Tabla de contenidos para January / February 2023 en WIRED UK

MEETING THE MUSIC MAN Christopher Hunt photographed Corite founder Mattias Tengblad, who wants to restore agency—and income—to artists on Spotify: “He’s a veteran of the music industry, and while we had a nice, relaxed shoot, there was also a very interesting discussion regarding how its future might look. Corite sounds like it could really help musicians.” CAPTURING A PLANETARY CHAMPION “Being able to create a striking portrait of a brilliant mind like Friederike Otto made this WIRED story the dream assignment,” says Maria Lax, who shot our cover. “We used a gorgeous studio near my home in East London, with a team that consisted of friends—the atmosphere was so calm and creative that the day hardly felt like work.” FIONA DUNLEVY Dunlevy explores the world of medtech devices which harvest…

In May 2006, Stockholm was the unlikely frontline in the fight for the future of the music industry. The city’s police raided Swedish-owned file-sharing site, The Pirate Bay, and seized its web servers. Meanwhile, Daniel Ek was about to launch Spotify. It was a turning point, says Mattias Tengblad, who had just taken over as commercial director at Universal Music in Sweden. “We had politicians defending young people for using The Pirate Bay. It was felt the industry was finished,” he says. “But, in no time, Spotify had a million subscribers. In a few years it had two million Swedish users from a population of nine million.” But while Spotify was once the solution, today it is the problem. In July 2022, the UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) reported…

What does Neal Stephenson know? The science fiction author, 63, has no (living) rival when it comes to foresight. Some of his novels arguably predicted our current technological landscape, thirty years in advance. The Diamond Age famously inspired Amazon engineers charged with developing the Kindle e-reader, whose early codename, Fiona, takes after the book’s protagonist. Cryptonomicon is a tale of encryption and electronic money, written a decade before the birth of cryptocurrency. And then there is Snow Crash, the dystopian parody where the concept of the metaverse was first envisioned. Being a gifted forecaster, though, is a nuisance as much as a blessing. When, in late 2021, metaverse-mania reached a fever pitch following Facebook’s rebrand to Meta, Stephenson recalls “watching the whole thing in amazement.” “I was ramping up for…

Extreme E, the FIA-sanctioned international all-electric off-road racing series, has, with appropriate speed, has come a long way since it started as a glint in the eye of Formula E founder Alejandro Agag and former Brazilian driver Gil de Ferran in 2018. The races, inaugurated in April 2021, not only promote gender equality—each team must field both a male and female driver—and powers its cars with hydrogen fuel generated from off-grid water and solar energy, also maintain a “Legacy Program” to provide social and environmental support in the race locations long after the 10 teams, which include squads helmed by Nico Rosberg, Jenson Button, and Lewis Hamilton, have driven away. One of the more niche eco-collaborations in the Extreme E world, however, comes from tire-maker Continental and official timekeeping partner…

Helping employees with squiggly careers could enable companies to overcome the labor shortage challenging much of the West, explained an array of expert speakers. Sharmadean Reid, founder of the Stack World, Helen Tupper and Sarah Ellis, cofounders of Amazing If, and Sheela Subramanian, vice president, Future Forum at Slack all warned that, if the workplace doesn’t change, employers face losing up to 60 percent of staff. “This is a global trend that’s impacting all of our workplaces,” Subramanian warned. During lockdown, she said, “employees were redesigning their lives, their priorities, their time—and they weren’t necessarily seeing that reflected in how they worked.” Don’t buy people off, Tupper added. “Not having opportunities to grow and develop in your career is why people look to leave. We’ve got to re-imagine retention—or as…

Be aware of your tech’s true agenda “Technology encodes standards, and standards encode values—so whoever writes your technology imposes their values,” Dr Ian Levy, technical director of the NCSC told the room. Technology should encode democracy, but standards and technology are currently being used for Great Power competition between East and West. Pushing for privacy as standard A real-life version of Google would be someone who follows you around wherever you go, monitoring your every move, anything you say, everyone you meet, and everything you buy, pointed out Andy Yen, CEO of Proton. “In real life, we would never allow this, but because it’s invisible, we accept it—even though more of our lives are online.” Users, however, are waking up to this—and companies are finally talking seriously about privacy. Deep…

Some big companies deploy a wealth of tricks to keep their climate pledges on track. They use vague and misleading wording to improve their image without making any real changes. They offset corporate travel through donations to environmental projects, but don’t fly less. And then there’s creative climate accounting: furniture giant IKEA, for example, counts the carbon stored in its wooden chairs and beds, even though they’re unlikely to grace a home for as long as the trees they come from would have stayed in the forest. When it sells a solar panel to a household, IKEA puts the emissions saved in its own carbon credit column, too. Known as “greenwashing”, these tactics also occasionally happen by accident. “I don’t think all greenwashing is intended,” says Lubomila Jordanova, the founder…

2020 was the year of Covid lockdowns, 2021 the year of vaccines, and 2022 the year of worldwide reopening. 2023 will be the year of variant prediction. The first Covid variants of concern that were identified—from Alpha in the UK to Beta in South Africa—muddied the picture of where the pandemic would go next. Alpha was inherently better at transmitting, while Beta was able to evade pre-existing immunity to some extent. What would the longer-term pattern of evolution look like? The picture became clearer in 2022, with the Omicron BA.1 variant causing large epidemics. This led to an accumulation of immunity within populations, followed by declining transmission, only for a new subvariant, BA.2, to emerge, against which this immunity was less effective. Large epidemics followed and the cycle started again,…

Unprecedented heat, drought, and wildfires caused chaos and misery across the once-temperate British Isles this year, as climate change made its impacts felt beyond the mid-latitudes. Across the channel, Europe’s formerly pleasant Mediterranean climate has for some years been plagued by dangerous and uncontrollable blazes, smoke pollution, heat, floods and, recently, collapsing glaciers. The United States, too, is perpetually dealing with extreme events somewhere in the country—and often several at once. When fires blaze out of control, floods swamp communities, storms flatten buildings, or smoke makes the air unbreathable, people have to flee their homes. Tens of thousands were evacuated from the Gironde region of France in just one week in July, the same month that massive evacuations were ordered in California and Kentucky in the US. After each disaster,…

In 2023, all companies listed on regulated markets in the European Union will begin applying the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), a new rule which will require them to publish, from 2024, detailed information about how they relate to the environment, the treatment of employees, human rights, anti-corruption, bribery, and boardroom diversity. It’s aimed at improving the functioning of a multi-trillion-dollar market known as ESG (environment, society, and governance), which has long been troubled by inconsistencies in data quality, reporting standards, and methods used to generate companies’ ESG ratings. The new EU rule will try to tame the Wild West of ESG in three ways. First, companies must meet mandatory EU sustainability standards, which should introduce greater quality and consistency to their reporting. Second, companies’ reported information must be audited,…

It was the biggest match of Andre Odeku’s career. A week earlier, the 18-year-old forward had been playing in the seventh tier of the English football pyramid. Now, he was lining up for Burnley’s Under-23 side in a trial game, with a view to signing for the then-Premier League club’s academy. “Their scouts invited me for a week’s training,” explains Odeku. “I’d never really been on those kinds of pitches before: the grass was so lovely and flat, and there were Premier League players training next to us. They liked what they saw, so they wanted to see me up close in a game.” In footballing terms, Odeku had been plucked from relative obscurity, discovered while putting in Erling Haaland-like numbers for the development team of semi-pro north London side…

Quantum computers have a huge problem. Or, to be more accurate, lots of incredibly tiny ones. These futuristic devices promise to revolutionize everything from the financial industry to drug discovery by tapping into the power of quantum uncertainty—instead of using bits, like your laptop or phone, quantum computers use qubits, which means they’ll be able to perform certain tasks much faster than traditional computers, and may be better at simulating natural processes. Tech giants including Google, Microsoft and IBM are racing to build quantum devices, but collectively the field is mired in an era known in the business as “noisy-intermediate scale quantum”, or NISQ. Today’s quantum computers are delicate devices that can be thrown off-course by the slightest environmental interference: they’re slow, small-scale, and not that accurate, which means that…

Community = customer connection You can’t be part of a community if you don’t understand them, Sujata Bhatia, chief operating officer, Monzo, warned, and a brand’s tone of voice is critical. “It’s not just about customer experience—it’s about customer connection. It needs to be your north star,” she explained. “People can smell fake—but if you’re serious, it can be truly transformative.” Blockchain is more than crypto “A lot of people think blockchain is just crypto and bitcoin,” said Lavinia Osbourne, host and founder of Women in Blockhain Talks. “But blockchain can be a tool to address long term problems around equity, gender, and supply chain.” The key thing about blockchain is its decentralization, she argued. “No one can say, ‘you’re not a traditional finance company, you can’t come in.’ And…

GEAR MONEY SAVING SPECIAL Teenage Engineering PO-80 Record Factory Made in collaboration with Japanese designer Yuri Suzuki, this monophonic turntable might look like a child’s toy, but it is in fact capable of cutting your own lo-fi vinyl records, and playing them back to you. USB powered and supplied with six black 5-inch blank records, you can cut any digital recording (4 minutes per side at 33 rpm, 3 minutes at 45 rpm) via the 3.5mm audio input. Teenage Engineering has also created an online mastering tool, to help make your opus sound as good as possible. Although please, before dropping the needle, temper any audiophile expectations. £149 teenage.engineering GEAR MONEY SAVING SPECIAL MUSIC! 1. Boombocs STUDIO Boombocs founder Jonny Williams is known for his briefcase-sized Bluetooth speakers, but his…

It seems a ridiculous question, borderline obscene—whales are majestic creatures whose worth transcends the human impulse to quantify, obviously! Yet it is one which has been seriously considered by economists in an effort to convince governments and corporations to value wildlife. In her recent book, The Value of a Whale: On the Illusions of Green Capitalism, Adrienne Buller dissects the asinine logic of “green” capitalist thinking, from putting a dollar value on cetaceans to carbon offsets and financial products such as “sustainability-linked bonds.” The director of research for the London-based progressive think tank Common Wealth, Buller sees market-based corporate “green” initiatives as distracting at best—and, at worst, actively destructive. The Value of a Whale takes a bracing look at how corporate interests are using the superficial trappings of climate activism to reinforce their own…

CELINE HALIOUA DROPS into a crouch and greets Bocce, a Chihuahua-dachshund mix with soulful brown eyes, like a long-lost friend. “Oh my god, you’re so beautiful!” she chirps. The two have just met in an upstairs room at Muttville Senior Dog Rescue in San Francisco, where light streams in through the open windows and urine occasionally streams onto the floor. About a dozen elder dogs, none taller than a kneecap, putter around on the gray linoleum or nap on blankets. When Halioua kneels, her dark hair tumbling over her shoulder, Bocce rests his head blissfully in her lap. A tragedy of human-canine relations is that a 10-year-old dog such as Bocce is elderly, while a 28-year-old person such as Halioua is in the prime of life. Bocce is one of…

Robert Solow, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, famously said in 1987 that you can see the computer revolution everywhere, but in the productivity statistics. I predict 2023 is the year that finally changes, thanks to artificial intelligence. By the end of 2023, AI will be fast becoming one of the most important factors of production in the global economy. It’s true that the history of AI is largely a history of disappointment: Hype followed by “AI winters” in which both talent and funding abandon the discipline. But this time, thanks to the deep learning revolution, it really is different. In 2023, we’ll see ordinary people, everywhere, enjoy the power of AI at their fingertips. What might this look like? Let’s say you need to create a marketing brochure for a new…

Women’s ovaries age at more than twice the rate of other organs, and it’s one of the most important unanswered questions in the field of reproductive health. Reproductive aging dramatically impacts women’s health. As more women delay childbearing, it can lead to infertility, miscarriages, and birth defects. Ovaries also produce hormones essential for overall health. Hormonal levels fluctuate during perimenopause. During menopause, they collapse to zero. These shifts cause a spike in the risk of developing diseases like dementia, metabolic disorders, and depression. Half of postmenopausal women develop osteoporosis, more than double the rate of men; menopause quadruples risk for a cardiovascular event. Bluntly, menopause makes a woman’s body age faster: indirectly by interfering with sleep cycles, and directly by speeding up cellular aging by at least six percent. The…

In the summer of 2020, the death of George Floyd sparked global conversations about race and racial justice. It inspired soul-searching and a chorus of commitments to greater racial diversity from many in the tech industry. Yet, two years on, many of these promises have not seemed to come to fruition. In 2023, firms and individuals will start to pay greater attention to the “social” part of environmental and social governance It’s not enough for there to be more Black hires at big institutions, or one-off mentorship schemes for under-represented groups to get into the tech industry. My cofounder of Black Seed, Cyril Lutterodt, says that Black founders are over-mentored, but under-funded. Data from Crunchbase shows that Black-founded startups received record funding in 2021, with over $1 billion invested in…

Unless we act, 2023 will be the year that women leave the internet. Women already face enormous risks online. A Pew Research report of a US survey shows that one third of young women report having been sexually harassed online and that women report being more upset by these experiences and seeing it as a bigger problem than men do. A UNESCO study of journalists found that 73 percent of women surveyed had experienced online violence, and 20 percent said that they had experienced physical attacks or had been abused offline in connection to online abuse. In response, women journalists reported self-censoring, withdrawing from online interactions, and avoiding interacting with their audiences. Filipino-American journalist and Nobel Peace Prize winner Maria Ressa wrote about the online abuse that she faces, at…

Our approach to data is fundamentally broken, Tim Berners-Lee—the inventor of the world wide web and cofounder of Inrupt—told the room in an agenda-setting first session. Monopolies, surveillance capitalism and fake news benefit from exploiting us and our data, rather than empowering us, as he first dreamed the web would do. “People are locked into platforms and systems we can’t control, the winner controls most data, the online economy exploits not benefits us, and we provide our data for so little in return,” he pointed out. “Companies claim they’re better than you at knowing what you want.” Most of the data we put online is siloed on the servers of companies and used to sell us as an audience for targeted advertising, he said. It is possible to download and…

Players in the metaverse are wasting money and time on “bullshit”, Improbable’s CEO Herman Narula warned the room. Investors and developers need to avoid this confusion, or they’ll be at the wrong end of the next version of the dot.com bubble. “If you define the metaverse in a way that includes smart TVs and Disney Glass, boy, are you going to be confused in what you invest in and where you go,” he said to laughter. “The metaverse has nothing to do with technology or virtual 3D worlds in the same way a Kindle has nothing particularly to do with defining literature.” Even virtual reality headsets are “Facebook’s poisonous distraction,” he shrugged. “When you play a game of Fortnite with 100 players, that takes 10,000 operations per second on the…

Seed access is crucial The cost of entry to retail startups is holding back DNI, warned Abi Oyepitan, cofounder of LIHA Beauty. “We were told ‘you could get your first £50k from friends and family’,” she laughed. She found investors were surprised when she said her friends and family didn’t have a spare £50k. “It’s not just a race thing; it’s a class thing.” Ecommerce should get personal Thirty-seven percent of fashion executives cite social commerce as one of the top three themes that will impact their business in 2022, and by 2025, ecommerce is going to be the largest and primary distribution channel for luxury goods, according to Ommy Akhe, creative technologist at autonommy—so the experience needs to be more personal. Diverse markets are huge The beauty industry is…

FRIEDERIKE OTTO ATTRIBUTION SCIENCE IS THE SMOKING GUN FOR CLIMATE CHANGE On July 19, 2022, the UK experienced a taste of the weather to come. Temperatures reached 40.3 degrees Celsius—soaring past the previous record by more than one-and-a-half degrees. Dozens of homes in east London were destroyed by fires, while elsewhere in the country, the heat pushed the power grid close to the point of failure. The Office for National Statistics estimates that there were more than 2,800 excess deaths among the over-65s during the summer heat waves of 2022, making it the deadliest year for heat since 2003. Before the temperatures had even peaked, Friederike Otto was in her office in Imperial College London, getting ready to answer the question that she knew would be thrown at her countless…

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was founded in 1988 after scientists had spent decades raising the alarm about global warming. Thirty-five years later, there is effectively zero binding international policy to address climate change. In the United States, the largest historical emitter of greenhouse gasses and second largest polluter today, there have been repeated legislative failures, including the recent Supreme Court ruling limiting the government’s authority to regulate power plant emissions. We now know that a large part of the reason for the political failure to act is because the fossil fuel industry built a network to challenge the science and policy of climate change. The industry’s efforts have included at least 4,556 individuals with ties to 164 different organizations. The investment in climate change denial—at least $9.77 billion…

Ten years after its discovery, the implications of CRISPR genome editing are already profound and far-reaching, and we are only getting started. This tool, adapted from a bacterial immune system, allows us to cut and edit the genetic code in any living cell to make highly targeted changes and repairs. A small number of people with genetic diseases have already been helped by CRISPR therapies, highlighting the potential to impact the lives of those suffering from the ~7,000 genetic diseases with known causes. Trials are ongoing in diseases ranging from diabetes to infectious disease. In 2023, we will begin to benefit from new CRISPR-based solutions in many other areas. For instance, following on the heels of the initial clinical trial results, the first agricultural applications using CRISPR have recently entered…

In 1986, President Ronald Reagan argued that the nine most terrifying words in the English language are, “I’m from the Government and I’m here to help”. In Britain, Margaret Thatcher largely concurred. It signified a summary of what was becoming the dominant political orthodoxy across the West at the time: That government caused more harm than good, getting in the way of entrepreneurs using the market to meet consumer needs. Times have changed. Governments will no longer leave innovation and the economy to the market. 2023 will be the watershed for a new doctrine that I call “catalytic government”. In previous eras of active government, these interventions could be messy. Bureaucrats might dominate industry sectors. Or they might bet on specific technologies because they appeal to political bigwigs. In the…

BUT I WAS AN ONLY CHILD.—Andy Walton, via Facebook He did what she would not. —Eric Nisly, via Facebook They think I’m the good one. —@bobtheimpaler, via Instagram “Well, only if you stay digital.” —Morten Kielland, via email Her eye is mine for eternity. —@cessmtz, via Twitter “Relax. Mom will never find out.” —@ascendant_dada, via Instagram I’m the one you really want. —@kalkikanmani, via Twitter Only mirrors can reveal the truth. —@BuddhaandDog, via Twitter Born triplets, but three’s a crowd. —@jkadz, via Instagram Want to submit a six-word story for us to consider? At the beginning of each month, we ask for new ideas on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and wired.com/six-word, where you can also see how we’ve illustrated past favorites.…