we’re worried it won’t work,” a self-
own that received nearly 29,000 likes.
biggest albatross: Leave the machine with a bit too much or too On a recent evening in March, I attempted to tally the number of
little ingredient mixture in its hoppers, accidentally turn it off or people joking on Twitter that they were going to spend their $1,400
unplug it at the wrong moment, or fall victim to myriad other triv- Covid stimulus payment to fix their local McDonald’s ice cream
ial errors or acts of God, and the four-hour pasteurization process machine. I lost count at 200.
fails and offers a generic, inscrutable error message—meaning that
the machine won’t work until the entire four hours of heating and
freezing repeats, often in the middle of peak ice cream sales hours. A decade ago, however, the ice cream headaches at McDonald’s
The result can be hundreds of dollars in sales immediately lost. hadn’t yet become the subject of social media notoriety. In 2011,
(Especially, O’Sullivan explains, during “shamrock season,” when when O’Sullivan and Nelson first decided to gamble their careers on
McDonald’s offers a St. Patrick’s Day–themed mint-green milkshake the frozen confection business, they had to learn about the quirks
that boosts shake sales as much as 10-fold. “Shamrock season is a of the soft-serve industry the hard way.
big fucking deal,” O’Sullivan emphasizes.) The two met at Bucknell University and started dating in the late
Taylor sells a machine with these technical demands to businesses 2000s, then went off to careers in accounting—Nelson at Deloitte,
O’Sullivan at Ernst & Young—which they
both found deeply dull. After a few years,
they began brainstorming business plans
of their own and zeroed in on the frozen
yogurt craze that was dotting the country
with Pinkberry and Red Mango outlets.
Here was a business that was essen-
tially constructed around a bunch of ice
cream machines—largely Taylor ice cream
machines, ones without the pasteurization
step that would kill the yogurt culture—and
yet froyo vendors were paying for hundreds
of square feet of real estate and human
employees, by far their biggest monthly
expenses. The froyo industry seemed ripe
for disruptive automation.
So Nelson and O’Sullivan, then based in
the Washington, DC, area, began to develop
what they called the Frobot: a bulky enclo-
sure built like a closet around a Taylor fro-
zen yogurt machine, with its own TV-sized
touchscreen interface and credit card
reader. In other words, they set out to con-
dense the frozen yogurt store into a sin-
gle autonomous appliance. They hoped to
install their Frobot in public spaces, turn it
on, and let it extrude revenue. (Toppings
remained an unsolved problem. But they’re
the lowest-margin part of the business any-
way, O’Sullivan confides.)
It took them three years to build their first
Frobot prototype with a Taylor machine
bought from Craigslist. After an initial,
uneventful trial run at a West Virginia med-
ical school cafeteria, Nelson and O’Sullivan
set up the Frobot in a Washington, DC,
coworking space, and the towering cabinet
proved a moderate success. The couple took
the leap, quit their jobs, and moved to San Francisco to work on their
startup full-time, putting a next-gen Frobot prototype in an events
space next to the Palace of Fine Arts, where they say it began gener-
ating as much as $500 in sales a day.
“It was a real aha
But now that Frobot was out in the world, its inventors had a moment,” Nelson
problem: They wanted their machine to be fully autonomous, to
convert tangy dairy ingredients into money with minimal human
says. “Why are these
intervention. Regulations set by the National Sanitation Foundation features that are
required them to periodically monitor the temperature of the
product to make sure their machine wasn’t selling putrid refrozen
so important hidden
yogurt. That temperature data was locked up in the Taylor machine behind this menu
inside Frobot, where they couldn’t access it. They were intrigued,
however, to see that the technician they called out to service their
that most people
machine could summon up exactly the figures they needed—by don’t know about?”
entering the 5-2-3-1 secret code that appeared nowhere in their
owner’s manual.
Around the same time, O’Sullivan reached out to a contact at the
Shenzhen-based Hax hardware accelerator, who invited the startup
to come work on Frobot at the Hax workshop. They’d receive both
 O’Sullivan and Nelson’s first product was Frobot, a fully automated froyo dispenser built around a Taylor ice cream
machine. But the Taylor machine was so prone to breakdowns that they gave up and focused on a device to fix its flaws.

a $100,000 investment and the consultation of Hax’s advisers, fited from web 2.0,” Huang recalls telling them. “It’s a product every-
including Andrew “bunnie” Huang, the legendary hardware guru one eats, and the machine that makes it is just in the dark ages.”
who first hacked the Xbox 20 years ago. O’Sullivan and Nelson saw O’Sullivan and his engineer nonetheless forged ahead, and by the
that offer of technical expertise as their chance to get over their end of their time in China, four months later, they’d built the device
temperature-monitoring hurdle: Could Huang and his fellow hack- that would become Kytch—a hack to bring their Frobots in line with
ers help them pull out the machine’s data and send it in real time US sanitation requirements.
to a remote interface? O’Sullivan and Nelson did all of this, they’re careful to note, with
O’Sullivan and one of Frobot’s contract engineers moved to Taylor’s knowledge and, in some cases, enthusiastic participa-
Shenzhen in late 2016. They got to work in Hax’s warehouse tion. A top Taylor exec had attended their prototype launch party
space, above one of the city’s famous electronics markets, trying in Washington, DC. Later, the company offered them 10 of its ice
to reverse-engineer Taylor’s ice cream machines to understand cream machines on consignment to work on and adapt. The com-
and intercept their internal communications. Huang remembers pany even shipped an ice cream machine to Shenzhen for them.
O’Sullivan being more business-minded than technical, but he was After all, Frobot didn’t represent a competitor to Taylor so much as
impressed with the clarity of the Frobot-filled future he imagined. “It a promising new source of sales.
was pretty clear from the beginning they had a vision,” Huang says. At one point while in Shenzhen, O’Sullivan wrote to an executive
Huang also remembers pointing out to O’Sullivan that the Taylor at Taylor to ask for advice about a technical question they were stuck
machine they were using to build their Frobot was, like a lot of food on. The executive wrote back that “if you want to tap into the con-
industry appliances, technology that hadn’t fundamentally changed trols or sniff data packets it will need to be without the assistance of
in 50 years. “It hasn’t benefited from Moore’s law, hasn’t even bene- Taylor at this time due to our current security policies.”

0 5 5
 That response may not have been entirely friendly. But O’Sullivan different product, one that offered a solution to
read it to mean: We won’t help you hack our machines, but we know the very problem killing their current business.
what you’re doing, and we’re not asking you to stop. In other words, For about the next year , they honed the little
as he puts it, “carte blanche.” computer component in the Frobot that eaves-
dropped on the Taylor ice cream machines’
data. They built features that allowed visibil-
In 2017, Frobots began to catch on. Tesla installed two in a fac- ity into and control of the machine’s variables
tory cafeteria. Levi’s Stadium, home of the San Francisco 49ers, (including some that automatically bypassed
installed another six, and the football team’s owners invested in the 5-2-3-1 code to access its service menu), a
Nelson and O’Sullivan’s company. Taylor, meanwhile, remained software interface for diagnosing and trouble-
amicable enough toward Frobot that it invited Nelson and O’Sullivan shooting the machine’s many hiccups, and a
to present it at Taylor’s booths at food industry trade shows. sleek case for the Raspberry Pi minicomputer
At those trade shows, just as their Frobots were getting their first that powered it.
field tests, Nelson and O’Sullivan say they began to hear whispers In the spring of 2019, they relaunched their
from Taylor customers that echoed bunnie Huang’s warning about company, this time as Kytch. (In a sign of the
Taylor’s engineering: The machine inside of Frobot, despite its indus- grandeur of their ambitions, they chose a name
try dominance, was simply very hard to keep running. that suggested the idea of an entire connected
In their eight Frobots across the San Francisco Bay Area, they kitchen, leaving open the possibility of prod-
began to see the same mysterious failures and error messages ucts that went well beyond Taylor’s ice cream
that plagued those Taylor customers. They’d find that their Taylor machines.) When Kytch launched in April of
machines were throwing up error messages saying the froyo mix that year, Nelson drove around the Bay Area
was too cold. Or too hot. Or too viscous. Soon they found themselves looking for any restaurant that used a Taylor
constantly driving out to Levi’s Stadium to help befuddled staff machine, pitching them on LinkedIn, and offer-
troubleshoot and rebuild the Taylor machines inside their Frobots. ing a six-month free trial before a $10-a-month
As their problems continued, they went so far as to mount Nest subscription kicked in. After finding a few ini-
security cams in the Frobot cabinets to capture video of what might tial customers at Burger Kings and Super Duper
be going wrong inside. On one occasion, they watched as the ingre- Burgers, they finally began to tap into their real
dient mixture inside a Frobot at the Tesla factory bubbled up and target market, the people who represented
out of the Taylor machine, catastrophically hemorrhaging liquid the biggest single collection of Taylor machine
yogurt into the surrounding cabinet. Seven hours later, they saw owners and who used the most complex, most
a Tesla food-service worker casually open the cabinet, leave the often borked digital version of Taylor’s product:
sticky mess untouched, and quietly replace a missing plastic paddle McDonald’s franchisees.
component he’d forgotten when cleaning the machine. In the fall of 2019, as they began to penetrate
Their business, it soon became clear, was the very opposite of the baroque inner workings of the McDonald’s
automation: No one at Levi’s Stadium or Tesla seemed capable of world, O’Sullivan and Nelson were stunned to
setting up or maintaining a Frobot without the constant hands-on learn that most restaurant owners had never
help of Frobot’s founders. And the problem was the Taylor machine accessed or even heard of the service menu
at Frobot’s core. “Holy shit,” O’Sullivan recalls realizing. “These that unlocked variables like the temperature
machines just suck.” of the machine’s hoppers or the glycol used for
It began to dawn on O’Sullivan and Nelson that they would need its ultra-fussy pasteurization process. “It was a
to pivot. And they had already unwittingly built the prototype for a real aha moment,” Nelson says. “Why are these
features that are so important hidden
behind this menu that most people

McDonald’s owners were don’t know about?”

Meanwhile, many McDonald’s owners were paying thou-
paying thousands of dollars sands of dollars a month to Taylor distributors in service fees,

a month to Taylor distributors often for making simple changes locked behind that menu.
So they added a feature to Kytch called Kytch Assist that
in service fees, often for could automatically detect some of the machine’s common

making simple changes pitfalls as they happened, and tweak those hidden variables
to prevent some of the mishaps before they occurred.
locked behind that menu. One franchisee, who asked that wired not identify him
for fear of retribution from McDonald’s, told me that the ice
cream machine at one of his restaurants had been down
practically every week due to a mysterious failure during
its pasteurization cycle. He’d scrutinized the assembly of
the machine again and again, to no avail.

0 5 6
 As word of mouth spread through McDonald’s fran-
chisees, Kytch’s sales began to double every quarter.
O’Sullivan and Nelson hired a salesperson as their third
full-time employee. By the fall of 2020, more than 500
of their devices had infiltrated the innards of Taylor’s ice
cream machines around the world, and based on their
trial subscriptions they projected 500 more by the end
of the year. But the ice cream empire they were taking
on was about to strike back.

Within two days of Kytch’s late April 2019 launch,

O’Sullivan and Nelson noticed that an executive they
knew at Taylor had placed an order for a device. So
they wrote to their Taylor contact, politely asking what
Taylor’s stance was on their product and what the com-
pany intended to do with it. When they got no response,
they canceled the order and refunded Taylor’s money.
A couple of months later, they saw another strange
order, this time from someone at Taylor’s outside law
firm, Brinks Gilson. Recognizing the firm’s name, they
canceled that sale too. Over the next months, the suspi-
cious buying attempts continued. While most franchi-
sees would order Kytch sent to their restaurant, these
supposed customers were asking for them to be sent to
home addresses.
Checking those addresses against public records,
Nelson and O’Sullivan matched one with someone listed
on LinkedIn as an employee of Marksmen, an investiga-
tion firm specializing in intellectual property cases. They
came to suspect that Taylor had hired private investiga-
tors, who were using fake names to try to get their hands
on the device that was hacking their machines.
Around the same time, Taylor sent Nelson and
O’Sullivan a cease-and-desist letter telling them to
stop using Taylor’s branding in their displays at food
Kytch’s device, built around a Raspberry Pi
minicomputer, is designed to be installed industry trade shows. The days of their Frobot friend-
inside a Taylor ice cream machine. ship had officially ended. But as Kytch hit its stride over
the months that followed, the strange orders stopped
and there were no more signs of animosity from Taylor.
In February 2020, the partners were excited to see an
email from Tyler Gamble, head of the equipment team
for the National Supply Leadership Council, a flagship
Installing Kytch revealed almost instantly that an overeager group of McDonald’s franchisees. Gamble was hearing “lots of buzz”
employee was putting too much mix in one of the machine’s hop- around Kytch, his email read, and he wanted to look into using it in
pers. Today the franchisee wakes up every morning at 5:30, picks his own 10 restaurants.
up his phone, and confirms that all his machines have passed their On a phone call, O’Sullivan remembers Gamble being friendly
treacherous heat treatment. Another franchisee’s technician told me and interested in Kytch, but also warning them about the device’s
that, despite Kytch nearly doubling its prices over the past two years ability to bypass Taylor’s secret menu code, which he described as
and adding a $250 activation fee, it still saves the franchisee “easily a risky move that might incur Taylor’s wrath. Nelson and O’Sullivan
thousands of dollars a month.” were nonetheless tantalized by the possibility that Gamble could
McD Truth confides that Kytch still rarely manages to prevent ice use his enormous sway with other franchisees to promote their
cream machines from breaking. But without Kytch, restaurants’ har- product. They gave him four Kytch devices to test.
ried staff don’t even notify owners nine out of 10 times when the ice That October, at the annual conference of the National Owners
cream machine is down. Now, at the very least, owners get an email Association, the biggest trade group of McDonald’s franchisees,
alert with a diagnosis of the problem. “That is the luxury,” McD Truth Gamble gave a speech pledging to fix the audience’s ice cream woes.
writes. “Kytch is a very good device.” “On the shake machine, I want to assure you guys that I will not feel
 All these components of a Taylor ice cream machine have to be disassembled, cleaned,
and lubricated every two weeks. A single one out of place can cause failure. The machines are
“very, very, very finicky,” one McDonald’s franchisee’s tech manager says.

my tenure as your equipment lead has been a success unless we find remove the Kytch device from all machines and discontinue use.”
a way to ensure that McDonald’s is no longer the butt of the joke,” he The very next day, McDonald’s sent another note to franchisees
said, with an earnest smile. “We won’t stop until we get this right.” announcing a new machine called Taylor Shake Sundae Connectivity
Then he gave Kytch a free, minute-long infomercial. “I’ve had that would essentially duplicate many of Kytch’s features. The note
the opportunity to have their devices in my restaurants over the last ended with a repeat of its boldfaced warning not to use Kytch.
several months,” Gamble told the crowd. “This is not a McDonald’s- As McDonald’s restaurant owners canceled hundreds of subscrip-
approved piece of equipment, and the suppliers are not yet fully on tions, trials, and commitments to install Kytch over the next months,
board with it,” Gamble continued. “But it’s my job to bring you feed- the startup’s sales projections evaporated. Finding new customers
back on equipment and best thinking as it relates to the industry, and became impossible. Their sole, flabbergasted salesperson quit.
I really think that this device can reduce complexity in your restau- When wired reached out to McDonald’s and Taylor, both compa-
rants, make the lives of your teams easier, and help drive cash flow.” nies reiterated the warning that Kytch presents dangers to employees
O’Sullivan and Nelson, watching the speech on a webcast from and technicians. “The operation and maintenance of the specialized
their sales booth at the conference, were elated. They hardly regis- equipment developed by Taylor and used to produce soft-serve and
tered the “not McDonald’s-approved” and “suppliers not on board” shake products can be complicated,” reads a statement from a Taylor
parts of Gamble’s comments. It seemed they were about to sell a spokesperson. “The checks and balances embedded in the controls
Kytch to practically every McDonald’s in America. of our equipment are meant to protect the operator and service tech-
Then, on November 2, the ax fell. Kytch’s shocked salesperson nician when they interact with the machine.”
forwarded Nelson and O’Sullivan an email that McDonald’s had As for Taylor’s Kytch-like internet-connected machine, the com-
apparently sent to every franchisee. It warned first that installing pany states flatly that “Taylor has not imitated Kytch’s device and
Kytch voided Taylor machines’ warranties—a familiar threat from would have no desire to do so.” It argues that the connected device
corporations fighting right-to-repair battles with their customers has been in the works for years, along with a different connected
and repairers. Then it went on to state that Kytch “allows complete kitchen device called Open Kitchen, sold by another subsidiary of
access to all of the equipment’s controller and confidential data” Taylor’s parent company, Middleby.
(data belonging to Taylor and McDonald’s, not the restaurant owner), None of the franchisees who spoke to wired had ever even heard
that it “creates a potential very serious safety risk for the crew or of the Open Kitchen device. Nor had they seen a Taylor Shake Sundae
technician attempting to clean or repair the machine,” and that it Connectivity machine in the wild. McDonald’s says that only a few
could cause “serious human injury.” The email included a final warn- dozen restaurants have been testing the new models since October.
ing in boldface italics: “McDonald’s strongly recommends that you All the franchisees agreed, too, that the notion that Kytch could
cause harm to humans was far-fetched, if not impossible: Kytch’s planning is based on their claims that Gamble and likely other
commands don’t generally affect moving parts, and Taylor’s own Kytch users violated their contracts with Kytch when they allegedly
manual tells anyone servicing or disassembling the device to unplug let Taylor analyze their devices, in an effort to curry favor with
it before working on it. McDonald’s and its corporate allies.
McD Truth argues that those Kytch-killing emails stem from But Kytch’s cofounders make no secret that their legal threats
Taylor’s goal of building its own Kytch-like system and the don’t end with those defendants. They say they intend to pursue
long-standing relationship McDonald’s has with Taylor—which, their case as far as it leads, all the way up the McDonald’s food chain.
after all, makes not only its ice cream machines but also the grills “We’re very confident that we’ll learn everything we need to know in
used to cook its mainstay burger products. McDonald’s may have discovery,” O’Sullivan says forebodingly, “to hold every guilty party
also been spooked by Kytch’s ability to collect proprietary data on fully accountable.”
ice cream sales, McD Truth speculates. Taylor counters that it “does not possess, and has never possessed,
Another franchisee called the slapdown “suspicious” and “very a Kytch device” and “has no knowledge of anyone logging onto a
heavy-handed.” In more than 25 years of owning McDonald’s restau- Kytch device.” But it notes that “our Tennessee distributor reported
rants, he told me, “I’ve never seen anything like this.” to Taylor that its servicer removed a Kytch device from a customer
location in order to service our product.” Taylor distributor TFG
didn’t respond to repeated requests for comment, and Tyler Gamble
In the aftermath of the bomb that McDonald’s and Taylor dropped didn’t answer wired ’s questions. But in an emailed response he
on their startup, Nelson and O’Sullivan came to believe that some- described himself as “Kytch’s biggest advocate” and argued that he
how the two companies must have gotten their hands on a Kytch had supported the startup both publicly and privately. “Weird they
device—at least to test it, if not to copy it. But Kytch had required its would sue someone that has been in their corner and is a paying
customers to sign a contract that forbade them from sharing their customer,” Gamble wrote, “but the facts will come out.”
devices. Who had handed it over? Regardless of how the legal conflict unfolds, Kytch’s old techni-
Nelson and O’Sullivan began sleuthing. Tyler Gamble, they cal adviser and investor bunnie Huang argues that the efforts by
recalled, had told them six months earlier that one of his Taylor McDonald’s and Taylor to crush this tiny startup represent a form
machines equipped with a Kytch device had suffered a broken of validation. “When big guys come along and start thumping their
compressor. When they saw Gamble at the National Owners chests around you, that’s sort of a recognition that you’re a threat
Association conference, he’d mentioned that the machine was to the alpha male,” says Huang, whose Hax accelerator still owns
still in the shop—which struck them as strange. Compressors don’t a small investment in the company. “It shows there was a demand
take six months to fix. for Kytch and it had an opportunity to disrupt things. But when that
After their business cratered, O’Sullivan and Nelson began look- happens, if the big guys can’t keep up or they want to take the idea,
ing up the logins on Kytch’s website and saw that one of the user then sometimes it’s easier for them to just sort of bury the body.”
profiles associated with Gamble’s machine in the shop had been As for Nelson and O’Sullivan, they have no illusions that their
deleted a couple of months after the fateful McDonald’s email in legal efforts will ultimately protect Kytch from the efforts by
November. That deleted user was named Matt Wilson. Was Wilson McDonald’s and Taylor to destroy it. In one of our final conversa-
one of Gamble’s employees? They began to check his locations tions, O’Sullivan admitted that he saw this very article as perhaps
based on the IP addresses of the networks where he’d logged in, a postmortem on his company after it had been successfully mur-
and found IPs from Arkansas, Tennessee, and Louisiana. dered by the fast-food superpowers. “You’re kind of writing our
When they placed those points on a map, none of them appeared obituary,” O’Sullivan told me.
at Tyler Gamble’s restaurants. All the pinpoints were instead on top At times, he seemed to acknowledge the admittedly low stakes
of facilities owned by TFG—a Taylor ice cream machine distributor. of Kytch’s story, the cutthroat battles his tiny startup has fought
Nelson and O’Sullivan had been on friendly terms with TFG exec- and continues to fight over such a trivial thing as a fast-food ice
utives back in their Frobot days. So they began digging through their cream cone. “We want the world to know this because it’s such a ...
old contacts there. They found a business card for Blaine Martin, one I mean, this is about ice cream!” O’Sullivan said at one point with
of TFG’s owners, which he had given them with a handshake at a exasperation.
trade show. To their shock, his cell phone number had been used to But at other moments, he described Kytch’s story as a kind of
create the “Matt Wilson” Kytch account. David and Goliath right-to-repair struggle, or even in grander terms:
A Taylor distributor, it seemed, had obtained their device. And, a valiant effort to fix a very noncritical but ubiquitous piece of the
contrary to the broken compressor story, they came to suspect it world’s infrastructure. An effort that had been defeated not by the
had been handed over by none other than friendly Tyler Gamble. flaws of that machine but by the people controlling it—some of
Even as Gamble was praising Kytch on the conference stage in whom would rather it remain broken.
October, Nelson and O’Sullivan now allege, he had also been help- “There’s the ice cream machine,” O’Sullivan says darkly, “and then
ing Taylor as it engineered their company’s downfall—the coldest there’s the machine behind the machine.” They haven’t found the
betrayal of all. secret code to crack that one yet.

ANDY GREENBERG covers security, privacy, and information free-

Revenge, Nelson and O’Sullivan now hope, is a dish best served— dom. He’s the author of Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the
well, through a long and elaborate legal process. The lawsuit they’re Hunt for the Kremlin’s Most Dangerous Hackers.

0 5 9
 NO ONE
C O U L D D E N Y T H AT

TIMOTHY
WA S S I C K .

He was a sweet-natured 10-year-old one day and

a disturbed, obsessive stranger the next.

But when doctors can’t agree on the cause of an illness,

BY

SEEMA YASMIN

PHOTOGRAPHS BY JENNA GARRETT

0 6 0
what happens to the patient?
 The boy’s doctors were stumped. Concussions can
cause mood changes, but not like this. They ran test
after test, searching for a diagnosis. When Timothy’s
parents wrestled him into the car to take him to var-
ious clinics—for brain scans, blood draws, immuno-
logical workups—he told them he wanted to jump out
onto the highway. “You’re not my mom,” he yelled at
Rita. In March, he started leaving the house and running
barefoot through the surrounding fields. His parents
placed a go bag near each door with bottles of water and
a walkie-talkie. When Timothy ran, his father would slip
Timothy was 10 years old when his personality on sneakers, grab a bag, and run alongside him until he
changed overnight. A concussion during a family ski tired. Eventually, the couple hired a military veteran to
trip in December 2016 left him unsteady on his feet, keep an eye on their son day and night.
but that was just the first sign something was wrong. The tests kept coming back normal. Neurologists
The strawberry-blond boy who played on the chess referred him to psychiatrists. Psychiatrists referred
team and looked forward to Mandarin lessons became him back to neurologists. Pediatricians recommended
withdrawn, obsessive, and suicidal. Back home in Marin therapists. Therapists suggested psychologists. In late
County, California, he said “bad men” had surrounded March, with Timothy in a deepening depression, his par-
his family’s house and were trying to get him. ents and uncle made a plan: They would rent a car with
Timothy’s parents, Rita and John, took him out of no back doors, sedate him with Benadryl, and drive him
school while doctors tried to decipher what was going overnight to the child psychiatric unit at UCLA.
on inside his head. (The family members’ names have Timothy stayed there for more than three weeks. The
been changed to protect their privacy.) Rita suggested doctors prescribed Lexapro, an antidepressant, and
that her son take up knitting to fill the time. Once he steadily upped the dose. But the boy only became more
started, he couldn’t stop. Compulsive thoughts haunted agitated. It was as if an alien had crept into his body
him, and he refused to wear many of his clothes, fearing and stolen the real Timothy, Rita recalls. His intrusive
they were contaminated. thoughts suggested a diagnosis of obsessive-compulsive

0 6 2
disorder; his mood changes pointed to a depressive dis- lescence: When doctors disagree on the cause of an ill-
order. Rita says one psychiatrist told her, “To be honest, ness, where does that leave the patient?
he doesn’t really fit any category we have.”
While Timothy was undergoing treatment at UCLA,

U
Rita spoke with a mom in the San Francisco Bay Area
who worked with a support group for athletes who p until the 1980s, psychiatry in the United
suffer concussion and brain injury. She told Rita that States was still a quasi-Freudian undertak-
when a child’s concussion symptoms don’t go away, ing. If a child developed tics or obsessive-
it’s sometimes because there is an underlying infection compulsive disorder, the thinking went, it
that disrupts the brain. Rita searched online and found must be because her parents were emotion-
a diagnosis that seemed to describe the full range of her ally frigid or had punished her during toilet
son’s symptoms: pediatric acute-onset neuropsychiatric training. (Mothers were also blamed for a
syndrome, or PANS. One possible trigger of the disease, number of other conditions, including autism.) So when
she read, is infection with Streptococcus, the bacteria a pediatrician named Susan Swedo joined the National
that cause strep throat. Institute of Mental Health in 1986, she was delighted
Rita thought back to the winter. She couldn’t remem- to be part of a new vanguard. Her mentor there, Judith
ber Timothy coming down with a sore throat, but just Rapoport, was challenging the prevailing theories and
before the ski trip she had noticed that the skin around seeking a medical explanation for OCD.
his anus looked a little red. She had put it down to A few old papers in the literature had piqued
irritation. But strep, she read, can cause rashes like Rapoport’s interest. They concerned a childhood ill-
that. She asked a neurologist at UCLA whether PANS ness that causes tics in the face, hands, and feet. Patients
might be making her son sick. The reply shocked her. jerk their limbs in a strange and uncontrollable dance;
“That’s a made-up disease,” she recalls the doctor their tongues flicker; their fingers seem to hammer the
saying. According to Rita, the UCLA team wanted to keys of an invisible piano. Thomas Sydenham, the 17th-
keep Timothy in the hospital and continue giving him century English physician who first described the con-
antidepressants. She and John had watched their son dition, called it Saint Vitus’ dance, after the dancing
become less and less like the boy they knew. They made manias that emerged in continental Europe during the
a plan to get him home. Black Death, when large groups of people, sometimes
A couple of days after returning to Marin, the fam- thousands at a time, would cavort in the streets until
ily met with a chiropractor in San Francisco who spe- they collapsed from exhaustion. He attributed the cause
cialized in the treatment of neurological disorders. to “some humor falling on the nerves.”
Chiropractors are not medical doctors, but by this point Not until the 1930s did scientists discover that
Rita and John were ready to speak with any professional children suffering Saint Vitus’ dance, now known as
who might be able to help. Rita mentioned the rash, Sydenham’s chorea, had something else in common:
and the chiropractor seemed to confirm her research: Their blood contained antibodies for Streptococcus.
Timothy, he said, had a subset of PANS called pediat- Left untreated, the pathogen can cause acute rheumatic
ric autoimmune neuropsychiatric disorder associated fever, a serious autoimmune disease of the heart, joints,
with streptococcal infections, or PANDAS. If the bacte- and skin. Sydenham’s chorea, it turned out, is the neuro-
ria were still there, circulating in the boy’s bloodstream, logical manifestation of acute rheumatic fever.
the first step toward alleviating his symptoms was to Scientists have yet to work out exactly how one pro-
knock them out. gresses to the other, but the theory goes something like
The chiropractor arranged for a doctor he worked this: Pathogens and antibodies in the bloodstream gen-
with to write a prescription for azithromycin, an anti- erally have a tough time getting past the tight-knit bar-
biotic used to treat strep. Rita had her doubts. She’d told rier of cells and blood vessels that protect the brain. But
other doctors about the skin irritation; why hadn’t any of some Streptococcus seem to carry a secret key. They are
them diagnosed Timothy with PANDAS? But the risks to believed to secrete toxins that open up the blood-brain
her son were low, and she figured they might as well try. barrier, allowing antibodies in. The antibodies try to
Two days later, the boy was starting to become him- grab hold of the distinctive sugar-protein clumps on the
self again. The bad men had disappeared. He wanted to exterior of the bacteria—but, in a stroke of evolutionary
go out for pizza and read his favorite sci-fi books. For bad luck, some brain cells wear similar clumps. Unable
the first time in almost five months, Rita and John rec- to differentiate friend from foe, the antibodies attack
ognized their son. The relief was immense, but it was both. The worst damage occurs in the basal ganglia, the
tinged with uncertainty: If this disease was “made up,” part of the brain that controls habits and movement.
why was Timothy getting better? Would the improve- Rapoport had found that children with OCD showed
ment in his condition last? And the biggest question, the increased activity in the basal ganglia. And when she
one that would dog the family well into Timothy’s ado- looked at the case reports of patients with Sydenham’s
 She told Swedo that her other son—the patient’s elder

“
brother—had Tourette’s syndrome. She’d noticed that
his tics were worse when he had a sore throat, so she’d
started taking swabs and culturing them in her lab. Sure
enough, they sprouted colonies of Streptococcus. The
same was true of the younger brother; his strep infec-

We’ve been studying tions and OCD symptoms waxed and waned in tandem.
This raised a new possibility: You might not need a full-
blown infection to trigger mental illness. Something as
the disease for eight minor as a sore throat could be enough.
By 1996, Swedo and her colleagues were feeling con-
years, and we fident enough of the strep-tic link to give the condi-
tion a name: PANDAS. Then, in 1998, they published

never promise a cure. a paper in The American Journal of Psychiatry laying

”
out the diagnostic criteria, with the goal of developing
“treatment and prevention strategies.” They spent the
following year working on those strategies, publishing
case studies on various therapies—immunoglobulin,
plasmapheresis, and prophylactic doses of antibiotics
to reduce the severity of strep-triggered neuropsychi-
atric symptoms. (Swedo, who retired from the NIMH
in 2019, is still active in PANDAS work. She did not
respond to numerous interview requests.)
Some of Swedo’s fellow researchers were skeptical.
Stanford Shulman, an expert on Streptococcus who
edited the journal Pediatric Annals for 14 years, called
chorea, she discovered that many had developed the evidence for PANDAS “tenuous at best.” More than
compulsive thoughts and obsessive behaviors weeks two decades later, he finds the data even less convinc-
before their tics began. Was it possible that this auto- ing. For one thing, he notes, strep infection is extremely
immune disease, an illness of the body, was triggering common in children, accounting for as many as a third
illness in the brain? If you could cure one, would the of all sore throats—but you don’t see droves of kids with
other disappear? abnormal behavior crowding emergency departments
Over the next few years, Swedo and her colleagues and psychiatric clinics in late winter and early spring.
treated a number of children with Sydenham’s chorea What’s more, strep antibody levels can remain high for
and OCD. Most had already tried the standard neuro- months after the infection is gone. “That creates a huge
psychiatric medications, but the drugs didn’t seem to background noise,” Shulman says. “If a child develops
work. The next step was to see whether the standard PANDAS symptoms and by reflex some doctor draws
autoimmune treatments had any effect. Some of the anti-strep antibodies, they’ll say, ‘Oh look, there’s ele-
kids received intravenous immunoglobulin, which can vated titers!’”
help reboot the immune system with a mixture of anti- As Shulman and others see it, that doesn’t consti-
bodies from healthy donors. Some underwent plasma- tute enough evidence to prescribe the child antibiot-
pheresis, a process in which all of the patient’s blood ics, much less intensive immunological treatments.
plasma is run through a filter. They seemed to improve. “If a child has psychiatric symptoms, that child needs
Around this time, the first case of what would come to psychiatric care,” he says. Conventional psychiatric
be known as PANDAS was referred to Swedo’s lab. The drugs and talk therapy are backed up by decades of
patient, an 8-year-old boy, had begun flailing his arms robust scientific evidence. This is not true, he notes,
seemingly at random, and he had trouble speaking. of the typical PANDAS therapies. The long-term use
His doctor suspected Sydenham’s chorea, but Swedo of antibiotics especially worries him, because it could
and her colleagues ruled it out. To them, his symptoms contribute to the problem of drug-resistant bacteria.
looked like OCD. The flailing wasn’t a physical tic; it was This is still the mainstream position: The most recent
a mental compulsion. The boy was trying to fling bad edition of the Red Book, an exhaustive guide to child-
germs away. He hoarded pieces of paper in a brown bag hood infectious diseases published every three years
and refused to swallow his saliva because he feared it by the American Academy of Pediatrics, goes out of
was contaminated. its way to recommend that children with PANS and
Swedo has credited the boy’s mother, a medi- PANDAS symptoms not be given an extended course
cal technologist, for drawing the crucial connection. of antibiotics.
JENNIFER FRANKOVICH,
A PEDIATRIC
RHEUMATOLOGIST, In 2010, after more than a decade of controversy,
STARTED OUT AS Swedo convened a group of colleagues to revisit the
A PANS SKEPTIC.
PANDAS diagnostic criteria. Physicians, patients, and
their families had been “left confused” by the scien-
tific shouting match, they later wrote in the journal
Pediatrics & Therapeutics. Sick kids weren’t getting
treated; researchers were having a tough time design-
ing and funding rigorous studies. The group’s solution
was to scrap the taboo letters in the PANDAS acronym,
the ones standing in for “autoimmune” and “associ-
ated with streptococcal infections.” Rather than nam-
ing the condition for its supposed cause, they’d name
it for its presentation in patients.
The clearest and most common characteristic
was rapid onset: A kid could be himself one day and
a stranger the next. That became the centerpiece of
the new name, PANS, or pediatric acute-onset neuro-

0 6 5
 MARGO THIENEMANN,
A CHILD AND ADOLESCENT
psychiatric syndrome. The diagnosis was meant to be PSYCHIATRIST, COUNSELS
broad, allowing for a range of possible triggers—infec- PANS PATIENTS
AND THEIR PARENTS ON
tion with strep or another microbe, environmental fac-
HOW TO NAVIGATE
tors, metabolic disorders. PANDAS, in other words, THE MEDICAL SYSTEM.
wasn’t going away; it was just becoming a subset of the
larger syndrome.
Swedo and her colleagues included a handful of chil-
dren’s drawings in their paper, made before, during, and
after the kids got sick. One triptych is especially mov-
ing, a course of illness in miniature. The “before” image
shows a dark-haired woman in a teal cocktail dress, her
cat-eye makeup meticulously rendered. The “during”
image, drawn in the midst of a flare-up, feels addled by
comparison. There are no colors or recognizable fig-
ures, just squiggles and disembodied eyes. The “after”
image shows a girl in a red-striped shirt and sunglasses.
She’s standing beside the Eiffel Tower, smiling.

0 6 6
A
bout a week after his visit to the chiro- Swedo’s research. The pair treated the boy with ste-
practor in San Francisco, Timothy was sit- roids. His symptoms melted away. To Frankovich, this
ting in a clinic at Stanford’s Lucile Packard suggested a sobering possibility: Thousands of sick kids
Children’s Hospital telling a trio of board- around the country were being treated with psychiat-
certified doctors about his hellish ordeal. His ric medications while the underlying cause of their ill-
life had been turned upside down, he said, ness—inflammation—went unnoticed.
but a few days of antibiotics had made him Frankovich cobbled together an informal clinic with
feel himself again. By this point, he told me, he thought two psychiatrists. Starting in 2012, the trio worked
of physicians as “clueless.” He’d have won a gold medal overtime, tagging hours onto their already packed
in the “100-meter ditch-your-doctor dash,” he said. He schedules. They borrowed clinic space and a clinical
had been poked and prodded, his brain scanned, his coordinator from the rheumatology department and
mind trawled. The medical establishment had belittled called themselves the Neuro-Psychiatric-Immunology
his parents, and he felt he had been misdiagnosed and Clinic, a non-catchy mouthful of a name chosen delib-
mistreated. So he expected these doctors might dismiss erately to avoid attention. They didn’t want controversy,
him, too. Instead, the head of the clinic, a rheumatol- and they certainly didn’t want to put the names of con-
ogist named Jennifer Frankovich, promised that her tested illnesses in their clinic’s title. The hypotheses they
team would help. (Although Frankovich and I are both were testing placed them at the margins of their disci-
employed by Stanford, our work has never intersected.) plines and at odds with mainstream medicine.
Alongside Frankovich were Margo Thienemann, a Frankovich shared her research and patients’ sto-
child and adolescent psychiatrist, and Theresa Willett, a ries at small medical meetings around the country, in
pediatrician with a PhD in immunology. The three doc- hopes that more doctors might consider treating PANS
tors weren’t shocked by Timothy’s spiral into despair, and PANDAS. But as she spoke, some of her peers would
the sudden psychiatric symptoms and the personality stand up and walk out of the room. Others approached
change. They weren’t surprised that psychiatric medi- her afterward. “What are you doing, Jenny?” she recalls
cines made him feel worse and that antibiotics made one saying. “Why are you pushing this nonsense?”
him feel better, or that a multitude of doctors had not asked another. Word travels fast through the world of
been able to offer a single, conclusive diagnosis. This pediatric rheumatologists. At the time, there were fewer
was classic PANS, they said.

“
The doctors started Timothy on a new course of
antibiotics. (Frankovich says she’s always reluctant
to prescribe them, though some kids end up need-
ing antibiotics for years.) They also gave him anti-
inflammatories and intravenous steroids. Rita felt hope
for the first time that year.
Frankovich had started out as a PANS and PANDAS
skeptic. As a resident in Stanford’s pediatrics training
Doctors are used to
program in the early 2000s, she’d given a presentation
on an article that questioned the link between OCD, tics,
knowing the answer.
and strep. She fell in line with the mainstream think-
ing, which attributed the disorders to faulty wiring in
They want to be the ones
the brain. Then, in 2010, she met a 13-year-old girl who
to figure everything out.

”
suffered from the autoimmune disorder lupus. The girl
had endured years of treatment with steroids and other
harsh medications, including an immune-suppressing
drug called CellCept. The side effects had been horrible:
Her cheeks ballooned and her belly became distended.
Finally, though, she had gone into remission.
But when Frankovich began to taper the dose of
CellCept, the girl became depressed; she found it hard
to read, remember, and think. Frankovich upped the
CellCept and started intravenous steroids again. “Right
in front of my eyes, all those mental illness symptoms
melted away,” she says. The same thing happened with
a 10-year-old boy who had an inflammatory disease
of the spine. Overnight, he had developed OCD and
tics. Frankovich called his pediatrician and mentioned
 than 300 such doctors in the United States. Frankovich organized, and they can be very aggressive with try-
felt like an outcast. ing to get their child help.” (Several PANDAS skeptics
In 2014, a story about one of Frankovich’s patients declined to be interviewed for this story, saying they
made the pages of a local newspaper. Other doctors had feared online harassment.)
diagnosed the little girl with bipolar disorder, but the Jonathan Mink, a pediatric neurologist at the
Stanford team treated her for PANS, and she’d made a University of Rochester Medical Center, attributes the
dramatic recovery. The article, Frankovich says, marked heightened emotions to a mismatch between what fam-
“a very low point in my career and life.” It brought on ilies want—an answer, a treatment—and what medical
a renewed wave of criticism, which was bad enough. science is equipped to provide: “Some people come up
Even worse, Frankovich says, it gave hope to vastly to me and say, ‘I know you’re not a believer in PANDAS,’
more patients and families than she and her colleagues and I say, ‘It’s not about believing in PANDAS. I believe in
would ever be able to treat. “We got absolutely crushed the data, and right now the data on PANS and PANDAS
with phone calls and emails and people just showing is inconclusive.’” He adds, “The underlying hypothesis
up,” she recalls. “It was a nightmare.” But the article was is reasonable, but the data is very mixed. So how do we
also a turning point: Frankovich soon got an offer of approach things when we physicians are uncertain?”
support from the hospital’s chief operational officer. She Stanford Shulman, the early PANDAS critic, also
requested a clinic room and a half-time coordinator. stressed the need for better data. “Should all older adults
As the calls and emails kept coming, Frankovich’s take an aspirin once a day? Because that was dogma for
team would sift through thousands of medical records, a long, long time,” he says. “But then studies came along
looking for patients with the clearest-cut cases of in The New England Journal of Medicine, very large stud-
PANS. She estimates they were able to treat one in 10 ies demonstrating no benefit and potential side effects,
patients who applied, if that. They met families who so we do have to change our mind.” He adds, “If we’re
had sold their cars and refinanced their homes to pay proven wrong, and really proven wrong, then we have
for their children’s medical care. Many said, like Rita, to change our opinions, and that’s true for all medicine.”
that Frankovich’s clinic was the first place they felt hope. For the past several years, Frankovich has been trying
to raise money and recruit patients for a comprehen-
sive, long-term study of PANS, which would follow 600

D
children for as long as 12 years. “We need proper funds
octors have been proving other doctors to provide the kind of robust evidence that could end
wrong for millennia. Established credo has the controversy,” she says. “My colleagues have applied
been overturned many times, only to be for NIH grants to study PANS and PANDAS, and despite
replaced with new information and new their proven accomplishments they failed to get gov-
beliefs about science and medicine. In the ernment funding. So how do we provide the evidence
19th century, perhaps one in five British men that this is real?”
who were admitted to a mental hospital suf- There are PANS and PANDAS programs at a num-
fered what was then called general paresis of the insane, ber of respected academic institutions, including
a crippling condition that ended in delusions of gran- Dartmouth, Massachusetts General Hospital, and—as
deur, paralysis, and death. As the poet Kelley Swain of recently—UCLA. Most lack enough resources to study
writes in The Lancet, the Victorians considered it “a the thousands of children who walk through their doors.
disease of dissolution and disrepute,” more moral than Late last year, though, a wealthy couple donated $2.4
biological. We have a different name for the disease million to Frankovich’s clinic to fund the completion
now, neurosyphilis, and a treatment, penicillin. But in of a “biorepository.” For now, Frankovich is focused on
the decades it took for medical science to cross that stocking the biorepository with blood and tissue spec-
threshold, people were left to suffer in shame without imens; she is also collecting MRI and EEG scans and
proper treatment. sleep study data that might reveal the disease’s path-
Many PANS patients and their families feel stuck ways through the immune system.
on the wrong side of the threshold. “The system is not One concern Frankovich and Shulman share is that
there for them in the same way it is for other illnesses,” some practitioners try to capitalize on the medical and
Frankovich says. She points out that a child undergo- scientific uncertainty. They open up cash-only clin-
ing treatment for a brain tumor gets access to a spe- ics and dangle the promise of a cure. “They promote
cialized ward and a team of medical professionals and this idea that this is an easily fixed problem,” he says.
social workers. “But when a kid comes in with a mental “They find a sizable market, and they give therapies
health deterioration and their brain MRI is normal,” she that have never been demonstrated to be beneficial.
says, the support network “walks away from them.” The That’s dangerous.” At Stanford, Frankovich says, “we’ve
families become so desperate for treatment, Frankovich been studying the disease for eight years, and we never
adds, that “they can appear very dysfunctional and dis- promise a cure.”

0 6 8
 Timothy likens the fighting doctors to gods in a
Greek myth, doing battle on Olympus while the mor-
tals down on the ground try to survive. He believes
that the PANS treatments have worked for him and
that they could do the same for other patients. “I love
debate—I’m in the debate club—and I love science,”
he told me. “So give people the help they need and
keep debating.”
Timothy is 14 now. He plays drums in a rock band and
acts in school plays, but he still struggles to make sense
of his ordeal in the early months of 2017. “I’m seeking
absolution,” he says, a process that requires ongoing
talks with a therapist. He has been on antibiotics since
his diagnosis at age 10, although Frankovich has signif-
icant concerns about long-term antibiotic use and is
collaborating with a pediatric infectious disease spe-
cialist who is managing Timothy’s treatment. In the
winter of 2019, Timothy suffered a significant recur-
rence of symptoms, including obsessive thoughts about
contamination, which his doctors said were possibly
triggered by another strep infection. At that time, he
says, flare-ups of differing severity occurred as often
as once a month. Today, he and his parents consider
him in remission.
Likening doctors to gods, whether those gods are
beneficent or truculent, seems fitting for a profession
that rules over the bodies of the dying, the voiceless, and
the vulnerable. Margo Thienemann, the child and ado-
lescent psychiatrist at the Stanford clinic, teaches her
patients’ parents how to engage with the people who
choose this profession: Don’t put them on the defensive,
don’t appear aggressive or hostile, don’t lead with your
own diagnosis, don’t say the words PANS or PANDAS
when you first see a doctor, she tells them. “Doctors are
used to knowing the answer,” she says. “Doctors are
people who got all the good grades in school; they want
to be the ones to figure everything out. So if you go in
saying, ‘I’m telling you my child has this,’ then the doctor
TIMOTHY AND RITA NEAR
will feel like, who’s the doctor here?” She advises fami-
THE FAMILY’S HOME IN
lies to “stick to the symptoms, stick to the presentation.
MARIN COUNTY.
If the doctor can come up with the answer, then that’s
better for everyone.”
But while we wait for proof to possibly sway opinion,
children are in limbo, stuck between highly qualified
doctors who say these diseases are real and equally
qualified doctors who say they are made up. Timothy
gushes over Frankovich and the help she offered when
he was scared, wary, and sick. She’s a rare kind of god,
he says. “That god goes down and tries to help the
people. That god is extraordinary.”

SEEMA YASMIN (@DoctorYasmin) is a clinical

assistant professor of medicine at Stanford University,
director of the Stanford Health Communication
Initiative, and author of Viral BS: Medical Myths and
Why We Fall for Them.
Illustrations by
Mark Harris

A family-run
psychotherapy
startup grew
into a health
care giant.
Then a hacker
started posting
patients’
most intimate
secrets on the
internet. What
happened at
Vastaamo?
by William Ralston
on the morning of October 24, 2020, expecting what Finnish college students
call normi päivä, an ordinary day. It was a Saturday, and he’d slept in. The night
before, he had gone drinking by the beach with some friends. They’d sipped
cheap apple liqueur, listened to Billie Eilish on his boom box. Now Jere (pro-
nounced “yeh-reh”) needed to clear his head. He was supposed to spend this
gray fall day on campus, finishing a group physics project about solar energy.
The 22-year-old took a walk around the lake near his apartment outside Hel-
sinki. Then, feeling somewhat refreshed, he jumped on the bus.
The day went quickly. Jere caught up with his friends, many of whom he
hadn’t seen since the pandemic began. They chatted about their Christmas
plans, ordered pizzas from a favorite local spot, and knuckled down to work
in the cafeteria.
At around 4 pm, Jere checked Snapchat. An email notification popped up on
his screen. His hands began to shake. The subject line included his full name,
his social security number, and the name of a clinic where he’d gotten mental
health treatment as a teenager: Vastaamo. He didn’t recognize the sender, but
he knew what the email said before he opened it.
A few days earlier, Vastaamo had announced a catastrophic data breach. A
security flaw in the company’s IT systems had exposed its entire patient data-
base to the open internet—not just email addresses and social security num-
bers, but the actual written notes that therapists had taken. A group of hackers,
or one masquerading as many, had gotten hold of the data. The message in
Jere’s inbox was a ransom demand.
 “If we receive €200 worth of Bitcoin
within 24 hours, your information will be
permanently deleted from our servers,” the
email said in Finnish. If Jere missed the first
deadline, he’d have another 48 hours to fork
over €500, or about $600. After that, “your
information will be published for all to see.”
Jere had first gone to Vastaamo when he
was 16. He had dropped out of school and
begun to self-harm, he says, and was con-
suming “extreme amounts” of Jägermeister
each week. His girlfriend at the time insisted
he get help; she believed it was the only way
Jere would see his 18th birthday. as the state of Minnesota—it was the “McDonald’s of psychotherapy,” one Finn-
During his therapy sessions, Jere spoke ish journalist told me. And because of that, the attack on the company rocked
about his abusive parents—how they forced all of Finland. Around 30,000 people are believed to have received the ran-
him, when he was a young kid, to walk the som demand; some 25,000 reported it to the police. On October 29, a head-
nearly 4 miles home from school, or made line in the Helsinki Times read: “Vastaamo Hacking Could Turn Into Largest
him sleep out in the garden if he “was being Criminal Case in Finnish History.” That prediction seems to have come true.
a disappointment.” He talked about using If the scale of the attack was shocking, so was its cruelty. Not just because
marijuana, LSD, DMT. He said he’d orga- the records were so sensitive; not just because the attacker, or attackers,
nized an illegal rave and was selling drugs. singled out patients like wounded animals; but also because, out of all the
He said he’d thought about killing himself. countries on earth, Finland should have been among the best able to pre-
After each session, Jere’s therapist typed out vent such a breach. Along with neighboring Estonia, it is widely considered
his notes and uploaded them to Vastaamo’s a pioneer in digital health. Since the late 1990s, Finnish leaders have pur-
servers. “I was just being honest,” Jere says. sued the principle of “citizen-centered, seamless” care, backed up by invest-
He had “no idea” that they were backing the ments in technology infrastructure. Today, every Finnish citizen has access
information up digitally. to a highly secure service called Kanta, where they can browse their own
In the cafeteria, Jere grabbed his bag treatment records and order prescriptions. Their health providers can use
and told his friends he’d turn in his por- the system to coordinate care.
tion of the physics project the next day. On Vastaamo was a private company, but it seemed to operate in the same spirit
the bus ride home, he frantically texted his of tech-enabled ease and accessibility: You booked a therapist with a few clicks,
best friend to come over. Then his mother wait times were tolerable, and Finland’s Social Insurance Institution reimbursed
called; as the adult listed on his old account, a big chunk of the session fee (provided you had a diagnosed mental disor-
she’d received the ransom note too. She and der). The company was run by Ville Tapio, a 39-year-old coder and entrepre-
Jere were on good terms now, but if she got neur with sharp eyebrows, slicked-back brown hair, and a heavy jawline. He’d
involved she might learn what he’d said in cofounded the company with his parents. They pitched Vastaamo as a humble
his sessions. Then, he says, he’d probably family-run enterprise committed to improving the mental health of all Finns.
lose her from his life completely. He told For nearly a decade, the company went from success to success. Sure,
his mother not to worry. That afternoon, some questioned the purity of Tapio’s motives; Kristian Wahlbeck, director
he filed an online police report. of development at Finland’s oldest mental health nonprofit, says he was “a
Jere poured himself a shot of vodka, then bit frowned-upon” and “perceived as too business-minded.” And yes, there
two or three more. He found his vape pen were occasional stories about Vastaamo doing shady-seeming things, such as
and took a Xanax, prescribed to him years using Google ads to try to poach prospective patients from a university clinic,
earlier for anxiety. He’d stored a few pills as the newspaper Iltalehti reported. But people kept signing up. Tapio was so
in his bedroom drawer just in case, but he confident in what he’d created that he spoke about taking his model overseas.
never believed he’d need them again. He
passed out shortly after his friend arrived.
The next morning, Jere checked Twitter,
where he was both horrified and relieved to
learn that thousands of others had received
the same threat. “Had I been one of the only
people to get the mail, I would have been 0 7 3
more scared,” he says.
Vastaamo ran the largest network of pri-
vate mental-health providers in Finland. In
a country of just 5.5 million—about the same
 Before “the incident,” Tapio says, “Vastaamo produced a lot of social good.”
Now he is an ex-CEO and the company he founded is being sold for parts. “I’m
so sad to see all the work done and the future opportunities suddenly go to
waste,” he says. “The way it ended feels terrible, unnecessary, and unjustified.”

T
APIO GREW UP in a “peaceful and green” neighborhood in
northern Helsinki during a bad recession. His mother, Nina, was
a trauma psychotherapist, and his father, Perttu, a priest. His
grandparents gave him a used Commodore 64 when he was 10,
which led him to an interest in coding. Something in his brain
resonated with the logical challenge of it, he says. He also saw it
as a “tool to build something real.”
The obsession endured: In middle school Tapio coded a sta-
tistics system for his basketball team, and in high school he worked for the
Helsinki Education Department, showing teachers how to use their com-
puters. Rather than going to college, he set up an online shop selling com-
puter parts—his first business, funded with “a few tens of euros,” he says. A
couple of years later, at age 20, he joined a small management consultancy.
The idea for Vastaamo came to Tapio when he was working with the Finn-
ish Innovation Fund, a public foundation that invests in solutions to social
and environmental problems. The fund sent him on a survey of health care
systems in Western Europe. Being his mother’s son, he noticed that the Neth-
erlands and other countries seemed to do a better job of providing mental
health services than Finland did; the public system at home was known for
patchy coverage and long wait times. Ever the coder, he wondered whether
a web-based counseling service would help. It could sell vouchers to cities
and towns, which could distribute the vouchers for free to residents. People
could use the service anonymously. They wouldn’t have to worry about the
stigma of seeking care, and they’d have access anytime, anyplace.
In 2009, the Finnish Innovation Fund backed Tapio’s idea with an initial
grant of about $12,000. He and his parents used the money—along with more
than $13,000 of their own savings—to start Vastaamo, Finnish for “a place
where you get answers from.” Tapio registered the company as a social enter-
prise, meaning that the bulk of its profits would be poured back into its mis-
sion to improve mental health services. He would own around 60 percent, and
most of the remainder would belong to his parents. Perttu would serve as CEO. A Vastaamo
Clients could send a message to Vastaamo, and within 24 hours they’d get a clinic
personal response from a qualified therapist. (Wahlbeck, of the mental health location
in Espoo,
nonprofit, notes that such services aren’t regulated by the government.) But near where
counseling by internet “was not enough for customers,” Tapio says. Many of Jere lives.
them needed access to in-person therapy.
One way to meet that need was to grow Vastaamo into a network of brick-
and-mortar clinics. Tapio planned to digitize whatever he could, from book-
ings to invoices to medical records—everything but the appointment itself. The
idea was that independent therapists would join Vastaamo to avoid dealing
with their own administrative headaches. Freed by automation, they’d have
more time to spend with clients (and rack up billable hours).
To deliver on this vision, Vastaamo needed an electronic medical record
system, but Tapio didn’t like the options he found. Either the systems bristled
with irrelevant features or they were too tightly tailored to a different area of
medicine. The lack of good software, Tapio says, was one of the “main rea-
sons” nobody had done what Vastaamo was about to attempt.
Rather than use an existing system, the company designed its own. It
launched in late 2012, around the same time Vastaamo’s first in-person
clinic opened, in the Malmi district of Helsinki. Tapio wouldn’t go into
technical detail about the system, but of cybersecurity”: It didn’t anonymize the records. It didn’t even encrypt them.
in court documents he suggests it was The only thing protecting patients’ confessions and confidences were a cou-
browser-based and stored patients’ records ple of firewalls and a server login screen. Anyone with experience in the field,
on a MySQL server. More important for Vas- Koivukangas says, could’ve helped Vastaamo design a safer system.
taamo’s purposes, the interface was easy to At the time, though, fears of a breach were far from Tapio’s mind. The sum-
use. When therapists applied for a job at the mer after Vastaamo’s first clinic opened its doors, he took over as CEO and set
company, they heard all about how much the company on a path toward expansion.
it would quicken their work. In 2014 there was a change in the regulations around Vastaamo’s business.
But the slick exterior concealed deep The Finnish Parliament decided to split medical information systems into two
vulnerabilities. Mikael Koivukangas, head categories. Class A systems would connect with Kanta, the national health data
of R&D at a Finnish medtech firm called repository, so they’d need to meet strict security and interoperability standards.
Onesys Medical, points out that Vastaamo’s Anyone who planned to keep their patients’ records in long-term electronic
system violated one of the “first principles storage would have to use a Class A system.
Smaller organizations, the kind that kept vital records in manila envelopes and
filing cabinets, would be allowed to use Class B systems. These weren’t as tightly
regulated, in part because they wouldn’t make very interesting targets for a hacker.
Class B operators would simply self-certify to the government that their setup
met certain requirements. “The government” being, in this case, a single man—
0 7 5 Antti Härkönen—whose purview includes all 280 Class B systems in Finland.
The new law gave Vastaamo several years to adopt a Class A system. The
problem, Tapio says, is that the Finnish government hadn’t specified how psy-
chotherapy practices should format their data. Vastaamo could build a Class A
system and plug into Kanta, but there was “no way to stop, for example, gen-
eral practitioners at health care centers or occupational health physicians from
accessing” therapy records, he says.
Outi Lehtokari, Kanta’s head of services, pushes back against this claim.
“Tapio might have misunderstood how Kanta works,” she says. Patients can
choose to restrict access to their information.
In any event, on June 29, 2017, Vastaamo registered a Class B system. As
Tapio tells it, the company was eager to upgrade to Class A as soon as the gov-
ernment released formatting specs for psychotherapy. But that didn’t happen.
Instead, when the specs came out, Vastaamo kept on going with its Class B.
Tapio says that Finland’s “supervisory authorities” then signed off on the
system “numerous times” in the years ahead. Härkönen, who is one of those was a pretrial investigation for aggravated
authorities, says that to monitor all the Class B systems carefully would be fraud, breach of confidentiality, and bur-
“mission impossible” for him. He adds, however, that there should be more glary, but the prosecution could not estab-
“proactive inspections.” lish that Lind and Keskinen had used the
By 2018, Vastaamo was operating nearly 20 clinics and employing around database for financial gain.
200 therapists and staff. By the end of 2019, annual revenue had risen to more Tapio says that if he had known about the
than $18 million. The company drew the interest of Intera Partners, a Finnish two men’s histories, he would never have
private equity firm, which bought out the majority of Tapio’s and his parents’ hired them. (Keskinen and Lind declined to
stakes. Tapio took home nearly $4 million from the deal. comment.) As it was, though, he had more
With each new clinic that opened, the original process repeated: Härkönen pressing problems to worry about.
reviewed Vastaamo’s self-certification and gave the thumbs-up. More patient On the morning of Wednesday, October
data flowed into the MySQL server. And the reservoir behind the dam rose 21, the hacker posted a message on Ylilauta,
a little higher. an anonymous public discussion board.
“We have attempted to negotiate with the
Ville Tapio, the CEO of vastaamo, but he

T
has stopped responding to our emails,” they
APIO FIRST HEARD from the hacker on September 28, 2020. wrote in English. Until they got their 40 bit-
The demand was 40 bitcoin, around half a million dollars at the coin ransom, they were going to leak 100
time. The message came to him and a pair of developers he’d hired patient records each day. The first batch
in 2015, Ilari Lind and Sami Keskinen. Lind was responsible for was already up on a Tor server. Anyone who
maintaining the company’s IT systems, including its servers and wanted to could go read them.
firewalls; Keskinen was the data protection officer. The hacker started emailing with Hen-
According to a statement Tapio made to Helsinki District Court, rik Kärkkäinen, a reporter at the news-
he immediately notified various government authorities, includ- paper Ilta-Sanomat. To prove they were
ing the police. Lind sifted through Vastaamo’s network traffic logs but reported the real McCoy, they uploaded a file to the
finding no evidence of a hack. Tapio hired a security company called Nixu to Tor server called “henrik.txt”—a snippet of
investigate further. Two days later, Tuomas Kahri, COO of Intera Partners and their exchange. In emails to Kärkkäinen,
chairman of the board of Vastaamo, sent an email to Tapio to thank him for his the hacker scorned Vastaamo: A company
diligence in handling the breach. Kahri would later say that some of his own with security practices that weak was the
loved ones had been targeted in the attack. real criminal, he recalls them writing. They
In early October, Tapio got another shock. Keskinen and Lind called with a claimed to have been sitting on the stolen
confession: Just before they’d joined Vastaamo, they had been arrested as part database for 18 months, unaware of its value.
of a security breach at Tekes, the Finnish Funding Agency for Technology and When Ylilauta’s moderators removed the
Innovation. Lind had discovered that he could download Tekes’ entire data- posts, the conversation migrated to Torilauta,
base, containing information on as many as 20,000 companies, by changing a popular discussion forum on the dark web.
the URL on a funding application. He informed Tekes, which fixed the vulner- The hacker took on a name: ransom_man.
ability—but he also notified Keskinen, who downloaded the database. There At least one desperate person offered to pay
the full 40 bitcoin. Another wrote, in English,
“I have discussed about very private things
with my therapist and will literally kys myself
if they are released.” They had their bitcoin
ready: “I can send it in minutes, I’m con-
stantly refreshing this page.” About 30 pay-
ments ended up going to the hacker’s Bitcoin
wallet, according to Mikko Hyppönen, the
 chief research officer at F-Secure, a global cybersecurity company. It is unclear
whether ransom_man actually deleted anyone’s information.
The hacker did follow through on another promise, however. On October
22, they leaked 100 more patient records. Some belonged to politicians and
0 7 7
other public figures. They contained details about adulterous relationships,
suicide attempts, pedophilic thoughts. The next batch came around 2 am the
following morning. The hacker also put all the records they’d leaked so far
into a single file called “Vastaamo.tar.”
And then something strange happened. Ransom_man replaced the first
“Vastaamo.tar” with a much bigger one. It was 10.9 gigabytes—the entire
leaked database. This file also contained a Python script that the hacker had
used to organize the therapy records. The 10.9 GB upload seems to have been
a mistake, because it disappeared in a matter of hours, along with the entire
Tor server. Some speculated that Vastaamo had paid the 40 bitcoin, though
company officials denied it.
Either way, ransom_man soon changed tactics and started extorting individual
patients. This was unusual. Most of the time, cybercriminals go after institutions,
according to Hyppönen. He knew of only one earlier instance of patients being
singled out—in late 2019, after a breach at the Center for Facial Restoration in
Miramar, Florida. (Since the Vastaamo attack, he adds, two other hacks have also
targeted patients of plastic surgery clinics.) “Most attackers want money, and
health care data is not directly monetizable,” Hyppönen says. But with real-world
examples of the crime paying off, he adds, “it could become more common.”
Vastaamo reacted by offering patients a free counseling session. Therapy con-
tinued as normal. One patient says her therapist advised her to consider that not
everything being said in the news was true. Some patients picked up a physical
copy of their records, to learn what had been stolen, and others joined Facebook
groups dedicated to victim support. Jere, however, opted not to; he wanted to
minimize his online presence. He changed his phone number and purchased

ON E V ICTI M HAD THE IR

BI TC O IN R A N S OM
AT T HE REA DY.

“I CA N S E ND I T I N MI NUT ES ,”
T HEY WROT E. “ I’ M CO NSTANT LY

R E F RES H ING T HIS PAGE .”

credit protection. He never seriously considered paying the hacker, he says,
because “there was absolutely no guarantee they would obey” their own terms. A Vastaamo
clinic
location in

O
Turku.
N THE MONDAY after the breach became public, Tapio went
to Vastaamo headquarters in Helsinki. He’d been summoned
there by Tuomas Kahri, the Intera COO who a month earlier
had thanked him. Instead of speaking to Tapio face to face,
Kahri had a consultant hand him a letter. It said that Tapio’s
contract as CEO was terminated.
Hours later, the company announced Tapio’s dismissal.
Shortly after that, in response to a legal motion filed by Intera,
the Helsinki District Court ordered the temporary seizure of $11.7 million worth
of the Tapio family’s assets—exactly what Intera had paid for its share of Vas-
taamo. Kahri declined several requests to comment on Intera’s claims, but
they’re described in public (albeit redacted)
court documents.
In its filings, Intera says it became aware
of two previously unreported breaches at
Vastaamo, in late 2018 and the spring of
2019. The second date fell shortly before
the buyout went through. “Based on the
information received so far, it is reason- kinen wanted to be able to manage the server from offsite, and that instead of
able to assume that Ville Tapio was aware going to the trouble of setting up a VPN, they simply peeled back the firewalls.
of the breach,” Intera argues. Not only that, “Those are two professionals that know much more about the network and
but he “sought to conceal” it. Intera wanted firewall and server management than I,” Tapio says. “I was not responsible.”
to dissolve the transaction and reclaim the Keskinen and Lind have not testified in the Intera case. They declined to com-
purchase price. ment on Tapio’s numerous allegations. Until the dispute is resolved, the $11.7 mil-
Tapio, as the defendant, submitted writ- lion that Intera wants back—the fortune that Vastaamo built—will remain frozen.
ten testimony in rebuttal. He claims to have
been blindsided by the news of the 2019

I
breach. The reason he didn’t find out about
it at the time, he writes, is that Keskinen N EARLY JANUARY of this year, the Vastaamo patient data-
and Lind—the “system architects”—never base reappeared on at least 11 anonymous file-sharing services
told him about it. across the public internet. The file contained all the same records
On the morning of March 15, Vastaamo’s as before but was a fraction as big, so it spread easily. Without an
servers crashed and the patient database accompanying message, the motivations for the upload are hard
was replaced with a blackmail message. to discern—but it did appear fewer than 48 hours before Vasta-
Tapio notified staff of the crash at 11:18 am, amo’s board was due to discuss the company’s future. Was this a
but no one appears to have discussed the spiteful push to bring the company down?
possibility of a breach in either of the If so, then it was a success. On January 28, Vastaamo was put into liquida-
reports submitted to the government. tion, and it filed for bankruptcy two weeks later. In early March, its staff and
According to Tapio’s testimony, Keskinen services were transferred to Verve, a provider of occupational welfare ser-
and Lind—who shared an administrator vices. The acquisition did not include Vastaamo’s customer data, and Verve
account—told him that the crash might will use a Class A system.
have been caused by some minor adjust- Almost immediately after the hack happened, Parliament fast-tracked leg-
ments they’d made shortly beforehand. But islation that would allow victims like Jere to change their social security num-
he says that Nixu, the cybersecurity com- bers in case of a serious breach. But patients were spooked, one counselor told
pany he hired in September, found some- the newspaper Helsingin Sanomat. “Not everyone who needed help may have
thing else: The shared account read the sought treatment,” he said. Some argue that therapists should never be able
ransom message and deleted it. to enter session notes into Kanta; now more than ever, patients will not risk
In Tapio’s version of events, then, who- having their data travel beyond the consultation room.
ever was using that account covered up the In wider medicine, Koivukangas says, the Vastaamo scandal has highlighted
March breach. And the reason they did it, the “unmet demand” for electronic medical record systems that are scalable,
he contends, was to conceal a vulnerabil- easy to use, and—crucially—secure. This is an area ripe for disruption, he
ity they’d created themselves—one that had says, and “prior to this breach, many thought with good reason that Vastaamo
left Vastaamo’s patient database “without would’ve been one of those disruptors.” Until the marketplace improves, he
firewall protection” for more than a year. says, expect more bespoke solutions, and more breaches.
There were supposed to be three levels Unless ransom_man is caught and the Finnish authorities sort out every-
of security surrounding the database, Tapio thing that happened at Vastaamo, it will be impossible to know exactly how
tells me: one firewall at the network level, “the incident” began. Would it have happened, for example, if Finland had
which blocked connections from the pub- been more proactive in policing electronic medical systems? Or if Tapio had
lic internet; another around the individual implemented a more secure system? What’s clear is how it ended—in the most
server that stored the patient database; and painful way possible for tens of thousands of patients. As more health care sys-
the server configuration itself, which pre- tems across the world go digital, the risk of that outcome rises.
vented connections from outside accounts. “Being honest about my mental health turned out to be a bad idea,” Jere says.
In November 2017, Lind spent a few hours He worries about identity theft, about some debt collection company calling
configuring the server to allow remote him out of the blue and demanding tens of thousands of euros. He worries that
access. Tapio believes that Lind and Kes- his history of teenage alcoholism, so well documented on the web, will make
it hard for him to find meaningful work as an adult. And he still worries that
WILLIAM RALSTON (@RalstonWilliam9) his mother may read his file one day. It’s somewhere in the ether, accessible
is a writer based in London. to anyone.
 Nobody h as h e a r d o f t he

sc i -f i w r i t er

R. A. L AF F ERT Y —
e xc e pt f o r a ll y o u r fa vo r i te s c i- f i w r i te r s .

BY
J a s o n Ke h e

ILLUSTR ATIONS BY SAM WHITNE Y

 29

06

A GIGANTICAL
TALE OF

LAFFERVESCENT
GENIUS
 WHAT FOLLOWS WILL
BE THE BEST ARTICLE
YOU’VE EVER READ ABOUT
WRITING AND SCIENCE
FICTION. Just kidding. Sort of. The sci-fi writer R. A. Lafferty used to make claims
like that. For most of his career, he’d tell people he was “the best short story
writer in the world.” Smart move, in theory. Makes you want to read him.
We’re suckers for superlatives. Best, greatest, most important. When
Lafferty did it, he was joking. He was also being perfectly serious. Everything
Lafferty put his name on was outrageous, insidery, and truth-seeking: a seri-
ous joke. But then, so is life itself. Therefore, Lafferty might be right. He might
really be the best there ever was.
Just one problem: Nobody reads him. They didn’t when he was alive,
and they don’t now that he’s dead. It’s a clickbait cliché falling somewhere
between desperate and insulting to say so-and-so is the greatest such-and-
such you’ve never heard of, but in this case, it happens to be true. Ask your
nerdiest friends if they’ve ever encountered a Raphael Aloysius Lafferty in

Illustrations: Photo by H. Armstrong Roberts/ClassicStock/Getty Images

their cosmic travels. They haven’t, and a name like that sticks with a person.
Even people who’ve heard of people other people haven’t heard of are peo-
ple who haven’t heard of him.
Lafferty didn’t just write possibly the best short stories in the world, of
which more than 200 were published by various pulps and small presses in
his lifetime. He also wrote 36 novels, which is a lot and which nobody, not
even Lafferty, has ever put in the category of best. (A tragic mistake.) Of them,
only four merit entries on Wikipedia; fewer than that are currently in print.
The Wikipedia page for Serpent’s Egg, a late-career work that came out in
1987 and fell into obscurity promptly thereafter, includes what might be the
most fitting plot summary not only of a Lafferty novel but of any novel ever
written. As of February 24, 2021, at 3:22 pm, it reads, in its entirety: “Serpent’s
Egg is a novel in which .”
This is exactly right. It could be a typo, but maybe it’s not. A joke, but also
highly serious. Look at the awkward, breathtaking space the ghostly editor
added before the period. In which—GASP, the end. The question is, do we
dare to fill it in?

0 8 2
 OK, Ralph, wrote Invisible Man—says this of
Lafferty: “He is the invisible man.” Nice.
It is now time to expose you to some
so a select few have read Lafferty, a of Lafferty’s writing, which will begin
secret society of loonies whose names to illuminate his chronic invisibility.
you probably do recognize. Neil Gaiman. So much of his output is dangerously
Ursula Le Guin. Samuel Delany. Other unquotable outside its immediate con-
sci-fi writers, in other words. R. A. text, because it depends for its effect
Lafferty has always been, then, a sci-fi on the words flying madly around it,
writer’s sci-fi writer—a blurry, far-out but occasionally a paragraph pops
position to find oneself in. When come- up that makes about as much sense
dians hang out, they famously have to within the story as without and is there-
commit acts of borderline criminal- fore safer for the plucking. Here’s one,
ity, usually involving nudity and great from “Selenium Ghosts of the Eighteen
heights, to get each other to bust up. So Seventies,” Lafferty’s alternate history,
just think what absurdities a sci-fi writer published in 1978, of television:
has to conjure in order to gobsmack his
fellow sci-fi writers—who actually are, There seemed to be several
by much wider consensus, some of the meetings in this room superim-
best in the world. posed on one another, and they
The descriptor they tend to resort to, cannot be sorted out. To sort
as if by no other choice, is sui generis, them out would have been to
dusty old Latin for “one of a kind.” It’s destroy their effect, however, for
probably the most common phrase they achieved syntheses of their
associated with Lafferty (incidentally several aspects and became the
a self-taught student of Latin), and it true meeting that never really
appears not once but twice in The Best took place but which contained
of R. A. Lafferty, which Tor published all the other meetings in one the-
earlier this year to nonexistent fanfare atrical unity.
and which, in keeping with the man’s
self-aggrandizing sense of humor, Don’t go away! On first read, yes, it’s
should’ve been called The Best (of the nonsense, but this is the experience of
Best) of R. A. Lafferty. Each of the 22 experiencing Lafferty. He doesn’t make
short stories is introduced by a writer any sense, until you decide, and you
often far more famous than Lafferty must decide, that he does. Then, sud-
ever was, including Gaiman and Delany, denly, he becomes a genius. Read the
and also John Scalzi, Jeff VanderMeer, paragraph again. What’s he talking
Connie Willis, and Harlan Ellison (who’s about? Today, you might realize he’s
dead; his piece was originally published predicting Zoom: a main meeting full
in 1967). Ellison—whose fellow Ellison, of individual nonmeetings taking place
in chats and side slacks that together
constitute a constant and overarching
supermeeting! Tomorrow, it’ll sound like
something else entirely.
However you read him, you can’t
read Lafferty quickly, because he lit-
erally won’t let you. He speeds up his
stories, his sentences, his mythopo-
etic thoughts so that you all but have to
slow yourself down. In “The Primary
Education of the Camiroi,” he docu-
ments the education system of a neigh-
boring planet, whose students can
outthink Earthly postdocs by the equiv-
alent of their elementary school. When
 a young Camiroi girl is asked how rap-
idly she can read, she says she used
to read an astonishing 4,000 words a
minute. “They had quite a time correct-
ing me of it,” she then admits. “I had to
take remedial reading, and my parents
were ashamed of me. Now I’ve learned
to read almost slow enough.”
You begin to see why people, even pro-
fessional wordsmiths, fumble their way
toward talking about Lafferty, a writ-
er’s writer who wants to retrain the way
his readers read. So instead, they invoke
phrases like sui generis—or, just as often,
can’t help but use the name of the artist
to describe the work itself. A Laffertarian
might refer to Lafferty’s short stories as
Laffervescent Lafferties in the Laffertian
genre of Laffertiana at the annual fact, is all this linguistic babble—this “sil- there, electric and extraordinary: often
LaffCon. All of those eponymous autol- very gibberish,” as Lafferty would say— his very best characters.
ogies have been used by real people in making it sound as though he’s difficult Lafferty was also an alcoholic. The
real writing about Lafferty, seemingly to read? Torturous? Impenetrable? Here’s reason he took up writing, he said, was
because no other words would do. the secret, people: He’s not. Not really. In to cut back on drinking, that “tricky
Lafferty would Lafferlove this (#laff- some ways, he’s the easiest of them all. old animal.” It’s unclear the extent to
outloud). Among his many intellectual which he was successful in this. Over
hobbies was etymology, and he had, he the course of his career, he was nomi-
once said, “a rough reading knowledge nated for a handful of awards and won

UNLIKE,
of all the languages of the Latin, German, one Hugo, for the short story “Eurema’s
and Slavic families, as well as Irish and Dam,” which he considered average but
Greek.” One of his favorite writerly moves which remains the best portrait of a tech
was to force his readers to think about say, a Neil Gaiman type, Lafferty did CEO ever written. “Albert hadn’t been a
where his words were coming from: not grow up reading much science fic- very well-adjusted adolescent, and he
“Thunder-struck,” he once wrote of cer- tion and fantasy. Nor did he dream of hated the memory of it,” Lafferty writes.
tain imperiled characters, “they were lit- becoming a writer—he wouldn’t publish “And nobody ever mistook him for an
erally astonished (which is the same thing a word until his mid-forties. Born in Iowa adjusted man.” Lafferty seems to have
latinized).” Huh? What’s that mean? Then in 1914, he was 4 or 5 years old when his been talking about himself there, too; he
you look up the word astonished—and family moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma, and, once suggested he was “somehow defi-
realize that it literally comes from the with the exception of the time he spent cient or lacking in person or personality.”
Latin for “to thunder.” fighting in World War II, he lived there On his occasional trips to sci-fi conven-
Nothing about Lafferty’s style is ordi- for the rest of his life. tions and awards ceremonies, where he
nary. He averages approximately one Not a lot is known about that life; shocked readers by being much older
exclamation mark a page. He likes to the number of Lafferty scholars can than they thought he was, he was known
address his readers as people. His favor- be counted on one (half of a thumb- to imbibe a little too freely. Helped him
ite words, based on frequency of use, less) hand. He was politically conser- get over his shyness, friends said.
include shaggy, ensorcel, and obtain. vative and a devout Catholic who went And Lafferty’s writing does have a
Not obtain in the obvious, transitive to mass every day, and he worked for kind of mad-drunk clarity to it. This
sense of “to get,” no no, but in the less many years as an electrical sales- is not to say he wrote under the influ-
familiar, more philosophical, intran- man and technician. Some ways he ence; apparently he never did. But
sitive sense of “to succeed” or “to pre- described himself: left-handed, a fat there’s a moment before incapacita-
vail.” As in, Lafferty does not obtain for man, a compulsive walker, not very tion, but after considerable consump-
most readers, perhaps because he often interesting. Ways others described him: tion, where a drinker’s thoughts seem
invents words outright. Novanissimus. shy, soft-spoken, eccentric, brilliant. He to sharpen, heighten, and laser in, and
Mithermenic. Runningest. Giganticals. never married and lived with one of his that’s the state Lafferty sustains, some-
Some are weirder than others. All are, sisters. He seemed to consider women what impossibly, in his prose. It rambles,
in theory, parseable. But you don’t have near-mystical beings. A minority in it sweats, it nearly collapses, but then it
to work them out if you don’t want to. In his stories, they’re nonetheless always triumphs and takes a bow. As he once

0 8 4
 so loopingly, lapidarily put it: “One does
whatever one can for oneness that is
greater than self.”
You feel no pressure, reading a
Lafferty. It’s like listening to a street
preacher hold forth—you choose how
and what to hear. The little that’s been
written about him overemphasizes his
religious and political beliefs, which
are indeed all over his stories, but only
if you want them to be. If you don’t,
they’re simply tall tales, supremely well
told—and many, about Native land-
owners (“Narrow Valley”), the speed-
ing up of the technologized world (“Slow
Tuesday Night”), and the fear of death
(“Old Foot Forgot”), don’t feel Catholic
or conservative at all. “Nine Hundred
Grandmothers” follows a cultural
anthropologist who travels deep under-
ground on an alien planet to meet tinier
and tinier ancient grandmas so he can
discover the origin of life. (When he gets
there, they laugh in his face.) In “Boomer
Flats,” scientists search for Abominable
LAFFERTY AT THE 29TH WORLD SCIENCE FICTION CONVENTION IN 1971.
Snowmen at the bottom of a muddy
river. Possibly Lafferty’s all-time best
(of the best) is “Thus We Frustrate
Charlemagne,” in which a sentient robot
serpent aids foolish humans in traveling,
and inadvertently erasing themselves,
through time. It’s simple, ingenious, and
Used by permission of Special Collections & University Archives, University of California, Riverside

completely hysterical.
By 1970, at age 56, Lafferty retired
from electrical jobbing to write full-
As Harlan Ellison said of Lafferty, time. He became “moderately success-
ful,” as he put it. “It didn’t put me on
“He is the easy street, but it put me on easy alley.”
He didn’t have a style that grew more

I NVI SIB LE
apparent and solidified over time, sim-
ply because his style was fully set from
the beginning. The literal would always

MAN.”
slip into the metaphorical and back
again. Children would always talk like
the smartest adults. Random characters
would always be introduced only to die
a sentence later—it was as if an occult
hand had placed them there for reasons
even beyond Lafferty’s knowing. Only
people who already thought about writ-
ing all day seemed to fully get it. None of
it made sense, all of it made sense, and
he became the best short story writer in
the world.
And all the while, he was also writing
a bunch of insane novels.
 AN ire, which Past Master also becomes: a
critique of sci-fi utopias as a satire of a
satire! To get to Earth, the hero Paul has
In 1972, Lafferty published one of his
rare non-sci-fi novels, Okla Hannali,
a history of the Choctaw Indians in
early editor of Lafferty’s told him two to use “Hopp-Equation travel,” during the 19th century. A subset of the few
things: (1) Every story should start with which he becomes left-handed, expe- (mostly writers) who have read it con-
a bang; and (2) never give a reader lon- riences a “total reversal of polarity,” and sider it an American classic on a par
ger than 15 seconds before you “jerk him hallucinates the events of the rest of the with Huck Finn and Bury My Heart at
back.” So when Lafferty went to write novel. It all ends both fantastically and Wounded Knee, and it’s the only one
his first novel, Past Master, published in also, somehow, historically. of his books that’s consistently in print.
1968, he began it this way: Lafferty loved history. In fact, he pre- (A division of Hachette UK published a
ferred it to science fiction. Sci-fi was rather sad-looking omnibus edition of
The three big men were met never native to him; those were simply three others, including Past Master and
together in a private building of the stories of his that sold early in his Space Chantey, in 2018.) In an intro-
one of them. There was a clat- career, so he kept it up, mostly ignor- duction, Geary Hobson, a professor of
tering thunder in the street out- ing what others were doing and being, English at the University of Oklahoma
side, but the sun was shining. It he said, “a little bit stubborn about writ- and the editor of The Remembered
was the clashing thunder of the ing my own stuff.” Over time, though, he Earth: An Anthology of Contemporary
mechanical killers, ravening and seems to have realized the connection Native American Literature, calls it “a
raging. They shook the building science fiction has to myth and history. rather unusual, totally extraordinary
and were on the verge of pull- Growing up, Lafferty was surrounded book.” It’s straighter than his sci-fi, per-
ing it down. They required the by stories—tall tales his father would haps, being based on real people, but it’s
life and blood of one of the three spin to entertain the family, “old Indian still classic Lafferty: formally inventive,
men and they required it imme- stories” that his mother picked up as mythopoetic, word-centric. The last
diately, now, within the hour, a school teacher of Native students in bit of Lafferty you read here should be
within the minute. Oklahoma. When he became a writer, this, one of Okla Hannali ’s most star-
he found himself doing the same thing. tling passages:
Three bangs, basically. And never a
moment to breathe. It carries on like this
for 200 pages.
Simply put, Lafferty’s books are his
short stories stretched profoundly past
breaking, which is perhaps why he
thought of them as inferior. “Choppy”
was the word he used, in a 1983 inter-
view with Amazing magazine. This Every s o of t e n
is both literally true—his third book,
Space Chantey, a retelling of The s omeon e di sco ve rs him , a n d
Odyssey as a space opera in which one

CE RTAIN
Captain Roadstrum spends years trying
to return home to “Big Tulsa the mar-
velous, the Capital of the World,” is so

DE ST INIE S
choppy it makes you space-sick—and
also irrelevant to their heady pleasures.
His novels all but implode with ideas.
When the “three big men” of Past Master
realize their perfect future utopia on the s ubtl y sh if t.
planet of Astrobe is about to collapse,
they look around for a savior, even-
tually settling on a figure from Earth’s
past: Thomas More, the 16th-century
humanist who, before being beheaded
by the King of England on charges of
treason, wrote what’s regarded as the
first work of utopian fiction. What the
Astrobe men don’t realize is that More’s
Utopia was, Lafferty maintains, a sat-
 There is an interesting question in the Summa
of St. Thomas Aquinas and also in an old sci-
ence fiction story, the name of which I forget,
concerning the paradox of free will and pre- Liabilities that helped get this
destined fate. It asks whether a man in making issue out:
a great decision that will forever set the seal on
his future does not also set the seal on his past. A Living above a chronically broken train track
and the daily jackhammering, excavating,
man alters his future, and does he not also alter and surface drilling that comes with it; new
his past in conformity with it? Does he not settle apartment + Craigslist + Facebook Market­
place; Reese’s Peanut Butter Eggs next to
not only what manner of man he will be, but also the checkout lane; wearing slides in the
what manner of man he has been? Sonoran Desert; 50 grand of law school debt;
an unplayed guitar and other abandoned
pandemic hobbies; poor posture plus a year
The science fiction story he’s referencing could, slyly, of commuting from the chair to the couch and
back; bad puns, preserved via text; the mess
be his own—“Thus We Frustrate Charlemagne”—but it of wires for every electronic device in creation
crowding the floor of my child’s room; preor­
needn’t be. The point is that Native myths, Catholicism, dering books and then forgetting about them;
and science fiction all ask versions of the same ques- a sudden and deep interest in mezcal.
tion: How preordained is destiny? In a single paragraph, is a registered trademark of Advance
wi r e d
Lafferty elevates sci-fi to the level of theology and ulti- Magazine Publishers Inc. Copyright ©2021
Condé Nast. All rights reserved. Printed in the
mate truths, and unifies his entire artistic and thematic USA. Volume 29, No. 6. wi r e d (ISSN 1059–
project in the process. 1028) is published monthly, except for the
combined July/August issue, by Condé Nast,
Lafferty would write many more novels, some histori- which is a division of Advance Magazine Pub­
cal, most science fictional, all squirming inside the rigidity lishers Inc. Editorial office: 520 Third Street,
Ste. 305, San Francisco, CA 94107­1815. Prin­
of categorization. He’d stop writing, due to health issues, cipal office: Condé Nast, 1 World Trade Cen­
in his seventies, and die, with almost all of his work out ter, New York, NY 10007. Roger Lynch, Chief
Executive Officer; Pamela Drucker Mann,
of print, in 2002. But every so often, someone discov- Chief Revenue & Marketing Officer, US;
Jackie Marks, Chief Financial Officer. Peri­
ers him, and certain destinies, both his and others’, sub- odicals postage paid at New York, NY, and
tly shift. Neil Gaiman will mention him in a blog post, at additional mailing offices. Canada Post
Publications Mail Agreement No.40644503.
sending a few readers off to find an affordable old copy Canadian Goods and Services Tax Registra­
of, say, Not to Mention Camels or Serpent’s Egg. (Good tion No. 123242885 RT0001.
luck.) Or Jeff VanderMeer will include him in a new POSTMASTER: Send all UAA to CFS (see DMM
anthology, reminding those in the know of Lafferty’s 707.4.12.5); NONPOSTAL AND MILITARY
FACILITIES: Send address corrections to
deep, continuing influence. Samuel Delany has sug- wi r e d , PO Box 37617, Boone, IA 50037­0662.

gested that some of the genre’s worthiest books, such as For subscriptions, address changes, adjust­
ments, or back issue inquiries: Please write to
his Triton and Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, are rooted in wi r e d , PO Box 37617, Boone, IA 50037­0662,

Lafferty’s strange un-utopias. Lafferty pushed them, as call (800) 769 4733, or email subscriptions@
wi r e d .com. Please give both new and old
he did many others, to think bigger and weirder about addresses as printed on most recent label.
First copy of new subscription will be mailed
the possibilities of the fantastic. within eight weeks after receipt of order.
Maybe that’s the final reason for Lafferty’s microfame Address all editorial, business, and production
correspondence to wi r e d Magazine, 1 World
as the sci-fi writer’s truest sci-fi writer. He did what the Trade Center, New York, NY 10007. For per­
others couldn’t, and still can’t, do: He talked not only missions and reprint requests, please call
(212) 630 5656 or fax requests to (212) 630
about the future but as the future, in a language truly 5883. Visit us online at www.wi r e d .com. To
outside the immediacies of time. Reflecting on his body subscribe to other Condé Nast magazines on
the web, visit wi r e d .condenet.com. Occasion­
of work, Lafferty once said he wasn’t so much writing ally, we make our subscriber list available to
individual stories as “one very very long novel,” with carefully screened companies that offer prod­
ucts and services that we believe would inter­
recurring characters and settings, that he’d never quite est our readers. If you do not want to receive
these offers and/or information, please advise
be able to finish. He called this hypothetical supernovel us at PO Box 37617, Boone, IA 50037­0662, or
A Ghost Story, one forever haunted by gaps and hopes call (800) 769 4733.
and spaces before the period. It is a novel, perhaps more is not responsible for the return or
wi r e d
than any other in the history of the world, that is about loss of, or for damage or any other injury to,
unsolicited manuscripts, unsolicited art­
the fate of that world, the fate of us all. It is unknowable work (including, but not limited to, drawings,
and incomplete. It is, in the end, a novel in which . photographs, and transparencies), or any
other unsolicited materials. Those submit­
ting manuscripts, photographs, artwork, or
other materials for consideration should not
send originals, unless specifically requested
Jason Kehe (@jkehe) is a senior editor and culture to do so by wi r e d in writing. Manuscripts,
critic at wired . He writes about sci-fi/fantasy, animation, photographs, artwork, and other materi­
als submitted must be accompanied by a
and the philosophy of technology. self­addressed, stamped envelope.

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SIX-WORD SCI-FI: STORIES BY WIRED READERS WIRED 29.06

IN SIX WORDS, WRITE A REVIEW OF A FUTURE WORK OF ART:

IT TICKLED ALL
OF MY SENSES. Jacky Reif
via Facebook

↙ SO THAT’S AN AI SELF-PORTRAIT? BRAVE TO SHOW AN UNFILTERED CANVAS.

Every month, we ask for a
new six-word story on
—JASON COHEN, VIA FACEBOOK —@ALCESTRONAUT, VIA TWITTER Facebook, Twitter, and
I PREFER BOSTON DYNAMICS’ EARLIER WORK. NOT WHAT TELEPORTATION WAS INVENTED FOR. Instagram. Submit your ideas
—@SSCARSDALE, VIA TWITTER —@ARTURO_THRDEZ, VIA TWITTER there, along with the hashtag
NFT OR NOT, IT IS GREAT. SHAME MORTALS WILL NOT APPRECIATE IT. #WIREDSIXWORD. And visit
Honorable —PETER BOERSMA, VIA FACEBOOK —@ASYLBEK0205, VIA INSTAGRAM the archive at wired .com/
Mentions NOT AS GOOD AS BANKSY’S VIRUS. REMINDS ME OF THE BEFORE TIMES. six-word to see how we’ve
—SIMON O WRIGHT, VIA FACEBOOK —JACQUELINE JAEGER HOUTMAN, VIA FACEBOOK illustrated our favorites.

ILLUSTRATION / VIOLET REED

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JON RIMANELLI

Founder and CEO, ASX.US