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SmarterChild, redux

The big story in tech this week was the early release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, a chatbot-style interface built on top of the large language model GPT-3.

I’ve written about it before, but as a summary: GPT-3 is trained on a massive dataset of human language, from which it can infer connections between words, sentences and fragments in order to map a kind of simulacrum of meaning through patterns. It’s not intelligence, but it often looks and feels like it.

For those who regularly tune in to this newsletter, you might well ask what has changed. Well, not much — at least in terms of the underlying tech. Much of what ChatGPT does has been possible since GPT-3 launched in beta in 2020. What ChatGPT does do exceptionally well is wrap the technology up in a pleasant, usable interface with the kind of guardrails you would expect for something intended for a wide audience. It makes it into a product, in other words. You can ask it questions and it will answer them, remember its answers, and allow you to make followup inquiries. OpenAI says it will also “admit its mistakes, challenge incorrect premises, and reject inappropriate requests”.

Its ability to both retain information and maintain a kind of coherent semantic universe within the chatbox can lead to some great exchanges:

Aside from the weird stuff, which I’m loving as always, one of the prominent responses to ChatGPT is that seems like a successor product to Google and search engines has landed in our laps. Its conversational and responsive way of relaying information is very compelling, and totally different in form and function to a Google search.

For example, I asked it how Gothic cathedrals were built:

Gothic cathedrals were built using a number of techniques, many of which were innovations at the time. The primary construction material was stone, which was used to create the tall, thin walls and large stained glass windows that are characteristic of Gothic architecture. To support the weight of the stone and the roof, the builders used flying buttresses, which are external arches that transfer the weight of the walls and roof to the ground. The builders also used pointed arches, which allowed them to build higher and create larger windows. The interiors of Gothic cathedrals were also notable for their intricate stone carvings and ribbed vaulted ceilings. Overall, the construction of Gothic cathedrals was a combination of skill, innovation, and engineering prowess.

As a followup, I asked if adhesives or bonding agents were used:

It is unlikely that glues or adhesives were used in the construction of Gothic cathedrals. These structures were built using stone, which was carefully cut and arranged to fit together without the need for additional bonding materials. In some cases, the stones were held in place using mortise and tenon joints, in which a projection on one stone fits into a groove on another. However, it is more likely that the stones were simply stacked on top of each other and held in place by their own weight and the strength of the joints. Overall, the construction of Gothic cathedrals relied on the skill of the builders and the inherent stability of the stone, rather than on the use of adhesives or other bonding materials.

Wonderful. It also handles code remarkably well. Here’s a simple example:

The Achilles heel which makes it unsuitable to replace Google, at least for now, is twofold. Firstly, it gets things wrong, in ways both subtle and overt. I asked the Gothic cathedral question multiple times with different phrasings. Occasionally it would say adhesives were rarely or never used in the construction of Gothic cathedrals; other times it would say mortar, plaster and animal glues were used extensively. It’s remarkably accurate for a large language model — many of which are far more scattershot than this — but is doesn’t quite reach the standard you would get reading it from a trusted source with legible citations.

That leads to the second problem: it can’t tell you where it got its information from. If you ask it for a citation, it will either refuse to do it, or make a valiant attempt by literally making up a citation – like a completely fabricated URL. As increasingly defective as Google is for basic searches — for reasons both in and out of its control — you’re still able to establish exactly where the information you’re getting is coming from, and evaluate it as trustworthy. If you were using ChatGPT for anything requiring accuracy, you’re going to have to do your own research. In the case of specific construction detail of Gothic cathedrals, that might be quite a lift for you.

Of course, it would be dumb to assume that Google doesn’t have a similar product to this cooked up and ready to go. Its AI and large language model work is extensive, and informs how its search engine operates. So I wouldn’t necessarily count on it as a Google killer, though I think we’ll see people’s expectations of how a search engine operates and how responsive it is to natural human inputs change pretty quickly from here on out.

I don’t think there are actually jobs at risk here, as some doom-and-gloom predictions have assumed. It’s pretty clear that automation has been coming for very low-level writing tasks for a long while, but I think this will be a shift rather than a total disruption. As I mentioned in the last issue, playing around with AI-assisted writing tools makes you feel more like a curator than a writer at times, but it’s worth remembering those are complex skills too: being able to evaluate text for flow, structure and content will remain in demand, at least in the near term. (This may be nuclear-level cope, but whatever.)

On a more vibes level, it’s difficult not to look at emerging tools like this and see a yawning void opening up before us — not necessarily The Singularity as imagined by science fiction authors, but the total collapse of whatever blurry boundaries remained between human-created and computer-generated text. Whether we’ll even really notice the difference, in the aggregate, might be the greatest test of all.

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No future

Business Insider reports that Future, the content arm of venture capital megafund Andreessen Horowitz, is shutting down:

Launched in June of 2021, it was billed as a buzzy new tech publication from prestigious venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz — and a way to sidestep the legacy media entirely and take the message of technological progress directly to readers … But a year and a half later, the publication is dead in the water.

Future hasn't published a new article in months, most of its editorial staffers have left, and its newsletter is defunct. A source familiar with Andreessen Horowitz's content strategy confirmed to Insider that Future is shutting down.

The ignominious fizzling out highlights the challenges of "going direct" and building a new media brand from scratch — even with one of tech's biggest investors driving the effort.

I’ve mentioned Future a few times in this newsletter, because I thought it was an interesting moment in the tech industry attempting to go its own way, divorcing itself from a media complex it considered too critical of its mission and establishing a new kind of political positioning away from the entrenched liberalism of Silicon Valley.

It cane amidst a flurry of similar efforts from other Valley institutions, most of which operated on the same general principle: we can talk straight to our sizeable audiences and give them information with a tech optimist slant. We don’t need media gatekeepers any more, and we certainly don’t need to bend our whim to their negative framing, which treats Silicon Valley as a global power centre that needs to be interrogated rather than as a leading light of human civilisation.

Even a long-running institution like Sequoia Capital began running feature writing prominently on its homepage, including a bizarrely overwrought hagiography of Sam Bankman-Fried weeks before he was exposed as a fraud and scoundrel, which has now been taken down. (You can read an archived version here, if you’re in the mood for 13,000 words which correspond with reality only in the loosest sense.)

The failure of Future to make a dent can be read in a few ways. The first is that these content arms generally were really just a luxury indulgence at the tail end of the era of free money and low interest rates, and there’s really no good reason why a firm like that should be acting like a publisher outside of the fact they have some cash to throw around for content marketing.

I think a more pressing problem is that this program of adversarial content doesn’t actually work all that well. If your north star is “the media is too inquisitorial and doesn’t tell the good stories about our portfolio companies and our industry” then what you’ll end up producing is just branded content with a different sheen. The audience for that is not very large. Yes, there’s a base of people who will probably read it to affirm their ideological priors. But even that audience probably likes the idea of the publication more than they’d actually read it.

It also didn’t help that Future itself was editorially incoherent and a pain to navigate, and immersed itself as deeply as its parent company did in the crypto ecosystem — right as the ass fell out of the market and people were more interested in stories of chaos and doom rather than sunny predictions of Web3 revolution.

Of course, it’s not the end of the tech industry stridently asserting its interests and ‘optimism outside the mainstream media apparatus. You can read Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter — which seems to think is a kind of revanchist project bucking the influence of what Curtis Yarvin might call The Cathedral — as a parallel project from a different angle. We’ll no doubt see more movement: it’ll just be a different kind of vanity project.

Elsewhere

• On Apple’s increasingly rapid pivot to becoming an advertising company, despite trading for a long time on privacy and the sanctity of user data.

• After Elon Musk sacked most of Twitter’s workforce, many assumed the site was going to collapse at some point. It didn’t. Here’s a writeup from a former Twitter site reliability engineer explaining why.

• A story at MIT’s Technology Review on Meta’s Galactica, a large language model which can “summarize academic papers, solve math problems, generate Wiki articles, write scientific code, annotate molecules and proteins, and more”. Sounds cool in theory — but what the short-lived demo mostly ended up achieving was spitting out vaguely scientific-sounding bullshit at industrial scale.

• FTX sold itself in Australia as having an Australian Financial Services Licence, giving it a patina of legitimacy for people interested in investing but worried about whether their money was safe. Turns out it only got it after acquiring a company that already had one, which in turn had acquired another company which was licensed legitimately.

• Some good recursive dystopia here in The Verge: Amazon uses cameras to track the productivity of its warehouse workers, trained on machine learning. When the AI system fails to interpret imagery from the camera, it is sent off to teams in India for human evaluation.

• “Was This $100 Billion Deal the Worst Merger Ever?” – This is a story about AT&T’s takeover of Time Warner and goes into some interesting detail about the culture clash between a massive telecoms company and its new Hollywood subsidiaries. It was a bet that AT&T could turn itself from a stodgy phone provider into a media powerhouse, and it did not play out that way

• The latest version of open source AI image model Stable Diffusion has made it harder to generate porn or mimic the style of individual artists. The dedicated subreddit is not pleased by what they see as a deliberate effort to hobble the software for basically political reasons.

• How the obliterating gaze of the social internet has rendered legendary Berlin club Berghain uncool: “Berghain’s virality has reduced a culture that developed organically over the last 18 years into a caricature of itself, with this cringey conformity amplified by obsessive TikTok/Reddit guides on how to get in, what to wear, how to act, right down to the facial expressions you should copy-paste on your face.”

• A deep dive into the cardboard industry. More interesting than it sounds.

• A history of the Walkman.

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I co-host the podcast Down Round, which you can subscribe to here (and follow us on Twitter.)

End of an era

I think it’s pretty clear by now the software-led tech boom of the 2010s is pretty much over. The combination of pandemic stimulus and tech-enabled remote work kept things ebbing along a few years longer than they perhaps would have otherwise, but the party’s over. There are the mass layoffs — helpfully tracked here — plunging stock prices and missed revenue guidance, but all of those can be blamed on a generally flagging economy. The rest of it is in the vibes.

You don’t have to look far for those vibes. Elon Musk ascending to the throne of Twitter atop a pile of middle manager skulls. Mark Zuckerberg pumping the spoils of a decade of social media dominance into brute forcing the existence of a parallel universe nobody wants to spend any time in. Legions of platform businesses collapsing on their own rickety scaffolding. The form and function of the smartphone growing stagnant, such that it is no longer really possible to discern the difference between iPhone models. The slushy cultural output of a legion of streaming services chasing what few potential subscribers remain. Elizabeth Holmes going to jail.

It’s unsurprising that it should be experienced as a vibe. If the last ten to fifteen years of technological development should be remembered in any way specifically, it is in the total convergence of the tech industry and mass culture, such that is no longer possible to imagine experiencing culture in a way not shaped by the hardware and software of some tech firm or another. Technological culture is how we experience the turning screw of increased interest rates and less free money flowing through the economy. Less startups are founded, less platforms thrive, less founders are elevated to the status of cultural icons.

For much the same reason, it’s hard to imagine what comes next, or what the inevitable next boom will be driven by. It’s hard to imagine, for example, Twitter actually dying regardless of how Musk chooses to run it, or a platform like Instagram withering away entirely despite how poorly Meta updates it for the tastes of a new generation. It might be short-sighted of me to say so, but it feels like we’re locked into the platform economy we live in thanks to the sheer accumulation of users and data we amassed over the past decade of crucial early tech development.

All of this, more succinctly:

Magic beans

One of the best pieces of writing on the collapse of FTX was Matt Levine’s Bloomberg newsletter about the balance sheet the imperilled exchange was shopping around to potential investors and rescuers after its shoddy finances were laid bare by a frenzied customer bank run. In it, Levine focuses on the fact most of FTX’s ‘assets’ were native crypto tokens it had invented from thin air and had a barely theoretical value which would absolutely not be realised if they were sold on the open market:

Last week I was shocked that one of the main assets of FTX — one of the main assets it relied on to be able to pay out customer balances — was a token it had just made up. But I was wrong! It was two tokens that it had just made up! FTX’s two largest asset balances, “before this week,” were $5.9 billion of FTT ($553 million at post-crash prices last Thursday) and $5.4 billion of SRM ($2.2 billion post-crash). Something like two-thirds of the money that FTX owed to customers was backed by its own tokens that it had made up […] It is striking that the balance sheet that FTX circulated to potential rescuers consisted mostly of stuff it made up. Its balance sheet consisted mostly of stuff it made up! Stuff it made up! You can’t do that! That’s not how balance sheets work! That’s not how anything works!

As the contagion from the FTX collapse continues to spread, imperilling various crypto exchanges, tokens, protocols and projects, one of the interesting observances is that the impact on the broader economy seems to be basically. There’s no doubt many retail investors and casual gamblers who bought into the company’s aggressive marketing have personally been torched, but the damage in the aggregate, while potentially extensive within the crypto shadow economy, seems basically constrained within in. The general cautiousness of regulators and institutional money to jump in with both feet probably contributed in this regard. (Maybe for the best that SBF’s extensive lobbying efforts weren’t fully successful.)

As this tweet puts it, it pretty well establishes crypto as largely what it always seemed to be: a “casino economy” which is “unrelated to actual financial functions”. I don’t think there are many actual crypto faithful who would disagree that is the current state of play, even if they believe it will serve a richer function somewhere down the line.

There’s also something darkly funny about the general response from within the crypto world that this merely proves that centralised institutions and exhanges are suspect, and that the only way forward is to return to the yeoman fantasy of everyone custodying their own assets — such as by putting their bitcoin on a hardware wallet, for example. I think the blackpill here is that you’ll never convince a huge portion of the population engaging with the monetary system to have absolute responsibility for their own keys and money.

There’s something uncanny about the FTX scenario in the end, which places it in a different realm to your usual fraud or Ponzi scheme. On the one hand it was a vast, sloshing pit of customer deposits, poorly managed and incompetently gambled by a bunch of speed addicts, which ended up as little more than a vault filled with illiquid company scrip, which at least rhymes with other luminary examples from the history of financial fraud. But maybe it’s the religious intensity of the crypto and blockchain world that gives it a different character. It reminds me of the newsletter I wrote about NFTs almost two years ago — evidence of our “epoch of high weirdness” and a “shadow world unmoored from reality and the rational laws we like to believe govern us”.

Vaguely related bonus – here’s a tweet I cosign as being probably at least somewhat true:

Poetic interlude

Robot scribes

I’ve spent the past couple of weeks playing around with Lex, the AI writing assistant developed by tech writing collective Every. Describing itself as a “thought partner who’s always ready to help while you’re writing”, it’s a pretty simple application in execution. It takes OpenAI’s GPT-3 and integrates it into a barebones browser-based word processor, allowing you to prompt the AI to imagine the next few sentences by typing ‘+++’.

The experience is pretty spotty right now. (“Sometimes it outputs rubbish,” the app’s documentation admits.) Rarely in my experimentation did it produce text I could slot seamlessly into whatever it was I was writing, and it frequently produced copy that was either stylistically jarring or wandered off on useless informational tangents. But, unlike the legions of terrible AI copywriting startups which constantly appear in my Instagram ads, Lex is not selling itself as something intended to produce final copy, or to automate the writing process entirely. Instead, it is leaning on a less disruptive pitch as a friendly assistant, efficiently supplying you with ideas which you might then reformulate in your own words or do further research into. It sells itself as a productivity tool rather than automation.

Here’s how Lex suggested I continue this section following those two paragraphs:

In many ways, it feels like a kind of ‘content prompt’, with all the attendant benefits and drawbacks. On the plus side, it can help you come up with ideas when you’re staring at a blank page; on the downside, it can often produce ideas which are either too general or too specific, and which lack the nuance and context that only a human writer can provide.

Still, as a tool for writers, it has potential to be genuinely useful, particularly when used in conjunction with other writing tools such as Scrivener or Ulysses. (It also integrates with Draft, though I have yet to try this.) And as the technology improves, it’s not hard to imagine a future in which AI-assisted writing becomes the norm, rather than the exception.

First paragraph is true in a generic sense for any AI-assisted writing. Second paragraph contains a glaring factual error, but if you’re counting on the synthetic output of GPT-3 for reliably correct information, you’re not going to get very far. As is always the case with software built on large language models, Lex is great at identifying and replicating patterns from its vast corpus of learning data, but not so great at establishing context or actually mapping ideas in meaningful ways.

That said, in Lex — alongside other AI writing assistants like Sudowrite, which is marketed to writers of fiction — you can observe some pretty interesting shifts in the way writing works as a productive activity. It unbundles certain skills from the fundamental act of writing. Using Lex for some basic, uncreative writing work I was doing felt more like acting as a curator than a writer, extracting structures and passages from latent space and then editing the output for errors, structure, style and readability. The biggest barrier as a productivity tool in this regard was that I felt compelled to fact check even the most anodyne output.

Of course, there are certain core aspects of being a writer that don’t seem ready to be disrupted by language models. Lex won’t offer you a truly original idea, unless it manages to stumble on one through accidental synthesis of text strings from across it training data. Anything it spits out will by definition be a reformulation of some idea (or collection of ideas) articulated by someone else. Maybe GPT-4 will find a way to shake real insight out of the machine. But I doubt it.

Elsewhere

• Are we living under technofeudalism? Malcolm Harris says that’s giving too much credit:

  There is no universal architecture between nature and God — and that’s definitely not what Facebook is. Facebook is not a public utility either. Facebook is a once-ubiquitous entertainment business financed by advertising, much like the television show Friends. At a more basic level, Facebook is servers full of degrading code and a bunch of workers getting yelled at by their bosses. If Mark Zuckerberg is a wizard, he’s the of-Oz variety, as he constantly reminds us by tripping over his curtain like a dork.

• Interesting feature at The Verge on BuzzFeed’s struggle to remain relevant. There’s a broader point here in the leading lights of the mid-2010s digital media ecosystem attempts to keep the lights on in the post-Facebook era.

• Bring back forums:

  … There used to be hundreds of small kingdoms and principalities in Europe, each ruled by its own set of inbred weirdos. There was occasional cross-pollination through marriage, but each place nonetheless retained a distinct cultural identity. Eventually these kingdoms unified, creating the Europe we know today: a few dozen countries where people’s regional pride (and conversely, their regional animus) is forced to exist within a broader national identity … Today’s internet functions in a similar way.

• The internet is over, writes Sam Kriss. “You know, secretly, even if you’re pretending not to, that this thing is nearing exhaustion. There is simply nothing there online. All language has become rote, a halfarsed performance: even the outraged mobs are screaming on autopilot. Even genuine crises can’t interrupt the tedium of it all, the bad jokes and predictable thinkpieces, spat-out enzymes to digest the world.”

• On Caroline Ellison, the CEO of FTX-tied hedge fund Alameda Research, one of the stranger characters to emerge from the collapse. Forbes has a story reporting that she has developed a following among esoteric right-wing types online thanks to her (now deleted) Tumblr, which went on her weird trad-slash-rationalist cyberpunk philosophy.

• The Infinite Conversation, a webpage hosting a bot which spits out “an AI generated, never-ending discussion between Werner Herzog and Slavoj Žižek”.

• A post summarising major critiques of modern computing, both in paradigm and execution.

• On Andor, which is not only a great Star Wars show but one of the best shows on TV right now. Not sure how Disney let this one through the keeper.

• Kevin Xu at Interconnected has translated the final speech of former ByteDance CEO Zhang Yiming before his resignation.

• “It used to be critics who wielded the power to intimidate, but critics have been usurped by the online audience.”

• Flatpack ‘fast furniture’ is clogging landfill in the United States.

• On the invention and development of the thermometer.

• “Mass Murder on the High Seas”.

• “Post-Cryptomania”.

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One of the more amusing political theses of the 2010s internet relates to Tumblr.

It goes like this. When Tumblr banned porn in 2018, after running into approval problems with the Apple App Store, it experienced a precipitous decline in use. The proximate cause was the implementation of a content filter that, by Tumblr's own admission, was imperfect. (I…

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Checked out

In a newsletter last month I wrote about the weird system of prestige that had built up around account verification on social media platforms like Twitter and Instagram. What originally began as a practical way to identify real accounts from impersonators developed into a class system that puts celebrities, influencers, journalists and brands on a different level to the great unwashed, and made the blue check into a status symbol. (As in any good aristocracy, the process for reliably acquiring a blue check is opaque and mostly based on who you know.)

So it’s extremely interesting that the first thing Elon Musk is signalling in his revanchist takeover of Twitter — aside from some flavour of stack ranked layoffs — is paid verification.

From The Verge:

Now that he owns Twitter, Elon Musk has given employees their first ultimatum: Meet his deadline to introduce paid verification on Twitter or pack up and leave.

The directive is to change Twitter Blue, the company’s optional, $4.99 a month subscription that unlocks additional features, into a more expensive subscription that also verifies users, according to people familiar with the matter and internal correspondence seen by The Verge. Twitter is currently planning to charge $19.99 for the new Twitter Blue subscription. Under the current plan, verified users would have 90 days to subscribe or lose their blue checkmark.

There are two ways to read this. The first is that this is just an obvious way to eke out money from Twitter’s core base of power users, many of whom are either verified or would love to be. The way it’s structured is deliberately extortionate — cough up or you’ll lose your precious status flex — while also opening the door for the army of grindset guys who would love a juicy, validating blue check next to their threads about sales tactics. If you want the extended reach and benefits of the tick, you should pay for it. It makes sense, in the same way that LinkedIn slugs its power users for its (quite pricey) Premium product, though it doesn’t exactly help make a vibrant platform anyone but recruiters and cold-blooded sociopaths enjoys spending time on.

But the second interpretation is that this makes an interesting bit of culture war. There are plenty of people in the extended Musk war room who would no doubt love to smash up the class system the blue check represents — one that disproportionately favours journalists mainstream media. Replacing the opaque processes which replicate that order with one based on simple willingness to pay makes for a great way to break that up while also making some money.

Also amusing while we’re on Twitter: the return to the glorious era of free speech doesn’t mean there can’t be a little grovelling to the gods of advertising brand safety. Not even the richest man on earth can escape that.

Transistor girls

Allow me to take you down a weird rabbit hole I’ve been pursuing the past few days in lieu of real research on matters of actual importance. I’m currently reading Chip War by Chris Masters, which was released this month. So far, it’s a very readable popular history of the development of semiconductors and the microchip, and the increasingly important geopolitical systems and tensions generated by chip manufacturing and supply chains.

I was struck by one colourful passing anecdote in one chapter: a reference to a trashy Australian pulp novel from 1964 named The Transistor Girls, by Paul Daniels, described as being about about “Chinese gangsters, international intrigue, and women assembly line workers”. As you might be able to ascertain from the cover, these Japanese assembly line workers were also — shock horror — sex workers by night. You can guess how the book plays out from there.

Masters uses this lurid bit of Orientalist erotica to illustrate two things: firstly that early microchips were designed by men but largely assembled by women, and secondly a developing fascination with the semiconductor and transistor industry, which was then exciting and futuristic. American companies had begun pushing semiconductor production to Asia to dodge higher wages and labour unions domestically, establishing early association between a computerised future and Asian culture. (Another great example of the burgeoning cultural fixation with semiconductors, unmentioned in this book, was that the first Iron Man comics in the early ‘60s were heavily focused on the fact his suit was powered by “thousands” of transistors, which did everything from protect his wounded heart to enabling him to shoot antigravity rays from his hands.)

I decided to dig into this, because the prospect of an intersection of forgotten Australian pulp lit and Cold War tech development is, regrettably, extremely my shit. The National Library does indeed carry a copy of the book, which it notes was published by long-defunct Sydney erotic paperback house Stag Publishing. But some cursory research reveals Paul Daniels was a pseudonym of Paul W. Fairman, an American pulp author who churned out innumerable paperbacks in genres from sci-fi to hardboiled detective fiction and gothic romance under a legion of names until his death in 1977.

So where’s the Australian connection here? Turns out Chris Masters got it wrong in his book — The Transistor Girls is not an Australian novel. But, in a standard bit of midcentury pulp fiction marketing, Stag Publishing took the book and churned out a localised clone titled Ne-San — attributed to the truly incredible fake name ‘Jerome Denver’ — which copied the blurb, cover, plot and chunks of text from the original novel, shoehorning in some Australian characters in lieu of the American ones. (I guess if you were a discerning Australian consumer of stupendously racist erotica in the 1960s, you wanted characters you could really relate to.)

A sad end for my pursuit of the sordid Australian connection to early microchip history. But I guess we learned something anyway? Well, not really.

That’s hot

A compelling brief Twitter thread here, which I think has something to it. HotorNot really did pioneer some of the simple incentive structures which went on to drive later social media and dating apps, and it did go into the cocktail of influences behind Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg went on to insist to Congress that Facemash, his HotorNot clone, was a prank and not actually relevant to the creation of Facebook. A 2003 Harvard Crimson article about FaceMash does feature a great quote from Zuck on the website: “I don’t see how it can go back online. Issues about violating people’s privacy don’t seem to be surmountable.”

(Sidenote: I didn’t know that HotOrNot.com is now owned by Badoo, which in turn is a subsidiary of Bumble, though it now has been rebranded as a general chat and dating app.)

Turning red

An interesting tidbit from The Information on the shifting political landscape of Silicon Valley:

Employees of four big tech companies are directing a greater share of their midterm political contributions to conservative candidates than in the two previous election cycles. The Information’s analysis of political giving by employees of Google, Apple, Amazon and Meta shows that 15% of donations have gone to Republican candidates or political action committees this election cycle. That figure is up from 5% in 2020 and 8% in 2018.

On the whole, Silicon Valley’s donor class remains overwhelmingly liberal, with more than $7 million going to Democratic candidates and causes, compared to about $1.3 million for Republican ones.

As it says, the tech industry still leans liberal, as represented by how the donor class behaves. For subscribers I’ve written a few stories here and there about these political shifts, as some aspects of a new builder culture — for want of a better descriptor — push further to the right.

One last thing

Turns out this is real.

Elsewhere

• A good essay on the gamelike nature of politics and culture experienced via social media. “Digital discourse creates a game-like structure in our perception of reality. For everything that happens, every fact we gather, every interpretation of it we provide, we have an ongoing ledger of the “points” we could garner by posting about it online.”

• On AI content creation:

  The relationship between content production and consumption has long since inverted, with human attention as the primary bottleneck; as the content continues to accumulate, its purpose will evolve. Instead of an output—something to inform or entertain humans—content will increasingly be an input for our massive global culture machine, with AI distilling the existing archive into yet more content in an accelerating cycle.

• On ‘Cultural Moneyballism’, the thesis that access to extensive and granular data has led to a beige homogenisation of culture, affecting everything from sports to movies and music. “In a world that will only become more influenced by mathematical intelligence, can we ruin culture through our attempts to perfect it?” (An adjacent critique, of ‘refinement culture’, has been argued by Paul Skallas.)

• A feature in Bloomberg on the general rejection of NFTs by gamers, who were supposed to be the vanguard for wider adoption of blockchain-based digital assets generally. It makes the case that, while gamers might be inclined to buy Fortnite skins or other status-flexing cosmetic items, the prospect of financialising their hobby and turning it into a giant stock exchange was significantly less appealing. (The fact the vast majority of NFT-adjacent games are shrewdly manufactured economies first with fun a distant second priority doesn’t help.)

• On pickleball, the “combination of badminton, Ping-Pong and tennis” which tennis purists argue is an astroturfed sport for fake fans and non-athletes being seized on as an investment vehicle for rich weirdos. Contains a link to a tongue-in-cheek manifesto by left-wing tennis newsletter Club Leftist Tennis, which accuses pickleball of representing “further entrenchment of the capitalist logic of productivity”. Wonderful.

• Francis Fukuyama is back for another bite of the apple: “More Proof That This Really Is the End of History”.

• Good summary of the current state of play with microchip sanctions on China.

• On the possible impact of generative AI on advertising.

• “The Try Guys and the Prison of Online Fame”.

• “Taylor Swift and the New Distribution”.

• “The visual legacy of tabloid talk shows.”

• “Andreessen Horowitz Went All In On Crypto at the Worst Possible Time”.

In 2013, an American programmer named Rob Rhinehart decided he was done eating food.

Posting on his personal blog, he sketched out how he had arrived at that conclusion. Thinking rationally, it was impossible to avoid the conclusion that food was “the fossil fuel of human energy”, he wrote. It was created and distributed using processes and markets reple…

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The end is nigh

A fun thread here about r/Superstonk, a meme stock subreddit which pitches itself as being a place for “theoretical discussions about business” — with a particular, and some might argue maniacal, focus on GameStop. I have also been keeping an eye on it for the past year or so, and yes: it has over time evolved into something which strongly resembles a millenarian cult.

Here’s the short version of the bizarre eschatology adopted by r/Superstonk. You will surely remember the events of 2021, when GameStop’s heavily shorted stock started to explode in value as an army of shitposters and self-described degenerates — whipped into a frenzy by analysis in r/wallstreetbets and Discord — piled into it. Investors who were shorting GameStop took heavy losses, with one, Melvin Capital, eventually forced to close its doors in May this year as a consequence. Some retail investors made a lot of money jumping off the rollercoaster at the right time, whereas others were left holding the bag when the stock eventually crashed back down to normal levels.

Naturally this led to a whole lot of discourse, most of it annoying. Was this an outburst of financial populism, revenge for the failure of Occupy Wall Street in the noughts? Was the crackdown by platforms like Robinhood on meme stock trading evidence of the unseen hands of a hostile elite? Or was this all completely meaningless — pandemic money sluicing through a red hot economy, powered by the same arcane internet dynamics that drive other viral videos and online trends?

Whatever your view at the time, it’s quite likely you are no longer dedicating much of your mental bandwidth to GameStop. But there remains a very sizeable community of people who still hold the stock, and think the events of 2021 were merely a prelude to the Mother of All Short Squeezes (MOASS) — an apocalyptic event which will unwind the entire corrupt financial system and leave the keepers of the faith with wealth beyond their wildest dreams. Posters on r/Superstonk author novel-length dissertations overflowing with esoteric language to spread their doctrine, and argue endlessly about a proposed timeline for when it might actually happen, with the general consensus being “as soon as tomorrow”. (The virtual bookshelf they’ve built to organise and display their sacred texts is truly something to behold.)

On the one hand, you can read this — as Olson does in his thread — as a kind of nuclear-level cope by people who were swept up in the GameStop mania but didn’t actually make off with the spoils. They have a long position in a brick-and-mortar video games retailer which, while attempting to innovate out of its fundamentally doomed core business and dabbling in new products like a digital assets market and crypto payments, has not yet revealed itself as a genuine reservoir of deep and untapped value. Conjuring a scenario in which GameStop is a loadbearing Jenga block for the entire global financial system is how they resolve that.

But it’s also worth thinking about it through the lens of the same phenomenon that powers just about everything else now: fandom. Strip away the populism, and you find a highly organised subculture of GameStop fans who have organically generated a mythology, language and meme ecology to support the natural camaraderie around their favourite thing. While undeniably cultish about its weird belief system, it only looks a little fiercer than what you find on many of the shitposting subreddits dedicated to the video game IPs GameStop retails.

In short: never underestimate a bunch of guys with the same obsession hanging around in a chatroom together all day. It was ever thus.

Labour of love

Plenty of laughs were had online this past fortnight with the launch of The Right Stuff, a dating app pitched at American right-wingers which pitches itself as a ‘non-woke’ version of Tinder. Its developers argue that the current generation of dating apps (like Tinder, Bumble and Hinge) have gone woke, disadvantaging right-wingers who use them to find partners. To that end, it offers prospective users the scintillating promise of “profiles without pronouns” and connecting with “people who aren’t offended by everything”. Shockingly, only straight pairings are supported here.

The Right Stuff sits comfortably as part of the current generation of ‘alt tech’ startups that are attempting to build a competing right-wing platform ecosystem to Big Tech, to varying degrees of success. All of them operate on the assumption that existing platforms enable liberals and persecute conservatives through moderation policy and algorithmic selection. Whether or not you think that is true, it’s hard to deny these alternative platforms inevitably they run into two fairly significant hurdles. The first is that the existing platforms generally have a scale and technological sophistication that’s very difficult to challenge from a cold start, and the second is that it’s a serious challenge to peel off users to a competitor once their network effect has accumulated.

But I find the alternative dating app universe fascinating on its own merits. Apps like Tinder have had a significant and under-described impact on the social order in the countries in which they are popular. They play an important role in relationship formation — particularly among younger people — and have largely supplanted whatever vestigial remnants of old courtship rituals survived the onset of network technology. To the extent dating apps play a systematised role in the way family units are formed and therefore how society is organised, they’re obviously naturally political, even if the broader impact can be difficult to observe. If you’re inclined to think the dominant dating apps have an entrenched ideological bent opposed to your own, then that’s a much thornier problem for you and your movement.

I was thinking about this when I read this article in Compact from academic Jon Askonas, who argues the modern conservative movement has failed because it doesn’t account for the radically disruptive impact of new technology. “As new technologies enter a society, they disrupt the connections between institutions, practices, virtues, and rewards,” he writes. “They can render traditions purposeless, destroy the distinction between virtuous and vicious behaviour, make customary ways of life obsolete, or render their rewards meaningless or paltry.” It’s not hard to see that applying to the new dating technology we face.

There are rival dating apps popping up which are more explicit about having a broader political vision beyond just pairing right-wingers with other right-wingers. These seem to take a much more actively revanchist goal; using technology to walk back the sexual revolution and reinstitute older moralities. Take Keeper, which says its mission to enable human flourishing prioritises “long-term meaning over short-term gratification” and doesn’t “deny nature”. From its website:

We are the result of millions of years of natural and sexual selection. These evolutionary pressures have created intersexual dynamics that dictate how relationships form. Because of this, men and women behave differently when they look for a partner, from the things they want, to how they feel about short-term vs. long-term relationships. We are conscious of the incentives and limitations hardwired into all of us. For example, because men are visually primed more easily than women for short-term pursuits, Keeper built our user experience for men differently.

So it’s quite obviously wearing its politics on its sleeve. Nonetheless, it makes you wonder whether it’s even possible to build tech that reinstalls older value systems like this, or whether more casual, fleeting human relationships are hardwired into the technological and communication systems we’ve built.

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Art for art’s sake

Watchers of the rapidly developing AI art world will have seen one name pop up perhaps more than anyone else: Grzegorz ‘Greg’ Rutkowski. The Polish digital illustrator, who isn’t particularly well-known in the artworld at large, has seen his name quickly become one of the most widely-used prompts on AI art platforms like Arthub and Lexica. The MIT Technology Review reported last month that use of his name as a prompt far outstrips objectively more iconic artists like Picasso and Van Gogh.

He is not a big fan of his newfound position as prompt du jour:

Rutkowski was initially surprised but thought it might be a good way to reach new audiences. Then he tried searching for his name to see if a piece he had worked on had been published. The online search brought back work that had his name attached to it but wasn’t his. 

“It’s been just a month. What about in a year? I probably won’t be able to find my work out there because [the internet] will be flooded with AI art,” Rutkowski says. “That’s concerning.” 

What makes Rutkowski’s artwork so popular in this space? He’s best known for his classic-style fantasy art, which is basically a modernised, video-gamey amalgam of decades of fantasy paperback covers. You know: giant fire-breathing dragons, snow-capped mountains, cloaked warlocks, the works. His work has appeared in trading card games like Magic: The Gathering, and he’s created concept art for games like Horizon: Zero Dawn.

Because his work is competent, clear, uniformly styled, and captures the general vibe of ‘epic fantasy art’, it has become useful prompt shorthand for people who want to make images in that style. Thinking programatically, it’s almost like a function which applies the aesthetic vibe of the last twenty years of fantasy cover art to an input. The other takeaway is that the overwhelming majority of enthusiastic AI art creators are geeks with an aesthetic sensibility gleaned from video games rather than museum pieces, but I think the fact an insane amount of AI art is basically ‘conventionally beautiful women in spacesuits’ makes that abundantly clear.

I’m sure being heralded as the standard-bearer for a whole art style is somewhat flattering, but it does result in the AI art rapidly supplanting Rutkowski’s own work in search:

I’m not sure where this particular trend ends up. But it’s not hard to imagine a future where particular (organic, human) artists become famous not so much for their work but for their role as signifiers which can be easily fed into the algorithm for wider interpretation and creation.

Legs

Legs are here. Finally, we can feel truly embodied in the machine.

Elsewhere

• People have been sharing this 1995 article by engineer and early internet pioneer Robert Metcalfe, in which he predicts the utter collapse of the internet in 1996. He didn’t get it right, but many of the things he predicted as being fatal are things we still argue about.

• On RealPage’s YieldStar, a software product which aggregates private and public data to assist landlords in setting rents, and boasts it can help them “outperform the market 3% to 7%”. The story doesn’t convincingly make the case that YieldStar is currently exacerbating to the current rental crisis in the US (except perhaps in some narrow markets) but there’s some interesting implications there in data being leveraged to create something that looks like a pricing cartel.

• This from Fabricated Knowledge is an interesting read on the market for timekeeping, including the variable cost of essential goods like quartz crystals.

• A skeptical take on VR from a self-described technology enthusiast: “And as much as VR might be able to make massive improvements in speed and graphical fidelity, it’s hard to see how it can overcome the fundamental friction involved in strapping a thing on your face that blocks out the world.”

• On the online fascination with “images of commodities in the process of destruction". Finally someone has intelligently addressed the bizarre viral video format of objects being destroyed by a hydraulic press.

• A post from 99% Invisible explaining the Irish roots of airport duty-free stores.

• An investigation into refugees using TikTok livestreaming to beg for donations, while the company takes up to 70% of their earnings. “In the camps in north-west Syria, the BBC found that the trend was being facilitated by so-called "TikTok middlemen", who provided families with the phones and equipment to go live.”

• A convincing argument that conservatism as a broad political philosophy is failing largely because its proponents rarely account for the impact of technology. “As new technologies enter a society, they disrupt the connections between institutions, practices, virtues, and rewards. They can render traditions purposeless, destroy the distinction between virtuous and vicious behavior, make customary ways of life obsolete, or render their rewards meaningless or paltry.”

• “TikTok’s content and form both reflect something that is increasingly true about the internet: It is becoming more like TV.”

• “The Secret Microscope That Sparked a Scientific Revolution”.

• “The Most Surveilled Place In America”.

• “A Minecrafter Set Out to Build the Known Universe, Block by Block”.

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Music box

The form and content of recorded music has always been downstream of the technology that enables it. The three-minute pop song remains the most popular and enduring format in no small part thanks to the original limitations of the 45-rpm vinyl disc, and new developments in recording technology, synthesisers and software continue to reverberate through music and culture at large.

You can often identify a material basis for new trends in music through shifts in production and distribution technology. You may have noticed, for example, that song choruses have been moving earlier and earlier in the track. Artists and producers attempt to work around the fact platforms like Spotify and Apple Music don’t recognise a stream unless the user plays it for more than thirty seconds, making those seconds utterly essential to hook the listener in. Pop culture naturally organises itself around the structures of its undergirding technologies.

It’s well-attested by this point that TikTok has become the primary growth engine for new popular music. The platform, which hit Western markets firstly in the form of lip-syncing platform Musical.ly before being acquired by ByteDance, has thrust an entirely new model onto the music industry, forcing artists and musicians to capitulate to its schizoid viral incentives. These trends aren’t exactly new — YouTube had already brought viral content dynamics to music, and platforms like Spotify impose their own variation — but the algorithmic black magic that has made TikTok grow so explosively has amped it to eleven, and brought with it a wholly new cultural territory.

“Technological change is neither additive nor subtractive,” writes critic Neil Postman in his book Technopoly. “It is ecological … You have a new environment, and you have reconstituted the conditions of survival.” This trickles down into the material conditions of making music, too. You might recall earlier this year there were a flood of complaints from artists saying they were being forced by their labels and management to make TikToks in an effort to go viral.

Similarly, it’s impossible not to notice the contours of manufacture in the kind of pop music that reliably goes viral on TikTok (and then the charts) these days. It all sounds largely the same: sanded-down hyperpop and EDM, with subtext-free lyrics custom-built to be bolted onto some meme or another. You can’t tell me, for example, that Rabbit Hole by Qveen Herby — currently featured in nearly 200,000 TikToks — wasn’t cannily engineered for its viral potential.

On the one hand, that’s just the way it goes as music is dragged into another technological era. The incentives and systems are new, and the culture shifts to accommodate them. Given a time machine, you could madlib most of what I just wrote into a critique of what MTV and the ubiquity of the music video did to songwriting and production culture in the 1980s. But, as is often the case, the algorithmic internet brings with it its own brand of kaleidoscopic weirdness, worthy of its own note. There are many and varied examples of its strange affect, but two perfectly illustrative cases emerged over the past few weeks.

First there was the success of Mary on a Cross, a 2019 B-side by theatrical Swedish pop metal project Ghost, which was propelled to the Billboard Hot 100 on the back of its sudden TikTok success. The song, which is overladen with references to oral sex and contains lyrics like “if you choose to run away with me / I will tickle you internally”, inexplicably became a favoured soundtrack to grimly sad TikToks and hacked-together movie clip compilations. Its success had second-order reverberations through the platform, as musicians began to post covers en masse and dead-eyed content mercenaries attached it to ever more irrelevant videos in order to capture the eyeballs (and earholes) pointed towards it. It has now been streamed over 100 million times on Spotify, easily dwarfing the band’s other output.

The second example was odder still. A 2007 video of the Miami Boys Choir, a long-running pop group made up of an evolving cast of pre-teen Orthodox Jewish boys, went viral on TikTok. The track, titled Yerushalayim, emerged into mass fandom based largely on the fact the kids are quite talented vocalists, and it goes surprisingly hard (in a gaudy sort of way). Orthodox pop is one of the more endearing subcultural musical relicts — controversial within the community that produces it and trapped production-wise among the sparkling horns and squealing guitars of 80s AOR — and seeing an army of TikTok users dissect a single Miami Boys Choir video clip with the quasi-ironic fervour of the K-pop fandom is certainly something to behold.

Spurred by its newfound fame, the live version of the song was re-released on streaming services in the past fortnight, and has been played millions of times.

The response from those in and around the Orthodox community has largely been bafflement. Writing at her newsletter Unorthodox Gymnastics, Dvora Meyers describes the dislocating feeling of seeing the Miami Boys Choir, a somewhat guache fixture of her upbringing, emerge into flash-in-the-pan mainstream success thanks to the unknowable mechanics of the algorithm. “Those of us who consumed this stuff and were also exposed to secular pop culture did so with the sense that perhaps our own products were simply not as good as the stuff created by the mainstream media,” she writes. That confusion and amusement at seeing what amounts to a community secret explosively broadcast everywhere is, I think, an increasingly permanent fixture of reality.

The spectre of subcultural intrusion into broader success is not native to the internet, of course. In 2000, a Canadian vinyl collector named Brian Linds discovered, while browsing a thrift store, a series of recordings made between 1976 and 1977 of a number of Vancouver schoolchildren amateurishly singing pop hits in a way that came out perfectly haunting. The Langley Schools Music Project was rereleased the next year and became a cult hit, appearing on a number of end-of-year lists. (The cover of Space Oddity is particularly affecting.)

This feels a little different, though. The currents of virality, fully unleashed with platforms like TikTok and its legion of incoming imitators, are sanding away the infrastructure that once sustained the music industry and the cultural universes it generated around it. And as our platforms increasingly gravitate towards the unrelenting content firehose model pioneered by TikTok, I think it’s going to get weirder still.

I’ll wrap this series of somewhat disjointed thoughts with an excerpt from this wonderful newsletter by Drew Austin, which articulates a parallel phenomenon: the rapid death of the 20th century music snob under the annihilating force of omnipresent, on-demand content.

Like the printing press in the 15th century, the internet would rapidly devalue a variety of hard-won skills, and analog snobs would suffer the same fate that monastic scribes once did. As the ‘00s progressed, it became clear that internalizing information—memorizing, cataloging, recognizing—was precisely what we would no longer need to do. Memory was outsourced to the cloud as taste became the individual’s burden: We all found ourselves adrift on an unbounded sea of content, suddenly responsible for doing our own canonization.

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Strange indicators

Big fan of odd indices tracking economic sentiment. Please share if you have a favourite you’ve seen out there.

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License to thrill

In a delightful use of open government data, this Twitter account collects and shares applications for personalised license plates at the California DMV between 2015 and 2016, a period when that information was made available under the state’s Public Records Act. (At least I believe that’s the case — LA Mag claimed to have made the application back in 2019, when these would-be vanity plates were first surfaced.)

Officially, the California DMV — as with many state entities responsible for vehicle licensing around the world — does not permit “any personalised license plate configuration that [carries] connotations offensive to good taste and decency,” meaning that anything sexual, profane or likely to offend is not getting past the keeper. Contained in the public dataset is a treasure trove of Herculean efforts to evade that directive, and evidence of a state bureaucracy armed with little more than Google and Urban Dictionary trying in vain to stop them.

The vast majority of these plates tweeted at random by the account are denied, which leads me to think either the DMV has a remarkably low tolerance for tomfoolery, or this specific system only captures plates which were flagged for review or didn’t get picked up by some automated filter. (Assuming, of course, the creator of the bot isn’t prioritising denials in what it shares.)

It’s all very funny. But did get me thinking about vanity plates as an interesting aspect of a modern state bureaucracy. If I may put on my Seeing Like A State hat for a moment, they are part of an imposed system of legibility — vehicle licensing — but one permitted to be treated with a little bit of levity by the population at large. It’s one of the few instances in which the modern drive to inflict scientific order on messy reality is balanced with the human impulse to take the piss. (Even the simplest of human endeavours, naming one’s children, comes with all sorts of explicit rules depending on jurisdiction.)

The corollary is that vanity plates naturally become one of the points at which faceless government administrators are invited to make basically arbitrary rulings on good taste. It’s definitely an arbitrary call for our friends at the California DMV, given that basically every combination of letters imaginable has been entered into Urban Dictionary as a mythical sex act.

Thankfully, this Twitter bot exists to document those brave soldiers taking a pickaxe to the foundations of bureaucratic good taste.

Elsewhere

• More on the ‘far out, AI-generated content is moving quickly’ front. Two major text-to-video were announced in the past week or so: one from Meta, named Make-A-Video, and one from Google, named Imagen. The output from both still looks busted — even in what one assumes are the best examples they could muster — but it’s not hard to imagine this getting a lot better very quickly.

• Further to the above thoughts on streaming, The Guardian covers those who are “quitting Spotify to save their love of music”. I can’t imagine this is particularly widespread as a habit, but it’s still interesting to think about how the format of streaming instils a certain kind of listening, which some people just don’t jibe with.

• A good read here on earlier advocates for the decentralisation of the internet, who were trying to disrupt the web’s power centres long before crypto and Web3 usurped the mission.

• Insta-click for me in my Gmail inbox from headline alone: “Why is this cyber-education nonprofit selling a $13,000 occult artifact on eBay?”

• The Onion filed an amicus brief in the U.S. Supreme Court case of a man who faced criminal charges for starting a parody Facebook page of his local police department. It’s funny, but also a well-articulated case for parody as necessarily involving some degree of mimicry. “If parody did not deliver that advantage, then no one would use it.”

• The Hollywood Reporter has a feature on how the Amazon Rings of Power deal worked, including selecting the (basically untested) showrunners and the process for dealing with the Tolkien estate. Enjoyed this bit:

  Netflix pitched doing several shows, such as a Gandalf series and an Aragorn drama. “They took the Marvel approach,” said one insider to the talks, “and that completely freaked out the estate.”

• Some interesting thoughts here: “80 brief predictions on the future of computing and its impact on the broader world”.

• Fascinating (and extremely numbers-heavy) blog by mathematician Terry Tao about a recent viral news story about a lottery in the Philippines which had 433 winners, who then had to split the winnings amongst themselves. He starts out addressing the simple question (“how likely is that to happen?”) before digging into the more complicated issues — like punters having lucky numbers, or the likelihood of us hearing about something like this.

• A critique of the practical impact of effective altruism and longtermism, two movements seeing something of a Silicon Valley renaissance.

• “How Big Tech Is Importing India’s Caste Legacy to Silicon Valley”.

• “Internet-born analog horror intensifies the uncanny with familiar, obsolete media.”

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House of pain

In Dirt, a story on the emergent film subgenre of ‘Airbnb horror’:

Barbarian, the buzzy new horror film from comedian Zach Cregger, is the latest in a growing trend of vacation rental horror and thrillers, a genre colloquially known as “Airbnb horror.”

Films that fit into this category take a modern twist on home invasion movies, but also include commentary on how pervasive Airbnb’s practices have become in our world. In A Perfect Host, released in 2020, the main characters rent a lake house only to discover that the owner has been lurking nearby and will not grant them their peace; a frequent complaint of early Airbnb users who would realise upon arriving to the place that they would be in a room of an apartment or a house while the host was still around.

Years ago, before the pandemic, a friend visiting Sydney stayed in one of those generic inner-city apartment blocks which appeared to have been entirely colonised by Airbnbs, which was of little surprise considering its central location and proximity to great tourist amenities. The whole building vibrated with the unsettling lack of place that comes with that kind of arrangement. Everyone in the narrow hallways didn’t quite seem to know where they were going, and the apartment itself was fully immersed in globalisation chic; stuffed to the gills with generic wall art and the cheap IKEA fitout one can expect to see in any reasonably-priced Airbnb the world over. The ‘host’, per the app, was clearly a faceless real estate business masquerading unconvincingly as an individual landlord. You got the feeling every other apartment in the building probably looked exactly the same.

Just being there was an encounter with the Weird. It felt haunted. I’ve been reminded of that particular experience repeatedly as Airbnb became the latest anxiety for horror filmmakers prod at over the last few years. It’s a timely update for home invasion movies at a time when the prime horror-viewing audience is far less likely to own a home, let alone have its sanctity and sovereignty violated. Many horror movies over the last decade have been built on exploiting and intensifying the various minute social frictions we experience in our day-to-day lives, and there are few experiences more replete with irritating social frictions than booking and staying in an Airbnb. (Having to do host-imposed chores despite paying a large cleaning fee is one of them, but I haven’t seen a movie touch on that yet. Hollyweird: call me.)

I would also situate these movies in the broader trend identified here by Chris Person as ‘housecore’ — low and mid-budget movies which build their narrative around a single cool-looking house, the physical and psychic geography of which is usually explored thoroughly throughout. Bodies, Bodies Bodies, mother! and Hereditary come to mind as recent examples.

Until I publish that short story, my lone contribution to the world of Airbnb horror is this review someone left me in 2015, which reads like it was written at gunpoint:

Viral arbitrage

At The Verge, writer Russell Brandom argues a unifying thesis for “why platforms turn boring”:

After following half a dozen platforms through this shift, I’ve come to see it as a test for platform health in general. I call it the Bootleg Ratio: the delicate balance between A) content created by users specifically for the platform and B) semi-anonymous clout-chasing accounts drafting off the audience. Any platform will have both, but as B starts to overtake A, users will have less and less reason to visit and creators will have less and less reason to post. In short, it’s a sign that the interesting stuff about the platform is starting to die out.

Brandom points to the slow shift of TikTok from being a crucible where viral culture and trends are born to a place where accounts share warmed over content from other places. I’ve definitely noticed this shift — half the time when I look at TikTok I’m being shown parts of random TV shows cut into short clips which are linked together through nested comments and replies, which is basically the only reliable way you can create continuity between clips on the app. Going by the comments, there are a lot of people who enjoy consuming content in this hacky, disjointed way, which gives me great concern about the state of their minds.

This ‘bootleg content’, as Brandom puts it, makes an online space feel like a bit of a wasteland — less a vibrant space for creativity and more a vat full of regurgitated slurry. The dynamics of regurgitation also tend to echo through the supposedly ‘original’ content too: if you are ever unlucky enough to click on the Facebook Watch tab, you will enter a cold and dead universe of plainly fake videos of American husbands pranking their wives which seem like they were generated by a neural network.

“The point isn’t that this is aesthetically or morally bad, but it represents a change in how people relate to the platform,” Brandom writes. “Instead of a space for creation, it’s become a space for distribution.”

I personally will go so far as to say it is aesthetically bad, and makes for a completely recursive cultural deadzone. And it’s interesting that the increasingly prevalent content format of the platforms we spend so much of our time on means we move along this funnel quicker and quicker every time.

~ UNDER CONSTRUCTION ~

The link to the Google Drive is here if you would like to delve into this important work of archaeology.

To the stars

This week came news that Star Citizen, the endlessly promised and vastly ambitious space sim multiplayer game, has raised over half a billion dollars since it was first revealed in 2012, as spotted by Eurogamer:

Star Citizen's exceedingly lengthy development is well-documented, with the game still in alpha over a decade after production began. And while it's attracted some private funding in that time, the overwhelming bulk has come via crowdfunding, beginning with a successful $2m USD Kickstarter in 2012 and ballooning from there.

As of today, Star Citizen has amassed $500,075,150 USD in crowdfunding from a total of 4,096,384 backers, according to the official Roberts Space Industries website. Its previous major milestone of $400m USD raised was reached last November, meaning it’s taken a further ten months to accrue an additional $100m.

I’ve been fascinated for years by Star Citizen and the fervent community which has frothed up around it. It’s an ambitious project which intends to culminate in a game of unprecedented detail, quality and scope, allowing players to inhabit a dynamic sci-fi universe where they can be anyone and do anything.

The reality, as is often the case, is a little less exciting. Watch any video of Star Citizen in action in 2022 and you’ll see is a mishmash of half-baked systems, random ideas and dubiously functional gameplay mechanics. Very little of it comes together into anything approaching a coherent whole. A spin-off single player title, Squadron 42, was announced in 2014 and has also been repeatedly delayed, with no end in sight. A poorly-received update sent out to the community in May discussed at length the effort the team was putting into mastering the finer details of bedsheet physics, to ensure a bed would realistically deform when characters get in and out of it. As one Reddit comment put it: "How about just GETTING THE GODDAMN GAME OUT THE DOOR before worrying about [how] a fricking BEDSHEET will deform?" (Sounds like someone who is constitutionally incapable of excellence to me.)

A game is certainly being made here, but it’s obviously nowhere near completion and perhaps never will be. Even the army of Star Citizen ultras who evangelise the game on TikTok like Christian missionaries struggle to create gameplay videos which don’t look glitchy and unpolished. A Forbes feature in 2019 covering the long and shambolic development process described it as “not fraud”, but the product of “incompetence and mismanagement on a galactic scale”.

So that’s what half a billion dollars buys you. And yet the impassioned Star Citizen cult — some of whom have been eagerly helping fund the game’s development for a decade — are more than happy to tell you they’re in it for the long haul. The very long haul, in fact. They’re building the Great Pyramid of Giza here. A representative comment on the Kotaku story: “I, for one, think it’s fitting that a truly immersive space sim should take generations to build, and commend this kind of ambition that no gaming megacorp would ever touch.”

Personally, I’m not sure Star Citizen will rise to the level of being a multigenerational project like the construction of a cathedral — I’m not sure the dynamics of software and game development are really amenable to that — but at least some people are having fun.

Shrieks and murmurs

Here’s my favourite weird internet story of the week. Film producer Emerson Collins shared a video to TikTok and Twitter of human-sounding moaning and groaning noises playing over the intercom on his American Airlines flight. Flight attendants weren’t able to identify the source of the noise, and one can be heard on Collins’ video suggesting it might be some sort of prank.

But then multiple other people online shared their own experiences on different American Airlines routes — alleging they also heard an assortment of moans, squeals and grunts over the intercom.

The LA Times quoted someone who had the same experience on a flight back in July:

Bradley P. Allen, a technology executive from Manhattan Beach, couldn’t believe what he was hearing when he stumbled across the video on Twitter. He had the same perplexing experience during his American Airlines flight from John F. Kennedy Airport to LAX in July.

Collins’ video captured it exactly, he said: like someone had grabbed the flight attendants’ mike, collapsed at the front of the galley and was just “incapacitated by a severe gastrointestinal problem, and is just moaning.”

For their part, American Airlines has blamed the sounds on a technical issue, with a spokesperson saying the plane intercoms “are hardwired and there is no external access." It does sound very human, but — as numerous audio hardware experts have commented — electronic feedback can sound extremely weird, and you can generate sounds not far removed from the ones in the clip by dicking around with a vocal synthesiser.

We love a haunted technology story, don’t we folks? Aeroplanes, breathtaking machines that they are, have been been particularly prone to incursions of the uncanny throughout modern history. You’re likely familiar with gremlins, the mischievous entities invented by British pilots to explain aircraft malfunctions with no other clear cause. Some kind of moaning phantom on a passenger aircraft is very much in tradition.

Elsewhere

• Fascinating bit in The Hollywood Reporter on how the economics of streaming have radically changed documentary production. The “scientific rationalisation” of making documentaries — as filmmaker Alex Gibney puts it — has led to punishing schedules, a blurring of the line between premium nonfiction and reality TV, and a breakdown in ethics.

• How trafficking victims in Cambodia are being forced to run Facebook romance scams. This is obviously awful, but one striking aspect is how women with language skills are used to build rapport with the love scam victim, before they’re passed on to ‘management’ who have the knowhow to execute the financial scam itself.

• “Crypto Darling Helium Promised A ‘People’s Network.’ Instead, Its Executives Got Rich.”: Above anything else, I think Helium is best understood as a cautionary tale about one of the core dynamics of the Web3 economy. It’s not a long journey for tokens to go from being a tool to align incentives to being your actual product. That’s when pumping the token price becomes your priority, and whatever imagined community and network benefits become less central.

• Stock image platforms like Getty Images and Shutterstock are banning AI images. The Getty CEO pointed to the thorny copyright issues around AI image generation as the motivation here, but the prospect of the platforms being rapidly swamped by mass-produced AI art was surely part of it too. Congrats to whoever managed to make a few bucks off this before the drawbridge went up.

• Extremely interesting website here demonstrating how various technologies work using interactive diagrams.

• Interesting (and long) on the death of lifestyle brands, and what comes next: “The era of lifestyle brands has passed. The world is organising around a new model: profitable cultural belief systems that produce ‘types of guy.’”

• Today in vibes: “Jeremy Corbyn played a version of 'Doom' that lets you 'kill Thatcher'“

• The guy trying revitalise the lost art of stone skipping.

• “How TikTok became an e-commerce juggernaut in China”.

• ”How tech is changing what it means to be an author”.

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Some housekeeping: I’m moving this weekly free instalment of The Terminal to a Monday, thanks to some new projects I’m working on. (More on that later.)

I co-host the podcast Down Round, which you can subscribe to here.

Spellcrafting

If you wanted to take a sacralised, enchanted view of the form and function of modern tech, you could formulate it like this: microchips are runic inscriptions on sand which, when coursed through with lightning, act as conduits for incantations that are written in occult tongues and studied obsessively by monks. (Imagining the average software dev as a monk might be a stretch, but let’s roll with it.)

But that mildly annoying stoner thought bubble is increasingly becoming a broader mental model for the industry and people trying to understand new shifts. As focus moves towards AI models that can accept and process natural language prompts in increasingly sophisticated ways, we’ve quickly arrived at a position where we can type something in human language and have neural networks conjure images, text and actions seemingly from thin air.

One of my favourite second-order effects of this shift is how contested the space of prompt design (or spellcrafting, if you like) is rapidly becoming. When AI image generators hit the market en masse, one of the immediate assumptions was that entire creative industries could be replaced by laypeople entering extremely simple text prompts. But one of the wonderful traits of humankind is our propensity to create replicable systems, and another is our ability to turn things that should be fairly simple into shockingly creative endeavours that require more skill than strictly necessary. (See for example the guys who have turned Google Maps into a high-intensity spectator sport.)

The still-nascent AI art space has quickly been colonised by obsessive pro users who have figured out all sorts of complicated prompt tricks to generate exactly the sort of images they want. This isn’t remotely comparable to the skill required to create a digital artwork manually — at least, I don’t think it is — but it’s some order of magnitude more complex than just typing “cyberpunk Shrek” into DALL-E 2. For example, here’s an image generated with Stable Diffusion:

And here’s the prompt used to generate it:

ancient indonesia, indonesian villagers, punakawan warriors and priests, cinematic, detailed, atmospheric, epic, concept art, wimmelbilder, matte painting, background mountains, shafts of lighting, mist,, photo – realistic, concept art,, volumetric light, cinematic epic + rule of thirds | 3 5 mm, 8 k, corona render, movie concept art, octane render, cinematic, trending on artstation, movie concept art, cinematic composition, ultra – detailed, realistic, hyper – realistic, volumetric lighting, 8 k

This isn’t really natural language at this point — its a series of vaguely linked incantations to coax a desired image out of the machine. (It’s its own kind of coding, in a way.) You can see why people are imagining the space will become even more absurdly professionalised:

But as quickly as AI art mavens figured out ways to systematise production, people started automating it. A number of prompt generators have sprung up in recent weeks, which use AI to create prompts for you, which you can then pop into one of the many image generation models to get better results. Amusingly, this has led to an immature kind of gatekeeping, as people who became proficient at prompt writing over the past few months become annoyed at being automated out of their newly-found professions.

Vale to the AI spellcrafters. Your reign as priests of the new order was brief and went largely unnoticed.

Moving pictures

Meta has been attempting to acquire GIF-hosting platform Giphy since 2020 and integrate it into its platforms, and has faced serious antitrust pressure for it. Unfortunately for both parties, animated GIFs have become deeply uncool in the interim. Now, the increasing uncoolness of Giphy’s product is becoming part of the company’s desperate pitch to competition regulators. From The Guardian:

In a filing with the Competition and Markets Authority, Giphy argued that there was simply no company other than Meta that would buy it.

Its valuation is down by $200m from its peak in 2016 and, more importantly, its core offering shows signs of going out of fashion. “There are indications of an overall decline in gif use,” the company said in its filing, “due to a general waning of user and content partner interest in gifs.

“They have fallen out of fashion as a content form, with younger users in particular describing gifs as ‘for boomers’ and ‘cringe’.”

I’ve always abstractly been a fan of the animated GIF as a format. (Less so in actual execution.) They’re relicts from an earlier internet era — extremely inefficient, clunky and low-resolution imports from the Age of Forums which persisted for their organic cultural resonance rather than any objective technical benefit. I liked that, and I liked how platforms like Twitter had to develop hacky ways of making them work in a modern web environment, simply because everyone loved the specific aesthetic vibe of these busted, pre-Web 2.0 anachronisms.

Now the humble GIF is disrespected and spat on by Zoomers, merely because it has become an extremely cheugy transmission vector for the lamest aspects of 2010s mass culture. (Maybe we should have seen the writing on the wall when a flurry of thinkpieces in 2017 accused the format of enabling ‘digital blackface’.) All that said, if it means I never have to see the one of the woman spitting out water, I’m happy to lend my sword to their scorched earth campaign.

At Garbage Day, Ryan Broderick argues that GIFs fell from cultural grace largely because of big content warehouses like Giphy, which made them less anarchic, more searchable, more monetisable and less cool. “It’s sad and, I think, a very good lesson about what happens when you centralise a piece of internet culture,” he writes. “It becomes commodified, it becomes stagnant, and, ultimately, becomes cringe.”

Panopticon

A somewhat alarming project here from Belgian artist Dries Depoorter, who describes himself as tackling themes surrounding “privacy, artificial intelligence, surveillance and social media.”

For The Follower, Depoorter recorded a series of open camera feeds, then scraped the Instagram location tags for photos in the area of each camera. Using software, the two are linked, displaying the photos at their moment of conception.

The point he’s making is not that hard to figure out. But there’s an element to it Open video camera feeds remain one of the most fascinating artefacts of the digital age, and one of the few kinds of content which still feels somewhat transgressive to view. Yes, Deeporter’s project about surveillance, but part of what makes it so unsettling is the machine’s eye view of an unsecured video camera, which appears even more alien when juxtaposed with the performatively human lens of Instagram.

It’s funny how long we’ve been wrestling with that specific weirdness, too. In Don DeLillo’s 2001 novel The Body Artist, the main character spends hours of her day staring at a webcam feed of a road on the outside of the Finnish city of Kotka. From the text:

She set aside time every day for the webcam at Kotka. She didn't know the meaning of this feed but took it as an act of floating poetry. It was best in the dead times. It emptied her mind and made her feel the deep silence of other places, the mystery of seeing over the world to a place stripped of everything but a road that approaches and recedes, both realities occurring at once, and the numbers changed in the digital display with an odd and hollow urgency, the seconds advancing toward the minute, the minutes climbing hourward, and she sat and watched, waiting for a car to take fleeting shape on the roadway.

As one might expect, not everyone captured by Depoorter’s commentary on the overlapping systems and structures of surveillance society is pleased. From Input:

At least one of the project’s subjects is extremely unhappy. The Follower also identified Renata Costa and her partner Cleison kissing outside the Temple Bar. When contacted, Cleison declined to talk via Instagram video call, believing Input was behind the project. “I would like you to delete my photo... immediately,” Cleison writes. “It’s a crime to use the image of a person without permission.” Cleison says he’ll be contacting his lawyers.

Waterworld

It’s a MONIAC (Monetary National Income Analogue Computer), designed by New Zealand economist Bill Phillips in 1949. Originally intended as a teaching aid to help students learn how the economic processes of the United Kingdom worked, it used the flow of coloured water to represent money moving through the economy into various tanks, representing how it could be distributed and spent, and the effects of doing so. It was effective enough at a time where electronic computers were rare and not fully suited to the task of complex economic modelling that it was used for actual work and analysis.

Obviously, computers quickly got good enough at that work that we transcended our need for water-powered computers. Still, it’s fun to imagine a kind of quasi-steampunk alt future where everything runs on flowing water and fluidic logic. Fellow Vladimir Nabokov heads will recall that his 1969 novel Ada or Ardor is set in an alternate reality where electricity has largely been outlawed and everyone communicates with the ‘hydrophone’, which is some kind of (largely unexplained) telecommunications system which uses water to transmit voice.

Anyway. Here’s a fun video of a MONIAC in operation:

Elsewhere

• Fascinating read on unauthorised boutiques springing up in Mexico which buy, warehouse and resell clothes from Chinese e-retailer giant Shein, capitalising on the “lack of trust in digital businesses and low connectivity rates” across the country. (They also benefit from Shein’s discounts on bulk purchases.) E-commerce and its dynamic finds ways of manifesting even in those communities still resistant to it.

• An interview with Craigslist founder Craig Newmark, discussing why the site still looks more or less the same as it did in the late nineties. “I've learned that people want stuff that is simple and fast and gets the job done. People don't need fancy stuff. Sometimes you just want to get through the day.”

• Seems like despite Meta’s attempts to turn Instagram into a content firehose aren’t working very well. From the WSJ: “Instagram users cumulatively are spending 17.6 million hours a day watching Reels, less than one-tenth of the 197.8 million hours TikTok users spend each day on that platform.”

• The New York Times paywall now uses machine learning to determine how many free articles a given user should get access to.

• A fun summary at Jacobin of the unusual urban design and architecture obsessions of the freshly-minted King Charles.

• On the demographic of remote workers most troubled by the push to return to the office: people who have secretly moved to another country.

• A nascent mystery developing: who is Elly Conway, the debut novelist behind forthcoming spy thriller Argylle, currently being made into a $200 million Apple TV+ movie? She appears to have no internet presence, and the Hollywood Reporter made no progress trying to figure out her identity or anything else about her.

• An essay on AI art: “We find ourselves currently somewhere between the uncanny valley and the holy mountain, alive in a time of dreaming machines.”

• And here’s another front-end image generation interface for Stable Diffusion. Play around with it before it inevitably goes paid or becomes volume-restricted.

• From 2019, but I found it interesting: The hunt for Japan’s ‘ghost wolves’.

• One of those essays most people have read by now, but worth reposting given recent events: “Roger Federer as Religious Experience".

• “On social platforms, the “fluid self” is not a rejection of personal branding but another manifestation of it”.

• “AI And The Limits Of Language”.

• “Towards a theory of the creator”.

• “Carnival of Brexit”.

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Toiling in the fields

Rest of World has a feature on Critterz, a play-to-earn NFT game built on top of Minecraft that (like Axie Infinity before it) turned into a kind of digital sharecropping operation where wealthy players would lease their assets to low-income earners in the Philippines and take a cut of the tokens they earned. As I mentioned in a newsletter a couple of months ago, Minecraft developer Mojang unilaterally banned NFT and blockchain products in their game, which threw nascent gaming economies like Critterz into a tailspin.

The feature interrogates the social and economic structures that have formed around play-to-earn games, and it’s a great read. But one standout for me is this little tidbit, quoting a NFT gaming consultant:

But he also envisions NFT games that could exploit the wealth gap between players to deliver a different experience. “With the cheap labor of a developing country, you could use people in the Philippines as NPCs (“non-playable characters”), real-life NPCs in your game,” said Kossar. They could “just populate the world, maybe do a random job or just walk back and forth, fishing, telling stories, a shopkeeper, anything is really possible.”

Putting aside the fact that there’s nothing about this concept that really demands the use of the blockchain or NFTs, it’s nice to see someone reconstructing the more dystopian promises of the metaverse as an intentional part of the sales pitch. Rather than having the various basic functions of a digital world performed by programmed characters performing a simulacra of personhood, you can be thrilled in the knowledge it’s a real guy who lives in Cebu City, and he’s doing it to feed his family.

In a prescient 2017 article for WIRED titled “Face It, Meatsack: Pro Gamer Will Be the Only Job Left”, writer Clive Thompson sketches out a future where displaced workers from industries experiencing pressures from automation and other shifts in the global order will serve to populate online communities experienced by a superstrate of wealthy gamers who crave “vibrant communities” to spend their money in. “Rich players don’t want to play with bots,” he writes. “They crave the social fellowship of real humans. And they also enjoy the thrill of lording their socioeconomic status over others.”

Despite the consultant in the Rest of World article pitching it as a bold new future for NFT gaming, this sort of perverse class system has already existed for a very long time in online games. Less affluent players from the developing world already form a functional underclass in MMOs like World of Warcraft, where they perform services for wealthier players that are compensated either with in-game rewards or real currency. Wherever a virtual world exists, it will inevitably replicate many of the incentive structures of the real world, including one of its most enduring dynamics: those with a lot of money and no time doing business with those with no money and a lot of time.

Generally speaking, those games are not explicitly built to sustain that sort of social order, and in many cases try to actively discourage it through either technology or policy. What is interesting is a new generation of metaverse developers making a class system part of the living texture of their worlds, making it more believable and enjoyable for the section of the playerbase who reliably spend money.

$XXX

A chastening reminder of where the real energy in the creator economy lies, despite the millions of words expended on arguing about free speech and influence on Substack. More from Variety:

The U.K.-based company on Thursday announced financial results for the year ended Nov. 30, 2021. OnlyFans’ net revenue grew 160%, to $932 million, and the company had pre-tax profits of $433 million (up from $61 million in 2020), its biggest yearly growth in profits.

OnlyFans creators earned $3.86 billion in 2021, an increase of 115% from the year prior, bringing the company’s payments to creators to more than $8 billion since its 2016 founding. Gross revenue (i.e., fan payments net of taxes) also more than doubled, to $4.8 billion, for the year ended November 2021.

It’s often said that porn is the dark matter of the internet, and this has led to slightly defective analysis — like the widely held, but not entirely accurate, belief that the porn industry ultimately picks the winner of competing media standards and formats. (No, porn isn’t actually the reason VHS beat Betamax.)

But those OnlyFans numbers are crazy, especially given it runs a much leaner operation than most other creator economy platforms. This is no doubt why, as Casey Newton reported at The Verge, Twitter was strongly considering building its own competing adult content platform, as opposed to just being a marketing channel for others:

In the spring of 2022, Twitter considered making a radical change to the platform. After years of quietly allowing adult content on the service, the company would monetize it. The proposal: give adult content creators the ability to begin selling OnlyFans-style paid subscriptions, with Twitter keeping a share of the revenue.

Had the project been approved, Twitter would have risked a massive backlash from advertisers, who generate the vast majority of the company’s revenues. But the service could have generated more than enough to compensate for losses. OnlyFans, the most popular by far of the adult creator sites, is projecting $2.5 billion in revenue this year — about half of Twitter’s 2021 revenue — and is already a profitable company.

Violent delights

The emergent AI art space has its first widespread bit of horror creepypasta. Or, as one replier put it, the “first cryptid of the latent space”.

Twitter user Supercomposite was playing around with an unnamed AI image generation model and experimenting with a technique called negative prompt weighting. Usually with these systems you’ll feed it a prompt and the neural net will draw upon its vast corpus of visual and textual data to generate an image that most closely resembles the content of said prompt. Negative weighting involves the opposite — you’re telling it to generate an image that isn’t like the prompt.

Supercomposite threw the AI the word ‘Brando’, as in Marlon Brando, instructing it to generate something as far from the actor as possible. It spat out what looked like a corporate logo for a non-existent company with the vaguely Pynchonian moniker ‘DIGITA PNTICS’. Wondering whether executing the experiment in the inverse would then produce a picture of Marlon Brando, she dutifully entered DIGITA PNTICS as a negatively weighted prompt. Instead of a picture of Brando, it created what she described as a “devastated-looking older woman with defined triangles of rosacea on her cheeks”. Supercomposite named this woman ‘Loab’.

The creator went on to experiment further with the original Loab image and the model, combining it with other AI-generated images and further prompts. She claims that the imagery became increasingly bizarre, and the face of ‘Loab’ appeared recognisably through multiple generations of images — sometimes disappearing, but inevitably coming back, sometimes in quite abstract ways. What elevates it to the level of horror is the goriness and violence of the images. "Through some kind of emergent statistical accident, something about this woman is adjacent to extremely gory and macabre imagery in the distribution of the AI's world knowledge," she writes.

The thread went viral this week, with a nice mixture of responses ranging from enjoyment of a grisly bit of internet horror to those who seem to genuinely think it is inviting a real-life demonic entity across the threshold. You can, as Max Read writes, imagine that “across a number of offices in Los Angeles people are already pitching Loab movies to bored agents and executives.”

If you want to be a cynic, you can say that Supercomposite’s storytelling is doing a lot of the heavy lifting in that thread, and that the pictures aren’t that similar, beyond what one might expect from feeding similar prompts and images into the AI’s maw. But it’s not hard to see why it has resonated so strongly. This isn’t unexplored thematic terrain, even beyond the realm of internet fiction. The notion of otherworldly sentiences manifesting through technology is a well-worn trope in horror and science fiction, and here we have the added weirdness of a computer spitting out imaginary demons in response to incantations, like a digital ouija board.

The parallel theme of photographs and images being haunted by malevolent entities captures a general unease about the nature of content creation and consumption. In Stephen King’s 1990 novella The Sun Dog, a Polaroid camera purchased in a junk store only produces images of a malevolent black dog which approaches the frame with each successive photograph. In Scott Derrickson’s 2012 film Sinister, a pagan demon manifests in Super 8 footage discovered in the basement of a house where a multiple murder occurred. I could go on with more examples, but I won’t.

This narrative archetype, of which you can find antecedents in various folkloric traditions, also has a habit of breaking out into contemporary urban legend. Students at the Royal Holloway College at the University of London for the better part of a century have traded stories suggesting Edwin Landseer’s macabre painting Man Proposes, God Disposes is haunted, and one of the earliest creepypasta memes of the 21st century generated a similar mythology around artist Bill Stoneham’s unsettling 1972 painting The Hands Resist Him.

So there’s certainly something latent in the terrain of the human creative consciousness that our friend Loab speaks to. But there’s something else interesting going on here too. AI image generation has advanced in leaps and bounds recently, becoming both more impressive and more accessible at incredible pace, but even the most sophisticated of them veer more often than not into the uncanny valley. Among the most active and vibrant communities emerging in AI art are those leaning into that inhuman strangeness to create spooky images.

Indeed, it seems like that particular genre of imagery is what AI is actually best at right now, as a natural consequence of its technological imperfection. We can probably expect more Loabs as artists continue to play around in the unexplored territories of AI art.

I’ll close off this section with a quote given to PC Gamer by David Holz, founder of image generation platform Midjourney, on the place of violent and scary imagery in AI. “Obviously, it doesn't matter if there's a little bit of gore,” he said. “But the problem is that you have 10,000 people who want to do gore all day. Then we produce more gore content in one month than all of human visual history. I don't know if we need that.”

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Star power

An important dispatch from the far-flung provinces of an overstretched empire:

It’s been remarked upon before, but one of the least edifying aspects of the internet and streaming-enabled content bubble is how it mainstreams the impulse once exclusive to fan fiction of leaving absolutely no narrative thread unpulled or unexplained. There’s always a new show or movie waiting in the wings to obliterate whatever alluring skerrick of mystery might be left in the spaces between existing properties.

In this case, Disney can’t even let its esoteric cosmology go unexplained. Sad!

Elsewhere

• A story here from Katie Notopoulos at BuzzFeed which tickles my enduring interest in the cultural grey economy that has sprung up around music streaming platforms. She makes the case that a bunch of musicians who have recorded scatological ditties with titles like "Poopy Diaper" are profiting (inadvertently or otherwise) from little kids yelling rude phrases at Amazon Alexa.

• A good essay at The New Atlantic on on the gamelike nature of online existence, and the various new sensemaking techniques we apply to life and politics. “We build online identities with the same diligence and style with which Dungeons & Dragons players build their characters, checking boxes and filling in attribute fields.”

• What comes next for the ‘creator economy’ — a category that has become so broad and overstuffed that it is losing meaning? “At the same time, the shift to individuals versus institutions is, I believe, a real and lasting phenomenon. You can’t see over 10,000 people showing up at the ghastly American Dream mall in New Jersey for a YouTuber’s new burger joint and not recognise there’s a cultural shift at work.”

• A fun story about an internet mystery that spread on social media this week. The writer has an old family photo with a TV shown in the background displaying an obscure cartoon he had never been able to identify, and the social media hivemind took a while to figure it out too.

• Interesting report on Apple’s quiet efforts to build up an advertising empire now that it kneecapped competitors like Facebook and Google with its app tracking reforms.

• A thread describing what happened among eager Wikipedia editors when the Queen died.

• A forums thread featuring someone using an AI image generator to turn old Sierra adventure game images into modern high-resolution art.

• On the role of advanced chips in the Russia-Ukraine War, and the effect of Russia’s ongoing failure to obtain them.

• Blackbird Spyplane interrogates a new trend in car paintjobs, which resemble featureless wet putty — “almost as though a computer-rendered object has somehow infiltrated the real world, beholden to a slightly different set of physics.” Can’t say I’ve seen too many of these in Australia, but now I’m impossibly attuned to their arrival…

• On “training TikTok to create a feed you'll hate”.

• “Did the internet ruin culture?”

• “The Curious Afterlife of a Brain Trauma Survivor”.

• “The Three-City Problem of Modern Life”.

• “El Salvador Had a Bitcoin Revolution. Hardly Anybody Showed Up.”

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One thing that keeps drawing my attention to the crypto world is how suffused it is with an almost religious mysticism. I don’t just mean that it functions as a cult, although even the most casual observer would correctly identify it often looks look like one. It has outwardly spiritual dimensions that you rarely observe so close to the surface in techn…

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Welcome to this week’s free edition of The Terminal. If you’d like to become a paying subscriber and gain access to more content, hit the button below.

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To my cherished subscribers: apologies for the low number of posts in August – I took a longer break than expected to wrap up a few projects. Coming up over the weekend for your delectation: a dive into the strange politics of the Ethereum Merge.

Check yourself

An investigation this week by ProPublica into “likely the biggest Instagram verification scheme revealed to date”:

Since at least 2021, at least hundreds of people — including jewelers, crypto entrepreneurs, OnlyFans models and reality show TV stars — were clients of a scheme to get improperly verified as musicians on Instagram, according to the investigation’s findings and information from Meta […] The scheme, which likely generated millions in revenue for its operators, illustrates how easily major social, search and music platforms can be exploited to create fake personas with real-world consequences, such as monetizing a verified account.

I think account verification has generated one of the most interesting status and incentive systems of the social media era, and one that major platforms still don’t seem to have any idea of how to deal with.

The original mission of account verification when it was first launched on Twitter in 2009 was pretty simple: if you see a blue check, you know you’re looking at an authentic account. It did not promise any particular status beyond the confirmation you were looking at Justin Timberlake’s real Twitter output, and not that of some scurrilous impostor trading on his celebrity.

That didn’t last long. As a wider class of posters began being verified — including relatively obscure people like writers at digital publications and minor local celebrities — it became thought of more as a marker of status and credibility, like a priestly class for the digital age. Twitter did a lot to solidify that perception, such as by emphasising blue check replies in threads or more aggressively recommending them to new users, making it even more desirable. It developed a number of other signifiers along with it, thanks to the numerical dominance of media and politics personalities among the ranks of the verified. Calling someone a “blue check” on Twitter conjures a particular image — usually some kind of aloof metropolitan elitist occupying a high-status lanyard class profession, utterly divorced from the interests of the unverified masses.

The weird incentives created by this system have wider reverberations. Twitter users might remember the armada of blue ticks who would hold court in Trump’s replies during the presidency, becoming micro-celebrities in their own right from posting variations on “You are a disgrace, sir!” under his posts, and benefiting from the exposure boost. The 2020 Twitter hack — and plenty of smaller ones between — used stolen verified accounts to run crypto scams. I’ve had a blue check on Twitter for about five years, and can probably credit plenty of follower growth and opportunities to the subtle and unearned ways the platform boosts or foregrounds my posts.

The first time the company really acknowledged that a perverse value system had emerged was when it verified white nationalist Jason Kessler not long after the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, which many people read as an endorsement of his views. That led to a pause in the verification system, as pontification from people like Jack Dorsey on whether maybe verification could be opened up to everyone.

Five years later, the system still works like an exclusive status club, with more stringently defined criteria for authenticity and notability. For whatever reason, having approximately half a million accounts operating as a network aristocracy at Twitter’s discretion is a political equilibrium the company is happy to maintain. (Given blue ticks tend to be Twitter power users, I assume they have sway in maintaining the system as is. Just like the Ancien Régime before the French Revolution. Disgusting.)

The same dynamics play out on other social platforms that later adopted Twitter’s tick, like Instagram, Facebook and TikTok. Content from blue tick accounts is highlighted or foregrounded in various ways by the platform, bolstered by social signals that have developed over the years. So it’s obviously inevitable that people are willing to jump through a lot of hoops to acquire verification, even if that means doing it through less than legitimate means. On the mild end there’s an expansive SEO content universe offering tips and tricks on how to maximise your chance of being verified, and then you have the outright scams like those covered in the ProPublica investigation.

I don’t know how you actually fix this problem, but it does seem like a problem worth fixing. The web3 people are experimenting with digital assets and NFTs as new markers of authenticity, with as yet very limited success. Rather than create a decentralised community status system, Twitter’s hexagonal NFT avatars mostly serve as a general signifier that the person in question is ‘into NFTs’ (derogatory). Reddit’s experiments with blockchain avatars are pissing off its own userbase, with a number of large subreddits threatening to ban anyone who comes into their territory using one.

Oh well. I have my tick already, my spot on the Ark is reserved. The rest of you can rot!

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The dark arts

A couple of months ago when I was dicking around with various new AI image generation models like DALL·E 2, I said it was likely this sector was going to accelerate at explosive pace, and material and ethical questions about everything from copyright to labour were going to become relevant very quickly.

Well, it’s moving even quicker than I expected. The latest text-to-image model is Stable Diffusion, which was released to the public last week. Unlike DALL·E 2, Stable Diffusion has been released in its entirety, meaning that as well as using it in a browser here, you can also download and run it on your own computer, assuming you have decent graphics card capable of producing good results.

The model also includes a function named ‘img2img’, which uses the same diffusion technique to add or fill in detail to an image. (You can play around with it here.) The subreddit for Stable Diffusion is full of people experimenting with it by using the model to turn crude drawings and prompts into more interesting art. This example from u/argaman123 has been doing the rounds1:

Because the model is open-source, people are rapidly building tools and plugins to introduce generative workflows into apps like Photoshop, creating a whole new constellation of uses for neural net art. Developer Andy Baio also released a tool showing “12 million image/caption pairs out of over 2 billion” that Stable Diffusion was trained on, giving a sense of how the sausage was made.

There’s an interesting thread here from someone who did some experimentation with Stable Diffusion, DALL-E 2 and Midjourney to find out which was better at particular tasks or types of images, and what sort of ‘flavour’ each introduce:

Because Stable Diffusion’s public release is open, it’s also possible to remove what little guardrails exist on it. If you attempt to generate something violent or sexual in DALL·E 2 it will rebuff you, whereas Stable Diffusion can’t. This, predictably, has led to an instant, thriving market for strange porn:

This is all being done in defiance of Stability AI’s weekslong warnings to not use its model for anything sexual. As AI-generated hentai nudes started appearing on forums and social media earlier this month, the company wrote in a Twitter announcement (and to the discredit of cool moms everywhere): “Don’t generate anything you'd be ashamed to show your mother.” 

The images include everything from hentai, to computer-generated celebrity nudes, to naked images of people who don’t really exist. Some of the results almost look convincing, while other results are horrific, generating impossible bodies with errant limbs and distorted faces.

Okay, one more to get the juices flowing. A guy won a state art fair competition by submitting art generated with Midjourney:

Adults only

This tweet pointed to me to a fun FOI disclosure of the documents relating to when Australian Classification Board’s decision to ban the 2004 video game Manhunt after waving it through initially. Australia did not have an R18+ classification for games, so anything deemed more extreme thant might be captured by an MA15+ rating was summarily banned. (Agitating for an 18+ rating to be introduced represented the high water mark of political engagement for wide swathes of Australia’s gaming community.)

The enclosed documents are amusing not only for the feeble attempt by the local Take-Two Interactive boss to argue the notoriously sleazy and violent title contained some sort of positive moral value (“While it may not be clear from the initial levels, Manhunt is at heart a traditional tale of good versus evil”) but also the great hand-written notes by the attending censors at the time:

Links

• On Gen Z using TikTok as a search engine to find everything from news and culture to recipes and hyperlocal recommendations. I find this particularly interesting, because TikTok’s search and metadata functions are borderline unusable, and built mostly for surfacing highly engaged content. But it’s another datapoint on Google no longer being the first point of call for a huge range of online search activity.

• Interesting thread and associated newsletter about the widening divergence between critic and user scores on blockbuster movies. There’s a few theories offered as to why — like critics getting sick of Marvel movies while fans still like them, or targeted campaigns by certain fandoms. I think there’s a generally more hostile anti-critic vibe out there too these days. Like a militant wing of the ‘let people enjoy things’ movement.

• Thought this was a good interview with Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, who is a much smarter and more critical thinker about crypto political structures than most people trying to build them on his platform. The lengthy section on intentional crypto communities is particularly interesting.

Also, the attempts at forming local crypto communities intentionally so far have sucked. The problem I see is basically that they all use some form of "low taxes" as a primary pitch, and while low taxes are a lovely benefit from the point of view of an individual, they are a terrible filter if your goal is to attract people who are actually interesting. The kinds of communities you get when low taxes are the primary reason to come are just really boring and lame.

• Things don’t get ‘released' now, they drop, and that includes basically every kind of consumer good or cultural product you can imagine. An Interesting bit on how social media and e-commerce have led to a wider tectonic shift in language.

• This history of the TSA in the US is good, and opens with an absolutely insane anecdote.

• Interesting piece on the challenges of refrigeration in Africa, and why building reliable ‘cold chains’ on the continent is so tough.

• On the guild of medieval carpenters rebuilding Notre Dame.

• “How the internet turned dadcore staple, ‘fish fear me,’ into viral fashion”.

• “The Book That Explains Our Cultural Stagnation”.

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Good sports

A short, fun history of the development of the tech industry as represented by sponsorships on football shirts at Rest of World:

But these sponsorships actually reveal something about the tech industry as a whole: when you trace the history of these commercial deals across the decades, patterns emerge. Rather than individual companies, entire sectors of the industry — from cars to consumer tech to gambling websites — seem to jump into the sport at once, signaling their rise to, or the desire to, dominate global markets where football is also part of everyday life. It’s no coincidence, for example, that mobile phone companies turned to sponsoring football clubs during the beginning of the new millennium: with handsets becoming increasingly common and 3G just around the corner, companies like Samsung and Vodafone wasted no time in paying record amounts to some of the most successful clubs in England.

This is not just limited to association football. The most recent cross-code development, which is discussed in the article, is explosion of cryptocurrency exchanges and blockchain companies investing the spoils of the recent bull market in sponsorships, like Crypto.com splurging $700 million on the 20-year naming rights to the former Staples Center in LA. Regardless of your views on crypto more generally, the increasingly rapid turnover in tech empires these days makes the continuing existence of Crypto.com in twenty years a reasonably open question.

The funny thing about this trend is that as you move deeper into the crypto ecosystem, the products themselves become increasingly alienated from something your average sports audience would know or care about. Case in point: the latest sponsor for the Canterbury-Bankstown Bulldogs of Australia’s NRL:

Illuvium is an Australian-developed “open-world exploration, NFT creature collector and autobattler game” which is still development and currently not playable outside of a very limited private beta for early users, which only covers a small slice of what the game is supposed to do and attracts very mixed reviews in the project’s Discord. Despite not being a viable product yet, it is built on a crypto token ecosystem which has already made its creators phenomenally wealthy, and it clearly has cash to burn on empire-building like sport sponsorships. The first reply on Twitter to the Bulldogs announcement is representative of the rest:

It’s an interesting development in the long marriage of tech and sport marketing. One promise of tokenisation is that you can raise capital for projects from both eager participants and outside investors in a sort of supercharged, financialised crowdfunding effort. That’s all well and good when you’re talking to the sort of crypto-native degenerates who might be inclined to dump money and time into that sort of project, but it’s funny to watch the mindset collide with that of your average rugby league spectator.

It’s also not really clear if this big global push into sponsorship and massive marketing campaigns is actually doing much to move the needle on getting people into crypto. From a report in the Washington Post:

Now a core metric of how successful they were has been returned, and experts say it’s an eye-opening one: not successful at all. The number of people who invested in crypto has not expanded since last September before the push began, according to a new study led by Pew Research Center.

The monoculture reasserts itself

A sad day for all the tweets and thinkpieces about how Game of Thrones crashed through the culture without a trace because of the last couple of seasons.

Hole in the sky

Fired Twitter security boss Peiter Zatko filed a whistleblower complaint arguing the platform displays "extreme, egregious deficiencies" in everything from security and privacy to content moderation.

I’ll let you read and decide for yourself what’s accurate and what’s sour grapes — as some are alleging — but a particularly interesting bit relates to the 2020 hack, when a number of high-profile verified accounts like Barack Obama, Joe Biden and Kim Kardashian started tweeting bitcoin scams. It’s long been reported that it was some sort of social engineering hack, but there’s detail here:

The 2020 hack was then the largest hack of a social media platform in history, and triggered a global security incident. Moreover, the hack did not involve malware, zero-day exploits, supercomputers brute-forcing their way past encryption, or any other sophisticated approach. In fact, it was pretty simple: Pretending to be Twitter IT support, the teenage hackers simply called some Twitter employees and asked them for their passwords. A few employees were duped and complied and — given systemic flaws in Twitter's access controls — those credentials ‘were enough to achieve “God Mode,” where the teenagers could imposter-tweet from any account they wanted.

Changing of the guard

Here’s a reasonably major media acquisition story that went by without much fanfare this week, but seems like a signpost for the moment.

After a massive and protracted bidding war, the long-held rights to The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit were sold off to Swedish video game holding company Embracer Group, which owns a mammoth 120 game studios and properties like Tomb Raider. These include “motion picture, merchandising, stage and other rights”, though Warner Bros. still seemingly retains some licensed rights thanks to the Peter Jackson movies.

The rights for the massively influential Tolkien novels now sit with a video game conglomerate which insists it plans to release not only games but also make "additional movies based on iconic characters such as Gandalf, Aragorn, Gollum, Galadriel [and] Eowyn”. The famously rapacious company also announced a handful of other acquisitions at the same time as the big Middle-Earth Enterprises purchase, including developer Tripwire Interactive, which produced Maneater, a video game where you play a killer shark eating beachgoers on the Gulf Coast. (I’m sure Maneater is as seismic a work as The Hobbit for some people.)

In February, I wrote a story for subscribers about the enduring fascination of tech culture with The Lord of the Rings, from midcentury programmers peppering their code and documentation with references, to today’s industry elite naming their companies and products after various features of the legendarium. Despite the fact Tolkien himself was famously critical of the technological and industrial character of modernity, they persevere with the love affair regardless.

The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit have had a particularly weird relationship with intellectual property and film rights over the years. Without getting too much into the gory details, the exclusive rights to key elements of those novels have sat with Saul Zaentz since 1976, when the Hollywood producer acquired them from United Artists. When noted Tolkien freak Jeff Bezos become singularly obsessed with making a Lord of the Rings show for Amazon Prime, he went straight to the Tolkien estate to nab television rights for $250 million, which came with all sorts of byzantine restrictions on what could and couldn’t be addressed by the new show.

It’s a neat little indicator of where the gravitational centre of popular culture is moving. It feels weirdly appropriate — if maybe a little grim — that the rights to Tolkien’s wildly popular universe are now split between a video game company and what can very crudely be described as a sophisticated logistics and web hosting firm.

It’s converging in the other direction too, with the major Hollywood studios beginning to pack their slates with blockbusters based on video game properties. From The Verge: “As it stands, the number of upcoming projects listed from other studios on the Wikipedia page for movies adapted from video games is almost half of the total number of movies ever historically released within the genre.” (Even cultural hegemon HBO is giving it a crack with The Last of Us.)

You can read all of this as just the flavour of the moment and the entertainment industry trying to locate some spark, but I think there’s something deeper going on here: tech — and I include gaming here — continuing its long march through the institutions and flexing cultural muscle. The tail is wagging the dog.

Elsewhere

• Interesting interview with Reddit CEO Steve Huffman on the company’s blockchain and digital asset efforts, which very deliberately do not use the labyrinthine in-group language of web3 — even less obscure words like ‘wallet’. One quote: “One of my frustrations with the crypto community is like, you know how everything in open source is just a little bit worse? But they're like, ‘it's amazing! Look at this Microsoft Word replacement, it's just as good!’ No it’s not. Crypto’s like that, again."

• This came out last week while I was off, but a good feature on the collapse of crypto hedge fund Three Arrows Capital.

• Binance chief comms officer Patrick Hillmann claims that hackers impersonated him on calls to prospective clients by using a a deepfaked AI hologram. I haven’t seen any actual evidence of this beyond his claim, but sounds cool.

• A dispatch from FWB Fest, the “first IRL festival” from the influencer social club Friends with Benefits, which is operated by a DAO.

• A good rundown of the planned Ethereum merge set to take place next month.

• Interesting on residencies becoming a strategy for big-ticket touring music artists, whereas they used to be basically a death knell for an someone at the end of their career. (I’m reminded of when Pink did 58 shows in Australia back in 2009 for a total audience of 660,000 people. Underexamined moment in the culture.)

• On the increasing spread of worker tracking software, especially as remote work becomes the norm.

• An interview with Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul creator Vince Gilligan.

• A piece on The Swimmer, one of the great short stories.

• “Against apocalypse: the slow cancellation of the slow cancellation of the future”.

• “The Wild West Outpost of Japan’s Isolationist Era”.

• “The High-Stakes Race to Engineer New Psychedelic Drugs”.

• “When Your Boss Is Crying, But You’re the One Being Laid Off”.

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Note: I won’t be publishing next week. I trust you to occupy yourselves.

Spinning around

This week, the U.S. Treasury officially sanctioned Tornado Cash, a decentralised cryptocurrency mixing service, which it accused of laundering “more than $7 billion worth of virtual currency since its creation in 2019”, including funds from North Korean hacking team Lazarus Group. That means U.S. citizens and businesses are now prohibited from using it. This morning, an alleged Tornado Cash developer was arrested in the Netherlands, along with the announcement further arrests were “not ruled out”.

Here’s how crypto mixers like Tornado Cash work. A user deposits their cryptocurrency into the protocol, where it is blended with the crypto of random strangers who have similarly deposited their funds. The user can then return later once the process is complete and receive the same amount from the pool of blended funds (minus a fee) and walk away with coins that are no longer linked to the ones they deposited.

Because most blockchains are built with transparency in mind, it is otherwise pretty simple for someone to examine the public ledger and trace the movement of funds from one wallet to another. Protocols like Tornado Cash make that considerably more difficult. There are all sorts of reasons why one might want to cover their tracks — keeping the details of a business transaction private or avoiding persecution, for example — but the one that most easily comes to mind is laundering money. And yes, Tornado Cash has been used to do that, like how Lazarus used it to wash some of the money it obtained from the Axie Infinity hack this year.

What is interesting about this, though, is that Tornado Cash is a protocol made up of a bunch of smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain. It’s not a platform that lives on a bunch of servers sitting in the basement of a warehouse in North Macedonia, for example. The distributed algorithm can’t actually be destroyed short of somehow eliminating the Ethereum network itself. So much of what Treasury can feasibly do is go after wallet addresses and owners who have received funds via those smart contracts. This has led to a situation where people are sending small amounts of ETH to Jimmy Fallon via Tornado Cash, theoretically exposing him to prosecution.

As has become very clear, much of the crypto world is actually fairly centralised, despite the mythology. So, every bit of consumer plumbing and infrastructure that can feasibly block off Tornado Cash now has, like popular web3 platforms Alchemy and Infura. This means the front-end interfaces that let people actually use the protocol are now gone, so one now requires a little more technical know-how to use it — assuming you’re willing to take the risk.

What most interests me, though, is the odd spectacle of governments trying to arrest the operation of self-executing, distributed algorithms that do not ‘live’ anywhere specifically, and will continue to execute as long as there are still computers on their networks. Whether or not the sanctions and arrests work as intended in this case, there are vistas of genuine weirdness in the direction we’re heading. Authorities trying in vain to stop semi-sovereign algorithms firing off in the ether. Very Neuromancer.

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I’d buy that for a dollar

I’m just floating this instance of “corporate synergy” for its RoboCop vibe:

Wanda Sykes is knocking on the door of syndication with a new series that features videos taken from Ring doorbells.

The comedian is to host Ring Nation, a new twist on the popular clip show genre, from MGM Television, Live PD producer Big Fish Entertainment and Ring.

The series, which will launch on September 26, will feature viral videos shared by people from their video doorbells and smart home cameras.

It’s a television take on a genre that has been increasingly going viral on social media.

The series will feature clips such as neighbors saving neighbors, marriage proposals, military reunions and silly animals.

Now that’s vertical integration! (Amazon closed its $8.5 billion acquisition of MGM in March.)

Take a DAO

Earlier this year, there was a brief craze over over how DAOs — decentralised autonomous organisations — were on the cusp of revolutionising human social organisation, supplanting traditional corporate structures and bringing people-powered democracy into realms it had not yet penetrated. By attaching voting rights to blockchain token ownership, the thinking went, new networks and products could bootstrap themselves into existence and be run by a community rather than a top-down hierarchy.

This craze was supported by a bunch of odd, well-capitalised projects which tried to apply the supposed power of decentralised communities to bear on real-world cases, rather than the uninspiring drudgery of governing crypto projects and pumping the value of tokens. You’ll no doubt remember some of them, and I covered a few on The Terminal. There was ConstitutionDAO, which tried to pool user money to buy a copy of the US Constitution at auction. (It failed.) There was Spice DAO, which wanted to do the same for a copy of the production bible for Alejandro Jodorowsky’s unfilmed version of Dune. (It kind of succeeded, and then completely went to shit.) LinksDAO wanted to own and manage a golf course and blur the line between NFT ownership and country club membership. friesDAO planned to acquire a fast food franchise and then leverage blockchain voting to run it according to the “wisdom of the crowd”.

Much of that energy instantly dissipated with the crypto crash, and it became very obvious — if it wasn’t already — that a large share of participants in these projects were more interested in acquiring and flipping tokens for rapid profit than inaugurating a radical new experiment in human organisation. These projects seemed to have little issues raising funds — it was just everything that came after which didn’t work nearly as well. (It turns out running a business with the same organisational structure as an internet forum can result in institutional paralysis.) I poked my head into the friesDAO Discord this week and found an absolute wasteland, with only a handful of posts every few days; mostly vague updates from the core team about various fast food franchise opportunities falling through.

As Olga Kharif wrote earlier in the year, illustrating some other problems DAOs inevitably face:

With DAOs, often-anonymous cohorts issue tradeable tokens to investors and users and deposit a large chunk of the float into a treasury. Many create their code in haste and get hacked. Even when working, their community-based structure can be hard to manage and operate, with a small group often ending up in control. And bad actors abound: A project called Wonderland, which is trying to become a DAO, recently admitted that a convicted felon with a track record of financial fraud was helping manage its treasury.

There have been several high-profile cases in which a DAO’s founders drained a project’s liquidity and ran. Last year, such “rug pulls” cost users millions of dollars, according to industry expert Chainalysis.

Ergo, most DAOs these days are back to doing the thoroughly unsexy work of operating DeFi protocols, governing crypto projects and facilitating group purchases of NFTs. They’re real enough use cases as far as they go — and its having a genuine impact on the wider financial ecosystem — but it’s not going to excite anyone who isn’t an investor, and their ‘real world effect’, for want of a better phrase, approaches nil.

That’s why I was excited to see another freakish DAO project pick up some mainstream attention, making the same absurd promises of projects that crashed and burned earlier in the year. This one is a retail shop in San Francisco named STORE_0, which founder and CEO Itsuki Daito wants to be fully run by a DAO.

From a feature in Bloomberg:

Daito’s pitch goes like this: when the DeStore app is launched this fall, anyone will be able to buy a blockchain-based token that represents ownership in the store, and join the community’s server on Discord, a chat app similar to Slack that includes many elements of more traditional social media platforms. The greater the value of the tokens participants own, the greater their share of voting power. As the store gets up and running, token holders will be able to vote on what brands to stock and sell at the location, what furniture to buy, and even who will work there. What happens to any revenue the store may generate will also be up to a vote. 

Personally, I don’t have much faith this idea will shake out much differently to the other broken dreams articulated above, or even that the wisdom of the crowd has much value in the operation of a retail store which one assumes needs to turn a profit to stay viable. But I’m glad everyone’s having fun again.

Elsewhere

• You may have come across this story about the scandal gripping the world of audiophiles, but if you haven’t it’s very amusing.

• “A Hookup App For The Emotionally Mature”. It’s interesting that the solutions offered to some kind of problem caused or worsened by technology — like the forced sociality of Instagram, or the hookup culture of Tinder — are usually just more technology, only arraigned or structured in a different way the developers hope will generate different (and maybe more positive) behaviours.

• In the same mode, and relevant now that new platforms like BeReal are selling themselves as authentic, this 2016 essay on authenticity from Rob Horning: “Authenticity is commercialised nostalgia for that way of life that was articulated by a different set of economic relations: precapitalistic, or pre-massified, or pre-globalised — whatever word you want to use to describe how it seemed when you were nine years old, when things were ‘real’.”

• 20th century media and communications theorists like Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman are experiencing a little revival of late. Ezra Klein at the New York Times put up both a podcast and a feature touching on the applicability of their ideas to the post-internet world. I thought this was a good response and critique.

• In what I can only assume is a healthy signal for the world of digital publishing, it seems like major publishers are now plying their trade with ads in shitty mobile games.

• Did you know there’s a giant candy arbitrage scheme happening on Amazon? Now you do.

• A short bit on the evolution of TikTok comments, which were originally funny and absurd but now have become as heated and contested as other online places where people congregate.

• On an important sociological phenomenon of the 90s: dads who got incredibly obsessed with one video game for a period of time and then never touched another again.

• A dive into Praying, “a pseudo-religious minimalist brand for the Very Online and performatively pious”.

• This newsletter on storied jewellery brand Tiffany’s foray into weird crypto stuff.

• A neat post about electrum coins.

• On the “sex bracelet hysteria” of the early aughts.

• On ‘secular puritanism’.

• “The feud between a weed influencer and a scientist over puking stoners”.

• “Pirates of Khadda Market”.

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Here’s a stat you might have seen been bandied around a lot recently. A search of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission database finds that in the first six months of 2022, the word metaverse appeared in regulatory filings over a thousand times, compared to 260 for the entirety of 2021. In the preceding two decades, the word appeared about ten tim…

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The desert of BeReal

This week I decided it was time to, like many millennials desperately grappling for relevance in a world disappearing into the rearview mirror, sign up for BeReal. I’m currently writing up a newsletter for paid subscribers on some deeper thoughts and analysis of the company itself, but I thought I’d touch on one aspect of it here.

For the uninitiated, BeReal is an increasingly popular social media network which pitches itself as an authentic ‘anti-Instagram’ engineered to run against the overly manicured, performative aspect of social media in the 2010s. Instead of posting whatever you want, the app sends you (and everyone else in your timezone) a notification at a random time in the day, at which point you need to take out your phone and take a simultaneous photo with the front and back camera within two minutes. If you take it late, it tells your friends exactly how late you were — shameful evidence that you may have put more than a single moment’s thought into it. You can’t see your friends’ photos from that day unless you take one yourself. Everything, including comments and reactions, is ephemeral, lasting only until the next day’s designated time to BeReal.

The effect of this piece of social engineering is not merely to obliterate the natural impulse towards online performance and brand alignment. It makes everything stultifying boring in the way real life often is between the moments actually worth remembering. Scrolling through the day’s feed, you are reminded that the topology of human experience in 2022 is mostly made up of unadorned rooms in offices, work-from-home desks, laptop screens, washed out televisions, suburban streets, distant warehouses, quiet train carriages, pets on leashes and the inside of cars.

Writing for OneZero, Clive Thompson describes Google’s CAPTCHA verification images, drawn from Street View photography, as possessing a “positively Soviet anomie”; depicting the world as a jumble of “blurry, anonymous landscapes” that are “never joyful vistas of human activity, full of Whitmanesque vigour”. BeReal generates something only one step removed from that robot perspetive. Divorced of the storytelling impulses and incentives built into to other, more performative social media — including the Stories format pioneered by Snapchat, which was intended to encourage more off-the-cuff, loose posting — life as it quite literally is seems somehow untextured.

But it doesn’t really matter, obviously, because the people on your feed are people you know. You can find meaning in the most inconsequential parts of their lives because you know them. It’s a different story on the ‘Discovery’ tab, which juices BeReal’s engagement metrics by displaying an endless feed of photos from people around the world. Without the connective tissue of social relationships and devoid of the well-developed dramatic language of other platforms like TikTok, it makes for odd viewing.

Some randomly collected samples, which are very much representative of the whole:

All of them look like this, and all are beautiful art that collectively makes an aching point about the desolation and loneliness at the heart of modern online culture.

I guess this could be the near-future of online life: the firehose of staged and scripted content from a lineup of endless viewing apps attempting to chase TikTok’s tail, while our genuine social activity is reduced to randomly taken photos of our immediate environment when we receive a collective signal from the heavens. Very exciting, I’m sure you’ll agree.

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Desert power

There is no greater object of fascination for me right now than NEOM, which is Saudi Arabia’s bizarre plan to build a $500 billion smart city in its northwestern desert. It’s a strange vaporous pipedream which has at various times promised to include everything from flying cars to a gigantic artificial moon, and every bit of content that comes out of it is incredible.

Like the above video, which depicts THE LINE — a so-called ‘smart linear city’ and part of the overall NEOM project. It’s supposed to be a 170-kilometre long vertical city, clad in reflective glass and without cars or greenhouse emissions, in which any given resident is only a 5-minute stroll from essential amenities.

One can only assume its basically just a consulting scam and a way to funnel oil money into the pockets of various architectural firms and futurist keynote speakers. Bloomberg reported in a feature story on the bizarre project last month that Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman specifically instructed designers to ape the aesthetics of cyberpunk — which is rarely meant to match the utopian vision NEOM is supposedly aiming for:

MBS told its designers that he liked the aesthetic of “cyberpunk,” a sci-fi subgenre that typically depicts a dark, tech-infused future with a seedy underworld—think William Gibson’s novel Neuromancer or the Keanu Reeves vehicle Johnny Mnemonic (also based on a book by Gibson). “I was a little surprised to hear that the prince was very interested in science fiction, but many people are, of all sorts of political persuasions,” Gray says. He and a team of other consultants were soon working long hours to research the aesthetics and implied culture of cyberpunk’s many iterations, which fed into a taxonomy of science fiction atmospheres that Neom employees were developing.

It does, however, show the extent to which our imaginings of the future are completely inextricable from fictional aesthetics, even when said aesthetics are meant to evoke a future gone wrong.

It’s not currently looking positive for NEOM The Economist reported earlier this year that only two buildings had actually been constructed for the entire NEOM project, with most of the site — which has displaced tens of thousands of people — remaining barren desert.

We need to go back

Monkey business

Here’s a weird one a few people have asked my opinion on over the past few months. I’ve been meaning to mention it at some point, as it does lie at the intersection of a number of my interests, so I may as well now. It’s weird, so bear with me.

There’s a long-running theory popular in parts of the internet that the Bored Ape Yacht Club, the popular NFT collection and aspiring cultural powerhouse — with a big splashy profile on Input this week — is in fact some kind of subversive alt-right project, and is laden with fascist imagery and subliminal messaging. Allegations that the crypto scene is somehow adjacent to the far-right underground are a dime a dozen (and in some cases true) but this one is especially scandalous because so many celebrities either own Apes or desperately want to.

I’m not going to get into the weeds here, because — as with virtually anything crypto-adjacent — there are a lot of posts to read and digest. Much of this particular theory is driven by artist and NFT creator Ryder Ripps, who is basically locked in a blood feud with the BAYC creators. Ripps has posted a number of Twitter threads comparing the project’s logo to the Nazi Totenkopf and alleging the name of the company that runs BAYC, Yuga Labs, refers to the Kali Yuga, a concept from Hindu cosmology which has been adopted by some online far-right communities, essentially meaning the prolonged period of conflict, sin and unrest we are currently experiencing. (I probably don’t need to join the dots for you on where that lines up with esoteric online fascism.)

Ripps, who is endlessly fighting the BAYC after he created an NFT collection that uses the same art, collected his arguments and published them on GordonGoner.com, named for one of the founders. A quick read will reveal that his points range from the vaguely plausible to the absurdly reaching.

The idea of a multibillion-dollar NFT collection popular with celebrities and their agents actually being some kind of Nazi culture jamming project is obviously wild. I personally don’t really see it, but the fact people are getting fired up about it is of great interest to me. The mere thought that Justin Bieber might be a single handshake away from contemporary devotees of Savitri Devi — by way of a glorified blockchain streetwear brand — is an intoxicating idea for any self-respecting fan of weird stuff online.

The internet heat around this theory accumulated to the point that the BAYC founders had to put out a statement in June denying it, offering up the original design pipeline for the skull logo, quoting the Anti-Defamation League and rejecting the allegations of being somehow adjacent to right-wing 4chan mysticism.

3) Talk about the company name, “Yuga Labs”?

We’re nerds, and Yuga is the name of a villain in Zelda who has the ability to turn himself and others into 2D art. It makes perfect sense for an NFT company. We were also aware that “Yuga” means “era” in Sanksrit. Gordon spent a decade practicing Hinduism, and the “Kali Yuga” is the current era we are in according to Hinduism. The ADL quite literally laughed at the suggestion that the term Kali Yuga had anything to do with white supremacy.

The Input profile I linked up top also goes into some detail attempting to rebut the allegations, which clearly loom large over the founders (“It’s all day, every day,” one said, regarding the online hate that comes as a result of the allegations.) The latest development on all of this is an interview with NFT newsletter Surfing the Waves, in which BAYC founder Wylie Aronow admits a friendship with a wannabe transgressive writer from one of the many online lit scenes that supposely harbour reactionary currents.

Again, I don’t really buy much of this. Most of the connections drawn are either circumstantial or can very easily be written off as juvenile internet edgelordism. But the dynamics I do find incredibly interesting. Much hay has been made of web3 providing the infrastructure for a whole new, radical way of generating culture and doing business, but what it has spat out here is a brand with a billion-dollar market cap which is at the mercy of the eternal dynamics of forums drama and crypto bag-pumping, the mythology of the online rabbit hole, and the insatiable desire for more and more content.

As with everything in this space, it’s basically impossible for an outside observer to tell who is spreading these allegations because they genuinely believe it to be true, because they are talking their books on a rival NFT project, or because they’re craving engagement on an expose they posted about it. I can’t shake the feeling that, by seeking to attach a tradable token and a treasury to every weird internet subculture and fandom that exists, we’re going to see plenty more of this new breed of corporate scandal.

Elsewhere

• A story in The Guardian on the recent cultural obsession with flight tracking. Over the past few weeks tracking private jet activity of celebrities has become part of climate activism, but it’s generally an interesting kind of anti-elite activism. Whatever your politics, you can usually divine some overarching message in the skies from the flight activity of the rich.

• Thought this was a good temperature check on the newsletter revolution. The Terminal will not be shutting down or going on hiatus, but I get what the people profiled here are driving at.

• On “the euphoria of stumbling upon weird Spotify cover songs”. The writer here is interested in the “every song, whenever you want it” model of music streaming spitting out some often bizarre deep cuts, but I think there’s an even more interesting story in the SEO optimisation game of brinkmanship compelling low-rung artists to cover songs they think people might be searching for. (Related: this painful thread of boutique TikTok covers of Running Up That Hill attempting to capitalise on the song’s post-Stranger Things popularity on the platform.)

• Doing the rounds: Marc Andreessen, the powerful VC who wrote the famous essay ‘It’s Time To Build’ inveighing against the regulatory capture and civilisational squeamishness that have robbed Western nations of their capacity to make everything from new tech to infrastructure and housing, appears to have written a complaint with his wife to their local authority opposing multifamily development in their wealthy neighbourhood. A dark day for the YIMBY community.

• There’s a rich vein of thought in comparing current social changes under Western capitalism with similar cultural and subcultural shifts in Japan from the 90s through the 2000s. I thought this was good, on infantalisation.

• Interesting on AI copywriting, and Google’s longstanding stance that AI-generated copy shouldn’t be permitted in Search. One assumes these frictions are going to become more intense over the next few years.

• Thought this was good on Meta’s changes to Instagram versus what people actually want.

• On rappers and their attempts to elbow NFTs into the culture.

• “The Secret History Of The Internet’s Funniest Buzzer-Beater”.

• “The Writing on the Wall”.

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Some housekeeping

Before we get into it, an announcement. I’m soft launching a podcast, which will be massive news for the two or three people who have requested this over the past decade of my life.

Down Round, which I’m co-hosting with Raph Dixon of The Meeting Tree, will be more or less adjacent to The Terminal in coverage, unpicking whatever’s going on at the intersection of tech, culture and business. Also, it’s only twenty minutes long! Bear with us as we experiment and find a format and flow that works, and feel free to email me with your feedback.

You can subscribe with your favourite podcast app here.

Ozymandias

Back in October, just after Wall Street Journal dropped a trove of leaked internal documents from Facebook, The New York Times published a story headlined “Facebook Is Weaker Than We Knew”. The thesis of the piece, drawing from those documents, was that Facebook — then on the precipice of its rebrand as Meta — was much further over the hill than most assumed, riven with internal fractures, and bleeding users and attention to challengers like TikTok.

At the time this seemed like somewhat wishful thinking, considering how profitable the company was, and how deeply it had insinuated itself into both the structure of the internet and culture more broadly. But this week, the prediction seems to have been broadly vindicated. in multiple ways. Meta has announced its first quarterly decline in revenue:

For the first time in nearly a decade, Meta’s explosive growth has come to a halt, as the Facebook parent company forecast its first decline in revenue since it went public.

Meta, in its second-quarter earnings report on Wednesday, said it expects third-quarter revenue of between $26bn and $28.5bn – lower than the $30.52bn analysts predicted.

Part of that is thanks to Apple, which last year decided to give consumers the right to opt out of ad tracking across apps via a simple prompt box — a decision which has blown a $10 billion hole in Facebook revenue so far, and has also hit companies like Snap and Twitter. Part of it also thanks to Zuck and co’s huge investment in the metaverse — losing $2.8 billion in Q2 — which exist now mostly as a kind of vaporous promise of revenue growth over the horizon rather than a place people actually want to spend their time.

But the more interesting Meta story this week was the consumer uprising over the company’s attempts to turn Instagram into a TikTok clone in a vain attempt to copy its success. Instead of being an app where you look at photos your friends have posted, Instagram was initiating a rapid pivot into being a content firehose more interested in showing you random video memes and trends from creators you don’t follow.

It’s understandable why they want to do that. As I wrote a few weeks ago when these changes were being forewarned, the entire topography of the internet is shifting away from replicating real-life social networks in favour of short-form video in a never-ending feed. “Two decades of innovation in social networking, mobile technology, content creation tools, algorithms, AI, user experience has converged in a singular feed of video,” writes Troy Young at People vs Algorithms. “People love video. It just took a little time to get everybody to this point.

But what Meta didn’t count on was that people would viscerally hate the change and disagree that Instagram should be more like TikTok, and that it wouldn’t have the political capital to enact the pivot against their will. This led to Insatgram boss Adam Mosseri having to post a hostage video defending the changes; admitting they would go ahead despite the fact no one seemed to admit to wanting them. The fact that it was basically an irresistible commercial imperative which would go ahead regardless of opposition was implied.

Perhaps the biggest sign of the looming peasant revolt, and sort of broadly instructive about the whole situation, was when the Kardashians shared a viral post which demanded the company “make Instagram Instagram again” by dropping the pivot to video and focusing on its core business of displaying “cute photos of my friends”.

For Instagram, the Kardashians are tantamount to an anchor tenant. They basically wrote the playbook for what it means to be a successful influencer on the platform. Obviously they don’t actually give a shit about the Instagram algorithm showing less photos of friends and family, given their personal relationships are completely alien compared to those of a normal person. Instead, they care about the entire mode of creative production that has sustained their celebrity for a decade being yanked out from under them.

The new leisure class currently being generated and showcased by TikTok has particular skills and vibes they lack. Unfortunately for Kim K, being able to convincingly lip sync to Doja Cat and do weird dances choreographed by bored Midwestern teenagers is table stakes for the incoming generation of idle nouveau riche. When it comes to LA’s first family, the transition to Instagram Reels isn’t just an annoying interface change and reformation of feed logic — it’s a completely new paradigm they are materially unsuited to exploit.

Anyway. Today, Instagram announced the changes would be wound back and delayed. Mosseri told Platformer that users can expect the pivot will come at some point, but the company will go back to the drawing board to figure out the execution.

There are a couple of things I find interesting about this whole saga, which seems to have achieved a level of social resonance far beyond your average social media interface change

The first is that Meta seems to be facing many of the same pressures afflicting the rest of our institutions. It can be instructive (if a little limiting) to think about giant tech platforms as being like nation-states, and you can make out many of the same political dynamics play out. Politics across the West is in a period of profound stagnation, where everything only barely works and none of our institutions retain the legitimacy or capacity to do anything about it. Seeing Meta be incapable of pushing through a change like this, even though it seems existentially important to its continuing survival, it’s hard not to see a parallel. In conjunction with the fact its only forward momentum is towards the metaverse — which looks shittier and shittier every time they show it off — it looks like a spent political force, despite its massive capital.

The other thing that was interesting was the user reaction, which was quite intense. You can sense the same technological anxieties currently troubling digital elite like the Kardashians afflicting the non-famous too, like the whole edifice of human communication is being shifted towards a register they aren’t built for. Being able to produce a viral TikTok or Reel for an audience of strangers seems like a skill — useless for the vast majority of human history — that our interhuman discourse is being rewired to emphasise, purely because it is more engaging.

It’s not hard to see why people react strongly to that. That, or the fact they — like me — are sick of seeing Instagram show them terrible crowdwork videos by bad comedians they do not follow. Either one.

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Bonus

That single section went on a lot longer than I anticipated it would, and absorbed most of the wordcount of this newsletter. Have this as consolation:

Elsewhere

• A great read about crypto from Noah Kulwin at The Baffler. Connects the current endemic culture of grift in the space to the savings-and-loans scandals in the 80s and 90s, which I guess is an obvious connection but I hadn’t seen it articulated so well as here.

• Josh Dzieza of The Verge has a great read on AI-assisted authors, who create “high-speed, semi-automated” genre fiction. Because tools built on AI models generally have very short memories — GPT-3, for example, only remembers roughly the preceding 1,500 words — they can’t actually write novels, because they can’t keep track of characters and events beyond a certain point. These authors, who largely work at chugging out self-published genre lit for Amazon, use the AI to help them increase productivity.

• The sad death of the music snob in the face of the algorithm. “Pre-internet cultural elitists distinguished [themselves] from the masses not by deciding what was good, but by having better access to the sources of taste and then merging them into [their] own identity, thereby becoming a beacon for others to follow."

• On the debates about AI sentience that have cropped up over the past few months, and why the mere fact we ask those sorts of question is telling. “The debate over whether LaMDA is sentient or not overlooks important issues that will frame debates about intelligence, sentience, language and human-AI interaction in the coming years.”

• An anonymous VFX artist goes in on Marvel in a piece for Vulture about the punishing special effects pipeline they have created in an attempt to support their insane volume of big budget content. (It follows a similar Reddit thread.) Labour issues in VFX are interesting, and particularly pertinent now we’re being told that virtual worlds and metaverses are the next evolution of the internet, and someone has to build those. Also, Disney and Marvel have built basically the biggest content empire in history, and clearly are having problems maintaining it at acceptable levels of output and quality.

• Reuters has a feature trying to understand how a “former leftie” fell into a far-right internet rabbit hole and ended up threatening to kill US election workers. It’s one of those stories that is perhaps more interesting as an artefact than for what it contains, in that the guy in question is so far from normal in every respect that it’s difficult to draw any broader lessons from his journey. Interesting, though.

• Absolutely insane story about a plagiarism scandal. You walk away from this one with a sense that there is something deeply broken in the publishing industry. Some truly weird narcissists throughout.

• On the “hot, strenuous and unsung” people who maintain the world’s cloud computing infrastructure.

• On “posthuman architecture”: “Home today is less a protective shelter but an embodied interface”.

• “How DoorDash delivery drivers became the new YouTube stars”.

• “How high property prices can damage the economy”.

• “The Loneliness of the Junior College Esports Coach”.

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In Philip K. Dick’s 1969 sci-fi novel Ubik, one of the casual bits of dystopian world-building he deploys is the revelation that the front door of the protagonist’s apartment has a coin slot. In order to leave his own home and go about his day, Joe Chip needs…

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Red letters

The above is a troubling thread of letters to the judge in the bankruptcy case of cryptocurrency lender Celsius, which underwent a spectacular collapse over the past couple of months

Here’s the shortened version of the Celsius story, for those unaware. Founded in the crypto surge of 2017 and pitched with the radical language of ‘debanking’ and ‘replacing Wall Street with the blockchain’, the company facilitated lending and borrowing for its users, who could deposit a range of tokens and digital assets to lend and borrow against. It promised mind-bogglingly high yields for doing so, which made it attractive for a wide range of investors, who entrusted the company with over $12 billion in funds under management at peak.

Despite its claims to be sticking it to the Wall Street elite, it turned out Celsius was supporting its high yields in part by pumping customer money into risky DeFi protocols, which you might fairly describe as equivalent to putting it in a big sack and taking it down the greyhound racetrack. It was not, as founder and CEO Alex Mashinsky repeatedly asserted, safely collateralised lending. There’s a good Twitter thread here from last month which goes into some detail about what some of these odd plays were.

This made it increasingly challenging to manage risk, and when the crypto market plunged, all those bets unwound at pace. In June, Celsius posted a blog titled — hilariously, in retrospect — “Damn The Torpedoes, Full Speed Ahead”, which denied persistent rumours the company had dumped customer funds into bad investments and was facing a serious liquidity crisis. These claims were dismissed as “misinformation”, in line with the general crypto mandate to decry any legitimate criticism whatsoever as FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt).

Quite literally seven days later, on the same blog, Celsius announced it would pause all customer withdrawals, swaps and transfers, citing “extreme market conditions” as depositors made a run on their assets amid the crypto crash. That pause ended up being permanent. It tried to recover its position before declaring bankruptcy this month. Vale.

Anyway: the letters. The collapse of Celsius has left a lot of people, many of whom are average, unsophisticated investors lured by the phenomeal promised rates of return, out in the cold. The thread above documents many people who say they have lost their life savings, and it makes for very grim reading.

I don’t really need to add to the scads of comparisons made online between the dynamics of crypto and multi-level marketing schemes, but it’s not hard to observe that specific topology of despair in these letters to the judge. You see a common thread in many of them: these people were drawn to both the promise of easy riches as well as Mashinsky’s messianic promises of liberation from the old system. One representative example:

Much of my life’s savings are currently held hostage on the Celsius platform. Alex Mashinsky week after week promised the community that our funds were safe and not being used in any risky lending. Every week during his AMA’s he promised that Celsius had the funds to cover all user assets and that under no circumstances were our funds at risk.

Or:

My life savings were in Celsius. I trusted Alex. I pray and hope everyday you are doing everything in your power to rightfully return deposits back to customers. I can’t tell my wife and kids our retirement and dreams have been stolen from us. Life is stale, we need updates and silence is not the answer. Please I request you to help put the interest of unsecured creditors, or as Alex famously called his “community” first.

There’s a lot in here which speaks to a yawning gap between the promise of crypto and Web3 as some long-promised return of power and capital to ‘the people’ and the common reality: some combination of over-leveraged hedge fund, unregulated casino and Discord tent revival.

I wonder whether that sort of messaging is going to see a shift next time around the sun. Probably not.

Blocked!

While we’re on Web3-ish subjects, there was an interesting development from the sick, sad world of NFTs this week. Minecraft developer Mohjang, which is owned by Microsoft, issued a unilateral ban on users and developers integrating the blockchain and NFTs into the game. This instantly obliterates projects like NFT Worlds, which have built bespoke NFT economies on top of Minecraft in order to benefit from its existing developer ecosystem and absolutely massive player base.

I was particularly taken by the reasoning offered (my bold):

Each of these uses of NFTs and other blockchain technologies creates digital ownership based on scarcity and exclusion, which does not align with Minecraft values of creative inclusion and playing together. NFTs are not inclusive of all our community and create a scenario of the haves and the have-nots. The speculative pricing and investment mentality around NFTs takes the focus away from playing the game and encourages profiteering, which we think is inconsistent with the long-term joy and success of our players.

This is not a particularly radical opposition to NFTs and other blockchain applications (in fact, it’s basically objection number one) but it’s interesting to hear from a major game developer, many of whom have been delicately managing the politics of placating their customers while leaving open the door to profiting from the pre-crash NFT craze.

The current debate within the broader gaming community about NFTs is a really interesting digital culture in miniature. For some time, Web3 boosters have insisted that gaming will be the crucible for broader blockchain adoption, and that gamers will be at the centre of a coming cultural revolution around digital ownership. In practice, the vast majority of gamers and individual developers (in the West, at least) are violently opposed to it, to the point that working for a blockchain company has basically become a black mark within significant parts of the industry. Despite the best efforts by evangelists, that situation isn’t changing fast.

There are plenty of reasons for this. Firstly, most gamers consider NFTs to be little more than a new vector of profiteering and rentseeking, aided by the fact that some of the most mercenary publishers have expressed an interest in exploring them. Secondly, most NFT and crypto games right now are terrible garbage. You can put that down to the fact that it’s still early days, but there’s also a defective mentality behind most of these projects. They’re built as speculative economies first, with the actual gameplay — crucial to gaming, some might argue! — becoming secondary to the casino.

There’s no better example of this than Axie Infinity, the vaguely Pokémon-esque NFT game which evolved into a digital sharecropping scheme for poor workers in the Philippines. The core gameplay wasn’t very good, and it was abundantly clear no one would be playing it without the speculative earning aspect. Once the air went out of the Ponzi and it was no longer feasible to earn an extremely minimal living playing it, it went to shit. Turns out no one was battling these awful little beasts for fun.

So it was interesting to see Mohjang — and, by extension, Microsoft — betting against NFTs and their role in gaming in very explicit and critical terms.

In the NFT Worlds Discord, where there was once a widespread (and unfounded) belief that Microsoft might actually acquire their project, theories abound that this is a conspiracy to eliminate competition before Mohjang unveils its own system of digital ownership. Maybe, but it’s an interesting signal of the sentiment out there regardless.

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Art heist

A take here from artist David O’Reilly, of a genre I think will gain plenty of traction as various kinds of generative AIs like DALL·E become more widespread.

The argument is basically this: these models are trained on millions and millions of images indiscriminately sucked up from the internet. Very few (if any) of the creators of those images consented to their work being used to train a robot, and the opaque nature of the system means it will never be clear exactly what ‘influences’ might have gone into creating any given image. By commercialising its product, OpenAI is profiting from the labour of millions of artists and creators, living and dead, in a vast, borderless act of plagiarism.

The counter-argument to this, which I’m also seeing spring up, is that these image models represent a rough simulacra of creativity itself. Everything is a remix, and everything you create is necessarily guided by the accumulation of your influences in some undefinable concoction. To think of your creativity as purely emergent versus whatever DALL·E is doing is simply giving yourself too much credit. You’re plagiarising all the time too, you dog!

I’m personally not entirely sure where the chips fall here. I’m hugely unconvinced by any counterargument which assumes the human mind works in roughly the same way as a computer. But at the same time I find it hard to discern an obvious harm on behalf of literally every artist in human history who has had their work digitised. Either way, I expect it to pop up a lot in the coming years, and I assume there will be some curly questions about copyright which might one day be tested in court somewhere.

High fidelity

I fell down an internet wormhole this week watching videos like the above, which show earlier high definition video experiments before the format became standardised and widespread in the 21st century (mostly thanks to Hollywood).

Attempts to create a HD standard for television and broadcast are much older than you’d think. The Soviets even gave it a crack in the 1950s with the somewhat imposing name Transformator, which had the extremely non-commercial goal of producing ultra-crisp teleconferencing for the military high command. The above clip, which the uploader assumes is likely shot in 1993 on a Sony HDVS camera like the HDC-500, was part of a marketing effort for the relatively small high-def VHS market, which never took off. For a variety of reasons, including cost, it wasn’t practical.

Anyway. There’s a weirdly fantastical element to watching clips like this. Our cultural memories of certain eras are inevitably guided by the media and video formats of the age. As a result, your memories of the nineties are probably heavily connected to not only the movies and television shows of the era, but also news broadcasts and home videos. When you picture ‘the nineties’, you’re probably naturally picturing it with the washed out sheen of a VHS tape, or the fuzz of a CRT television. It helps that so much cultural and visual history of the era is now uploaded to YouTube and Facebook replete with those visual artefacts, plus the fact those aesthetics have a nostalgic and aspirational cool to them now.

So it feels somehow wrong and inauthentic to see a New York City streetscape in 1993, full of obvious visual markers of the era, in widescreen and high definition. It doesn’t cohere. There’s a good playlist of similar videos here if you’re interested.

Elsewhere

• Readers of this newsletter will know one of my pet fixations is Wikipedia and how people use it for all sorts of creative purposes beyond its intended purposes. I’d never seen this wiki page, which is like an FBI Most Wanted list of the site’s most pathologically obsessed vandals. Some truly interesting characters detailed within, including someone who “frequently inserts unsourced and untrue information about cast changes for Broadway shows, casts for upcoming tours, or cast for upcoming shows”.

• Excellent and very long piece on the luxury yacht industry. As depraved as you might imagine, and more!

• On the odd online culture of ‘transvestigators’: a highly weird anti-trans community who sit online all day analysing photos of Henry Cavill and Elon Musk to figure out if they were assigned female at birth.

• This 2020 interview with director Brian De Palma. Adjacent to what I wrote about streamcore last month.

The things that they’re doing now have nothing to do with what we were doing making movies in the ’70s, ‘80s and ’90s. The first thing that drives me crazy is the way they look. Because they’re shooting digitally they’re just lit terribly. I can’t stand the darkness, the bounced light. They all look the same. I believe in beauty in cinema. Susan and I were looking at “Gone With the Wind” the other day and you’re just struck at how beautiful the whole movie is. The sets, how Vivien Leigh is lit, it’s just extraordinary. If you look at the stuff that’s streaming all the time, it’s all muck. Visual storytelling has gone out the window.

• Enjoyed this on the hard seltzer craze, and how everyone is waking to the realisation that — buzzy branding aside — White Claw and its legion of copycat pretenders basically just aren’t very good. Strange moment in the culture.

• On the timeless fear of parents and new technology, and “watching kids go where adults can’t follow”.

• A feature in Bloomberg on how crypto hedge fund Three Arrows Capital imploded.

• “How a small airport in central Kenya became a hub for high-end electronics imports.”

• “What comes after the American Century?”

• “Imaginary numbers are real”.

In 2008, an unusual website began to circulate the internet, largely via email and then-nascent social media networks. Titled Ever Dream This Man?, it included a sketch of an unsettling, vaguely simian face, with purported testimonials from thousands of people across the world who insist…

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