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This week we talk about cacao, plantations, and bean-to-bar chocolate.We also discuss black pod disease, swollen shoot virus, and seed pod currency.Recommended Book: The City & The City by China MiévilleTranscriptThe cocoa bean, also called "cacao," is a seed derived from the cocoa tree, which is native to the Amazon Rainforest in South America.More than 5,000 years ago, near present day Ecuador, the Mayo-Chinchipe culture domesticated and cultivated this tree, which then found its way north into Mesoamerica—so parts of Central America, and modern day Mexico—and that's where we actually thought it came from until a handful of years ago, when new research pushed the initial domestication date back by about 1,500 years, tracking its path down into Ecuador by identifying cocoa residue on pottery from that time period down in that region.But way back then, it's thought that the pulp of this seed was used primarily to create an alcoholic beverage that was fermented to about the same alcohol percentage as a consumer-grade, modern day beer—just over 5%—and because of that utility in making this popular beverage, it was used as a currency in some parts of South and Central America.It's worth noting, too, that this tree and its seed would have originally been called kakawa, which was then turned into an Aztec derivative word much later, cacauatl, which then became cacao, when the Spanish colonized the region, and cacao then became cocoa when introduced to English-speaking parts of the world—and that variation of the word took over in the age of post-WWII globalization, due in large part to the popularization of chocolate products from English-speaking countries like the US and the UK, cacao only recently being reintroduced on that scale to differentiate more expensive cocoa products from those that have become mainstream.Also worth noting is that in addition to being used to produce a popular alcoholic beverage way back in the day, the cocoa bean was also turned into a kind of frothy spiced drink by Aztec royalty and other higher-ups in this part of the world, and that drink was enjoyed by high-born members of society for several thousand years, the beverage used in all sorts of rituals.And to make it, cocoa was whipped together with vanilla and other spices and sweeteners to produce something akin to a sort of hot chocolate the modern person would recognize, though leaning a lot more into those spices than most modern chocolates, rather than sugars and fats.This wasn't a widely available thing in most areas, and it probably wasn't the main end-product for most cocoa beans for most of history, as that alcoholic drink and its many derivatives were a lot more broadly available and widely disseminated.That said, different groups, across this region and across time, including the Maya and the Olmecs, had their own variations of this hot cocoa-like drink, and there's even an Aztec story that Quetzalcoatl was outcast by the other gods in their pantheon for sharing chocolate with humans, and some regional experts have speculated that the ritual of extracting the hearts from human sacrifices in the Aztec empire might be connected to the process of extracting the cocoa pulp from the cocoa bean seed pod when producing this beverage; though that's pretty speculative.The Aztecs came later than a lot of the other cultures in this region that partook in chocolate-related rituals and made cocoa-related goods, so that's likely part of why their rituals surrounding this drink were more elaborate than those of their neighbors, contemporary and forebear, but it's likely that the nature of the bean itself, which only grows in a finite region, about 20 degrees north and south of the equator, also had something to do with it.Because of that limited range, the Aztecs couldn't grow cocoa in their territory, and that meant it was always a luxury import for them, which meant—like many luxuries, even today—only the richest members of society could afford it, and that helped them differentiate themselves from the chocolate-less plebeians.This changed somewhat following the arrival of the Europeans in the Americas, when the Spaniards, who were maybe originally introduced to the drink by Montezuma or one of his underlings, brought the drink back home with them, eventually creating a new market for producers, though Europeans were not initially a fan of it, and mostly seemed to indulge because it seemed exotic, but early on they realized that because this bean already served as a unit of currency in many of the areas they were exploring and exploiting, it allowed them to deal with locals in a familiar way: this many cocoa beans for one thing, this many for another—it made negotiations and payment a lot cleaner and clearer, and cocoa beans could be easily transported for trade while also being useful, in a pinch, as a stable source of food while in transit, which compared favorably to other food goods they were bringing back home from their explorations and invasions, like bananas.What I'd like to talk about today is the modern chocolate market, and a dramatic price increase in cocoa beans that's raising eyebrows and concerns around the world.—The modern chocolate market has expanded in the years since Montezuma and the Spanish conquistadors to cover the whole of the globe, with products based on the cocoa bean on shelves in every country—even shut-ins like North Korea.In 2022, the global chocolate industry was worth something like $116 billion, which is more than double the $50 billion or so it was worth in 2009, and analysts expect this market's compound annual growth rate, which tallies the increase in the industry's return on investment each year, to remain steady at around 3.4%, which is solid, and predicated on the increase in the dark chocolate market, especially amongst health-conscious consumers, and the burgeoning plant-based and vegan chocolate markets, which further reinforce the perception of some chocolate as being a luxurious and healthful indulgence.Such luxury upbranding is key to those CAGR assumptions, as positioning some of these products as more expensive, but better versions of what's long been available allows chocolate companies to sell relatively less product for relatively higher prices, and that means expanding their customer base while also increasing their profit-margins.All of which would be vital for this sort of industry even during normal times, but it's even more important when things are going sideways with an industry's access to raw materials, which seems to be what's happening in the world of chocolate.In the 20th century, especially the late-20th century, the brands that were selling the most chocolate to the most people, globally, started gobbling up their competition. This period of acquisition and consolidation left us with about a dozen big chocolate manufacturers, globally, including names you've almost certainly heard of, like Cadbury, which is the biggest such company in the world, but also Hershey, Mars, Neuhaus, Ferrero, and Milka.Some of these companies, like Nestlé, are what's called bean-to-bar chocolate manufacturers, but most of the titans in this space melt chocolate from other manufacturers into their end-products, only using the bean-to-bar model for a few high-end offerings.But there are a slew of bean-to-bar companies still in operation, today, they just tend to be a lot smaller, because this model requires that they process their own cocoa beans in-house, rather than outsourcing, which tends to be required to achieve the scale that companies like Hershey and Mars have reached; it's a lot more time-intensive and expensive to do it this way.That said, the expansion of the chocolate market into a multi-billion, then more than $100 billion global industry necessitated expanding the footprint of its base-level production beyond its traditional South and Central American origins.Several other locations within that 20 degrees north and south of the equator spectrum have thus seen cocoa trees introduced, but the biggest producer of cocoa, today, is Côte d'Ivoire, the Ivory Coast, in Western Africa, where about 45% of the world's cocoa was cultivated, as of 2022, which amounted to around 2.2 million tonnes that year, alone.Neighboring Ghana comes in second, producing about half as much as Ivory Coast, with about 1.1 million tonnes produced that same year, and Indonesia is a distant third, producing about 667,000 tonnes in 2022.Combined with Ivory Coast's output, Ghana's cocoa bean industry, plus the smaller outputs of nearby Nigeria and Cameroon, account for about 70% of all the cocoa produced anywhere in the world.Ecuador, where the cocoa tree was seemingly first domesticated, is now all the way down in fourth place, producing about 337,000 tonnes of the bean for export in 2022.Because of the nature of how cocoa beans are harvested, and where, chocolate companies have huge sway over local politics and economics, and the folks doing the harvesting have historically not been treated terribly well, and in some cases their ranks have been filled with children.In some such areas, people are trafficked or enslaved and put to work harvesting cocoa beans, and even those who are there of their own behest are paid very little by international standards, not even a living wage (based on the cost of things like shelter and food in their regions), their incomes artificially capped by an agreement with the cocoa bean-buying industry, and though Fair Trade certification has become more common for many chocolate companies, demonstrating their commitment to paying better wages, and in turn allowing the folks producing the raw materials for their chocolates to actually be able to afford to buy chocolate products, which is not the case for those working in non-Fair Trade conditions, that's still not the norm, and in some areas the conditions faced by workers are pretty bleak, many of them children under the age of 15, many of them forced to work for various reasons, and all of them making just enough money to survive, but nothing beyond that, and in some cases, barely that.Most of these beans, the ones that end up in chocolate produced by those bigwig entities that dominate the global chocolate trade, are mixed together with beans from other locations on commodity markets, these companies buying them by the metric ton, similar to other food commodities that are traded in this way, like soybeans, milk, and palm oil.Distinct from most other commodities right now, though, is the increase in price cocoa beans are seeing on these markets.In 2022, the average price for a metric tonne of cocoa beans was somewhere between $2,200 and $2,500.That's of a kind with the typical pricing for the past decade or so, and though there was a massive spike in 1977, which was only about $5,700 per tonne in unconverted money, but that's about $28,000 per tonne if we account for inflation—so that was a pretty bad year for chocolate lovers and companies—but other than that and a few other aberrations through the decades, cocoa beans have been a pretty stable commodity, at least compared to other commodities that are thus traded.In February of 2024, though, cocoa bean prices shot up from those $2,500-ish per tonne prices all the way to around $6,000 per tonne, and then in March cocoa futures hit a record (unconverted for inflation) price of about $10,000 per tonne, which is a staggering leap of something like 4 to 5 times the usual cost.This price jump is being attributed to a confluence of variables, most of them contributing to a series of poor harvests in Ghana and the Ivory Coast, which again, together, account for most of the world's cocoa bean output.The El Niño phenomenon that's been messing with the global water cycle and increasing average global temperatures since July of 2023 is partly the blame here, as are the creeping effects of climate change, which have, in practice, moved the ideal growing areas for all sorts of plants, because of a tweak to the average global temperature knobs that have nudged things higher in most parts of the world, while also making weather patterns more irregular, compared to what we've become used to.Those climate nudges have also allowed diseases to spread faster and to new regions, including those that impact plants.Extreme and unusual rainfall in Western Africa sparked outbreaks of black pod disease, which usually hits after wet season, and all that rain was followed by a period of extreme dryness and drought, which stoked the spread of swollen shoot virus, which reduces output by up to 25% in the first year of infection, up to 50% in the second, and which ultimately kills its hosts, the cocoa trees, and once it spreads to a plantation, the whole plantation, all the trees, usually have to be uprooted and burned, new trees planted in their stead, before things can get up and running again—all of which takes a lot of time and resources.Cocoa manufacturers have been underinvesting in their plantations and smaller cocoa producers for years; so it's not just their workers that they're under-investing in, it's the infrastructure surrounding those workers, which is often decrepit and unsafe, and which has left them prone to these newly aggressive diseases and unusual climate happenings.And a lot of the cocoa produced in these top-producing countries are run by small-holders, not by large-scale plantations. And because these small-holders are often almost as impoverished as the people working on the plantations, they don't have the money to invest in treating disease or uprooting and replacing all their trees, and that's led to a surge in illegal mining operations in cocoa growing areas, because illegal miners come in and say they'll pay the owners of the land where they want to dig a reliable, if still small income, and those landowners don't really have a choice—cocoa doesn't provide them enough money to do more than sustain themselves, so they take what they can get, and every time this happens, that's less prime cocoa-growing land that's being used to grow cocoa.Because of all this, the mid-season crop coming out of Ivory Coast, the biggest producer in the world, is expected to be about a third lower than usual this year, and Ghana's production is expected to hit a 22-year low; hence, those dramatically hiked prices, which have been further inflamed by market maneuvers meant to protect investors from irregularities, but which have the practical effect of raising prices in the short-term, creating more volatility, not less.This price-surge and negative overall outlook for the industry is causing a fair bit of concern for the global chocolate market, which has some stockpiled supply of beans, but which is struggling to account for this increase in overall cost, and is thus attempting to prepare their customers for price hikes and fresh instances of shrinkflation: which basically means selling the same product for the same price, but with less of the product in the package; so maybe a candy bar selling for the same price as before, but the bar is 2/3 its former size.This has been a big discussion topic recently in part because of the recent Easter holiday, which is a big day for chocolate sales in many parts of the Western world in particular, so this situation is topical news, but also because it's representative of what's happening in other commodity and non-commodity markets, as well, as a result of many of the same factors.The global supply of coffee beans has been shrinking since 2021, labor and other systemic issues contributing to that, but the climate also changing where coffee grows best, and thus making life hard on the folks who currently grow most of it, in what were previously the optimal regions for doing so, but which aren't any longer, and may no longer be capable of growing these beans at all in a few decades, the way things are going.Olive oil is likewise seeing record-high prices in 2024, the price of extra virgin olive oil up 70% from a year previous, and 260% from two years ago, due to widespread drought across the Mediterranean, where most olives are grown, and because of a bacteria that's infecting olive trees more enthusiastically than ever before because of all that heat and drought.The banana industry is also raising alarms, too, as the change in global temperatures and the water cycle are combining with a collection of increasingly aggressive diseases and infections that are impacting banana growing regions in Australia, Asia, Africa, and South America, necessitating a clean-sweep approach similar to those used to get a cocoa bean plantation ready to grow, again, post-infection, requiring a lot of additional investment and leading to a lot of waste and diminished expectations.Most of these industries have enough of a backlog and stockpile to keep prices on shelves constant for a while after this sort of hit, but for all of these industries, prices are expected to go up, possibly permanently, because of this seeming new reality, and because of the nature of the entities operating in these spaces, and the systems they've deployed to keep their goods flowing to the entities that turn them into products that end up in stores around the world.So while chocolate is the first to really hit the public consciousness in terms of the companies that own this space trying to prepare their customer base for what's about to happen by making it known that their core prices have grown shockingly high, it's likely we'll continue to see this sort of base-level inflationary impact on all sorts of goods in the coming years, unless something fundamental changes about the variables impacting supply, or the business model they use to sustain their industries.Show Noteshttps://finance.yahoo.com/news/chocolate-market-size-worth-usd-191300029.htmlhttps://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/mar/29/easter-eggs-chocolate-cacao-harvests-cocoa-prices-aoehttps://www.cnbc.com/2024/03/26/cocoa-prices-are-soaring-to-record-levels-what-it-means-for-consumers.htmlhttps://archive.ph/YnZH7https://apnews.com/article/easter-chocolate-africa-farmers-cocoa-ghana-4a4d58a4e6076c8d46258c1b4dc414c4https://archive.ph/SbWVFhttps://archive.ph/wPhkkhttps://www.visualcapitalist.com/worlds-top-cocoa-producing-countries/https://www.statista.com/statistics/263855/cocoa-bean-production-worldwide-by-region/https://www.confectioneryproduction.com/news/47651/cocoa-sector-reaches-crisis-point-as-crop-prices-hit-10000-a-tonne/https://ycharts.com/indicators/cocoa_bean_pricehttps://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2024/3/30/chocolate-prices-to-keep-rising-as-west-africas-cocoa-crisis-deepenshttps://investorplace.com/2024/03/olive-oil-coffee-and-cocoa-prices-oh-my-3-grocery-store-items-to-watch/https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-68534309https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2024/mar/analysis-cocoa-beans-short-supply-what-means-farmers-businesses-chocolate-lovershttps://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20231220-illegal-mining-smuggling-threaten-ghana-s-cocoa-industryhttps://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022316622143798?via%3Dihubhttps://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/10/181029130945.htmhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chocolatehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocoa_bean This is a public episode. 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This week we talk about the Rwandan genocide, the First and Second Congo Wars, and M23.We also discuss civil wars, proxy conflicts, and resource curses.Recommended Book: Everyday Utopia by Kristen R. GhodseeTranscriptThe Democratic Republic of the Congo, or DRC, was previously known as Zaïre, a name derived from a Portuguese mistranscription of the regional word for "river."It wore that monicker from 1971 until 1997, and this region had a rich history of redesignations before that, having been owned by various local kingdoms, then having been colonized by Europeans, sold to the King of Belgium in 1885, who owned it personally, not as a part of Belgium, which was unusual, until 1908, renaming it for that period the Congo Free State, which was kind of a branding exercise to convince all the Europeans who held territory thereabouts that he was doing philanthropic work, though while he did go to war with local and Arab slavers in the region, he also caused an estimated millions of deaths due to all that conflict, due to starvation and disease and punishments levied against people who failed to produce sufficient volumes of rubber from plantations he built in the region.So all that effort and rebranding also almost bankrupted him, the King of Belgium, because of the difficulties operating in this area, even when you step into it with vast wealth, overwhelming technological and military advantages, and the full backing of a powerful, if distant, nation.After the King's deadly little adventure, the region he held was ceded to the nation of Belgium as a colony, which renamed it the Belgium Congo, and it eventually gained independence from Belgium, alongside many other European colonies around the world, post-WWII, in mid-1960.Almost immediately there was conflict, a bunch of secessionist movements turning into civil wars, and those civil wars were amplified by the meddling of the United States and the Soviet Union, which supported different sides, funding and arming them as they tended to do in proxy conflicts around the world during this portion of the Cold War.This period, which lasted for about 5 years after independence, became known as the Congo Crisis, because government leaders kept being assassinated, different groups kept rising up, being armed, killing off other groups, and then settling in to keep the government from unifying or operating with any sense of security or normalcy.Eventually a man named Mobutu Sese Seko, usually just called Mobutu, launched a real deal coup that succeeded, and he imposed a hardcore military dictatorship on the country—his second coup, actually, but the previous one didn't grant him power, so he tried again a few years later, in 1965, and that one worked—and though he claimed, as many coup-launching military dictators do, that he would stabilize things over the next five years, restoring democracy to the country in the process, that never happened, though claiming he would did earn him the support of the US and other Western governments for the duration, even as he wiped out any government structure that could oppose him, including the position of Prime Minister in 1966, and the institution of Parliament in 1967.In 1971, as I mentioned, he renamed the country Zaïre, nationalized all remaining foreign owned assets in the country, and it took another war, which is now called the First Congo War, to finally unseat him. And this conflict, which began in late-1996, spilled over into neighboring countries, including Sudan and Uganda, and a slew of other nations were involved, including but not limited to Chad, the Central African Republic, Rwanda, Burundi, Angola, Eritrea, South Africa, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Ethiopia, and Tanzania, alongside foreign assistance granted to various sides by France, China, Israel, and covertly, the United States.The conflict kicked off when Rwanda invaded Zaïre, more neighboring states joined in, all of them intending to take out a bunch of rebel groups that the Mobutu government was no longer keeping in line: Mobutu himself having long since fallen ill, and thus lacking the control he once had, but still profiting mightily from outside influences that kept him as a friendly toehold in the region.So these other nations sent military forces into Zaïre to handle these groups, which were causing untold troubles throughout the region, and the long and short of this conflict is that it only lasted a few months, from October 1996 to May 1997, but the destruction and carnage was vast, everyone on both sides partnering up to take out rebels, or in the case of those rebels, to join up against these government militaries, and all of them using the opportunity to also engage in violence against ethnic enemies with whom they had long-simmering beefs.This led to the collapse of Mobutu's government, the country was renamed the Democratic Republic of the Congo when a new government was installed, but very little changed in terms of the reality of how that government functioned, so all the same variables were still in place a year later, in 1998, when what's now called the Second Congo War kicked off, informed by basically the same problems but bringing even more African governments into the fighting, many of them pulled into things by alliances they had with involved neighbors.And just as before, a variety of groups who felt aggrieved by other groups throughout the region used this conflict as an excuse to slaughter and destroy people and towns they didn't like, including what's been called a genocide of a group of Pygmy people who lived in the area, around 70,000 of them killed in the waning days of the war.In mid-2003, a peace agreement was signed, most of the warring factions that had fought in Congolese territory were convinced to leave, and it was estimated that up to 5.4 million people had died during the conflict.What I'd like to talk about today is what's happening in the DRC, now, at a moment of heightening tensions throughout the region, and in the DRC in particular, amidst warnings from experts that another regional conflict might be brewing.—A transition government was set up in the DRC in 2003, following the official end of that Second Congo war, and this government, though somewhat weak and absolutely imperfect in many ways, did manage to get the country to the point, three years later, in 2006, that it could hold an actual multi-party election; the country's first ever, which is no small thing.Unfortunately, a dispute related to the election results led to violence between supporters of the two primary candidates, so a second election was held—and that one ended relatively peacefully and a new president, Joseph Kabila, was sworn in.Kabila was reelected in 2011, then in 2018 he said he wouldn't be running again, which helped bring about the country's first peaceful transition of power when the next president, from the opposing party, stepped into office.During his tenure in office, though, Kabila's DRC was at near-constant war with rebel groups that semi-regularly managed to capture territory, and which were often supported by neighboring countries, alongside smaller groups, so-called Mai-Mai militias, that were established in mostly rural areas to protect residents from roaming gangs and other militias, and which sometimes decided to take other people's stuff or territory, even facing off with government forces from time to time.Violence between ethnic groups has also continued to be a problem, including the use of sexual violence and wholesale attempted genocide, which has been difficult to stop because of the depth of some of the issues these groups have with each other, and in some cases the difficulty the government has just getting to the places where these conflicts are occurring, infrastructure in some parts of the country being not great, where it exists at all.That 2018 election, where power was given away by one president to another, peacefully, for the first time, was notable in that regard, but it was also a milestone in it marked the beginning of widespread anti-election conspiracy theories, in that case the Catholic Church saying that the official results were bunk, and other irregularities, like a delay of the vote in areas experiencing Ebola outbreaks, those areas in many cases filled with opposition voters, added to suspicions.The most recent election, at the tail-end of 2023, was even more awash with such concerns, the 2018 winner, President Tshisekedi, winning reelection with 73% of the vote, and a cadre of nine opposition candidates signing a declaration saying that the election was rigged and that they want another vote to be held.All of which establishes the context for what's happening in the DRC, today, which is in some ways a continuation of what's been happening in this country pretty much since it became a country, but in other ways is an escalation and evolution of the same.One of the big focal points here, though, is the role that neighboring Rwanda has played in a lot of what's gone down in the DRC, including the issues we're seeing in 2024.Back in 1994, during what became known as the Rwandan genocide, militias from the ruling majority Hutu ethnic group decided to basically wipe out anyone from the minority Tutsi ethnic group.Somewhere between a 500,000 and a million people are estimated to have been killed between April and July of that year, alone, and that conflict pushed a lot of Hutu refugees across the border into the eastern DRC, which at the time was still Zaïre.About 2 million of these refugees settled in camps in the North and South Kivu provinces of the DRC, and some of them were the same extremists who committed that genocide in Rwanda in 1994, and they started doing what they do in the DRC, as well, setting up militias, in this case mostly in order to defend themselves against the new Tutsi-run government that had taken over in Rwanda, following the genocide.This is what sparked that First Congo War, as the Tutsi-run Rwandan government, seeking justice and revenge against those who committed all those atrocities went on the hunt for any Hutu extremists they could find, and that meant invading a neighboring country in order to hit those refugee groups, and the militias within them, that had set up shop there.The Second Congo War was sparked when relations between the Congolese and Rwandan governments deteriorated, the DRC government pushing Rwandan troops out of the eastern part of their country, and Kabila, the leader of the DRC at the time, asking everyone else to leave, all foreign troops that were helping with those Hutu militias.Kabila then allowed the Hutus to reinforce their positions on the border with Rwanda, seemingly as a consequence of a burgeoning international consensus that the Rwandan government's actions following the genocide against the Tutsis had resulted in an overcompensatory counter-move against Hutus, many of whom were not involved in that genocide, and the Tutsis actions in this regard amounted to war crimes.One of the outcomes of this conflict, that second war, was the emergence of a mostly Tutsi rebel group called the March 23 Movement, or M23, which eventually became a huge force in the region in the early 20-teens, amidst accusations that the Congolese government was backing them.M23 became such an issue for the region that the UN Security Council actually sent troops into the area to work with the Congolese army to fend them off, after they made moves to start taking over chunks of the country, and evidence subsequently emerged that Rwanda was supporting the group and their effort to screw over the Congolese government, which certainly didn't help the two countries' relationship.Alongside M23, ADF, and CODECO, a slew of more than 100 other armed, rebel groups still plague portions of the DRC, and part of the issue here is that Rwanda and other neighboring countries that don't like the DRC want to hurt them to whatever degree they're able, but another aspect of this seemingly perpetual tumult is the DRC's staggering natural resource wealth.Based on some estimates, the DRC has something like $24 trillion worth of natural resource deposits, including the world's largest cobalt and coltan reserves, two metals that are fundamental to the creation of things like batteries and other aspects of the modern economy, and perhaps especially the modern electrified economy.So in some ways this is similar to having the world's largest oil deposits back in the early 20th century: it's great in a way, but it's also a resource curse in the sense that everyone wants to steal your land, and in the sense that setting up a functioning government that isn't a total kleptocracy, corrupt top to bottom, is difficult, because there's so much wealth just sitting there, and there's no real need to invest in a fully fleshed out, functioning economy—you can just take the money other countries offer you to exploit your people and resources, and pocket that.And while that's not 100% what's happened in the DRC, it's not far off.During the early 2000s and into the 20-teens, the DRC government sold essentially all its mining rights to China, which has put China in control of the lion's share of some of the world's most vital elements for modern technology.The scramble to strike these deals, and subsequent efforts to defend and stabilize on one hand, or to attack and destabilize these mining operations, on the other, have also contributed to instability in the region, because local groups have been paid and armed to defend or attack, soldiers and mercenaries from all over the world have been moved into the area to do the same, and the logic of Cold War-era proxy conflicts has enveloped this part of Africa to such a degree that rival nations like Uganda are buying drones and artillery from China to strike targets within the DRC, even as China arms DRC-based rebel groups to back up official military forces that are protecting their mining operations.It's a mess. And it's a mess because of all those historical conditions and beefs, because of conflicts in other, nearby countries and the machinations of internal and external leaders, and because of the amplification of all these things resulting from international players with interests in the DRC—including China, but also China's rivals, all of whom want what they have, and in some cases, don't want China to have what they have.In 2022, M23 resurfaced after laying low for years, and they took a huge chunk of North Kivu in 2023.For moment that same year, it looked like Rwanda and the DRC might go to war with each other over mining interests they control in the DRC, but a pact negotiated by the US led to a reduction in the military buildup in the area, and a reduction in their messing with each other's political systems.In December of 2023, though, the President of the DRC compared the President of Rwanda to Hitler and threatened to declare war against him, and UN troops, who have become incredibly unpopular in the region, in part because of various scandals and corruption within their ranks, began to withdraw—something that the US and UN have said could lead to a power vacuum in the area, sparking new conflicts in an already conflict-prone part of the country.As of March 2024, soldiers from South Africa, Burundi, and Tanzania are fighting soldiers from Rwanda who are supporting M23 militants in the eastern portion of the DRC, these militants already having taken several towns.Seven million Congolese citizens are internally displaced as a result of these conflicts, having had to flee their homes due to all the violence, most of them now living in camps or wandering from place to place, unable to settle down anywhere due to other violence, and a lack of sufficient resources to support them.Rwanda, for its part, denies supporting M23, and it says the Congolese government is trying to expel Tutsis who live in the DRC.Burundi, located just south of Rwanda, has closed its border with its neighbor, and has also accused Rwanda of supporting rebels within their borders with the intent of overthrowing the government.Most western governments have voiced criticisms of Rwanda for deploying troops within its neighbors' borders, and for reportedly supporting these militant groups, but they continue to send the Rwandan government money—Rwanda gets about a third of its total budget from other governments, and the US is at the top of that list of donors, but the EU also sends millions to Rwanda each year, mostly to fund military actions aimed at taking out militants that make it hard to do business in the region.So changes in political stances are contributing to this cycle of violence and instability, as are regular injections of outside resources like money and weapons and soldiers.And as this swirl of forces continues to make the DRC borderline ungovernable, everyday people continue to be butchered and displaced, experiencing all sorts of violence, food shortages, and a lack of basic necessities like water, and this ongoing and burgeoning humanitarian nightmare could go on to inform and spark future conflicts in the region.Show Noteshttps://archive.ph/lk0mNhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Kabilahttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rwandan_genocidehttps://gsphub.eu/country-info/Democratic%20Republic%20of%20Congohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_Democratic_Republic_of_the_Congohttps://www.reuters.com/world/africa/why-fighting-is-flaring-eastern-congo-threatening-regional-stability-2024-02-19/https://archive.ph/lk0mNhttps://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/2/21/a-guide-to-the-decades-long-conflict-in-dr-congohttps://www.cfr.org/global-conflict-tracker/conflict/violence-democratic-republic-congohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_23_Movementhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kivu_conflicthttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congo_Free_Statehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobutu_Sese_Sekohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congo_Crisishttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1965_Democratic_Republic_of_the_Congo_coup_d%27%C3%A9tathttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Congo_Warhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Congo_War This is a public episode. 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This week we talk about mergers, acquisitions, and the Shale Oil Revolution.We also discuss liquid natural gas, energy diplomacy, and political hypocrisy.Recommended Book: Eversion by Alastair ReynoldsTranscriptFor the sixth year in a row, the United States is the largest oil producer in the world.As of March 2024, it's producing an average of 12.93 million barrels of oil per day, according to the US Energy Information Administration, and it periodically pops above that average for stretches of time, like in December of last year when it managed to average just over 13.3 million barrels per day.That's an absolutely astonishing volume of oil.For context, while Saudi Arabia remains the holder of the world's most substantial spare oil capacity and was the largest oil exporter in 2023, they set aside plans to increase output to 12 million barrels a day back in January, which leaves them about a million barrels a day shy of the expansion target they set in 2020.In 2023, the US produced about 28% more oil than Russia and about 33% more than Saudi Arabia, on average.The US is becoming a huge player in oil exports, too, but it really shines if you look at not just crude oil, but also natural gas liquids and refined petroleum products. In aggregate, in 2023, the United States exported nearly the same volume of these products that both Saudi Arabia and Russia produced, not exported, which is pretty wild.As is the fact that in December of 2023, the US exported about 400 billion more cubic feet of natural gas than it imported; and it imports a lot, and it only started exporting natural gas a few years ago, so that's the figure for an industry that didn't even exist until 2016, and didn't really grow until the 2020s.The US hasn't always been this kind of force in the global oil market. It's long been a consumer of huge quantities of the stuff, but while it produced a decent amount until the late-90s, competing with Russia and trailing Saudi Arabia, though not by much, US production levels dropped substantially beginning in the early 90s, the US becoming a huge importer of fossil fuels, its production levels dipping down to something closer to those of Iran by the mid-2000s; when 9/11 happened in 2001, one of the big concerns was that the US's fundamental reliance on Middle Eastern oil would complicate its military options and hamstring its economy.That all changed, though, with what became known as the Shale Revolution, when the widespread investment in and deployment of hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking" technologies, combined with developments that allowed for horizontal drilling, opened up huge swathes of new oil-rich territories in the US and Canada, making what were previously usable, but incredibly expensive to exploit fossil fuel resources less expensive and easier to tap, and southern US states in particular saw a wave of new and expanded drilling, leading to a surge in the US's production output, and ultimately allowing the US to become the top producer in the world beginning in 2018.The degree to which this has changed things, geopolitically, cannot be overstated, in the US and globally.Stateside, petroleum prices became less tethered to the whims and political motivations of mostly Middle Eastern nations and Russia, which, working together via the OPEC+ oil cartel, were long able to threaten and coerce the US government and its allies in various ways.That remained the case for a while, even after this shale oil boom, as production and export figures weren't optimally aligned. But as this new reality has set in, the US government has been more strategic in how it has stockpiled fossil fuels resources and how it's been willing to use those stockpiles to manage price fluctuations, for itself and its allies, when warranted.This has also been important for manufacturing, shipping, and other energy-hungry aspects of the US economy, and it has stoked booms in all sorts of consumer-facing industries, alongside the deployment of power-hungry infrastructure like new power plants and data centers.Globally, this increased production has allowed the US to become a player in energy diplomacy, exporting fuel to allies that needed it because of disasters or foreign meddling, and recently, the US has taken this up a notch by bolstering Europe's energy supplies in the wake of Russia's invasion of Ukraine—an invasion that led to sanctions from the EU against Russia, those sanctions arriving more slowly than they might have otherwise arrived because of concerns that Russia's stranglehold on much of the bloc's energy resources might turn into a chokehold, hobbling their economies, military preparedness, and civilian support for the sanctions, because people would be paying extreme prices for ever-shrinking volumes of energy.In the decades leading up to that invasion, many European nations, especially Germany, completely recalibrated their economies so they could profit from Russian fuel, so the fear that those fuel supplies would dry up if they made the wrong move, supported Ukraine too ardently, was a significant concern and shaped a lot of what happened in those early days of the invasion.The US started exporting liquified natural gas to the bloc, though, which is gas that's turned into a liquid using incredibly low temperatures, which shrinks it so that it's easier and cheaper to ship. And these shipments arrived first in drips and drabs, because the infrastructure on the receiving end, to convert that chilly liquid gas back into room-temperature, full-volumed gas, needed to be installed, but once that infrastructure was in place, LNG began to arrive from the US in huge volumes, a whole new energy economy popping up essentially overnight, relative to how these things typically go, anyway. And that enabled more and sterner sanctions from the EU, of a kind that may not have been feasible, lacking that energy resource backstop.What I'd like to talk about today is another, even more recent development within the US oil industry, and what it might mean for the future of this industry.—In 2023 alone, the businesses that make up the US energy sector spent about $250 billion scooping up clients, suppliers, and rivals.A poll of energy executives in December of the same year suggested we could see another $50 billion or so invested in more acquisitions and mergers over the next two years, and in 2024, so far, as of mid-March, we've already seen APA buy Callon, Chesapeake buy Southwestern, Talos buy QuarterNorth, and Sunoco acquire NuStar; these deals all close at the tale-end of Q1 or in Q2 2024, and they were worth around $4.5, $7.4, $1.29, and $7.3 billion, respectively, so nearly $20.5 billion worth of big oil industry deals, already, and the year is just getting started, so that $50 billion figure is looking prescient.The majority of next-step deals are expected to center around the Permian Basin, which is located in western Texas, with a little bit of overflow across the border into New Mexico.This basin is the highest-producing oil field in the US, generating nearly 6 million barrels of oil and around 25 billion cubic feet of natural gas each day, as of early 2024, and this is a region of intense investment and growth; oil fields around the country are shutting down, and that increase in gas and oil production that we're seeing is mostly the consequence of more effective technologies and upgrades in the hardware and software being used by the industry.So better exploration, better tools to get to the best pockets of resources, better capturing technologies and means of shuttling what they pump from place to place—it's a full stack of better tech and systems, and that is allowing the industry to consolidate its sprawl into fewer areas, many of them in the Permian Basin, and that's thought to be part of why we're seeing so much consolidation at the moment: more investment in fewer wells and fields in a smaller portion of the country is leading to more output, and that means the bigger companies with more R&D capacity and higher-end assets will tend to have a bigger advantage than their more dispersed, smaller rivals.It's anticipated, though, that a collection of variables, including that consolidation, will actually slow the growth of the US's fossil fuel-based energy industry, at least for the next few years.Less activity from fewer business entities and fewer investments that will lead directly to higher output is expected to nudge that 12.93 million barrels a day up by maybe 120,000 or 170,000 barrels per day, rather than the previously projected 1 million barrel a day increase.That's the EIA projection, as least—some other analysts have higher expectations, in some cases double or quadruple that range, but the general consensus is that more of the oil wealth in this region being owned by larger entities that are aiming for consolidation, not growth in the sense of exploring and exploiting a bajillion new wells, will likely lead to a period of more tempered industry-wide growth, and probably a period in which these now-bigger companies will be focusing on getting all their ducks in a row, reducing redundancies and inefficiencies in their new, combined collection of assets, and possibly eyeballing other acquisition targets, as well—so that'll means more investment in efficiencies, less investment in upping those already sky-high production numbers.All of this is happening within the context of efforts, globally, to reduce humanity's reliance on and use of fossil fuels. And that's led to some strange combinations of policies and political messaging, and no shortage of claims of hypocrisy from all sides of the conversation.Case in point: even as US President Biden has celebrated US energy independence and the associated security enabled and supported by this expansion of fossil fuel production and processing, he has also flogged and signed all sorts of laws and regulations meant to reduce oil use and to increase the deployment of solar, wind, and other clean energy sources.He's also pushed hard for government investment in clean energy and related infrastructure, including things like electric vehicles and upgrades for homes, and he's not alone in this: other wealthy nations in particular have been pushing hard to emphasize and enable this transition, as all the data indicates the faster we shift away from burning fossil fuels and engaging in other emitting activities, the less destructive the impacts of human-amplified climate change will be, and the less expensive it will ultimately be to adapt to those new realities, and to stop making them worse; to fully transition to a net-zero, and then eventually, a practically non-emittive future.This seemingly bipolar stance can be disorienting, especially for those it directly impacts.And consequently, rather than making everyone happy, as both sides of the climate change, renewables conversation are getting a fair bit of what they want due to these seemingly opposing investments, it's mostly just pissing everyone off, as environmentalists, climate change activists, and everyday people who are concerned about the impacts of the changing climate that they're seeing around them, more and more each year, are irritated that the segue to a non-emittive energy future isn't happening faster, while oil, gas, and coal companies are peeved that they're being elbowed out, despite having arguably gotten the country to where it is today, provide the US economy with a substantial chunk of its overall income and wealth, and in a very real way enable modern, everyday life—even for those people who want them and their products to disappear as quickly as possible.That perception of hypocrisy is difficult to sidestep, then, because while, yes—there has been a lot of new, clean infrastructure deployed, many EV and similar companies have been invested in, and on the other side there have been all those big expansions of oil and gas infrastructure and an increase in the market for those sorts of products—these two narratives are also in diametric opposition to each other, at least in the long-term, and slow-walking a transition away from fossil fuels makes climate change worse, its impacts more devastating and longer-lasting, the worst stuff arriving faster, too, while the shift toward cleaner energy is stealing market share from those emittive energy companies, and this movement toward renewables puts a cap on fossil fuel companies' very existence, as well—some policies suggesting that they can't exist, or at least not exist at any real scale, doing the type of business they've always done, past a certain, government-mandated date.And both of these perspectives are arguably true; so those victories both sides are accumulating are often lost in the sea of concomitant victories for the perceptually opposing side, which manifest as losses for the non-victorious side.It's worth noting, too, that both sides actually have pretty good arguments, in isolation.Lacking the dominant, fossil fuel-based energy sources of today, the US military wouldn't be able to operate; it simply wouldn't be able to function, which would have all sorts of knock-on effects, until and unless all of those vehicles and missiles and other bits of hardware could be replaced with cleaner versions of the same.Lacking a full-scale replacement of every fuel-chugging car, bus, train, jet, and other piece of transportation infrastructure, the US economy would come to a halt, overnight, and that would wreak untold havoc in-country and around the world.There's a chance that certain plastic goods would disappear, too, and a gobsmackingly large portion of all things created in the modern world are made of some kind of plastic, which is a petroleum product, and the well-being of that industry is in some ways correlated with the well-being of the rest of the industry's efforts.That said, if we don't shift away from the use of these fuels and materials soon, we may lose the ability to counter some of the worst impacts of climate change, including many that are deadly, like overpowered and more regular storms and heatwaves, and others that will take out ecosystems and the creatures living in those ecosystems, permanently, changes to their conditions arriving so quickly they don't have a change to adapt.Military conflicts and economy collapses may seem quaint compared to the cost and loss of lives and treasure associated with forthcoming, more common, climate change-triggered disasters and norm-shifts.There's some indication that some Big Oil companies are making tweaks to how they do things in order to reduce the distance between their economic priorities and the priorities of folks who want them to stop pumping more fossil fuels from the ground.Top mining officials from Saudi Arabia recently announced they're building out the systems and hardware necessary to extract the more than $2.5 trillion worth of metals they're so far located in their territory, for instance, and other state-run businesses have suggested they intend to do the same: leveraging their knowledge, tools, and expertise to mine and process some of the resources that'll be most necessary (and thus, valuable) for the transition to cleaner energy.Some US-based Big Oil companies have made announcements about their own intentions in this regard, some saying they'll pull lithium from their oil wells, while others claim they're investing in rare earth mining infrastructure.ExxonMobil recently announced that it would be returning to one of its old, long-closed oil wells in a small town in Arkansas to mine lithium there, which could be beneficial for their bottom line, but also for folks in that region who were left in the lurch when Exxon left to refocus on Texas in the 1990s.A coal company operating in Wyoming, with the help of the US Department of Energy, recently discovered what could be one of the largest rare-earth metal deposits in the world, and the biggest in the US, on land that they originally bought for coal mining purposes.These sorts of investments are not consequence-free, as mining of any kind tends to deplete local resources, especially water and energy, and can have serious and deleterious effects on people and ecosystems, too. But this does seem like one of the more likely avenues through which these companies' interests may slowly come to align with those of folks, businesses, and governments that are trying to segue the US and other economies to clean energy; and that's meaningful because otherwise these companies almost always represent the most significant, well-moneyed and lobbyist-employing roadblocks to legislation and investment that would speed up the deployment of renewables and associated infrastructure; so this type of pivot would conceivably give them reason to support, rather than hamstring those efforts.That said, some of these announced efforts may end up being mostly PR plays, similar to how big oil companies have dangled the possibility of cleaning up their emissions using carbon drawdown technologies, for years, but few such investments have been made, and some of the deployed tools were eventually retired, as they didn't really do what they were supposed to do.So there are potential avenues via which priorities might align more closely in the coming years, if the economics of such paths can be worked out and if the market validates them, but there's also a chance these opposing interests remain oppositional for the foreseeable future, even though both arguably scratch necessary itches, and both represent anchors and wings for politicians who support and rely upon them.Show Noteshttps://grist.org/energy/oil-companies-used-to-run-this-town-now-theyre-back-to-mine-for-lithium/https://www.reuters.com/default/more-us-energy-deals-likely-2024-wave-consolidation-2024-01-24/https://www.semafor.com/article/03/13/2024/inside-saudi-arabias-plan-to-take-over-the-mining-industryhttps://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/us-leads-global-oil-production-sixth-straight-year-eia-2024-03-11/https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/saudi-aramco-says-it-will-cut-planned-maximum-capacity-12-mln-bpd-2024-01-30/https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/record-us-oil-output-challenges-saudi-mastery-kemp-2023-12-04/https://www.visualcapitalist.com/visualizing-the-rise-of-the-u-s-as-top-crude-oil-producer/https://www.forbes.com/sites/gauravsharma/2023/12/19/as-2024-approaches-us-leads-global-crude-oil-production-roster/?sh=107f8c582706https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/is-us-shale-oil-revolution-over-kemp-2022-11-22/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shale_gas_in_the_United_Stateshttps://www.nrdc.org/stories/fracking-101https://www.eia.gov/dnav/ng/hist/n9133us2M.htmhttps://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/natural-gas/liquefied-natural-gas.phphttps://www.reuters.com/business/energy/us-was-top-lng-exporter-2023-hit-record-levels-2024-01-02/https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61523https://jpt.spe.org/the-trend-in-drilling-horizontal-wells-is-longer-faster-cheaperhttps://edition.cnn.com/2023/03/28/energy/eu-us-oil-imports-overtake-russia/index.htmlhttps://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/09/25/climate/fracking-oil-gas-wells-water.htmlhttps://www.newscientist.com/article/2422110-methane-leaks-from-us-oil-and-gas-are-triple-government-estimates/https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61523https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petroleum_in_the_United_Stateshttps://www.marketplace.org/2024/02/12/diamondback-and-endeavor-merger-trend-bigger-fewer-oil-companies/https://www.strausscenter.org/energy-and-security-project/the-u-s-shale-revolution/ This is a public episode. 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This podcast discusses the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, including foreign aid, brain drain, and economic consequences. It explores the challenges faced by Ukraine in their counter-offensive against Russia, the complexities of international aid, and the economic and social implications of the conflict. The episode also touches on Russian political developments and recommends a book for further reading.

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 SuarezTranscriptRansomware 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 Noteshttps://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-lockbithttps://www.cisa.gov/news-events/cybersecurity-advisories/aa23-165ahttps://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-63590481https://www.justice.gov/usao-nj/pr/russian-and-canadian-national-charged-participation-lockbit-global-ransomware-campaignhttps://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=emailhttps://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-warnhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockbithttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ransomwarehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ransomware_as_a_service This is a public episode. 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From the Meiji Revolution to economic bubbles, this podcast delves into Japan's economic journey. Explore the impact of Commodore Perry's arrival, the shift from feudal to industrial society, and the challenges faced during the Lost Decade. Discover insights on NVIDIA, economic fluctuations, and the Tokyo Stock Exchange.

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 screens seem to work just fine, and with less neck-strain.So we could be looking at a flash in the pan movement, or we could be living through the emergence of a new, mainstream, perhaps even universal computing-related product type; but there's a good chance we won't know which for several more years.Show Noteshttps://stratechery.com/2024/the-apple-vision-pro/https://arstechnica.com/apple/2024/02/our-unbiased-take-on-mark-zuckerbergs-biased-apple-vision-pro-review/https://www.theverge.com/24054862/apple-vision-pro-review-vr-ar-headset-features-pricehttps://www.theverge.com/2024/2/16/24058318/apple-vision-pro-sharing-difficultieshttps://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-instagram-facebook-meta-posting-era-vision-pro-quest-2024-2https://www.theverge.com/2024/2/13/24072413/mark-zuckerberg-apple-vision-pro-review-quest-3https://www.theverge.com/24074795/vision-pro-returns-xbox-future-gemini-open-ai-vergecasthttps://fortune.com/2023/02/06/meta-buying-vr-startup-within-unlimited-after-ftc-battle/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geographic_information_systemhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spatial_computinghttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_HoloLenshttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Glasshttps://www.theverge.com/2023/12/21/24010787/microsoft-windows-mixed-reality-deprecated This is a public episode. 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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 SuleymanTranscriptThere 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 Noteshttps://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-00138187https://www.axios.com/2024/01/26/media-layoffs-strikes-journalism-dyinghttps://airmail.news/issues/2024-1-27/sports-immolatedhttps://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-trusthttps://www.cnn.com/2024/01/23/media/los-angeles-times-layoffs-strike/index.htmlhttps://www.theringer.com/2024/1/23/24047683/us-media-industry-meltdown-sports-illustrated-layoffs-pitchforkhttps://www.vulture.com/article/what-we-owe-pitchfork.htmlhttps://www.adweek.com/media/go-media-portfolio-sale/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=emailhttps://archive.ph/SMSDUhttps://www.semafor.com/article/02/04/2024/inside-conde-nasts-breakup-with-pitchforkhttps://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=291911003https://www.axios.com/2024/01/30/wall-street-journal-washington-layoffs-restructuringhttps://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.htmlhttps://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-00138517https://pwestpathfinder.com/2022/05/09/the-big-sixs-big-media-game/https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/futureofmedia/index-us-mainstream-media-ownershiphttps://www.axios.com/2024/02/03/news-media-business-implosion-philanthropic-wealthhttps://www.axios.com/2024/02/06/great-subscription-news-reversalhttps://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/06/style/journalism-media-layoffs.htmlhttps://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/our-digital-media-platform-will-revolutionize-news-and-is-also-shutting-downhttps://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-fundraisinghttps://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/31/business/media/messenger-closing-down.htmlhttps://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/feb/02/the-messenger-startup-collapse-journalism-takeawayshttps://www.niemanlab.org/2024/02/ineptitude-bordering-on-cruelty-a-roundup-of-recent-news-on-the-messenger/ This is a public episode. 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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.1142963https://www.nature.com/articles/s41584-023-00964-yhttps://www.theguardian.com/science/2022/jan/08/global-spread-of-autoimmune-disease-blamed-on-western-diethttps://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2024/02/01/why-women-have-more-autoimmune-diseases/https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/autoimmunity-has-reached-epidemic-levels-we-need-urgent-action-to-address-it/https://archive.ph/0outqhttps://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00169-7https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25277817/https://www.theguardian.com/science/2022/sep/15/scientists-hail-autoimmune-disease-therapy-breakthrough-car-t-cell-lupushttps://www.biopharmadive.com/news/crispr-cancer-cell-therapy-autoimmune-lupus/701528/https://www.wsoctv.com/news/trending/fda-issues-warning-secondary-cancer-risk-linked-car-t-therapies/RPAPN44ZCRFWFOROZOZLG2ZKG4/https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/treatment/research/car-t-cellshttps://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/23/health/fda-cancer-car-t-warning.htmlhttps://phys.org/news/2024-01-nanoparticles-anaphylaxis-side-effects-mouse.htmlhttps://hillman.upmc.com/mario-lemieux-center/treatment/car-t-cell-therapy/fda-approved-therapieshttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAR_T_cellhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engineered_CAR_T_cell_deliveryhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellular_adoptive_immunotherapy#Chimeric_Antigen_Receptor_(CAR)_T_Cell_Therapy 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

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/daily/stories/2023/11/04/teens-are-terrorizing-classmates-with-fake-nudeshttps://www.ft.com/content/0afb2e58-c7e2-4194-a6e0-927afe0c3555https://arstechnica.com/ai/2024/01/george-carlins-heirs-sue-comedy-podcast-over-ai-generated-impression/ https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/26/arts/carlin-lawsuit-ai-podcast-copyright.html?unlocked_article_code=1.Qk0.GtfO.azJzGDa58AVv&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleSharehttps://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/social-sciences/fair-use This is a public episode. 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