How to love technology again

From semiconductors to surveillance cameras, hardware still rules the world. [View in browser]( | [Your newsletter preferences](newsletter=wir) 04.09.23 We saw it written once that software was eating the world. What really happened, it seems to us, is that software made a world of its own and invited us there to be eaten. These days, we’re lighting out for other worlds—real places, rather than ghostly spaces conjured by software. Take our local hardware store. The sights, the sounds of actual machines, the advanced tools that still seem built to thrill. We enter to the whirring music of the key duplicator. We seek counsel from people in many-pocketed vestments. We smell the sacred scents of oiled metal, dusty cardboard, evaporated varnish, PVC fumes, and bags of fertilizer with leaky seams. We imagine everything it took to build this world: millennia of trial and error, oceans of brow sweat, megatons of earthly matter mined, refined, and industrially transformed so that we humans might enjoy access to more varieties of self-tapping deck screw than there are stars in the Andromeda Galaxy. What a species, we think. Our definition of “hardware” extends beyond the plumbing department, of course. We apply the word to anything physical that underlies our (increasingly immaterial) realities—any object with the power to transform techne, the knowledge of how to do something, into logos, its utterance. Hardware moves earth. Hardware shapes molecules. Hardware sends electrons coursing throughout the world and into our fingertips. Software can still create worlds unto itself, even make us believe that the world of bits is all that matters. But we will always, in the pits of our beings, crave atoms. In [this special WIRED series](, we have collected stories to answer that craving—stories that look inside cameras, cars, computers, and ultimately the chips that constitute the foundation of them all. Whether these stories reach you in molecules of ink on processed wood fiber or in layers of light-emitting diodes on a screen or in the electromagnetic pulsing of a speaker coil, we hope you’ll fall in love with the beauty and possibilities of hardware all over again.   [Giant brass fly art object on top of a map]( [WE ❤️ HARDWARE | 19-MINUTE READ]( [A Tiny Blog Took on Big Surveillance in China—and Won]( BY AMOS ZEEBERG [Digging through manuals for security cameras, a group of gearheads found sinister details and ignited a new battle in the US-China tech war.](   [WE ❤️ HARDWARE | PHOTO ESSAY]( [The Arctic’s Permafrost-Obsessed Methane Detectives]( BY MATT SIMON [The Far North is thawing, unleashing clouds of planet-heating gas. Scientists rely on an arsenal of tech to sniff out just how nasty the problem is.](   [Illustration of a fictional computing machine]( [WE ❤️ HARDWARE | 17-MINUTE READ]( [The Unbelievable Zombie Comeback of Analog Computing]( BY CHARLES PLATT [Computers have been digital for half a century. Why would anyone want to resurrect the clunkers of yesteryear?](   [Semiconductor chip]( [WE ❤️ HARDWARE | 32-MINUTE READ]( [I Saw the Face of God in a Semiconductor Factory]( BY VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN [As the US boosts production of silicon chips, a WIRED journalist goes inside the mysterious Taiwanese company at the center of the global industry.](   [RV driving on a scenic road]( [WE ❤️ HARDWARE | 23-MINUTE READ]( [When a Vintage RV Is Your Home, Repair Is a Way of Life]( BY SCOTT GILBERTSON [Six years ago, I moved my family into a 50-year-old RV—not just to see America, but to test my belief that anything worth fixing can be fixed.]( For more investigations and features from WIRED, sign up for our [Longreads](newsletter. [GET WIRED]( [Get WIRED for just $29.99 $5. Includes the print edition plus editor in chief Gideon Lichfield's column, System Update.]([Subscribe now.]( [(image) WIRED Logo]( [(image) WIRED on Facebook]( [(image) WIRED on Twitter]( [(image) WIRED on Instagram]( [(image) WIRED on LinkedIn]( [(image) WIRED on YouTube]( [Podcasts]( Have questions or comments? [Reply to this email](mailto:hello@wired.com?subject=WIRED%20Newsletter%20Questions,%20Comments%20or%20Feedback). This email was sent to you by WIRED. To ensure delivery to your inbox (not bulk or junk folders), please add our email address, wired@newsletters.wired.com, to your address book. View our [Privacy Policy]( [Unsubscribe]( or [Manage your newsletter subscriptions](newsletter=wir) Copyright © Condé Nast 2023. One World Trade Center, New York, NY 10007. All rights reserved.