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"slug": "meet-ukraines-geeks-of-war",
"title": "Meet Ukraine’s ‘Geeks of War’",
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"headTitle": "Meet Ukraine’s ‘Geeks of War’ | KQED",
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"content": "\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"#episode-transcript\">\u003ci>View the full episode transcript.\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Ukraine-Russia war has been called the most technologically advanced war in history. Ukrainian citizens receive notifications about incoming missile and drone attacks through apps on their phones; remote-controlled drones swarm the front lines; and volunteer cyberwarfare units target Russian digital infrastructure. It’s all part of what some have dubbed Ukraine’s “Geeks of War.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In this episode, investigative reporter Erica Hellerstein takes us to the digital front line. On a recent trip to Ukraine, she met a husband-and-wife duo running a DIY nonprofit that supplies tech to defense forces, toured the recently-bombed headquarters of one of the country’s biggest tech companies, and explored how a swarm of online accounts with Shiba Inu avatars is countering Russian propaganda.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Throughout, she looks at how Ukraine’s culture of tech innovation — and its surprising ties to Silicon Valley — are fueling the country’s resistance through an army of engineers, coders, hackers, and tinkerers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c!-- iframe plugin v.4.3 wordpress.org/plugins/iframe/ -->\u003cbr>\n\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" frameborder=\"0\" height=\"200\" scrolling=\"no\" src=\"https://playlist.megaphone.fm?e=KQINC5459549472\" width=\"100%\" class=\"iframe-class\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guest: \u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.ericahellerstein.com/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Erica Hellerstein\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, investigative journalist and feature writer\u003c/span>\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Further Reading/Listening:\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/tnyradiohour/articles/dexter-filkins-on-drones-and-the-future-of-warfare?tab=transcript\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Dexter Filkins on Drones and the Future of Warfare\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> — Adam Howard, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">WNYC\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.kyivpost.com/post/47836\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Lessons From the World’s First Full-Scale Cyberwar\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> — David Kirichenko, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Kyiv Post\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/30/technology/russia-propaganda-video-games.html\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Russia Takes Its Ukraine Information War Into Video Games\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> — Steven Lee Myers and Kellen Browning, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The New York Times\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/08/27/ukraine-drones-war-russia-00514712?utm_source=perplexity\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Why Ukraine remains the world’s most innovative war machine\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> — Ibrahim Naber, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Politico\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/03/03/world/europe/ukraine-russia-war-drones-deaths.html\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">A Thousand Snipers in the Sky: The New War in Ukraine\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> — Marc Santora, Lara Jakes, Andrew E. Kramer, Marco Hernandez and Liubov Sholudko, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The New York Times\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003cp>Want to give us feedback on the show? Shoot us an email at \u003ca href=\"mailto:CloseAllTabs@KQED.org\">CloseAllTabs@KQED.org\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.instagram.com/closealltabspod/\">Follow us on Instagram\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2 id=\"episode-transcript\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung, Host: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Here on Close All Tabs, we cover all different sides of tech and the internet — the good, the bad, and the gray areas in between. Today, we’re doing something different, and taking our deep dive abroad. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The tech industry is increasingly intertwined with global conflict. Like how Silicon Valley’s AI obsession has fueled the automated warfare in Israel’s attacks on Gaza, or US bomb strikes in Iraq and Syria. So-called “defense tech” startups are attracting billions in funding. And like we’ve talked about on this show before, the Pentagon’s Cold War investments actually built Silicon Valley. This startup approach to weaponry has some pretty concerning implications for the future of war. And we’ve seen, in real time, the way these advancements in surveillance and automated warfare are being used to oppress people — like Palestinians in Gaza. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">At the same time in another region plagued by conflict, Ukraine, tech culture has become a vital part of the country’s resistance against Russian aggression. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">That’s the kind of story that Erica Hellerstein stumbled upon, as she prepared for her own trip to Ukraine. Erica is a Bay Area investigative journalist who reports on human rights, politics, and tech. Back in June, she spent three weeks around Kyiv on a reporting trip, working on a project about her own family’s roots in the country. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Just before her trip, she heard a story about a Ukrainian engineer who had worked for a Bay Area tech company, but left his job to join his country’s defense forces. It got her thinking about the connection between Silicon Valley and the Ukrainian fight against Russian occupation. She started digging and according to the people she talked to, the tech sector is part of the reason Ukraine is still standing today. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">These are the Geeks of War — that’s what one Ukrainian drone operator nicknamed the group. Ukraine actually has a long history of technological innovation that is still alive today, and is fueling the country’s resistance through an army of engineers, coders, hackers, and tinkerers.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In this special episode, Erica will introduce us to a few of these “Geeks” and we’ll explore how this new generation is blurring the lines between the digital and physical battlefield — reshaping the next generation of conflict, and maybe even the future of war itself. I’ll let Erica take it from here. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein, Reporter\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">:\u003c/span> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It’s around 11:55 pm when the first alarm goes off.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[Alarm sounding from Air Alert app]\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">:\u003c/span> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The noise shatters any illusion I had that my first night in Kyiv would be quiet or peaceful. I’ve been doomscrolling on my phone in a bomb shelter connected to my hotel in Kyiv. It’s surprisingly nice, with wifi, beverages, even bean bag chairs. On heavy nights of bombardment, like tonight, these sirens can go off multiple times and last for hours. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But most of the time I’m in Ukraine, I’m hearing these alarms digitally through an app on my phone called Air Alert. The Ukrainian government developed the app towards the beginning of the war, and it’s now been downloaded at least 27 million times. That’s in a country of 39 million people. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Air Alert sounds a loud, jarring alarm whenever a Russian missile strike, or drone attack is detected in your region. And the voice telling you to find the nearest shelter? None other than Jedi master Luke Skywalker. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[Mark Hammill from Air Alert app]\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Attention. Air raid alert. Proceed to the nearest shelter. \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">: Or rather, Mark Hamill, the actor who \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">played\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> the beloved character in Star Wars. Hamill’s a vocal supporter of Ukraine so he pitched in to voice the English language version of the app.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[Mark Hammill from Air Alert app] \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Don’t be careless. Your overconfidence is your weakness.\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">: I’ve learned, though, that the app only gives you basic information. To get details, I go to a different app, Telegram, where I follow a volunteer-run channel that gives updates about what kinds of missiles, or drones, are in the air.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">As if two apps aren’t enough, I’m also on WhatsApp messaging a group of journalists who are also in Kyiv. Some are in the same hotel shelter, others are sheltering in the hallways of their apartment buildings or metro stations. Everyone is sharing updates. “Drone flew right over our roof,” someone writes around 1 am. Another, two minutes later: “Loud explosion not far from my place.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Finally, around 6am, another alert goes off. Once again, I hear a familiar voice.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[Mark Hammill from Air Alert app]\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Attention. The air alert is over. May the Force be with you.\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">:\u003c/span> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">That means, at least for now, the skies in Kyiv are safe. But as dawn breaks, the scale of the destruction starts to come into focus. About two miles from where I’m staying, an apartment building was hit by a ballistic missile and reduced to rubble – there are reports of people still trapped inside. A Kyiv metro station and university were also hit. All told, ten people, including a child, were killed in the onslaught.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This has become a regular occurrence in Ukraine. People have been living through these kinds of attacks for years. Unable to sleep through the wails of the sirens, reading news about buildings blown up, civilians killed and then somehow, still managing to go about their daily lives – going to work, picking up their kids, celebrating birthday parties, getting married.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And beyond the apps like Air Alert, technology has become a centerpiece in this war — hacking software, killer drones, medical robots delivering supplies to the frontlines. It’s transforming how people experience war. Now, every aspect of our lives, including conflict, is mediated by our digital world. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But the people behind the screens can be a little mysterious. I wanted to learn more about them. To understand the workers and whizzes changing what warfare looks like, with major implications for the rest of the world. I wanted to meet the self-styled “Geeks of War.” \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And for that, we’ll need to open a new tab: \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[Typing sounds] \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Meet the Geeks\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">: My first guide to the geeks is a couple I met in Lviv, which is a Western city in Ukraine. Dimko and Iryna Zhluktenko. They’re the co-founders of Dzyga’s Paw. It’s a Ukrainian nonprofit that donates defense technology to the frontlines. Both Iryna and Dimko used to work in tech. Dimko was a software engineer, Iryna a product analyst for the San Francisco-based tech company, JustAnswer. But after Russia invaded Ukraine, they quit their jobs and threw themselves into Dzyga’s Paw, which, by the way, is named after their adorable little fox-faced pup, Dzyga.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I stop by the organization’s headquarters one night. They greet me with a tour of the space. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Iryna Zhluktenko: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">You can just come like this. So we used to live here, so this is actually, like a normal house location, but very old one is from 1906, so it’s more than 100 years old, and here you have our main working, like a little open space.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">: There’s a small party happening, with some women playing an intimidating-looking card game in the kitchen.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Iryna Zhluktenko: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The girls are playing [inaudible] Do you know this game? No, you should try. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein in tape: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Okay, I’m horrible at cards.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We pass an entire wall full of framed thank you letters from different military units. There’s another wall, too, full of patches from soldiers and volunteer fighters, some coming from the other side of the world.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein in tape: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Wow, I see Argentina. That’s far.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Iryna Zhluktenko: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">That’s from, yeah, from international volunteer who’s fighting here in Ukraine, from Argentina. This is a Estonian one from Estonian cyber defense forces. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Iryna shows me another decoration tacked to the wall: A downed Russian drone. And it’s in really good shape. So she decides to give it a whirl.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Iryna Zhluktenko: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Let me try to do it. So it turns on. And if I had a controller, if I had a like TX controller, I could launch it and start it, probably.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein in tape:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> So this is like a war treasure?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Iryna Zhluktenko: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Looted from Russians. Yes.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Once I tear myself away from the shiny objects, I sit down with Dimko, Iryna, and of course, Dzyga, who has extreme zoomies. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Iryna Zhluktenko: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">She is the boss of the operation.\u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> [Laughs]\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[Dzyga barks]\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> They tell me that the project came about in the early months of the war. Of course, like so many other Ukrainians, they wanted to help. And they started to think about what they could bring to the table. And that’s when Dimko and Iryna, had their \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">a-ha\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> moment. “We’re nerds!” \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Dimko Zhluktenko\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> We’ve decided that well, we might just use our, uh, tech experience, our tech geekiness, uh, to, uh, innovate. Some of the approaches on the battlefield.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Iryna Zhluktenko:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> We figured out, okay, we can help better when our expertise is. So basically we started looking more into more advanced equipment. We started looking into drone and things like that and because we had friends in the military, uh, it was like our first point of contact because like we had people we could trust. And we started, you know, buying and supplying some tech devices.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> They started with what their friends in the military really needed: equipment. Drones, Starlink units — which provide remote internet access – long-range encrypted radios, thermal cameras. Dzyga’s paw has since grown from a scrappy idea into a multi-million dollar nonprofit. In October alone, they delivered over $230,000 worth of equipment to the military, according to the organization. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And all of this high tech gear goes to soldiers and drone operators who are stationed near the frontlines.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">They often work in hideouts, or command centers, miles from the front, flying drones by remote control while wearing a headset that shows exactly what the device sees through its camera. Other soldiers sit beside them, watching live maps on screens, calling out targets and coordinates in real time.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Dimko explains what these command centers look like in action.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Dimko Zhluktenko:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Basically an underground shelter with, uh, tons of, uh, big ass four screen TVs or something. Uh, and guys looking like they just finished the MIT or something. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So literally geeks of the war, sitting in those command centers and analyzing what is happening at the battlefield, and then suggesting what decisions should be taken to be the most effective.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> About a year ago, Dimko also enlisted as a drone operator for a Ukrainian military unit. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Dimko Zhluktenko:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Because this is my chance to, uh, well defend my home, defend my family, and, uh, in the end defend my country.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Basically the job is to do the reconnaissance. Um, you have this big UAV that, uh, like a fixed wing kind of a thing that you launch in the air.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Drone warfare has quickly become one of the defining characteristics of this conflict. The kind Dimko pilots are called UAVs — or unmanned aerial vehicles. They look like small airplanes, and like Dimko said, they’re mainly used for reconnaissance.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Dimko Zhluktenko: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It has the radio connection, so you have the radio signal link, uh, to it. And, uh, you have the live stream from that, you stream that footage into one of the IT systems that we have, uh, in the armed forces.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein in tape:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Okay \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Dimko Zhluktenko: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So all of the people interested in the situation in the area. Can watch that live stream. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Then there’s this other kind of drone, called an FPV. That stands for first-person-view. They’re some of the most common drones on the battlefield right now. Once upon a time, these drones were mainly the toys of hobbyists and creatives. You know that insufferable wedding reel you saw on Instagram? Probably shot on an FPV drone.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">When Russia invaded, the Ukrainian military started rolling them out on a massive scale. They cost next to nothing. They’re endlessly scalable, and for a country like Ukraine, with far fewer resources and manpower than Russia, they’ve been a game-changer. Drones that can be bought for just a few hundred dollars are now taking out Russian tanks and artillery worth millions.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">There are swarms of these things buzzing around now on the front, some with cameras for spying, others loaded with explosives to detonate on their targets. And they’re responsible for massive damage. Drones now account for as much as seventy percent of casualties on both sides, according to Ukrainian officials.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Experts are already warning that this rapid, wide-scale shift could dramatically change the future of conflict. Other countries are likely to learn from or maybe adopt the technologies and tactics deployed in this war. And It’s not just militaries that can repurpose these technologies. Paramilitaries, militias, and extremist groups can all easily purchase and deploy drone technology. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">As drone warfare becomes more lethal on the battlefield, Dimko tells me that his work is also getting more treacherous as the war progresses.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Dimko Zhluktenko:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> It is very and very dangerous because the kill zone is getting wider and wider because of the danger of FPV drones there in our direction.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We have a lot of, uh, Russian groups there, specifically hunting pilots like us.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> But even though Dimko is now an official member of the Ukrainian military, the organization he helps run, Dzyga’s Paw, started completely outside of that system as a grassroots, volunteer mission. And now it’s directly helping units like his and this is really common. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Ukraine is heavily dependent on volunteers. People like the Dzyga’s Paw team, delivering supplies to the frontlines, volunteer air defense groups that shoot down Russian drones in the middle of the night, or Ukrainian tech companies building safety apps for civilians. All of this experimentation, this volunteer work – it’s been a really important part of Ukraine’s survival. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Iryna Zhluktenko: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In a classic battlefield, it’d fail. But, um, it’s a constant competition of technology again and I still feel we are more rapid. We are more fast in terms of inventing something new. I wanna believe at least that, um, it all comes from our initial desire to survive and to fight for our country ’cause uh, there were many different people with different careers and professions, but, uh, huge part of them switched to thinking in this direction. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> And this bottom-up, grassroots approach represents a fundamental difference between how Ukraine and Russia operate.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Iryna Zhluktenko: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Compared to Russia, it’s like they don’t have a, they like, everything is very like, top down. It’s controlled from the,yeah, from the state. So, indeed they have great engineers, but they are given like a task to develop something, to come up with a solution. While in Ukraine, it’s more of a like, grassroots thing and sometimes something brilliant just comes out of nowhere.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> So how did Ukraine get here to this nimble and adaptive space for innovation and experimentation? And why does it all remind me so much of the tech culture in the Bay Area? We’ll get into that after this break. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Ok, we’re back. Time to open a new tab: [\u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Typing sounds] \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Ukraine’s culture of tech innovation.\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">To help us understand Ukraine’s tech culture, we’re taking a visit to MacPaw — one of the most successful tech companies to come out of Ukraine before the war. They created the CleanMyMac software. I’m at the company’s headquarters in Kyiv.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This building was actually hit by a Russian missile back in December. There are still some traces of the attack around the building: Window glass damaged, parts of the exterior crumbling. Here’s MacPaw CEO Oleksandr Kosovan describing that day:\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Oleksandr Kosovan: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The rockets were very powerful so they destroyed all the facade of the building. All the windows were shattered. A lot of damage inside the office, but nothing super critical. We were very lucky in that none of our employees were injured. It was scary.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> MacPaw has built several digital tools to support Ukraine during the war, including an app to help Ukrainian companies check on employees after attacks, software that helps computers identify Russian malware, and a special VPN to help people in occupied territories circumvent Russian censorship.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">While getting a tour of the MacPaw office, something catches my eye. It’s a wall filled with a collection of old Apple products from across the ages. It’s got ancient looking grey computers, and those bulky, colorful desktops that always felt to me like the computer version of a jolly rancher. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein in tape:\u003c/b> \u003cb> \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I remember having these in school. It brings me back. Very nostalgic. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Oleksandr created this wall as an homage to Apple, which has always been an inspiration to him. Before the war, he wanted to create a museum full of the company’s products. For now, this wall is a little shrine in the middle of the MacPaw office.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">As a Bay Area resident, it’s kind of funny, being here and seeing traces of where I’m from all over the tech industry here. Granted, Silicon Valley is hugely influential but what surprises me is just how intertwined Silicon Valley and Ukraine’s tech industries are. Like how Iryna of Dzyga’s Paw worked for a San Francisco startup.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And this is not unusual I’m learning. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">For years, tech companies from San Francisco to San Jose have relied on Ukrainian engineers for their technical skills, English fluency, and lower labor costs. Companies like Google, Grammarly (which was founded by Ukrainians), Ring, JetBridge, and Caspio all had employees based in Ukraine when Russia began its full-scale invasion.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">There’s a general cultural ethos here that feels familiar to my Bay Area sensibilities, like the food trucks, ping pong tables, and hoodies I see all over tech campuses in Kyiv. There was one friendship bracelet-wearing tech worker I talk to who tells me all about her recent ayahuasca healing journey in South America. I felt like I was back at home.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And then there are all the personal connections I notice with the Ukrainians I meet. Some worked for Bay Area companies. Or, have friends who live there for work. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And since the war began, these transnational ties have become a quiet but meaningful network of support for Ukraine. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The Silicon Valley–based nonprofit Nova Ukraine, which was co-founded by a former Facebook and Google employee from Kharkiv, has raised over $160 million in humanitarian aid.\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Iryna’s old employer, JustAnswer, \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">has expanded its Ukrainian workforce. It funded a pediatric mental health center in the country as well. Caspio \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">helped relocate dozens of Ukrainian staffers safely out of the country, and\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> continues supporting staff remotely. Sometimes, \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">company Zoom calls will be interrupted by the wail of a siren telling Ukrainian workers to go to a bomb shelter. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">While there’s a lot of overlap between these two parts of the world, the innovation mindset that runs through Ukraine’s tech sector has deep roots. It started long before Steve Jobs or Silicon Valley exploded onto the global scene, like, decades before.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In 1951, when Ukraine was still part of the USSR, engineers on the outskirts of Kyiv developed the first computer in all of Europe. They worked around the clock, under tough conditions, in a crumbling old building that was ravaged by bombing during WWII. The people who made this computer, they’re considered the godfathers of Ukrainian IT. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Here’s Oleksandr again.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Oleksandr Kosovan: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Most of the, uh [inaudible] or IT on that era was actually originated from Ukraine. And um, beside that, there were like so many engineers, like my father was an engineer. There are so, so many great engineers that were working for this industry back then. And, and this basically were like the birth of the modern IT industry in Ukraine. So when the USSR collapsed, this talent and this, uh, uh, knowledge, uh, stayed in, in Ukraine.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> And today, the industry those engineers helped to create now plays a significant role in Ukraine’s economy. In 2024, Ukraine’s IT sector contributed 3.4% to Ukraine’s GDP, behind only the agricultural industry, according to a report published by the IT Association of Ukraine. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Oleksandr Kosovan: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Literally hundreds of thousands of people joined, uh, Ukrainian army. They started to bring their experience and their, like, creative, uh, vision and approach, uh, to the Army. And they started to apply, uh, some changes from, from bottom up. Uh, because, uh, these generals here, they probably know how to, uh, find the war of previous era, uh, but they don’t, uh, definitely understand how they can apply these technologies in order to, to receive some, some advantage. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> To this point, we’ve been mostly talking about the physical battlefield, like drones attacking targets in the real world. But a new frontline has emerged in this war — the internet. And the tools and tactics needed to fight in these spaces look completely different. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Let’s open a new tab. \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[Typing sounds] \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The new digital battlefield.\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Our guide to this world is David Kirichenko, a fellow journalist who splits his time between the U.S. and Ukraine. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>David Kirichenko:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I’m a war journalist and since 2022, I’ve been working on the front lines, um, in Ukraine.\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> But he’s also been reporting on another front: the digital fight between the two countries. Because the information space between Russia and Ukraine has become its own proxy war, with each vying for support at home and abroad.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>David Kirichenko: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It certainly has, I think, a very big impact on what goes on the physical battlefield just from the amount of influence and impact that you can have. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Russia’s a country long known for its sophisticated cyber warfare campaigns. In the current conflict, it’s been deploying vast amounts of disinformation online to weaken support for Ukraine around the world — on social media, fake news sites, even video games. This practice, as David points out, has deep roots, going back to the Cold War.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>David Kirichenko:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Even since the 1980s, the Russians first started out by building like a newspaper in India. It prints a fake story and then you have a, a more slightly more credible one, print that, and then everyone just starts citing it and it circulates around the world. And an MIT study showed that, um, like the fake news it it spreads like six, seven times faster than the truth.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Enter: The Fellas. They’re a niche online community that has come together to fight Russian disinformation. They call themselves the North Atlantic Fellas Organization, or NAFO, for short. And because it’s the internet, their entire social media “army” has adopted the likeness of one very good boy: A Shiba Inu.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The members of this online battalion, who like to be called the Fellas, usually identify themselves on Twitter, or X, with a cartoon Shiba avatar. And they have one major purpose: To take up digital arms against Russian propaganda. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">When a pro-Russian narrative pops up on social media, The Fellas leap into action. Their objective is to distract, mock and debunk the Kremlin’s talking points. Politico called the group “a sh*t posting, Twitter-trolling, dog-deploying social media army taking on Putin one meme at a time.” \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">There are now thousands of Fellas out there in the digital dog fight. They’re an organic phenomenon, borne out of internet culture. And they make anyone who earnestly tries to engage with their trolling look ridiculous. “Oh, you’re fighting with a cartoon Shiba at 3 pm on a Tuesday? Don’t you have anything better to do?”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>David Kirichenko:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> The best way to counter Russia propaganda is by mocking it, ridiculing it, and showing that like, this is how ridiculous it is. And like you just make a joke at it yourself by sharing it. Just the fact that, you know, over the years you had all these high-ranking Russian and then other officials engaging with cartoon dogs on, on Twitter.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">A less cheeky example of digital warfare is the IT Army of Ukraine. They’re a collective of volunteer hackers around the world who coordinate cyber attacks against Russia. They’ve attacked thousands of targets since the war began, from Russian banks to media outlets, and power grids. In June 2024, the group claimed responsibility for a large-scale cyberattack against Russia’s banking system, reportedly causing outages on banking websites, apps, and payment systems. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The IT Army of Ukraine isn’t a traditional military unit. It’s a sprawling, loosely organized network that runs primarily online. They post updates and send communications on their Telegram channel, where they have nearly 115,000 subscribers. They also have a website that lays out more information about their work and how to get involved. One page, for example, is titled: “Instructions for setting up attacks on the enemy country.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">David has also been reporting on this group. The IT Army’s spokesperson told him last year that its volunteer hackers had caused something like a billion dollars in damage from these attacks. David explains the anatomy of an attack.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>David Kirichenko:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> You typically have people that you have the toolkit installed so it doesn’t interfere with your, your Netflix or slow down your internet. You couldn’t set it to, I want to run from like 12:00 AM to 6:00 PM, I’m gonna leave my computer on. So if the IT army, like, runs the botnet and wants to direct an attack, it has the access to the compute to be able to run it and send pings from a lot of different places to overwhelm, um, a system. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And so they like posted the, the toolkit onto their website so anyone’s able to go and, and download it. And it’s pretty, pretty simple to install it. And, uh, all you gotta do is just make sure that your computer is running and contributing your compute power to the botnet so that it’s overwhelming, like services when the attack begins.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I’ve met people that said like, even my 12-year-old child is like doing these, uh, cyber attacks against Russia. They just download the toolkit and, you know, you set, you can even set a timer, allow your computer to participate in this botnet\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But these IT soldiers operate in a legally murky zone. There’s obviously something troubling about kids participating in cyberwar against another country. And, if someone participates in an attack from their couch on the other side of the world, are they breaking any laws?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>David Kirichenko:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> It is a gray space. How do governments prepare to legislate for this. Like, are you a combatant If you’re engaging in like cyber warfare? Are you breaking any laws? Should governments build a cyber reserve or some sort of like legal framework for their, like, people to be able to participate in this stuff? I mean, it, you know what, if you’re in Poland and then you’re conducting some cyber attacks and the Russians are very upset and they can launch a missile and they claim that you’re an enemy combatant. And yeah, just it’s, it’s a very challenging space and for I think lawmakers.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">For all the reasons he just laid out, most of the people I spoke with wouldn’t talk openly about participating in the IT Army. Though one person told me that “literally everyone with a laptop did.” \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Regardless, all these IT Army volunteers are having a real impact, David says. And this theme of a decentralized, grassroots approach as part of Ukraine’s strategy — chaotic with flashes of ingenuity — it keeps coming up. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>David Kirichenko:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> It ties back to Ukraine’s, wider story of, it’s a volunteer driven war effort. Like Ukrainian soldiers across the frontline are just dependent on online communities and, and volunteers. And so just people around the world have had such a big impact, both in information space, getting supplies to soldiers. Um, and one of the other ways has been on the cyber realm. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This grassroots system is pretty much the opposite of how \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Russia\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> does things. Which is centralized, top down, structured. Just a few solutions, scaled across every single military unit. They’re two competing philosophies fueling this technological arms race between Russia and Ukraine. A war of who’s quicker to out-innovate the other side. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>David Kirichenko:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Ukraine is so decentralized, it’s kind of its biggest strength and biggest weaknesses. You have a zoo of solutions of every volunteer group. They’re making, they’re iterating, but then there’s so many different technologies and, and weapons, that everyone’s using different things and it’s hard to standardize, but then it also makes it very effective. But then the Russians learn what’s working and over time they can steer \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">the\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, the whole war machine to focus on a, on a few things, and it’s sharing those lessons. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And no matter how things end, what they’re coming up with is changing what war looks like altogether. With major implications.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>David Kirichenko:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Drones dominate not just the, the frontline itself, but it’s changed like naval warfare. Ukrainians’ naval drones have helped to neutralize a third of Russia’s Black Sea fleet, and they’re basically blockading Russia’s fleet that had to retreat from occupied Crimea. Ukraine has built, right, these ground robots that are becoming like mechanical medics, and the naval drones help shoot down multiple Russian helicopters, a couple of fighter jets. And those two fighter jets that were lost in Mayra, um, each like 50 million. So you can have a sea drone worth like 200, $300,000 with the, uh, missile worth that much or less, shooting down something that’s $50 million.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And so we’re going to continue to see the proliferation of like, cheaper, faster tech. And we gotta learn what, you know, how do we prepare for that?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Technology is fundamentally a gray area. It’s built on these bursts of genius and promise, and also shows up in our modern world in dark and scary ways. It’s that first European computer, created out of the ashes of a bombed-out building in the Soviet Union. It’s Silicon Valley revolutionizing the world we now inhabit. For better, in some ways and in many ways, for worse: consolidating power, money, data, and influence, on an unimaginable scale.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And that’s the real story of the geeks of war. There are the lifesaving apps, like Air Alert, Telegram channels with real-time information about missiles and drones, VPNs connecting people in occupied territories to a bigger, broader, information ecosystem- Tools that are keeping people safe, connected and alive.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But there are also new technologies that are killing people, and the potentially catastrophic consequences of cyber saber-rattling. Destroyer drones, yes, they can give an underdog country like Ukraine an edge, but when you stop and think about their capabilities, the damage that can be unleashed with a tool literally anyone can buy for just a few hundred dollars, it’s terrifying. And then of course, there’s cyberwarfare, which can take down a whole country’s infrastructure, cripple power grids, communication networks, financial systems and thrust us all into completely uncharted geopolitical territory. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It reminds me of the early days of social media. When Google was still telling us not to be evil. When social networks were described as a revolutionary, democratizing force, helping to topple authoritarian regimes, organize mass protest, connect people all over the world. But we all know what actually happened was a lot more complicated than Big Tech’s aspirational mottos. The lens flipped. The narrative cracked. And now we’re living on the other side. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So what will be the story we tell about all these tools 10, 20 years from now? The technology we’re seeing in this war is opening up a new frontier. But who knows where it will be deployed next: What it will look like, who it will target. The geeks are showing us the future we just don’t know where it will lead.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung, Host: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Thanks to Erica Hellerstein for her reporting and collaboration on this episode. Erica’s reporting was supported by a fellowship through the International Women’s Media Foundation’s Women on the Ground: Reporting from Ukraine’s Unseen Frontlines Initiative in partnership with the Howard G. Buffett Foundation.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">With that, it’s time to close all these tabs.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Close All Tabs is a production of KQED Studios in San Francisco, and is hosted by me, Morgan Sung.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This episode was produced by Maya Cueva and edited by Chris Egusa, who also composed our theme song and credits music. Additional music by APM. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Chris Hambrick is our editor. Brendan Willard is our audio engineer.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Audience engagement support from Maha Sanad. Jen Chien is KQED’s director of podcasts. Katie Sprenger is our podcast operations manager, and Ethan Toven-Lindsey is our editor in chief.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Some members of the KQED podcast team are represented by the Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, San Francisco, Northern California local.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Keyboard sounds were recorded on my purple and pink dust silver K84 wired mechanical keyboard with Gateron red switches.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">OK, and I know it’s a podcast cliche, but if you like these deep dives and want us to keep making more, it would really help us out if you could rate and review us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to the show.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Thanks for listening.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n",
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"title": "Meet Ukraine’s ‘Geeks of War’ | KQED",
"description": "The Ukraine-Russia war has been called the most technologically advanced war in history. Ukrainian citizens receive notifications about incoming missile and drone attacks through apps on their phones; remote-controlled drones swarm the front lines; and volunteer cyberwarfare units target Russian digital infrastructure. It’s all part of what some have dubbed Ukraine’s “Geeks of War.”In this episode, investigative reporter Erica Hellerstein takes us to the digital front line. On a recent trip to Ukraine, she met a husband-and-wife duo running a DIY nonprofit that supplies tech to defense forces, toured the recently-bombed headquarters of one of the country’s biggest tech companies, and explored how a swarm of online accounts with Shiba Inu avatars is countering Russian propaganda. Throughout, she looks at how Ukraine’s culture of tech innovation — and its surprising ties to Silicon Valley — are fueling the country’s resistance through an army of engineers, coders, hackers, and tinkerers.",
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"socialDescription": "The Ukraine-Russia war has been called the most technologically advanced war in history. Ukrainian citizens receive notifications about incoming missile and drone attacks through apps on their phones; remote-controlled drones swarm the front lines; and volunteer cyberwarfare units target Russian digital infrastructure. It’s all part of what some have dubbed Ukraine’s “Geeks of War.”In this episode, investigative reporter Erica Hellerstein takes us to the digital front line. On a recent trip to Ukraine, she met a husband-and-wife duo running a DIY nonprofit that supplies tech to defense forces, toured the recently-bombed headquarters of one of the country’s biggest tech companies, and explored how a swarm of online accounts with Shiba Inu avatars is countering Russian propaganda. Throughout, she looks at how Ukraine’s culture of tech innovation — and its surprising ties to Silicon Valley — are fueling the country’s resistance through an army of engineers, coders, hackers, and tinkerers.",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"#episode-transcript\">\u003ci>View the full episode transcript.\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Ukraine-Russia war has been called the most technologically advanced war in history. Ukrainian citizens receive notifications about incoming missile and drone attacks through apps on their phones; remote-controlled drones swarm the front lines; and volunteer cyberwarfare units target Russian digital infrastructure. It’s all part of what some have dubbed Ukraine’s “Geeks of War.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In this episode, investigative reporter Erica Hellerstein takes us to the digital front line. On a recent trip to Ukraine, she met a husband-and-wife duo running a DIY nonprofit that supplies tech to defense forces, toured the recently-bombed headquarters of one of the country’s biggest tech companies, and explored how a swarm of online accounts with Shiba Inu avatars is countering Russian propaganda.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Throughout, she looks at how Ukraine’s culture of tech innovation — and its surprising ties to Silicon Valley — are fueling the country’s resistance through an army of engineers, coders, hackers, and tinkerers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c!-- iframe plugin v.4.3 wordpress.org/plugins/iframe/ -->\u003cbr>\n\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" frameborder=\"0\" height=\"200\" scrolling=\"no\" src=\"https://playlist.megaphone.fm?e=KQINC5459549472\" width=\"100%\" class=\"iframe-class\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guest: \u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.ericahellerstein.com/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Erica Hellerstein\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, investigative journalist and feature writer\u003c/span>\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Further Reading/Listening:\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/tnyradiohour/articles/dexter-filkins-on-drones-and-the-future-of-warfare?tab=transcript\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Dexter Filkins on Drones and the Future of Warfare\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> — Adam Howard, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">WNYC\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.kyivpost.com/post/47836\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Lessons From the World’s First Full-Scale Cyberwar\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> — David Kirichenko, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Kyiv Post\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/30/technology/russia-propaganda-video-games.html\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Russia Takes Its Ukraine Information War Into Video Games\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> — Steven Lee Myers and Kellen Browning, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The New York Times\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/08/27/ukraine-drones-war-russia-00514712?utm_source=perplexity\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Why Ukraine remains the world’s most innovative war machine\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> — Ibrahim Naber, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Politico\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/03/03/world/europe/ukraine-russia-war-drones-deaths.html\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">A Thousand Snipers in the Sky: The New War in Ukraine\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> — Marc Santora, Lara Jakes, Andrew E. Kramer, Marco Hernandez and Liubov Sholudko, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The New York Times\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003cp>Want to give us feedback on the show? Shoot us an email at \u003ca href=\"mailto:CloseAllTabs@KQED.org\">CloseAllTabs@KQED.org\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.instagram.com/closealltabspod/\">Follow us on Instagram\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2 id=\"episode-transcript\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung, Host: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Here on Close All Tabs, we cover all different sides of tech and the internet — the good, the bad, and the gray areas in between. Today, we’re doing something different, and taking our deep dive abroad. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The tech industry is increasingly intertwined with global conflict. Like how Silicon Valley’s AI obsession has fueled the automated warfare in Israel’s attacks on Gaza, or US bomb strikes in Iraq and Syria. So-called “defense tech” startups are attracting billions in funding. And like we’ve talked about on this show before, the Pentagon’s Cold War investments actually built Silicon Valley. This startup approach to weaponry has some pretty concerning implications for the future of war. And we’ve seen, in real time, the way these advancements in surveillance and automated warfare are being used to oppress people — like Palestinians in Gaza. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">At the same time in another region plagued by conflict, Ukraine, tech culture has become a vital part of the country’s resistance against Russian aggression. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">That’s the kind of story that Erica Hellerstein stumbled upon, as she prepared for her own trip to Ukraine. Erica is a Bay Area investigative journalist who reports on human rights, politics, and tech. Back in June, she spent three weeks around Kyiv on a reporting trip, working on a project about her own family’s roots in the country. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Just before her trip, she heard a story about a Ukrainian engineer who had worked for a Bay Area tech company, but left his job to join his country’s defense forces. It got her thinking about the connection between Silicon Valley and the Ukrainian fight against Russian occupation. She started digging and according to the people she talked to, the tech sector is part of the reason Ukraine is still standing today. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">These are the Geeks of War — that’s what one Ukrainian drone operator nicknamed the group. Ukraine actually has a long history of technological innovation that is still alive today, and is fueling the country’s resistance through an army of engineers, coders, hackers, and tinkerers.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In this special episode, Erica will introduce us to a few of these “Geeks” and we’ll explore how this new generation is blurring the lines between the digital and physical battlefield — reshaping the next generation of conflict, and maybe even the future of war itself. I’ll let Erica take it from here. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein, Reporter\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">:\u003c/span> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It’s around 11:55 pm when the first alarm goes off.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[Alarm sounding from Air Alert app]\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">:\u003c/span> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The noise shatters any illusion I had that my first night in Kyiv would be quiet or peaceful. I’ve been doomscrolling on my phone in a bomb shelter connected to my hotel in Kyiv. It’s surprisingly nice, with wifi, beverages, even bean bag chairs. On heavy nights of bombardment, like tonight, these sirens can go off multiple times and last for hours. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But most of the time I’m in Ukraine, I’m hearing these alarms digitally through an app on my phone called Air Alert. The Ukrainian government developed the app towards the beginning of the war, and it’s now been downloaded at least 27 million times. That’s in a country of 39 million people. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Air Alert sounds a loud, jarring alarm whenever a Russian missile strike, or drone attack is detected in your region. And the voice telling you to find the nearest shelter? None other than Jedi master Luke Skywalker. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[Mark Hammill from Air Alert app]\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Attention. Air raid alert. Proceed to the nearest shelter. \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">: Or rather, Mark Hamill, the actor who \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">played\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> the beloved character in Star Wars. Hamill’s a vocal supporter of Ukraine so he pitched in to voice the English language version of the app.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[Mark Hammill from Air Alert app] \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Don’t be careless. Your overconfidence is your weakness.\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">: I’ve learned, though, that the app only gives you basic information. To get details, I go to a different app, Telegram, where I follow a volunteer-run channel that gives updates about what kinds of missiles, or drones, are in the air.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">As if two apps aren’t enough, I’m also on WhatsApp messaging a group of journalists who are also in Kyiv. Some are in the same hotel shelter, others are sheltering in the hallways of their apartment buildings or metro stations. Everyone is sharing updates. “Drone flew right over our roof,” someone writes around 1 am. Another, two minutes later: “Loud explosion not far from my place.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Finally, around 6am, another alert goes off. Once again, I hear a familiar voice.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[Mark Hammill from Air Alert app]\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Attention. The air alert is over. May the Force be with you.\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">:\u003c/span> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">That means, at least for now, the skies in Kyiv are safe. But as dawn breaks, the scale of the destruction starts to come into focus. About two miles from where I’m staying, an apartment building was hit by a ballistic missile and reduced to rubble – there are reports of people still trapped inside. A Kyiv metro station and university were also hit. All told, ten people, including a child, were killed in the onslaught.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This has become a regular occurrence in Ukraine. People have been living through these kinds of attacks for years. Unable to sleep through the wails of the sirens, reading news about buildings blown up, civilians killed and then somehow, still managing to go about their daily lives – going to work, picking up their kids, celebrating birthday parties, getting married.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And beyond the apps like Air Alert, technology has become a centerpiece in this war — hacking software, killer drones, medical robots delivering supplies to the frontlines. It’s transforming how people experience war. Now, every aspect of our lives, including conflict, is mediated by our digital world. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But the people behind the screens can be a little mysterious. I wanted to learn more about them. To understand the workers and whizzes changing what warfare looks like, with major implications for the rest of the world. I wanted to meet the self-styled “Geeks of War.” \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And for that, we’ll need to open a new tab: \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[Typing sounds] \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Meet the Geeks\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">: My first guide to the geeks is a couple I met in Lviv, which is a Western city in Ukraine. Dimko and Iryna Zhluktenko. They’re the co-founders of Dzyga’s Paw. It’s a Ukrainian nonprofit that donates defense technology to the frontlines. Both Iryna and Dimko used to work in tech. Dimko was a software engineer, Iryna a product analyst for the San Francisco-based tech company, JustAnswer. But after Russia invaded Ukraine, they quit their jobs and threw themselves into Dzyga’s Paw, which, by the way, is named after their adorable little fox-faced pup, Dzyga.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I stop by the organization’s headquarters one night. They greet me with a tour of the space. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Iryna Zhluktenko: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">You can just come like this. So we used to live here, so this is actually, like a normal house location, but very old one is from 1906, so it’s more than 100 years old, and here you have our main working, like a little open space.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">: There’s a small party happening, with some women playing an intimidating-looking card game in the kitchen.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Iryna Zhluktenko: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The girls are playing [inaudible] Do you know this game? No, you should try. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein in tape: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Okay, I’m horrible at cards.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We pass an entire wall full of framed thank you letters from different military units. There’s another wall, too, full of patches from soldiers and volunteer fighters, some coming from the other side of the world.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein in tape: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Wow, I see Argentina. That’s far.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Iryna Zhluktenko: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">That’s from, yeah, from international volunteer who’s fighting here in Ukraine, from Argentina. This is a Estonian one from Estonian cyber defense forces. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Iryna shows me another decoration tacked to the wall: A downed Russian drone. And it’s in really good shape. So she decides to give it a whirl.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Iryna Zhluktenko: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Let me try to do it. So it turns on. And if I had a controller, if I had a like TX controller, I could launch it and start it, probably.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein in tape:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> So this is like a war treasure?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Iryna Zhluktenko: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Looted from Russians. Yes.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Once I tear myself away from the shiny objects, I sit down with Dimko, Iryna, and of course, Dzyga, who has extreme zoomies. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Iryna Zhluktenko: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">She is the boss of the operation.\u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> [Laughs]\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[Dzyga barks]\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> They tell me that the project came about in the early months of the war. Of course, like so many other Ukrainians, they wanted to help. And they started to think about what they could bring to the table. And that’s when Dimko and Iryna, had their \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">a-ha\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> moment. “We’re nerds!” \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Dimko Zhluktenko\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> We’ve decided that well, we might just use our, uh, tech experience, our tech geekiness, uh, to, uh, innovate. Some of the approaches on the battlefield.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Iryna Zhluktenko:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> We figured out, okay, we can help better when our expertise is. So basically we started looking more into more advanced equipment. We started looking into drone and things like that and because we had friends in the military, uh, it was like our first point of contact because like we had people we could trust. And we started, you know, buying and supplying some tech devices.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> They started with what their friends in the military really needed: equipment. Drones, Starlink units — which provide remote internet access – long-range encrypted radios, thermal cameras. Dzyga’s paw has since grown from a scrappy idea into a multi-million dollar nonprofit. In October alone, they delivered over $230,000 worth of equipment to the military, according to the organization. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And all of this high tech gear goes to soldiers and drone operators who are stationed near the frontlines.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">They often work in hideouts, or command centers, miles from the front, flying drones by remote control while wearing a headset that shows exactly what the device sees through its camera. Other soldiers sit beside them, watching live maps on screens, calling out targets and coordinates in real time.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Dimko explains what these command centers look like in action.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Dimko Zhluktenko:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Basically an underground shelter with, uh, tons of, uh, big ass four screen TVs or something. Uh, and guys looking like they just finished the MIT or something. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So literally geeks of the war, sitting in those command centers and analyzing what is happening at the battlefield, and then suggesting what decisions should be taken to be the most effective.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> About a year ago, Dimko also enlisted as a drone operator for a Ukrainian military unit. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Dimko Zhluktenko:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Because this is my chance to, uh, well defend my home, defend my family, and, uh, in the end defend my country.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Basically the job is to do the reconnaissance. Um, you have this big UAV that, uh, like a fixed wing kind of a thing that you launch in the air.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Drone warfare has quickly become one of the defining characteristics of this conflict. The kind Dimko pilots are called UAVs — or unmanned aerial vehicles. They look like small airplanes, and like Dimko said, they’re mainly used for reconnaissance.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Dimko Zhluktenko: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It has the radio connection, so you have the radio signal link, uh, to it. And, uh, you have the live stream from that, you stream that footage into one of the IT systems that we have, uh, in the armed forces.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein in tape:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Okay \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Dimko Zhluktenko: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So all of the people interested in the situation in the area. Can watch that live stream. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Then there’s this other kind of drone, called an FPV. That stands for first-person-view. They’re some of the most common drones on the battlefield right now. Once upon a time, these drones were mainly the toys of hobbyists and creatives. You know that insufferable wedding reel you saw on Instagram? Probably shot on an FPV drone.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">When Russia invaded, the Ukrainian military started rolling them out on a massive scale. They cost next to nothing. They’re endlessly scalable, and for a country like Ukraine, with far fewer resources and manpower than Russia, they’ve been a game-changer. Drones that can be bought for just a few hundred dollars are now taking out Russian tanks and artillery worth millions.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">There are swarms of these things buzzing around now on the front, some with cameras for spying, others loaded with explosives to detonate on their targets. And they’re responsible for massive damage. Drones now account for as much as seventy percent of casualties on both sides, according to Ukrainian officials.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Experts are already warning that this rapid, wide-scale shift could dramatically change the future of conflict. Other countries are likely to learn from or maybe adopt the technologies and tactics deployed in this war. And It’s not just militaries that can repurpose these technologies. Paramilitaries, militias, and extremist groups can all easily purchase and deploy drone technology. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">As drone warfare becomes more lethal on the battlefield, Dimko tells me that his work is also getting more treacherous as the war progresses.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Dimko Zhluktenko:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> It is very and very dangerous because the kill zone is getting wider and wider because of the danger of FPV drones there in our direction.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We have a lot of, uh, Russian groups there, specifically hunting pilots like us.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> But even though Dimko is now an official member of the Ukrainian military, the organization he helps run, Dzyga’s Paw, started completely outside of that system as a grassroots, volunteer mission. And now it’s directly helping units like his and this is really common. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Ukraine is heavily dependent on volunteers. People like the Dzyga’s Paw team, delivering supplies to the frontlines, volunteer air defense groups that shoot down Russian drones in the middle of the night, or Ukrainian tech companies building safety apps for civilians. All of this experimentation, this volunteer work – it’s been a really important part of Ukraine’s survival. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Iryna Zhluktenko: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In a classic battlefield, it’d fail. But, um, it’s a constant competition of technology again and I still feel we are more rapid. We are more fast in terms of inventing something new. I wanna believe at least that, um, it all comes from our initial desire to survive and to fight for our country ’cause uh, there were many different people with different careers and professions, but, uh, huge part of them switched to thinking in this direction. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> And this bottom-up, grassroots approach represents a fundamental difference between how Ukraine and Russia operate.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Iryna Zhluktenko: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Compared to Russia, it’s like they don’t have a, they like, everything is very like, top down. It’s controlled from the,yeah, from the state. So, indeed they have great engineers, but they are given like a task to develop something, to come up with a solution. While in Ukraine, it’s more of a like, grassroots thing and sometimes something brilliant just comes out of nowhere.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> So how did Ukraine get here to this nimble and adaptive space for innovation and experimentation? And why does it all remind me so much of the tech culture in the Bay Area? We’ll get into that after this break. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Ok, we’re back. Time to open a new tab: [\u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Typing sounds] \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Ukraine’s culture of tech innovation.\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">To help us understand Ukraine’s tech culture, we’re taking a visit to MacPaw — one of the most successful tech companies to come out of Ukraine before the war. They created the CleanMyMac software. I’m at the company’s headquarters in Kyiv.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This building was actually hit by a Russian missile back in December. There are still some traces of the attack around the building: Window glass damaged, parts of the exterior crumbling. Here’s MacPaw CEO Oleksandr Kosovan describing that day:\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Oleksandr Kosovan: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The rockets were very powerful so they destroyed all the facade of the building. All the windows were shattered. A lot of damage inside the office, but nothing super critical. We were very lucky in that none of our employees were injured. It was scary.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> MacPaw has built several digital tools to support Ukraine during the war, including an app to help Ukrainian companies check on employees after attacks, software that helps computers identify Russian malware, and a special VPN to help people in occupied territories circumvent Russian censorship.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">While getting a tour of the MacPaw office, something catches my eye. It’s a wall filled with a collection of old Apple products from across the ages. It’s got ancient looking grey computers, and those bulky, colorful desktops that always felt to me like the computer version of a jolly rancher. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein in tape:\u003c/b> \u003cb> \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I remember having these in school. It brings me back. Very nostalgic. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Oleksandr created this wall as an homage to Apple, which has always been an inspiration to him. Before the war, he wanted to create a museum full of the company’s products. For now, this wall is a little shrine in the middle of the MacPaw office.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">As a Bay Area resident, it’s kind of funny, being here and seeing traces of where I’m from all over the tech industry here. Granted, Silicon Valley is hugely influential but what surprises me is just how intertwined Silicon Valley and Ukraine’s tech industries are. Like how Iryna of Dzyga’s Paw worked for a San Francisco startup.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And this is not unusual I’m learning. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">For years, tech companies from San Francisco to San Jose have relied on Ukrainian engineers for their technical skills, English fluency, and lower labor costs. Companies like Google, Grammarly (which was founded by Ukrainians), Ring, JetBridge, and Caspio all had employees based in Ukraine when Russia began its full-scale invasion.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">There’s a general cultural ethos here that feels familiar to my Bay Area sensibilities, like the food trucks, ping pong tables, and hoodies I see all over tech campuses in Kyiv. There was one friendship bracelet-wearing tech worker I talk to who tells me all about her recent ayahuasca healing journey in South America. I felt like I was back at home.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And then there are all the personal connections I notice with the Ukrainians I meet. Some worked for Bay Area companies. Or, have friends who live there for work. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And since the war began, these transnational ties have become a quiet but meaningful network of support for Ukraine. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The Silicon Valley–based nonprofit Nova Ukraine, which was co-founded by a former Facebook and Google employee from Kharkiv, has raised over $160 million in humanitarian aid.\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Iryna’s old employer, JustAnswer, \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">has expanded its Ukrainian workforce. It funded a pediatric mental health center in the country as well. Caspio \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">helped relocate dozens of Ukrainian staffers safely out of the country, and\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> continues supporting staff remotely. Sometimes, \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">company Zoom calls will be interrupted by the wail of a siren telling Ukrainian workers to go to a bomb shelter. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">While there’s a lot of overlap between these two parts of the world, the innovation mindset that runs through Ukraine’s tech sector has deep roots. It started long before Steve Jobs or Silicon Valley exploded onto the global scene, like, decades before.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In 1951, when Ukraine was still part of the USSR, engineers on the outskirts of Kyiv developed the first computer in all of Europe. They worked around the clock, under tough conditions, in a crumbling old building that was ravaged by bombing during WWII. The people who made this computer, they’re considered the godfathers of Ukrainian IT. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Here’s Oleksandr again.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Oleksandr Kosovan: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Most of the, uh [inaudible] or IT on that era was actually originated from Ukraine. And um, beside that, there were like so many engineers, like my father was an engineer. There are so, so many great engineers that were working for this industry back then. And, and this basically were like the birth of the modern IT industry in Ukraine. So when the USSR collapsed, this talent and this, uh, uh, knowledge, uh, stayed in, in Ukraine.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> And today, the industry those engineers helped to create now plays a significant role in Ukraine’s economy. In 2024, Ukraine’s IT sector contributed 3.4% to Ukraine’s GDP, behind only the agricultural industry, according to a report published by the IT Association of Ukraine. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Oleksandr Kosovan: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Literally hundreds of thousands of people joined, uh, Ukrainian army. They started to bring their experience and their, like, creative, uh, vision and approach, uh, to the Army. And they started to apply, uh, some changes from, from bottom up. Uh, because, uh, these generals here, they probably know how to, uh, find the war of previous era, uh, but they don’t, uh, definitely understand how they can apply these technologies in order to, to receive some, some advantage. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> To this point, we’ve been mostly talking about the physical battlefield, like drones attacking targets in the real world. But a new frontline has emerged in this war — the internet. And the tools and tactics needed to fight in these spaces look completely different. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Let’s open a new tab. \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[Typing sounds] \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The new digital battlefield.\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Our guide to this world is David Kirichenko, a fellow journalist who splits his time between the U.S. and Ukraine. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>David Kirichenko:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I’m a war journalist and since 2022, I’ve been working on the front lines, um, in Ukraine.\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> But he’s also been reporting on another front: the digital fight between the two countries. Because the information space between Russia and Ukraine has become its own proxy war, with each vying for support at home and abroad.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>David Kirichenko: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It certainly has, I think, a very big impact on what goes on the physical battlefield just from the amount of influence and impact that you can have. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Russia’s a country long known for its sophisticated cyber warfare campaigns. In the current conflict, it’s been deploying vast amounts of disinformation online to weaken support for Ukraine around the world — on social media, fake news sites, even video games. This practice, as David points out, has deep roots, going back to the Cold War.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>David Kirichenko:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Even since the 1980s, the Russians first started out by building like a newspaper in India. It prints a fake story and then you have a, a more slightly more credible one, print that, and then everyone just starts citing it and it circulates around the world. And an MIT study showed that, um, like the fake news it it spreads like six, seven times faster than the truth.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Enter: The Fellas. They’re a niche online community that has come together to fight Russian disinformation. They call themselves the North Atlantic Fellas Organization, or NAFO, for short. And because it’s the internet, their entire social media “army” has adopted the likeness of one very good boy: A Shiba Inu.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The members of this online battalion, who like to be called the Fellas, usually identify themselves on Twitter, or X, with a cartoon Shiba avatar. And they have one major purpose: To take up digital arms against Russian propaganda. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">When a pro-Russian narrative pops up on social media, The Fellas leap into action. Their objective is to distract, mock and debunk the Kremlin’s talking points. Politico called the group “a sh*t posting, Twitter-trolling, dog-deploying social media army taking on Putin one meme at a time.” \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">There are now thousands of Fellas out there in the digital dog fight. They’re an organic phenomenon, borne out of internet culture. And they make anyone who earnestly tries to engage with their trolling look ridiculous. “Oh, you’re fighting with a cartoon Shiba at 3 pm on a Tuesday? Don’t you have anything better to do?”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>David Kirichenko:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> The best way to counter Russia propaganda is by mocking it, ridiculing it, and showing that like, this is how ridiculous it is. And like you just make a joke at it yourself by sharing it. Just the fact that, you know, over the years you had all these high-ranking Russian and then other officials engaging with cartoon dogs on, on Twitter.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">A less cheeky example of digital warfare is the IT Army of Ukraine. They’re a collective of volunteer hackers around the world who coordinate cyber attacks against Russia. They’ve attacked thousands of targets since the war began, from Russian banks to media outlets, and power grids. In June 2024, the group claimed responsibility for a large-scale cyberattack against Russia’s banking system, reportedly causing outages on banking websites, apps, and payment systems. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The IT Army of Ukraine isn’t a traditional military unit. It’s a sprawling, loosely organized network that runs primarily online. They post updates and send communications on their Telegram channel, where they have nearly 115,000 subscribers. They also have a website that lays out more information about their work and how to get involved. One page, for example, is titled: “Instructions for setting up attacks on the enemy country.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">David has also been reporting on this group. The IT Army’s spokesperson told him last year that its volunteer hackers had caused something like a billion dollars in damage from these attacks. David explains the anatomy of an attack.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>David Kirichenko:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> You typically have people that you have the toolkit installed so it doesn’t interfere with your, your Netflix or slow down your internet. You couldn’t set it to, I want to run from like 12:00 AM to 6:00 PM, I’m gonna leave my computer on. So if the IT army, like, runs the botnet and wants to direct an attack, it has the access to the compute to be able to run it and send pings from a lot of different places to overwhelm, um, a system. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And so they like posted the, the toolkit onto their website so anyone’s able to go and, and download it. And it’s pretty, pretty simple to install it. And, uh, all you gotta do is just make sure that your computer is running and contributing your compute power to the botnet so that it’s overwhelming, like services when the attack begins.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I’ve met people that said like, even my 12-year-old child is like doing these, uh, cyber attacks against Russia. They just download the toolkit and, you know, you set, you can even set a timer, allow your computer to participate in this botnet\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But these IT soldiers operate in a legally murky zone. There’s obviously something troubling about kids participating in cyberwar against another country. And, if someone participates in an attack from their couch on the other side of the world, are they breaking any laws?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>David Kirichenko:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> It is a gray space. How do governments prepare to legislate for this. Like, are you a combatant If you’re engaging in like cyber warfare? Are you breaking any laws? Should governments build a cyber reserve or some sort of like legal framework for their, like, people to be able to participate in this stuff? I mean, it, you know what, if you’re in Poland and then you’re conducting some cyber attacks and the Russians are very upset and they can launch a missile and they claim that you’re an enemy combatant. And yeah, just it’s, it’s a very challenging space and for I think lawmakers.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">For all the reasons he just laid out, most of the people I spoke with wouldn’t talk openly about participating in the IT Army. Though one person told me that “literally everyone with a laptop did.” \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Regardless, all these IT Army volunteers are having a real impact, David says. And this theme of a decentralized, grassroots approach as part of Ukraine’s strategy — chaotic with flashes of ingenuity — it keeps coming up. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>David Kirichenko:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> It ties back to Ukraine’s, wider story of, it’s a volunteer driven war effort. Like Ukrainian soldiers across the frontline are just dependent on online communities and, and volunteers. And so just people around the world have had such a big impact, both in information space, getting supplies to soldiers. Um, and one of the other ways has been on the cyber realm. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This grassroots system is pretty much the opposite of how \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Russia\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> does things. Which is centralized, top down, structured. Just a few solutions, scaled across every single military unit. They’re two competing philosophies fueling this technological arms race between Russia and Ukraine. A war of who’s quicker to out-innovate the other side. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>David Kirichenko:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Ukraine is so decentralized, it’s kind of its biggest strength and biggest weaknesses. You have a zoo of solutions of every volunteer group. They’re making, they’re iterating, but then there’s so many different technologies and, and weapons, that everyone’s using different things and it’s hard to standardize, but then it also makes it very effective. But then the Russians learn what’s working and over time they can steer \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">the\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, the whole war machine to focus on a, on a few things, and it’s sharing those lessons. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And no matter how things end, what they’re coming up with is changing what war looks like altogether. With major implications.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>David Kirichenko:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Drones dominate not just the, the frontline itself, but it’s changed like naval warfare. Ukrainians’ naval drones have helped to neutralize a third of Russia’s Black Sea fleet, and they’re basically blockading Russia’s fleet that had to retreat from occupied Crimea. Ukraine has built, right, these ground robots that are becoming like mechanical medics, and the naval drones help shoot down multiple Russian helicopters, a couple of fighter jets. And those two fighter jets that were lost in Mayra, um, each like 50 million. So you can have a sea drone worth like 200, $300,000 with the, uh, missile worth that much or less, shooting down something that’s $50 million.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And so we’re going to continue to see the proliferation of like, cheaper, faster tech. And we gotta learn what, you know, how do we prepare for that?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Erica Hellerstein: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Technology is fundamentally a gray area. It’s built on these bursts of genius and promise, and also shows up in our modern world in dark and scary ways. It’s that first European computer, created out of the ashes of a bombed-out building in the Soviet Union. It’s Silicon Valley revolutionizing the world we now inhabit. For better, in some ways and in many ways, for worse: consolidating power, money, data, and influence, on an unimaginable scale.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And that’s the real story of the geeks of war. There are the lifesaving apps, like Air Alert, Telegram channels with real-time information about missiles and drones, VPNs connecting people in occupied territories to a bigger, broader, information ecosystem- Tools that are keeping people safe, connected and alive.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But there are also new technologies that are killing people, and the potentially catastrophic consequences of cyber saber-rattling. Destroyer drones, yes, they can give an underdog country like Ukraine an edge, but when you stop and think about their capabilities, the damage that can be unleashed with a tool literally anyone can buy for just a few hundred dollars, it’s terrifying. And then of course, there’s cyberwarfare, which can take down a whole country’s infrastructure, cripple power grids, communication networks, financial systems and thrust us all into completely uncharted geopolitical territory. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It reminds me of the early days of social media. When Google was still telling us not to be evil. When social networks were described as a revolutionary, democratizing force, helping to topple authoritarian regimes, organize mass protest, connect people all over the world. But we all know what actually happened was a lot more complicated than Big Tech’s aspirational mottos. The lens flipped. The narrative cracked. And now we’re living on the other side. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So what will be the story we tell about all these tools 10, 20 years from now? The technology we’re seeing in this war is opening up a new frontier. But who knows where it will be deployed next: What it will look like, who it will target. The geeks are showing us the future we just don’t know where it will lead.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung, Host: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Thanks to Erica Hellerstein for her reporting and collaboration on this episode. Erica’s reporting was supported by a fellowship through the International Women’s Media Foundation’s Women on the Ground: Reporting from Ukraine’s Unseen Frontlines Initiative in partnership with the Howard G. Buffett Foundation.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">With that, it’s time to close all these tabs.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Close All Tabs is a production of KQED Studios in San Francisco, and is hosted by me, Morgan Sung.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This episode was produced by Maya Cueva and edited by Chris Egusa, who also composed our theme song and credits music. Additional music by APM. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Chris Hambrick is our editor. Brendan Willard is our audio engineer.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Audience engagement support from Maha Sanad. Jen Chien is KQED’s director of podcasts. Katie Sprenger is our podcast operations manager, and Ethan Toven-Lindsey is our editor in chief.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Some members of the KQED podcast team are represented by the Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, San Francisco, Northern California local.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Keyboard sounds were recorded on my purple and pink dust silver K84 wired mechanical keyboard with Gateron red switches.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">OK, and I know it’s a podcast cliche, but if you like these deep dives and want us to keep making more, it would really help us out if you could rate and review us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to the show.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Thanks for listening.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"#episode-transcript\">\u003ci>View the full episode transcript.\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">When Ubisoft, publisher of the sprawling open-world racing game \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The Crew\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> shut down the game’s servers, cutting off access to even its single-player mode, fans were outraged. The moment tapped into their decades of frustration with the gaming industry’s push toward online-only content — and what some now call the growing epidemic of “game death.” In this episode, host Morgan Sung is joined by Ross Scott, a filmmaker and YouTube creator who launched the “Stop Killing Games” campaign. They’ll cover the push for new regulations requiring publishers to plan for the end of their games’ lifespans. Then, Morgan talks with gaming journalist Nicole Carpenter about the passionate community that formed around the mobile game \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Kim Kardashian: Hollywood\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, and how gamers grieve the loss of their favorite virtual worlds.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c!-- iframe plugin v.4.3 wordpress.org/plugins/iframe/ -->\u003cbr>\n\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" frameborder=\"0\" height=\"200\" scrolling=\"no\" src=\"https://playlist.megaphone.fm?e=KQINC8671440434\" width=\"100%\" class=\"iframe-class\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Guests: \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/@Accursed_Farms\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Ross Scott\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, filmmaker, creator, and founder of the Stop Killing Games movement\u003c/span>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://x.com/sweetpotatoes?lang=en\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Nicole Carpenter\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, freelance reporter\u003c/span>\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Further reading: \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://aftermath.site/anthem-server-shutdown-trying-for-the-first-time-bioware-ea/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">With Anthem’s Impending Server Shutdown, I’m Trying It For The First Time\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> — Nicole Carpenter, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Aftermath\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ci>\u003c/i>\u003ca href=\"https://www.polygon.com/24152760/kim-kardashian-hollywood-glu-mobile-game-legacy/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Kim Kardashian: Hollywood has an unlikely, lasting place in gaming history\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> — Nicole Carpenter, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Polygon\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> \u003c/span>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.pcmag.com/news/stop-killing-games-campaign-closes-in-on-getting-eu-regulators-to-intervene\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">‘Stop Killing Games’ Campaign Closes in on Getting EU Regulators to Intervene\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> — Jon Martindale, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">PC Mag\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ci>\u003c/i>\u003ca href=\"https://theconversation.com/stop-killing-games-demands-for-game-ownership-must-also-include-workers-rights-262774\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">‘Stop Killing Games’: Demands for game ownership must also include workers’ rights\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> — Louis-Etienne Dubois and Miikka J. Lehtonen, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The Conversation\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ci>\u003c/i>\u003ca href=\"https://youtu.be/w70Xc9CStoE?si=-lmbSPUoeyXVYxa1\">The largest campaign ever to stop publishers destroying games\u003c/a> — Ross Scott, \u003ci>Accursed Farms (YouTube) \u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003cp>Want to give us feedback on the show? Shoot us an email at \u003ca href=\"mailto:CloseAllTabs@KQED.org\">CloseAllTabs@KQED.org\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.instagram.com/closealltabspod/\">Follow us on Instagram\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2 id=\"episode-transcript\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/b>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung, Host:\u003c/strong> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In 2014, Ubisoft launched a racing game called The Crew. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[Driving sounds from The Crew video game]\u003c/span>\u003c/i> \u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">All units, there’s a dangerous driver in your area. \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The crew has a real fast and furious vibe to it. You play as a guy who’s been framed for the murder of his brother, who takes a deal with the FBI to infiltrate and take down a corrupt criminal organization. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[Driving sounds from The Crew video game]\u003c/span>\u003c/i> \u003cb>\u003ci> \u003c/i>\u003c/b>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">All units, rollover in place. \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And to work your way to the top, you have to drive a lot. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ross Scott, Guest: \u003c/b>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Driving games, they’re less common as they used to be. So the ones that are good or semi-decent tend to have a lingering fan base now.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This is Ross Scott, a filmmaker who runs the YouTube channel Accursed Farms. He’s also a gamer and was a huge fan of The Crew. The game had an intriguing story, cool missions to complete, and all of these ways to customize your car to make it feel like it’s really yours. But what Ross loved most about the game was the driving. The Crew was an open world game and he spent hours exploring. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ross Scott: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I think it still is the second largest driving game ever made and it contains kind of a miniaturized version of the continental United States where you can literally drive for hours in it and see the different landscapes like the Rockies in the west or swamps in the south. They kind of had miniaturized versions of different cities in there too. So you have San Francisco, LA, New York, Miami. Like, you can go by the Pentagon and you can go by Mount Rushmore. It’s exactly the sort of game you would hope to see from a big company with lots of resources to throw at something. It is just so huge.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But, there is this one aspect of the game that always bugged Ross. You needed an internet connection to play, which meant that The Crew would only remain playable as long as Ubisoft kept its servers running, even in single player mode. That meant that if the company ever decided to pull the plug, the game would be dead. \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cb>Ross Scott: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Literally no one can ever play it again. It’s just not even possible no matter how much you do want to play it. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And that’s exactly what happened to The Crew. In the spring of 2024, about a decade after launching the game, Ubisoft shut down the crew’s servers. The company said that the shutdown was due to, “upcoming server infrastructure and licensing constraints.” Most of the time, when a product is discontinued, it’s removed from the shelves. But if you already owned that product, you can generally keep using it. But in this case, Ubisoft made it impossible to play The Crew at all. The company even revoked digital licenses for the game, preventing players from setting up private servers, which would have allowed them to continue playing. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">As a seasoned gamer, Ross knew that The Crew was fragile and susceptible to game death, but it didn’t make the shutdown any less infuriating. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ross Scott: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The closest real world analogy I can think of would be printers. Say you buy a printer for your computer, but then after two years it just stops. And then you find out, oh, that’s because it was connecting to the server. Well, it still has ink. It can still run, I mean, physically run, but it just won’t print anything because it was depending on that signal from the company. And they just decided to cut it and you can’t use your printer now. That’s essentially what’s happening with these games. And they can say, well, we designed it that way. It’s like, yeah, but you didn’t have to, and it’s still very capable of printing things without you doing this. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">As someone who started gaming decades ago, Ross has experienced game death over and over again. The Crew was his last straw and spurred him to start the Stop Killing Games movement, which has sparked global debate about the issue.\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In today’s episode, we’re exploring what happens when games die, how the industry got here, why gamers are up in arms about it, and whether there’s any right way to let a game die gracefully. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This is Close All Tabs. I’m Morgan Sung, tech journalist and your chronically online friend, here to open as many browser tabs as it takes to help you understand how the digital world affects our real lives. Let’s get into it. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Let’s open a new tab. How do games die? \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">To get to the bottom of this, we’re calling up an industry expert, Nicole Carpenter. She’s a journalist who’s been covering the games industry for years. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So to start off, like, what goes into the decision to take a game offline? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Nicole Carpenter, Guest: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">You know, let me take a step back. Because when we’re talking about games that are being taken offline, we’re taking about games that are multiplayer, usually, and online games, so games with an online component. Like, a game that you purchased for the Nintendo 64 back in the day, that game’s always gonna be there. But for a game with an on-line component, it relies on servers that the company controls, and they can take those servers down at any time they want. And usually, it’s related to money. When a game has a player base that is really small or a game that isn’t generating enough money to make it worth it for the corporation that is running this game, that’s often when you will see a game go offline. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yeah, let’s look at one specific game as a case study and it’s one that I really loved like, when it first launched: Kim Kardashian Hollywood. Kim Kardashian Hollywood was a free-to-play mobile game set in a cartoon version of Los Angeles. Once you level up enough and pay real-world money for in-game perks, you could take your private jet around the world, photoshoots in Paris, vacationing in Bora Bora, Fashion Week in New York. You get the idea. It was an animated slice of the real Kim Kardashian’s life. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Nicole Carpenter: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This game was about rising through the Hollywood rankings. You’re trying to get to the A list, but you’re like really far down in the alphabet. You meet Kim Kardashian.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[Sounds from Kim Kardashian: Hollywood] I need something cute but super quick. Can you help me find something? I could really use your help. \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cb>Nicole Carpenter: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And she helps you like rise through the influencer, social media celebrity ranking.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[Sounds from Kim Kardashian: Hollywood]: This is super cute. Thank you so much for your help.\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Nicole Carpenter: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The game was based around a storyline that follows you throughout that journey, but it was also largely about fashion, collecting fashion items, and building up this amazing library of clothes… \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[Sounds from Kim Kardashian: Hollywood]: You look stunning. Welcome to the A-List!\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Nicole Carpenter: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">…doing it you know with Kim Kardashian as your best friend. It was interesting because it was tapping into culture. You could go on dates, photoshoots. You can visit your friends, and it got frequent updates and it referenced things that were happening in the world, both in Kim Kardashian’s life, but also just kind of like cultural moments as as well. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I remember they responded like in real time to real-world fashion trends like when off-the-shoulder tops were in they had off- the-shoulders tops in Kim Kardashian Hollywood. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Nicole Carpenter:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yeah. A thing that was also really interesting about this game is that it was funny. It kind of saw how ridiculous, absurd this idea is. You know, you’re Kim Kardashian’s best friend. It’s very self-aware in its humor. And that was another draw for people, is that it was really earnest, but it was also self- aware. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yeah, it was like, playing on this kind of parasocial relationship with like, Kim Kardashian, the real person, and then also Kim Kardashian your in-game friend. Yeah. What was the emotional investment here? Like, why were people so into this game beyond the fashion and the glam of Kim Kardashian? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Nicole Carpenter: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">For a game that updates so frequently, it becomes like a ritualized experience and you are coming into this day knowing that like, there are going to be things for you to do and to check off on this game. And so it really becomes embedded in a person’s life in a way, because you expect there’s something new to do in that game. And I think that is part of what made this game such a big part of people’s lives is because it became that sort of daily habit. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[Kim Kardashian:Hollywood player 1] When I tell you I am a A plus plus plus member in the top 100 of the game world, number 11, if we want to be exact, 595.7 million fans. Baby, I take this game very seriously. \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cb>Nicole Carpenter: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">There’s also the community around it. Kim Kardashian: Hollywood is not a multiplayer game, but online, a community built around it, people who are sharing the creations that they made, sharing their fashion, talking about the storylines, talking about the characters, and you’re able to build a community from something like, that isn’t multiplayer game. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yeah. Players were, you know, getting emotionally attached to the game, but they also, to get all these outfits, to get these fun little accessories, they had to spend real money. Can you talk about the kind of like monetary investment people were making into this game? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Nicole Carpenter: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">People were spending a lot of money. People were spending thousands of dollars on this sort of thing. And the fashion was compelling enough that it was worth it for a lot of people and they spent so much. This game generated hundreds of millions of dollars. I believe the total was around $600 million over the course of its lifetime, maybe more. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Despite making so much money, in 2024, the studio decided to shut down Kim Kardashian: Hollywood. Nicole said it was a combination of diminishing returns, a complicated licensing agreement with Kim Kardashian herself, and a larger move away from mobile gaming by the parent Studio EA.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Nicole Carpenter: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">When it was announced that this game was going offline, the community was so, so sad. One of the things that popped up almost instantly was people creating funeral outfits. People were creating like the most fabulous, amazing, all-black, just like, funeral garb to wear to the Kim Kardashian: Hollywood funeral. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[Kim Kardashian:Hollywood player 2] Kim Kardashian, are you okay with this? What is going on? Please do not take this game. What am I supposed to do? \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[Kim Kardashian:Hollywood player 3] Because I worked hard to get to level 26 and it’s being ripped away from me. \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[Kim Kardashian:Hollywood player 4] \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">When I tell you I have invested so much time and money, it’s ridiculous. I have purchased so many outfits, jewelry, makeup, blemish, all of that. Kim, I need my money back or you can send me my outfits in the mail, whichever one you prefer. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Nicole Carpenter: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The community was devastated. They were so devastated that some people immediately started spinning up like, so where are we going next? What game are we moving on to? Some fans are even working on creating a new game to replace Kim Kardashian: Hollywood. I mean, let’s talk about the industry factors here in taking a game offline. Who’s making this decision to pull the plug? I would say it’s a mixture of the publishers and developers that are making these decisions and that for the majority of games, it is largely coming down to: is this making enough money to make the cost of the servers worth it? And a lot of the times they have been running these servers for years, like decades, and the player base has diminished. In other cases, these games have been running for weeks and the players have diminished and they pull the plug.\u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It seems like now a lot of games are taken offline before they even have a chance to like build a fanbase. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Nicole Carpenter:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yeah, yeah. There’s one game that came out recently, it’s called Concord, and it just didn’t hit with people. It was released and it never had that surge of players and just immediately started declining. It was turned off weeks into its release. I’m not sure why you would shut a game down after just weeks, you know, it it’s kind of ridiculous because there isn’t even a chance for the developers to improve a game, to make patches, to keep updating a game. Because there are instances where a game is released, it is released poorly, and then it can gain an audience back. And for a game like Concord, it shut down just weeks after. There isn’t even that chance. Games take a really long time to make, and there’s a lot of money that goes into that as well and for that to get thrown away so quickly without giving it a chance is like, pretty sad. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Like Nicole explained, there are a lot of industry factors that affect whether or not a game stays online. And now the odds are stacked against any new game that has to compete in this market. Is game death inevitable? Is there any way to future-proof our favorite online games? We’ll try to answer those questions after the break. Okay, we’re back. So, is game death inevitable? Well, the tides may finally be turning against the practice of pulling the plug on games. Time for a new tab. What is Stop Killing Games? For the most part, the issue of game death boils down to something called digital rights management, or DRM. We don’t technically own digital downloads, and even if you paid for it, your access to this content can be revoked at the whims of publishers. This goes for e-books, digital movies, TV shows, and, of course, games. And this DRM issue really bothers Ross, the YouTuber we heard from earlier. He says it wasn’t always like this.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ross Scott:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So the transition where things really started shifting, in my opinion, I think was around 2004, 2005. That’s when you could buy games as a one-time purchase, but then you would still have to connect to the publisher in order for it to run. You don’t own the contents of what’s on the disk, you just own the piece of plastic. I’d say around the mid-2000s is when you started seeing a shift that, no, even if you bought that game, even if it was a physical copy at some point in the future, it became impossible to play it. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Ross was upset when The Crew shut down, but he wasn’t surprised. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ross Scott:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Me liking the game was actually just a coincidence. I would have done this for any game because this issue has bothered me for a long time.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">He has been sounding the alarm since 2019, when he went viral with a video essay about game ownership.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[Ross Scott in Youtube Speech]: Now I’ll warn you, this video is gonna be long and could get boring in spots, but it’s necessary. See, this is my declaration of war on games as a service.\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Games as a service, or live service games, are typically online only, include microtransactions or subscription fees, and are continuously updated with new features. But what it really boils down to is the fact that players don’t control their access to the game. They depend on the company to keep it afloat. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Ross posted that video six years ago, and he was already fed up back then. By the time Ubisoft killed The Crew, after years of watching beloved games bite the dust. He was ready to fight back. In April of last year, right after The Crew went down for good, Ross launched a campaign he called Stop Killing Games.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ross Scott: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Stop Killing Games has been me just trying to work backwards from my conclusion, which is, I want to try and stop games being effectively killed this way. This was not hardly the first game that this sort of thing had happened to, but…\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Earlier this year, Ross and a handful of Stop Killing Games volunteers conducted an informal report on the playability of 731 online-only games. Of those 731 games, nearly 70% were either dead or at risk of game death because publishers had no public plans for preserving them. The Crew is just one of many in a long line of dead and potentially doomed games. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ross Scott: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I realized if we don’t act on this game, yeah, there’s gonna be others, but this is about as good as it gets to try and test this because it was a relatively large game. It had, I think, a maximum of 12 million owners. It was also kind of black and white what happened where no one could run it again. Just the whole thing was gone. And the publisher was located in France, which has many more consumer protection laws than many other countries. So it would kind of maximize our chances that something could be done about it. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">He posted his campaign manifesto on YouTube. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[Ross Scott in Youtube Speech] Honestly, everything about what I’ve been doing has been an amateur effort. I don’t even want to be doing this. But if you care about this issue, I’m what you’re stuck with, because nobody else has stepped up. And I guess there is one thing that makes me a good candidate for this, and that, at least with me, you’re getting maximum hustle. I have decades worth of resentment on this issue. \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Stop Killing Games started as a website, guiding gamers on how to petition their local governments and hold game companies to a higher standard. Then it became a movement. \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cb>Ross Scott:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I realized that we could try to submit this to consumer protection agencies in various countries because it had so many players. We could still get, we did end up getting several thousand complaints sent. That meant a lot of people still had proof of purchase of it. I kind of saw this as my only chance, momentum-wise, to do anything about this. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Stop Killing Games organized government petitions and consumer agency complaints in Canada, the UK, Australia, and throughout Europe. They’ve had mixed results introducing legislation, but they might have some actual movement in the EU. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ross Scott: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The big one ended up being a European citizens initiative where if enough people signed it, then that could be brought before the EU commission to create new law on it. I called it the moonshot. I wasn’t sure if it was realistic or not. And we ended up passing the signature threshold and now it’s kind of going through the government procedures. And I’m somewhat optimistic because if this practice of you know selling someone a game, then disabling it at an undisclosed date later, but keeping the money, if that was all completely legal, it’s been over a year since we submitted that. I would think they’d be able to give an answer by now saying, sorry, but this is lawful and you don’t have any case on this. I think what’s happening is this is a giant gray area in the law and they’re trying to unravel it all. If you have no idea how long a game you’re buying is going to last, I think that’s pretty relevant information. Because the span of online-only games, the shortest we’re aware of was a game called The Culling 2. It lasted eight days before shutting down. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Oh, wow. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ross Scott:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And the longest that was made as a one-time purchase, so, you know, not a subscription, is Guild Wars, which is still going. So if you bought the disk in 2005 and never got around to playing it, you can still play it now, even though it’s online only. So that’s no standard at all for what consumer expectations are. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">How did other people respond to you saying like, hey, we should do something about this? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ross Scott: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I think the majority of people thought, yeah, that’s a good idea because it’s kind of common sense that if you buy something, you should be able to keep it. This was never really codified in the laws, whether this was legal. It’s just that it had never been tested. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It seems like the most potential for real legislation here is in the EU. Do you think that could work in the US? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ross Scott: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I have talked to some US lawyers on it, they all agree that the only way to fix this is through an act of Congress. So I’m pretty pessimistic about being able to influence anything along those lines. That said, I think most of the world will get the benefits downstream if we win in a big enough country. Like, there’s actually a real world example of this sort of thing. In 2014, Australia’s consumer protection agency sued Valve for not allowing refunds of games people bought on Steam. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Valve started as a game developer and now owns Steam, the biggest digital platform for PC games. It’s where the majority of PC games are bought and sold, all digitally. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ross Scott:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Valve lost that case so afterwards, rather than just allowing Australians to refund their games, they just made that global policy because I think they just didn’t want to deal with this in more countries and have more legal fees. And now that’s kind of common practice that you can refund a game if you only played a five minutes or something like that. The cost of basically not destroying a game and having some sort of end of life plan for it once the company’s done does not have to be that much if it’s planned for from the beginning. It’s just one step out of hundreds of making a game. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So I think what would happen is if they realize that there’s gonna be fines or some penalty for not having that, if they wanna sell in the EU, which has something like 450 million people. It’s a sizable market. We’ll decide, okay, when we shut down the game, we’ll release an end of life patch so people can keep playing it, but we don’t have to support anything. They may as well roll it out globally afterwards. So just because they’ll have already done the work on it. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It doesn’t always have to be this way. Since Ross and the Stop Killing Games volunteers put together that playability report, they found that over 250 games survived after publishers took them offline. Let’s talk about these possible solutions in a new tab. Is there life after game death? That playability report from Ross and the Stop Killing Games volunteers, they found that over 230 games survived because of fan preservation projects. Another 30 are still playable thanks to their developers making end-of-life plans. What does that really mean? What does end- of-life care for a game look like? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ross Scott: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Our initiative is structured this way in that we’re actually trying to leave maximum flexibility to publishers and developers and how they solve it. Every game is different. If there’s just one thing to do, it’s have an end-of-life plan for when you have to end support to the game so that it’s not impossible to play it. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Now, the most common way to do that might be to just, if it’s a single-player one, have an offline mode. If it’s smaller scale game, maybe allow like, private servers that people can host. If it was a big complex one, like an MMO, then maybe having something where they release like a version of the server software that customers can maybe run separately. But we’re not mandating any one solution, but just realize that you won’t be able to support your game forever. That’s kind of inevitable. And as long as that’s planned for, it really doesn’t become a problem. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Most games are already compliant with what we’re asking for. And ironically, a lot of online multiplayer games from the late 90s, early 2000s are still playable today, even if the companies don’t exist anymore, because they planned ahead for that. This is not some undiscovered formula for how to do this. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Gamers get a bad rap for being reactive and angry and complaining all the time. Sometimes it’s deserved. They can be annoying. And sometimes all that complaining can be channeled into something actually productive, like changing the games industry. In the meantime, there are some smaller efforts underway to make it more clear to customers whether the game they’re buying could eventually go away, like The Crew did. Here’s Nicole again. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Nicole Carpenter: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">If you’re playing a game that has a single player component, usually if the multiplayer component goes away, you can still access the single player. The Crew didn’t have that at all. So for people who purchased this game after it was released in 2014, there’s no more access there. This comes down to a problem with the idea of licensing versus ownership. So when you are buying a game with an online component, you are licensing the game and you are not outright purchasing it. So you are paying the company for access and they can take that away at any time. And so there has been a movement to change some laws, specifically in California, when you’re buying a game there has to be some kind of like a label that’s like you don’t own this you’re licensing it. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">As of January this year, California law requires digital stores, like game platforms such as Steam, to disclose what the buyer is really getting when they pay for something. They can’t prompt you to buy or purchase a game if you’re only getting a license that can be yanked back at any time. Do you think a, like, “you don’t own this” kind of label on a game is satisfying to players?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Nicole Carpenter:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Oh, absolutely not. Like it’s not satisfying to players at all. Like, people want it to be like it used to be like, when you buy something, you own it. It’s a problem with ebooks. It’s a problem with music. It’s problem with the games collectively, like in your Steam library. I wrote a story about, you know, where do your Steam games go when you die because of these licensing issues. That you’d like legally can’t pass those games down to anyone, you know, they’re just like stuck in your account because they’re yours, not theirs. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">That’s bleak.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Nicole Carpenter: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I know. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Is there any way for companies to let games die gracefully? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Nicole Carpenter: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I do think there is. I don’t know, however, if big corporations are willing to do the things necessary to allow this to happen. Some players are hoping that studios and developers could go open source and so like, hand over some of the file’s code arts to the player base because if they’re not going to invest into it anymore, you know, they’re necessarily like, losing out on money by going open source, um, and so handing it over to like, a dedicated fan base could be a way to keep those servers running at like no additional cost to the developer. And that is a possibility. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But if fans are crafty enough, they might be able to figure out how to keep playing their favorite games, even if publishers aren’t cooperating. And that’s what happened with The Crew. Players have recently reverse engineered the digital key that unlocks the game. As of September this year, the game is back. It’s not exactly the same, but this fan effort managed to breathe new life into a game that was previously dead. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ross Scott:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This is the exception to the rule, and I’m thankful it has happened. What’s really going on with most of these games is a whole lot of the content is on the customer system or their disk or, you know, like the textures, models, sounds, and everything. And usually the part that’s held by the company is code for kind of managing how that all connects and it’s runs. So it’s kind of like having a locked car in your garage and you can’t get open, but they have the keys. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yeah.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ross Scott: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And what will happen sometimes is you have these, honestly, geniuses reverse engineering how that game worked and trying to take their best guess at figuring it out. This almost always takes years of work with people who really know what they’re doing, they’re experts in the field. I’ve compared it to like reconstructing a photograph from the ashes that has been burned. But sometimes with enough time and effort, they can do it. In fact, in one video, I compared it to trying to crack the code the Germans were doing at World War II in terms of complexity, only to have people comment saying, no, it’s more complicated than that. A group that’s been working on it a little under two years managed to do that for The Crew, and now it is back. If you bought the original for PC, you can run it again now, offline and online. It’s the sort of thing where it took them a little over two years, and that’s honestly a best-case scenario. If they had access to the relevant code, they probably could have done it in a day or two. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I mean, it’s incredible that they were able to reverse engineer this. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ross Scott: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Honestly, I think it’s gonna be an even better experience than when it was being supported because now it also allows for lots of modifications to it. And there were things I wanted like adjusting the field of view or brighter headlights in the game. Whereas if you were to do that when it’s being supported, that would be detected as a hack because it is. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Is there still more work left to be done in keeping games alive? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ross Scott: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I never really wanted to be doing any of this. I’m just trying to do as much as I can to try to stop this practice and then just kind of be done with it. I guess I am glad that it seems like we’re not in the minority that people don’t like seeing things they’ve bought destroyed. It can feel like a Twilight Zone episode sometimes where you have to convince people that no, maybe this isn’t a good practice to just destroy things that you pay for when we can prevent it. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In some rare cases, there is life after death, game death, at least. But for the majority of online games that shut down without an end of life plan, the best we can do is mourn them. Sometimes that looks like fondly watching old gameplay footage on YouTube. Or it might look like slaying a funeral fit and sharing screenshots with other players on Reddit. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Today, it’s a memorial segment at the end of your favorite podcast. Let’s take a moment to remember a few of the games that didn’t survive and the games that are on their way out: The Sims Mobile, Anthem, Battleborn, Concord, Babylon’s Fall, Dear Hunter Classic, House of Newerth, Overwatch 1, MapleStory 2, Skyforge, and the one and only Kim Kardashian: Hollywood. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Let’s close all these tabs. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Close All Tabs is a production of KQED Studios and is reported and hosted by me, Morgan Sung. This episode was produced by Francesca Fenzi and edited by Chris Egusa. Close All tabs producer is Maya Cueva. Chris Hambrick is our editor. Chris Egusa is our senior editor and composed our theme song and credits music. Additional music by APM. Brendan Willard is our audio engineer. Audience engagement support from Maha Sanad. Jen Chien is KQED’s Director of Podcasts. Katie Springer is our podcast operations manager, and Ethan Toven-Lindsey is our editor-in-chief. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Some members of the KQED podcast team are represented by the Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, San Francisco, Northern California Local. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Keyboard sounds were recorded on my purple and pink dust silver K84 wired mechanical keyboard with Gateron red switches. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Okay, and I know it’s a podcast cliche, but if you like these deep dives and want us to keep making more. It would really help us out if you could rate and review us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to the show. Don’t forget to drop a comment and tell your friends, too, or even your enemies or frenemies. And if you really like Close All Tabs and want to support public media, go to donate.kqed.org/podcasts. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Thanks for listening. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp> \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"#episode-transcript\">\u003ci>View the full episode transcript.\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">When Ubisoft, publisher of the sprawling open-world racing game \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The Crew\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> shut down the game’s servers, cutting off access to even its single-player mode, fans were outraged. The moment tapped into their decades of frustration with the gaming industry’s push toward online-only content — and what some now call the growing epidemic of “game death.” In this episode, host Morgan Sung is joined by Ross Scott, a filmmaker and YouTube creator who launched the “Stop Killing Games” campaign. They’ll cover the push for new regulations requiring publishers to plan for the end of their games’ lifespans. Then, Morgan talks with gaming journalist Nicole Carpenter about the passionate community that formed around the mobile game \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Kim Kardashian: Hollywood\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, and how gamers grieve the loss of their favorite virtual worlds.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c!-- iframe plugin v.4.3 wordpress.org/plugins/iframe/ -->\u003cbr>\n\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" frameborder=\"0\" height=\"200\" scrolling=\"no\" src=\"https://playlist.megaphone.fm?e=KQINC8671440434\" width=\"100%\" class=\"iframe-class\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Guests: \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/@Accursed_Farms\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Ross Scott\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, filmmaker, creator, and founder of the Stop Killing Games movement\u003c/span>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://x.com/sweetpotatoes?lang=en\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Nicole Carpenter\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, freelance reporter\u003c/span>\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Further reading: \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://aftermath.site/anthem-server-shutdown-trying-for-the-first-time-bioware-ea/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">With Anthem’s Impending Server Shutdown, I’m Trying It For The First Time\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> — Nicole Carpenter, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Aftermath\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ci>\u003c/i>\u003ca href=\"https://www.polygon.com/24152760/kim-kardashian-hollywood-glu-mobile-game-legacy/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Kim Kardashian: Hollywood has an unlikely, lasting place in gaming history\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> — Nicole Carpenter, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Polygon\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> \u003c/span>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.pcmag.com/news/stop-killing-games-campaign-closes-in-on-getting-eu-regulators-to-intervene\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">‘Stop Killing Games’ Campaign Closes in on Getting EU Regulators to Intervene\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> — Jon Martindale, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">PC Mag\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ci>\u003c/i>\u003ca href=\"https://theconversation.com/stop-killing-games-demands-for-game-ownership-must-also-include-workers-rights-262774\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">‘Stop Killing Games’: Demands for game ownership must also include workers’ rights\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> — Louis-Etienne Dubois and Miikka J. Lehtonen, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The Conversation\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ci>\u003c/i>\u003ca href=\"https://youtu.be/w70Xc9CStoE?si=-lmbSPUoeyXVYxa1\">The largest campaign ever to stop publishers destroying games\u003c/a> — Ross Scott, \u003ci>Accursed Farms (YouTube) \u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003cp>Want to give us feedback on the show? Shoot us an email at \u003ca href=\"mailto:CloseAllTabs@KQED.org\">CloseAllTabs@KQED.org\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.instagram.com/closealltabspod/\">Follow us on Instagram\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2 id=\"episode-transcript\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/b>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung, Host:\u003c/strong> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In 2014, Ubisoft launched a racing game called The Crew. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[Driving sounds from The Crew video game]\u003c/span>\u003c/i> \u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">All units, there’s a dangerous driver in your area. \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The crew has a real fast and furious vibe to it. You play as a guy who’s been framed for the murder of his brother, who takes a deal with the FBI to infiltrate and take down a corrupt criminal organization. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[Driving sounds from The Crew video game]\u003c/span>\u003c/i> \u003cb>\u003ci> \u003c/i>\u003c/b>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">All units, rollover in place. \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And to work your way to the top, you have to drive a lot. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ross Scott, Guest: \u003c/b>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Driving games, they’re less common as they used to be. So the ones that are good or semi-decent tend to have a lingering fan base now.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This is Ross Scott, a filmmaker who runs the YouTube channel Accursed Farms. He’s also a gamer and was a huge fan of The Crew. The game had an intriguing story, cool missions to complete, and all of these ways to customize your car to make it feel like it’s really yours. But what Ross loved most about the game was the driving. The Crew was an open world game and he spent hours exploring. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ross Scott: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I think it still is the second largest driving game ever made and it contains kind of a miniaturized version of the continental United States where you can literally drive for hours in it and see the different landscapes like the Rockies in the west or swamps in the south. They kind of had miniaturized versions of different cities in there too. So you have San Francisco, LA, New York, Miami. Like, you can go by the Pentagon and you can go by Mount Rushmore. It’s exactly the sort of game you would hope to see from a big company with lots of resources to throw at something. It is just so huge.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But, there is this one aspect of the game that always bugged Ross. You needed an internet connection to play, which meant that The Crew would only remain playable as long as Ubisoft kept its servers running, even in single player mode. That meant that if the company ever decided to pull the plug, the game would be dead. \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cb>Ross Scott: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Literally no one can ever play it again. It’s just not even possible no matter how much you do want to play it. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And that’s exactly what happened to The Crew. In the spring of 2024, about a decade after launching the game, Ubisoft shut down the crew’s servers. The company said that the shutdown was due to, “upcoming server infrastructure and licensing constraints.” Most of the time, when a product is discontinued, it’s removed from the shelves. But if you already owned that product, you can generally keep using it. But in this case, Ubisoft made it impossible to play The Crew at all. The company even revoked digital licenses for the game, preventing players from setting up private servers, which would have allowed them to continue playing. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">As a seasoned gamer, Ross knew that The Crew was fragile and susceptible to game death, but it didn’t make the shutdown any less infuriating. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ross Scott: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The closest real world analogy I can think of would be printers. Say you buy a printer for your computer, but then after two years it just stops. And then you find out, oh, that’s because it was connecting to the server. Well, it still has ink. It can still run, I mean, physically run, but it just won’t print anything because it was depending on that signal from the company. And they just decided to cut it and you can’t use your printer now. That’s essentially what’s happening with these games. And they can say, well, we designed it that way. It’s like, yeah, but you didn’t have to, and it’s still very capable of printing things without you doing this. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">As someone who started gaming decades ago, Ross has experienced game death over and over again. The Crew was his last straw and spurred him to start the Stop Killing Games movement, which has sparked global debate about the issue.\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In today’s episode, we’re exploring what happens when games die, how the industry got here, why gamers are up in arms about it, and whether there’s any right way to let a game die gracefully. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This is Close All Tabs. I’m Morgan Sung, tech journalist and your chronically online friend, here to open as many browser tabs as it takes to help you understand how the digital world affects our real lives. Let’s get into it. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Let’s open a new tab. How do games die? \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">To get to the bottom of this, we’re calling up an industry expert, Nicole Carpenter. She’s a journalist who’s been covering the games industry for years. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So to start off, like, what goes into the decision to take a game offline? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Nicole Carpenter, Guest: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">You know, let me take a step back. Because when we’re talking about games that are being taken offline, we’re taking about games that are multiplayer, usually, and online games, so games with an online component. Like, a game that you purchased for the Nintendo 64 back in the day, that game’s always gonna be there. But for a game with an on-line component, it relies on servers that the company controls, and they can take those servers down at any time they want. And usually, it’s related to money. When a game has a player base that is really small or a game that isn’t generating enough money to make it worth it for the corporation that is running this game, that’s often when you will see a game go offline. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yeah, let’s look at one specific game as a case study and it’s one that I really loved like, when it first launched: Kim Kardashian Hollywood. Kim Kardashian Hollywood was a free-to-play mobile game set in a cartoon version of Los Angeles. Once you level up enough and pay real-world money for in-game perks, you could take your private jet around the world, photoshoots in Paris, vacationing in Bora Bora, Fashion Week in New York. You get the idea. It was an animated slice of the real Kim Kardashian’s life. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Nicole Carpenter: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This game was about rising through the Hollywood rankings. You’re trying to get to the A list, but you’re like really far down in the alphabet. You meet Kim Kardashian.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[Sounds from Kim Kardashian: Hollywood] I need something cute but super quick. Can you help me find something? I could really use your help. \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cb>Nicole Carpenter: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And she helps you like rise through the influencer, social media celebrity ranking.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[Sounds from Kim Kardashian: Hollywood]: This is super cute. Thank you so much for your help.\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Nicole Carpenter: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The game was based around a storyline that follows you throughout that journey, but it was also largely about fashion, collecting fashion items, and building up this amazing library of clothes… \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[Sounds from Kim Kardashian: Hollywood]: You look stunning. Welcome to the A-List!\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Nicole Carpenter: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">…doing it you know with Kim Kardashian as your best friend. It was interesting because it was tapping into culture. You could go on dates, photoshoots. You can visit your friends, and it got frequent updates and it referenced things that were happening in the world, both in Kim Kardashian’s life, but also just kind of like cultural moments as as well. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I remember they responded like in real time to real-world fashion trends like when off-the-shoulder tops were in they had off- the-shoulders tops in Kim Kardashian Hollywood. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Nicole Carpenter:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yeah. A thing that was also really interesting about this game is that it was funny. It kind of saw how ridiculous, absurd this idea is. You know, you’re Kim Kardashian’s best friend. It’s very self-aware in its humor. And that was another draw for people, is that it was really earnest, but it was also self- aware. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yeah, it was like, playing on this kind of parasocial relationship with like, Kim Kardashian, the real person, and then also Kim Kardashian your in-game friend. Yeah. What was the emotional investment here? Like, why were people so into this game beyond the fashion and the glam of Kim Kardashian? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Nicole Carpenter: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">For a game that updates so frequently, it becomes like a ritualized experience and you are coming into this day knowing that like, there are going to be things for you to do and to check off on this game. And so it really becomes embedded in a person’s life in a way, because you expect there’s something new to do in that game. And I think that is part of what made this game such a big part of people’s lives is because it became that sort of daily habit. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[Kim Kardashian:Hollywood player 1] When I tell you I am a A plus plus plus member in the top 100 of the game world, number 11, if we want to be exact, 595.7 million fans. Baby, I take this game very seriously. \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cb>Nicole Carpenter: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">There’s also the community around it. Kim Kardashian: Hollywood is not a multiplayer game, but online, a community built around it, people who are sharing the creations that they made, sharing their fashion, talking about the storylines, talking about the characters, and you’re able to build a community from something like, that isn’t multiplayer game. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yeah. Players were, you know, getting emotionally attached to the game, but they also, to get all these outfits, to get these fun little accessories, they had to spend real money. Can you talk about the kind of like monetary investment people were making into this game? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Nicole Carpenter: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">People were spending a lot of money. People were spending thousands of dollars on this sort of thing. And the fashion was compelling enough that it was worth it for a lot of people and they spent so much. This game generated hundreds of millions of dollars. I believe the total was around $600 million over the course of its lifetime, maybe more. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Despite making so much money, in 2024, the studio decided to shut down Kim Kardashian: Hollywood. Nicole said it was a combination of diminishing returns, a complicated licensing agreement with Kim Kardashian herself, and a larger move away from mobile gaming by the parent Studio EA.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Nicole Carpenter: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">When it was announced that this game was going offline, the community was so, so sad. One of the things that popped up almost instantly was people creating funeral outfits. People were creating like the most fabulous, amazing, all-black, just like, funeral garb to wear to the Kim Kardashian: Hollywood funeral. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[Kim Kardashian:Hollywood player 2] Kim Kardashian, are you okay with this? What is going on? Please do not take this game. What am I supposed to do? \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[Kim Kardashian:Hollywood player 3] Because I worked hard to get to level 26 and it’s being ripped away from me. \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[Kim Kardashian:Hollywood player 4] \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">When I tell you I have invested so much time and money, it’s ridiculous. I have purchased so many outfits, jewelry, makeup, blemish, all of that. Kim, I need my money back or you can send me my outfits in the mail, whichever one you prefer. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Nicole Carpenter: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The community was devastated. They were so devastated that some people immediately started spinning up like, so where are we going next? What game are we moving on to? Some fans are even working on creating a new game to replace Kim Kardashian: Hollywood. I mean, let’s talk about the industry factors here in taking a game offline. Who’s making this decision to pull the plug? I would say it’s a mixture of the publishers and developers that are making these decisions and that for the majority of games, it is largely coming down to: is this making enough money to make the cost of the servers worth it? And a lot of the times they have been running these servers for years, like decades, and the player base has diminished. In other cases, these games have been running for weeks and the players have diminished and they pull the plug.\u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It seems like now a lot of games are taken offline before they even have a chance to like build a fanbase. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Nicole Carpenter:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yeah, yeah. There’s one game that came out recently, it’s called Concord, and it just didn’t hit with people. It was released and it never had that surge of players and just immediately started declining. It was turned off weeks into its release. I’m not sure why you would shut a game down after just weeks, you know, it it’s kind of ridiculous because there isn’t even a chance for the developers to improve a game, to make patches, to keep updating a game. Because there are instances where a game is released, it is released poorly, and then it can gain an audience back. And for a game like Concord, it shut down just weeks after. There isn’t even that chance. Games take a really long time to make, and there’s a lot of money that goes into that as well and for that to get thrown away so quickly without giving it a chance is like, pretty sad. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Like Nicole explained, there are a lot of industry factors that affect whether or not a game stays online. And now the odds are stacked against any new game that has to compete in this market. Is game death inevitable? Is there any way to future-proof our favorite online games? We’ll try to answer those questions after the break. Okay, we’re back. So, is game death inevitable? Well, the tides may finally be turning against the practice of pulling the plug on games. Time for a new tab. What is Stop Killing Games? For the most part, the issue of game death boils down to something called digital rights management, or DRM. We don’t technically own digital downloads, and even if you paid for it, your access to this content can be revoked at the whims of publishers. This goes for e-books, digital movies, TV shows, and, of course, games. And this DRM issue really bothers Ross, the YouTuber we heard from earlier. He says it wasn’t always like this.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ross Scott:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So the transition where things really started shifting, in my opinion, I think was around 2004, 2005. That’s when you could buy games as a one-time purchase, but then you would still have to connect to the publisher in order for it to run. You don’t own the contents of what’s on the disk, you just own the piece of plastic. I’d say around the mid-2000s is when you started seeing a shift that, no, even if you bought that game, even if it was a physical copy at some point in the future, it became impossible to play it. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Ross was upset when The Crew shut down, but he wasn’t surprised. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ross Scott:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Me liking the game was actually just a coincidence. I would have done this for any game because this issue has bothered me for a long time.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">He has been sounding the alarm since 2019, when he went viral with a video essay about game ownership.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[Ross Scott in Youtube Speech]: Now I’ll warn you, this video is gonna be long and could get boring in spots, but it’s necessary. See, this is my declaration of war on games as a service.\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Games as a service, or live service games, are typically online only, include microtransactions or subscription fees, and are continuously updated with new features. But what it really boils down to is the fact that players don’t control their access to the game. They depend on the company to keep it afloat. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Ross posted that video six years ago, and he was already fed up back then. By the time Ubisoft killed The Crew, after years of watching beloved games bite the dust. He was ready to fight back. In April of last year, right after The Crew went down for good, Ross launched a campaign he called Stop Killing Games.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ross Scott: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Stop Killing Games has been me just trying to work backwards from my conclusion, which is, I want to try and stop games being effectively killed this way. This was not hardly the first game that this sort of thing had happened to, but…\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Earlier this year, Ross and a handful of Stop Killing Games volunteers conducted an informal report on the playability of 731 online-only games. Of those 731 games, nearly 70% were either dead or at risk of game death because publishers had no public plans for preserving them. The Crew is just one of many in a long line of dead and potentially doomed games. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ross Scott: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I realized if we don’t act on this game, yeah, there’s gonna be others, but this is about as good as it gets to try and test this because it was a relatively large game. It had, I think, a maximum of 12 million owners. It was also kind of black and white what happened where no one could run it again. Just the whole thing was gone. And the publisher was located in France, which has many more consumer protection laws than many other countries. So it would kind of maximize our chances that something could be done about it. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">He posted his campaign manifesto on YouTube. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[Ross Scott in Youtube Speech] Honestly, everything about what I’ve been doing has been an amateur effort. I don’t even want to be doing this. But if you care about this issue, I’m what you’re stuck with, because nobody else has stepped up. And I guess there is one thing that makes me a good candidate for this, and that, at least with me, you’re getting maximum hustle. I have decades worth of resentment on this issue. \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Stop Killing Games started as a website, guiding gamers on how to petition their local governments and hold game companies to a higher standard. Then it became a movement. \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cb>Ross Scott:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I realized that we could try to submit this to consumer protection agencies in various countries because it had so many players. We could still get, we did end up getting several thousand complaints sent. That meant a lot of people still had proof of purchase of it. I kind of saw this as my only chance, momentum-wise, to do anything about this. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Stop Killing Games organized government petitions and consumer agency complaints in Canada, the UK, Australia, and throughout Europe. They’ve had mixed results introducing legislation, but they might have some actual movement in the EU. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ross Scott: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The big one ended up being a European citizens initiative where if enough people signed it, then that could be brought before the EU commission to create new law on it. I called it the moonshot. I wasn’t sure if it was realistic or not. And we ended up passing the signature threshold and now it’s kind of going through the government procedures. And I’m somewhat optimistic because if this practice of you know selling someone a game, then disabling it at an undisclosed date later, but keeping the money, if that was all completely legal, it’s been over a year since we submitted that. I would think they’d be able to give an answer by now saying, sorry, but this is lawful and you don’t have any case on this. I think what’s happening is this is a giant gray area in the law and they’re trying to unravel it all. If you have no idea how long a game you’re buying is going to last, I think that’s pretty relevant information. Because the span of online-only games, the shortest we’re aware of was a game called The Culling 2. It lasted eight days before shutting down. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Oh, wow. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ross Scott:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And the longest that was made as a one-time purchase, so, you know, not a subscription, is Guild Wars, which is still going. So if you bought the disk in 2005 and never got around to playing it, you can still play it now, even though it’s online only. So that’s no standard at all for what consumer expectations are. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">How did other people respond to you saying like, hey, we should do something about this? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ross Scott: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I think the majority of people thought, yeah, that’s a good idea because it’s kind of common sense that if you buy something, you should be able to keep it. This was never really codified in the laws, whether this was legal. It’s just that it had never been tested. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It seems like the most potential for real legislation here is in the EU. Do you think that could work in the US? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ross Scott: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I have talked to some US lawyers on it, they all agree that the only way to fix this is through an act of Congress. So I’m pretty pessimistic about being able to influence anything along those lines. That said, I think most of the world will get the benefits downstream if we win in a big enough country. Like, there’s actually a real world example of this sort of thing. In 2014, Australia’s consumer protection agency sued Valve for not allowing refunds of games people bought on Steam. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Valve started as a game developer and now owns Steam, the biggest digital platform for PC games. It’s where the majority of PC games are bought and sold, all digitally. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ross Scott:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Valve lost that case so afterwards, rather than just allowing Australians to refund their games, they just made that global policy because I think they just didn’t want to deal with this in more countries and have more legal fees. And now that’s kind of common practice that you can refund a game if you only played a five minutes or something like that. The cost of basically not destroying a game and having some sort of end of life plan for it once the company’s done does not have to be that much if it’s planned for from the beginning. It’s just one step out of hundreds of making a game. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So I think what would happen is if they realize that there’s gonna be fines or some penalty for not having that, if they wanna sell in the EU, which has something like 450 million people. It’s a sizable market. We’ll decide, okay, when we shut down the game, we’ll release an end of life patch so people can keep playing it, but we don’t have to support anything. They may as well roll it out globally afterwards. So just because they’ll have already done the work on it. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It doesn’t always have to be this way. Since Ross and the Stop Killing Games volunteers put together that playability report, they found that over 250 games survived after publishers took them offline. Let’s talk about these possible solutions in a new tab. Is there life after game death? That playability report from Ross and the Stop Killing Games volunteers, they found that over 230 games survived because of fan preservation projects. Another 30 are still playable thanks to their developers making end-of-life plans. What does that really mean? What does end- of-life care for a game look like? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ross Scott: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Our initiative is structured this way in that we’re actually trying to leave maximum flexibility to publishers and developers and how they solve it. Every game is different. If there’s just one thing to do, it’s have an end-of-life plan for when you have to end support to the game so that it’s not impossible to play it. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Now, the most common way to do that might be to just, if it’s a single-player one, have an offline mode. If it’s smaller scale game, maybe allow like, private servers that people can host. If it was a big complex one, like an MMO, then maybe having something where they release like a version of the server software that customers can maybe run separately. But we’re not mandating any one solution, but just realize that you won’t be able to support your game forever. That’s kind of inevitable. And as long as that’s planned for, it really doesn’t become a problem. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Most games are already compliant with what we’re asking for. And ironically, a lot of online multiplayer games from the late 90s, early 2000s are still playable today, even if the companies don’t exist anymore, because they planned ahead for that. This is not some undiscovered formula for how to do this. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Gamers get a bad rap for being reactive and angry and complaining all the time. Sometimes it’s deserved. They can be annoying. And sometimes all that complaining can be channeled into something actually productive, like changing the games industry. In the meantime, there are some smaller efforts underway to make it more clear to customers whether the game they’re buying could eventually go away, like The Crew did. Here’s Nicole again. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Nicole Carpenter: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">If you’re playing a game that has a single player component, usually if the multiplayer component goes away, you can still access the single player. The Crew didn’t have that at all. So for people who purchased this game after it was released in 2014, there’s no more access there. This comes down to a problem with the idea of licensing versus ownership. So when you are buying a game with an online component, you are licensing the game and you are not outright purchasing it. So you are paying the company for access and they can take that away at any time. And so there has been a movement to change some laws, specifically in California, when you’re buying a game there has to be some kind of like a label that’s like you don’t own this you’re licensing it. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">As of January this year, California law requires digital stores, like game platforms such as Steam, to disclose what the buyer is really getting when they pay for something. They can’t prompt you to buy or purchase a game if you’re only getting a license that can be yanked back at any time. Do you think a, like, “you don’t own this” kind of label on a game is satisfying to players?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Nicole Carpenter:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Oh, absolutely not. Like it’s not satisfying to players at all. Like, people want it to be like it used to be like, when you buy something, you own it. It’s a problem with ebooks. It’s a problem with music. It’s problem with the games collectively, like in your Steam library. I wrote a story about, you know, where do your Steam games go when you die because of these licensing issues. That you’d like legally can’t pass those games down to anyone, you know, they’re just like stuck in your account because they’re yours, not theirs. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">That’s bleak.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Nicole Carpenter: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I know. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Is there any way for companies to let games die gracefully? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Nicole Carpenter: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I do think there is. I don’t know, however, if big corporations are willing to do the things necessary to allow this to happen. Some players are hoping that studios and developers could go open source and so like, hand over some of the file’s code arts to the player base because if they’re not going to invest into it anymore, you know, they’re necessarily like, losing out on money by going open source, um, and so handing it over to like, a dedicated fan base could be a way to keep those servers running at like no additional cost to the developer. And that is a possibility. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But if fans are crafty enough, they might be able to figure out how to keep playing their favorite games, even if publishers aren’t cooperating. And that’s what happened with The Crew. Players have recently reverse engineered the digital key that unlocks the game. As of September this year, the game is back. It’s not exactly the same, but this fan effort managed to breathe new life into a game that was previously dead. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ross Scott:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This is the exception to the rule, and I’m thankful it has happened. What’s really going on with most of these games is a whole lot of the content is on the customer system or their disk or, you know, like the textures, models, sounds, and everything. And usually the part that’s held by the company is code for kind of managing how that all connects and it’s runs. So it’s kind of like having a locked car in your garage and you can’t get open, but they have the keys. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yeah.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ross Scott: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And what will happen sometimes is you have these, honestly, geniuses reverse engineering how that game worked and trying to take their best guess at figuring it out. This almost always takes years of work with people who really know what they’re doing, they’re experts in the field. I’ve compared it to like reconstructing a photograph from the ashes that has been burned. But sometimes with enough time and effort, they can do it. In fact, in one video, I compared it to trying to crack the code the Germans were doing at World War II in terms of complexity, only to have people comment saying, no, it’s more complicated than that. A group that’s been working on it a little under two years managed to do that for The Crew, and now it is back. If you bought the original for PC, you can run it again now, offline and online. It’s the sort of thing where it took them a little over two years, and that’s honestly a best-case scenario. If they had access to the relevant code, they probably could have done it in a day or two. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I mean, it’s incredible that they were able to reverse engineer this. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ross Scott: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Honestly, I think it’s gonna be an even better experience than when it was being supported because now it also allows for lots of modifications to it. And there were things I wanted like adjusting the field of view or brighter headlights in the game. Whereas if you were to do that when it’s being supported, that would be detected as a hack because it is. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Is there still more work left to be done in keeping games alive? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ross Scott: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I never really wanted to be doing any of this. I’m just trying to do as much as I can to try to stop this practice and then just kind of be done with it. I guess I am glad that it seems like we’re not in the minority that people don’t like seeing things they’ve bought destroyed. It can feel like a Twilight Zone episode sometimes where you have to convince people that no, maybe this isn’t a good practice to just destroy things that you pay for when we can prevent it. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In some rare cases, there is life after death, game death, at least. But for the majority of online games that shut down without an end of life plan, the best we can do is mourn them. Sometimes that looks like fondly watching old gameplay footage on YouTube. Or it might look like slaying a funeral fit and sharing screenshots with other players on Reddit. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Today, it’s a memorial segment at the end of your favorite podcast. Let’s take a moment to remember a few of the games that didn’t survive and the games that are on their way out: The Sims Mobile, Anthem, Battleborn, Concord, Babylon’s Fall, Dear Hunter Classic, House of Newerth, Overwatch 1, MapleStory 2, Skyforge, and the one and only Kim Kardashian: Hollywood. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Let’s close all these tabs. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Close All Tabs is a production of KQED Studios and is reported and hosted by me, Morgan Sung. This episode was produced by Francesca Fenzi and edited by Chris Egusa. Close All tabs producer is Maya Cueva. Chris Hambrick is our editor. Chris Egusa is our senior editor and composed our theme song and credits music. Additional music by APM. Brendan Willard is our audio engineer. Audience engagement support from Maha Sanad. Jen Chien is KQED’s Director of Podcasts. Katie Springer is our podcast operations manager, and Ethan Toven-Lindsey is our editor-in-chief. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Some members of the KQED podcast team are represented by the Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, San Francisco, Northern California Local. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Keyboard sounds were recorded on my purple and pink dust silver K84 wired mechanical keyboard with Gateron red switches. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Okay, and I know it’s a podcast cliche, but if you like these deep dives and want us to keep making more. It would really help us out if you could rate and review us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to the show. Don’t forget to drop a comment and tell your friends, too, or even your enemies or frenemies. And if you really like Close All Tabs and want to support public media, go to donate.kqed.org/podcasts. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Thanks for listening. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp> \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"info": "The MindShift podcast explores the innovations in education that are shaping how kids learn. Hosts Ki Sung and Katrina Schwartz introduce listeners to educators, researchers, parents and students who are developing effective ways to improve how kids learn. We cover topics like how fed-up administrators are developing surprising tactics to deal with classroom disruptions; how listening to podcasts are helping kids develop reading skills; the consequences of overparenting; and why interdisciplinary learning can engage students on all ends of the traditional achievement spectrum. This podcast is part of the MindShift education site, a division of KQED News. KQED is an NPR/PBS member station based in San Francisco. You can also visit the MindShift website for episodes and supplemental blog posts or tweet us \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/MindShiftKQED\">@MindShiftKQED\u003c/a> or visit us at \u003ca href=\"/mindshift\">MindShift.KQED.org\u003c/a>",
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"soldout": {
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