Hidden Machinery

What happens inside the systems you use every day.

Hidden Machinery is a small independent studio making animated explainers about computer science for curious teenagers and adults. Each episode follows one concrete event — a million people clicking Buy at once, a deleted file that can still be recovered — and opens the machine to show the mechanisms behind it. The systems in our films are made up; the mechanisms are real, and every episode lists its sources.

Our first series is Inside the Machine. Episode one: A Million People Click Buy. What Breaks First?

Hidden Machinery Studio

Our videos are published to our own YouTube channel by Hidden Machinery Studio, a private tool that runs only on our own computer. It uses the YouTube API Services to upload our videos, set their thumbnails and captions, and check that it is signed in to our channel. It has no public users and no sign-up.