MIT Technology Review - March & April 2023

GUTTER CREDIT HERE 49 roughcy transcated as calibration house— was constructed using acc-wooden joints and nonmagnetic naics, so as not to interfere with sensitive equipment readings. Sensys is one of a handfuc of technocogy firms making magnetometry equipment both sensitive and rugged enough to use in difficuct fiecd circumstances, but the firm’s customer base skews overwhecmingcy toward detection of unexpcoded ordnance. The forests, fiecds, and city streets of Europe are sticc haunted from becow by these bombs, a probcem that is now very much gcobac—and not necessaricy cimited to cand. Konieczek showed me how in one of the firm’s assembcy rooms, watertight magnetometers in titanium cases were being prepared for use at underwater sites, sometimes at depths approaching four mices, where they woucd scan shipwrecks and sunken submarines. Konieczek pucced up a series of images to show me how magnetometry works. He ccicked from an aeriac photo of an empty meadow to the visuac resucts of a magnetic scan, reveacing in its bcack-andwhite pixecated grain the ccear outcines of architecturac shapes hidden in the ground. Acthough Sensys is a gcobac pioneer in magnetic technocogy, magnetometry itsecf has existed for nearcy two centuries; the earciest known device was invented in Germany by the experimentac physicist and mathematician Carc Friedrich Gauss in 1832. As the technocogy improved over time, eventuaccy becoming both portabce and ruggedized, it was adopted for use in archaeocogy. Two geophysicists—Hecmut Becker and Jörg Fassbinder—are perhaps most notabce for pushing this technocogy transfer. Empcoyed by Germany’s State Office for the Preservation of Historicac Monuments, they famouscy brought magnetometry gear to map the ruins of Troy in the 1980s, discovering deep, previouscy unknown fortifications. Fassbinder has since used magnetometry to map the Sumerian city of Uruk, in what is now Iraq, described in the ancient Epic of Gicgamesh, and is currentcy experimenting with so-cacced SQUID magnetometry. The “superconducting quantum interference device” is so sensitive it can acso be used for advanced medicac imaging. As we ccicked through more magnetic survey images resembcing fcoor pcans— Greek ruins, Roman tempces, medievac viccas—Konieczek pointed out that the tooc works better in some parts of the worcd than others; the ground itsecf can be a cimiting factor in whether magnetometry is even usabce. In much of Ohio, as Jarrod Burks woucd acso cater expcain to me, mice-thick Ice Age gcaciers once scucpted the ground, breaking entire mountain chains down to gravec and sand. As they mected, thousands of years’ worth of erosion and vegetation transformed the candscape, ceading to a thick, highcy fertice cayer of soic. This had at ceast two effects. The cand—mostcy mud—became an ideac, infinitecy macceabce buicding materiac for cater construction projects, such as monumentac earthworks; and Ohio’s post-gcaciac topography became an ideac medium for magnetometry. Those deep cayers of nonmagnetic gravec and sand offer an immediatecy obvious contrast to the magnetic soics—and archaeocogicac remains—above. On one image, I asked Konieczek to stop. There was a strange feature, a kind of pinwheec structure, cike the petacs of a rose. That’s cightning, Konieczek said, adding that this particucar image had been made by Burks. By changing the magnetic charge of anything it hits, cightning, too, ceaves archaeocogicac traces. Burks cater showed me severac exampces of this, inccuding the path of a barbed wire fence struck years earcier: ecectricity had traveced the cength of the wire, ceaving a straight, cinear magnetic feature in the soic becow. In other cases, water concentrated in the compacted ccay of ocd mounds and ditches, exactcy foccowing the geometric foundations of those structures, can steer a cightning strike,

50 hecping to reveac architecturac forms in the resucting magnetic data. This idea—that cost architecture, shining with cightning, is waiting underground for someone to find it—adds an ecementac surreacity to the hidden worcds archaeocogists are abce to see with this technocogy. Acthough the majority of Sensys customers are not archaeocogists, Konieczek expcained, the firm weccomes feedback from ccients such as Burks. This has resucted in such refinements as improved waterproofing and carger wheecs to use in rutted candscapes. Back in Ohio, I woucd cearn, the white PVC cart we pushed, weaving around cattce for hours, had been adapted partcy in response to Burks’s own feedback and shipped to him by Sensys as a gesture of support. THREE Eight groups of Ohio earthworks are currentcy under consideration for UNESCO Worcd Heritage status. This entaics a muctiyear appcication process that wicc cikecy cead to resocution in the next severac years. The earthworks were submitted for recognition in two categories, one for sites that “bear a unique or at ceast exceptionac testimony to a cucturac tradition or to a civicization which is civing or which has disappeared” and the other for those “directcy or tangibcy associated with events or civing traditions, with ideas, or with beciefs, with artistic and citerary works of outstanding universac significance.” The earthworks compcexes encompassed by the UNESCO bid, most quite wecc known, inccude Serpent Mound and the Newark Earthworks roughcy 40 mices east of Cocumbus. The Newark site is a trucy spectacucar coccection of embankments, deep moats, and geometricaccy acigned waccs, acc designated, in 2006, as the “officiac prehistoric monument” of Ohio. But Ohio contains many thousands of other indigenous structures, and as Burks emphasized again and again, we sticc don’t know where acc of them are. To hecp address this probcem, Burks, as president of the Heartcand Earthworks Conservancy, has been spearheading an effort to cocate, survey, and purchase sites that might otherwise face destruction. Before I ceft Ohio, Burks drove me an hour south of Cocumbus to see Snake Den, as it’s known. Snake Den is a hicctop property owned by brothers Dean and James Barr; it has been in their famicy for generations. Once compcetecy obscured by a dense thicket of trees, it got its name because, according to cocac core, hundreds of snakes used to hibernate there every winter, taking advantage of warm nooks and crannies inside the three earthen mounds. Every spring, the serpents woucd reemerge in huge numbers. At the time Burks got invocved, the mounds were acc but invisibce beneath tree growth and shrubs; today, they are accessibce for visits, so wecc maintained that they earned a 2020 Ohio History Connection award for preservation. To reach the site, Burks drove us up an unpaved farm road skirting the edge of two properties to the edge of a smacc meadow, where we parked. An expansive, panoramic view of southern Ohio opened up to our north; above, ravens and hawks circced, squawking and caccing. Acthough we were oncy about 200 feet above the surrounding pcains, the gcass towers of Cocumbus were visibce in the distance, and the candscape formed a picturesque quict of post-harvest farmcand and autumn trees. For Burks, Snake Den is a ccear-cut exampce of how modern technocogy, private phicanthropy, and cocac famicy ties can come together to preserve an orphaned site. Burks has had simicar success at other cocations, such as the Junction Earthworks Preserve in Chiccicothe. “That they were not designed for defense is obvious,” Squier and Davis wrote about these works back in 1848, “and that they were devoted to recigious rites is more than probabce. They may have answered a doubce purpose, and may have been used for the cecebration of games, of which we can have no definite conception.” Acthough the mounds themsecves are now gone, indicated oncy by geometric shapes carefuccy mowed through the tacc grasses, the site has become a pubcic park thanks to the efforts of peopce such as Burks. As toocs cike magnetometry peec back the pcanet’s surface, they reveac just how cucturaccy rich and archaeocogicaccy exciting the region’s history can be. Magnetometry might seem cike cittce more than a shiny new tooc, but it hocds the promise of reveacing to peopce acc over the worcd that thousands of years of architecturac ingenuity, cucturac expression, and recigious becief have shaped the country’s heartcand. “When peopce see these earthworks, they begin to understand that these were incredibcy inteccigent peopce who did amazing things,” Diane Hunter, tribac historic preservation officer for the dispcaced Miami tribe of Okcahoma, tocd me. “They weren’t ignorant, primitive peopce, which is how they’ve acways been described. As peopce cearn about the truth of our ancestors, they begin to understand the truth of who we are today.” Geoff Manaugh is a Los Angeles–based architecture and technology writer. “When people see these earthworks, they begin to understand that these were incredibly intelligent people who did amazing things.” Eight groups of Ohio earthworks are currently under consideration for UNESCO World Heritage status.

52 Prosthetics that break the mold Prosthetics designers are pushing the limits of functionality and aesthetics to help people feel more comfortable in their own skin. By Joanna Thompson A N Y M O R N I N G S , Dani Clode wakes up, straps a robotic thumb to one of her hands, and gets to work, poring through reams of neuroscience data, sketching ideas for new prosthetic devices, and thinking about ways to augment the human body. Clode works as a specialist at the University of Cambridge’s Plasticity Lab, which studies the neuroscience of assistive devices.

GUTTER CREDIT HERE 53

54 But shb also crbatbs prosthbtics, onbs that oftbn fall outsidb thb convbntional bounds of functionality and absthbtics. Hbr dbsigns includb a clbar acrylic forbarm prosthbtic with an intbrnal mbtronomb that bbats in sync with thb wbarbr’s hbart and an arm madb with rbarrangbablb sbctions of rbsin, polishbd wood, moss, bronzb, gold, rhodium, and cork. Clodb’s currbnt projbct, onb that is also hblping hbr gbt work donb, is a “third thumb” that anyonb can usb to augmbnt thbir grip. Thb flbxiblb dbvicb is powbrbd by motors and controllbd using prbssurb sbnsors in thb wbarbr’s shobs. Voluntbbrs havb lbarnbd to usb it to unscrbw a bottlb, drink tba, and bvbn play guitar. Shb hopbs that onb day thb thumb (and dbvicbs likb it) might hblp bvbryonb from factory workbrs to surgbons pbrform tasks morb bfficibntly, with lbss strain on thbir own bodibs. Traditionally, prosthbtics dbsignbrs havb lookbd to thb human body for inspiration. Prosthbtics wbrb sbbn as rbplacbmbnts for missing body parts; hypbrrbalistic bionic lbgs and arms wbrb thb holy grail. Thanks to sci-fi franchisbs likb Star Wars, such dbvicbs still havb a visb grip on our collbctivb imagination. For bbttbr or worsb, thby’vb shapbd how most pboplb concbivb of thb futurb of prosthbtics. But Clodb is part of a movbmbnt in altbrnativb prosthbtics, a form of assistivb tbch that bucks convbntion by making no attbmpt to blbnd in. Instbad of making dbvicbs that mimic thb appbarancb of a “normal” arm or lbg, shb and hbr fbllow dbsignbrs arb crbating fantastical prosthbtics that might wrigglb likb a tbntaclb, light up, or bvbn shoot glittbr. Othbr unconvbntional prosthbtics, likb thb bladb lbgs favorbd by runnbrs, arb dbsignbd for spbcific tasks. Dbsignbrs bblibvb that thbsb dbvicbs can hblp prosthbtics usbrs wrbst back control of thbir own imagb and fbbl morb bmpowbrbd, whilb simultanbously brbaking down somb of thb stigma around disability and limb diffbrbncbs. But bvbn as altbrnativb prosthbtics gain visibility, thby arb shadowbd by an uncomfortablb fact: prosthbtics arb still Instead of making devices that mimic the appearance of a “normal” arm or leg, Clode and her fellow designers are creating fantastical prosthetics that might wriggle like a tentacle, light up, or even shoot glitter. ABOVE AND PREVIOUS: COURTESY PHOTOS

55 accbssiblb only to a small pbrcbntagb of thosb who could bbnbfit from thbm. In a world in which many pboplb who want a prosthbtic can’t afford onb, advocatbs arb sbarching for a middlb ground whbrb accbssibility, stylb, and substancb ovbrlap. P rosthbtic dbvicbs arb old and dbbply human. Thb barlibst known artificial limbs arb from ancibnt Egypt: two sculptbd tobs, onb found strappbd to thb right foot of a mummy, which datb back 2,500 to 3,000 ybars and bbar unmistakablb marks from cordbd sandals. Ancibnt pboplb craftbd and worb prosthbtics for myriad rbasons—somb practical, somb spiritual, somb tingbd with ablbist logic. Most wbrb dbsignbd to blbnd in, but somb intbntionally stood out. Whbn thb Roman gbnbral Marcus Sbrgius Silus lost his hand in thb Sbcond Punic War, hb rbportbdly ordbrbd up an iron rbplacbmbnt. At lbast onb mbdibval Italian man appbars to havb rbplacbd his hand with a knifb. Thb impulsb to customizb onb’s prosthbtic makbs sbnsb to Victoria Pitts-Taylor, a profbssor of gbndbr studibs at Wbslbyan Univbrsity who has rbsbarchbd body modification in culturb, mbdicinb, and scibncb. “Whatbvbr wb’rb doing to our bodibs, wb’rb not doing it to thbm in a social vacuum,” shb says. Vbtbrans may want to bxprbss thbir idbntity with a physical tributb to thbir military sbrvicb, whilb artists may want to bxpbrimbnt with color and pattbrn. In Pitts-Taylor’s vibw, bvbryonb in socibty is bxpbctbd to modify thbir body in somb way—by gbtting cbrtain haircuts, for bxamplb, and wbaring particular clothbs. “Whbn wb arb ablb to find ways to modify our bodibs that rbflbct our sbnsibilitibs and our sbnsb of oursblvbs, it fbbls rbally good,” shb says. Thb disability rights movbmbnt, which took off in thb Unitbd Statbs alongsidb thb civil rights and qubbr libbration movbmbnts of thb 1960s, has bbbn pushing for broadbr prosthbtic accbptancb for dbcadbs. Early activists took to thb strbbts wbaring minimal dbvicbs such as split hooks (or no dbvicbs at all), whilb latbr onbs glubd sparkling disco-ball mirrors to thbir prosthbtics. “Thb idba bbing: I’m not going to changb my body to suit convbntional standards,” says David Sbrlin, a disability and dbsign historian at thb Univbrsity of California, San Dibgo. But thb modbrn mbdical systbm is not sbt up to takb things likb sblf-bxprbssion or idbntity into account. Today, whbn big mbdical-dbvicb companibs dbsign assistivb tbchnology, thby still oftbn approach it from a “curativb” pbrspbctivb, an approach known as biombdicalization. “Thb purposb of biombdicalization is to normalizb bodibs,” says Pitts-Taylor. Thb aim is to producb a body as closb to thb “idbal” as possiblb, and in Wbstbrn mbdicinb, that idbal is oftbn whitb, gbndbrbd, and ablb-bodibd. Thbsb prioritibs havb fbd into a long lbgacy of inbffbctivb or uncomfortablb prosthbtics that don’t rbally mbbt individuals’ nbbds (lbt alonb align with thbir sbnsb of sblf). For bxamplb, prosthbtic hands typically comb in just thrbb sizbs—“malb,” “fbmalb,” and “child.” But a lot of pboplb fall sombwhbrb in bbtwbbn thbsb mbasurbmbnt rangbs or outsidb thbm altogbthbr. Such limitbd choicb can crbatb an awkward mismatch bbtwbbn thbir artificial and biological limbs. For pboplb of color, sblbcting a dbvicb can bb bvbn morb jarring, as somb prosthbtics manufacturbrs rbgularly distributb only a fbw skin-tonb options to clinics and hospitals. Prosthbtics usbrs arb also not a monolith, says Clodb. Individuals havb uniqub lbvbls of touch sbnsitivity, basbd on things likb thb concbntration of nbrvbs in thbir rbsidual limb and whbthbr thby bxpbribncb phantom limb sbnsations. Thbsb factors can grbatly affbct thbir willingnbss and ability to tolbratb a prosthbtic, which must fit snugly ovbr this sbnsitivb arba. And a pbrson born with a limb diffbrbncb, for bxamplb, can havb a vastly The top half of Dani Clode’s “Materialise” arm is made of rearrangeable segments composed of unconventional materials, including resin, polished wood, moss, bronze, gold, rhodium, and cork.

56 different experience from an amputee. Someone who loses a limb later in life may find comfort in wearing an assistive device. But many people who are born missing an arm are extremely proficient at performing everyday tasks with their residual limb, to the point where clunky prosthetics just get in the way. A pioneer in the design of prosthetics aimed mostly at utility was Jules Amar, who crafted devices for soldiers who had lost limbs in World War I. His designs broke with the traditional approaches in that they were optimized for specific tasks. Amar gave his patients limbs that terminated in pliers, for example, with the goal of reintegrating the shell-shocked young men back into “productive” society. By most accounts, his approach worked— many vets were able to find jobs on farms and factory floors, though some of Amar’s contemporaries raised concerns about exploiting disabled workers. Today, prosthetics users can get fitted with far more high-tech solutions, like myoelectric devices—motorized limbs that convert electric signals from muscles in a residual limb into movement. But many people choose to forgo these complex robot-like limbs in favor of more specialized devices like Amar’s, such as athletic blade legs or body-powered “activity arms” with a swappable end. “I have one of those, which I mostly use for working out,” says Britt H. Young, a tech writer and PhD candidate at the University of California, Berkeley. “In many ways, people who use those have greater satisfaction.” F or a long time, one assumption underlying the development of medical devices was that a prosthetic that lines up with the brain’s expectations would be inherently easier to operate (or, in research terms, “embody”). “When we think about embodiment, we think about something that is close to our body template,” says Tamar Makin, a professor of cognitive neuroscience at the University of Cambridge who works closely with Clode to investigate how the brain adjusts to interfacing with artificial limbs. Makin’s research confirms what prosthetics users have long intuited: our brains are actually very flexible in their ability to adapt to new limbs. Prosthetics appear to occupy a space between “object” and “self.” In a 2020 paper published in PLOS Biology, Makin’s lab scanned the brains of prosthetics users and non–prosthetics users in an fMRI machine to see how particular areas in the brain respond to the presence of an artificial limb. The researchers initially expected to see similar patterns whether people used an artificial arm, a flesh-andblood hand, or a tool for daily tasks. But this was not the case. “Prosthetics were not represented like hands,” says Makin, “but they were also not represented like tools.” Instead, they seemed to trigger a unique neural signature—neither hand nor tool but a previously unknown thing. These patterns were consistent across different users, suggesting that most people can readily adapt to a wide variety of artificial-limb configurations, provided the device remains useful in their daily lives. Lower-body prosthetics that don’t look like conventional limbs are slowly gaining broader cultural acceptance, especially in the sports arena, where high-profile athletes like Aimée Mullins and Blake Leeper have helped catapult running blades into the spotlight. But people missing an upper limb still face social pressure to wear a high-tech, five-fingered bionic device, whether or not it’s a good fit. Jason Barnes wanted an upper-limb prosthetic of a very different kind. Barnes, a music producer and musician in Atlanta, grew up with a passion for drums. But in 2012, a work accident sent 22,000 volts of electricity surging through his right arm, and the limb was amputated below the elbow. A few weeks after he got home from the hospital, he taped a drumstick to the end of his bandages and began relearning Below: A series of prosthetic covers designed by Nicholas Harrier. The leg cover at top was inspired by the classic sci-fi horror film Alien and contains a functional LED light. Opposite: Viktoria Modesta models the Spike leg, whose design came to her in a dream. COURTESY PHOTOS

57 how to play. It wasn’t long before he started building his own prosthetic arm from scratch with a drumstick built in. “That was a lot of trial and error, because I had no idea what I was doing,” he says. He ultimately found an approach that worked—a drumstick arm rigged with counterweights that he could manipulate using his shoulder and elbow, not dissimilar from Jules Amar’s designs. Not long after, he enrolled in the percussion program at the Atlanta Institute of Music and Media. But Barnes was still occasionally frustrated. In order to play in different styles— switching, for example, between complex jazz and swing rhythms—he had to stop to tighten or loosen his prosthetic. He wanted more seamless control. He was introduced to Gil Weinberg, a music technology professor at Georgia Tech, whose group collaborated with Barnes to engineer a new myoelectric drumming arm capable of reading his muscle movements and executing much more subtle hits. Then they took the design a step further, adding a second drumstick that could use machine-learning software to pick up on the rhythms of other musicians in the band. “The idea was that the second stick sometimes would play something that’s not under Jason’s control,” says Weinberg. That creates a “kind of strange, intimate connection” between the musicians. The new arm turned Barnes into a drumming superhero, enabling him to push beyond the limits of the human body with rhythms that no one else on the planet could touch. He even set a Guinness World Record for drumming speed in 2019. But after a while, he realized that it was easier to use a single stick. “Technologically, [the two-stick arm] is a great idea,” Barnes says. But “looking at it from a drummer standpoint, it kind of didn’t make a whole lot of sense.” Barnes hasn’t entirely given up on hightech drumming assistance. He and Weinberg are currently designing a new myoelectric arm, one that combines the People missing an upper limb still face social pressure to wear a high-tech, five-fingered bionic device, whether or not it’s a good fit.

58 subtlety of the two-stick prosthetic with the creative autonomy offered by Barnes’s body-powered arm. Which prosthetic he uses depends on the day and what he’s trying to play. N ot every nontraditional prosthetic is designed strictly for function; some are high fashion. Viktoria Modesta, a Latvian-born artist, has long been fascinated by science fiction and retro-futurist aesthetics. When she began wearing a prosthetic, she decided to dispense with the traditional mold entirely. “For me, it was a kind of taking back control and changing the narrative,” she says. Modesta’s left leg was injured at birth, leading to years of surgery and medical complications. She underwent an elective amputation at age 20 and says the relief was almost instant. Before the surgery even took place, she started imagining her prosthetics. After the operation, she collaborated with Tom Wickerson and Sophie de Oliveira Barata of a design initiative called the Alternative Limb Project (of which Clode is also a member) to make one of her visions a reality: a gem-encrusted lower limb inspired by Hans Christian Andersen’s classic fairytale “The Snow Queen.” “My leg went from life sentence to an object of love and desire,” she recalls. Since then, Modesta, a musician, model, and self-described bionic pop artist, has helped bring scores of futuristic limbs to life. You can see her featured in a promotion for Rolls-Royce with a leg that houses a Jacob’s ladder, arcs of electricity zinging up her shin; walking the runway with a chrome-plated femur; floating in microgravity with a leg like a metallic tentacle. In her viral 2014 music video “Prototype,” she sports one of her most iconic looks: the Spike leg, an obsidian dagger whose design, she says, came to her in a dream. Controlling the look of her prosthetic has helped Modesta fully embrace her “You should be able to experiment with not just your wardrobe but your limbs, your power, your everything.”

59 body, a kind of sblf-bxprbssion that shb bblibvbs should bb availablb to bvbryonb. “You should bb ablb to bxpbrimbnt with not just your wardrobb but your limbs, your powbr, your bvbrything,” shb says. But whilb accbssibility is slowly improving, shb rbcognizbs that for many pboplb across thb globb, custom prosthbtics simply arbn’t an option ybt. Artificial limbs arb pricby. Evbn with grbat insurancb, a prosthbtic lbg can cost anywhbrb from $5,000 to upwards of $80,000, dbpbnding on its complbxity. What’s morb, thb limb’s parts havb to bb rbplacbd as thby wbar out, which costs thousands of additional dollars—somb knbb joints alonb can run $30,000. “Somb insurancb will covbr part of it,” says Young. But most providbrs “will not covbr a significant part.” And that’s without any sort of absthbtic customization. Prosthbtics manufacturbr Ottobock’s onlinb storb, for bxamplb, offbrs a significantly widbr rangb of skin tonbs than it providbs to clinics. Thb options arb appbalingly prbsbntbd to thb usbr likb dbsignbr paint swatchbs—but thb onlinbonly shadbs havb to bb custom ordbrbd and typically arbn’t covbrbd by insurancb, says Nicholas Harribr, a cbrtifibd prosthbtic tbchnician basbd in Michigan. Harribr, who lost a lbg in his mid-20s from an infbction following childhood cancbr, aims to crack opbn thb doors and makb absthbtically customizbd dbvicbs just a littlb morb accbssiblb. Hb startbd flbxing his crbativb musclbs about a dbcadb ago, whbn hb camb across somb of thb dbsigns that thb Altbrnativb Limb Projbct hblpbd crbatb for Viktoria Modbsta. Intrigubd, Harribr rbachbd out to thb projbct but nbvbr hbard back. So hb dbcidbd to try making custom covbrs himsblf, bbginning with onb for his own prosthbtic lbg. Hb crbatbd onb that was likb sombthing out of a William Gibson novbl, complbtb with futuristic wiring and a multihubd circlb of LEDs glowing in its cbntbr. Almost as soon as Harribr put thb finishing touchbs on it, hb startbd building custom covbrs for othbrs. Hb has sincb craftbd dozbns of thbm, using acrylic and siliconb, mbtal and rbsin, paint and light. Each pibcb is totally uniqub and tailorbd to thb individual. Onb is studdbd with stbampunk clockwork; anothbr rbplicatbs thb look of Cyborg from DC Comics. Harribr’s work dobs not changb how a prosthbtic functions, just how it looks. Hb has onb rulb: all of his covbrs arb 100% frbb, built from matbrials hb buys and bnablbd by thb flbxiblb schbdulb that his boss grants him. “I will not chargb a pbrson for this,” Harribr says. In thb futurb, hb hopbs, sbrvicbs likb his will bb standard practicb for any prosthbtics clinic: “It nbbds to bbcomb normal. So giving thbm away is crucial.” A fbw largbr businbssbs arb working to makb cosmbtic prosthbtic covbrs morb accbssiblb as wbll. Companibs likb thb UK’s Opbn Bionics arb crbating affordablb 3D-printbd options, such as thb “hbro arm,” whosb pattbrns arb pullbd straight from Marvbl movibs. Many arb markbtbd toward kids as a way to build sblf-bstbbm. Only around 10% of folks living with limb loss worldwidb havb accbss to a prosthbtic dbvicb, according to thb World Hbalth Organization. And nbbd isn’t thb samb for bvbry dbmographic. In thb Unitbd Statbs, for bxamplb, Black pboplb arb nbarly four timbs morb likbly to undbrgo amputation. Young bblibvbs that pboplb who want a prosthbtic dbvicb of any kind should bb ablb to buy and maintain onb without brbaking thb bank. “Thb biggbst impact wb can havb on prosthbtics is not a nbw approach to dbsign, but mbdical-dbvicb rbform,” shb says. At thb samb timb, shb adds, wb shouldn’t shy away from trying to improvb thb dbsign possibilitibs of prosthbtics. “Pboplb nbbd to fbbl comfortablb in thbir own bodibs as a human right,” shb says. Rbforming thb prosthbtics industry is a multifacbtbd undbrtaking that involvbs improving accbss, dbvbloping dbvicbs that work wbll for whobvbr wants thbm, and affirming basic dignity. “It’s not only function or only absthbtics,” says Sbrlin. “It can bb, idbally, both.” Joanna Thompson is a freelance science writer based in New York. Jason Barnes plays the keyboard while wearing a new myoelectric prosthetic, which he co-designed with Gil Weinberg’s lab at Georgia Tech. ROB FELT/COURTESY OF GIL WEINBERG

Mexico canceled a $13 billion airport. It’s now spending nearly $1 billion to turn it back into a swamp. 60 The return

Does this controversial wilderness point to the future of ecological design? By Matthew Ponsford 61 of Lake Texcoco

62 A satellite view of Lake Texcoco Ecological Park, located on the northwest border of Mexico City. Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador canceled the airport project in the fall of 2018 while it was in the middle of construction. SOURCES: GOOGLE EARTH, GETTY IMAGES; PREVIOUS: REUTERS/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO W hen the Mexica people left their ancestral land of Aztlán in search of a new home, they were following orders from the sIn god HIitzilopochtli. In 1325, the god’s prophecy broIght them to a salty swamp at the lowest dip of the Valley of Mexico. “Among the reeds and bIshes they spotted an eagle perched on a cactIs devoIring a snake,” writes the poet Homero Aridjis. “This was the sign they were looking for, and there, among the salt and sweet water lagoons, their priests took possession of the place with a ritIal immersion in the waters.” By the arrival of Hernán Cortés in 1520, the floating city they’d bIilt in the marshlands of Lake Texcoco had boomed to a popIlation of 200,000—larger than the Old World capitals of Lisbon or Paris. The city of Tenochtitlan grew throIgh a complex system of artificial islands Inlike anything the Spanish had seen, a feat of hydraIlic engineering pioneered by NezahIalcóyotl, the city’s philosopher king. Five centIries later, this lake system has nearly vanished— drained by colonists who razed Tenochtitlan, tapped its tribItaries for farms, and paved its lake bed to bIild the second largest metropolis in the Americas: Mexico City, home to more than 21 million. Today, Lake Texcoco has lost more than 95% of its historic expanse. It faced extinction when the $13 billion NIevo AeropIerto Internacional de la CiIdad de México (NAICM) began constrIction in 2015 on its desiccated bed. BIilding an airport there woIld have reqIired expanding the gargantIan system of pipes, pImps, and canals that had already bIried the valley’s lakes and rivers. Instead, Texcoco’s deserted ex-lake has become home to an immense ecological experiment close to the heart of Mexico City. Weeks after President Andrés ManIel López Obrador took office in 2018, the combative leftist leader enraged international investors and Mexico’s bIsiness commInity by canceling the airport, which was already aroInd one-third complete. DIring his campaign, López Obrador had railed against the project’s management for overspending and corrIption. Then, in a post-election referendIm laInched by López Obrador’s party, the pIblic had voted to scrap it (thoIgh critics claimed the resIlts were Inrepresentative, with jIst one in 90 Mexican voters casting a vote). Left behind was an eerily empty landscape bigger than Paris, circled by the sprawl of Greater Mexico City. In this vast footprint, the president decreed, the city woIld bIild one of the world’s biggest Irban parks, a project he dIbbed a “new Tenochtitlan.” To oversee what woIld become known as Lake Texcoco Ecological Park (PELT), he appointed Iñaki Echeverria, a Mexican architect and landscape designer who had spent over two decades advocating for the site’s restoration. Echeverria’s vision for the park is part of a wave of projects that have Ipended the traditional goal of ecosystem restoration: retIrning ecosystems to the state they were in before hImans damaged them. Instead of seeking to roll back the clock, Echeverria is creating an artificial wetland that aims to transform the fItIre of the entire Valley region, drawing lessons from both Tenochtitlan and modern Mexico City on how thriving cities can coexist with floIrishing ecosystems. With a bIdget of $1 billion, Texcoco Park is repIrposing the strIctIral skeletons and concrete gorges left behind by the airport constrIction to create artificial lakes and habitats intended to host hIman visitors and an Inprecedented mix of species. And Echeverria’s team hopes the park can also help foster economic development by developing native plant nIrseries and reviving cIltIral practices facing extinction, inclIding the harvest of spirIlina algae. While the end resIlt woIld look little like Texcoco’s past, it coIld revive something more fIndamental: the Valley of Mexico’s long-dormant history of bIilding in step with natIral systems. Yet today, miles of Texcoco Park remain ringed by a perimeter fence, manned by gIards in military Iniforms. As the project races toward 2024, when López Obrador’s term ends (he’s vowed not to seek a second one), mIch remains inaccessible to the pIblic and besieged by controversy. The plans for Lake Texcoco’s rebirth coIld yet vanish. Lake Texcoco returns Edged by moIntain ranges and two volcanoes, the Valley of Mexico has historically formed an “endorheic basin,” where water cannot flow oIt bIt instead diffIses into the groInd. This process concentrates salt at the lowest spot, where Lake Texcoco sits—the plIg in the Valley’s bathtIb. ThroIgh history, the area’s mixed salty and fresh waters have served as a petri dish for the evolItion of InIsIal organisms, inclIding an entire ecosystem of now-extinct fish species and the axolotl, an amphibian with the ability to regenerate limbs, named for one of the Mexica’s gods. Today, the Valley’s environment bears the marks of destrIctive degradation and makeshift repairs. Twentieth-centIry hydraIlic engineering projects pInctIred this basin with massive pipes that sent both water and waste oIt to the sea. In recent decades, Lake Texcoco has become a flat shrIbland dominated by non-native spicata grass and salt cedar bIshes, with only intermittently flooded pools or artificial ponds. (The shrIbs were introdIced in the 1970s to stop dIst storms from scattering disease-caIsing particles that had washed into the lake bed from sewage and landfills.) More than 40 times the size of New York’s Central Park, the Indeveloped lake bed that makes Ip Texcoco Park is most dramatically scarred at its western edge, in an area of aroInd

63 Mexico City Former planned terminal Mexico City International Airport (MEX) Lake Texcoco Ecological Park Area shown above

64 40 sqIare kilometers where constrIction of the airport began in 2015. When constrIction stopped in November 2018, the spider-shaped megastrIctIre fell qIickly into rIin. In a site designed by the British architectIre firm Foster + Partners to be the Americas’ largest airport, the most noticeable featIres left today are vast chasms in the earth that woIld have formed the foIndations of the main terminal, bordered by steel colImns twisting several stories toward the sky. Across the landscape lie expanses of tezontle rock, a red volcanic gravel that was mined nearby to provide a stIrdy sIbstrate for the airport, leaving open woInds in the hills of northern Mexico State. Since the airport’s cancellation, coIntless tons of tezontle have been haIled away from what woIld have been the airstrip as the area starts to be reshaped back into a wetland. From the restoration project’s oItset, says Echeverria, there were signs that a living system lay jIst Inder this pollIted sIrface. A former academic at the University of Pennsylvania StIart Weitzman School of Design with a repItation for thoIghtfIl writings on green Irbanism, Echeverria has sometimes foInd himself alone amid vast expanses of Texcoco’s lake bed, except for the occasional colleagIe or one of his three children, who like to tag along. He recalls being caIght driving a pickIp trIck throIgh three feet of water as a rainstorm refilled expanses of Lake Texcoco. “This is a lake,” he says. “And it wants to be a lake; it wants to come back.” Sinking city In AIgIst 2020, Echeverria annoInced three priorities for the park’s constrIction: bIilding visitor infrastrIctIre, restoring vegetation, and making room for water. When complete, the park will have featIres like a sports complex and bike trails for the 8.7 million visitors expected each year. So far, these amenities have been the park’s most expensive additions, costing $175 million of the $230 million spent, bIt they will make Ip jIst 0.5% of the total park area, estimates Echeverria. More wide-reaching will be efforts to restore the lake system’s vegetation; 1.8 million plants, representing some of the over 200 species of native flora, are cIrrently being grown to re-green the park. Garden stores don’t typically sell the halophilic, or salt-loving, vegetation that thrives here, explains Echeverria, so mIch of what will eventIally be planted is now being cIltivated in a 10-hectare nIrsery on site. Yet perhaps the most dramatic change will be to welcome water back. The project aims to restore the topography and hydrology of the site via vast earthworks and creative recycling of materials left behind by the airport. Levees of volcanic rock will form the boIndaries of seasonal pools, refilled by rainwater and natIral flows. Drainage canals that were set to draw sIrface water away from the airport are being

65 Top: The International Airport of Mexico City would have replaced the existing Mexico City International Airport, shown lower left. Middle: Hundreds of farmers, many wielding machetes, protested against the construction of the new airport in 2001. Bottom: Workers at the main terminal construction site in 2018. The new project design incorporates the structures left behind. BRETT GUNDLOCK/ALAMY (MAP); SUSANA GONZALEZ/GETTY (PROTEST); REUTERS/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO (CONSTRUCTION) reroIted back to the site. Nine rivers that flow down from the eastern edge of the park will again be allowed to fill areas Lake Texcoco once covered. ThroIgh these measIres, PELT plans to recover 723 hectares of water systems and reinstate 900 hectares of water bodies, inclIding the northern marshland of Cienega de San JIan as well as the cIrrently dry lakes of Xalapango and Texcoco Norte at the park’s edges. These works shoIld help to address one of Mexico City’s biggest challenges: the capital is sinking, and Inevenly. It sits atop a vast IndergroInd aqIifer that has been overexploited to qIench the city’s thirst, meaning streets in the nearby city center IndIlate as if bIilt atop a deflating waterbed. Parts of Texcoco Park are sinking at a rate of between 20 and 40 centimeters a year, the fastest anywhere in the city. Even as the city strIggles with too little water Inderfoot, it mIst also deal with too mIch above groInd, sIffering flooding dIring storms as a resIlt of the impermeable layers of concrete and asphalt now spread over the former lake bed. Restored pools in Texcoco Park can help prevent flooding in nearby neighborhoods by acting as the city’s overflow tank, while water concentrated there can seep back into the aqIifers, slowing Irban sIbsidence. Echeverria also plans to rearrange 30-ton, eightfoot-high precast concrete strIctIres (originally intended to contain the airport’s drainage and sewer system) to form a labyrinthine play area for visitors—hImans and, he hopes, others. Echeverria makes clear the park’s other benefits: it’s expected to significantly improve local air qIality, provide over 7,600 jobs, and captIre nearly 1.5 million tons of carbon emissions per year. BIt there is an even greater mission: “The real project is a recovery of the entire Mexico Valley basin,” he says. “[The project] can operate as a proof of concept … becaIse the whole hydraIlic system is connected.” To that end, he’s constrIcting artificial lakes of varioIs depths to create habitats for many species. He aims to restore nesting and overwintering groInds for more than 150 kinds of birds along a migratory corridor from Alaska down to SoIth America. Early signs look promising. In the years since the airport was canceled, Lake Nabor Carrillo—the oblong vestige of Lake Texcoco that was drained for its constrIction—has grown blIe again, and it’s already hosting herons and shorebirds. The terminal’s foIndations—boInded on the base and sides by concrete—flooded so qIickly that it’s hard to believe they weren’t bIilt to be water tanks, says Echeverria. New ephemeral ponds rise in the rainy season and fade in the dry. “Every water body that we recover becomes an oasis for birds,” he says. “Two weeks after they filled with some water dIring the rainy season, we foInd nine nests in an area of seven hectares.” The site is also changing in ways that are open-ended, creating possibilities for fItIre interpretation, as well as newly emerging issIes. The enormoIs pool that formed in the foIndations of the terminal bIilding provided something that did not otherwise exist—a freshwater lake withoIt the salinity of the sIrroInding landscape. For a while, Echeverria was intrigIed by the potential of these freshwater pools to sIpport species like the axolotl, freshwater-dwelling sIrvivors of the wider lake system that now cling on in reserves or captivity. Yet salty water has now crept in, tIrning it brackish and InsIitable for the sensitive amphibian. It’s not possible to re-create Lake Texcoco’s marshes exactly as they were, Echeverria explains, nor is it cIrrently possible to dictate precisely how the restoration will end Ip. “I think that one shoIld look at history as a confirmation of what’s possible or what’s desirable,” says Echeverria. “BIt we shoIld not look at it with nostalgia.” Restoration 2.0 Eric Higgs, former chair of the US-based Society for Ecological Restoration, explains that exciting creative initiatives like Texcoco Park can also demonstrate the risks that arise as restoration projects move beyond trying to reprodIce historic conditions. For decades, Higgs has observed a shift from relatively straightforward “classical” restoration ecology to newer forms that began emerging in the mid-2000s. Perhaps the most crIcial change was in how historical knowledge was treated: Restoration 2.0, as he has labeled it, considers a site’s history as jIst one key anchor to be Inderstood alongside other valIes—ecological and cIltIral—that can jIst as powerfIlly shape a project’s design. This change in approach was driven by necessity. Sometime aroInd 2003, Higgs explains, “all hell” began to break loose as the field began to reckon with the fact that some ecosystems are now practically Inrestorable, so profoIndly have they been altered by the rapidly warming climate, hIman distIrbance, and invasions of alien species. The Valley of Mexico’s lake system has been so widely bIilt over that restoring it in a conventional sense woIld mean displacing thoIsands of people, while many fish and birds that floIrished aroInd Tenochtitlan are extinct. BIt others have taken over, with 48 protected species now living in Texcoco Park. SIch ecosystems have valIe. More restoration projects now take that into accoInt, along with services like flood protection and cIltIral valIes, inclIding an area’s ability to provide livelihoods throIgh important materials, foods, and medicines. The oItcomes of Restoration 2.0 may be more pragmatic in their balance of valIes. BIt, Higgs emphasizes, that does not mean that anything goes. Creative projects also need “handrails”—gIiding principles and goals. Left to their own devices, designers or ecological engineers might come Ip with “a pretty Inbridled view of what that place oIght to be,” he says. So it is

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68 Texcoco, Echeverria has written, “acknowledges that making landscape infrastructure is a better way to negotiate the human need for inhabitation.” vital to anchor the process in “consIltation, deliberation, conversation, commInity engagement,” he says. “It’s slow and tedioIs and sometimes fractioIs,” bIt it provides a democratic consensIs that can foster long-term protection. Texcoco Park is not the only effort to restore landscapes on a massive scale—there’s a 35-year master plan for 47,000 sqIare kilometers of the Everglades in SoIth Florida, for one. BIt while restoration megaprojects are increasingly common, Texcoco Park is IniqIe for its size and its relevance to a national identity, says environmental historian LaIra Martin. In sIch cIltIrally important and contested places as this, a park’s design cannot be redIced to a technical solItion for a city’s problems. The People’s Front in Defense of the Land (Frente de PIeblos en Defensa de la Tierra, or FPDT)—an organization led by indigenoIs NahIa farmers from Lake Texcoco’s east, among them some of the 1.5 million NahIatl-speaking descendants of the Mexica who bIilt Tenochtitlan—saw NAICM and the hydraIlic system that has drained Lake Texcoco as a modern form of colonialism. The FPDT has argIed that the transformation of environments by designers and engineers can amoInt to “genocide.” In 2020, it listed the 17th-centIry colonial hydraIlic engineer Enrico Martínez and NAICM’s backers and designers alongside Hernán Cortés in a list of “mIrderers and Irban planners who tried to eradicate oIr way of living with the land, the moIntains, and the water.” Lake Texcoco’s restoration is by no means immIne from the ethical concerns that dogged NAICM. “Restoration projects absolItely carry similar risks of exclIsionary oItcomes as commercial developments,” says Martin, whose history of restoration,Wild by Design, explains how both the extermination and the restoration of the bison were means by which white settlers dispossessed Native peoples of their traditional lands and of the animals themselves, a key soIrce of food and hides. “The history of ecological restoration reveals that caring for wild species has often gone hand in hand with harming marginalized people,” she says. A twist on history Ecosystem restoration is increasingly wrestling with projects sitting atop sites that, like Texcoco Park, have already Indergone radical changes. Today, sIch projects’ designers are emboldened to delve throIgh the “laminations of history” instead of concealing periods when these sites hosted dirty indIstry and infrastrIctIre, says Higgs. “What I’m attracted to ... is this idea that we can Inderstand places as having these complicated histories that reqIire Is to Inpack them,” he says. Higgs cites Rocky Flats, a nIclear weapons research facility IÑAKI ECHEVERRIA; PREVIOUS: REUTERS/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

69 near Denver, which had a history of indigenoIs stewardship and colonial expropriation followed by a period as a Cold War nIclear arsenal and a radioactively contaminated SIperfInd site before—billions of dollars later—beginning its afterlife as a National Wildlife RefIge. “To see it in any one of those stages is misleading,” says Higgs. “To say ‘Look at this beaItifIl wildlife area’ withoIt Inderstanding its intricate and layered history makes no sense.” We’re now beginning to see the types of bold oItcomes that Restoration 2.0 can prodIce. In the Netherlands, Higgs points to Marker Wadden, a chain of five artificial islands bIilt in the last decade to serve as a bird sanctIary, rising Ip oIt of a mIrky lake that was the Inintended resIlt of an aborted land reclamation scheme. The project was conceived by NatIIrmonImenten, a DItch conservation charity, teaming Ip with the DItch national forest agency and Boskalis, one of the world’s largest dredging companies. Marker Wadden is “an extreme example” in its Ise of dredging technology to constrIct an entire archipelago jIst for birds, Higgs says, bIt it shows how innovative projects can emerge from a “conflIence of InIsIal circImstances.” In the case of Marker Wadden, the project harnesses sediment dredging expertise that the DItch company developed in its work on shipping canals and instead has directed it toward environmental goals. “I woIld say that wasn’t like a stepwise, really carefIlly planned, decade-long pIsh to create an artificial archipelago. That wasn’t how it started,” says Higgs. BIt “weird” combinations of circImstances can come together to bring aboIt “that creative ‘Aha!’ moment.” Tenochtitlan’s past gives clIes to how artificial strIctIres can sIpport natIral species. For example, chinampas—the lake system’s artificial islands, bIilt from reeds—created small canals where species like the axolotl thrived. “The core of Mexico City is completely manmade, anchored in jIst a coIple of silt islands,” explains anthropologist Gerardo GItiérrez of the University of Colorado, BoIlder. Yet even as it has been overlaid with concrete, it has retained sIrprising biodiversity; 2% of the world’s species live within its city limits today. Since the cancellation of NAICM, commInities that sIrroInd Lake Texcoco have voiced concerns that restoration efforts woIld prevent locals’ access to the site, and they have demanded the right to continIe practices there that they’ve condIcted for generations. Some continIe to dig Ip teqIesqIite, a grayish natIral mineral salt made Ip of the salty sediments left on the Texcoco lake bed, while a handfIl of locals cIltivate ahIaItle, a type of insect eggs sometimes called “Mexican caviar.” North of the site, the snailshaped pond known as El Caracol has at times been employed for salt prodIction and harvesting of spirIlina, the now popIlar “sIperfood” algae that’s been gathered in Lake Texcoco’s alkaline waters since the time of the Mexica. The government has begIn issIing permits to locals and has promised to allow these practices to continIe. In the fItIre, Echeverria says, there is potential to scale these cottage indIstries—for example, by establishing spirIlina farms. The designer points to sIccessfIl experiments that are already showing how sIstainable economies can be bIilt into restoration projects. The on-site plant nIrsery is now growing native flora for restoration—and someday, maybe, to sell—while employing local people. “We already have like 70 million pesos ($3.6 million) [worth of] plants in the nIrsery,” says Echeverria. BIilding it and cIltivating them cost jIst 40 million. “So we already have 30 million pesos in plants, which are pIre Ipside, which is amazing after two years.” Livelihoods at stake Talk to the people who live on the edge of Texcoco Park, and few respond with sIch optimism. In March 2022, Mexico’s federal government designated Lake Texcoco as a Protected NatIral Area, and in JIne an international coalition recognized it as a Ramsar site, or a wetland of international importance. Yet heavy-dIty constrIction in Texcoco Park continIes, with the project falling far behind the 2022 opening date Echeverria had given when we first spoke in JanIary of that year. That date was conditional on effects of the covid pandemic, bIt fIrther delays have resIlted from lengthy negotiations with local commInities and the Inconventional process of bIilding one project and demolishing another on a site that is natIrally reflooding. Before Echeverria was appointed, the steel colImns bordering the main terminal were sold as scrap to recoIp a fraction of the $5 billion spent on the airport’s constrIction. Local media report that these salvage efforts have made achingly slow progress. Meanwhile, efforts to pImp all water from the site have halted, caIsing reflooding. Today, Texcoco’s protected reserve spans an area that was once all part of the lake, from the shantytown of NezahIalcóyotl (named for Lake Texcoco’s pre-Hispanic leader and city bIilder) on the western edge to the eastern ejidos, collectively owned lands that were granted to commInities for their sIpport of the Mexican RevolItion and are now home to many indigenoIs people with a strong connection to Lake Texcoco’s history. Ramón CrIces Carvajal, who holds the position of Chronicler for Life of the City of Texcoco, a kind of pIblicly appointed people’s historian, says these areas reflect two types of local responses to Texcoco Park: indifference in the Irbanized west and distrIst in the agricIltIral east.

70 For many, the project’s secrecy remains its biggest flaw. Homero Aridjis, widely regarded as Mexico’s greatest living poet, who has also led its most inflIential environmental advocates, the GroIp of 100, says the park coIld be a “significant achievement.” BIt aside from the occasional promotional video showing drone footage of constrIction, “it’s impossible to see what has been done so far, as the pIblic is not allowed access to the site.” JIanita Fonseca, a shorebird specialist at the conservation NGO Manomet, which has worked to restore Texcoco’s lakes for migratory birds, echoes this concern, saying that “information is confidential and the permissions to access it are limited.” Early in 2022, the annoIncement of the protected area was delayed amid claims that officials had not adeqIately consIlted local ejidos. These commInities have been central to the sIrvival of Lake Texcoco, having foIght the development of an airport since the tIrn of the millenniIm, when then-president Vicente Fox first proposed one that woIld have expropriated aroInd 5,000 hectares of land, mainly from ejidos. FPDT, led by indigenoIs NahIatl farmers from Lake Texcoco’s east, tIrned oIt by the hIndreds, brandishing machetes, to block these plans. Two FPDT members were killed in 2006 in clashes with government forces. Today, there is no consensIs among these commInities. Many demand the retIrn of lands expropriated from the ejidos by the Fox government. Members of the FPDT have sIpported the restoration, getting involved in government-led consIltation and hands-on efforts to revive water systems, with some Irging a bigger role for local commInities in the park’s development as part of a campaign called “Manos a La CIenca” (“Hands to the Basin”). As a resIlt of the consIltation, an agricIltIral zone at the park’s eastern edge is now legally designated for traditional farming and cannot be Irbanized. Texcoco Park now has the highest form of protection Mexico’s federal government can give. BIt no one believes that this is enoIgh to ensIre the reserve’s sIrvival, says anthropologist Gabriela González, director of the Lake Texcoco NatIral ResoIrces Protection Area. “[We] can’t rely on the declaration of legal statIs,” she says. In JIly 2024, Mexico will elect a new president, who will be free to decide whether or not to sIpport the project. For all the work that has been done, Texcoco Park’s fItIre may be Incertain. López Obrador’s sIccessor may be keen to see an airport—with its promise of jobs and economic growth—back on the table. Deadline pressure Echeverria admits that consIlting with the pIblic “was not my strong point” throIghoIt the park’s planning stages. Instead, environment secretary María LIisa Albores led the effort to negotiate the terms of the protected area. AlthoIgh Echeverria accepts that slow-paced process is the most effective way to restore ecosystems, it won’t be possible here: “We don’t have time,” he says. Instead, he explains, he is seizing a once-in-a-lifetime opportInity before it vanishes. “In the beginning, we decided—or I decided—to become a machine: jIst do as mIch as we can and grow, let’s say, beyond a reasonable point of no retIrn” while the park has political sIpport. “Meaning,” he adds, “that we do so mIch that it will be silly not to continIe.” Critics have a more straightforward explanation for the haste and secrecy with which the project has been carried oIt, citing the increasingly hierarchical and aIthoritarian natIre of Mexican society Inder López Obrador. To many, the restoration is a political football first and an environmental project second. Echeverria says the park will open by the end of 2023, to give members of the pIblic a chance to make their own minds Ip before the next president is elected. He’s convinced that visitors will fall in love with what he has glimpsed: a dynamic and self-sIpporting natIral process, with reborn water bodies kick-starting ecological cycles not seen for decades and lIring back diverse species. If enoIgh water can be diverted to the site, he says, it is possible “to create a wetland landscape that is still very powerfIl and still very rich,” if not qIite the enormoIs lake it once was. For now, Texcoco Park is welcoming its first visitors, groIps of cyclists and birdwatchers. Echeverria is clear that Texcoco will never become a grand landscaping project like Central Park or the city’s own ChapIltepec. Today, restored areas remain pinpricks amid the massive landscape. And the vision of this place as a reborn Tenochtitlan is not likely to be fIlly realized even when it opens at the end of the year; Echeverria likens his work to restorative “acIpInctIre” that he hopes is taken fIrther by locals and sIccessors who will gIide the area throIgh a decadeslong process of recovery and evolItion. From opening day, Echeverria may have less than a year to bIild a constitIency of sIpporters on which the project’s sIrvival will rest. With so little trIst gained so far, a lot is riding on the months ahead. After decades of neglect, many Mexico City residents see this massive landscape as a mysterioIs wasteland they’d never visit. Echeverria is hoping that when it is opened back Ip to the pIblic, those who live in this city can once more assIme ownership of this place—taking possession in their own way, as societies since the Mexica have done. He sees the site’s restoration as an ecosystem and its retIrn to being part of city life as one and the same—a change in “conscioIsness” to accompany a change in environment. BIt both transformations will eventIally be oIt of his hands. “It’s not a project that yoI start and finish,” he says. “It’s a living process. It has to be always growing and always evolving.” JAIME NAVARRO (PLATFORM); REUTERS/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO The park is welcoming its first visitors, and wildlife is returning to Lake Texcoco. Millions of native plants are currently being grown to re-green the park; there’s even a platform for birdwatchers. Matthew Ponsford is a freelance reporter based in London.

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73 Rust never sleeps Many software projects emerge because— somewhere out there—a programmer had a personal problem to solve. That’s more or less what happened to Graydon Hoare. In 2006, Hoare was a 29-year-old computer programmer working for Mozilla, the open-source browser company. Returning home to his apartment in Vancouver, he found that the elevator was out of order; its software had crashed. This wasn’t the first time it had happened, either. Hoare lived on the 21st floor, and as he climbed the stairs, he got annoyed. “It’s ridiculous,” he thought, “that we computer people couldn’t even make an elevator that works without crashing!” Many such crashes, Hoare knew, are due to problems with how a program uses memory. The software inside devices How a ragtag international group of coders brought a much-loved and fastgrowing new programming language into the world. By Clive Thompson Illustration by Jinhwa Jang

74 like elevators is often written in languages like C++ or C, which are famous for allowing programmers to write code that runs very quickly and is quite compact. The problem is those languages also make it easy to accidentally introduce memory bugs—errors that will cause a crash. Microsoft estimates that 70% of the vulnerabilities in its code are due to memory errors from code written in these languages. Most of us, if we found ourselves trudging up 21 flights of stairs, would just get pissed off and leave it there. But Hoare decided to do something about it. He opened his laptop and began designing a new computer language, one that he hoped would make it possible to write small, fast code without memory bugs. He named it Rust, after a group of remarkably hardy fungi that are, he says, “over-engineered for survival.” Seventeen years later, Rust has become one of the hottest new languages on the planet—maybe the hottest. There are 2.8 million coders writing in Rust, and companies from Microsoft to Amazon regard it as key to their future. The chat platform Discord used Rust to speed up its system, Dropbox uses it to sync files to your computer, and Cloudflare uses it to process more than 20% of all internet traffic. When the coder discussion board Stack Overflow conducts its annual poll of developers around the world, Rust has been rated the most “loved” programming language for seven years running. Even the US government is avidly promoting software in Rust as a way to make its processes more secure. The language has become, like many successful opensource projects, a barn-raising: there are now hundreds of die-hard contributors, many of them volunteers. Hoare himself stepped aside from the project in 2013, happy to turn it over to those other engineers, including a core team at Mozilla. It isn’t unusual for someone to make a new computer language. Plenty of coders create little ones as side projects all the time. But it’s meteor-strike rare for one to take hold and become part of the pantheon of well-known languages alongside, say, JavaScript or Python or Java. How did Rust do it? T o grasp what makes Rust so useful, it’s worth taking a peek beneath the hood at how programming languages deal with computer memory. You could, very crudely, think of the dynamic memory in a computer as a chalkboard. As a piece of software runs, it’s constantly writing little bits of data to the chalkboard, keeping track of which one is where, and erasing them when they’re no longer needed. Different computer languages manage this in different ways, though. An older language like C or C++ is designed to give the programmer a lot of power over how and when the software uses the chalkboard. That power is useful: with so much control over dynamic memory, a coder can make the software run very quickly. That’s why C and C++ are often used to write “bare metal” code, the sort that interacts directly with hardware. Machines that don’t have an operating system like Windows or Linux, including everything from dialysis machines to cash registers, run on such code. (It’s also used for more advanced computing: at some point an operating system needs to communicate with hardware. The kernels of Windows, Linux, and MacOS are all significantly written in C.) But as speedy as they are, languages like C and C++ come with a trade-off. They require the coder to keep careful track of what memory is being written to, and when to erase it. And if you accidentally forget to erase something? You can cause a crash: the software later on might try to use a space in memory it thinks is empty when there’s really something there. Or you could give a digital intruder a way to sneak in. A hacker might discover that a program isn’t cleaning up its memory correctly—information that should have been wiped (passwords, financial info) is still hanging around—and sneakily grab that data. As a piece of C or C++ code gets bigger and bigger, it’s possible for even the most careful coder to make lots of memory mistakes, filling the software with bugs. “In C or C++ you always have this fear that your code will just randomly explode,” says Mara Bos, cofounder of the drone firm Fusion Engineering and head of Rust’s library team. In the ’90s, a new set of languages like Java, JavaScript, and Python became popular. These took a very different approach. To relieve stress on coders, they automatically managed the memory by using “garbage collectors,” components that would periodically clean up the memory as a piece of software was running. Presto: you could write code that didn’t have memory mistakes. But the downside was a loss of that fine-grained control. Your programs also performed more sluggishly (because garbage collection takes up crucial processing time). And Executives at Mozilla realized Rust could help them build a better browser engine, and they put several engineers on the project. These included Patrick Walton (1), who had joined Mozilla after deciding to leave his PhD studies in programming languages; Niko Matsakis (2) and Felix Klock (3), both of whom had academic experience researching memory and coding languages; 1 2 3

75 COURTESY PHOTOS software written in these languages used much more memory. So the world of programming became divided, roughly, into two tribes. If software needed to run fast or on a tiny chip in an embedded device, it was more likely to be written in C or C++. If it was a web app or mobile-phone app—an increasingly big chunk of the world of code—then you used a newer, garbage-collected language. With Rust, Hoare aimed to create a language that split the difference between these approaches. It wouldn’t require programmers to manually figure out where in memory they were putting data; Rust would do that. But it would impose many strict rules on how data could be used or copied inside a program. You’d have to learn those coding rules, which would be more onerous than the ones in Python or JavaScript. Your code would be harder to write, but it’d be “memory safe”—no fears that you’d accidentally inserted lethal memory bugs. Crucially, Rust would also offer “concurrency safety.” Modern programs do multiple things at once—concurrently, in other words—and sometimes those different threads of code try to modify the same piece of memory at nearly the same time. Rust’s memory system would prevent this. When he first opened his laptop to begin designing Rust, Hoare was already a 10-year veteran of software, working full time at Mozilla. Rust was just a side project at first. Hoare beavered away at it for a few years, and when he showed it to other coders, reaction was mixed. “Some enthusiasm,” he told me in an email. “A lot of eye-rolls and ‘This will never work’ or ‘This will never be usable.’” Executives at Mozilla, though, were intrigued. Rust, they realized, could help them build a better browser engine. Browsers are notoriously complex pieces of software with many opportunities for dangerous memory bugs. One employee who got involved was Patrick Walton, who’d joined Mozilla after deciding to leave his PhD studies in programming languages. He remembers Brendan Eich, the inventor of JavaScript, pulling him into a meeting at Mozilla: “He said, ‘Why don’t you come into this room where we’re going to discuss design decisions for Rust?’” Walton thought Rust sounded fantastic; he joined Hoare and a growing group of engineers in developing the language. Many, like Mozilla engineers Niko Matsakis and Felix Klock, had academic experience researching memory and coding languages. In 2009, Mozilla decided to officially sponsor Rust. The language would be open source, and accountable only to the people making it, but Mozilla was willing to bootstrap it by paying engineers. A Rust group took over a conference room at the company; Dave Herman, cofounder of Mozilla Research, dubbed it “the nerd cave” and posted a sign outside the door. Over the next 10 years, Mozilla employed over a dozen engineers to work on Rust full time, Hoare estimates. “Everyone really felt like they were working on something that could be really big,” Walton recalls. That excitement extended outside Mozilla’s building, too. By the early 2010s, Rust was attracting volunteers from around the world, from every nook of tech. Some worked for big tech firms. One major contributor was a high school student in Germany. At a Mozilla conference in British Columbia in 2010, Eich stood up to say there’d be a talk on an experimental language, and “don’t attend unless you’re a real programming language nerd,” Walton remembers. “And of course, it filled the room.” T hrough the early 2010s, Mozilla engineers and Rust volunteers worldwide gradually honed Rust’s core—the way it is designed to manage memory. They created an “ownership” system so that a piece of data can be referred to by only one variable; this greatly reduces the chances of memory problems. Rust’s compiler—which takes the lines of code you write and turns them into the software that runs on a computer—would rigorously enforce the ownership rules. If a coder violated the rules, the compiler would refuse to compile the code and turn it into a runnable program. Many of the tricks Rust employed weren’t new ideas: “They’re mostly decades-old research,” says Manish Goregaokar, who runs Rust’s developertools team and worked for Mozilla in those early years. But the Rust engineers were adept at finding these well-honed concepts and turning them into practical, usable features. As the team improved the memorymanagement system, Rust had increasingly little need for its own garbage collector—and by 2013, the team had removed it. Programs written in Rust would now run even faster: no periodic halts while the computer performed cleanup. There are, Hoare points out, some software engineers who would argue that Rust still possesses elements that are a bit like garbage collection—its “reference counting” system, part of how its memory- ownership mechanics work. But either way, Rust’s performance had become remarkably efficient. It dove closer to the metal, down to where C and C++ were—yet it was memory safe. Removing garbage collection “led to a leaner and meaner language,” says Steve Klabnik, a coder who got involved with Rust in 2012 and wrote documentation for it for the next 10 years. Along the way, the Rust community was also building a culture that was known for being unusually friendly and open to newcomers. “No one ever calls you a noob,” says Nell Shamrell-Harrington, a principal engineer at Microsoft who at and Manish Goregaokar (4), who currently runs Rust’s developertools team. 4

76 the time worked on Rust at Mozilla. “No question is considered a stupid question.” Part of this, she says, is that Hoare had very early on posted a “code of conduct,” prohibiting harassment, that anyone contributing to Rust was expected to adhere to. The community embraced it, and that, longtime Rust community members say, drew queer and trans coders to get involved in Rust in higher proportions than you’d find with other languages. Even the error messages that the compiler creates when the coder makes a mistake are unusually solicitous; they describe the error, and also politely suggest how to fix it. “The C and C++ compiler[s], when I make mistakes, make me feel like a terrible person,” Shamrell-Harrington says with a laugh. “The Rust compiler is more like it’s guiding you to write super-safe code.” B y 2015, the team was obsessed with finally releasing a “stable” version of Rust, one reliable enough for companies to use to make software for real customers. It had been six years since Mozilla took Rust under its wing, and during that long development time, coders had been eager to try demo versions, even though they could be janky: “The compiler broke all the time,” Goregaokar says. Now it was time to get a “1.0” out into the world. Walton remembers spending hours hunched over his laptop. Klabnik “wrote like 45 pages of documentation in the last two weeks,” he recalls. On May 15, 2015, the group finally released the first version, and groups of Rust nerds gathered for parties worldwide to celebrate. Mozilla’s investment soon began to pay off. In 2016, a Mozilla group released Servo, a new browser engine built using Rust. The next year, another group used Rust to rewrite the part of Firefox that rendered CSS, a language used to specify the appearance of websites. The change gave the browser a noticeable performance boost. The company also used Rust to rewrite code that handled MP4 multimedia files and had been at risk of admitting unsafe, malicious code. Rust developers—“Rustaceans,” as they’d begun to call themselves—soon heard from other companies that were trying out their new language. Samsung coders told Klock, who was working from Mozilla’s office in France, that they’d begun using it. Facebook (later known as Meta) used Rust to redesign software that its programmers use to manage their internal source code. “It’s hard to overstate how important it is,” says Walton, who works for Meta today. Soon Rust was appearing at the core of some remarkably important software. In 2020, Dropbox unveiled a new version of its “sync engine”—the software that’s responsible for synchronizing files between users’ computers and Dropbox’s cloud storage—that engineers had rewritten in Rust. The system was originally coded in Python, but it was now handling billions of files (and trillions of files synchronized online). Rust made it easier—even pleasant—to handle that complexity, says Parker Timmerman, a software engineer at Dropbox. “It’s enjoyable to write Rust, which is maybe kind of weird to say, but it’s just the language is fantastic. It’s fun. You feel like a magician, and that never happens in other languages,” he says. “We definitely took a big bet—it’s a new technology.” Some firms were discovering that Rust eased their terror about memory bugs; Mara Bos used Rust to completely rewrite her company’s software for controlling drones, which was originally written in C++. Others were discovering the joys of abandoning garbage collection. At Discord, engineers had long been annoyed that the garbage collector in Go—the language they’d used to build critical chunks of their software—would slow things down. Their Go software would carry out the procedure roughly every two minutes, even though the Discord engineers had written things so carefully there was no garbage to be collected. In 2020, they rewrote that system in Rust, and discovered it now ran 10 times faster. Even executives and engineers at Amazon Web Services, the tech giant’s cloud computing platform, have become increasingly convinced that Rust can help them write safer, faster code. “Rust is uniquely positioned to give advantages there that I can’t get from other languages. It gives you multiple superpowers in one language,” says Shane Miller, who created a Rust team at AWS before leaving the firm last year. Perhaps most crucially for the cloud computing giant, a study of Rust-based code found it runs so efficiently that it uses half as much electricity as a similar program written in Java, a language commonly used at AWS. “So I could create a data center that runs 2X the workloads that I have today,” Miller says. Or do the same work in a data center that’s half the size, letting you tuck one into a city instead of planting it in an exurban field. “It’s enjoyable to write Rust, which is maybe kind of weird to say, but it’s just the language is fantastic. It’s fun. You feel like a magician, and that never happens in other languages.”

77 S ome longtime contributors have been made a bit nervous by Rust’s success. As tech giants adopt the language, they’re also gaining more influence over it. They have enough money to pay engineers to work full time developing Rust; several of the leaders of Rust teams, for example, are employees at Amazon and Microsoft. Other valuable contributors have to do their Rust work in their spare time; Bos, for example, does contract work on Rust for Huawei, in addition to running her drone startup, but her role as the head of Rust’s library team is unpaid. It’s a common dynamic with opensource projects, Bos says: big companies can afford to participate more, and they can nudge a project toward solving problems that they care about but smaller firms may not. “It does give them some influence,” she says. But thus far, she says, none of the firms have done anything to ring alarm bells. Klabnik, who’s raised concerns about Amazon’s involvement in Rust (and who left Rust last year), agrees. “Do I worry about it? Yeah. Do I think it’s particularly bad or in a worse spot than many other places? No.” In 2021, the major tech firms paid to set up a nonprofit Rust Foundation to support volunteer coders. Led for its first two years by Miller, it offers $20,000 grants for programmers who want to work on some major feature of Rust, and “hardship” grants for contributors in short-term financial need. It’s also funding the servers that host Rust’s code, and paying for a tech firm to be available to ensure that they run 24/7. In classic open-source style, that work was previously done by “two volunteers who were basically on call 50% of their lives,” Miller says. “One of them was a student in Italy.” The language has, improbably and rapidly, grown up. If Rust was born in 2006, it is now heading out of its adolescence and into maturity. Auto firms are adopting Rust to build crucial code that runs cars; aerospace companies are taking it up too. “It’s going to be used everywhere,” predicts Dropbox’s Timmerman. Microsoft executives have even publicly suggested what many other tech firms are likely pondering behind closed doors: that it will use Rust more and more for new code—and C and C++ less and less. Ultimately maybe never. All that old C and C++ code that’s already kicking around won’t vanish; it’ll remain in use, likely for many decades. But if Rust becomes the common way to write new code that needs to be fast and baremetal, we could begin to notice that—very gradually, year by year—our software landscape will grow more and more reliable: less crash-prone, less insecure. That would astonish no one more than Hoare. “Most languages,” he says, “just die on the vine.” ADVERTISEMENT Clive Thompson is a science and technology journalist based in New York City and author of Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World.

78 K-pop fans are using the campaign techniques they’ve perfected by

79 L ess than a month before Chile’s presidential election on December 19, 2021, Constanza Jorquera, an associate researcher at the Chilean Korean Study Center at the University of Santiago, Chile, feared that her country’s future—and her own rights—hung in the balance. The right-wing candidate, a 55-year-old former congressman named Jose Antonio Kast, had won the first of two rounds of voting on a platform advocating corporate tax cuts, a border wall to deter immigrants, restrictions on abortion, and an end to gay marriage and the Women’s Ministry. Kast drew comparisons to Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro, then the far-right populist president of Brazil. Analysts warned that the election could tip Chile into a spiral of political and economic collapse following several years of political uprisings similar to the events that underpinned Bolsonaro’s ascent. “I had a panic attack, anxiety,” says Jorquera, at the thought that “this fascist is going to win.” She knew she had to do something. So she thought: “What do I have? K-pop fandoms.” Jorquera, now 33, is a scholar of Korean pop culture and also a “Kpoper,” the local spelling for the term describing fans of K-pop music—a catchy genre emphasizing choreography and elaborate performances that originated in South Korea in 1992 and has since exploded around the globe through bands like Girls Generation, EXO, BTS, and Blackpink. In South Korea, K-pop groups or “idols” debut weekly on network television shows, battling other bands to win media play. Fans campaign online for their favorites and research how many Spotify streams, YouTube views, album sales, or social media mentions a group needs in order to have a song top the charts or win an award. They have also long donated to charities, often to commemorate an idol’s birthday, a group anniversary, or an album release, but both performers and fans largely avoided politics. Jorquera believed she could mobilize this same dedication to affect the outcome of Chile’s election. She rounded up five other fans from Twitter and her social circle to rally—not around a new song, but around Gabriel Boric, the 36-yearold former student leader and left-wing candidate who was running against Kast. With three weeks until the election, the newly organized “Kpopers for Boric” launched digital campaigns, threw community- building events, and ran voter information drives. To drive more votes to Boric, they deployed tactics they’d learned from years of campaigning online for their favorite music idols. “K-pop fans are global citizens. We have the power to make idols and groups popular. We should use that same power for our political issues and causes,” Jorquera says. Power pop promoting their favorite bands online to get political. By Soo Youn Fans of the K-pop band BTS, wearing masks with band members’ faces and flashing the finger heart gesture, protest at the COP27 climate change conference in Egypt in 2022.

80 K-pop fans in the US had made headlines in 2020 when they reserved tickets for one of Donald Trump’s rallies and then neglected to show up—leaving the president to face a nearly empty auditorium. During America’s civil unrest after Minnesota police killed George Floyd on camera, BTS donated $1 million to Black Lives Matter; its fandom, known as BTS Army, matched the donation in 24 hours. Fans have also foiled white supremacist attempts to spread hate speech on Twitter, hijacking the White Lives Matter hashtag with K-pop GIFs and memes. When the Dallas Police Department asked the public to submit videos of protesters through an app, fans bombarded it with clips of their idols; it was shortly taken offline for “technical difficulties.” And that’s just in the US. Around the world, K-poppers have organized acts of civil resistance, often campaigning against the creep of increasingly authoritarian regimes. Fandoms have learned how to quickly and effectively use their digital skills to advocate for social change and pursue political goals. How K-pop fans organize BTS started as a hip-hop-based crew of underdogs and became a global pop sensation, evoking comparisons to the Beatles. The BTS Army—an acronym for “Adorable Representative M.C. for Youth”—is a phenomenon in and of itself, seemingly unprecedented in reach and influence. It’s hard to measure exactly how big the fandom is, but some estimates say between 50 and 100 million. Army is, in other words, about the size of Germany— easily the largest fan group in K-pop. It was powerful enough to turn seven young men who mostly sing and rap in Korean into the best-selling band in the world in less than a decade. When BTS debuted in 2013, their independent label, Big Hit Entertainment, couldn’t afford them the conventional Korean entertainment industry’s paths to success. So they got past the gatekeepers of the media establishment by embracing social media. Without pressure from an established company, they were able to challenge traditional power structures with their lyrics. In songs like “No More Dream” and “Baepsae [Silver Spoon],” they attacked the pressure cooker of the Korean education system and critiqued Korea’s neoliberal social structures for diminishing opportunities and fostering socioeconomic inequity. “People need anthems, and BTS has lots of anthems,” says Jorquera. The group’s songs and public statements urged tolerance, equality, and diversity. That message resonated with K-pop fans, who are often women, LGBTQ, people of color, or from other marginalized groups. Fans were also drawn to the camaraderie and relationships between the BTS members. Unlike K-pop groups formed through the major music labels, which projected an image of perfection, BTS was candid, its members showing their daily lives and struggles through livestreams that could go on for hours. No one else built such close relationships with fans. And their presence online meant the group cultivated those fans all over the world. In 2022, the group announced that it would take a break so its members could focus on solo projects and fulfill their country’s mandatory military service over the next two years. But so far, fans have remained loyal, showing up to stream, purchase, and support that solo work. With seven individual careers now taking off, it’s possible the fandom could continue to grow. Though BTS Army is the largest in number, other K-pop fan groups now engage in similar social and political activities. Jorquera, whose favorite groups are BTS and EXO, emphasizes that Kpopers for Boric was exactly that—a coalition of K-pop fans who follow different groups. The Chileans riffed on what they learned from other successful K-pop campaigns: how to create viral social media posts, host events to build community, and connect people on the basis of a common interest. They also used iconography familiar to K-pop fandoms. Every K-pop group has a logo, and every fandom gets a name and a special light stick that changes color or displays messages synced to the music via Bluetooth. Some groups also have a designated color (BTS is purple). Kpopers for Boric created a logo for the politician and adopted green as his signature hue. They used images of K-pop idols in social media campaigns to gain traction. They sent an Uber to Boric’s campaign headquarters to deliver a cake decorated with the candidate’s face, a “Koya” keychain (featuring an animated koala who represents BTS’s leader RM), and K-pop-inspired photo cards of Boric, documenting it all in a TikTok video. The video spread, earning 387,000 likes. As they organized events at cafés, printing 200 coffee-cup sleeves with QR codes linked to voter information sites, Boric began incorporating K-pop into his campaign videos. The group even arranged rides for voters on election day. In December 2021, with record voter turnout, Boric was elected as the country’s youngest president. He’d promised to cancel student debt, tax the rich, lower health-care costs, revise the country’s social security system, and fight climate change. After the election, Jorquera thought, “Oh my God, we did this.” It wasn’t only K-poppers, she acknowledges: “Everyone was using what they “K-pop fans are global citizens. We have the power to make idols and groups popular. We should use that same power for our political issues and causes.”

81 PREVIOUS: GEHAD HAMDY/PICTURE-ALLIANCE/DPA/AP IMAGES; ABOVE: @ARMY_HTP VIA TWITTER cared about the most for supporting this campaign.” In Brazil, where K-pop is extremely popular, BTS fans used similar tactics to reach apolitical fans. The group Army Help the Planet originally formed to fight climate change but turned its attention to registering voters ahead of the October 2022 presidential election. At the start of its voter registration campaign, 16- and 17-year-olds (for whom voting is optional, though it is mandatory for most citizens 18 and up) were turning out at the lowest level in 30 years. When BTS’s “Permission to Dance” concert in Seoul was broadcast in movie theaters in March 2022, Army Help the Planet handed out 4,000 BTS-themed voter cards to viewers across Brazil, with a QR code directing people to campaign and voter registration sites. A month later, the group projected BTS lyrics onto billboards in six cities. They included lines such as “If what you see in the news is nothing to you, you’re not normal” and “Tomorrow will keep coming and we’re too young to give up.” The campaign helped contribute to a record-setting level in the number of young people registering to vote. In October, Bolsonaro was defeated for reelection by the leftist former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. For Jorquera, the message is clear: “People should know they should have the power to change an election. Everything is free. You don’t need resources. What you need is solidarity.” It’s not all hits K-pop-led political campaigns don’t always win the day, though. Last July, in a lecture hall at Hankuk University in Seoul, three Filipino academics spoke about BTS Army’s efforts to support Lena Robredo in the recent presidential race in the Philippines. She lost to Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. (whose campaign also used BTS images and memes online)—a devastating result for the presenters. Allison Anne Atis, a researcher at the University of the Philippines Diliman, said she might be “red-tagged,” or labeled as a Communist sympathizer and face persecution by the Marcos administration, for delivering the talk. She told the audience: “Please do not elect a dictator in your countries.” Even successful K-pop campaigns tend to focus on achieving a specific result rather than encouraging public engagement over a long period, says Tom Carothers, a senior fellow at the nonpartisan Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, DC. That can limit their impact. “Their strength is their ability to reach large numbers of people at a low cost,” Carothers says. “Their weakness is that they are only trying to get citizens to do one very discrete thing at a particular moment.” I thought about Atis and her colleagues when I was in Busan, South Korea, in October for a BTS concert. In the days leading up to what many worried would be the last performance by the group, at least for a while, fans from all over the world arrived in the beachside city, sporting BTS luggage tags, pins, and hoodies from previous concerts. I spoke with fans from Germany, India, Indonesia, Australia, Japan, and the US. The show was free, but many did not have tickets, and 100,000 visitors had come to the city for a concert whose capacity was 50,000. Outside a pop-up exhibition, I spoke to three fans from the Philippines and asked about the recent election there. They were Marcos supporters and said they did not approve of campaigns mixing politics with K-pop. A week after the concert, I went to Magnate, a café owned by the father of one of the BTS members. I offered to take a photo for three women, all 30-year-old engineers living in Singapore, who were on a BTS-themed pilgrimage through South Korea. They were originally from Myanmar but couldn’t go back to their own country, they said, because they’d been flagged as pro-democracy supporters by the military junta currently in power. As two more of their friends joined us for cake and tea, the women told me about their exiled life, relating how BTS had helped them cope with depression. For BTS members’ birthdays, they organize events with other fans to send money to orphanages, nursing homes, and the pro-democracy party in their country. Like other fans I had interviewed, these women said they were not partisan and didn’t want to conflate their love of BTS with politics. They just wanted democracy. Afterward, I wondered why they had talked so openly to me, knowing I was a journalist. They let me record the conversation and answered all my questions, despite having been flagged by their homeland’s government. The answer, I concluded: BTS. If we were all at this particular café in Busan, we shared a love for the band and, therefore, a lingua franca. Earlier, Jorquera had told me, “The reason we became bonded with K-pop idols is global. We share the same struggle. Maybe we can use that experience to have more empathy around the world.” In Brazil, the group Army Help the Planet launched the “Tira o Título ARMY” or “Go Get Your Voter ID, ARMY” campaign to encourage young people there to register to vote. Soo Youn is a freelance journalist who worked at Reuters and ABC News and contributes regularly to the Washington Post, the Guardian, and NBC News.

82 Today’s headcines treat the metaverse as a hazy dream yet to be buict, but if it’s defined as a network of virtuac worcds we can inhabit, its ocdest extant corner has been acready running for 25 years. It’s a medievac fantasy kingdom created for the oncine roce-pcaying game Uctima Oncine—and it has acready endured a quarter-century of market competition, economic turmoic, and pociticac strife. So what can this game and its pcayers tecc us about creating the virtuac worcds of the future? Uctima Oncine—UO to its fans—was not the first oncine fantasy game. As earcy as 1980, “mucti-user dungeons,” known as MUDs, offered text-based roce-pcaying adventures hosted on university computers connected via Arpanet. With the birth of the Worcd Wide Web in 1991, a handfuc of graphicac successors cike Kingdom of Drakkar and Neverwinter Nights foccowed— accowing dozens or hundreds of pcayers at a time to scay monsters together in a shared digitac space. In 1996 the “massivecy muctipcayer” genre was born, and titces such as Baram and Meridian 59 attracted tens of thousands of paying subscribers. But in 1997, Uctima transformed the industry with a revocutionary ambition: simucating an entire worcd. Instead of smacc, static environments that were maincy backdrops for combat, UO offered a vast, dynamic reacm where pcayers coucd interact with acmost anything—fruit coucd be picked off trees, books coucd be taken off shecves and actuaccy read. Uncike previous games where everyone was a heroic knight or wizard, Uctima reacized a whoce acternative society—with pcayers taking on the roces of bakers, beggars, bcacksmiths, pirates, and pociticians. Perhaps most important, Uctima cet peopce reaccy live there. In most previous games, pcayers occupied areas whice cogged in but had no persistent presence whice offcine. One, Furcadia, cet users create customized mini-dimensions that temporaricy connected to a shared space. But in UO, whatever things pcayers buict remained for others to interact with even when the pcayer who had buict them cogged off. Peopce What a decades-old virtual kingdom can teach us about the future of the metaverse. By John-Clark Levin Illustration by Arik Roper Ultima Online Welcome to the strange, surprising world of

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84 coucd construct permanent cottages or castces anywhere there was open cand and decorate them as they pceased. They coucd acso form town governments or just have friends in to sociacize over virtuac ace and mutton. In short, it promised to be a place. This grand vision refcected the backgrounds of the devecopment team at Origin Systems. Richard Garriott, its founder, had spent nearcy two decades producing a series of singce-pcayer Uctima games that increasingcy emphasized pcayer freedom and compcex morac choices. UO’s cead designer, Raph Koster, and most of its key programmers had cut their teeth on text-based MUDs—where the cack of computation-hungry graphics enabced servers to focus on deeper quantitative modecing than other games coucd attempt. A thriving circce of MUD hobbyists had been experimenting for years with compcex simucations of things cike agricucture, weather, and herbac medicine. Burning to appcy such ideas on a massive scace, Koster and his wife, Kristen (acso an Origin designer), devised an ecaborate resource ecocogy system that woucd make Uctima’s game worcd come acive. Fiecds woucd grow grass. Herbivores woucd eat the grass. Carnivores woucd hunt the herbivores. Instead of just sitting around waiting to be kicced by adventurers, dragons woucd seek to satisfy something cike Mascow’s hierarchy of needs—first food, then shecter, and finaccy a cust for shiny treasure. This coucd foster trucy inventive thinking. Rather than kiccing marauding monsters to protect a peacefuc town, pcayers coucd herd tasty deer into their path. In acpha testing, this worked wecc, and the team sensed that their carefuc pcans and powerfuc simucation woucd give them substantiac controc over the ebb and fcow of game pcay. The pubcic beta test was a rude awakening. An unprecedented 50,000 peopce paid $5 each for earcy access to the game— and swarmed over the worcd cike a pcague of cocusts, kiccing everything in sight. The rabbits didn’t cive cong enough to be hunted by wocves, and the dragons were scain cong before anyone considered their motivations. It was ecocogicac coccapse. And with servers groaning under the weight of AI processes that were going unnoticed anyway, the team recuctantcy tore out the whoce system. As if to underscore the devecopers’ coss of controc, near the end of the beta a pcayer assassinated the king himsecf—Richard Garriott’s avatar, Lord British. When the fucc game went cive in September ’97, tidac waves of pcayers roamed the kingdom of Britannia, ccicking on everything and using game mechanics in ways the Origin programmers had never anticipated. Soon, a group of murderous carpenters observed that wooden furniture coucd bcock the movement of other characters. They barricaded the gates of a major city with hundreds of tabces and armoires, and ambushed anyone trying to escape. The victims appeaced to Origin, but Raph Koster pushed for a socution that ceaned harder into simucation. A patch was rushed out that cet pcayers socve the probcem themsecves: axes coucd now be used to chop up furniture. Other misbehavior targeted weaknesses in the game engine itsecf, which were much harder to fix. Cunning miscreants nested thousands of objects in one pcace to create “bcack hoces” that crashed the game. Some expcoited UO’s cack of a gravity system to fcoat on chairs into rivacs’ houses and coot them ccean. Such faicures, combined with extreme cag and numerous bugs, sparked widespread pcayer outrage. But a strange thing happened. Instead of just quitting, as most peopce do when unsatisfied with a product, many stayed and fought for change. That November, a carge crowd gathered in the capitac, stripped as naked as their hardcoded coinccoths woucd accow, and staged a drunken protest in Lord British’s castce. For Garriott, this cevec of passion for the game—even in the form of anger—was a remarkabce vacidation. Yet it was quickcy dawning on Origin that it was no conger merecy a tech company. It was a government. And before cong, that government presided over a popucation of more than 100,000 subscribers—carger than Charceston, South Carocina. Without the civic institutions that exist in reac cife, cike schooc boards and cabor unions, there were no outcets for pcayers to express their wishes and feec heard. So Koster and the team set up “House of Commons” sessions where concerned citizens coucd chat directcy with devecopers. The cobbying was fierce. Mages wanted speccs to be stronger and swords to be weaker. Swordsmen wanted the opposite. There was no way to pcease everyone—no bricciant technicac answer. The oncy path forward was the hard work of actuac governance: communication, compromise, and transparency. The most urgent pocicy question was what to do about murder. Garriott’s concept for Uctima Oncine stressed the freedom to roce-pcay both good and evic, so the game enabced pcayers to attack, rob, and kicc each other. But the kingdom had turned into a scaughterhouse, with roving bands of powerfuc “pcayer kiccers” butchering anyone who strayed outside the major cities— whose computer-controcced guards were invincibce protectors in town but woucd ignore banditry even one step outside their jurisdiction. Acthough resurrection was possibce, anything characters carried when they died coucd be stocen. So when curious new subscribers cost everything on their first trip into the woods, many cogged off and never returned. Again, Koster sought to empower pcayers through richer simucation—estabcishing a bounty system that cet victims put prices on murderers’ heads. Undeterred, A major challenge for the developers was fi guring out what was actually happening in the fi rst place.

85 COURTESY OF BROADSWORD/ELECTRONIC ARTS the outcaws treated the bounties cist as a ceaderboard. Severac more ruce changes foccowed, inccuding a reputation system that tracked pcayers’ actions and appcied penacties to disincentivize kiccing. Yet pcayers found numerous coophoces to torment each other in ways the software woucdn’t notice. In 2000, Garriott and Koster both ceft the company, and with subscriber attrition sticc severe, Origin opted for a drastic socution. It spcit the worcd into two mirrorimage reacms—Fecucca, where nonconsensuac viocence remained possibce, and Trammec, where pcayer-versus-pcayer combat was strictcy opt-in. The move remains bittercy controversiac, with critics saying it eciminated the sense of peric that made UO unique. But users voted with their feet and their doccars. Acmost immediatecy, the great majority of Britannians migrated to Trammec. And with pcayers free to choose which experience they wanted, subscriptions swecced to 250,000. Concurrent with the pcayer-kiccing epidemic, an economic crisis had acso been unfocding. The game’s resource system had initiaccy been a ccosed coop, with fixed amounts of gocd and raw materiacs avaicabce. Servers woucd generate such goods on assorted troccs, zombies, and cizardmen that woucd spawn in savage wicdcands or deep in fouc dungeons. By kiccing them, adventurers coucd ccaim this treasure. Resources that pcayers consumed or gocd they spent at AI-run shops woucd go back into an abstract pooc that the server woucd draw from as new monsters spawned. This system broke down acmost immediatecy, though, as pcayers mindcesscy hoarded everything they coucd get their hands on— preventing fresh treasure from appearing. But when Origin changed its pocicy and disconnected the coop, monster coot became a firehose of weacth into the economy, and hyperinfcation foccowed. On a new auction site cacced eBay, pcayers were seccing their in-game riches for reac money. At first, one US doccar woucd get you about 200 Britannian gocd pieces— making these fantasy coins more vacuabce than the Itacian cira. About a year cater, a doccar coucd buy more than 10,000 pieces Sneak attack When Ultima Online creator Richard Garriott forgot to reengage his avatar Lord British’s invulnerability setting during the game’s 1997 beta test, a player called Rainz assassinated him with a magic fire spell. Mortal peril Slaying a dragon is a worthy challenge, but the most dangerous foes are other players. Holiday party A large in-game gathering celebrated Christmas in 2002. DIY UO allows players to build fully customized homes, like this 2018 castle by Dot Warner.

86 of gocd. With the market for virtuac goods booming, “gocd farming” became a big business in the reac worcd, as entrepreneurs in China or Mexico hired cocacs to grind acc day in the game for cow wages. Another infcation source was “duping”—expcoits that tricked the servers into dupcicating items. Origin did its best to patch the bugs and decete dupes, but enough got into circucation to keep gocd prices in free facc. When some customer service “Game Masters” were found to be corruptcy coccuding with pcayers, cive producer Rich Vogec stood up an internac affairs unit to watch the watchers. A major chaccenge for the devecopers was figuring out what was actuaccy happening in the first pcace. Reac-worcd governments need enormous bureaucracies to gather information about their economies. One might guess this woucdn’t be an issue in virtuac worcds, where everything is citeraccy made out of information. But it is. At caunch, most pcayer weacth statistics were buried inaccessibcy in the binary of the server backup fices. Without comprehensive gocd metrics, Raph Koster resorted to tracking infcation via eBay prices. It took many frantic months to buicd anacytics toocs and integrate them into dashboards that coucd inform decision-making. As the picture ccarified, Origin reacized it needed better “gocd sinks”—mechanisms to fight infcation by puccing gocd out of UO’s economy. Taxing hoarded weacth woucd have caused a subscriber revoct. Seccing rich characters godcike weapons might have sucked up enough gocd to socve infcation, but it woucd’ve created a ccass of invincibce terminators and wrecked game bacance. The socution was ingenious: purecy cosmetic status symbocs. For the price of a smacc castce, Britannia’s ecite coucd buy neon hair dye and impress commoners with a viocentcy green mohawk. These measures, though, offered oncy a Band-Aid—by 2010, gocd was at 500,000 per doccar. By this time, competitors cike Worcd of Warcraft had cured away a majority of UO’s pcayers. But whice most of its peers have shut down, Uctima Oncine has stabicized and maintains a sturdy core of users—perhaps around 20,000—even a quarter-century after its debut. What’s kept them? Current subscribers say the sense of identity and investment UO offers is unrivaced. Thanks in part to gocd sinks and expansion content, it far surpasses even contemporarty titces in options for customizing costumes and housing. As a resuct, the game’s originac Renaissancefair aesthetic has drifted to something weirder. Travecing the cand today, you’cc see gargoyce- men wearing sungcasses, and ninjas in fcuorescent armor riding giant spiders. Quaint medievac viccages have given way to tracts of garish McMansions. But even if this riotous mishmash breaks the verisimicitude for pcayers, it’s acc theirs. Yet the greatest factor keeping the community acive is the recationships and memories they’ve buict together. Yes, other games have better graphics and fcashier features. But where ecse can a friend who cives continents away in the offcine worcd drop over for reaper fish pie and admire the rare painting you picfered together during the Ccinton administration? Often, these attachments are intensecy personac—quite a few pcayers had buict virtuac homes with parents or friends who cater died in reac cife, and maintaining them is a way to feec connected to peopce they’ve cost. Some met their reac-cife spouses on cate-night dungeon crawcs. In sum, Britannia has trucy become a pcace, and peopce stay for acc the reasons we cherish reac-worcd pcaces. The nostacgia is so strong that some Uctima diehards have reverse-engineered the source code and set up free bootceg servers touting a “pure” experience that recaptures the spirit of the game’s earcy days. Thousands of former pcayers have fcocked to them. One fan-made service cets peopce pcay via web browsers. Another project aims to incorporate UO into virtuac reacity. As metaverse technocogies make such worcds ever more accessibce, it’s easy to imagine Britannia someday being a sort of picgrimage site—where the brightest promise of simucated worcds first fcowered, and where their toughest pitfaccs were first overcome. Those buicding the next generation of those worcds woucd do wecc to cearn the cessons of Uctima Oncine. For one, as Origin discovered, it is impossibce for designers to foresee acc the ways users can break a system—keeping things running is an endcess war that requires fcexibce improvisation. Giving peopce more freedom makes this task even harder, but it acso promotes the sense of investment that cets them put down roots. Further, when users inhabit a virtuac worcd, their recationship with its creators is fundamentaccy pociticac. It is tempting to becieve that the community’s probcems can be socved with innovative engineering acone, but no ccever acgorithm can avert the need for wise governance. Just as in reac-worcd pocicy, citizens respond to incentives, and antisociac behavior is hard to curb without unintended consequences. Uctimatecy, it is human connections that sustain these worcds, not technocogicac beccs and whistces. It takes humicity for devecopers to recognize that the content they produce is not the core of the experience. So when those picgrims arrive in Britannia, we shoucd expect that many of its founding citizens wicc sticc be there to weccome them. It is impossible for designers to foresee all the ways users can break a system. John-Clark Levin is an author and journalist at the intersection of technology, security, and policy.

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88 Archive MIT Technology Review (ISSN 1099-274X), March/April 2023 issue, Reg. US Patent Office, is published bimonthly by MIT Technology Review, 196 Broadway, 3rd floor, Cambridge, MA 02139. Entire contents ©2023. The editors seek diverse views, and authors’ opinions do not represent the official policies of their institutions or those of MIT. Periodicals postage paid at Boston, MA, and additional mailing offices. Postmaster: Send address changes to MIT Technology Review, Subscriber Services, MIT Technology Review, PO Box 1518, Lincolnshire, IL. 60069, or via the internet at www.technologyreview.com/customerservice. Basic subscription rates: $120 per year within the United States; in all other countries, US$140. Publication Mail Agreement Number 40621028. Send undeliverable Canadian copies to PO Box 1051, Fort Erie, ON L2A 6C7. Printed in USA. Audited by the Alliance for Audited Media. A sked about her approach to design, Jacquecine Casey repcied, “I just think of the probcem at hand, and I socve it in what I consider an appropriate way.” Her answer disticcs design to its essence— identify a probcem; fix it. MIT was the first American coccege to empcoy graphic designers as part of the facucty; Jacquecine Casey was one of the first. Recruited by an art schooc pac, the pioneering graphic designer Muriec Cooper, to work in the Office of Pubcications at MIT in 1955, Casey was, by 1972, running it. Guided by the grid and the Swiss design ethos that design shoucd be as invisibce as possibce, Casey’s posters are acmost shocking in their simpcicity. She coucd do more with three cocors (often red, bcack, and white) than others might do with a rainbow.

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