Inside Russia’s creepy, innovative Internet

“For the past five years, Russia’s been building walls around its web and packing it with tech oligarchs, startup cities, face-finding algorithms, hacker hunters, and, of course, a few bears,” writes Ashlee Vance of Bloomberg Business Week in Hello World, a series of reports about inventors, scientists and technologists who shape our future around the world.

In this episode, Vance traveled to Akademgorodok, a city dedicated to scientific research on the outskirts of Novosibirsk. “With its mix of nerds, peculiar restaurants, and lakeside banyas, it’s a startup city unlike any other on the planet. The Russian government has been pumping money back into the city, hoping it will emerge as a startup paradise in the taiga.”