black hat

People Make Games explores VRChat, the social virtual world that many consider the metaverse people actually like, interviewing users and covering its communities and uncertain future.

A 1997 BBC documentary on Black Wednesday in 1992, when sterling was forced out of the Exchange Rate Mechanism. It covers the crisis from the British government side, including George Soros's trade and political mistakes.

The first episode of James Burke's 1978 BBC series Connections traces modern dependence on complex technological networks, starting with the 1965 New York blackout, and moves through ancient agriculture to Kuwait's oil-driven leap.

A 29-minute cinematic timelapse by melodysheep that journeys trillions of years into the future, covering the death of the sun, the end of stars, proton decay, black hole evaporation and the fate of the cosmos.

A Gamers Nexus investigative documentary on the black market for Nvidia AI GPUs, following smugglers, middlemen, and buyers, including reporting from China. It examines how export-restricted chips reach their users.

A day-in-the-life video following a move between apartments in Tokyo using a Japanese moving company. It shows how the movers work and what the experience is like.

An hour-long video essay on Elite, the 1984 BBC Micro game by David Braben and Ian Bell. It covers how they fit a 3D engine, economy and universe into 22KB on a 2MHz 6502.

Destin Sandlin tours a progressive metal stamping factory, showing machines that stamp millions of metal parts and the tooling behind them.

A behind-the-scenes tour of the ILFORD factory in Mobberley, England, showing how black and white film, paper and chemicals are made. It walks through emulsion making, coating, finishing, QC and distribution.

A short Great Big Story piece about Hagoromo, a Japanese chalk brand so prized that mathematicians stockpiled it, with some reportedly dealing it on the side. It tells the quirky tale of a writing tool whose supply became scarce.

The 1990 NOVA documentary follows astronomer Clifford Stoll as he tracks a hacker through military and research computer networks, a story that involved the CIA and KGB. It is based on The Cuckoo's Egg.

Ben Anderson's VICE documentary shows embedded reporting on Afghan security forces and US Marines in Helmand during the troop drawdown, exposing incompetence, drug abuse and corruption.

The first episode of CuriousMarc's series restoring a real Apollo Guidance Computer, led by AGC expert Mike Stewart. They set up a makeshift lab in a Houston hotel room to open up a rare machine owned by a private collector.

BobbyBroccoli documentary on the rise of Nortel Networks, once the dominant Canadian telecom giant, during the dot-com era. It is part one of a two-part story.

Machine Thinking argues the 1751 machine, a metal-cutting lathe associated with Vaucanson, triggered the biggest explosion of wealth in history by enabling precise manufacturing of other machines.

CNBC gets a tour of ASML's cleanrooms in the Netherlands to see how its roughly $200 million EUV lithography machines are built. It covers exploding molten tin, ultra-flat optics and why only one company can make these systems.

People Make Games interviewed 16 current and former Valve employees to examine how the company's no-bosses, no-titles structure works in practice, and where it falls short.

A 69-minute documentary on the Polybius arcade-game legend. It examines visual, physical and anecdotal evidence, traces the story's source, and concludes the game never existed beyond one website entry.

A Channel 4 Equinox documentary on the NK-33 engines built for the Soviet N1 moon rocket and how they ended up in the USA. It includes rare footage and interviews with veterans of the early Soviet space program.

A New Yorker short documentary about the 2014 sinking of the Sewol ferry in South Korea, based on the film In the Absence. It examines the failures in the rescue and the political aftermath.

A short documentary on the 2015 Yale Halloween costume controversy and the confrontation with Nicholas Christakis. Filmmaker Rob Montz investigates campus free speech and the state of the university afterward.

A short tour of a UK materials recycling facility showing how mixed recyclables are mechanically and optically sorted. Aluminum, ferrous metal, glass, paper, and trash come out as separate streams.

A WGBH/NOVA re-enactment of Clifford Stoll's hunt for KGB-linked hacker Markus Hess, based on his book The Cuckoo's Egg. It starts from a 75-cent accounting discrepancy at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory.

A 57-minute account of Clifford Stoll's tracking of a KGB-linked hacker through Lawrence Berkeley Lab computers in 1986, the story of The Cuckoo's Egg. It covers the FBI and Chaos Computer Club involvement.

Jim Browning reverses a scammer's remote connection and discovers CCTV in a Delhi call centre. He gives a detailed look at how a tech support scam operation runs, and he shared the footage with the BBC.

Veritasium tells the story of the XZ backdoor, how a patient attacker became maintainer and nearly compromised SSH on Linux systems. It also covers free software history and how encryption in SSH works.

Paul Grignon's animated documentary presenting his view of how banks create money as debt and why that system requires continuous growth. It outlines the historical background of modern banking.

A 98-minute LEMMiNO video reconstructing what happened inside the Texas School Book Depository before, during, and after the Kennedy assassination. It draws on testimony to map people's movements and discrepancies.

A very long video essay by Shaun on the decisions and motivations behind the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, with a detailed timeline and argument that they were not militarily necessary.

Kirby Ferguson's updated four-part video essay arguing that creativity is built on copying, transforming and combining existing work. It covers examples from film, music and technology and touches on generative AI.

A long rebuttal arguing that the Wright Brothers truly invented the airplane, responding to other YouTubers who credit others. It walks through the engineering breakthroughs the Wrights achieved, such as control and wind tunnel work.

Strange Parts builds a working refurbished iPhone 6S entirely from components bought in the Huaqiangbei phone parts markets in Shenzhen. The video explains how the markets work and what the parts cost.

Adam Curtis's 2016 BBC documentary arguing that politicians, financiers and technologists retreated into a simplified, fake version of the world because reality became too complex. It ranges across Trump, Brexit, Syria, Surkov's Russia and more.

A BBC Earth clip from The Hunt showing an octopus species from northern Australia that leaves the water at low tide to hunt crabs on land.

A short film in which friends build the first true-to-scale model of the solar system, with full planetary orbits, on a Nevada dry lakebed. It conveys the real distances and sizes involved.

A Veritasium video, sponsored by Waymo, that rides in a fully driverless car in Chandler, Arizona and argues for putting autonomous vehicles on roads based on safety data.

Adam Curtis' multi-part documentary on how Freud's ideas and Edward Bernays' public relations shaped consumer culture and political control. It argues that business and government learned to manufacture desires.

Dominion is a two-hour documentary using drones and hidden cameras to expose conditions in animal agriculture, including food, clothing, entertainment and research. It questions humanity's dominion over animals.

Nate Harrison's 2004 video history of the Amen Break, a six-second drum sample from a 1969 b-side that became the basis of hip-hop sampling, jungle and drum and bass. It is also a meditation on cultural ownership and creativity.

Feature-length documentary following DeepMind's AlphaGo program as it prepares for and plays the 2016 match against Go champion Lee Sedol. It covers the team, the games, and the emotional reaction of the Go world to an AI beating a top human.