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AT A GLANCE
A quick overview of this week’s content:
- The Week that Was: Dynamic Zero, Metaverse Marionettes, and Divisive Diffusion
- Walled Gardening: Discount Gladiators
- Rules of Engagement: Gambling Goals, and Facebook Gets Better…?
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DYNAMIC ZERO
A rare wave of protests took place across China this past week as frustrations boiled over with Xi Jinping’s ‘dynamic zero’ COVID strategy. It was difficult to find updates about these events on twitter due to what some took to calling the “Great Wall of Porn.” Meanwhile, protestors were holding up pieces of blank paper. Their general reasoning was that the state couldn’t censor them if they did not say or writing anything. These protests were coupled with riots at ‘iPhone City’ and made calls for companies to ‘leave China’ even louder. However, this is easier said than done, as some experts are pointing out that these protests aren’t merely isolated incidents. They situate these protests within the broader struggles for freedom on the Asian and global stage. If they are correct, even if companies were able to walk out the ‘made in China’ door, it wouldn’t necessarily solve their supply chain issues. LINK
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METAVERSE MARIONETTES
On November 7th, 2022, Sony put out a press release about their acquisition of beyond sports in which Hiroshi Kawano, Executive Vice President of Sony Corporation stated that "we are confident that the acquisition of Beyond Sports will further strengthen our sports business to realize new sports entertainment bridging live and virtual worlds.” On November 29th, 2022, Sony revealed ‘Mocopi.’ This is a new toolkit that uses six-motion tracking gadgets spread across a person’s body, and a smartphone, to copy the user’s motions onto a digital avatar. I believe Sony’s core strength lies in combining a strong multimedia portfolio with (usually) high quality hardware. Sony has anime, it has games, movies, and music etc. At the same time, heading in this direction hits Microsoft where it hurts, its floundering AR, VR, and Metaverse efforts as well as the increased antitrust scrutiny the company is under. LINK
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DIVISIVE DIFFUSION
Stable Diffusion (SD) 1.0 rapidly gained a large user base of devoted enthusiasts by pitching a powerful dream. It promised freedom and customisability. Some users took this freedom and customisability and chose to make problematic content. The release of SD 2.0 caused controversy when Stability.ai, the company that finances and updates the core features of SD removed pornographic material from their training data and removed modern artists’ names from the prompt recognition. The broader debate this controversy fits into is about who should be held accountable for open-source software. SD has made headlines more than once for its use in porn, art theft, and deepfakes. Slowly but surely, regulation is catching up. It makes sense that stability.ai wouldn’t want to be on the hook for abuse material when the law is ready to come knocking. LINK
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DISCOUNT GLADIATORS
To many, it feels like black Friday went on forever this year rather than just being the day, weekend, and Monday after thanksgiving. I myself began to get a little nervous, wondering if perhaps Groundhog Day had gotten a sequel. Unlike the strictly limited inventories and ‘killer deals’ of yesteryear, black Friday and similar sales have increasingly turned into a global scam where retailers will first maximize prices, and then apply their discounts to those boosted prices. The end result is that the prices will land at or (usually) above, the normal pricing. This is, in large part, attributed by analysts to an ever-smaller number of vendors having control over prices and available stock. Vendors such as Amazon, whom journalists are now ringing the alarm bell about as it stands accused of its digital storefront being almost entirely stocked with ads this year. LINK
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GAMBLING GOALS
The FIFA world cup in Qatar is being considered by some (paywalled, sorry!) as a breakthrough moment for online gambling. This is the context with which to view not just DraftKing’s rise to prominence as a gambling platform, but also the current cybersecurity dilemma that online sports gambling faces. Sports gambling is greatly reliant of quick impulses. To indulge these impulses, people need to go from trigger to wager as fast as possible. The more security features gambling apps have, the more time potential gamblers have to calm down from their initial spur of the moment decision. And that is how DraftKings has now found itself in hot water over the loss of at least $300k to hackers, just as the already controversial world cup has gotten underway. The issue the broader gambling industry now faces is whether to risk losing impulse wagers to better security, or to risk controversies big enough to tighten the freshly loosened regulations. LINK
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FACEBOOK GETS BETTER...?
Facebook has gotten an unexpected windfall this past week. Back in December of 2021, there was a huge twitter data breach, where the information of 54 million users was looted. That data was first offered for sale, but has now been posted online for free. This bad PR for twitter overlaps with a new internal report on Facebook’s platform health. The report appears to show a dramatic drop in ‘garbage content’ at the top of Facebook’s content engagement leaderboard. Facebook has now also been declared the biggest media company in India because it dominates online life there and India is experiencing a creator economy boom. It will be very interesting to see if anything more comes of this. LINK
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Old Army Ant LINK
Toaster Hoax LINK
A Leg Up LINK
Black Coral LINK
Atlantis…? LINK
BPdeeznutzz LINK
Space Elevator LINK
Cryo Sleep LINK
Diving Physics LINK
Solarpunk LINK
Pain Plant LINK
Orange Sauce LINK
Libra 2.0 LINK
Silk Plastic LINK
Bio-home LINK
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ONE MORE THING
Whew! I really struggled to make the items this week as short and accessible as I could. The subject matter was really complicated, but also really important, so I couldn’t back down. The newsletter ended up getting delayed a bit as a result, but I’m really proud of how streamlined I’ve been able to make the items this time. I’ve reduced the article count down to 6 this week as well because I wanted to really commit to the streamlining, no half measures! I’m finding that I really like the sweet spot of 6-8 items per newsletter myself. Any less than 6, and there’s not enough content, any more than 8 and I’ve heard from some readers that they started feeling overwhelmed. And really, overwhelmed was the word of the week, because I was about ready to throw my phone in the rubbish if just one more store had the sheer audacity to pretend they were self-aware and witty about not taking part in the black Friday feeding frenzy. Surprise! The next line of their email to me would then boil down to ‘so give us your money instead!’ My response? “No, no I don’t think I will, not today shopping Satan.”
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