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For forty years we told ourselves a comforting story. There were real computers, and then there were phones.

OpenSSH creator Theo de Raadt was pushed out of NetBSD, lost a DARPA grant and fought half of open source. Now his paranoid code guards the world's servers.

Kai on a real M5StickS3: clipped to a lanyard.

The curious story of Erlang, told from inside the head of the man who built it.

Fabrice Bellard wrote the code that carries the world's video, spins up its clouds, and speaks to its cell towers. He does not give interviews. For nearly forty years he has been in conversation with one thing only, a machine, in a quiet room, with no one else invited. This is a portrait of that conversation, assembled from everyone left standing outside the door.

Digits of pi, fragments of C, and the space where the man should be.

Brendan Eich built the language that runs the world in ten days. Nineteen years later, the internet running on his code needed just eleven to throw him out of Mozilla, the house he built. The industry that purged him over a $1,000 check now asks to be trusted with the future of the species. This is the story of the making, the unmaking, and the return of the web's most stubborn architect, and of a Silicon Valley that has never stopped confusing its power for its virtue.

Alone on a dark stage. Brendan Eich at a Web Directions conference in 2010, four years before the industry he built decided it could not look at him.

He built a country with a currency, a curriculum, and four hundred citizens. He did not build an army. A municipal council in Johor took his flag down.

Forest City, Johor, Malaysia: a $100 billion development with almost nobody in it. An ideal blank canvas — until it wasn't. (Jonashtand, CC BY-SA 4.0)

A twenty-year-old in a cold Helsinki apartment thinks the entire trillion-dollar architecture of machine intelligence is in bad taste. He may be the most dangerous kind of person in tech: the kind who is bored.

Helsinki after midnight. The city where this keeps happening.

A century after he taught the world to measure information, the ghost of Claude Shannon walks into a modern AI lab — and recognizes every machine in the room.

Moonlighting: Employed by Bell Labs during World War II, Claude Shannon (at chalkboard) still found time to work on his own research. Photo: Nokia Bell Labs

Picture him arriving the way he liked to travel the halls of Bell Labs: on a unicycle, juggling.

The science, the systems, and the very expensive question of who gets to keep living

Human-derived cells imaged by fluorescence microscopy. The blue is DNA. Somewhere in those nuclei is the configuration file the entire longevity industry is trying to edit.

Every human being who has ever lived has been party to a contract none of us signed.