This story first appeared in China Report, MIT Technology Review’s newsletter about technology in China. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday.
Like most reporters, I have accounts on every social media platform you can think of. But for the longest time, I was not on Threads, the rival to X (formerly Twitter) released by Meta last year. The way it has to be tied to your Instagram account didn’t sit well with me, and as its popularity dwindled, I felt maybe it was not necessary to use it.
But I finally joined Threads last week after I discovered that the app has unexpectedly blown up among Taiwanese users. For months, Threads has been the most downloaded app in Taiwan, as users flock to the platform to talk about politics and more. I talked to academics and Taiwanese Threads users about why the Meta-owned platform got a redemption arc in Taiwan this year. You can read what I discovered here.
I first noticed the trend on Instagram, which occasionally shows you a few trending Threads posts to try to entice you to join. After seeing them a few times, I realized there was a pattern: most of these were written by Taiwanese people talking about Taiwan.
That was a rare experience for me, since I come from China and write primarily about China. Social media algorithms have always shown me accounts similar to mine. Although people from mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan all write in Chinese, the characters we use and the expressions we choose are quite different, making it easy to spot your own people. And on most platforms that are truly global, the conversations in Chinese are mostly dominated by people in or from mainland China, since its population far outnumbers the rest.
As I dug into the phenomenon, it soon turned out that Threads’ popularity has been surging at an unparalleled pace in Taiwan. Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, publicly acknowledged that Threads has been doing “exceptionally well in Taiwan, of all places.” Data from Sensor Tower, a market intelligence firm, shows that Threads has been the most downloaded social network app on iPhone and Android in Taiwan almost every single day of 2024. On the platform itself, Taiwanese users are also belatedly realizing their influence when they see that comments under popular accounts, like a K-pop group, come mostly from fellow Taiwanese users.
But why did Threads succeed in Taiwan when it has failed in so many other places? My interviews with users and scholars revealed a few reasons.
First, Taiwanese people never really adopted Twitter. Only 1% to 5% of them regularly use the platform, now called X, estimates Austin Wang, a political science professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. The mainstream population uses Facebook and Instagram, but still yearns for a platform for short text posts. The global launch of Threads basically gave these users a good reason to try out a Twitter-like product.
But more important, Taiwan’s presidential election earlier this year means there was a lot to talk, debate, and commiserate about. Starting in November, many supporters of Taiwan’s Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) “gathered to Threads and used it as a mobilization tool,” Wang says. “Even DPP presidential candidate Lai received more interaction on Threads than Instagram and Facebook.”
It turns out that even though Meta has tried to position Threads as a less political version of X, what actually underpinned its success in Taiwan was still the universal desire to talk about politics.
“Taiwanese people gather on Threads because of the freedom to talk about politics [here],” Liu, a designer in Taipei who joined in January because of the elections, tells me. “For Threads to depoliticize would be shooting itself in the foot.”
The fact that there are an exceptionally large number of Taiwanese users on Threads also makes it a better place to talk about internal politics, she says, because it won’t easily be overshadowed or hijacked by people outside Taiwan. The more established platforms like Facebook and X are rife with bots, disinformation campaigns, and controversial content moderation policies. On Threads there’s minimal interference with what the Taiwanese users are saying. That feels like a fresh breeze to Liu.
But I can’t help feeling that Threads’ popularity in Taiwan could easily go awry. Meta’s decision to keep Threads distanced from political content is one factor that could derail Taiwanese users’ experience; an influx of non-Taiwanese users, if the platform actually manages to become more successful and popular in other parts of the world, could also introduce heated disagreements and all the additional reasons why other platforms have deteriorated.
These are some tough questions to answer for Meta, because users will simply flow to the next trendy, experimental platform if Threads doesn’t feel right anymore. Its success in Taiwan so far is a rare win for the company, but preserving that success and replicating it elsewhere will require a lot more work.
Do you believe Threads stands a chance of rivaling X (Twitter) in places other than Taiwan? Let me know your thoughts at zeyi@technologyreview.com.
Now read the rest of China Report
Catch up with China
1. Morris Chang, who founded the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company at the age of 55, is an outlier in today’s tech industry, where startup founders usually start in their 20s. (Wall Street Journal $)
2. A group of Chinese researchers used the technology behind hypersonic missiles to make high-speed trains safer. (South China Morning Post $)
3. The US government is considering cutting the so-called de minimis exemption from import duties, which makes it cheap for Temu and Shein to send packages to the US. But lots of US companies also benefit from the exemption now. (The Information $)
4. The Chinese commerce minister will visit Europe soon to plead his country’s case amid the European Commission’s investigation into Chinese electric vehicles. (Reuters $)
5. After three years of unsuccessful competition with WhatsApp, ByteDance’s messaging app designed for the African market finally shut down last month. (Rest of World)
6. The rapid progress of AI makes it seem less necessary to learn a foreign language. But there are still things AI loses in translation. (The Atlantic $)
7. This is the incredible story of a Chinese man who takes his piano to play outdoors at places of public grief: in front of the covid quarantine barriers in Wuhan, at the epicenter of an earthquake, on a river that submerged villages. And he plays the same song—the only song he knows, composed by the Japanese composer Ryuichi Sakamoto. (NPR)
Lost in translation
With Netflix’s March release of The Three Body Problem, a series adapted from the global hit sci-fi novel by Chinese author Liu Cixin, Western audiences are also learning about a movie-like real-life drama behind the adaptation. In 2021, the Chinese publication Caixin first investigated the mysterious death of Lin Qi, a successful businessman who bought the movie rights to the book. In 2017, he hired Xu Yao, a prominent attorney, to work on legal affairs and government relations.
In December 2020, Lin died after he was poisoned by a mysterious mix of toxins. According to Caixin, Xu is a fan of the TV series Breaking Bad and had his own plant in Shanghai where he made poisons. He would order hundreds of different toxins through the dark web, mix them, and use them on pets to experiment. A week before Lin’s death, Xu gave him a bottle of pills that were supposedly prebiotics, but he had replaced them with poison.
Xu was arrested soon after Lin died, and he was sentenced to death on March 22 this year.
One more thing
Taobao, China’s leading e-commerce platform, announced it’s experimenting with delivering packages by rockets. Yes, rockets. Made by a Chinese startup, Taobao’s pilot rockets will be able to deliver something as big as a car or a truck, and the rockets can be reused for the next delivery. To be honest, I still can’t believe this wasn’t an April Fool’s joke.
Hainikoye hits Accept and a young woman greets him in Hausa, a gravelly language spoken across West Africa’s Sahel region. She has three new cows and wants to know: Does he have advice on getting them through the lean season?
Hainikoye—a twentysomething agronomist who has “followed animals,” as Sahelians refer to herding, since he first learned to walk—opens an interface on his laptop and clicks on her village in southern Niger, where humped zebu roam the dipping hills and dried-up valleys that demarcate the northern desert from the southern savanna. He tells her where the nearest full wells are and suggests feeding the animals peanuts and cowpea leaves—cheap food sources with high nutritional value that, his screen confirms, are currently plentiful. They hang up after a few minutes, and Hainikoye waits for the phone to ring again.
Seven days a week at the Garbal call center, agents like Hainikoye offer what seems like a simple service, treating people to a bespoke selection of location-specific data: satellite-fed weather forecasts and reports of water levels and vegetation conditions along various herding routes, as well as practical updates on brushfires, overgrazed areas, nearby market prices, and veterinary facilities. But it’s also surprisingly innovative—and is providing critical support for Sahelian herders reeling from the effects of interrelated challenges ranging from war to climate change. Over the long term, the project’s supporters, as well as the herders connecting with it, hope it could even safeguard an ancient culture that functions as an economic lifeline for the entire region.
The glossy red cubicles of Garbal’s office in Niamey, Niger’s capital, are tucked away in the second-floor space the call center shares with the local headquarters of Airtel, an Indian telecom. It had only been open for a few weeks when I visited early last year. Bursts of fuchsia bougainvillea garlanded the entryway to the building, a welcome respite from the sand-colored landscape and sewage-infused scent of the rotting industrial district around it. One lot over sat a former Total gas station that has remained unbranded since a drug cartel bought it to launder money and removed the sign. Running across the zone was a boulevard commemorating a 1974 coup d’état, which has been followed by four more over the ensuing five decades, the latest in July 2023. In the middle of the boulevard sat a few dozen miles of decomposing railway tracks that had been “inaugurated” by a right-wing French billionaire in 2016. For decades, postcolonial elites, promising development, have pillaged one of Africa’s poorest countries.
In more recent years, various Western players touting tech trends like artificial intelligence and predictive analysis have swooped in with promises to solve the region’s myriad problems. But Garbal—named after the word for a livestock market in the language of the Fulani, an ethnic group that makes up the majority of the Sahel’s herders—aims to do things differently. Building on an approach pioneered by a 37-year-old American data scientist named Alex Orenstein, Garbal is focused on how humbler technologies might effectively support the 80% of Nigeriens who live off livestock and the land.
“There’s still this idea of ‘How can we use new tech?’ But the tech is already there—we just need to be more intentional in applying it,” Orenstein says, arguing that donor enthusiasm for shiny, complex solutions is often misplaced. “All of our big wins have come from taking some basic-ass shit and making it work.”
Workers in the Garbal call center in Niamey are able to review data to help herders.
HANNAH RAE ARMSTRONG
Garbal’s work comes down to data and, critically, who should have access to it. Recent advances in data collection—both from geosatellites and from herders themselves—have generated an abundance of information on ground cover quantity and quality, water availability, rain forecasts, livestock concentrations, and more. The resulting breakthroughs in forecasting can, in theory, help people anticipate—and protect herds from—droughts and other crises. But Orenstein believes it is not enough to extract data from herders, as has been the focus of numerous efforts over the past decade. It must be distributed to them.
The work couldn’t be more urgent. The region’s herders face an existential crisis that has already started to shred the very fabric of society.
Herding—prestigious, high risk, and one of humanity’s most foundational ways of life—is a pillar of survival in the Sahel. In Niger, for instance, known across the continent for its succulent steak, animal production accounts for 40% of the agricultural GDP. Migratory herders usher between 70% and 90% of the cattle population between seasonal pastures, since they rarely own land. These pastoralists have historically relied on common resources, in coordination with local communities.
But the traditional ways are becoming next to impossible. The crisis stems, in part, from the changing climate: as the desert creeps south, and as the dry season stretches longer and the rains come in shorter and more volatile intervals, water, pasture, and other renewable resources are increasingly erratic. But the strain is also political: brutal fighting between pro-government forces and local groups with links to Boko Haram, Al-Qaeda, and the Islamic State has turned major transit hubs, cow superhighways, and wetlands into battlegrounds. Making matters worse, herders tend to be underrepresented within state institutions, whose land-use policies favor farmers, and overrepresented within jihadist groups, which appeal to this exclusion to draw recruits from herding communities. A common lack of schooling among children of herders further deepens this exclusion.
In their long journeys, herders sometimes drive cattle near or through urban land.
ALAMY
The result is that tens of millions of Sahelian herders who depend upon free movement are increasingly penned in. Things are especially dire for Fulani herders, who get scapegoated as troublemaking outsiders. So addressing the multidimensional crisis would not only help herders; it could remove an intractable driver of one of Africa’s worst wars.
“Ensuring that herders have land and water rights, and working out their access to these through dialogue, is an important part of the solution to conflict in the Sahel,” says Adam Higazi, a researcher at the University of Amsterdam and Nigeria’s Modibbo Adam University, whose 2018 report on pastoralism and conflict for the UN’s West Africa office remains a key reference in the field.
The question now is whether Garbal and a handful of other tech-driven projects can in fact deliver on promises to help stabilize herders experiencing rising precarity.
Aliou Samba Ba, who leads a regional pastoralist organization that has teamed up with Orenstein to get data to Senegalese herders, says he’s optimistic, largely because Orenstein is turning traditional interventions upside down: “We say he looks with the eye of the herder as well as with the eye of the satellite.”
When institutions fail
The Sahel stretches from Senegal’s Atlantic coastline across Africa to the Red Sea, bounded by the Sahara to the north and by verdant forests and savanna to the south. Much of the region has been ravaged by drought and insurgencies over the past few decades, but rural Senegal is still home to the types of spaces that herders elsewhere are fighting for: maintained, not overdetermined; protected, not overpoliced. There is climate change here, but no war.
Last September, I drove deep into the Ferlo, a pastoral reserve roughly the size of New Jersey, to meet with a Fulani herder named Salif Sow.
It was the height of the rainy season, and the Sahel was having a great one. The environment that greeted me was a miracle and a mirage—a desert burst into bloom. Tall, bony Fulani herders scrambled to keep up with throngs of lambs, goats, cows, and camels spread out over a seemingly infinite expanse of green grass and lushly foliated trees. The Ferlo was brimming with carefully maintained wells, abundantly filled seasonal ponds, and clearly marked pastoralist corridors, with the country’s biggest wholesale livestock market just a few hours’ ride by donkey cart. There were no paved roads, no commercial farmland, and no extremist recruiters for hundreds of miles in any direction.
Herders have to make complex calculations when choosing where to take their cows to wait out the dry season.
SVEN TORFINN/PANOS PICTURES/REDUX
Not that the herding was easy work. “A herder’s life is difficult,” Sow said, welcoming me to his compound with sweet tea and a calabash filled with fresh milk. “There is not one day of rest.”
In a few months’ time, the rains would stop, the herds would exhaust the pastures, and the grassland would revert back to desert. And Sow would again face the difficult decision he faces every year: whether to stay and buy livestock feed to tide his animals over until next year’s rains or to lead his cows on a journey, and if so, where.
A lot of complex spatial calculations go into choosing where to take hundreds of hungry cows to wait out the dry season on the edge of the world’s largest subtropical desert, while making sure they have enough to eat along the way. Observing these deliberations filled Orenstein with wonder more than a decade ago, when he started surveying herders in Chad for a food security project with the French NGO Action Against Hunger (ACF).
In 2014, Orenstein helped ACF develop an early-warning system, mining new data sources using remote sensing—observing the conditions of grazing pastures from space via satellite imagery and, in some cases, with the use of drones. He also worked with pastoralist organizations to gather information about diverse conditions on the ground, ranging from wildfire locations to the spread of animal disease. He then began making maps using open-access sources; passing the data through an algorithm that he developed to treat and filter imagery, he created detailed and accessible illustrations of rainfall levels and vegetation that became a rare reliable resource for herders and their allies. Aid workers in war zones would print out his maps and pass them around to herders.
It was part of a system designed to extract data, analyze it, and send it up the chain to institutions, including national ministries, UN agencies, and donors. Being able to see crises coming, the thinking went, would give institutional actors more time and power to prepare their response and assign their resources. Being able to deploy emergency programming earlier would in turn afford herders a bit more protection.
In practice, that’s not always how it worked.
At the start of the rainy season in the early summer of 2017, Orenstein was tracking rainfall patterns and felt a knot in his stomach. The first rains had hit too hard, washing the dormant seeds out of the soil; a dry spell followed that lasted for several weeks. When the rains did return, the grassland growth was stunted. Drought was coming.
By mid-August, Orenstein was scribbling reports and ringing journalists to warn that disaster was imminent. But when presented with this evidence, the regional body with the authority to declare an emergency did not act. By the time it finally did, in April 2018—eight months after initial warnings were sounded—it was far too late to respond effectively to what turned out to be the worst drought in 20 years.
Data scientist Alex Orenstein marks up areas during a field mapping exercise.
COURTESY OF ALEX ORENSTEIN
Two months after that, in June 2018, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs urgently warned that 1.6 million children faced severe acute malnutrition, up more than 50% from the previous year.
That blighted season was also brutal for Sow. In March, his entire village sent its animals south to escape the drought—the first time anyone could remember doing so that early in the dry season. But Sow lingered, unwilling to take his sons out of school to help him. Nonetheless, he also could not afford to stay and buy several tons of animal feed per month at inflated prices. By the time Sow finally hired a few assistants and headed south with his cattle, sands had engulfed the grasslands.
They marched across the desert like soldiers at war, covering 18 miles a day. On the 10th day, they reached the Tambacounda region by the Malian border, where the cows would spend the rest of the lean season grazing on savanna woodlands and lush forest. Not all the herd survived the trek, and the cows that did were emaciated and more prone to insect-borne tropical diseases. By season’s end, a quarter of the herd had dropped dead—a defeat from which Sow still hasn’t recovered.
Democratizing data
Driving through the Ferlo in 2018, Orenstein was distraught to see the rail-thin Fulani herders trailing behind their withering cows. Across the Sahel, anti-Fulani pogroms were on the rise; some West Africans were taking to Twitter to call for their extermination. As weather, food, and protection systems broke down, it was easier to scapegoat the drifting “foreigner” than to demand accountability from anyone responsible.
The combination of starvation and ethnic massacres reminded Orenstein of the stories his grandfather used to tell of surviving Auschwitz. What good were early warnings if institutions were not willing to act on them? Not that the drought could have been prevented. But declaring an emergency sooner would have facilitated measures to soften its impact on herders. For example, governments could have sent cash transfers and distributed food for both humans and livestock at strategic transit locations.
From that point on, Orenstein decided to do things differently. If institutions could not be trusted to make good use of new data, why not get it directly to herders?
But delivering data to herders would prove extremely challenging. The centralized, vertically oriented systems traditionally used for data collection and analysis are better adapted to those institutions, usually located in capital cities, than to herders dispersed across thousands of miles of desert. What’s more, Sahelian herders are some of the world’s least reachable, least connected people. Many of them don’t have cell phones or access to internet or strong cellular service.
Still, the timing was good—aid workers and donors were increasingly hopeful that technology could solve stubborn problems. In 2018, Orenstein secured a $250,000 grant for ACF to broadcast data reports to herders in northern Senegal via text message and community radio.
The project launched several months later, though by then Orenstein was already working on another one: the Garbal call centers. Even more than community radio, the call centers, which are a collaboration with the Netherlands Development Organization, could offer data tailored to individuals in very specific locations over a wider remit. The first center launched in Bamako, Mali, in 2018. Another, in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, followed in 2019.
Orenstein and the Garbal team—roughly a dozen local data analysts, project managers, digital finance experts, and tele-agents with degrees in livestock management and applied agriculture—have designed different tools for herders’ needs. For example, they’ve offered ways to connect with veterinarians, compare market prices for animal feed, and use satellite data to find seasonal migration corridors and track brushfires. Crucially, the team has also engaged directly with pastoralist organizations, training and equipping herders to send back field data about vegetation quality in different zones—a piece of critical information that is undetectable via satellite.
A screenshot of a tool developed by Orenstein and others that call center agents use to provide herders with location-specific data.
Orenstein himself went into the field as often as he could to hold focus groups with herders and ensure that the way information was delivered would be adapted to their epistemic culture. “Instead of asking them, ‘Do you need rainfall information?’ I would say, ‘What kind of information do you need? And how do you measure it?’” he recalls. “Otherwise, the system would tell them to expect 25 millimeters of rain. Math is not how they measure. So instead, I would hold consultations on pond fullness, for example, and define rain strength in those terms—terms they can use.”
Samba Ba, the Senegalese herder, notes how effective this work has been in bridging the gulf between what tech had promised and what he and his peers actually needed. “Orenstein would help us forecast in September what the vegetation would be like the following year, so we could plan the next seasonal migration,” he says. “He came to us in the field, took into account our customs, habits, and knowledge, and used technology to give us a clearer idea of the grazing situation.”
Still, the most popular Garbal service has been its weather forecasting for rural zones. Previously, reliable information was severely lacking, in part because there were not enough ground stations and in part because satellite data was available only for urban areas. (Mali, for instance, has just 13 active weather stations, compared with 200 in Germany—a country one-third its size.)
Orenstein came up with a way to make rural forecasts more readily available. “We had the coordinates for every village in Burkina Faso. Why couldn’t we just plug those into an API?” he remembers thinking, referring to an application programming interface, a kind of intermediary that allows applications to interact with one another. “Suddenly, we were getting weather forecasts for places that weren’t listed anywhere.”
The API has enabled Garbal tele-agents to click on remote pastoral zones on a map and receive tables showing weekly, daily, and hourly forecasts that are updated with fresh satellite data every three hours. Honoré Zidouemba, the project manager for the Ouagadougou call center, estimates that during the rainy season, his center receives 2,000 to 3,000 calls a day about the weather. “Herders and farmers used to derive information from natural cues,” he says, “but with climate change, those are more and more perturbed.”
A tool created by Orenstein and collaborators allows a user to highlight the presence of active cropland across time.
It’s simple and inexpensive—costing under $100 a month to use—but of all the team’s technological innovations, the API has made the biggest impact. And it’s a far cry from the kinds of higher-tech applications NGOs and development organizations have been promoting.
Since 2015, the World Bank has committed half a billion dollars to a two-phase project to support Sahelian herders’ “resilience” through strategies that include developing technological tools to map pastoral infrastructure. A senior humanitarian-agency staffer working with herders and technology, who requested anonymity to speak frankly, says the resulting databases have not been shared with herders; he calls the approach, which is geared more toward informing institutions than informing herders, “very technocratic.” (The World Bank did not respond to a request for comment.)
Meanwhile, ACF, the French NGO Orenstein previously worked with, got international attention in 2020 for reportedly using AI to help herders, a claim several people involved in the project say was simply incorrect. (“ACF does not use self-learning for its Pastoral Early Warning System. Presently, the analysis is done ‘manually’ by human expertise,” says Erwann Fillol, a data analysis expert at the organization.)
Climate change is making herding routes, like this one across the Niger River, increasingly volatile.
ALAMY
Other groups are experimenting with using predictive analytics to forecast displacements and herders’ movements. A pilot project from the Danish Refugee Council in Burkina Faso, for example, predicts subnational displacement three to four months into the future, allowing aid workers to pre-position relief. “Anticipatory action in response to climate hazards can be more timely, dignified, and cost effective than alternatives,” says Alexander Kjaerum, an expert on data and predictive analytics with the organization. “AI is a last option when other things fail. And then it does add value.”
Still, some argue these kinds of projects have missed the point. “How are high technology and AI going to address land access issues for pastoralists? It is questionable if there are technological fixes to what are political, socioeconomic, and ecological pressures,” says Higazi, the pastoralist expert.
Blama Jalloh, a herder from Burkina Faso who heads the influential regional pastoralist organization Billital Maroobé, echoes this broad sentiment, arguing that big-budget, high-tech efforts mainly just produce studies, not innovation.
Taking matters into its own hands, in 2022 Billital Maroobé organized the first hackathon designed by and for Sahelian herders. Jalloh says the hackathon aimed to narrow the gap between herders and tech developers who lack familiarity with herding lifestyles. It granted up to $8,000 to startups from Mauritania and Mali to track animals and introduce digital ID cards for herders, which could help them cross borders more seamlessly.
An uncertain future
With three call centers now open, and Orenstein serving as a remote technical advisor from the US, the Garbal team is striving to stay focused and make their work sustainable.
Nevertheless, the fate of the project is far beyond its supporters’ control. The region’s slide into violence shows no sign of stopping. As a result, even though more of the herders that Garbal set out to support have started carrying smartphones charged with battery packs, they are increasingly being pushed out of cell range.
Protesters fill the streets of Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso, where nearly 10% of the population has been displaced in recent years.
AP IMAGES
Between 2018 and 2022, Burkina Faso witnessed one of the world’s fastest-growing displacement crises, with the number of internally displaced people exploding from 50,000 to 1.8 million—almost 10% of the population. Fulanis in particular were targeted for killing by security forces and government-backed vigilantes, and in some areas that are home to significant Fulani herding communities, militants destroyed as many as half the mobile-phone antennas. One tele-agent says the herders who did manage to call in from war zones told her how happy they were to reach the center. When I visited the Ouagadougou call center last year, a tele-agent named Dousso, a 24-year-old with a livestock degree who speaks French, Gourmantche, Dioula, and Moré, told me that “all of the coups,” as well as incidents in which jihadists took over markets, were also making it increasingly difficult to get certain types of data.
This can make the service even more meaningful where it’s still available, says Catherine Le Come, a Garbal cofounder, pointing to Mali, where Garbal is still accessible in some parts of the country that are now cut off from the state.
Yet Garbal, just like other efforts to get data to herders, faces the always pressing issue of how to fund this work consistently over time.
Nonprofit projects like ACF’s community radio and SMS bulletin alerts are pegged to funding cycles that run out after a few years. In March 2021, for instance, as Sow marched his cows 140 miles east toward the Senegal River, he relied on geospatial data he received by community radio and text message from two different NGOs, informing him where pastures were plentiful. But just three months later, both projects ran out of money and stopped supplying information.
Traditionally, Sahelian herders have been some of the least-connected individuals. But now more are carrying smartphones charged by battery packs.
THOMAS GRABKA/LAIF/REDUX
The Garbal call centers are trying to build a more sustainable model. The plan is to phase out NGO sponsorship by 2026 and operate as a public-private partnership between the state and telephone operators. Garbal charges callers a modest fee—the equivalent of five cents a minute—and has plans to roll out online marketplaces and financial products to generate revenue.
“Technology in itself has lots of potential,” says Le Come. “But it is the private sector that must believe and invest in innovation. And the risks it faces innovating in a context as fragile as the Sahel must be shared with a public sector that sees user impact.” (Cedric Bernard, a French agro-economist who has worked with ACF, firmly disagrees; he insists that the information should be free, and that trying to be profitable “is going the wrong way.”) Furthermore, the for-profit model means that Garbal—which set out to help vulnerable herders—is already pivoting toward providing services to farmers, who make more reliable customers because they are easier to reach and better connected. Zidouemba, the Ouagadougou project manager, says that its callers are now overwhelmingly farmers; herders, he estimates, account for just 20% of the calls to the Burkina Faso center.
In 2018, a quarter of Salif Sow’s herd dropped dead in a severe drought. But that season he made a sacrifice that is finally paying off: his son recently started studying abroad in Paris.
HANNAH RAE ARMSTRONG
As the tides of data that reach them ebb and flow, the herders themselves are aware that the real work needed to keep their way of life going is a longer-term political effort. As I prepared to leave the Ferlo this fall, the landscape still resplendent from the rainy season, Sow pulled me aside. He was a modest man, but there was something he wanted me to know. That very night, he said shyly, his eldest son, Abdoulsalif, was leaving Dakar for Paris to begin graduate studies at the Sorbonne, where he had received a scholarship—a fruit of the sacrifice that Sow made during the year of the terrible drought.
I reached Abdoulsalif over WhatsApp a few weeks later, by which time he had learned that Sciences Po was more prestigious than the Sorbonne and enrolled there instead. He is studying public policy and plans to seek work on pastoralist policy in the Sahel after graduation.
“Herding is a beautiful way of life, a space where I feel very happy,” Abdoulsalif told me. “It is extraordinary to see, so far away, the animals in their vast spaces. Far more beautiful than to live in a place with four walls. Even in Paris, I feel nostalgic for this life, this space of herders.”
Hannah Rae Armstrong is a writer and policy adviser on the Sahel and North Africa. She lives in Dakar, Senegal.
Until last year, Ty Coker, a 28-year-old voice actor who lives in Missouri, mostly voiced video games and animations. But in December, they got a casting call for their first shot at live-action content: a Chinese series called Adored by the CEO, which was being remade for an American audience. Coker was hired to dub one of the main characters.
But you won’t find Adored by the CEO on TV or Netflix. Instead, it’s on FlexTV, a Chinese app filled with short dramas like this one. The shows on FlexTV are shot for phone screens, cut into about 90 two-minute episodes, and optimized for today’s extremely short attention span. Coker calls it “soap operas for the TikTok age.”
In the past few years, these short dramas have become hugely popular in China. They often span nearly a hundred episodes, but since each episode is only one or two minutes long, the whole series is no longer than a traditional movie. The most successful domestic productions make tens of millions of dollars in a few days. The entire market of short dramas in China was worth over $5 billion in 2023.
This success has motivated a few companies to try replicating the business model outside China. Not only is FlexTV translating and dubbing shows already released in China, but it has also started filming shows in the US for a more authentically American viewing experience.
It’s easy to compare apps like these to Quibi, a high-profile video service that infamously failed after less than a year in 2020.
But these latest Chinese apps are different. They don’t aim for slick, expensive productions. Instead, they choose simple scripts, shoot an entire series in two weeks, market it heavily online, and move on to the next project if it doesn’t stick.
“The biggest difference between short dramas and films is that they provide different things. We have to analyze the psychological needs of our audience and understand what they want to see … and we try to provide some emotional values,” Xiangchen Gao, the chief operations officer of FlexTV, tells MIT Technology Review.
When a show finds the right audience, it can generate significant revenue in the US too. The top-grossing show on FlexTV can bring in $2 million a week, while the production costs less than $150,000, Wang says.
Several other apps, like ReelShort and DramaBox, are also racing to bring Chinese short dramas to an international audience. They frequently top app stores’ download charts and produce blockbuster shows. Short dramas have been proven to work in China. It’s not always easy to replicate a business model in a different market, but if they succeed, they could be China’s next big cultural export.
The roots in Chinese web novels
Short dramas like Adored by the CEO are often adapted from another cultural product that is distinctly Chinese: web novels.
Web novels are a unique form of literature that has been popular on the Chinese internet for much of the last two decades: long stories that are written and posted chapter by chapter every day. Each chapter can be read in less than 10 minutes, but installments will keep being added for months if not years. Readers become avid fans, waiting for the new chapter to come out every day and paying a few cents to access it.
While some talented Chinese book authors got their big break by writing web novels, the majority of these works are the popcorn of literature, offering daily bite-size dopamine hits. For a while in the 2010s, some found an audience overseas too, with Chinese companies setting up websites to translate web novels into English.
But in the age of TikTok, long text posts have become less popular online, and the web-novel industry is looking to pivot. Business executives have realized they can adapt these novels into super-short dramas. Both forms aim for the same market: people who want something quick to kill time in their commute, or during breaks and lunch.
Many of the leading Chinese short-drama apps today work closely with Chinese web-novel companies. ReelShort is partially owned by COL Group, one of the largest digital publishers in China, with a treasure trove of novels that are ready for adaptation.
Poster of the short drama Mr. Williams! Madame Is Dying.
COURTESY OF FLEXTV
To get a quick sense of what these stories are like, you just need to take a look at their titles: President’s Sexy Wife, The Bride of the Wolf King, Boss Behind the Scenes Is My Husband, or The New Rich Family Grudge.
One of the highest-grossing shows on FlexTV is called Mr. Williams! Madame Is Dying. It’s a corny romance story about a love triangle, ultra-rich families, cancer, rebirth, and redemption, and it was adapted from a Chinese web novel that has nearly 1,300 chapters. The original story has been turned into a Chinese short drama, but FlexTV decided to shoot another version in Los Angeles for an international audience.
These short dramas prioritize quick, oversimplified stories of love, wealth, betrayal, and revenge, sometimes featuring mythical creatures like vampires and werewolves. Stories of marrying into a rich family attract men, while stories with a powerful female protagonist in control of her life appeal to women, says Gao, the COO of FlexTV.
“Quibi mostly served the [artistic] pursuits of directors and producers. They thought their tastes were better than the general public and their work was to be appreciated by the elites,” he says, “What we are making is more like fast-moving consumer goods. It’s rooted in the needs of ordinary users.”
Translating the story to a US audience
Still, no matter how universal the plots are, these short dramas need to be adapted to their local audience.
Ty Coker’s work is one example. The character they voiced, a personal assistant to the male protagonist, was named Dawei Hu in the original Chinese production. But in the English dubbing, “Dawei Hu” became “David Hughes.” All the other characters, as well as the geographical references, received similar treatments, while the visuals didn’t change. Sometimes the results of this straightforward swap method are a little jarring. “They would mention: ‘Oh, so and so is coming in from New York. And it was like, okay, I don’t think that character is originally from New York, but we’ll roll with it,” Coker says.
This “Americanization” could make it easier for some viewers to follow and remember the show. “My mom, who watches a lot of soap operas—she’d probably find it easier to follow if everyone has American names,” Coker says. It reminds Coker of anime shows they watched as a child, which would substitute Western names for the Japanese ones.
But that’s not where the localization efforts end. With shows that are later dubbed into a different language, there’s always going to be a feeling of mismatch. That’s why short-drama platforms are now filming their own productions with translated scripts and non-Chinese actors, sometimes even in Hollywood. It costs much more than dubbing an already-made show, but they believe it’s worth it.
FlexTV has just finished filming a new show in Los Angeles. Named Lost in Darkness, it is about a visually impaired woman trying to figure out which of two male characters murdered her father. The production took 10 days in total, with 34 actors filming over 150 scenes. It cost between $150,000 and $200,000.
Lost in Darkness was filmed in Los Angeles in February.
COURTESY OF FLEXTV
Roger Chen, a producer of the show, has been instrumental in bringing short dramas to the US. He originally produced traditional-length movies and animations in the States but formed a new company called Purple Filter last year, after noticing the demand for Chinese-adapted stories. His company now coordinates between Chinese platforms and the LA filming industry, scouting actors, directors, and producers who are interested in this new form of content.
He admits these shows can be a hard sell for actors in the US.
“An episode of a short drama is only one and a half minutes long, so the plot buildup is short, if there is any … Actors who are accustomed to traditional scripts find it hard to accept,” Chen says. “But we discovered that it’s necessary to have strong conflicts and quick plot twists. This is the unique content that suits the smartphone medium.”
His company has worked with most of the major platforms, including DramaBox and FlexTV. Meanwhile, there are more and more teams like Chen’s joining the American short-drama industry. “We believe that media content for phones will become a mainstream trend,” he says.
A well-oiled business in targeted ads
The business model of these short dramas is one that American TV audiences are mostly not familiar with. Unlike most American streaming services, which require subscriptions, Chinese platforms for streaming and web novels use a business model of paying by the episode or chapter. Essentially, the first 10 or so episodes are always available for free, but once users are hooked, they need to pay a certain amount to watch each episode. It resembles the microtransaction mechanism in mobile games, which Chinese companies, like the developer of the global hit Genshin Impact, also perfected. Users can quickly rack up thousands in payments by buying small items in-game here and there.
FlexTV has a similar tactic. You can pay $5 for 500 in-app coins, which in return unlock about seven episodes. A whole series therefore can cost around $50, but there are also small tasks users can do in the app to earn free rewards, like watching ads, posting about the app on social media, and doing daily check-ins.
Evidently, some people are willing to pay, as some of these shows are starting to see serious revenues. Gao shares that Mr. Williams! Madame Is Dying is bringing in over $2 million in user payments a week. Similar apps have also reported significant revenues. ReelShort made $22 million in December 2023, the company told the Wall Street Journal, and its global download count has already surpassed that of the ill-fated Quibi.
But there’s a caveat: these phenomenal numbers are also driven by heavy ad spending, which is an essential part of the business model. While it’s cheap to make these shows (around $150,000 per show if filmed in the US), millions of dollars are then spent on pushing them to prospective audiences. For Mr. Williams! Madame Is Dying, for example, the company had to spend $1 million on ads to get over $2 million in revenues.
FlexTV relies on targeted advertising through major platforms like Google, Meta, and TikTok. These platforms allow them to choose what kind of audience they want the ads to impress. For Mr. Williams! Madame Is Dying, FlexTV targeted “young women between the ages of 20 and 40, who like romance content and reading,” says Gao.
For each dollar spent on advertising, the target return on investment is at least $1.30 to $1.50, says Gao. The viral popularity of short dramas in China is no accident but the result of a well-oiled digital marketing industry that has adjusted to the TikTok age.
Despite early successes, the short-drama business inside China is now starting to run into difficulties. As its popularity grows, the Chinese government has started to censor it much as it does the film and TV industry. In a three-month period ending in February 2023, the government banned 25,300 short-drama series (totaling 1.3 million episodes) for being too violent, too sexually suggestive, or too trashy. Chinese short-video platforms like Douyin and Kuaishou have since been routinely removing shows or restricting their producers from buying targeted ads.
This is also part of the reason why companies like ReelShort and FlexTV are looking to expand in foreign markets, where the risks of censorship are much lower. The short-drama industry in the US is akin to what it was like in China in 2021, says Gao, which means there’s little competition and plenty of room to grow. The company plans to produce shows in six languages in the future, but North America will remain its most important market.
Ultimately, they’re betting that these dopamine-inducing mini soap operas will appeal to audiences regardless of their culture or language. “We don’t think Chinese and American audiences have fundamental differences in taste,” Gao says. “Chinese web novels have studied human nature deeply, and they do a great job at evoking emotions. Scriptwriters and directors who excelled in China can capture everyone’s universal desires.”
Two hundred thirty meters into one of the deepest underwater caves on Earth, Richard “Harry” Harris knew that not far ahead of him was a 15-meter drop leading to a place no human being had seen before.
Getting there had taken two helicopters, three weeks of test dives, two tons of equipment, and hard work to overcome an unexpected number of technical problems. But in the moment, Harris was hypnotized by what was before him: the vast, black, gaping unknown.
Staring into it, he felt the familiar pull—maybe he could go just a little farther. Instead, he looked to his diving partner, Craig Challen, floating a few feet to his right. They had both been diving increasingly dangerous and unplumbed caves for years, making them two of only a handful of people with the skills to assist in the rescue of the Thai soccer team that got trapped in one in 2018. They knew extreme risk, and each other, well. Even through the goggles and the mouthpiece of the breathing apparatus, its four thick hoses curling around his face like mammoth tusks, Harris could see that Challen felt the same way. They both wanted very badly to push forward into the dark expanse.
Instead, on Harris’s cue, they turned back. They weren’t there to exceed 245 meters—a depth they’d reached three years earlier. Nor were they there to set a depth record—that would mean going past 308 meters. They were there to test what they saw as a possible key to unlocking depths beyond even 310 meters: breathing hydrogen.
The problem has existed for more than a century: How can a human body withstand underwater pressure significantly past its natural threshold? Naval units and offshore oil companies around the world have long been invested in figuring it out for power and profit, and in the 1970s and ’80s their research began filtering into the civilian world, where people were testing the limits of their own curiosity.
In 2023, Richard Harris made an experimental dive to determine
whether hydrogen could enable exploration at greater depths.
COURTESY OF RICHARD HARRIS
This included people like Sheck Exley, a high school math teacher in Live Oak, Florida. Exley became an international icon in the diving community for his record-breaking dives—exceeding, in some cases, the limits of the military and commercial professionals. He had been diving the underwater caves of North Florida since he was a teen—by 1972, at age 23, he was the first person in the world to log 1,000 cave dives—and exploring them is what pushed him to go deeper. He’d been hooked since his first cave dive in Crystal River, Florida, in 1966. “I kind of wandered off into the cavern there, my eyes adjusted, and I swam a little bit further, peering off into the darkness,” he told AquaCorps, a magazine for divers, in 1992. “I guess I’ve been peering off into that darkness ever since.”
At around 40 meters, breathing the gas mixture we call air—78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen, and 1% trace gases—causes inert gas narcosis, or the “martini effect,” named for the incapacitating state it induces. A little deeper and oxygen becomes toxic. For years, the US and British navies had been using helium to dilute the oxygen and nitrogen in a diver’s tank as a means of counteracting both these problems, but few outsiders knew about it. In 1981, after the German cave diver Jochen Hasenmayer reached 143 meters using a helium mixture, Exley started using it as well—despite the knowledge that only a few years earlier, two divers in Florida had experimented with the mixture and died.
Divers who go past 40 meters typically don’t use a constant gas ratio—they cycle through mixes of nitrogen, oxygen, and helium as they descend and ascend, modifying them according to location, water temperature, neurological tolerance to narcosis, and many other variables. Decompression tables, which lay out different gas mixtures and the amount of time to be spent breathing them, provide a precise road map for this process—very necessary, as ascending too quickly releases the accumulated gases in a diver’s blood and tissue the way unscrewing the cap on a bottle of soda releases bubbles, resulting in the painful, often debilitating condition known as the bends. Without the tables, ascending from great depths was too risky. But generating them required high-level technology and archives of data unavailable to most people.
Exley was able to persuade a friend who worked in commercial diving to give him a sample table, which he used to extrapolate past 121 meters, working everything out on his computer. In 1987, guided by this information, he used helium to successfully break the 200-meter diving barrier at Nacimiento Mante in Mexico—a 24-minute descent that forced him to stay underwater for 11.5 hours to decompress. Over that period, he felt himself becoming dangerously weak. His blood sugar dropped, the cold seeped into his limbs, and his exposed hands and face began to grow wrinkly, become raw, and then flake. “At the time I felt I could have dived deeper,” he told InDepth magazine that year. “But I knew that I had reached my decompression limits.”
In 1988, Exley beat his own record, hitting 237 meters using a more precise table generated by the physiologist Bill Hamilton. Known among divers as “The Prince of Gases,” Hamilton had been involved with some of the earliest work on decompression past 200 meters.
He had helped develop a computer program that generated extremely precise tables calibrated to any number of parameters, which he created for commercial diving companies and navies around the world. “Through them, he had staggering amounts of data,” says Bill Stone, an aerospace engineer and cave diver who built and sold an early rebreather—a type of breathing apparatus that recycles exhaled air by scrubbing it of carbon dioxide. “He processed all that and developed stochastic models that figured out where you could gain speed on decompression and not hurt yourself.” In the ’80s, Hamilton made the unprecedented move of creating custom tables for people who were not commercial or military divers, forever endearing him to the diving community.
But in 1994, Exley died attempting to reach the bottom of the Zacatón sinkhole in Mexico, 332 meters down—he got to 270 meters. A likely factor was high-pressure nervous syndrome (HPNS), a neurological condition involving uncontrollable tremors brought about when a diver descends too rapidly at high pressure past 150 meters. Adding nitrogen to the mix of helium and oxygen could help—nitrogen’s narcotic effects could dampen the symptoms. But at that depth, adding more nitrogen would make it more difficult to breathe because of the gas’s density, and the narcosis would be debilitating.
Divers still pushed past Exley’s record into 250 and then 300 meters, white-knuckling through the HPNS symptoms. But at such depths, helium becomes too heavy for the human body to process. “As you go deeper, for every 10 meters you get an extra atmosphere of pressure—so once we’re down at those depths of 250 meters, that’s 26 atmospheres,” Challen, Harris’s dive partner, told me. “It becomes a physical problem of moving the gas in and out of your lungs.” In order to alleviate this problem, divers would need to breathe something lighter than helium.
“And we’ve only got one lighter gas to use,” Challen says. “After hydrogen, there’s nothing.”
What became known as the H2 Working Group began as a “thought experiment,” according to Michael Menduno, a veteran cave diver and editor in chief of InDepth magazine, who brought everyone together in collaboration with John Clarke, the former scientific director of the US Navy Experimental Dive Unit. It was also a way to socialize the way scientists, engineers, and tinkerers know how: by arguing over how to make something work.
The idea for the working group emerged in 2020, when Menduno, while researching an article on deep dives past 250 meters, concluded that the diving world had reached its limit with helium. Exley himself had pointed to what he saw as the next step in reaching unprecedented depths: “From what I’ve been learning, there seems to be some real potential for hydreliox”—that is, an oxygen-helium-hydrogen mix. Still, “no one has looked at its use for deep bounce dives,” he told Menduno in a 1992 interview, referring to dives without the use of a chamber to help the diver reach a safe gas saturation point before venturing into the water.
When the group formed in that year, at the beginning of the pandemic, Menduno was familiar with previous attempts to use hydrogen. In the ’90s he had traveled to France to watch a team of medical doctors, engineers, scientists, and trial divers from Compagnie Maritime d’Expertises (Comex), a Marseilles-based company focusing on deep diving systems and equipment, attempt to pass 701 meters in a hyperbaric chamber pumped with a hydrogen gas mixture. (It required 15 days of compression and 23 days of decompression.) This was Hydra 10, part of a series of experiments using hydrogen. After Hydra 12, in 1996, the project had scrapped pursuing hydrogen altogether. Companies were turning to manned underwater vehicles and saturation diving—that is, staying at extreme depths long enough to allow the inert gas to fully dissolve in a diver’s blood, which is only possible with a chamber. “[In commercial diving] there’s no poetry, no sense of humor—you just want to be efficient,” says Jean-Pierre Imbert, who worked on the Hydra project and had invited Menduno to observe the experiments in the ’90s.
At 40 meters, the gas mixture we call air becomes incapacitating. A little deeper and oxygen becomes toxic.
In 2012, building on Comex’s work, a team of Swedish divers, called the Hydrox Project, had successfully breathed a mixture of hydrogen and oxygen for five minutes at 40 meters. They were hesitant to share the information, concerned that people without the expertise might make the attempt at their peril. “We didn’t publish or tell too much about how we did it, because we believe if you do this wrong—you have to understand it, or you will fail miserably,” diving engineer Åke Larsson, one of the members of the Hydrox Project, later said. “But it’s not rocket science. If you do your homework, it’s not complicated. But you have to do it right.”
That was the history on Menduno and Clarke’s minds when they began calling up experts in the field to discuss whether it would be possible for a diver outside a chamber to descend beyond 200 meters breathing hydrogen. Each member was an expert in a different element of what would be involved in such a dive—the mechanics of the breathing apparatus, the calculation of gas mixtures, the physiological issues to be overcome as divers coped with cold and pressure. By the end of the first meeting, they had come up with so many potential problems they created what they called a “challenge tree” to organize them; members gravitated toward their areas of expertise and came back to present possible solutions to the group. The tree kept branching; solutions begat new problems.
Challen helps Harris
gear up in 2020; in front are dual Megalodon rebreathers, one containing an oxygen-helium-hydrogen
mix, the other the standard oxygen-helium-nitrogen.
SIMON MITCHELL
Harris joined the working group at Menduno’s invitation. The team of divers he was a part of, the Wetmules, had reached 245 meters at the Pearse Resurgence, the source of the Pearse River in New Zealand, but the cave stretched on, and they wanted to map it. They knew that helium was not going to get them past 300. Hydrogen, however, was nerve-racking. “I don’t really want to be the guinea pig who famously popped under water after switching to hydrogen,” he told the group at the first meeting. “So it’d be nice if we can solve that.”
Hydrogen—as the Hindenburg disaster showed the world—is highly flammable. A spark hundreds of times smaller than the slightest amount of static you can feel on your fingertip would be enough to ignite it. And even if such a spark didn’t cause an explosion, it could still set the gas on fire. “If you’re breathing that mix when it’s burning,” Clarke told the group, “it’s going to be a very unpleasant dive.”
David Doolette, a research physiologist at the US Navy Experimental Diving Unit who had himself dived the Pearse Resurgence in the ’90s, was skeptical but considered himself “dihydrogen-curious,” referring to the molecular structure of hydrogen gas. For one thing, its thermal properties mean divers risk hypothermia. “It’s gonna suck the heat out of your body to a dangerous level,” he told the group. And there was no data available to calculate the appropriate decompression times. “It’s going to be a challenge to do the decompression calculations,” he told the group. “Well, not a challenge doing that—that’d be easy. It’d be a challenge to get them right so that they were safe to dive.”
Harris begins the first
reported hydrogen rebreather dive, at New Zealand’s Pearse
Resurgence in 2023.
SIMON MITCHELL
Others shared his skepticism. Nuno Gomes, a former world-record-holding cave diver, was particularly concerned about decompression. “I think if we’re going to go with this, we’re going to have to progress slowly,” he told the group. “Start with shallow dives and progress to deeper and deeper dives.” But according to Doolette and Stone, the aerospace engineer, it soon became clear that Harris had already decided to try hydrogen in the Pearse Resurgence. At a conference in Australia in 2022, as members of the H2 Working Group met up to talk in person, Imbert said that going beyond 3.5% hydrogen would likely trigger a detonation.
“Harry nods and goes, ‘Well, I don’t think that’s true,’” Stone told me. Imbert asked how he could prove that. “Harry says, ‘Well, last week I did 7% in my pool.’ Everybody perked up.”
Harris had ordered a canister of hydrogen delivered to his suburban home in Adelaide and, as he later explained, “decided to have a bit of a play with it.” He rigged his rebreather for hydrogen and put it in his backyard pool, hoping to contain any potential blast. He filled the rebreather with hydrogen and then, backing way from the pool, began to introduce oxygen. (His dog observed from outside the pool fence; his wife was out.)
When nothing exploded, he started adjusting the ratio of oxygen and hydrogen, becoming confident enough to try using the rebreather himself. His first sip, he later told me, felt light, slippery, and cold. It was almost delightfully easy to breathe. “Hydrogen voice is much sillier than helium voice,” he told me. “And I was pleased the house and the dog were intact.”
The others were amazed. Some were perturbed. “Everybody has to make this decision for themself,” Stone told me. “The Pearse Resurgence is not a place to experiment. When you go in there, you should be using gear and techniques that you know are going to work at that depth. You don’t want to be doing physiological experiments at 300 meters’ depth. That’s what killed all of the other divers who went beyond 200 meters’ depth. So my advice to Harry and anybody else who wants to play this game is the same as what I gave Exley: Go. To. A chamber. Simulate this first.”
“The group was sort of split,” Menduno told me. “I mean, everybody was supportive of Harry, but there were some people in the group that thought: You’re gonna die. Some of the people in the group were upset and worried that their friend was going to go off and do this thing and potentially die.”
Around the first corner of the Pearse Resurgence, the light disappears, as though the dark walls, black marble striated with veins of gray quartz, have absorbed it. The cave sometimes narrows so much that if you stood, you could touch the ceiling. Other parts billow out into enormous chambers. At one point, jagged fingers of rock bristle from the walls. Other, deeper parts of the cave are smooth and almost perfectly round, broken only by dark fissures that lead to unexplored tunnels.
As each section of the cave gets discovered, it receives a name. Going down in February 2023, Harris and Challen passed through the Nightmare Crescent, the Needlebender, the Gargleblaster, Weaver’s Ledge, the Big Room, and finally the Brooklyn Exit. The water was 6 °C and perfectly clear. Aside from the brief hisses and clicks of the rebreathers—the crackle of the solenoid triggering, the sigh of gases being pumped through the loop—there was an otherworldly silence.
At 120 meters, the cave opens up onto a plateau that drops off into an abyss. “At that point it’s like standing on the precipice,” Harris told me. “And it feels like you are really beginning the journey.”
The abyss takes you down 50 meters through a vertical tunnel. By 170 meters, Harris could track where he was on the map in his head, following familiar rock formations. They wanted to preserve their energy and prevent carbon dioxide buildup in their joints, so they limited their movement, relying on underwater scooters to move. They slowly tied off at different points in the descent, working around ropes left behind from dives past, some of which had been installed by Doolette 20 years before.
At 230 meters, Harris had done something nobody had done before—swimming freely to unimaginable depths and breathing in hydrogen.
Harris remembers that even though his mind was absorbed with their strict plan, hypervigilant to any strange noises from his rebreather that could mean failure, he took a moment to pause, thinking: “What if I never got to see this again?”
At 200 meters, Harris introduced the hydrogen. For the next 30 meters he gauged his body’s reaction. He was calm, clearheaded, but even more, he noticed that the light tremors in his hands he usually got at this depth, an early sign of high-pressure nervous syndrome, had disappeared. He looked to Challen, who was using helium, as he tied off the rope: his dive partner’s hands had a visible tremor.
At 230 meters, Harris had done something nobody had done before—swimming freely down to these unimaginable depths and breathing in hydrogen—but his eyes were trained just a little farther, to the unexplored drop only 15 meters away. “I would be lying if I didn’t say I dream about going down there,” he later told an audience in Malta.
Those obsessed with learning how to put the human body under incredible amounts of pressure make up a relatively small community; for the most part, everybody is one degree of separation from everyone else. Clarke, the Navy scientist, and Susan Kayar, a physiologist and expert in decompression who was also part of the H2 Working Group, had both worked at the Navy Medical Research Institute in the ’90s. They had lost touch, but they reconnected after both published novels that included a scene with a hydrogen dive—hers for a rescue mission, his to recover a UFO that had crashed into the sea. “Hers is more realistic in that regard,” Clarke says. “I hadn’t spoken to Susan in 30 years, and then we finally found out: Gee, we’re thinking very much alike!”
Challen under the seven-meter habitat erected a short distance into Nightmare Crescent in the Pearse Resurgence. The habitat has seats so divers can sit in a dry environment during the final decompression stop.
SIMON MITCHELL
Doolette, the research physiologist skeptical about using hydrogen, has known Harris for more than 20 years, ever since Harris took Doolette’s diving medicine qualification course in Australia. At the time, they were also both working in the hyperbaric medical unit at the Royal Adelaide Hospital. Harris wanted to get more advanced at cave diving and Doolette was a longtime technical cave diver.
Even before the H2 Working Group began meeting, Doolette knew that Harris was thinking about diving with hydrogen. “I knew things were being planned,” Doolette told me. “It probably came as a surprise to some of the workshop, but not to me … I knew it wasn’t theoretical.”
But Doolette felt that testing hydrogen on a deep cave dive was too risky. “There’s a whole hydrogen industry—and their approach is to exclude hydrogen and oxygen from getting near each other. So when you’ve got to mix them together—well, there aren’t even procedures, really,” he says. “I certainly thought it was foolhardy.”
Stone, too, was skeptical of the expedition—for any dive beyond 200 meters, he said, the concept should be tested first. “I’ve been doing this for a long time, and I’ve got a lot of dead friends,” he says.
“We’re moving into the zone where robotics isn’t science fiction,” he continues. “It’s hardware, it’s software—we’re doing it. Is it perfect? No. But it’s a couple years away. We’re close to doing dives longer than the longest human dives, and with a kilometer-depth rating it’ll be far, far beyond even hydrogen diving.”
As a diver, Doolette says, he understands wanting to go where nobody else had been before: “Cave divers and other people explore for the joy of it. A robot’s not gonna get that.” The other draw, he says, is the puzzle of figuring out where the cave is going and how to follow it. And when you finally get into the water, the rest of the world falls away.
A few weeks after the hydrogen dive, Harris gave a presentation to the H2 Working Group, apologizing for “sneaking around a little bit.” He concluded with a caveat: n = 1. “Meaning it has been successful one time,” he said. When the PowerPoint ended, the group applauded. “Just something you can add to your final slide, Harry,” Doolette said. “The probability of survival is greater than zero.”
Doolette was relieved when he learned that Harris had made it back to the surface. “I recognized that it was a pretty groundbreaking, momentous dive,” he told me. “I don’t see the purpose of going deep for the sake of going deep, but if you’re committed to an exploration project and it involves cave diving in pursuit of exploration and discovery, then that’s what you do.”
“There’s always a little temptation to go that little bit further. That’s why we’re doing this stuff,” Challen told me. “We have this defective aspect to our characters that urges us to push on just a little bit more.”
Samantha Schuyler is a writer, editor, and fact-checker living in New York.
This story first appeared in China Report, MIT Technology Review’s newsletter about technology in China. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday.
Happy New Year! I hope you had a good rest over the holidays and feel ready to take on 2024. But for one more time, please allow me to indulge in a look back at 2023.
At the end of last month, I published an essay reflecting on how the prospects for anonymity online in China changed drastically last year. Following many smaller decisions that make posting anonymously more difficult, the largest blow came in October when all social media platforms in China demanded that certain users with large followings display their legal names.
The government and the platforms argue that the new rule can help prevent online harassment and misinformation. While anonymity can be associated with wrongdoing, their argument conveniently neglects what anonymity—a right that has existed since the invention of the internet—has afforded people online.
Who among us hasn’t participated in a niche online hobby that we didn’t tell our family about? Who insists that every online acquaintance call them by their real name? There’s comfort in knowing that my online persona and who I am in real life don’t have to be the same. Not everyone should, or deserves to, know everything about us.
Scholars I talked to have observed and found evidence of many benefits that come with anonymity in China. It gives people the courage to speak up against censorship or provide communal help to strangers. “We are more likely to do what’s risky when we feel there’s more protection,” says Xinyu Pan, a researcher at Hong Kong University. It’s particularly important to marginalized groups, from women to LGBTQ individuals, who feel that their identities could attract harassment online. They can find comfort and community in anonymity.
This topic is important for me both professionally and personally. As a reporter, I’m always watching what people are saying online and working to extract important information from between the lines. But I’ve also used Chinese social media personally for more than a decade, and my profiles and communities mean a lot to me, whether as archives of my life’s moments or places where I met dear friends.
That’s why I wrote the essay. And I’m worried there’s more change to come.
Vibe shifts are always small when they begin. I felt one earlier last year, when I started to notice little signs of aggression here and there that made me less comfortable sharing real-life experiences online. But soon they can begin to feel like a tsunami. And now, if people don’t want to end their digital lives, they don’t have much choice; the only option seems to be to give in and float with the waves, even if we don’t know where it’s taking us.
Consider that when it was first announced in October, platforms stated the real-name rule would only apply to accounts in more “serious” fields—people talking about politics, financial news, laws, health care. Even Weibo’s CEO, Wang Gaofei, replied to a user with 2 million followers who was worried about the rule, posting, “Took a look at [the] content. If it’s only an influencer sharing about their personal life, I don’t think they need to display their real names upfront.”
But as we’ve seen in the past, these kinds of “small” changes are really a slippery slope. Fast-forward to today and that Weibo user’s real name is already on their public profile. And other accounts on the platform that don’t engage in serious topics—pet influencers, comedians, artists, car bloggers—have all received messages that they need to display their names or their accounts’ reach will be restricted, essentially meaning they’d be shadow-banned on the platform.
Meanwhile, some platforms have acted even more quickly to implement the rule thoroughly. Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, seems to be already displaying the real names of most users with more than 500,000 followers. And last week, accounts on Bilibili, a Chinese YouTube-like video platform, also started mass-displaying popular users’ real names.
For people like me, this all proves that our fear is not overblown: the introduction of the mandatory real-name rule will almost certainly lead to more strict and expansive restrictions for everyone. The tendency to control more will always prevail, as platforms tend to err on the side of caution in China’s stringent censorship ecosystem.
Perhaps the only glimmer of hope I’ve found is that users all over China have not given up. Through rounds of previous changes that restricted anonymity, they’ve come up with all kinds of workarounds to protect themselves, either by adopting shared identities or entrusting a group account to post content for them. These solutions are not guaranteed to work in the long term, but I don’t doubt people will continue to come up with creative solutions that we haven’t even thought of yet. As always, to report on internet censorship in China is to report on the ingenious grassroots resistance. Perhaps that’s at least something to look forward to in 2024.
What do you think about the value of social media anonymity? Let me know where you stand by writing to zeyi@technologyreview.com.
Catch up with China
1. A draft of a harsh new regulation regarding video games tanked the stocks of major Chinese tech companies and caused widespread market fears in December. Now, a Chinese official behind the regulation has been removed from his position. (Reuters $)
China’s domestic gaming industry was just starting to pick up after a lengthy freeze on game publishing approvals. (Pocket Gamer)
2. China has sanctioned five US defense companies for selling arms to Taiwan. (BBC)
3. In the fourth quarter of 2023, Chinese electric-vehicle maker BYD officially outsold Tesla globally for the first time. (Wall Street Journal $)
The company is now spending 2 billion RMB ($281 million) to reward its dealers. (Reuters $)
Want to know more about BYD? It was on our 15 Climate Tech Companies to Watch in 2023. (MIT Technology Review $)
4. As China has set aggressive goals for decarbonization, “dinosaur” state-owned companies are being forced to pivot to using more renewable energy. (Financial Times $)
5. For two decades, major Chinese e-commerce platforms like Alibaba didn’t offer a “refund-only” option for buyers. That’s finally changed. (South China Morning Post $)
6. Thermo Fisher, a US-based biotechnology company, says it has halted sales of DNA collection kits to Tibet. The sales were criticized after it was revealed that the Chinese police used these kits for mass DNA collection. (Axios)
Lost in translation
If you call up or message a customer service representative in China today, there’s a high chance you will be answered by an AI chatbot masquerading as a human. But as the publication China News Service reports, the technology has brought more frustration than convenience, since it often gives completely irrelevant or boilerplate responses. The users end up wasting much more time and energy trying to circumvent the AI and get to a human representative. Even though the technology is not yet mature, AI customer service is prevalent because it’s a fairly easy way for businesses to cut costs. And its use will only expand: the AI customer service market in China is expected to grow threefold in five years.
One more thing
Have you ever seen a Chinese terra-cotta warrior looking so expressive? Well, it’s not real; it was generated by Alibaba’s newly released image-to-video model. The feature, called “Everybody is a dancing king,” can move any still image into a dance TikTok and is included in Alibaba’s AI app Tongyi Qianwen. Predictably, it’s going a bit viral on social media. Wanna watch the (generated) dance moves of Napoleon and Jeff Bezos? Scroll down in this story by the Chinese publication QbitAI.
For the better part of 17 years, the roiling, rolling, fractious, sometimes funny, sometimes horrifying, never-ever-ending global conversation had a central home: Twitter. If you wanted to know what was happening and what people were talking about right now, it was the only game in town.
But then Elon Musk purchased Twitter, renamed it X, fired most of its employees, and more or less eliminated its moderation and verification systems. He put in place a new financial structure that incentivized creators to spread and amplify lies and propaganda. Many people have begun casting about for a replacement service—ideally one that is beyond any individual’s control.
Decentralized, or federated, social media allows for communication across independently hosted servers or platforms, using networking protocols such as ActivityPub, AT Protocol, or Nostr. It offers more granular moderation, more security against the whims of a corporate master or government censor, and the opportunity to control your social graph. It’s even possible to move from one server to another and follow the same people.
To be sure, the dream of a decentralized Twitter-like service has been around for years. History is littered with failed attempts—most notably App.net and Identi.ca. A real competitor never broke out because not enough people had a strong reason to leave Twitter, or a place to go if they did. Now they have both.
According to Similarweb, X’s traffic is down by nearly 20%, year over year. Another study, by Apptopia, found that the number of daily active users went from 141 million to 120 million. Meanwhile, decentralized services like Mastodon, Bluesky, and some Nostr clients have surged in popularity.
But it’s Threads, from Meta, that’s been the big winner. Meta disclosed in September that Threads already had nearly 100 million monthly users. (As of press time, Threads has not yet implemented ActivityPub, but it promises to do so.) Nerd favorite Mastodon is a distant second at 1.5 million active users but is growing, while the still invite-only Bluesky, which runs on the AT Protocol, is at 2 million.
And of course, the real Twitter killer? That’s Elon Musk.
No one can predict the future, but here at MIT Technology Review we spend much of our time thinking about what it might hold. One thing we know is that it’s especially hard to make predictions about technology. Most emerging technologies fizzle or flame out. Some start out as consumer devices but wind up finding their niche in more specialized applications. Only a few become household names.
Each year, we put together a list of 10 Breakthrough Technologies, picking the advances that we think have the greatest potential to change our lives (for better or worse). We’ve done this for more than 20 years, and next month we’ll reveal our picks for the 2024 list.
We haven’t always been right (RIP, Baxter), but we’ve often been early to spot important areas of progress (we put natural-language processing on our very first list in 2001; today this technology underpins large language models and generative AI tools like ChatGPT).
Every year, our reporters and editors nominate technologies that they think deserve a spot, and we spend weeks debating which ones should make the cut. Here are some of the technologies we didn’t pick this time—and why we’ve left them off, for now.
New drugs for Alzheimer’s disease
Alzmeiher’s patients have long lacked treatment options. Several new drugs have now been proved to slow cognitive decline, albeit modestly, by clearing out harmful plaques in the brain. In July, the FDA approved Leqembi by Eisai and Biogen, and Eli Lilly’s donanemab could soon be next. But the drugs come with serious side effects, including brain swelling and bleeding, which can be fatal in some cases. Plus, they’re hard to administer—patients receive doses via an IV and must receive regular MRIs to check for brain swelling. These drawbacks gave us pause.
Sustainable aviation fuel
Alternative jet fuels made from cooking oil, leftover animal fats, or agricultural waste could reduce emissions from flying. They have been in development for years, and scientists are making steady progress, with several recent demonstration flights. But production and use will need to ramp up significantly for these fuels to make a meaningful climate impact. While they do look promising, there wasn’t a key moment or “breakthrough” that merited a spot for sustainable aviation fuels on this year’s list.
Solar geoengineering
One way to counteract global warming could be to release particles into the stratosphere that reflect the sun’s energy and cool the planet. That idea is highly controversial within the scientific community, but a few researchers and companies have begun exploring whether it’s possible by launching a series of small-scale high-flying tests. One such launch prompted Mexico to ban solar geoengineering experiments earlier this year. It’s not really clear where geoengineering will go from here or whether these early efforts will stall out. Amid that uncertainty, we decided to hold off for now.
Male-male reproduction
In March, scientists announced that they had created healthy mouse pups by taking cells from two male mice and transforming some of those cells into eggs. The proof-of-concept study shows that this technique can enable reproduction between animals of the same sex, and possibly even allow animals to reproduce without a partner. The advance may someday allow same-sex reproduction in other animals, too—perhaps even humans. But testing something in mice is a long way from testing it in people, so we deferred.
Over-the-counter Narcan
In March, the US FDA approved the first over-the-counter use of naloxone nasal spray, which reverses opioid overdoses. The spray is now sold by retailers nationwide, including CVS, Walgreens, and Walmart, where two doses cost about $45. Making this medicine more widely available without a prescription will undoubtedly save lives, given that opioid overdoses kill more than 80,000 Americans a year. But the real advance here, in our view, was a new distribution method rather than a scientific or technological breakthrough.
So what did make our list? Well, you’ll have to come back in January to see. However, we did share one of our 2024 picks in advance with attendees at our recent EmTech MIT event in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Subscribers can watch a video of that special announcement. (Not a subscriber? Get access here.)
There are no jury trials in Chinese courts—but if you think the noodles you just got delivered were too hot, a jury of your peers will quickly determine guilt in the app where you ordered it.
Jury trials, in fact, are plentiful on Chinese apps—especially Meituan, the country’s most popular food delivery service, where millions of users have volunteered to arbitrate complaints between customers and restaurants. Offering it as a way for restaurants to appeal bad reviews they believe are unreasonable, Meituan crowdsources help from users by showing them the review, details of the order, and supplementary notes from the restaurant. Then users can vote on whether to take down the review from the restaurant’s public page.
The vast majority of cases are trivial: the steamed rice was too firm, there were not enough utensils, the portion was too small. And then there’s the perennial complaint: the food is always too spicy or not spicy enough.
For example, a customer left a one-star review for one restaurant, saying that the “medium-spicy river snail rice noodle” ended up being not spicy at all. Yet the order detail showed that the user actually asked for the noodles to be “not spicy.” Bang: 91% of the jury voted that the customer was the guilty party. The review would be removed.
Lately, judging who’s in the wrong in these situations has become a favorite pastime for young Chinese users, who are increasingly sharing particularly ridiculous cases on social media. It’s not all that different from laughing at a ridiculous “Am I the Asshole” post on Reddit and contributing your two cents, except it has been institutionalized by a major tech company as a content moderation mechanism.
While a few other Chinese apps have similar features, Meituan’s is arguably the most popular at the moment. Meituan first introduced this feature in 2020 and called it “Kangaroo Juries,” since the app’s mascot is a yellow kangaroo. But perhaps because that sounded too close to the pejorative term “kangaroo court,” the feature has since been renamed “Little Mei’s Juries.”
Today, more than 6 million users have participated in “jury duty,” a Meituan spokesperson tells MIT Technology Review, the majority of them college students. (That may sound like a lot of people, but the app’s annual active user base is 677 million people.) Some minor rules have changed since the feature launched, but the essence remains the same: the juries help the platform sift through thousands of petty fights every day and uphold meal-related justice.
The fun of passing judgment
Even though it has existed for a few years, many people have only recently become aware of Meituan’s public jury feature. It’s now frequently a viral topic on social media—and a source of joy for those nosy enough to weigh in on other people’s business.
Yu Mingyao, a college student living in Dalian, first started judging these cases last winter and would occasionally jump into a jury when she was using the app to order food. But she says she didn’t think the feature was really that popular until mid-November, when she screenshotted a few ridiculous cases she had judged, including the spicy rice noodle saga. In another case she posted about, the user gave a restaurant three stars out of five because of a breakup experienced after eating there. The restaurant complained that it wasn’t to blame.
She posted these on Xiaohongshu, a Chinese social media app, and asked her dozens of followers: “Does anyone have anything funnier to share?”
To her surprise, the post attracted much more attention than she’s ever received. She soon got more than 2,000 comments, many of which were other screenshots of particularly bewildering complaints. People have kept replying to her, and she’s now at the point where she’s getting tired of reading Meituan reviews.
“At least 90% of the [jurors] are doing it for the fun,” Yu says. “If the complaints by the restaurants and the customers were boring, I don’t think there would be many participants.”
Meituan has clearly designed the feature to require only a light commitment from individual jurors. There are few qualifications needed other than having a verified, active account and passing a “test” that includes judging five simulated complaints. After that, each juror gets a maximum of three cases every 12 hours—meaning it’s more a casual game to keep them in the app than any serious form of crowdsourced platform management. They also don’t get any compensation for their participation, just the mental satisfaction.
But this doesn’t mean some jurors don’t take their duty very seriously. In one case that was posted on social media, a bubble tea vendor argued that contrary to the complaint, it did place a straw in the delivery package. But some jurors realized that the time stamp in the security camera footage uploaded by the merchant didn’t match the time of the delivery. The restaurant had seemingly fabricated evidence, and in the end, 51% of the jurors sided with the customer.
Meituan encourages the activity of these more serious jurors. In an October announcement, the app said it would reward 20 “quality jury comments” with a gift bag of Meituan merchandise every month. To explain who qualifies, the app offered an exampleof a juror not just casting a vote, but going above and beyond by consulting catering professionals on pricing standards.
Weeding out fake or unfair feedback
The public jury function can improve efficiency in resolving disputes and bring more transparency to the platform’s decision-making process, says Angela Zhang, a law professor at the University of Hong Kong, who has done extensive research on what she calls “crowd-judging” features. “Since these decisions are crowdsourced, they align more closely with community norms, helping platforms better understand and integrate these standards,” Zhang says.
Most of the cases up for trial are initiated by the merchants, according to reposted screenshots and Yu’s personal experience. Though the Meituan spokesperson says a user can open a case in some specific situations, for example if they have an issue after they’ve purchased one of the app’s coupons. “I think the main target of this feature is to reduce the number of malicious [customer] reviews,” Yu says.
The juries may even help uncover reviews that are fraudulent. Food delivery vendors, like any online service, rely heavily on reviews to attract potential customers, which has inspired a black market in both fake five-star reviews for themselves and one-star complaints for competitors.
Chen, a fast-food restaurant owner in Fujian province who has operated a store for more than a year, says that it’s important to retain 4.7 stars out of 5.0. “If it’s lower than [that], you don’t get any traffic, and you can’t make any money,” Chen says. (She asked to be identified by only her last name in order to speak more freely.)
But in practice, it’s not that easy for the merchants to utilize the public jury feature. Chen has had a lot of frustrating experiences with bad reviews, and she says Meituan requires multiple rounds of appeals and attempts to dial up a customer representative to actually open a jury trial.
In August, Chen received a review that claimed the delivery was missing one portion of rice, and she responded that the rice was merely buried under other food. After failing several times to get the platform to remove this review, she finally got the case to a jury. Twenty-two jurors voted for her, and nine voted for the customer.
“I just have one humble request: whenever a vendor provides enough supporting evidence, a trial by Little Mei’s Juries can be opened,” she says.
A wave of democratic experiments
Meituan is not the only Chinese consumer tech company that has invited users to weigh in on conflicts. Idle Fish, a secondhand marketplace operated by Alibaba, has a similar “court” system where any dispute between buyers and sellers can be decided by a panel made up of 17 volunteer jurors. Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, also allows users to become jurors and help the platform screen out content that violates its rules.
Like Reddit’s downvote system or X’s community notes, these features let the users participate in enforcing platform policies. But at the same time, some users complain that these features are designed to offload the responsibilities of the platform.
There have been similar user-governance experiments in the past, but they didn’t last long. WeChat once had a system in which volunteers could decide whether articles had been plagiarized, and Weibo also recruited volunteer content moderators who could suspend other users.
“Operating a crowd-judging platform isn’t free,” Zhang says. In particular, it takes human resources to maintain the platform. And if it doesn’t attract enough user participation, the system won’t be efficient. Still, Zhang believes that having such a system in place is good for the users and the platform: “Essentially, platforms are delegating some of their authority to their users, creating a more collaborative and democratic governance structure.”
In some cases, the activity of these juries can have pretty serious consequences. The example with the largest scale and highest stakes was probably Xianghubao, a discontinued online mutual-aid product from Alibaba that tried to challenge commercial health insurance in China.
The idea was that millions of users would each pitch in a few bucks so that when one of them got sick, the pool of money would be used to pay their medical bills. But first, to decide whether a medical bill qualified for payment, Xianghubao asked everyone to study the case details and cast a vote. In 2019, the first-ever case was judged by over 250,000 users. The patient was a man in his 40s who fell down a hole, broke his legs, and lost consciousness. The majority eventually decided, on the basis of his previous health history, to deny paying him 100,000 RMB (about $14,000). The service shut down in 2022.
Meituan has chosen a more entertaining approach with its public jury feature. It certainly doesn’t deal with life-or-death situations like Xianghubao, and by centering the arguments between customers and merchants, it carefully avoids the more controversial problems of the food delivery business—namely, the rights of delivery workers. (“A delivery worker can become a juror as a Meituan user. They can also initiate a trial by Little Mei’s Juries as a consumer,” says the Meituan spokesperson.)
Meituan’s public jury is ultimately more of a light-hearted activity for users who have placed an order and are waiting for it to arrive. Many users who talk about their experiences on social media compare it to a fun and addictive game. In five seconds, they can laugh at some ridiculous user complaints or examples of a delivery that went wrong. Plus, who doesn’t like to feel that you’re doing the right thing and acting in the name of justice?
On a late October evening, I found myself hiding in the shadows of a tree in a Hong Kong park. I was on high alert, warily eyeing everyone walking toward me. I was checking my phone every few seconds, watching the locations of dozens of people who were trying to hunt me down.
I wasn’t actually in danger. I was playing a game of hide-and-seek with 40 strangers in a seven-acre park built on the site of the infamous Kowloon Walled City. It wasn’t a typical hide-and-seek game, though, but rather one for the digital age: both the seekers and the hiders chase and evade each other by following their real-time locations on a map on their phones.
The “cat-and-mouse game,” as it’s usually referred to locally, has gone viral in China this year, drawing thousands of people across the country to events every week. It’s a fun combination of a childhood game, in-person networking, the latest location-sharing technology, and meme-worthy experience. When the game first emerged in February, videos of hide-and-seek players who went wild—climbing up trees, hiding in the sewers—got millions of views on social media.
Each contest convenes dozens of people in a predetermined area, often a large city park. All of them then join a group on Amap, a Chinese Google Maps alternative, and share their live location. Among the participants, 90% are designated as “mice” and have five minutes to run and hide. Then the rest, who are “cats,” will go out and hunt down each mouse with the help of the location sharing, as well as a neon wristband that visually separates them from nonparticipants. Once caught, the mice switch teams and join the cats, so the game gets harder and harder for the remaining mice.
During a short trip to Hong Kong last month, I joined two cat-and-mouse games in the city. Both of them had about 40 participants and lasted one hour. The first park was larger and had fewer people, meaning it was prime for running and chasing; the second was crowded and smaller, which made it ideal for trying to blend in with passersby.
Being an indoor person, I’m not always a fan of group physical activities, but the two experiences went far beyond my expectations. The addition of location sharing has turned the kids’ game into a more interactive version of Pokémon Go. Trying to remain hidden in the same spot throughout the game was not possible, since the cats could always see where I was; I needed to get more creative in crafting an escape plan. I quickly learned that deception—hiding my glowing bracelet, pretending to be an innocent jogger, and avoiding checking my phone too often—was also essential to being a good mouse.
Just watching everyone’s locations in the app was an intense experience. Dozens of little avatars were floating around in the park at once, with cats gradually outnumbering mice as the game progressed. Delays and bugs were plenty, but that added to the fun and difficulty of the game. I could feel safe at one moment, seeing there were no cats around, and panic seconds later when a cat suddenly moved hundreds of feet toward me, likely because its location sharing had lagged.
As a first-timer, I did okay. For my first game, I survived as a mouse until the last few minutes, when mostly everyone else had converted to the cat side. For my second outing, I converted mid-game and caught two mice myself.
I’ll readily admit some people were much better than I was. Hong Shizhe, a 19-year-old college student, was crowned the “cat king” of the second game, having caught 11 mice by the end. “I like that you can both exercise and have fun in this activity,” Hong says. He first learned about the game through videos people shared on Chinese social media, and he has been to several games in Hong Kong and mainland China since. He told me the largest one had more than 140 participants. Once, he even took his dog to the park with him and still won the game.
His secret for success? A lot of lies and politics: “You can make a deal with the mice and have them help you find other little mice. You can also pretend to be a mouse and strike up a chat with them.”
Half the fellow players Hong has met in his games are students, the other half young professionals. Like Ultimate Frisbee and a few other social activities that previously became popular in China, cat-and-mouse games are considered a great way for young people to meet each other and make new friends. At my two games in Hong Kong, I heard many participants chatting before the game started, many of whom were new to the city and eager to meet people.
But organizing the game has also become a business. Some games, like the second one I went to, charge participants a small fee (usually less than $10). That second game was hosted by a local group that organizes weekly activities, like camping trips, board games, and barbecue parties.
Transforming an ordinary map app
Many cat-and-mouse games use Amap, which is owned by Alibaba. Since Google services are blocked in China, and there aren’t as many Apple users, Amap is one of the most popular domestic map apps, with over 100 million active users every day.
Amap has enabled real-time location sharing within small groups since at least 2017, and it has in recent years expanded the maximum size of the group to 100 people. This feature has previously been advertised for users like family members tracking each other’s location or hikers keeping tabs on each other in the wild.
Perhaps inspired by the overwhelming success of Pokémon Go, Amap has done some experiments with gaming too. It has worked with a few Chinese game studios, as well as Alibaba’s e-commerce platforms, to develop games that integrate live location tracking, whether individually or in a group setting. None of these games, however, have caught on. The turn of events this year seems to have been more of an accident: cat-and-mouse was first played on WeChat, but players gradually moved on to Amap on their own and have basically made it the default app choice.
Amap declined to have anyone interviewed for this story, but the company is aware of its sudden popularity. Since September, the app has introduced a few features that cater to players’ needs. Now, users can specifically choose to start a “cat-and-mouse game group” right in the app and create groups over the typical 100-person limit; it can even randomly assign the roles of mice and cats. It also allows users to set customized rules and automates some of the formerly manual processes, like changing mice avatars to cats once players are caught.
All of these are nice-to-have features, but maybe not essential. At least for the two games that I went to, the organizers only used the most basic feature of group location sharing. Some didn’t even know the app had group features in the first place. (This may partly be because of where we were; Google Maps is much more popular in Hong Kong than other apps and only allows location sharing between two people.)
While it took a little time for the organizers to catch everyone up on how to use Amap and check that they had the right settings, the app is so easy to use that the whole group, including me, soon got the hang of it.
For a while, I was awed, reflecting that I never expected to be playing games in an app that guides people through their daily commutes. But soon enough, I had no time to think about that. A cat was approaching, and I needed to run for my life.
