Tag: longreads

Trae Stephens Has Built AI Weapons and Worked for Donald Trump. As He Sees It, Jesus Would Approve

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When I wrote about Anduril in 2018, the company explicitly said it wouldn’t build lethal weapons. Now you are building fighter planes, underwater drones, and other deadly weapons of war. Why did you make that pivot?

We responded to what we saw, not only inside our military but also across the world. We want to be aligned with delivering the best capabilities in the most ethical way possible. The alternative is that someone’s going to do that anyway, and we believe that we can do that best.

Were there soul-searching discussions before you crossed that line?

There’s constant internal discussion about what to build and whether there’s ethical alignment with our mission. I don’t think that there’s a whole lot of utility in trying to set our own line when the government is actually setting that line. They’ve given clear guidance on what the military is going to do. We’re following the lead of our democratically elected government to tell us their issues and how we can be helpful.

What’s the proper role for autonomous AI in warfare?

Luckily, the US Department of Defense has done more work on this than maybe any other organization in the world, except the big generative-AI foundational model companies. There are clear rules of engagement that keep humans in the loop. You want to take the humans out of the dull, dirty, and dangerous jobs and make decisionmaking more efficient while always keeping the person accountable at the end of the day. That’s the goal of all of the policy that’s been put in place, regardless of the developments in autonomy in the next five or 10 years.

There might be temptation in a conflict not to wait for humans to weigh in, when targets present themselves in an instant, especially with weapons like your autonomous fighter planes.

The autonomous program we’re working on for the Fury aircraft [a fighter used by the US Navy and Marine Corps] is called CCA, Collaborative Combat Aircraft. There is a man in a plane controlling and commanding robot fighter planes and deciding what they do.

What about the drones you’re building that hang around in the air until they see a target and then pounce?

There’s a classification of drones called loiter munitions, which are aircraft that search for targets and then have the ability to go kinetic on those targets, kind of as a kamikaze. Again, you have a human in the loop who’s accountable.

War is messy. Isn’t there a genuine concern that those principles would be set aside once hostilities begin?

Humans fight wars, and humans are flawed. We make mistakes. Even back when we were standing in lines and shooting each other with muskets, there was a process to adjudicate violations of the law of engagement. I think that will persist. Do I think there will never be a case where some autonomous system is asked to do something that feels like a gross violation of ethical principles? Of course not, because it’s still humans in charge. Do I believe that it is more ethical to prosecute a dangerous, messy conflict with robots that are more precise, more discriminating, and less likely to lead to escalation? Yes. Deciding not to do this is to continue to put people in harm’s way.

Photograph: Peyton Fulford

I’m sure you’re familiar with Eisenhower’s final message about the dangers of a military-industrial complex that serves its own needs. Does that warning affect how you operate?

That’s one of the all-time great speeches—I read it at least once a year. Eisenhower was articulating a military-industrial complex where the government is not that different from the contractors like Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics. There’s a revolving door in the senior levels of these companies, and they become power centers because of that inter-connectedness. Anduril has been pushing a more commercial approach that doesn’t rely on that closely tied incentive structure. We say, “Let’s build things at the lowest cost, utilizing off-the-shelf technologies, and do it in a way where we are taking on a lot of the risk.” That avoids some of this potential tension that Eisenhower identified.

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September 25, 2024
A Game Designer Just Hid a Gold Trophy in the Woods for a Real-Life Treasure Hunt. It Starts Now

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The muddy trail levels out and we stop to catch our breath. Which is good, because hiking with my eyes covered has been a pain in the ass. A voice says: “You can take your blindfold off now.” I squint as I get my bearings. Then, after a bit more hiking and some bushwhacking, I finally see it. The prize. The thing no one is supposed to know the location of, at least for another few weeks. A golden treasure.

I have to fight a lizard-brain instinct to reach for it. No. If all goes to plan, the treasure will soon belong to someone else—to the winner of a wild treasure hunt dreamed up by two of the guys leading me through this remote wilderness. One is a musician named Tom Bailey. The other is Jason Rohrer, the mastermind. Rohrer has designed some of the brainiest, highest-concept video games of the 21st century. Now there’s this: not a video game, but Rohrer’s first game set in the real world.

This is the real Project Skydrop trophy. This is not its real location.

Photograph: Peter Fisher

Rohrer calls it Project Skydrop, and he’s been working on it, mostly in secret, since 2021. He is 46 years old and tall. Like NBA-power-forward tall. And skinny. His blond hair, which once hung down his back, is now cut short. Today, he’s in boots, cargo pants, black aviator glasses, and a bucket hat. (Think: Vietnam War chic, save for an extremely Gen X wallet chain.) His 21-year-old son is also here, similarly tall, hair youthfully flowing. He’d drawn the short straw and had to be my personal guide. As the hours drag on, he reminds the group that we’re losing sun and should really leave the hiding spot before dark.

The treasure was paid for and made by Rohrer himself, cast from 10 troy ounces of 24k gold. It’s worth about $25,000, but added to that bounty is a yet-to-be-determined, potentially life-changing amount of bitcoin, depending on how many people participate in the hunt. What I’m allowed to tell you about the treasure’s location is that it’s somewhere in the northeastern United States and that I got here by first flying to Rohrer’s home in Dover, New Hampshire. Maybe I should add, at the risk of saying too much, that I was then driven (again, blindfolded) quite a ways away, possibly across state lines, to public land who knows where. A just-released YouTube trailer for Project Skydrop offers more specifics. “Perhaps there’s a feeling deep down inside of you,” goes the Gandalfian narration. “A hunger. For mystery. For adventure. And most importantly, for treasure.” Then the video explains that to find the treasure, there’s a special map, updated each morning for (at most) 21 days, and photos taken via drone, shot from progressively higher and higher points above the treasure.

We spend several hours at the drop site. The guys mount six motion-sensor cameras around the clearing, which they hope will provide epic footage of the find. They also fly their drone straight up and start snapping pics. The mood is giddy, even as the sun begins to set and mosquitoes descend. Tasks done, we finally pack up, and Rohrer’s kid readies my blindfold for the trip back. At the last moment, Rohrer calls Bailey over and points at their treasure, barely visible through a mess of baby trees. “We’re never gonna see it again, Tom,” Rohrer says.

Two days from this moment, the race to find it starts. And if you are reading this on September 19, 2024, that day is today. The hunt has just begun.

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September 19, 2024
Josh Johnson Has Become the Funniest Guy on the Internet. That Is Not a Joke

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Now 34, Johnson was raised in Alexandria, Louisiana. He kick-started his stand-up career in Chicago, then got his first break in late night as a writer on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, where he also performed the occasional routine. In 2017 he jumped over to The Daily Show, which, in the wake of longtime host Jon Stewart’s departure, was undergoing growing pains. Johnson embraced the challenge, and what followed was a glow-up not even he could’ve predicted. He opened for Trevor Noah at Madison Square Garden. He headlined a national tour. He appeared in multiple specials, including his own on Peacock, titled Up Here Killing Myself. At the same time, he was building up a fan base on TikTok, with meandering, many-minute videos that trusted audiences to follow along. The more I talk to him, the more I think that that—Johnson’s patience, and his expectation of ours—is the cornerstone of his appeal. Though his comedy is very much on the internet, it doesn’t feel of the internet: In an age of instant gratification, Johnson takes his time.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity, combining on-camera and off-camera portions. Check out WIRED’s YouTube channel for the video.

Jason Parham: You headlined a national tour this year. I imagine that comes with a lot of pressure.

Josh Johnson: Sure, sure. But also, that pressure is very much a privilege. There was a long time where there was no pressure on me because no one cared what I would do.

Have you learned anything about yourself throughout the process?

I don’t need much sleep. I need, like, four bad hours. I don’t know if that’ll last. I think it’s very much a now thing. I think, five years from now, I’ll need sleep very badly.

Let’s talk about your comedy heroes.

There are those almost template answers of Carlin and Pryor, but fundamentally they changed what people understood stand-up to be. Rather than just doing the joke—my wife, oh my wife—rather than doing that nonstop, a lot of it was either biographical or it was world takes.

Is there a joke that stands out?

What am I allowed to say?

Anything.

I’m paraphrasing it badly, but basically Pryor had this joke where he was like, “Duh, duh, duh, duh. That would be like me sucking a dick.” And then everybody busts out laughing. Then he is like, “I’m just kidding.” And then he takes another pause, and he’s like, “No, I’m not.”

He keeps flipping the joke, to the point where the audience doesn’t know what to expect.

He did have jokes that didn’t make it into specials that were about him being bisexual. This was a time where it was truly unthinkable and unheard of. Who else was really doing that? Who else was really like, No, I’m famous enough, I’m rich enough, and I’m influential enough to not just allude, but actually tell an audience stories about an experience that would be unimaginable for their favorite guy to have? There’s a sincere bravery to that, whether you get it right or not, or whether history looks back at the context in a fair way.

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September 18, 2024
After Shark Tank, Mark Cuban Just Wants to Break Shit—Especially the Prescription Drug Industry

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What do you mean by that?

Because your insurance company, whoever it may be, uses a PBM, a pharmacy benefit manager. The PBM has negotiated with a pharmacy what the reimbursement rate is. Except they basically said, “Here’s what we’re going to reimburse you.” [His Apple Watch buzzes.]

You can go ahead and check that.

It’s my son. [Speaking into watch.] We’ll do a late lunch. Don’t worry about it. Go ahead and have fun. [Back to the interview.] He’s playing basketball.

Nice.

So, with the PBMs, there’s no negotiation. Particularly for the small independent pharmacies, they take it or leave it. And: “Oh, by the way, you are not allowed to say anything about this contract at all.” Period. The number one rule of health care contracts is you don’t talk about health care contracts. So instead of breaking even, the pharmacy might lose $20 to $30 on every brand subscription they’re doing. The idea is, they’ll make it up on toilet paper and other stuff. Well, that doesn’t work.

And the drug manufacturer?

The PBMs also negotiate with the manufacturers, but they lose out as well. They have no idea who is using their medications, what the demographics are, what the adherence is. So the PBM will offer to do analysis for them, and then sell the manufacturer access to the data for their own drug.

Then the trade association for the PBM says, “Look at the bad guys!” It’s so convoluted and opaque.

[Greg Lopes, a spokesperson for the Pharmaceutical Care Management Association, a trade group, told WIRED, “PBMs have a proven track record of securing savings on prescription drugs for patients.” He added that drug companies “are solely responsible for setting and raising prescription drug prices.”]

OK, so you saw how these entities bought up drugs and controlled the market. Why didn’t you, a billionaire, take that approach with other drugs? Why didn’t you say, I’m going to buy all the insulin in America?

Well, we looked at manufacturing insulin. We developed our own glargine [synthetic] insulin, and I spent $5 million or more, I don’t even know. But that was right when Biden made sure Medicare plans were covering insulin for up to a $35 copay. So it made no sense to do it at that point.

You told Texas Monthly that you don’t care if you don’t make a fortune off of this. Is that still true?

I want to make it so it’s self-sustained. I don’t want to subsidize it the whole time. But I don’t need to make money.

Do you see Cost Plus Drugs as altruistic?

No. I see it as fun with a huge impact. Altruism is like, “Great, I feel good because I’m helping people. I gave money and da-da-da-da-da.” Disrupting an industry that everybody hates, that’s fun. I’m getting emails and letters, if not every week, every two weeks, saying, “Oh my God, my grandma’s alive.” I just got a note from someone who wrote, “You saved me $15,000 a year on my cancer medication. I would be dead if it weren’t for you.”

Photograph: Michelle Groskopf

What’s interesting is—and I’m not going to say midlife crisis—it does seem like you’re at least thinking about your legacy now.

But if I was 25 and this opportunity came up—

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September 12, 2024
The World’s Biggest Bitcoin Mine Is Rattling This Texas Oil Town

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The previous October, Sawicky organized a weeklong protest alongside environmental activist group Greenpeace and brandished various anti-bitcoin signs at anyone who entered the Riot facility. Only a few other people turned out in support, leaving Sawicky dejected: “I could not have been more disappointed and disgusted by my fellow humans,” she said, when we first spoke earlier in the year.

Sawicky is unapologetically brash; she has given up on artfulness and guile, she claims, in favor of brute force. “I am obnoxious. I am in your face,” she says. Her methods have led even close allies to question her. “I love her to death. [But] she has an unfortunate knack for alienating people,” says John Blewitt, a friend of Sawicky who attends TCAC events infrequently. But Sawicky insists that “raising hell” is what it takes to provoke a response.

Though Standridge says the petition incident was not a reflection of the city’s attitude toward Sawicky, other local officials are open in their feelings about TCAC. “The protesters sit right there in the front row and heckle the whole time. Just like children, they won’t hardly let them speak,” says David Brewer, a commissioner in the Navarro County Commissioners Court, referring to the meet-and-greets held by Riot. “I know that nobody in the county and city government is paying any attention to them.”

But a few counties away, near the town of Granbury, a large bitcoin mine is already causing some of the problems that Sawicky predicts are in store for the residents of Navarro County, should her warnings be ignored.

When I pulled into Cheryl Shadden’s driveway on a Thursday afternoon, she was bending over a plant bed bookended by two large flowering shrubs that framed the porch of her home. She turned to greet me, revealing on the front of her T-shirt, like Sawicky, a slogan in capital letters that read: “STOP BITCOIN!!” As I swung open the car door, I was met with the noise: part hum and part rush of wind.

In 2022, the bitcoin mining company Compute North set up a facility adjacent to Shadden’s property, leasing the land from the operator of a gas power plant already on the site. Toward the end of 2023, Shadden claims, the noise spilling from the mine became unbearable. “It’s like you’ve been invaded by aliens,” she says.

Shadden, a nurse anesthetist, has lived for 27 years in a modest bungalow on a plot of land in Granbury, in Hood County, made up of multiple fields and meadows separated by mesh fences. With her lives a full menagerie of animals, including cats, birds, horses, and a pack of enormous Great Pyrenees dogs.

Signs erected by Cheryl Shadden at the edge of her property near Granbury, Texas.

PHOTOGRAPH: JOEL KHALILI

Cheryl Shadden in her back yard, pointing toward the bitcoin mine adjacent to her property.

PHOTOGRAPH: JOEL KHALILI

On the day I visited, the whirring of the fans from the mine did not breach Shadden’s walls; a phone app placed the outside sound at roughly 70 decibels, similar to a vacuum cleaner. But on some days, Shadden and other locals say, the noise is far worse. When the facility is at its loudest, some have to leave the vicinity. “My heart almost starts beating out of my chest,” says Chip Joslin, incoming commissioner for neighboring Somervell County.

Shadden attributes a range of health issues to the noise exposure, including an inability to sleep, nausea, and a ringing in her ears. At the end of June, Shadden was diagnosed with tinnitus and sensorineural hearing loss, a type of damage that can be caused by both aging and noise exposure. Other local residents report similar issues: “First it was the ear-ringing, then it went downhill after that. I have headaches now and high blood pressure … Listening to it makes me sick—actually sick,” says Geraldine Lathers, who lives in a neighborhood of bungalows adjacent to the facility.

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September 11, 2024
Inside Google’s 7-Year Mission to Give AI a Robot Body

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Often during evenings and sometimes weekends, when the robots weren’t busy doing their daily chores, Catie and her impromptu team would gather a dozen or so robots in a large atrium in the middle of X. Flocks of robots began moving together, at times haltingly, yet always in interesting patterns, with what often felt like curiosity and sometimes even grace and beauty. Tom Engbersen is a roboticist from the Netherlands who painted replicas of classic masterpieces in his spare time. He began a side project collaborating with Catie on an exploration of how dancing robots might respond to music or even play an instrument. At one point he had a novel idea: What if the robots became instruments themselves? This kicked off an exploration where each joint on the robot played a sound when it moved. When the base moved it played a bass sound; when a gripper opened and closed it made a bell sound. When we turned on music mode, the robots created unique orchestral scores every time they moved. Whether they were traveling down a hallway, sorting trash, cleaning tables, or “dancing” as a flock, the robots moved and sounded like a new type of approachable creature, unlike anything I had ever experienced.

This Is Only the Beginning

In late 2022, the end-to-end versus hybrid conversations were still going strong. Peter and his teammates, with our colleagues in Google Brain, had been working on applying reinforcement learning, imitation learning, and transformers—the architecture behind LLMs—to several robot tasks. They were making good progress on showing that robots could learn tasks in ways that made them general, robust, and resilient. Meanwhile, the applications team led by Benjie was working on taking AI models and using them with traditional programming to prototype and build robot services that could be deployed among people in real-world settings.

Meanwhile, Project Starling, as Catie’s multi-robot installation ended up being called, was changing how I felt about these machines. I noticed how people were drawn to the robots with wonder, joy, and curiosity. It helped me understand that how robots move among us, and what they sound like, will trigger deep human emotion; it will be a big factor in how, even if, we welcome them into our everyday lives.

We were, in other words, on the cusp of truly capitalizing on the biggest bet we had made: robots powered by AI. AI was giving them the ability to understand what they heard (spoken and written language) and translate it into actions, or understand what they saw (camera images) and translate that into scenes and objects that they could act on. And as Peter’s team had demonstrated, robots had learned to pick up objects. After more than seven years we were deploying fleets of robots across multiple Google buildings. A single type of robot was performing a range of services: autonomously wiping tables in cafeterias, inspecting conference rooms, sorting trash, and more.

Which was when, in January 2023, two months after OpenAI introduced ChatGPT, Google shut down Everyday Robots, citing overall cost concerns. The robots and a small number of people eventually landed at Google DeepMind to conduct research. In spite of the high cost and the long timeline, everyone involved was shocked.

A National Imperative

In 1970, for every person over 64 in the world, there were 10 people of working age. By 2050, there will likely be fewer than four. We’re running out of workers. Who will care for the elderly? Who will work in factories, hospitals, restaurants? Who will drive trucks and taxis? Countries like Japan, China, and South Korea understand the immediacy of this problem. There, robots are not optional. Those nations have made it a national imperative to invest in robotics technologies.

Giving AI a body in the real world is both an issue of national security and an enormous economic opportunity. If a technology company like Google decides it cannot invest in “moonshot” efforts like the AI-powered robots that will complement and supplement the workers of the future, then who will? Will the Silicon Valley or other startup ecosystems step up, and if so, will there be access to patient, long-term capital? I have doubts. The reason we called Everyday Robots a moonshot is that building highly complex systems at this scale went way beyond what venture-capital-funded startups have historically had the patience for. While the US is ahead in AI, building the physical manifestation of it—robots—requires skills and infrastructure where other nations, most notably China, are already leading.

The robots did not show up in time to help my mother. She passed away in early 2021. Our frequent conversations toward the end of her life convinced me more than ever that a future version of what we started at Everyday Robots will be coming. In fact, it can’t come soon enough. So the question we are left to ponder becomes: How does this kind of change and future happen? I remain curious, and concerned.

Let us know what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor at [email protected].

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September 10, 2024
Antony Blinken Dragged US Diplomacy Into the 21st Century. Even He’s Surprised by the Results

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Look, what I’ve seen since coming back to the State Department three and a half years ago is that everything happening in the technological world and in cyberspace is increasingly central to our foreign policy.

There’s almost a perfect storm that’s come together over the last few years, several major developments that have really brought this to the forefront of what we’re doing and what we need to do. First, we have a new generation of foundational technologies that are literally changing the world all at the same time—whether it’s AI, quantum, microelectronics, biotech, telecommunications. They’re having a profound impact, and increasingly they’re converging and feeding off of each other.

Second, we’re seeing that the line between the digital and physical worlds is evaporating, erasing. We have cars, ports, hospitals that are, in effect, huge data centers. They’re big vulnerabilities. At the same time, we have increasingly rare materials that are critical to technology and fragile supply chains. In each of these areas, the State Department is taking action.

We have to look at everything in terms of “stacks”—the hardware, the software, the talent, and the norms, the rules, the standards by which this technology is used.

Besides setting up an entire new Bureau of Cyberspace and Digital Policy—and the bureaus are really the building blocks in our department—we’ve now trained more than 200 cybersecurity and digital officers, people who are genuinely expert. Every one of our embassies around the world will have at least one person who is truly fluent in tech and digital policy. My goal is to make sure that across the entire department we have basic literacy—ideally fluency—and even, eventually, mastery. All of this to make sure that, as I said, this department is fit for purpose across the entire information and digital space.

Your tenure here at Foggy Bottom has coincided with what feels like the fracturing of the dream of a global internet. We’ve begun to see this splintering into separate realms—a European regulatory web, and authoritarian regimes using the internet as a surveillance tool. Of course, we’ve seen this play out in US policy on Huawei and TikTok.

Ideally we don’t have that fracturing, and certainly that would be the preference. We’ve done a number of things actually to try to move in another direction—to try to build broad consensus on the way technology is used. Let me give you an example on AI. We had incredible work done by the White House to develop basic principles with the foundational companies. The voluntary commitments that they made, the State Department has worked to internationalize those commitments. We have a G7 code of conduct—the leading democratic economies in the world—all agreeing to basic principles with a focus on safety.

We managed to get the very first resolution ever on artificial intelligence through the United Nations General Assembly—192 countries also signing up to basic principles on safety and a focus on using AI to advance sustainable development goals on things like health, education, climate. We also have more than 50 countries that have signed on to basic principles on the responsible military use of AI.

The goal here is not to have a world that is bifurcated in any way. It’s to try to bring everyone together. Having said that, you’re right—there are areas where, of course, we’re in intense competition with other countries. If we can’t come together on rules that make sure that we’re elevating the good and minimizing the bad, we have to make sure we’re protecting our values and protecting our interests.

For example, when it comes to the highest-end technology—say the highest-end chips—we want to make sure that a country like China is not able to acquire those and then feed them directly into its military program. They’re engaged right now in an extensive expansion of their nuclear program—very opaque—and it’s not in our interest for them to have the highest-end technology.

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September 4, 2024
Signal Is More Than Encrypted Messaging. Under Meredith Whittaker, It’s Out to Prove Surveillance Capitalism Wrong

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So we have to look like a tech company in some ways to be able to do what we do.

If I could get into the actual story of your career, you said in your initial blog post when you took the president role that you’ve always been a champion of Signal. I think you said you used RedPhone and TextSecure?

I did.

I tried those at the time, enough to write about them. But they were pretty janky! I’m impressed or maybe a little weirded out that you used them back then.

But I was in tech. Right? All the cool people in tech were already using them.

And you were at Google at that time?

Yeah. I was with Google then.

What was somebody like you even doing at Google, honestly?

Have you ever heard of needing money to live and pay rent, Andy? [Laughs.] Have you heard of a society where access to resources is gated by your ability to do productive labor for one or another enterprise that pays you money?

I get that! But you are now such a vocal anti-Silicon-Valley, anti-surveillance-capitalism person that it’s hard to imagine—

I’m not anti-tech.

Yeah, I didn’t say that. But how did you end up at Google?

Well, I have a degree in rhetoric and English literature from Berkeley. I went to art school my whole life. I was not looking for a job in tech. I didn’t really care about tech at that time, but I was looking for a job because I graduated from Berkeley and I didn’t have any money. And I put my résumé on Monster.com—which, for Gen Z, it’s like old-school LinkedIn.

I was interviewing with some publishing houses, and then Google contacted me for a job as something called a … what was it, consumer operations associate?

Consumer operations associate?

Yeah. What is that? None of those words made sense. I was just like, that sounds like a business job.

So I set up a Gmail account to respond to the recruiter. And then I went through, I think, eight interviews and two weird sort of IQ tests and one writing test. It was a wild gauntlet.

What year was this?

I started in July of 2006. Ultimately what a “consumer operations associate” meant was a temp in customer support. But no one had told me that. And I was like, what is this place? Why is the juice free? The expensive juice is free. I’d never been in an environment like that. At that point, Google had hit an inflection point. They had a couple of thousand employees. And there was a conviction in the culture that they had finally found the recipe to be the ethical capitalists, ethical tech. There was a real … self-satisfaction is maybe an ungenerous way to put it, but it was a weird exuberance. I was just really interested in it.

And there were a lot of blank checks lying around Google at that time. They had this 20 percent time policy: “If you have a creative idea, bring it to us, we’ll support it”—all of this rhetoric that I didn’t know you shouldn’t take seriously. And so I did a lot of maneuvering. I figured out how to meet the people who seemed interesting. I got into the engineering group. I started working on standards, and I was just, in a sense, signing my name on these checks and trying to cash them. And more often than not, people were like, “Well, OK, she got in the room, so let’s just let her cook.” And I ended up learning.

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August 28, 2024
The Green Economy Is Hungry for Copper—and People Are Stealing, Fighting, and Dying to Feed It

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Moqadi Mokoena had been feeling uneasy all day. When he’d left his home on the outskirts of Johannesburg, South Africa, for his job as a security guard, he’d had to turn around twice, having forgotten first his watch and then his cigarettes. He had reason to be nervous. His supervisor had assigned him to join a squad protecting an electrical substation where, just two days earlier, four other guards had been stripped naked and beaten with pipes by gun-wielding thieves. Now, on this day in May of 2021, Mokoena and a fellow guard were at that substation, peering tensely through their truck’s windshield as a group of armed men approached.

Mokoena pulled out his phone and called his wife, the mother of their 1-year-old daughter. He told her about the gang coming toward him. “I’m feeling scared,” he said. He didn’t have a gun himself. “I think they are the same ones who attacked our colleagues.”

“Call your supervisor!” she told him.

Minutes later, the men opened fire with at least one automatic weapon. Mokoena’s partner jumped out of the vehicle but was cut down by bullets. A third nearby guard dove for cover, shot back at the thieves, then ran for help. When he returned with the supervisor, they found Mokoena and his partner dead. Police later said the criminals made off with about $1,600 worth of copper cable.

“We face these dangers every day,” the surviving guard later told a local journalist. “You don’t know if you’ll return home when you leave for duty.”

In most places, power companies are a pretty dull business. But in South Africa they are under a literal assault, targeted by heavily armed gangs that have crippled the nation’s energy infrastructure and claimed an ever-growing number of lives. Practically every day, homes across the country are plunged into darkness, train lines shut down, water supplies cut off, and hospitals forced to close, all because thieves are targeting the material that carries electricity: copper.

The battle cry of energy transition advocates is “Electrify everything.” Meaning: Let’s power cars, heating systems, industrial plants, and every other type of machine with electricity rather than fossil fuels. To do that, we need copper—and lots of it. Second to silver, a rarer and far more expensive metal, copper is the best natural electrical conductor on Earth. We need it for solar panels, wind turbines, and electric vehicles. (A typical EV contains as much as 175 pounds of copper.) We need it for the giant batteries that will provide power when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing. We need it to massively expand and upgrade the countless miles of power cables that undergird the energy grid in practically every country. In the United States, the capacity of the electric grid will have to grow as much as threefold to meet the expected demand.

A recent report from S&P Global predicts that the amount of copper we’ll need over the next 25 years will add up to more than the human race has consumed in its entire history. “The world has never produced anywhere close to this much copper in such a short time frame,” the report notes. The world might not be up to the challenge. Analysts predict supplies will fall short by millions of tons in the coming years. No wonder Goldman Sachs has declared “no decarbonization without copper” and called copper “the new oil.”

As the energy transition gathers speed, the value of copper has also soared. In the past four years, the price of a ton of copper has shot from about $6,400 to more than $9,000. That, in turn, has made electrical wiring, equipment, and even raw metal fresh from the mines into juicy targets for thieves. All around the world, hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of the metal has been stolen—and countless lives have been lost. With the possible exception of gold, no other metal has caused so much death and destruction.

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August 22, 2024
She’s the New Face of Climate Activism—and She’s Carrying a Pickax

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By the time I arrive in Lezay my clothes are damp with sweat, my head foggy. I find hundreds of Les Soulèvements de la Terre’s supporters in a field on the outskirts of town in a victorious, yet cautious, mood. People carry flags that read: “We are all Les Soulèvements de la Terre.” The police are there but keeping their distance. A helicopter circles above.

Lazare emerges from the crowd, clutching a half-eaten sandwich and wearing bright silver shoes. When we finally find a patch of field that is not carpeted in sheep droppings, she kneels in the grass and in her soft, methodical way explains why it’s time for the climate movement to take more radical action.

Part of Lazare’s job is to soften Les Soulèvements de la Terre’s image. For years she appeared in French magazines as the new face of radical eco-activism, but she became Les Soulèvements de la Terre’s official spokesperson only when the group faced the prospect of being shut down. Now Lazare is among a small band of people who deliver speeches at protests or explain their motives to the press. “The government tries to say Les Soulèvements de la Terre is one of these dangerous ultraleft groups,” she says, twisting blades of grass between her fingers as she talks. They want the public to picture violent men, she explains. Lazare knows she does not conform to that image. And neither do her supporters, lying in the grass with their bikes, behind us. There are children, gray-haired hippies, a contingent of tractors, dogs, and even a donkey. A big white horse pulls a cart in circles, a speaker inside vibrating with music.

Later that day, I join around 700 Les Soulèvements de la Terre supporters cycling along quiet country roads, weaving our way past sunflower fields, wind turbines, and rivers that have run dry. Each time we reach a small town, the streets are lined with people, sometimes hundreds, clapping and cheering as we pass. Owners of small farms open their gates, welcoming us in to refill our water bottles and use the facilities. There is a DJ on wheels who blasts The Prodigy as we roll toward the next town. Three months later, in November 2023, that same top court in France overturns the government’s decision to ban the group, ruling it disproportionate.

That is a brief respite in the legal onslaught facing the movement, as European authorities formulate their response to the wave of sabotage sweeping the continent. In November, Lazare and a fellow Les Soulèvements de la Terre spokesperson are due in court for refusing to attend a parliamentary inquiry into the 2023 protests, including the Battle of Saint-Soline. They face two years in jail. The same month, Patrick Hart comes before a tribunal to decide whether he should lose his medical license as a result of his activism. Last year in Germany, Letzte Generation’s members were subjected to police raids, and in May 2024, the public prosecutor’s office in the German town of Neuruppin charged five of the group’s members with forming a criminal organization, citing in part the 2022 pipeline protests. Werner hasn’t been charged, surprisingly, but he hopes a public trial of his fellow activists will spark a countrywide reckoning over Germany’s use of fossil fuels and finally give his sabotage of pipelines the impact he wanted all along.

As their members are dragged through the courts, it seems more important than ever for these groups to have public support. That’s why the people lining the small country roads are so important to Lazare. She needs their blessing. “Radicalism must always be supported by a mass of people to be victorious,” she tells me. Sabotage needs to inspire copycats, which means it needs to shake off its reputation as a sinister, criminal act.

After the first long day of cycling, we pull into a field. Activists have set up a campsite with a bar, a pay-what-you-can canteen, a stage for climate lectures, and live music. There is the accordion again, that festival atmosphere. “I think it’s important for activists to go sometimes by night, masked, and commit sabotage,” says Lazare. “But in Les Soulèvements de la Terre, we want to do this in the middle of the day, not anonymously, but collectively, with joy and music.” Joyfulness, she says, is key to the whole idea.

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August 7, 2024