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Ukraine War Update (Early 2024) Mar 12, 2024

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This week we talk about foreign aid, brain drain, and long-term economic consequences.We also discuss the Rasputitsa, counteroffensives, and strategic rethinks.Recommended Book: The Kaiju Preservation Society by John ScalziTranscriptWe've done this a few times before, but it's been a while since I've done a real update on Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine—September of last year, I think, was the last one, a bonus episode on the topic—and a fair bit has happened since then, even if a lot of these happenings have been overshadowed by other conflicts, most especially the invasion of Gaza by Israel following the attacks on Israel by Gaza-based Hamas.But before diving into what's been happening, recently, in Ukraine, let's walk through a quick summary of events up till this point.In early 2014, Ukraine's people rose up against their Russia-aligned government in what became known as the Maidan Revolution or Revolution of Dignity.This was a long time coming, by many estimates, because of changes that had been made to the country's constitution and government since a decade previous, most of those changes orienting Ukraine more toward Russia's sphere of influence, authoritarian policies, and various sorts of corruption at the top, and the protests that led to this revolution began in November of 2013 before culminating in February the following year, which led to the toppling of the government, the creation of a new, interim government, the president fleeing to Russia, and new elections that kicked off a period of decoupling from Russian influence.This was not well received in Russia, which has long seen Ukraine as being under its sway, if not belonging to Russia, outright, Ukraine serving as a large, friendly buffer between it and Europe, so Russian forces were send in, the flags and other identifiers on their fatigues removed, to support separatists in the eastern portion of Ukraine.This sparked what became known as the Donbas War, which periodically flared up and sometimes merely simmered, but continued from when it began in February of 2014 all the way up to Russia's more formal invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, following several months of buildup along the countries' shared border.Against the odds and most analysts' assumptions, Ukraine managed to fend off Russia's initial assault, Russia managing to capture some territory, but not the capital city, Kyiv, and thus it wasn't able to decapitate the Ukrainian government and replace it with folks who would be loyal to Russia, as was apparently planned.Russia's stated plans changed several times over the next few years, as their assaults continued to falter in the face of stiffer than expected resistance, and eventually the so-called "special military operation" in Ukraine became a more overt, full-on war, complete with forced conscriptions, massive loss of life, the demolition of infrastructure and entire towns, and a recalibration of the global order, new alliances popping up, others being challenged, and everyone, to some degree at least, being sorted into categories based on who they support, who they don't, and who they are willing to tolerate despite not supporting—that latter category consisting mostly of less-aligned nations like Brazil and India, which have done pretty well for themselves, economically, staying somewhat neutral and aloof from this conflict, and thus continuing to deal with both the Western alliance supporting Ukraine, and the comparably small team of opposing nations, including China, North Korea, and Iran, all of which back Russia to varying degrees.In September of 2023, when I did the last update episode on this conflict, the state of play was largely defined by drone-based harassment of soldiers and infrastructure, like energy sources and bridges, by both sides against the other, Ukraine's flagging counteroffensive against Russia, which started out pretty good, but then ran intro trouble, seemingly due to sturdy Russian defenses that had been built around the portion of Ukraine they'd captured, the arrival of the "Rasputitsa" muddy season, which makes movement difficult in the region, and discussions about whether the US would provide longer-range artillery to Ukrainian forces, as Russia was comfortably settled-in, lobbing endless missiles and drones at Ukrainian forces and civilians, so longer-range munitions would help Ukraine counter that advantage, but there were concerns that this could lead to more attacks by Ukraine against Russian targets within Russia, which—because they would be using US weaponry—could help Russia justify expanding the war, which could, in turn, lead to WWIII, nuclear deployments, and the end of the world.There was also discussion about whether the US should keep sending tens of billions of dollars to Ukraine, with Republicans mostly saying it wasn't okay, and some European leaders, especially those in Hungary, saying the same, while essentially everyone else said we need to keep Ukraine stocked with weapons and ammo, as the money is well-invested.What I'd like to talk about today is what's happened in the months since, and what folks in the know are expecting to happen, next.—Since last September, the debate over sending money to Ukraine has increased in volume, with countries like the UK scrambling to increase their funding to help fill the gap left by the US, where Congress is still deadlocked over a $60 billion aid package, the lack of which has left the Ukrainian government in the lurch, debating tax increases and spending cuts, while also rationing ammo, because they've hit their ceiling in terms of spending.Most of those gap-filling aid packages from elsewhere, though, weigh in at tens or hundreds of millions, not billions, so one of the main challenges Ukraine faces right now is figuring out how to adapt their strategy for a wartime reality in which they're not well-funded from outside sources, as there's a chance more funding could eventually arrive from the US and other sources, but it's looking like the appetite for uncapped aid checks is drying up, even though Ukrainian President Zelensky continues to make the case that funding his country's defense is an investment, not a hand-out, because it ties up, and potentially even halts Russia's military ambitions in the area, which might otherwise be aimed at other nations Russia considers to be part of its orbit, and in some cases even thinks of as stolen territory, like Estonia—an attack on which would bring the whole of NATO into a conflict like the one Ukraine alone is facing, currently.Ukraine has also been escalating its attacks, mostly surreptitious, but sometimes a bit more flagrant, into Russian territory near their shared border, using on the ground special forces teams on occasion, but mostly leveraging their remote-controlled and autonomous drone fleet to strike primarily military and energy targets, like fuel depots and fighter jets parked at airports.Over this same period, Russia has hammered Ukrainian cities and towns with heavier-than-usual waves of rockets and explosive drones, targeting some military infrastructure, but more often hitting civilian centers, apartment buildings, and shopping malls.A much-vaunted counterattack by Ukraine against Russian forces occupying their territory in November of 2023 achieved a few small, mostly symbolic goals, but failed to tally the large number of strategic successes accomplished during another counterattack earlier in the year.This failure to replicate that previous success led to a wave of pessimism in Ukraine and allied nations, and new calls for some kind of peace talks—though then, as now, the Ukrainian government maintains that it won't hold serious talks until Russian forces have left the Ukrainian territory they've occupied, and they also say—with merit, according to most analysts—that any ceasefire before a Ukrainian victory would mostly benefit Russia, which would likely spend the time shoring-up its military and then invade again within the next few years, no matter what the terms of the ceasefire said.So a ceasefire, at this point, would seemingly favor Russia, and most experts think the current situation on the ground in Ukraine favors Russia, as well, though Russia is suffering some serious consequences from their invasion, both of the short- and long-term variety.In the short-term, Russia's economy—though not collapsing as many of the nations applying sanctions, like the US and EU countries, had hoped—is not doing anywhere near as well as it would have been doing, had this invasion not happened, or had it gone better for them, ending quickly, within a few days or a week, as they had initially expected.It's become a lot more difficult for them to do business with much of the world, too, and their influence over global energy markets in particular have been severely hamstrung, which in turn has lessened the geopolitical heft of the OPEC + Russia oil cartel.Russia has also nearly emptied its prisons, giving even incredibly violent and unstable prisoners the option of joining the military and being sent to the frontlines, those who survive granted their freedom; and this has reportedly led to a lot of horribleness back home, as these prisoners have been causing the sorts of trouble you might expect violent and unstable people to cause after being freed from prison, with the addition of also potentially suffering from the effects of PTSD and other sorts of trauma from having survived on the frontline of what has often been described as a meatgrinder sort of conflict, and in some headline-grabbing cases, they've brought military weapons back home with them, allowing them to cause enough more damage than would have otherwise been possible.Russian citizens also have to worry about being conscripted, in some cases grabbed from the street and taken, with little preparation, to the front line somewhere in Ukraine, and about the sporadic drone attacks from Ukrainian special forces and Russian groups that support Ukraine in this conflict.More abstractly, the Russian economy is not doing great, they've been largely unable to produce much in the way of high-end or high-tech goods for several years, now, and they're also running short of workers, more than 43% of industrial enterprises in the country reporting worker shortages as of July, 2023.In parallel, more than 1000 companies have withdrawn from Russia, including their own google-equivalent, Yandex, which took a 50% hit on its already substantially depleted value just to be able to leave the country and operate elsewhere; this has given the Russian government more direct control over their regional slice of the internet, but it's also a tradeoff many companies, international and local, have decided to make, as being cut off from the rest of the world and having significant sanctions applied to their behaviors if they stick around generally isn't considered to be worth the upsides.Also leaving Russia are its people. And while there will almost certainly be long-term consequences of those contemporary economic issues for Russia and Russians, this so-called "brain drain" could prove to be even more significant, especially when paired with the large number of deaths amongst Russia's troops, estimated to tally somewhere between 70 and 120 thousand since the full-scale, 2022-era invasion began.Also since late-February 2022, at least 2,500 scientists have left Russia, and that's on top of the around 50,000 Russia's own Academy of Sciences estimates it has lost over the past five years—all those researchers moving to greener pastures in other countries.An estimated 11-28% of the country's software developers have fled, and as of early 2023, it was estimated that hundreds of thousands of young people have left Russia since the invasion.Research from within Russia that same year indicated that about 1.5 million people under the age of 35 left the Russian workforce in the year between December of 2021 and December of 2022, alone, for brain drain and other reasons, and this—combined with all the young people who have been conscripted, adding up to around 521,000 soldiers by the end of 2023, the goal being around 745,000 by the end of 2024—that's a lot of people, all from a relatively narrow age demographic, roughly 18 to 30, who are not working, are not getting a formal education, who are not dating, not home with kids or their older family members, to take care of them.From a demographer's perspective, this is the seed-corn of a country, the next generation that will step into roles that are currently held by the adults in the room. And Russia is a country of around 144 million people, so it's not small, and these figures won't wipe them out or anything, but their population has been on the decline since the mid-1990s, and the median age in the country is already just over 39 years old.So losing, to other countries, to the black market, maybe, or to death, disability, or the other consequences of a military conflict, a significant chunk of the younger portion of your population is not ideal, as that leaves a country with fewer people who are capable of stepping into the roles that their elders will be leaving over the next few decades, and that means fewer younger people to keep the economy ticking along, to make discoveries, to earn money and pay taxes, which over time perpetuates all kinds of negative cascades and spirals, economically, demographically, and in terms of a country's capacity to compete, globally.One of the most long-lasting consequences of this invasion, then, could be a demographic collapse in Russia that leads to untold consequences, up to and including the eventual overthrow of a government that, no matter how cleverly it navigates this war and whatever happens next, won't be able to bring renewed equilibrium, safety, success, and flourishing back to the country, because of issues like demography that are not really salvageable once the dice are cast.Of course, Ukraine is in an even worse state, and would be even if all the money than had been promised and implied by its wealthy western allies had arrived on time: the country is devastated, its people are almost uniformly traumatized, it's governance and infrastructure is operating only at subsistence level, and some of its towns and cities have been almost entirely leveled, no buildings left standing, completely unlivable, and not just because there's no running water or electricity or shelter—the very soil in many of these areas, some of which are vital breadbasket regions for the world, have been polluted with toxins and chemicals from the conflict, and that's when they haven't been freckled with mines.Over the past few months, the story on the ground has remained largely the same, with Russia managing to take a few symbolic and moderately strategic cities and towns, and the front line barely moving at all in either direction.Ukraine has been hobbled by a lack of resources and those aforementioned defense lines Russia set up, after it committed to hold still, shooting long distance stuff, and periodically flooding the zone with meat-shield, waves of soldiers, which seems to be working decently well, though with a significant loss of life as a tradeoff.The Ukrainian leadership replaced the country's commander-in-chief in early February 2024, amidst rumors of disagreements between him in the president about how to proceed, and there's been word that the US is encouraging Ukrainian's government to settle in for the long-haul, rather than aiming for shorter-term victories and press release-worthy counterattacks, building up their in-country manufacturing capacity so th…

Full show notes at the publisher

LockBit Mar 05, 2024

Show notes

This week we talk about virtual reality, the Meta Quest, and the Apple Vision Pro.

We also discuss augmented reality, Magic Leap, and the iPhone.

Recommended Book: Daemon by Daniel Suarez

Transcript

Ransomware is a sub-type of malware, which is malicious software that prevents its victim from accessing their data.

So that might mean keeping them from logging into their cloud storage, but it might also mean encrypting their data so that there's no way to access it, ever again, unless they have the necessary decryptor, which is a piece of software or sometimes just a key that allows for the decryption of that encrypted, that locked-down data.

The specifics of all this, though, are often less important than the practical reality of it.

If you're attacked by a ransomware gang or hacker, your stuff, maybe your personal files, maybe your business files, all your customer information, your valuable trade secrets, anything that's stored digitally, might be completely inaccessible to you, and possibly even prone to deletion, though that might not even be necessary since strong encryption is essentially the same thing as deletion, for most intents and purposes; but all that data is gone, held hostage until and unless you pay some kind of ransom to the person or group that encrypted it, and which holds the key to its decryption.

Most ransomware software is transmitted to its victims' computers via a trojan, which is a kind of malware that seems like real-deal software that you actually want or need to install, and folks are generally tricked into downloading and installing it because of that presumed legitimacy.

So maybe you receive what looks like a software update for a tool you use at work, and it turns out the update was faked and what you installed was actually a trojan that installed malware on your computer, and consequently on your network, instead.

Or maybe you pirated some software, and alongside the fake copy of Photoshop you installed, a trojan also carried another snippet of code that then, in the background, when your computer was hooked up to the internet, downloaded malware that looked for private data and encrypted it.

At some point after ransomware is delivered and installed, your data successfully encrypted and inaccessible, you'll receive the ransom demand.

For a while this was kind of an ad hoc thing, in some cases targeting people randomly on early internet usenet groups, in others big companies and other wealthy entities being specifically targeted and then ransomware teams calling or emailing or texting them directly, because they knew who they were hitting.

In recent years, this has become a more distributed and mainstream effort, akin to an, organized business, and that mainstreamification was partially enabled by the dawn of crypto-currencies like Bitcoin, which allow for relatively anonymous transactions with strangers, and the development of ransomware that is self-contained, in that it can install itself, find the right, valuable files, and then demand a ransom from its victim, providing that victim with the proper bitcoin wallet or other crypto-banking system into which they need to deposit a fixed amount of money in that less-trackable digital currency.

The software can then, still autonomously, either decrypt the files once the ransom is paid, or delete the files, killing them off forever, if the ransom isn't paid by an established deadline.

Other variations on this theme exist, and some ransomware doesn't use encryption as a motivator to pay, but instead locks down users' machines, displays some kind of demand for money, purporting to be a government agency (or lying about having encrypted or stolen something of value), or it threatens to install illegal pornographic images of minors on the victims' machine if they don't pay the ransom.

By far the most popular approach to ransomware, today, though, is encryption-based, and recent evolutions in the business model backing ransomware has escalated its use, especially what's become known as ransomware-as-a-service, which was popularized by a Russian hacker group calling itself REvil that started using it against a variety of targets, globally, to devastating and profitable effect.

What I'd like to talk about today is another group that has made successful use of this business model, and a recent investigation into and operation against that group.

—

First observed by cybersecurity entities in 2019, LockBit quickly became one of the most prolific and effective ransomware-as-a-service providers in the world, their offering, a product called LockBit 2.0, representing the most-used ransomware variant globally in 2022, accounting for something like 23% of all ransomware attacks in the US in 2023, and around 44% of all such attacks globally.

According to the FBI, LockBit has been used to launch around 1,700 ransomware attacks in the US since 2020, and according to the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, about $91 million worth of ransoms were paid in the US alone over the past three years, and it's estimated that number is in the hundreds of millions when we include targets around the world.

LockBit's offerings work like many other ransomware-as-a-service offerings, in that they provide what amounts to a dashboard filled with tools that allow users, those who wish to deploy ransomware attacks, those users being their customers, everything they need to do so, and most of their offerings allow even folks with little or no technical knowledge to launch a successful ransomware campaign; it's that user-friendly and intuitive.

Hackers using LockBit announced the 2.0 version of the service by attacking professional services giant Accenture in 2021, using what's called a double-extortion approach, which involves encrypting their victim's data, and then threatening to release it if their victim doesn't pay up.

They then hit French electrical systems and administrative and management services companies, alongside a French hospital, a group of British automotive retailers, a French office equipment company, the California Finance Administration, the port of Lisbon, and Toronto's Hospital for Sick Children in 2022—in that latter case backtracking after realizing a children's hospital was hit, the group formally apologizing for what they called a violation of its rules by a member of its group, who it claimed was no longer a part of its affiliate program; it provided a free decryptor for the hospital so it could regain access to its data.

And that response gestures at the larger opportunities and problems associated with this kind of business model.

LockBit is run by a group of people who develop the software tools and provide the services backing up those tools to help anyone who wants to use their product successfully launch ransomware attacks against whomever they want.

There are apparently rules about who they can attack, but that's kind of like being a gun store operator who tells their customers they're not allowed to shoot anyone, and if they do, they'll have their gun taken away: they can certainly have those rules in place, but by the time they take back the gun they sold to someone who ends up shooting someone else with it, some damage has already been done.

The business models of ransomware-as-a-service schemes vary, and some groups allow their customers to just pay a set licensing fee, once or reccuringly, others have profit-sharing schemes, while others have affiliate programs of some flavor.

LockBit seems to have landed on a scheme in which they take something like 20% of whatever their customers, those using their LockBit service, are able to get as a ransom.

And just like other software-as-a-service companies, LockBit is thus incentivized to continue providing better and better services, lest their customers leave and use one of their competitor's offerings, instead.

Thus, in mid-2022, they release LockBit 3.0, and among other innovations it offered a bug bounty program, which provides payouts to security researchers who find errors in their code—something that companies like Microsoft and Google do, but not something other ransomware gangs have done in the past.

The attacks kept coming through 2022 and 2023, and though the US Department of Justice announced criminal charges against one Russian national for his alleged connection to LockBit as an affiliate, and the arrest of another for his participation in a LockBit-oriented campaign, the hits just kept coming, LockBit affiliates attacking a French luxury goods company, a Germany car equipment manufacturer, a chain of Canadian bookstores, the Hong Kong branch of the China Daily newspaper, the Taiwanese TSMC semiconductor company, the Port of Nagoya in Japan, US aerospace and defense company Boeing, the Chicago Trading Company, and Alphadyne Asset Management, and it kicked off 2024 by encrypting the computer system of Fulton County, Georgia.

On February 19, 2024, the UK's National Crime Agency, working with Europol and agencies from 9 other countries seized LockBit's online assets, including more than 200 crypto wallets, 34 servers located in eight countries, and about 11,000 domains used by LockBit and its affiliates as part of its ransomware-installation and payout process.

They discovered that some of the data supposedly deleted by the group when their victims paid their ransoms wasn't deleted as promised, and they released decryptors to free the data of victims who hadn't paid ransoms, and who had thus been going without access to their data, in some cases for a long time.

They also issued three international arrest warrants and five indictments that target other people related to LockBit's operations, and they've issued a reward of up to $15 million for information about LockBit associates.

This operation, called Operation Cronos, took years to set up and months to complete, once it was ready to go, and though the agencies behind the operation say they've still got plenty left to do—as those in charge of LockBit are still in the wind, some ransomware tools are still functioning, at least partially, and thousands of accounts associated with LockBit affiliates have been identified, but not yet shut down—it's also being seen as a pretty solid success, allowing them to develop a universal decryptor for LockBit 3.0, and taking out much of the online infrastructure LockBit relied upon to function, not to mention, no doubt, a fair bit of its reputation, as it's likely many of its potential customers will now flee to other offerings for their ransomware-as-a-service needs.

All that said, ransomware continues to be a significant threat, for individuals, but especially for business entities, agencies, and organizations of any size, and there are plenty of other options out there for such tools, and only so many cybercrime agencies capable of tackling them; and it seems to take a lot longer to do the tackling than it does to set up a successful, large-scale ransomware-as-a-service business.

So the combination of potent encryption tools, automated services, and a potent means of earning fairly consistent income seems likely to keep ransomware tools of this kind in the money for the foreseeable future, and that means, even with these periodic takedowns of people involved with the larger-scale entities in this space, this approach to siphoning money from wealthy entities from a distance will probably continue to grow, until the next, more profitable and effective version of the same comes along.

Show Notes

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/police-arrest-lockbit-ransomware-members-release-decryptor-in-global-crackdown/

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/lockbit-ransomware-disrupted-by-global-police-operation/

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/ransomware-gang-apologizes-gives-sickkids-hospital-free-decryptor/

https://www.trendmicro.com/vinfo/us/security/news/ransomware-spotlight/ransomware-spotlight-lockbit

https://www.cisa.gov/news-events/cybersecurity-advisories/aa23-165a

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-63590481

https://www.justice.gov/usao-nj/pr/russian-and-canadian-national-charged-participation-lockbit-global-ransomware-campaign

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2024/02/feds-seize-lockbit-ransomware-websites-offer-decryption-tools-troll-affiliates/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/02/20/lockbit-ransomware-cronos-nca-fbi/

https://www.axios.com/2024/02/19/lockbit-ransomware-takedown-operation?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/02/20/lockbit-ransomware-cronos-nca-fbi/

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/police-arrest-lockbit-ransomware-members-release-decryptor-in-global-crackdown/

https://www.reuters.com/technology/cybersecurity/us-offers-up-15-mln-information-lockbit-leaders-state-dept-says-2024-02-21/

https://arstechnica.com/security/2024/02/after-years-of-losing-its-finally-feds-turn-to-troll-ransomware-group/

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/02/lockbit-ransomware-group-taken-down-in-multinational-operation/

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-02-21/russia-s-lockbit-disrupted-but-not-dead-hacking-experts-warn

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockbit

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ransomware

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ransomware_as_a_service

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Japan's Economy Feb 27, 2024

Show notes

This week we talk about the Meiji Revolution, shoguns, and the Lost Decade.We also discuss NVIDIA, economic bubbles, and the Tokyo Stock Exchange.Recommended Book: The Blue Machine by Helen CzerskiTranscriptWhat became known as the Meiji Restoration, but which at the time was generally, locally, called the Honorable Restoration, refers to a period of massive and rapid change in Japan following the restoration of practical powers to the country's Emperor.In 1853, the arrival of Commodore Perry and his warships in Japan forced the country to open up trade to the rest of the world, initially with the US but shortly thereafter with other nations, as well. This led to the signing of a series of treaties that were heavily slanted in favor of those other nations, at Japan's expense, and the Meiji Restoration was a consequence of those humiliating treaties, which were essentially forced and enforced by military might, not because Japan wanted anything to do with these foreign entities and their money and goods.So in the 1860s, some reformist political leaders in Japan started to support the Emperor, who had become something of a ceremonial figure in recent generations, during the country's multi-century seclusion from the rest of the world, and this, among other things, led to a decision by those in charge, who now had more power at their disposal, to shift from a feudal society into an industrialized one.There was a fair bit of tumult and internal conflict during this period, but the eventual upside was the re-centralization of the country and its land and other assets under the Emperor, away from the shoguns who had been running their own pseudo-countries within Japan for a long while, alongside an order that the country would do a complete 180, no longer isolating itself and eschewing anything foreign, instead seeking knowledge far and wide, wherever it originates, sending folks around the world to discover whatever they can, and to then bring that understanding back to Japan, to strengthen this new iteration of the nation.By the end of the 19th century, industrialization was the name of the game in Japan, and those in charge had successfully encouraged civilians to bolster the economy by tying its success to the country's military success.Other governments were happy to play into this transition, as it meant enriching themselves, as well, creating a new, modernizing trade partner that they could exploit but also invest in, and this led to a doubling-down on rapid modernization by the the government, including the culling and destruction of traditional practices, landmarks, and social classes, which wasn't popular amongst the nation's many samurai and other previously celebrated and upper-class people, but it did help the government further centralize power and influence, and reorient things toward economic success and away from a more feudal style of distributed military-backed fiefdoms.This allowed Japan to become the first non-Western great power, and it's what allowed them to grow to the point that they could take on half the world in World War II, expanding their control throughout Asia and across the Pacific.Because Japan suffered relatively less from the Great Depression than most Western nations, it was also in a pretty good spot compared to the countries that would become its opponents in WWII leading up to the conflict, and its GDP growth in the 1920s and 30s is part of what allowed it to expand so rapidly across Southeast Asia, grabbing a lot of Chinese territory and turning much of the region, including parts of the Philippines, Burma, Malaya, and Thailand into plantation-like colonies.The war and post-war periods, though, were a lot less great for Japan, as essentially all the economic gains it made during the Meiji Restoration were lost, their manufacturing capacity wiped out, their infrastructure destroyed, their population numbers depleted, and their civilians psychologically scarred by the drawn-out war and its eventual arrival on their doorstep.Japan lost its colonies, and as tends to be the case with post-colonial nations, it had to endure a period of economic recalibration, as it could no longer rely upon cheap labor and commodities from these colonies.It also had to make changes based on the treaties it signed upon its surrender, shifting resources away from its military—which had been a major focus of its entire culture and economy until this point—and moving from an imperial system into a democracy.The country was then occupied for years, and the previous landlord class that owned much of the country's rural territory was dissolved, the land distributed to the tenant farmers that worked it.Huge business conglomerates that were close with the government, and which owned much of the economy for about a century were also broken up, and new laws that encouraged business competition and discouraged monopolistic practices were enacted.After Japan's manufacturing capacity was restored and people were able to rebuild their homes and businesses and everything else that had been destroyed during the war, Japan opened up to international business entities, invested heavily in industries that other countries valued, like chemical production and information technology, and from the 1960s onward, this led to a surge in the country's economy, Japanese industry seeming to always get the jump on its international competition, especially in high-tech fields, like the burgeoning electronic appliance, television, and personal computer markets.What I'd like to talk about today is how Japan's fresh, 20th century rise fizzled out at the dawn of the 21st century, and why its stock market is booming, now, despite other economic indicators saying the opposite.—Things weren't perfect for Japan in the latter-half of the 20th century—they, like much of the rest of the world, experienced an oil crisis in the 1970s, for instance—but they really did chart an impressive economic trajectory for most of the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s.Their success was even more impressive in comparison to other wealthy nations at the time, as that oil shortage, mostly the result of geopolitics, hampered growth in the West, especially the United States, and that allowed Japan to steal a march on its main, electronic hardware and automobile industry competition.Japan was also in a good spot to profit in these spaces because it had a well-educated population that was used to working long, arduous hours, the former the result of a huge investment in schools, post-WWII, and the latter baked into the culture for generations, due to the country's long history of feudal governance and philosophies that celebrate labor as a moral pursuit.This allowed Japan to attain a spot amongst the most successful economies in the world, achieving the third-largest gross national product in the 1970s, following only the US and USSR, and achieving first place in the same by 1990.Previous waves of economic growth in the country had been spurred by exports, but the boom in the late-1980s that led to its 90s-era success was caused by an increase in local consumption, and that, in turn, increased the nation's imports, to feed still-increasing local demand for all sorts of luxuries, alongside fundamentals that were being upgraded, like medical services, leisure-related goods, and basic quality-of-life improvements.This period was also marked by heavy investment in telecommunications and computing research and development, and that made it the home of the world's largest stock exchange, the Tokyo Stock Exchange, as everyone, everywhere around the world wanted to invest in the most up-and-coming companies, most of which were operating in these industries, and many of them were thus based in Japan, whose cities felt like a sort of science fiction glimpse at the future compared to cities located elsewhere during this period.Beginning in 1989, though, Japan started to run larger and larger trade surpluses, the yen grew in value, and Japanese citizens were encouraged, through a variety of tariffs and other policies, to save their money rather than spending it.This led to a period in which businesses were incentivized to buy their foreign competitors rather than investing locally, because their yen bought more overseas than in-country, and this further appreciated the value of the yen, increased the trade-surplus even further, and led to a boom in financial assets, which led to a lot more speculation on the Japanese financial assets market.That increased popularity in financial speculation led to banks making riskier loans and the rates dramatically increasing on bonds, stocks, and housing, and that, as we've seen happen elsewhere over the years, led to a real estate bubble that made it difficult for Japanese citizens to afford housing, but which also, eventually caused an economic crash, all that investment that was aimed at booming Japanese businesses suddenly flooding outward, instead.This led to less investment in tech-centric R&D, which led to less-competitive Japanese businesses that were suddenly unable to compete with their foreign rivals, and that, combined with low local consumption, because a lot of people lost their savings in popped-bubble assets and were thus no longer spending as enthusiastically as they had been.This led to a deflationary spiral that was amplified by banks continuing to hand out money to basically anyone who asked, leading to even more bad investments and the emergence and popping of a number of smaller bubbles into the late-1990s.The government was forced to subsidize the banks that went under because of all those bad investments, and they did the same for businesses that could no longer do much of anything, but which continued to technically function, earning them the monicker "zombie businesses," of which there were many across Japan.This period, during which the country's meta-financial bubble slowly collapsed, rather than dramatically popping, has become known as Japan's lost decade, and despite moments of optimism here and there in the years, since, it has arguably become a lost couple of decades, as the government's many attempts to address its deflation and the devaluation of its stock market and larger economy haven't done much to stop the bleeding, and the slow-growth its Nikkei stock index has seen since late-2012 as a result of efforts to increase the country's money supply and eliminate deflation was halted by the implementation of significant new consumption taxes, the damage caused by a huge super typhoon in 2019, and the global recession sparked by the arrival of COVID-19 in 2020.All of which makes recent news out of Japan, that the country's Nikkei index reached a record high, surpassing its 1989 bubble-era peak in late-February of this year, a bit surprising.After all, most of the fundamentals in the country haven't really changed, not enough to significantly nudge the needle, anyway, and the other big headlines about Japan's economy, of late, have been about the recession that it entered at the end of 2023.Data released the same month the Nikkei hit that 34-year high indicate that at the tail-end of 2023, Japan entered a recession, and adding insult to injury, fell off the list of the world's top-3 economies, ceding its third-place position (after the US and China) to Germany—which also isn't doing great right now, but is still doing a bit better than Japan.What seems to be happening is that COVID-era recession is still weighing on consumer spending in Japan, and the country's industrial output is still low, wages are still low, and inflation is eating up the excess money folks have managed to put away.This has hurt the country's somewhat-burgeoning service industry, as folks aren't spending on services anymore, lacking enough extra money to do so, and capital spending seems to be stalling, as well, leading to production stoppages at automotive plants, which have reportedly been amplified by a lack of skilled labor, which is itself a problem tied to both insufficient pay and a rapidly aging population.The jump in the stock market, in contrast, seems to be the result of AI-linked enthusiasm throughout global markets.Chip-maker NVIDIA has been a huge success story in the US, propping up the market there, and serving as a sort of stand-in for AI optimism more broadly, because it makes the majority of the best, most AI-centric high-end computer chips, and that has led to a surge in its valuation, but also that of other companies even tangentially connected to it and its industry.Japan houses several such companies, including Tokyo Electron and Advantest, which make equipment that NVIDIA relies upon, and Japan actually still makes computer chips, even if its not as competitive as Taiwan-based TSMC or Netherlands-based ASML, which makes the machines that make chips.Japan, then, is in a relatively favorable position if this surge in AI-investment continues, because it has the infrastructure and skilled laborers necessary to build-out a hopping high-end chip manufacturing base—so investments are throwing money at some local, relevant companies in the hopes that they'll pay out in the way NVIDIA is currently paying out; which is a lot.The Japanese government is leaning into this, recently announcing about $68 billion in resources for chip-making companies and related entities in-country, which is a big bet to make, but similar to bets being made by other governments, all hoping that chips will become the next oil, and that they'll be in a position to become market leaders over the next decade, benefitting from further investment, and from that increased long-term capacity of this increasingly fundamental resource.All of which may or may not play out in their favor, as there's a chance a lot of the hype in AI right now does turn out to be just hype, similar to what we saw with crypto-assets a handful of years ago.There's also a chance that Japan's fundamentals just aren't where they need to be to sustain this kind of build-out, which would leave them with a lot of incomplete or non-competitive assets that further drain the country's economy and bank account, without providing much in the way of long-term payout.In the meantime, though, Japan's economy is incredibly uneven, the majority of people continuing to suffer under high-levels of inflation and wages that aren't keeping up, while a relative few are seeing their stock holdings boom, earning a lot more than they have in recent decades from these sorts of investments, and hoping that trend continues.Show Noteshttps://www.imf.org/external/pubs/nft/2003/japan/index.htmhttps://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/NGDPD@WEO/JPNhttps://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2024-02-20/japan-s-67-billion-bet-to-regain-title-of-global-chip-powerhousehttps://www.reuters.com/markets/asia/tokyo-stocks-rally-many-japanese-find-themselves-left-behind-2024-02-22/https://www.investopedia.com/5-things-to-know-before-the-stock-market-opens-february-22-2024-8598465https://www.ft.com/content/8b982ad2-8923-4f48-adc6-946c10964657https://www.wsj.com/finance/stocks/japans-nikkei-after-34-years-briefly-tops-record-close-in-intraday-trading-7c29e029https://www.ft.com/content/1539d638-7499-4dc9-af4f-8a8f2a06ec9bhttps://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/22/business/japan-stocks-record.htmlhttps://spectrum.ieee.org/intel-18a This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit letsknowthings.substack.com/subscribe

Full show notes at the publisher

Spacial Computing Feb 20, 2024

Show notes

This week we talk about virtual reality, the Meta Quest, and the Apple Vision Pro.We also discuss augmented reality, Magic Leap, and the iPhone.Recommended Book: Extremely Online by Taylor LorenzTranscriptThe term spacial computing seems to have been coined in the mid-1980s within the field of geographic information systems, or GIS, which focuses on using digital technology to mess with geographic data in a variety of hopefully useful ways.So if you were to import a bunch of maps and GPS coordinates and the locations of buildings and parks and such into a database, and then make that database searchable, plotting its points onto a digital map in an app, making something like Google Maps, that would be a practical utility of GIS research and development.The term spacial computing refers to pulling computer-based engagement into physical spaces, allowing us to plot and use information in the real world, rather than relegating that information to flat screens like computers and smartphones.This could be useful, it was posited, back in the early days of the term, as it would theoretically allow us to map out and see, with deep accuracy and specificity, how a proposed building would look on a particular street corner when finished, and how it would feel to walk through a house we're thinking of building, when all we have available is blueprints.This seemed like it would be a killer application for all sorts of architectural, urban planning, and location intelligence purposes, and that meant it might someday be applicable to everyone from security services to construction workers to doctors and health researchers who are trying to figure out where a pandemic originated.In the 1990s, though, the embryonic field of virtual reality started to become a thing, moving from research labs owned by schools and military contractors out into the real world, increasingly flogged as the next big consumer technology, useful for all sorts of practical, but also entertainment purposes, like watching movies and playing games.During this period, VR began to serve as a stand-in for where technology was headed, and it was dropped into movies and other sorts of speculative fiction to illustrate the evolution of tech, and how the world might evolve as a consequence of that evolution, more of our lives lived within digital versions of the world, rather than in the world itself.As a result of that popularity, especially throughout pop culture, VR overtook spacial computing as the term of art typically used to discuss this type of computational application, though the latter term also encompassed use-cases that weren't generally covered by VR, like the ability to engage with one's environment while using the requisite headsets, and the consequent capacity to use this technology out in the world, rather than exclusively at home or in the office, replicating the real world in that confined space.The term augment reality, or AR, is generally used to refer to that other spacial computing use-case: projecting an overlay, basically, on the real world, generally using a VR-like headset or goggles or glasses to either display information onto lenses the user looks through, or serving the user video footage that is altered to include that data, rather than attempting to project the same over the real thing; the latter case more like virtual reality because users are viewing entirely digital feeds, but like AR in that those feeds include live video from the world around them.A slew of productized spacial computing products have made it to the consumer market over the past few decades, including Microsoft's HoloLens, which is an augmented-reality headset, Google's Glass, which projects information onto a tiny screen in the corner of the the user's eyeline, and Magic Leap's self-named 1 and 2 devices, which are similar to the HoloLens.All three of these products have had trouble making much of a dent in the market, though, and Magic Leap is in the process of retiring its first headset, though it's reportedly partnering with Meta on a new device sometime soon, Microsoft has mostly pivoted to working with companies and agencies rather than selling to consumers, though future versions of their headsets might revert back to their original intended customer base, and Google Glass was retired in 2015, replaced by enterprise editions (sold to businesses and agencies) from that point forward, though those enterprise editions were also halted in 2023.What I'd like to talk about today is the current status of this space, which is being shaken up by two big, global players and their products: Meta with their Quest line of spacial computing devices, and Apple with it's new Apple Vision Pro.—In 2014, the company that was at the time known as Facebook, but which is now called Meta bought a virtual reality company called Oculus for about $2 billion.Oculus made a popular VR device, popular for VR devices in 2014, at least, that was only ever released as a development prototype, but which garnered a huge amount of attention nonetheless, blowing away its Kickstarter goal and attracting tens of millions of dollars in investment from well-known tech-world venture capitalists.The purchase was criticized by many, as part of the appeal of Oculus was that it was independent from the big players in the space, but $2 billion is a significant amount of money, so the sale went through after regulators approved it, and Facebook, now Meta, started churning out its own headsets, initially continuing to use the Oculus branding, but it was more cohesively integrated with Meta's portfolio of offerings in 2021, redesignating this now sub-company Reality Labs, and entwining it with other Meta products like Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp—that effort culminating in 2022 with the complete retirement of the Oculus monicker, re-designating the company's products with the Quest brand, its social platforms renamed Horizon, as in Horizon Worlds.So beginning in 2022, Meta had a fully integrated Meta Quest line of virtual reality products, including the hardware and a slew of online components, like social networks, and game, app, and other digital product stores.The company has a long, for this space, anyway, history of now-discontinued products, including partnerships with the likes of Samsung and headsets that vary in price and power, some plugging into one's computer to provide processing heft, but most of the new ones serving as self-contained, all-in-one headset devices, which typically include little handheld controls, wired or wireless, as well.They've also scooped up a variety of related companies, and in 2021, they attempted to buy a company called Within, which makes popular VR games like Beat Saber and Supernatural, but the FTC blocked the purchase on competition grounds; in 2023, though, the purchase was given the go-ahead, so those, and other popular VR-focused apps are now owned by Meta, as well.Meta also partnered with glasses-maker Ray-Ban in 2021 to release a product called Ray-Ban Stories, which are glasses that have built-in cameras that can upload videos they record to social media.So Meta has been investing heavily in this space for years, and their products are relatively well-developed, most of the teething issues faced by new products worked out, at this point, and their products are priced between a few hundred dollars on the low end, about $500 in the middle, and around $1000 at the top.They also have a decent-sized catalog of in-VR offerings for users, and all of their products plug into all of their other products—for better and for worse, as many people who were irritated about the Oculus purchase were angered by the realization that they would need to have a Facebook account to keep using their hardware; so this is both pro and con, depending on who you are.Despite Meta's relative success in the world of spacial computing, though, the big story in this space, as of 2024, is that Apple has released their own augmented-reality headset, the Apple Vision Pro, and it's similar but also distinct from Meta's spacial computing offerings.It has bogglingly detailed screens, which are what project stuff to the user inside the headset, in terms of pixel density, it has a sophisticated hand-tracking interface that allows users to gesture in a fairly natural way to control things within their virtual environment, no separate controllers necessary, it has video pass-through, as do the Quest models, that show the real world within the user's view, but which then superimposes virtual stuff over it, and its tracking of things in the real world is quite detailed and accurate, to the point that some users have been—ill-advisedly, if not illegally—driving their cars while wearing their Vision Pros, and it even offers some possibly just experimental, somewhat creepy quality-of-life additions, like inward facing cameras that track a users face and then display that face while they're video chatting from within the headset, and which project a 3D-video feed of their eyes to the outside of the display, so folks in the world around them can see what their eyes are doing, despite their face being largely covered by this heavy, compared to Meta's headsets, anyway, VR helmet.Apple's Vision Pro also costs $3,500, which is about 7-times the cost of Meta's entry-level, mid-tier, most popular Quest 3 headset.So what we have here is two companies presenting different visions of what the spacial computing industry will look like.Apple's pricing will likely come down, and some of the differences between these products, like Meta's lighter weight headsets and Apple's higher-quality screens, will almost certainly intersect at some point a few product iterations down the line, as they both figure out what's ideal in terms of the quality to price ratio.Other attributes may disappear, like the outward-facing eye projections, which don't seem terribly effective or useful, though some, like those eye-projections, may also evolve into something that people can't live without, and which Meta and other future competitors will then go on to copy.We're also seeing the emergence of different market positions within this space, which isn't something we've really had until this point.Meta had been occupying the perceptual high price point, as their products were the most fleshed-out and for most consumer purposes, at least, useful, and a thousand bucks at the high end is a lot of money for what's mostly an entertaining lark, for most consumers, at this point.Apple's entrance into this space, though, is a bit like when they stepped into the phone market in 2007 and announced a $500 iPhone: it changed the math, and recalibrated people's expectations of what they should expect to spend in the future.$500 seems almost ridiculously cheap for a premium device that's become fundamental to so many people for so many purposes, today, and it's possible that Apple's entrance in this space will do the same, allowing Meta to position its products as the Android of the spacial computing world, cheaper, sure, but also more useful for many people, with more pricing tiers, and serving as a sort of practical, non-luxury, and non-overpriced version of what most people want to get from this type of hardware.The reviews so far seem to support this positioning: Quest headsets are generally quite good, but that's it—they're not blowing any of the tech reviewers away, and most of what they do is passable, not magical.Apple generally aims for magical, and a lot of its initial reviews have suggested that what the Vision Pro does well, it does VERY well; at that magical level, if not beyond it.That said, a lot of the same reviews, and the reviews that have arrived since, after the device formally hit the market, have indicated that it has enough bugs and issues and missed opportunities to be incredible in some relatively few areas, but not worth $3,500 in most other regards; many of the stories on the device as of the week I'm recording this episode are about how many people, who enthusiastically forked over thousands of dollars for a first generation Vision Pro when it was released, are now returning their devices so as not to miss the 14-day return window.The Vision Pro is possibly revolutionary, then, but perhaps not in the sense that it replaces everything that came before: it'll probably change the space in significant ways, but it'll take several iterations before it becomes a must-have product, and in the meantime it'll mostly be meaningful because of how it resets price-expectations, sets a new bar for quality in some regards, and stokes a new round of competition in a space that hasn't seen much in the way of competition for years.Which is basically what happened with the iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and other Apple-made devices, as well. They tend to be really impressive and magical-seeming right out of the gate, but not great, practically, until the third or fourth generation, at which point they're just astoundingly good by most metrics.There's a chance that this product will find its feet eventually, too, then, though Meta seems keen to give them a run for their money on this, as their long-held desire to own a hardware product category now seems within reach, their past attempts at making their own watch and phone having been incredible failures.Their pivot to the metaverse, which has been put on hold a little bit because of the advent of generative AI technologies and all the big tech companies trying to figure out what their next steps should be, considering how influential those technologies have turned out to be, those technologies now seem likely to make that metaverse aspiration more viable in the long-term, and these headsets, especially if they can keep making them smaller and lighter and more useable in more contexts, seem like they could be the best entry-point for a Meta-owned network of metaversal platforms, all sorts of content generated on the fly by AI, keeping folks engaged longer, but only if they can maintain their lead over competitors while they build-out those virtual worlds, and as they attempt to grab more relevant companies and refine the relevant hardware, in the meantime.It's still an open question, though, despite this flurry of hype and investment, whether anyone will really want to use these sorts of devices on a regular basis, beyond those with more money than they can spend and people who are super-enthused about any new tech gizmo.Some analysts contend that the best access-point for the metaverse, whatever it eventually evolves into, remains and will remain the screens we have on all of our gadgets, and that the idea of face-based computing is a little bit silly and too cumbersome to ever become mainstream.Others have suggested, though, that we long assumed the same about pocketable computing, and wearing such devices on our wrists—which is something many of us now do, because smartwatches—a field that was for a long time super niche and weird and rare—became incredibly popular after Apple introduced its Apple Watch and then iterated the thing until it was useful, a slew of other companies, including those that were working in this space long-before Apple stepped in, all upgrading and refining their own products, in turn, making the smartwatch world a lot richer and more useful and popular, as a consequence.If these headsets become lighter, cheaper, and possibly even evolve into goggles or glasses, rather than headsets, that could make them a lot more accessible and useable by many people who, today, struggle to understand why they should care, and what possible use they might have for this kind of device, when their smartphones and computer scree…

Full show notes at the publisher

News Media Collapse Feb 13, 2024

Show notes

This week we talk about The Messenger, ads, and generative AI.

We also discuss search engines, algorithms, and Semafor’s new curation tool.

Recommended Book: The Coming Wave by Mustafa Suleyman

Transcript

There was a piece published on McSweeney's, a humorous, often satirical writing site, recently, entitled "Our Digital Media Platform Will Revolutionize News and Is Also Shutting Down," written by Devin Wallace, that includes gems, ostensibly from an announcement by some kind of new media business, like this one:

"Our new digital media platform is changing the way people consume content. We’re a one-stop-shop location for breaking news, long-form journalism, and in-depth art criticism. We’re also currently shutting down without any notice whatsoever."

It goes on to say:

"Mainstream media will try to shut us down, but they’ll never succeed since we already shut down at 3 a.m. with absolutely no warning to our readers or even our employees."

This piece is a completely unveiled criticism of The Messenger, a news-focused digital media company that launched in May of 2023 and was dissolved on January 31, 2024, about 8 months after its founding.

It was started by 70-something Jimmy Finkelstein, the former owner of The Hill, a DC-based politics and policy-oriented publication he bought in 2012, which was then acquired by another media company in 2021, who said he wanted to start The Messenger for legacy purposes, and which he raised $50 million to fund, before scooping up the assets of another new online media company, Grid News, and hiring a bunch of well-known writers and journalists from other publications, promising higher-than-usual for the industry wages for the 150 employees it hired for its launch, and that number was doubled to around 300 within a handful of months.

The Messenger was then unceremoniously shut down, the company's staff learning about its collapse and their layoffs from other publications reporting on the matter, many of them suspecting a closure, though, when their Slack conversations were suddenly shut down and their connections to the company, company emails, insurance, and the like, all stopped functioning or simply shut them out.

Company leadership, including Finkelstein, had bragged that The Messenger would defy the slow-motion collapse the rest of the news media world was experiencing, with few exceptions, because it would expand aggressively and publish constantly, increasing employment to 750 people and earning $100 million in annual revenue on the back of 100 million unique monthly visitors by 2024.

That...did not happen. It did achieve 100,000 unique daily visitors shortly after launching, but it was only able to earn about $3 million in total revenue by the waning days of 2023, and it burned through cash faster than its competitors.

That $50 million in funding had dropped to around $1.8 million in the bank from May to December of 2023, and the sudden closure seemed to be an effort by company leadership to cut their losses, though the explosion of activity and sum of money invested, followed by such a rapid decline and disappearance has earned The Messenger and those involved in its sudden shut-down the reputation for having invested in one of the most spectacular collapses in online news media history.

What I'd like to talk about today is the broader online news media industry, the challenges this industry faces, and how those challenges are shaping what's happening now and what's likely to happen next.

—

Explanations for The Messenger's rapid and explosive demise are rampant, but some of the most popular orient around Finkelstein's apparently outdated ideas about how to run a news publication, his reportedly bad attitude and horrible relationships with upper-management and other underlings (alongside his reported homophobia and misogyny, which may have amplified those issues), a lack of effort or capability within the ad sales team, which by some indications barely existed, the wasted money spent on Grid News, which was apparently doing some interesting things, but which was almost immediately shut down, killing its brand equity and losing its talented staff, and the incredible amount of bias Finkelstein injected into the publication, despite his claims that he was aiming for something more in the middle for folks who were sick of ideological bias.

It's also been claimed that talented journalists were forced to work in content-farm conditions, churning out dozens of click-bait calibre stories a day, and that Finkelstein and his cronies were basically accustomed to failing-up their entire lives, and thus were caught off guard when their out of touch, but to them brilliant assessment of what was going wrong in the news media world, today, proved to be not just wrong, but company destroyingly wrong—and that then led to a frantic attempt to merge with the LA Times, which was also spiraling, that was destined to fail, and a series of other smaller decisions that TV editor and culture writer Liam Mathews memorably called "ineptitude bordering on cruelty."

Some post-death assessments, though, have supported—implicitly if not explicitly—some of the excuses provided by Finkelstein himself, pointing at the larger winds of change within the industry and blaming those ebbs, flows, and disruptions for the failure of his legacy-defining project.

Among the cited issues is the shift back and forth between ad-supported news and a reliance on subscriptions and memberships: folks paying for the news with their attention versus folks paying monthly or yearly, basically.

There was a big segue toward an absolutist take on subscription and membership-paid content a few years ago, away from the ad-first revenue model that had dominated until that point for most of modern memory, but even big news entities like The Washington Post, Time, Quartz, The Atlantic, the Chicago Sun-Times, and TechCrunch are revamping their approach on this, following Gannett's lead with its newspapers, beginning in 2022, to reduce the number of stories published behind hard paywalls and to either go fully ad-supported once more, or to use more flexible approaches, optimized for what readers are willing to pay, or allowing for generous, ad-supported access to the majority of what they write, with relatively few pieces retained just for paid supporters.

We're also seeing a big move away from the growth-at-all-costs phase of the economy, which lasted from around 2010 until the pandemic, during which many of these entities shoveled gobs of investor money and cheap debt into expansion efforts and experiments, few of which panned out as they'd hoped, evolving into resilient income streams, and when interest rates were hiked as the pandemic peaked, profitability became the name of the game, and many of these companies were caught flat-footed with a lot of unprofitable assets and no-longer-serviceable expenses—so they started killing off components of their mini-empires and firing swathes of employees.

The threats and opportunities inherent in the emergence of generative artificial intelligence technologies are playing a role here, too, as some news entities will no doubt be able to replace some number of their workers with robo-versions of the same, reducing their headcount and paycheck-related liabilities, while also, in theory at least, bulking up some of their AI-handle-able output.

The degree to which this will be true has yet to be seen, but there have already been some early deals between relevant entities, including one recent deal for which Semafor will be paid by Microsoft and OpenAI to use their generative AI technology to help their journalists curate news via a tool called Signals; which in practice is similar in many ways to the news streams you see all over the web, today, with a big headline, an image, a summary of what happened, and some supplementary links.

The idea is that someday this type of tool might be ubiquitous, each news entity with their own spin on the concept, but these rundowns and curated feeds also serving as a jumping-off point for the rest of a media entity's content: something that could change the way they publish and monetize substantially, if it goes as planned.

All of which is leading to waves of layoffs, the industry experiencing what's been called a bloodbath, and even long-lauded brands like Sports Illustrated and Pitchfork are shutting down or becoming merged or stranded assets, their owners struggling to find a way to keep them solvent until they can figure out a business model that works in whatever this new stage of journalism and online publishing turns out to be.

By one estimate 538 journalists were laid off from US-based news publications in January of 2024, alone, not counting the 300-or-so people laid off from The Messenger, and that's following more than 3,000 in 2023 and more than 16,000 in 2020.

Some entities have announced that further firings are impending this year, and quite of a few of the ones that have remained silent so far are on deathwatch, possibly following in The Messenger's wake, collapsing entirely because they weren't able to figure out a way to keep existing in this new, still-emerging paradigm.

Part of the issue with the membership and ads component of this conversation, which are the two ways most news publications are funded, is that there's an increasing focus on algorithmic search and information-discovery on the internet, which basically means rather than someone going to a news entity they like, perusing their offerings and clicking around to different stories from their main website, they might google it or search on TikTok, bypassing traditional players in this space and going to curators and analysts and influencers, instead, reading the news or hearing a summary of it on these other platforms.

One of the major developing trends here, which could further change everything, possibly forever, is the shift within search engines like google toward becoming AI chatbot hubs instead of portals to other webpages.

Google is seemingly attempting to scrape all the information on the internet so folks can ask their on-search-page chatbots questions, and they can plop the answers and resources right there on the google webpage, rather than redirecting those people elsewhere.

Other search engines like Microsoft's Bing are doing the same, and other options are taking this concept even further, not displaying search results and links at all, but instead making a complete website full of information scraped from other sources every time you search, eliminating the need to go anywhere else, ever.

This dramatically changes the math for everyone who makes a living from ads, because folks no longer have to go to their pages and view their ads, which is what generates revenue for the site, in order to get the information they paid to produce. And it impacts membership and subscription income, as well, because why would folks pay for such things when they can just get it for free via google or some other AI-powered search engine?

What we're seeing now, then, is a partial reflection of what's happening elsewhere throughout the economy, as well, as everything recalibrates toward the interest rate and technological reality in which we find ourselves, today.

But it's also possibly a preview of what comes next, as a variety of additional factors, more focused on media and news media in particular, continue to hamstring the entities running the companies in this space, allowing a few, like the New York Times and The Guardian and quite a lot of right-leaning editorial-focused entities to flourish, but killing off basically everyone else during the transition, leaving us with far fewer, less diverse options, and an industry that doesn't seem to have a reliable business model anymore.

Show Notes

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/media-in-decline-advertising-layoffs-labor-unrest-1235806888/

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/01/27/is-the-journalism-death-spasm-finally-here-00138187

https://www.axios.com/2024/01/26/media-layoffs-strikes-journalism-dying

https://airmail.news/issues/2024-1-27/sports-immolated

https://www.wired.com/story/plaintext-hairpin-blog-ai-clickbait-farm/

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240126-ai-news-anchors-why-audiences-might-find-digitally-generated-tv-presenters-hard-to-trust

https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/23/media/los-angeles-times-layoffs-strike/index.html

https://www.theringer.com/2024/1/23/24047683/us-media-industry-meltdown-sports-illustrated-layoffs-pitchfork

https://www.vulture.com/article/what-we-owe-pitchfork.html

https://www.adweek.com/media/go-media-portfolio-sale/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

https://archive.ph/SMSDU

https://www.semafor.com/article/02/04/2024/inside-conde-nasts-breakup-with-pitchfork

https://www.adweek.com/media/recurrent-ventures-blackstone/

https://www.therebooting.com/the-media-blame-game/

https://variety.com/2024/tv/news/cnn-philippines-close-down-1235890177/?_hsmi=291911003

https://www.axios.com/2024/01/30/wall-street-journal-washington-layoffs-restructuring

https://www.adweek.com/media/techcrunch-shutters-subscription-layoffs/

https://theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/01/media-layoffs-la-times/677285/

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/24/business/media/sports-illustrated-covers.html

https://www.niemanlab.org/2024/01/a-student-newspaper-in-iowa-just-bought-two-local-weeklies/

https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradadgate/2023/12/19/media-companies-have-slashed-over-20000-jobs-in-2023/

https://www.politico.com/news/2024/02/01/journalism-layoffs-00138517

https://pwestpathfinder.com/2022/05/09/the-big-sixs-big-media-game/

https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/futureofmedia/index-us-mainstream-media-ownership

https://www.axios.com/2024/02/03/news-media-business-implosion-philanthropic-wealth

https://www.axios.com/2024/02/06/great-subscription-news-reversal

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/06/style/journalism-media-layoffs.html

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/our-digital-media-platform-will-revolutionize-news-and-is-also-shutting-down

https://thehill.com/homenews/media/4440773-news-startup-the-messenger-shutting-down/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Messenger_(website)

https://www.axios.com/2024/01/31/messenger-shut-down-closes-jimmy-finkelstein-fundraising

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/31/business/media/messenger-closing-down.html

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/feb/02/the-messenger-startup-collapse-journalism-takeaways

https://www.niemanlab.org/2024/02/ineptitude-bordering-on-cruelty-a-roundup-of-recent-news-on-the-messenger/

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Autoimmune Disease Therapies Feb 06, 2024

Show notes

This week we talk about CAR Ts, lupus, and antigen-presenting cells.We also discuss Hashimoto’s, potential cures, and allergies.Recommended Book: The Avoidable War by Kevin RuddTranscriptChimeric antigen receptors, usually shorthanded as CARs, are a type of protein structure that receives and transmits signals within biological systems.The term "CAR T cell" refers to chimeric antigen receptors that have been altered so that these structures can give T cells, which are a component of the human body's immune system, attacking stuff that our immune systems identify as being foreign or otherwise potentially harmful, it gives these T cells the ability to target specific antigens, rather than responding in a general sense to anything that seems broadly off.So while T cells are generally deployed en masse to tackle all sorts of issues all throughout our bodies all the time, CAR T cells can tell them, hey, see this specific thing? This one thing I'm pointing at? Go kill that thing. And then they do.The potential to use CAR Ts for T cell-aiming purposes started to pop up in scientific literature in the late-1980s and early-1990s, and in the mid-90s there was a clinical trial testing the theory that T cells could be guided in this way to targeted cells throughout the body that are infected with HIV.That clinical trial failed, as did tests using CAR T approaches to sic T cells on solid tumors; there just didn't seem to be enough persistence in the T cells, in their targeting, to do much good in this regard.Second-generation CARs improved upon that original model, and that led to tests with more follow-through, better focus for those guided T cells, basically, and that improved their capacity to clear solid tumors in tests.By the early 2010s, researchers were able to completely clear solid cancers from patients, leading to complete remissions in some of them, though those patients were also treated with more conventional therapies beforehand.These new approaches led to the first two FDA-approved CAR T cell treatments in the US in 2017, for a type of leukemia and a type of lymphoma.As of late-2023, there were six such treatments approved for use by the FDA, most of them leveraged only for cancer patients who didn't respond well to conventional treatments, or who continued to relapse after several rounds of cancer therapy. It's a last line of defense, at this point, in part because it's still relatively new, and in part because the current collection of CAR T therapies seem to work best when the cancers have already been weakened by other sorts of attack.What I'd like to talk about today is another potential use for this same general technology and therapy approach that, until recently, was considered to be a really pie-in-the-sky sort of dream, but which is rapidly becoming more thinkable.—There's a theory that essentially all human beings have some kind of immunodeficiency: something that our immune systems don't do well, don't do at all, or don't do in the expected, baseline way.Any one of those immunodeficiency types can result in issues throughout a person's life, ranging from a higher-than-normal susceptibility to specific infections to a tendency to accidentally target healthy cells or biota, which can then result in all sorts of secondary issues for the host of those cells or biota.One especially pernicious and increasingly common issue in this space is what's called autoimmunity, which refers to the tendency of one's immune system to attack one's own cells and tissues and organs.If these autoimmune attacks are substantial and consistent enough, they can cause a disease in the afflicted body components, and diseases caused in this way are called autoimmune diseases.You've almost certainly heard of some of the more common of these diseases:Lupus, for instance, varies in its specifics, but arises when someone's immune system attacks their skin or muscles or joint tissues or components of their nervous system, resulting in an array of problems that has earned this disease the categorization as a "great imitator" condition, because it replicates the symptoms of a slew of other diseases and disorders.Folks with celiac disease experience all sorts of gut issues, primarily centralized in the small intestine, that disallow the comfortable and healthful consumption of gluten, which is present in all sorts of foods and which, if consumed, can cause incredibly uncomfortable and painful side effects, alongside other gut-related problems.Type 1 diabetes is an autoimmune disease, as is multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, Addison's disease, Grave's disease, and Hashimoto's thyroiditis, in which one's immune system slowly destroys one's own thyroid, causing all sorts of problems, including, potentially, hypothyroidism and sometimes a rare type of cancer called thyroid lymphoma.All of these issues are associated with a variety of other issues beyond their initial, simplified portfolio of symptoms because our bodies are ecosystems, all the things connected to all the other things, so it's borderline impossible to tweak one thing without causing ripples throughout the rest of the system.If part of that system attacks another part of the system, then, there will be waves of long- and short-term consequences resulting from both the attack and the damage caused by the attack, so these issues, though in some cases quite mild, depending on the person who has them, can also flare-up periodically, after being triggered by something or for no apparent reason, and they can change in nature over time, perhaps seeming like nothing, flying under the radar most of our lives, until one day they pop up out of the woodwork, wreaking all sorts of havoc that can be debilitating and terrifying, especially since the person experiencing those issues generally doesn't know what's happening and may initially attribute them to something else.I actually speak with experience in that regard, as I have Hashimoto's, and only found out about it a few years ago—and it took nearly a year to figure out what was suddenly causing all sorts of health problems that seemed to arise from nowhere, but which were apparently lurking there, waiting to crest the surface of awareness, for the thirty-plus years it took me to reach that point.So autoimmune diseases are varied but stem from the same core issue of our immune systems attacking some component of the bodies they're meant to defend, and though the majority of such disordered immune system behaviors will lead to nothing, causing no damage and possibly being counteracted by some other component of our complex internal ecosystems, some cause damage leading to disease, and some of those diseases are significant and life-altering or life-threatening.About 50 million Americans have one of the more than 100 tracked autoimmune diseases, and it's estimated that something like 4% of the total human population has at least one autoimmune disease, though methods of identifying and tracking such things are imperfect, and methods for doing so vary greatly from country to country.It's long been known that women suffer from a lot more and more intense autoimmune diseases than men—about 80% of people who have autoimmune diseases are women—and the results of recent research suggest this may be because a molecule called Xist (which deactivates one of a woman's two X chromosomes, preventing the dangerous overproduction of proteins in their bodies) seems to play a role in the production of molecular complexes that are linked to a lot of the autoimmune diseases we track, those complexes triggering chemical responses that spark the cascade of other issues that then result in autoimmune problems.This is still very new science and a lot of the more thorough looks into the Xist molecule have been in mice, so far, so while some exploration of this same process has been done in humans, this is still pretty speculative right now.That said, better understanding this molecule and its triggers, and other potential, similar triggers, might someday help us bypass or reduce the influence of those chemical responses, which could in turn reduce the incidence or impact of these diseases.For the foreseeable future, though, we'll probably be plagued, on a significant scale, by autoimmune diseases. And the number of people suffering from these things seems to be going up; there's some evidence that folks are more prone to some autoimmune diseases after being infected with COVID-19, which suggests there might be a long-term infection component of these sorts of issues, with the viruses and bacteria we encounter over the course of our lives messing with our bodily functions just enough to tweak the variables that inform our autoimmune behaviors, sometimes permanently and negatively.But incidences of autoimmune disease have been on the rise for years, and there's some evidence that points at what we might call the Western Diet and its spread around the world for some of this increase, as the real uptick began about 40 years ago, when the American version of the Western Diet started to go global in a big way, and in the wake of that spread we've seen inflammatory bowel disease surge in the Middle East and Asia, along with the seeming export of Type 1 Diabetes, multiple sclerosis, and rheumatoid arthritis across parts of the world that had never really seen them on any scale before, but which, after the installation of a bunch of McDonalds and the introduction of highly processed foods to global supermarkets, began to show up in a big way.This is also still pretty speculative, so take this with a grain of salt, and it's also worth noting that environmental variables like the food we eat is only one component of this issue, even if a more direct causal relationship could be proven: you can eat nothing but ultra processed foods and never develop and autoimmune disease, and you can eat a perfect whole foods diet and develop one; none of these seeming amplifiers are being flagged as absolute causes: this seems to be something we're prone to, regardless, and the way we live and how we eat and maybe even the microsplastics in our environments are maybe tweaking the likelihood of autoimmune predispositions becoming autoimmune issues—they're probably not sparking the potential for those issues out of whole cloth, though, based on what we currently know, at least.Whatever's causing or fanning the flames of this increase in autoimmune issues, though, a recent series of announcements is becoming more significant as those numbers increase.Therapies based on research that was initially conducted back in the early 2000s suggest that it may be possible to either kill or dampen the impact of the cells that attack our own bodies as part of an autoimmune disfunction.It was reported back in 2022 that five people suffering from a severe autoimmune disease had those diseases driven into remission by a therapy that uses CAR T cells to tell the body to attack the patient's B cells, which in the case of these patients, were the cells responsible for their lupus.So this therapy programmed some of their T cells to attack their B cells, which were causing their symptoms, including lung inflammation, fatigue, arthritis, and fibrosis of their heart valves, and those symptoms then cleared up; the attacks stopped, and so did their symptoms.Even more interesting is that once the B cells were wiped out, the ones behaving badly, the therapy was halted, their B cells populations started to tick back up because the T cells stopped attacking them, but the new B cells didn't engage in the damaging behavior—they did what they were supposed to do, rather than attacking their host.The subjects' immune systems were also tested, as the researchers didn't want solve one problem but cause another, impairing their patents' immune systems in such a way that they were then prone to all sorts of other infections.That didn't seem to be the case: their immune responses were similar to those of other people, and that led them to conclude that the reprogrammed T cells were primarily targeting the bad B cells, not wiping out the whole of their immune functionality; which was a real issue with earlier versions of this concept which were tested about five decades ago, most of which basically demolished a patients' immune system and hoped for the best, leading to unfortunately predictable and terrible outcomes.In the year or so since that initial trial was conducted, ten more people have had their severe autoimmune diseases forced into remission by this approach, and there's now hope that it might also work on other such conditions, beyond the three that it has been shown to work on, so far. There's another, related approach being tested that aims to help the body develop a better sense of self-awareness, boosting its tolerance for what it wrongly perceives to be bad stuff, so that it doesn't have such a hair-trigger for attacking things it thinks are dangerous and foreign, slowly but surely upping the cap for attack until it no longer does so, or doesn't at a level that causes diseases symptoms.One approach to achieving this outcome uses a synthetic versions of what're called antigen-presenting cells, which pop around our bodies picking up little bits of antigens—which are detritus like chemicals and bacteria and pollen and so on, stuff that isn't part of us—and then they meet up with our T cells and tell them which of these things should be attacked, and which should be ignored because they're safe.The synthetic version of this system sends in nanoparticle replications of these antigen-presenting cells, using them to flag the stuff that's being errantly attacked as good, changing the T cells' opinion of those things over time, basically, but it's also possible to achieve something of the same by manipulating how the natural antigen-presenting cells operate.It may also be possible to use these signifiers to tell the T cells to attack the B cells, in the case of wanting to help folks with certain types of lupus, for instance, accomplishing what those other therapies accomplish but via different, less-invasive and more straightforward means.What we're seeing right now, then, is a change in how we think about autoimmune diseases and what causes them, and we're taking recent research and understandings about the mechanisms of how this stuff functions and trying to decide how best to recalibrate and even hijack those mechanisms to correct for issues in the system; the idea being to tweak one small thing, perhaps just once, and to consequently permanently change how the system functions in favor of healthier, happier outcomes.We are still at the beginning stages of this, but the pace at which these sorts of therapies are being developed and moved to clinical trials is heartening.It's possible that at some point in the next decade or two we could see commonly available treatments for things like lupus and Hashimoto's, which would be great, in my 100% biased opinion, but also for related issues like allergic reactions, which would make use of the same general theory and process to tell our immune systems not to freak out when they're exposed to, for instance, peanut proteins or pollen, changing the lives of even more people, as long as we can figure out how best to consistently and safely administer these therapies to folks who currently suffer from such things.Show Noteshttps://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(08)00624-7https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fimmu.2018.02359/fullhttps://www.nejm.org/doi/10.1056/NEJMc2107725https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1142963htt…

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AI Impersonation Jan 30, 2024

Show notes

This week we talk about robo-Biden, fake Swift images, and ElevenLabs.We also discuss copyright, AI George Carlin, and deepfakes.Recommended Book: Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David GraeberTranscriptThe hosts of a podcast called Dudesy are facing a lawsuit after they made a video that seems to show the late comedian George Carlin performing a new routine.The duo claimed they created the video using AI tools, training an algorithm on five decades-worth of Carlin's material in order to generate a likeness of his face and body and voice, and his jokes; they claimed everything in this video, which they called "George Carlin: I'm Glad I'm Dead," was the product of AI tools.The lawsuit was filed by Carlin's estate, which alleges these hosts infringed on the copyright they have on Carlin's works, and that the hosts illegally made use of and profited from his name and likeness.They asked that the judge force the Dudesy hosts to pull and destroy the video and its associated audio, and to prevent them from using Carlin's works and likeness and name in the future.After the lawsuit was announced, a spokesperson for Dudesy backtracked on prior claims, saying that the writing in the faux-Carlin routine wasn't written by AI, it was written by one of the human hosts, and thus the claim of copyright violation wasn't legit, because while the jokes may have been inspired by Carlin's work, they weren't generated by software that used his work as raw training materials, as they originally claimed—which arguably could have represented an act of copyright violation.This is an interesting case in part because if the podcasters who created this fake Carlin and fake Carlin routine were to be successfully sued for the use of Carlin's likeness and name, but not for copyright issues related to his work, that would suggest that the main danger faced by AI companies that are gobbling up intellectual property left and right, scraping books and the web and all sorts of video and audio services for raw training materials, is the way in which they're acquiring and using this media, not the use of the media itself.If they could somehow claim their models are inspired by these existing writings and recordings and such, they could then lean on the same argument that their work is basically the same as an author reading a bunch of other author's book, and then writing their own book—which is inspired by those other works, but not, typically anyway, infringing in any legal sense.The caveat offered by the AI used to impersonate Carlin at the beginning of the show is interesting, too, as it said, outright, that it's not Carlin and that it's merely impersonating him like a human comedian doing their best impression of Carlin.In practice, that means listening to all of Carlin's material and mimicking his voice and cadence and inflections and the way he tells stories and builds up to punchlines and everything else; if a human performer were doing an impression of Carlin, they would basically do the same thing, they just probably wouldn't do it as seamlessly as a modern AI system capable of producing jokes and generating images and videos and audio can manage.This raises the question, then, of whether there would be an issue if this AI comedy set wasn't claiming to feature George Carlin: what if they had said it was a show featuring Porge Narlin, instead? Or Fred Robertson? Where is the line drawn, and to what degree does the legal concept of Fair Use, in the US at least, come into play here?What I'd like to talk about today are a few other examples of AI-based imitation that have been in the news lately, and the implications they may have, legally and culturally, and in some cases psychologically, as well.—There's a tech startup called ElevenLabs that's generally considered to be one of the bigger players in the world of AI-based text-to-voice capabilities, including the capacity to mimic a real person's voice.What that means in practice is that for a relatively low monthly fee you can type something into a box and then have one of the company's templated voice personas read that text for you, or you can submit your own audio, creating either a rapidly produced, decent reflection of that voice and having that read your text, or you can submit more audio and have the company take a somewhat more hands-on approach with it, creating a more convincing version of the same for you, which you can then leverage in the future, making that voice say whatever you like.The implications of this sort of tech are broad, and they range from use-cases that are potentially quite useful for people like me—I've been experimenting with these sorts of tools for ages, and I'm looking forward to the day when I can take a week off from recording if I'm sick or just want a break, these tools allowing me to foist my podcasting responsibilities onto my robo-voice-double.In my opinion these tools aren't there yet, not for that purpose, but they're getting better all the time, and fast, and that the consumer-grade versions of these things are as good and accessible and easy to use and cheap as they are, today, suggests to me that I'll probably have something close to my dream in the next year or two, maybe sooner.That said, this startup has gotten some not great mainstream attention, of late, alongside the largely positive press it's received for being a popular tool for making marketing videos and generating voices for characters in video games, because it was apparently used by someone to generate an audio recording that sounds a lot like US President Joe Biden, and that recording was then used to make robo-calls to voters across New Hampshire, encouraging them not to vote in the democratic primary there, and to instead save their vote for November—which is not a thing you have to do, but this is being seen as a portentous moment in politics nonetheless, because although AI-generated images and videos and audio clips have been used in other recent elections around the world, with varying, still mostly low-key levels of impact, the upcoming presidential election in the US in November is being closely watched because of the stakes involved for the country and for the world.The folks running ElevenLabs have said they suspended the person who created the fake Biden audio clip from their service, and though the company recently achieved a valuation of more than a billion dollars and is, again, being generally seen as one of the leaders in this burgeoning space right now, this news item points at very tangible, already here risks for this sort of company, as there's a chance, still theoretical at this point, but a chance that has now become more imaginable, that this sort of deepfake audio or video or image could cause some kind of political or international or even humanitarian catastrophe if deployed strategically and at the right moment.This political AI story arrived shortly before another torrent of relevant news about a deluge of what we might call explicit material—I'm going to try to avoid saying pornographic so as not to trigger any distribution filters on this episode, but that's the type of material we're talking about here—featuring AI-generated versions of performer Taylor Swift.The most recent update to this story, as of the day I'm recording this, is that the social network formerly known as Twitter, now called X, has had to completely remove users' ability to search for the words Taylor and Swift on the platform, because efforts to halt the posting of such images and videos were insufficient due to the sheer volume of media being posted.One such image attained 45 million views, hundreds of thousands of likes and bookmarks, and about 24,000 retweets before it was taken down by X's staff, 17 hours after it was originally shared.Reports from 404 Media suggest that these images may have originated in a Telegram group, Telegram being a pseudo-social network that operates a lot like WhatsApp, and on 4chan, which is a forum that's basically dedicated to creating and sharing horrible and offensive things.Most of the images shared were not deepfakes, where an existing image has another person's face plastered over it, but instead original AI-generated, let's say "adult" works, based on Swift's likeness.The Telegram group recommends folks use Microsoft's AI image-generator, which is called Designer, to make these sorts of images—and though Microsoft has put limitations in place to try to keep people from making this sort of content, prompt-hackers, folks who enthusiastically figure out ways to bypass limitations on how AI tools respond to different prompts, telling them what to make, have figured out ways around most of these blocks, including those related to Taylor Swift, apparently, and those related to nudity and the other violatory themes that were incorporated into many of these images.Like ElevenLabs, Microsoft isn't thrilled about this and has said they're looking into it and are figuring out ways to prevent this from happening again in the future, including outright banning users who make these types of images.It's worth mentioning, though, that Taylor Swift, as a very famous and successful woman, has long been a target for this sort of thing, even before AI was used, back when folks were just photoshopping their fantasies and sharing those comparably less-sophisticated images in similar forums and on similar platforms.It's important to note here, too, that Swift isn't the only person dealing with this kind of violation.All sorts of people, men and women, though mostly women are also having their likenesses turned into explicit imagery and video content, and though this is an extrapolation on the way things have always been—the creation and distribution of revenge porn has plagued, again, mostly but not exclusively women since the dawn of the internet, and people have been making sometimes satirical, sometimes just intentionally vulgar images of other human beings since the dawn of pictographic communication.Back in November of 2023, there were reports of teenage boys using these sorts of AI tools to create fake nude photos of their female classmates without those classmates' knowledge (or, obviously, permission).The outcry following these revelations was substantial, as these were underage girls being turned into explicit images by their peers, which is creating all sorts of legal, interpersonal, and psychological problems, including but not limited to issues related to the creation of images featuring sexualized children, and issues related to the victimization of people via what amounts to completely fabricated revenge porn.There are really substantial and tricky layers to all of this, then, because while mimicking someone's voice for political purposes is in some ways the same as reproducing someone's facial features in order to portray them in adult situations, there are additional concerns when the content being generated makes it seem as if the portrayed people are doing or saying something that they didn't do or say, and it's even more complicated when the human beings in question are of a protected class, like children.There's also the question of degrees:To what degree is this better or worse, or maybe the same, as people creating these types of images with Photoshop, or drawing them in a sketchbook with a pencil, rather than using AI to create realistic images?How similar does a character in one of these images have to look to a real person, be they Taylor Swift or a classmate, in order for it to be, in the legal sense, a violation of their rights? How about a violation of their sense of personal security?How explicit must a generated character's youth be for that character to count as underage, in the eyes of the law?And how much protection does a normal, non-famous person have over their image, and should the legal consequences for violating that image be greater or less than the consequences for violating the image of a public figure who makes a living off their name and look and voice and persona?It's a big tangle of questions, all of them related to potentially quite traumatic and scarring experiences for the people being targeted and portrayed in this way.At the moment there are no clear answers about the legalities of all this, just a lot of in-the-works court cases and legal theories, and periodic pronouncements by government officials that we need to do something—but many of those same representatives are also slow-walking actual action on the matter due to a lack of legal precedent, an inability to do much about it, in a practical sense (because of the nature of these tools), and because some of them worry about stifling the fast-growing AI industry in their jurisdictions with regulations that may not actually address these issues but which would hamper potential productive uses of the same tools; throwing out the good stuff to try to hobble the bad, but not actually managing to do anything about the bad, so it's only the good that suffers.One potential upside of Swift being targeted like this, if there can be said to be an upside to something that, again, is often traumatic and scarring for those afflicted—is that the US government finally seems to be moving more aggressively to do something because of her status, though the nature of that something is still unclear at this point.The White House press secretary said that the government is alarmed by these reports, though, and they believe Congress should take legislative action, as there are no federal laws on the books that can keep someone from making or sharing these things at the moment, boggling as that may seem.Research from 2019 found that something like 96% of all deepfake videos are non-consensual, explicit videos of this kind, and they're mostly of women, and there are thousands of known sites dedicated exclusively to sharing such content and teaching people to make more of it.We're living through a tumultuous period in this regard, then, and are awash with flashy new technologies that grant everyday people heightened powers to create both incredible and harmful things.We will almost certainly see some of these ongoing court cases establish new policy in the coming year, though it will likely be several years before actionable legal, and concomitant practical technological solutions to these sorts of problems start to roll out—at which point the same denizens of the internet who are bypassing today's restrictions on such things will get to work finding ways around those new barriers, as well.Show Noteshttps://mashable.com/article/fake-biden-robocall-creator-suspended-from-ai-voice-startup-elevenlabshttps://www.wired.com/story/biden-robocall-deepfake-elevenlabs/https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-01-26/ai-startup-elevenlabs-bans-account-blamed-for-biden-audio-deepfakehttps://www.404media.co/ai-generated-taylor-swift-porn-twitter/https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/25/24050334/x-twitter-taylor-swift-ai-fake-images-trendinghttps://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2024/01/26/was-deepfake-taylor-swift-pornography-illegal-can-she-sue/72359653007/https://variety.com/2024/digital/news/x-twitter-blocks-searches-taylor-swift-explicit-nude-ai-fakes-1235889742/https://www.wsj.com/tech/x-halts-taylor-swift-searches-after-explicit-ai-images-spread-06ef6c45https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-68123671https://lawandcrime.com/high-profile/high-school-student-allegedly-used-real-photos-to-create-pornographic-deepfakes-of-female-classmates/https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/11/deepfake-nudes-of-high-schoolers-spark-police-probe-in-nj/https://www.morningbrew.com/da…

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Middle East Conflicts Jan 23, 2024

Show notes

This week we talk about Operation Iron Swords, October 7, and the International Court of Justice.We also discuss human rights abuses, the Red Sea, and Iran’s influence.Recommended Book: Empire Games by Charles StrossTranscriptIn the early morning of October 7, 2023, the militant wing of Hamas—which is also a political organization that has governed the Gaza Strip territory since 2007, a few years after Israel withdrew from the area and then blockaded it, leading to accusations from international human rights organizations that Israel still occupies the area, even if not officially—but the militant wing of this Sunni Islamist group, Hamas, launched a sneak-attack, in coordination with other islamist groups (a term that in this context usually but not always refers to groups that want to claim territory they can govern in accordance with what they consider to be proper Islamic fashion, usually defined by a fairly extreme interpretation of the religion).This sneak-attack was successful in the sense that it caught seemingly everyone off guard, despite the Israeli military's foreknowledge of this possibility; that foreknowledge only becoming public months after the attack, and the possibility of such an attack dismissed by those who could have prepared for it because it seemed to them to be a sort of pie-in-the-sky aspiration on the part of a group that was disempowered and incapable of putting up any kind of fight beyond periodically launching unsophisticated rockets that could be easily taken out by Israel's Iron Dome anti-missile defense system.So for more than a year the Israeli government had information indicating Hamas was planning some kind of incursion into Israel, but they dismissed it, and by some accounts they had every reason to do so, as Hamas had seemed to be more chill than usual, pulling back on the overt military activity and lacking sufficient support from the Gaza population to attempt even a tenth of what they had blueprinted.Three months before the attack an Israeli signals intelligence analyst raised a red flag on this issue, indicating that Hamas was conducting intense training exercises that seemed to be in line with those pie-in-the-sky plans, but this flag was ignored by those higher up the chain of command, once again.Consequently, when Hamas launched a huge flurry of rockets, around 3,000 by most estimates, sent drones to take out automated machine guns and cameras placed along the border fences between Israel and Gaza, and sent militants through holes in the fence, in on motorcycles, and over barriers using paragliders, Israeli defense forces were caught flat-footed, taking a surprisingly long time to respond to the incursion and failing to protect a military base that housed the defense division responsible for security in Gaza, alongside several other bases, and the around 1,200 people who were killed and around 250 who were taken hostage.Dozens of nations immediately decried Hamas's attack as a terrorist act, many of Israel's neighbors made noises about not liking it, but then blamed Israel's long-standing alleged occupation of Gaza and the West Bank for the attack, and attempts to shore-up defenses, clear out lingering Hamas fighters, and tally the dead and missing began; the numbers and the experiences of those involved were all pretty horrifying.Israel's response, a plan that was designated Operation Iron Swords, arrived alongside a state of emergency for the portions of Israel within about 50 miles or 80 km of its border with Gaza, and the country's prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that the country was at war with Hamas and would destroy them and anyone else who dared to join them.The nation's defense forces were also ordered to shore up its other borders to prevent anyone else from joining on in attacking Israel at a moment in which it might be seen as weak.In the just over 100 days—108 as of the day this episode goes live—everything has changed or been amplified in the Middle East as a consequence of this conflict.Most immediately, the Gaza Strip has been turned into a wasteland by Israel's counterattack, which involved heavy bombardment of what the Israeli military said were confirmed and potential Hamas hideouts, but which included countless civilian homes and businesses and other bits of infrastructure, and Gaza's population has been herded into public spaces and makeshift tents, the majority of them down at the southern end of the territory where Israel told them they would be safe, but which has since, itself, also come under bombardment and ground assault.Something like 25,000 Gazan residents have been confirmed dead by the Palestinian Ministry of Health, 70% of them women and children, around 8,000 more have been reported missing, and around 61,000 have been officially tallied as injured since the counterattack began.Israel has been accused of all sorts of human rights abuses because of this counterattack, has lost a fair bit of the support it garnered in the early days after Hamas' sneak attack against them, and Netanyahu has faced heightened challenges to his leadership, from outside entities, but also from Israeli civilians and service people who question his motivations for maintaining the offensive stance that he's still maintaining, and by those who question the logic of how that stance is playing out, strategically.What I'd like to talk about today is the bigger picture in the Middle East, and what we might expect to happen in the region, next.—The general state of play, as of the day I'm recording this at least, and this is a big collection of fast-moving interconnected stories, so this is all prone to change and quickly, but the big-picture layout right now is this:Israel is run by Prime Minister Netanyahu who is in the midst of a corruption trial and is facing opposition for his response to Hamas' attack and his alleged human rights-violating flattening of Gaza and treatment of Gaza-residing Palestinians, and that pushback is coming from Israeli citizens, from within Israel's defense leadership structure, and from a growing number of the country's allies.Israel's biggest and generally most supportive ally, the US, has been sending all sorts of support and throwing out vetoes in Israel's favor, as well, when international bodies have tried to hold them accountable for some of those alleged human rights violations, and when they've tried to push for official ceasefires, but there are reports that the Biden administration is reaching the end of its rope on this, and that's partially because much of the world is not a fan of how brutal this response has been and how badly Gazans have been treated, but also, reportedly at least, because this is not good for Biden's reelection potential in November, as young people in the United States have largely sided with the Palestinians rather than what they perceive to be the bigger, badder, abusive aggressor—the Israeli military.The EU, also a long-time and enthusiastic backer of Israel, most of the countries in the bloc, anyway, has arguably already reached the end of its rope, the bloc's foreign ministers increasing pressure on Israel to consider a two-state solution post-fighting, which would basically mean making a real-deal Palestinian state in the area, rather than two Palestinian Territories run or blockaded by Israel, as Netanyahu has recently said he won't even consider the concept as it would be bad for Israel's long-term national security, but the majority of influential nations that are providing support for Israel are saying, well, you're probably going to need to do this, so let's think this through.The EU is even calling for consequences for Israel if Netanyahu continues to oppose a two-state solution, the idea being that his stance on the matter is fanning the flames of violence, and will continue to stoke them long-term, so some new state of affairs is necessary to change the existing, incredibly tumultuous status quo.The UN is even more pointed on this matter than the EU, those three groups—again, nations and organizations that are typically on Israel's side with pretty much everything—becoming publicly pissed off at Netanyahu's apparent slow-walking of this counterattack, his standing in the way of any kind of long-term ceasefire or peace-making, and his increasingly extremist, nationalist language when it comes to the possibility of a Palestinian state at some point in the future.Chinese leadership have also said they think Israel should stop punishing Palestinians in their hunt for Hamas militants and leaders, South Africa brought a case against Israel to the international Court of Justice, alleging genocide—and while this case was originally seen as a bit of a headline-grabbing sideshow and still has some staunch opponents, it's gathering more and more support, especially from other African nations, including those that have seen genocidal and genocide-like massacres at some point in their past.Chile and Mexico, in recent days, have also asked the ICJ to investigate possible war crimes committed by Israeli forces against civilians in Gaza.Maybe the most important responses here, though, from Israel's Muslim majority neighbors, have been universally negative—and this is in the context of a period of pseudo-normalization of these nations' relationship with Israel, a lot of negotiating and deal-making leading to a flurry of announcements that seemed primed to set the area up for a period of peace and prosperity—former opponents suddenly dealing with each other peaceably instead of lobbing munitions at and threatening each other pretty much continuously.Instead, what we see now is Egypt worrying that Israel is trying to push Gazan civilian across their shared border, Saudi Arabia warning of potential long-term consequences from Israel's invasion of the Strip, the Hezbollah government and military in Lebanon increasing the intensity of its fighting with Israeli forces across their shared border in the north, an increase in the tempo of fighting between Israeli assets and Iran-linked assets in Syria, and a huge new push by the Houthis, a group that's been engaged in a long-term civil war with the Saudi-backed government in Yemen, to fire at and take hostage the crews of cargo ships passing through the Red Sea toward the Suez Canal, which has massively disrupted global trade; the Houthis say they're doing this in support of Gazans, demanding the Israelis pull out of the strip or they'll keep it up, though they've been doing this kind of pirating for a long while now, if not at this volume, so the degree to which they're just engaging in a rebranding effort for these attacks is up for debate.The general vibe of escalatory potential, though, is reshaping the region, and that's especially true of Israel's neighbors, like Egypt, Lebanon, and Jordan, which have suffered extreme economic damage—by some calculations around $10.3 billion, which is about 2.3% of their total, combined GDP—and that damage is expected to push hundreds of thousands of their citizens into poverty.This is the result of a dramatic decline in tourism to the area, a drop in oil production and oil market prices, and the confluence of climate-amplified droughts, economic and financial crises, and reverberations from other nearby conflicts like the ongoing fighting in Syria, which, among other things, has turned the Syrian government into one of the world's biggest illicit drug producers and exporters, which is having a hugely detrimental effect on many other nations in the region, in terms of their health outcomes and in terms of heightened and empowered gang activity.Uncertainty is a big variable, too, though, as investment money is suddenly finding other homes, those controlling these resources not wanting to plant their funds in a region that might soon catch fire, and the potential benefits from all that foreordained normalization, all that potential peace and divided entities suddenly able to do business with each other after a period of separation, has more or less disappeared.We're also see more military activity on the outskirts of this, the US and its allies launching regular air strikes against Houthi targets in Yemen, which themselves continue to launch strikes against vessels passing through the Red Sea, and Israel has been lashing out at other targets in the region, too, mimicking Iran's attacks on what it's called terrorist groups operating within its neighbor's borders—which has upped the volatility level even further, as one of those Iranian neighbors, Pakistan, is nuclear armed and working through its own collection of instability-inducing variables, at the moment.There are a lot of entities in this region that are taking this opportunity to bulk-up their reputations with their constituents and allies, doing things that allow them to show strength, and doing those things in such a way that it looks like they're opposing Israel, even when they're not really actually doing that—as is probably the case with the Houthis and some of Iran's efforts—because this framing of their efforts allows them to grab more power, reinforce their existing power, and potentially even team-up, if only loosely, with other regional fellow travelers against the new regional baddy of the moment, an even-more-opposable-than-usual Israel.This is all a lot! But one thing I think we can fairly confidently say at this point is that Iran seems like it's using this opportunity to expand and flex its influence throughout the region, mostly by using proxy groups, as it tends to do, to annoy and hurt its various enemies, including but not limited to Israel, the US, the West in general, and Saudi Arabia.We're also seeing cracks in the veneer of unity Israel's government and military have promoted following Hamas' sneak-attack, people in power coming out against the way things have been handled, and folks on the ground maintaining a steady cadence of protests aimed at many facets of how Netanyahu has done things and is continuing to do things, including but not limited to not seeing the sneak-attack coming, not prioritizing rescuing hostages, and arguably pushing the region deeper and deeper into a state of war, rather than looking for ceasefire options.So there's a chance we could see a change in leadership in Israel soon, whether by election or other means, which would likely then change the reality on the ground throughout the region.There are also signs, as I mentioned earlier, that the US and other Israel-allied governments have just about reached the point where they'll formally step away from Israel's side on this, and it's unlikely anyone involved wants that to happen, so we could see a grand pivot on this matter, from Israel's side, sometime in the next few weeks.And there have been still-in-the-background reports that the plan, amongst some US negotiators and their allies, anyway, is to try to promote a normalization of relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel as the means by which a new stability in the Middle East could still be reached: Israel's Muslim neighbors helping a new, Palestinian state get off the ground and everyone living together in relative harmony, except for Iran and its allies, which would see their influence substantially reduced by this potential new state of affairs.It's anyone's guess as to whether this possibility has any legs, as again, this is still a kind of under the radar possibility at this point, and Netanyahu has said with increasing force and clarity that he will not allow a Palestinian state to happen—so who knows, this may be dead in the water before it's even formally proposed and promoted.So…

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Ecuador State of Emergency Jan 16, 2024

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This week we talk about Bukele, Naboa, and the war on gangs.We also discuss emergency powers, authoritarianism, and the cocaine trade.Recommended Book: Firebreak by Nicole Kornher-StaceTranscriptNayib Bukele is the 43rd president of El Salvador, and he's an unusual leader for the country in that he's young—born in 1981, so just 42 years old, as of the day I'm recording this—and in that he's incredibly popular, having maintained an approval rating of around 90% essentially since he stepped into the presidency back in 2019.He's also unusual, though, for his policies.He has, for instance, made the crypto-asset Bitcoin legal tender in the country, buying up a bunch of them using government funds, developing a crypto wallet for citizens to use for storing and paying for things with their own digital assets, and he even announced the construction of what he called a bitcoin city, which would be built at the base of a volcano and would use geothermal energy to mine bitcoin, which basically means powering a bunch of powerful computers using the energy produced by the geothermal activity in that region.That gamble hasn't turned out as planned—Bitcoin has experienced a resurgence in recent months as some governments have passed somewhat favorable policies, including the SEC's recent decision to allow the sale of Bitcoin ETFs to everyday investors in the US—but he bought into the asset when the prices were high and lost a lot of the government's money on the gamble; it was estimated in late 2023 that El Salvador has lost something like 37% of the money it invested in this way, equivalent to around $45 million; though that's based on external estimates as the country doesn't provide transparent figures on this matter, so it could be more or less than that.Bukele has also caused a stir with his freewheeling approach to politics, which some local and international organizations have labeled authoritarian, as he's shown no compunction about trampling democratic norms in order to get things he wants done, done, and that has included sending soldiers into the Legislative Assembly to pressure them into approving a loan necessary to militarize the National Civil Police force, he and his party booted the Supreme Court's justices and the country's attorney general in an act that has been described as an autogolpe, or self-coup, a move by which the president takes full authoritarian control of his country while in power, he instigated widespread arrests and allowed all sorts of police abuses during the COVID-19 lockdown in 2020, and he and his party have been accused of all manners of corruption—though the attorney general who was investigating twenty such instances of corruption was fired, as I mentioned, so there's no longer any watchdog in the country keeping tabs on him and his cronies as they seemingly grab what they can— and that's led to a shift in the country's corruption perception index ranking, dropping it to 116 out of 180 ranked countries in 2022, with a score of 33 out of 100, higher being better on that latter figure; for comparison, that puts it on equal footing, according to this index's metrics, with Algeria, Angola, Mongolia, the Philippines, Ukraine, and Zambia.All of which is to say, after taking control of El Salvador, Bukele has rapidly reinforced his position, grabbing more of the reins of power for himself and firing or disempowering anyone who might be in the position to challenge the increasingly absolute power he wields.Despite all this, as I mentioned, though, he is incredibly popular, and the primary reason for this popularity seems to be that he has aggressively gone after gangs, and that has apparently dropped the homicide rate in the country precipitously, from around 103 murders per 100,000 people in 2015 down to just 17.6 per 100,000 in 2021; and the government has said it fell still further, down to half that 2021 that number, in 2022.So while there's reason to question the accuracy of some of these numbers, because of the nature of the government providing them, the reality on the ground for many El Salvadorans is apparently different enough, in terms of safety and security and fear, that everyone more or less just tolerates the rapid rise of a 40-something dictator because he's a dictator who is killing or jailing the bad guys who, until he came into power, functioned as a second, even more corrupt and violent government-scale power in the country.This crackdown has come with its own downsides, if you care about human rights anyway, as there are abundant allegations that Bukele's government is using this war against the gangs as an excuse to scoop up political rivals and other folks who might challenge his position, as well—basically, some of the killed and imprisoned people aren't actually gang members, but because of the scale of the operation, this is overshadowed by all the actual gang members who are also arrested.This effort has rapidly earned El Salvador the distinction of having one of the largest prisons in the world, which holds about 40,000 prisoners; a necessary investment because, as of early January 2024, more than 75,000 people who have been accused of having gang connections have been arrested as part of this effort, and as of 2023, El Salvador had the highest incarceration rate in the world, arresting people three-times as fast as the also notoriously arrest-happy United States.What I'd like to talk about today is a recent series of happenings in Ecuador, and why some analysts are wondering if this might point at a spread of Bukele's approach to dealing with gangs—with all its associated pros and cons.—In November of 2023, Ecuadorians elected a 36-year-old president named Daniel Naboa who ran on a promise to reform the country's prisons, which have in recent years become vital to the country's gang-run drug trade.In 2016 the government of Colombia signed a peace deal with the FARC, a guerrilla group that was at fighting odds with the government for more than 50 years, and that led to a period of relative stability in Colombia, but led to the opposite in Ecuador, which until that moment had been fairly peaceful, most of the gang stuff happening in neighboring Colombia.But the FARC entering a state of peace and the consequent end of their de facto monopoly on cocaine trafficking from Colombia into Ecuador, where a lot of the drug is shipped around the world from Ecuadorian ports, caused a flare-up in violence as local, previously connected but relatively small groups, rose up to fill the power-vacuum.So Mexican and Colombian cartels and the Albanian mafia and other local gangs that were tied to various aspects of the FARC-led cocaine network in the region were all suddenly scrambling to grab what they could grab, and Ecuador's road infrastructure, its use of the US dollar as its official currency, and its lack of visa requirements for foreign nationals made it a highly desirable location for building out assets for producing and shipping drugs, especially cocaine, globally.The emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic and a drop in oil prices, oil being Ecuador's main legal export, amplified this rush, as a slew of now job-less and prospect-less young people were funneled into various gangs, these gangs being the only real economic opportunities in town, and over the past few years this has created a state of near-constant inter-gang warfare, which in turn sparked a series of prison massacres in 2020 carried out by competing gangs.In the wake of those massacres, gangs more or less took over about a fourth of the country's prisons, using them as bases of operation for their drug- and inter-gang-warfare related efforts.The country's president from 2007 through 2017 did a pretty good job of keeping gang activity in Ecuador to a minimum by basically allowing gangs to become cultural institutions and leaving them alone, so long as they stopped with all the violence. But this hands-off policy was part of why the government was unprepared when things went sideways beginning in 2016 and even more so in 2020.Ecuador's social safety net fell apart in the wake of that peaceful coexistence period, as well, and organized crime was able to accumulate more wealth and influence than the government in many regards, because of how lucrative the drug trade was becoming, which allowed it to fill in some of the blanks left by those diminished safety nets and the government's new austerity policies.This also allowed them to insinuate themselves throughout the government, grabbing control of some of the country's mega prisons, but also a whole lot of military-grade weaponry and people in positions of power throughout the justice system.Entire regional governments have been captured by local gang leaders, a whole generation of youths has been incorporated into their ranks, and though the previous president, before Naboa, seemed to understand the growing issue with gangs in the country, he was unable to do much to fight them and his meager efforts in that direction were defeated before they could be implemented: possibly, allegedly at least, because some members of his inner-circle were co-opted by the Albanian mafia and other local gangs.So Naboa coming into power was both a big deal and not a big deal: big in that he seems keen to do something about these gangs and their violence from the get-go, but less big in that other politicians have tried and failed to do the same, and there's a good chance his efforts will fail just as completely as those that came before.Then, in the wake of Naboa's formal ascension into office, during which he reiterated his vow to respond to the threat of these gangs with violence is necessary, and following several months of political assassinations, the blowing up of bridges and the killing and kidnapping of prison guards and police officers, on January 7, 2024 a drug lord nicknamed Fito who leads the Los Choneros gang escaped from prison, ostensibly because of Naboa's intended prison reforms, and the fact that until this point he'd been sort of running his gang from the prison where he was technically detained.A series of riots shook-up prisons across the country, a bunch of guards were taken hostage and a bunch of other inmates escaped, as well. Some more bombs went off, too, creating a general sense of carnage across Ecuador.President Naboa announced that the country was now in a state of internal armed conflict, sent the military into the streets and the prisons to search for Fito and to reestablish order, and 22 gangs were officially classified as terrorist organizations.A few days later, on January 9, a group of masked, gun-wielding men attacked a local TV station and broadcast, live, their taking the station staff hostage, telling viewers that they were doing so because the government was trying to mess with the mafias.The government announced they arrested 13 suspects in that TV station attack, and that they freed those and other hostages that were taken across the country, but the big outcome of that attack and that general carnage that surrounded it is that Naboa announced a state of emergency and a declaration of war on the gangs operating in the country.This state of emergency is scheduled to last for 60 days, and grants the government additional, temporary powers meant to help them combat heavily armed and well-connected gangs.But there's some concern that this temporary suspension of some people's rights and the ability to go hard and brutal against these gangs, bringing the full force of the country's police and military to bear against them, might end up being less of a temporary thing and more of an initial justification for a new status quo in which the government wields more, and more absolute power so they can do difficult things, but at the expense of human rights in the country.And folks worry about this because something similar was done, and seems to have worked really well, by some measures at least, in El Salvador.Officials from across the political spectrum, far-left to far-right and everything in between, from Guatemala, Honduras, Costa Rica, Colombia, Peru, and Chile have publicly expressed admiration for the model that's working, for some value of "working," in El Salvador, at times suggesting or outright saying they would like or intend to replicate the so-called "Bukele Plan" in their own countries.The sense here, amongst some analysts who know the region and the players well, is that the popularity Bukele enjoys is desirable for politicians, and so far it's the only proven way to deal with gangs that are this powerful: you have to grab all the power, do away with human rights, and basically just go completely sociopathic against them, giving everyone the sense that the government is the biggest and most violent beast around, not the gangs, and anyone who steps out against the government will be killed or imprisoned for doing so.This sort of approach, of course, often leads to what's sometimes euphemistically called "democratic backsliding," and in this case what's sometimes called "hustle-bro populism" serves as a foot in the door toward outright dictatorial, if very popular rule.And there's no shortage of concern from the international community, in particular, but also political opposition within these countries, that the presence of strongman leaders, no matter how popular they are, will degrade the rule of law and democratic norms in these countries, which in turn often leads to corruption, more violence—justified by gesturing at the common enemy of the people, in this case, at this moment, the gangs—and that then goes on to justify all sorts of other abuses, as well.The big issue here, though, is that most of the other attempts to control this gang problem in South and Central America—which in this part of the world is fueled by the drug trade, and thus, secondarily, by wealthier countries—those attempts haven't worked. And this approach, though flawed in many ways, does seem to work.And people living in El Salvador, thus far at least, seem to be willing to suffer those negative consequences if it will make their day to day lives less dangerous and violence-prone.What we're seeing in this relative success of what we might think of as an illiberal democratic model in Central America, then, isn't the traditional issue of a populism-powered, corrupt politician grabbing control, because not having a powerful and popular dictator who's willing to use violence in this way in control would seem to be, in some ways at least, worse.And that would seem to represent a failure of the many alternatives that have been tried and proposed, and the entities—including the world's many liberal democracies—that continue to support them.There's a chance these not-uncommon variables and outcomes spark a wave of Bukele lookalikes through Latin America, then, though it's also possible that Bukele's own antics will catch up with him, and he, like many authoritarians throughout history, will crumble under his own weight and ambition before his movement can expand and really take off.It may also be that this model isn't replicable, is an El Salvador-specific thing, or that politicians like Naboa will figure out a way to make use the concept on a temporary basis, serving as a more traditional version of the dictator, taking on more power in order to put the whammy on the gangs, but then beneficently stepping aside, handing that power back in order to reassert the primacy of democracy; it's not a common outcome, but it's possible.There's no way to know which way things will go yet, but we'll probably have a better sense in a few mont…

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Subsidence Jan 09, 2024

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This week we talk about the raising of Chicago, Jakarta, and sea level rise.We also discuss groundwater, flooding, and insurance.Recommended Book: Once Upon a Tome by Oliver DarkshireTranscriptIn the mid-19th century, the city of Chicago, its many sidewalks and buildings and other infrastructure, were hoisted using jackscrews, which are kind of like heavy-duty versions of the jacks you might use to lift your car to replace a tire.The impetus for this undertaking, which was substantial and paid for with a combination of city and private funds, was Chicago's persistent drainage issues: the city was located at about the same altitude as neighboring Lake Michigan, and the ground upon which it was constructed was consequently pretty swampy to begin with, but became even more so as all those sidewalks and buildings and other human-made environmental objects were installed, putting downward pressure on that swampy soil, which led to widespread and persistent pools of standing water throughout the city.All this standing water led to the spread of diseases like dysentery and typhoid fever—the sorts of issues that tend to arise when there's opportunity for pathogenic beasties to hang out and spread and come into contact with drinking water sources, not to mention essentially every surface in a city, and in 1854 there was an outbreak of cholera—which is also caused by bacteria getting into peoples' bodies, usually from infected water sources—that killed about 6% of Chicago's total population.So this was an area that was already prone to what's called subsidence—the sinking of land that can be both natural and sparked or amplified by human activity in various ways—and Chicago's development into a city sped up that process, causing it to sink even further, quite rapidly, and that led to a collection of mostly but not exclusively water-related issues, which at this moment in history, the mid-19th century, meant a lot of disease-spread due to insufficient water sanitation efforts and infrastructure, and a very hit-or-miss understanding of the mechanisms of the diseases that were carried by that insufficiently treated water.The first brick building to be hoisted in this way was elevated in January of 1858 and required about 200 jackscrews to lift it six feet and 2 inches higher than its previous altitude, and that kicked-off a period of remarkably rapid and successful elevations throughout the city, including all sorts of huge, heavy, at times quite wide and cumbersome buildings of all heights and material composition, installing elements of the city's new sewage systems around the existing buildings, then covering all that up with soil, pouring or reinstalling roads and sidewalks atop that soil at the new height, and then raising all the buildings, filling the space beneath them with soil as they were slowly cranked up to that new baseline.This wasn't a straightforward effort, and there were several false-starts, initial problems that had to be solved, and quite a few pieces of the old city that either couldn't be elevated, and thus had to be buried and rebuilt, or that were moved to new locations, placed on rollers and shifted to areas, mostly on the outskirts of the city, which kept them aloft without having to raise them using the jackscrew method.Interestingly, some of the elevated buildings, like the Tremont House hotel, continued to function even as they were raised; guests continued to frequent the hotel, and some of them apparently didn't even realize it was in the process of being elevated while they were staying there.This process was largely completed in the 1960s, and much of the city, as it existed at the time, was raised by 4 and 14 feet—and that provided space for the new sewage system that would help with all those water and water-borne illness issues, while also establishing a new baseline altitude for future developments, which would be able to use that same sewer system while also being lifted up high enough that flooding and similar water-adjacent, low-lying land issues wouldn't be a problem most of the time.What I'd like to talk about today is the issue of subsidence in other cities around the world, today, and some of the solutions we're seeing deployed to address it.—The world is packed with sinking cities: a term typically applied to urban centers that are rapidly losing elevation, sinking into the ground due to a combination of natural and human instigated variables.Chicago is a sinking city, as though all that lifting back in the 19th century helped it with both immediate and potential future, sinking-related problems, the Chicago metro area is still primarily built atop clay which contracts as it's heated.This heat-related deformation hasn't always been much of an issue, but as more buildings have been erected and as the shift in our global climate has led to on-average higher temperatures for more of the year, the ground beneath Chicago, and quite a few other cities worldwide, has been slowly but measurably deforming, expanding and contracting more rapidly and dramatically due to temperature swings, which in turn has caused building foundations to shift and the surface, the ground upon which residents walk and build and live, to sink downward, which causes damage to those building foundations and to infrastructure that doesn't flex to accomodate this movement past a certain point, like roads, bridges, power lines, and basically everything else that makes up a city.The majority of sinking cities, those at the top of the list in terms of ground deformation and elevation loss, anyway, are located on coasts, and because about 2.15 billion people live in near-coastal zones, and around 898 million live within the most directly impacted, low-elevation coastal zones around the world—both of those numbers steadily rising as more people move closer to the world's on-average wealthier and more opportunity-rich coastal areas—this is a significant and growing issue because the costs and dangers associated with such areas are also increasing, in part because larger populations tend to amplify the same.A study published in 2022 that looked at the subsidence rate in 99 coastal cities from 2015 to 2020, intending to get a more accurate sense of just how rapidly they're sinking, found that while sinkage is occurring most rapidly across Asia, it's also happening on all the other inhabited continents—all of them except non-city-having Antarctica—and while the latent properties of these areas are partly to blame, human activity, especially the extraction of groundwater, is often a primary culprit causing these cities to sink.Even more alarming, in some ways, is that while experts are already alarmed about rising sea levels, as ice caps and glaciers and other stores of water melt due to higher average temperatures and more frequent and dramatic heat waves, the rate of subsidence in most of these sinking cities is higher than the rate of sea level rise.In other words, sea level rise is already causing insurance companies to leave some coastal areas and government coffers to run dry as they attempt to shore-up regions that are being lost to global oceans, but it would seem that many cities that are subsiding in this way are sinking faster than the water around them is rising—so the two opposite movements in parallel are amplifying those sea-level-rise-associated issues, but the issue of subsidence, which hasn't been as big a focus in mainstream conversation thus far, would seem to be the larger issue in many cases, and not terribly well addressed in most cities where it's an issue.Important to note is that just as subsidence isn't a single cause problem, since it's the consequence of both natural features and human activity, it's also not a single consequence issue: just as Chicago suffered from both flooding-related and disease-related problems tied to subsidence, so too do these other sinking cities suffer a portfolio of associated ailments.Probably the most immediate concern for most sinking cities, today, is similar to that of sea level rise.While it may be common to imagine that rising sea levels will someday leave threatened cities underwater 100% of the time like a modern Atlantis, the real issue, today, is that as the ocean gets higher, closer to the level of coastal land, it takes smaller and smaller perturbations in that water for it to surge inland, covering more and more territory.So buildings and roads that previously flooded once every ten years will flood every year, those that were previously inconvenienced by minor floods will be severely, perhaps permanently damaged by deeper and more intense floods that stick around longer, and areas further inland that were previously protected from surging ocean waters will start to flood, despite never having experienced flooding previously, and thus not being built to standards that would allow them to survive even relatively minor flooding.Again, the combination of sea level rise and subsidence is basically doubling the impact of this sort of issue, causing more intense and regular flooding in these regions earlier than was previously anticipated, and thus messing with or totally screwing over plans made by city governance to handle such problems.I mentioned earlier that the consumption of groundwater is often a component of this problem, and the general idea is that when modern humans move into a new region, they typically drill wells and start pumping water from deep underground, moving that underground water above ground for all sorts of uses, from drinking to filling our toilets to watering our lawns to manufacturing-related applications.Moving all that water from underground to aboveground is similar, in terms of consequences, to moving a bunch of rock or soil from underground to aboveground: it causes the remaining ground to sink, because there's less stuff down there to hold everything on the surface up at its existing level.Some previously sinking cities, like Tokyo, have been able to largely halt their subsidence by reducing the pumping of groundwater, Tokyo officials having implemented regulations to address the issue in the early 1960s, which brought their sinking issues to an end about a decade later.Shanghai did something similar, but instead of halting all groundwater pumping, they required that these underground supplies of water be refilled after extraction, so the amount of water down there stays roughly equal, even if some is pumped for various uses sometimes—another way to accomplish essentially the same end, and a solution that seems to have not quite halted, but significantly slowed sinkage in Shanghai in the years since that policy was implemented.Houston, in the US, also introduced groundwater remediation efforts in the 1970s, which seemed to have helped slow its sinkage, as did the Silicon Valley area in the 1960s.The fastest-sinking cities in the world, today, according to that new study, and other recent research into the same, are Tianjin, Semarang, and Jakarta, the first of which is located in China, and the latter two of which are located in Indonesia.These three cities are sinking almost 15-times faster than global mean sea levels are rising, and this is a big part of why the Indonesian government decided to move its capital from Jakarta to a new city the government is building on the island of Borneo.It's estimated that one-third of Jakarta could be completely submerged essentially 100% of the time by 2050, and there are about 10.5 million people living in Jakarta, so that means a lot of people whose homes and businesses and neighborhoods are prone to flood regularly, today, may be gone completely, lost to the ocean, by mid-century—which by any measure is a highly destabilizing sequence of events, and will almost certainly lead to a large number of lost lives and a huge sum of lost wealth, not to mention the secondary issues that may arise as all those people moving out of these no longer habitable areas move elsewhere, stressing the systems in those new areas, including but not limited to the need for more water, which may need to be pumped from underground, causing more urban centers to sink, or to sink faster.Jakarta is not alone in facing this heightened risk: there are many other big population centers around the world that are prone to similar outcomes, including but not limited to Chittagong and Dhaka in Bangladesh, Manila in the Philippines, Karachi in Pakistan, Kolkata and Mumbai in India, Guangzhou in China, Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam, Bangkok in Thailand, Miami and New York City and New Orleans in the US, and Mexico City in Mexico, alongside many, many other cities that are built on naturally subsidence-prone land, are draining that land's groundwater or oil or other underground resources, are building heavy infrastructure on the ground which causes it to settle and sink, and in some cases are built atop or near shifting tectonic plates that rumble continuously enough that the sediment is pretty much always naturally compacting, the ground always deforming just a little bit, and all that adds up over time, causing the same or similar issues.The most immediate consequences we're seeing in many of these areas is that insurance companies are leaving because it's no longer a winning bet to be operating in increasingly disaster prone regions, and that is likely to spread to other industries that no longer want to invest in assets that may be underwater part time or all of the time before they're expected to recoup their investment cost.People will either leave these areas, fleeing for more secure ground, or they'll stay, putting their lives and their wealth of various kinds at risk as they do so.Poorer people, so far at least, have tended to bear a disproportionate amount of the burden associated with these sorts of shifts, and resultantly the human and economic costs associated with impoverished populations are tending to increase, as is the number of impoverished people in afflicted areas, because of that aforementioned risk to wealth, an accompanying lack of security, and the increasingly difficult time people and businesses are having insuring their assets in these areas.There are efforts to mitigate subsidence underway in some of these regions, including the use of advanced tools like LIDAR and satellite imagery to pinpoint the primary regional causes of sinkage, and the passing of policies, like the groundwater regulations introduced in several sinking cities in the 20th century, that then help halt or slow their city's subsidence rate.Many cities are reorienting around an adaptation strategy, too, in part because sea walls and similar solutions don't work as well when it's not just sea level rise you have to worry about, and in part because the costs are more moderate than completely revamping a city's infrastructure to account for all that sinking.In most cases this means deploying a series of systemic changes alongside relatively light-touch infrastructural ones, so increasing the ground's capacity to sponge-up water, rerouting, replacing, or removing water-based infrastructure that can reduce a city's capacity to absorb rainfall, planting trees and similar water-breaks in flood-prone coastal areas, introducing early warning systems and evacuation plans in case of severe flooding, and overall attempting to allow flood waters to roll through with the minimum amount of damage, rather than struggling, and failing, to keep it out entirely.We're in the early days of this sort of adaption and mitigation evolution, though, and a lot of what we're trying now likely won't work as well as we had hoped—not everywhere it's tried, at least—and other solutions will almost certainly emerge in the coming years tha…

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