Iain Macarthur Turns a Silicon Valley Feud Into an Illustrated Medieval Tapestry for WIRED Magazine

WIRED’s Big Story this week is a long profile about the bitter split between two developers behind GrapheneOS and its predecessor CopperheadOS. The feature illustration, by London-based Iain Macarthur, does not look like a feature illustration about a privacy-focused mobile OS. Two mounted knights clash in the center of a horizontal frieze, one on a black horse with a dollar-sign shield, the other on a white horse bearing a shield with a large black keyhole. A body lies face down between them. Two castles burn at either edge of the scene. Archers in the corners are loosing arrows at both combatants. The whole scene is contained inside a red-and-black heraldic border.

Every surface in this image carries information. The two shields represent the two incompatible theories of what a privacy tool is for — a product to be sold, or a key to be guarded. The reader who has finished the article will find every beat of the story encoded within the illustration’s iconographic density. The reader who hasn’t will still read a combat scene with high stakes. It’s a double legibility with a fast read and a slow read.

This style of arrangement, where two armored combatants meet face-to-face, each bearing their own emblem, is a staple of medieval battle imagery, from illuminated manuscripts to Uccello’s Battle of San Romano. In painterly terms, the technique is called a bilateral frieze, which is a horizontal narrative compressed left-to-right with mirror symmetry at its core and incident at the edges. The direct ancestor is the Bayeux Tapestry, embroidered around 1070, which encodes the Norman conquest across seventy meters of linen frieze. MacArthur’s palette is a direct nod to that dyed-thread tonality.

MacArthur’s personal tarot project may be the key to his current voice. Tarot uses iconography as its delivery system. Every object on the card is a symbol, every gesture a meaning to be decoded. That is exactly the reading protocol this illustration asks for.

“They Built a Legendary Privacy Tool. Now They’re Sworn Enemies” was published in WIRED Magazine’s The Big Story section on April 21, 2026. Illustration by Iain Macarthur.