Image: Augustin Lignier
[ed. Next up - Tinder for Rats. Or isn't that already...]
Monday, February 19, 2024
The Future of Silk
The invention of the hypodermic needle in 1844 brought major benefits to the practice of medicine, but ran headlong into an unexpected quirk of human nature. It turns out that millions of people feel an instinctive horror at the thought of receiving an injection – at least ten percent of the US adult population and 25 percent of children, according to one estimate. This common phobia partly explains the widespread reluctance to receive vaccinations against Covid-19, a reluctance which has led to tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths.
But a company in Cambridge, Massachusetts, called Vaxess Technologies plans to sidestep this common fear by abandoning stainless steel needles and switching to silk.
Vaxess is testing a skin patch covered in dozens of microneedles made of silk protein and infused with influenza vaccine. Each needle is barely visible to the naked eye and just long enough to pierce the outer layer of skin. A user sticks the patch on his arm, waits five minutes, then throws it away. Left behind are the silk microneedles, which painlessly dissolve over the next two weeks, releasing the vaccine all the while.
The silk protein acts as a preservative, so there’s no need to keep it on ice at a doctor’s office. ‘It’s similar to what happens when you freeze something,’ said Vaxess founder and chief executive Michael Schrader. ‘It’s room-temperature freezing.’ In testing, Vaxess found that flu vaccines stored in a silk patch at room temperature remained viable three years later.
No more need for a ‘cold chain’, the costly network of refrigerators between manufacturing plants and medical clinics required by so many vaccines. Indeed, there’d be no need to get vaccinated at a clinic at all. Patients could vaccinate themselves.
‘We would mail you a patch,’ said Schrader. ‘It looks like a nicotine patch, only much smaller. You wear the patch for five minutes, then take it off and throw it away.’
Having completed a successful phase one clinical trial of the silk patches in late 2022, Schrader hopes to bring them to market by 2028.
It’s hardly the sort of product we’d usually associate with silk, the tough, luxurious, and luminous fabric that has delighted people for at least 5,000 years. But silk is proving to be far more valuable than its early Chinese cultivators could have imagined.
Much of what we now understand about silk was discovered at Silklab, a branch of the department of engineering at Tufts University in Medford, a suburb of Boston. Here a visitor encounters silken lenses that project words and images when bathed in laser light; surgical gloves coated in silk that display a warning if they’ve been contaminated with pathogens; tiny silken screws that are strong enough to repair a broken bone, only to dissolve entirely once the injury is healed.
For Silklab director Fiorenzo Omenetto, silk is not a fashion statement. It’s a set of microscopic Lego blocks that he and his colleagues are pulling apart and reassembling into an array of unexpected products.
‘We make everything,’ said Omenetto. ‘We make plastics, we make edible electronics, we make coatings for food.’
Silk isn’t everything at Silklab. Omenetto and his colleagues experiment with a variety of similar molecules, known as structural proteins. They’re found all over the place, shaping and strengthening plant and animal tissues. There’s the keratin in hair, collagen that holds our organs together, and more.
But for Omenetto, silk comes first. And his team has found an array of new uses for a fiber that humans have been cultivating for millennia. (...)
But a company in Cambridge, Massachusetts, called Vaxess Technologies plans to sidestep this common fear by abandoning stainless steel needles and switching to silk.
The silk protein acts as a preservative, so there’s no need to keep it on ice at a doctor’s office. ‘It’s similar to what happens when you freeze something,’ said Vaxess founder and chief executive Michael Schrader. ‘It’s room-temperature freezing.’ In testing, Vaxess found that flu vaccines stored in a silk patch at room temperature remained viable three years later.
No more need for a ‘cold chain’, the costly network of refrigerators between manufacturing plants and medical clinics required by so many vaccines. Indeed, there’d be no need to get vaccinated at a clinic at all. Patients could vaccinate themselves.
‘We would mail you a patch,’ said Schrader. ‘It looks like a nicotine patch, only much smaller. You wear the patch for five minutes, then take it off and throw it away.’
Having completed a successful phase one clinical trial of the silk patches in late 2022, Schrader hopes to bring them to market by 2028.
It’s hardly the sort of product we’d usually associate with silk, the tough, luxurious, and luminous fabric that has delighted people for at least 5,000 years. But silk is proving to be far more valuable than its early Chinese cultivators could have imagined.
Much of what we now understand about silk was discovered at Silklab, a branch of the department of engineering at Tufts University in Medford, a suburb of Boston. Here a visitor encounters silken lenses that project words and images when bathed in laser light; surgical gloves coated in silk that display a warning if they’ve been contaminated with pathogens; tiny silken screws that are strong enough to repair a broken bone, only to dissolve entirely once the injury is healed.
For Silklab director Fiorenzo Omenetto, silk is not a fashion statement. It’s a set of microscopic Lego blocks that he and his colleagues are pulling apart and reassembling into an array of unexpected products.
‘We make everything,’ said Omenetto. ‘We make plastics, we make edible electronics, we make coatings for food.’
Silk isn’t everything at Silklab. Omenetto and his colleagues experiment with a variety of similar molecules, known as structural proteins. They’re found all over the place, shaping and strengthening plant and animal tissues. There’s the keratin in hair, collagen that holds our organs together, and more.
But for Omenetto, silk comes first. And his team has found an array of new uses for a fiber that humans have been cultivating for millennia. (...)
by Hiawatha Bray, Works in Progress | Read more:
Image: Yuji Sakai/Getty, Chemistryworld via
Sunday, February 18, 2024
Influencers
Those of us who take a loving interest in words—their etymological forebears, their many layers of meaning, their often-surprising histories—have a tendency to resist change. Not that we think playfulness should be proscribed—such pedantry would be a cure worse than any disease. It’s just that we are also drawn, like doting parents, into wanting to protect the language, and thus become suspicious of mysterious strangers, of the introduction of new words, and of new meanings for familiar ones.
When we find words being used in a novel way, our countenances tend to stiffen. What’s going on here? Is this a euphemism? Is there a hidden agenda here?
But there are times when the older language seems inadequate, and in fact may mislead us into thinking that the world has not changed. New signifiers may sometimes be necessary, in order to describe new things.
Such is unquestionably the case of the new/old word influencer. At first glance, it looks harmless and insignificant, a lazy and imprecise way of designating someone as influential. But the word’s use as a noun is the key to what is different and new about it. And much as I dislike the word, and dislike the phenomenon it describes, necessity seems to have dictated that such a word be created.
The necessity to which I refer, the raison d’être of influencer, is the rise of social media, the ever more pervasive and enveloping interactive networks made possible by the Internet—X (the social networking service formerly known as Twitter), Facebook, Instagram, Amazon, TikTok, Snapchat, et alia, ad infinitum—into which and through which so much of our lives are now being poured. This is not the place to evaluate the pluses and minuses of these arrangements, except to point out that they have destabilized, if not demolished, all the conventional means by which we have determined what counts as an authoritative view of a subject. The Wikipedia entry for social media says it all in one dry sentence: “Social media can also be used to read or share news, whether it is true or false.” That the same can be said of open-sourced Wikipedia itself does not detract from the truth of this particular statement.
It has not helped matters that the rise of social media has coincided with a serious decline in the general public’s faith in experts and other trusted sources of objective knowledge—a term we are now too often tempted to put between scare quotes. The debacle of the public health establishment’s response to the COVID pandemic is only the most recent of blows to our confidence in the competence and disinterestedness of our accredited experts. One could cite a great many more examples, including the declining status of my own demimonde, the world of higher education.
So what to believe? And whom to believe? In the night all cows are black, and in the social media age, all opinions become equal. People will turn to whatever sources they trust, for reasons both good and bad, the only stipulation being that these sources be easily available online. And thus enter the influencers, and the need for a word to describe them.
A recent study by the Reuters Institute at the University of Oxford found that 55 percent of TikTok and Snapchat users, and 52 percent of Instagram users, get their news from influencers, rather than conventional news sources. The numbers are less startling for older platforms such as X and Facebook, but the figures for general distrust of the news media—32 percent in the United States—are alarming enough.
In the newspaper era now passing, if not already past, figures like Walter Lippmann, Anthony Lewis, A.M. Rosenthal, Meg Greenfield, George F. Will, and Joseph Alsop were called “opinion leaders,” because they not only had access to large audiences but also were thought to be intelligent, informed, broadly well educated, and well acquainted with the various aspects of our political and cultural life. They were not infallible, and they could be opinionated, but they had authority. Their readers learned to trust them not because they were pretty faces or led enviable lives but because their opinions were reliably thoughtful and usually persuasive.
Influencers have some of the same characteristics, but there are two big differences. The term influencer is entirely functionalist and results oriented. There is no credentialed baseline of presumed or demonstrated authority. You don’t need a degree; you don’t even have to have graduated from high school. You become an influencer not because you know anything, or are accredited in any way, but solely on the basis of your demonstrable influence, the size of the audience you are able to gather around you and hang on to—in other words, your ability to carry out the function of influencing. As that audience grows and comes to believe that you know what you are talking about, it follows you and follows your instructions. By their fruits ye shall know them, and the influencers’ fruits are precisely measurable: in followers, and in the promotion and sale of consumer goods.
For make no mistake, and this is the second big difference, the chief importance of the influencer is his or her effectiveness in moving goods. That’s what they do. (When opinion leaders do it, it’s a grave ethical lapse.) Influencers generally do not produce the goods or run the businesses that distribute those goods, but they provide outsourcing for the promotion and marketing of products, and in time develop a brand identity around the products they flog, and if they’re very successful, are sought out in turn by the producers of those goods. The brand identity provides the audience a kind of Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval, for whatever standard of good housekeeping one might have in mind.
Successful influencers need to have a lot of self-confidence, stepping out there as they do. They have to believe that their seal of approval matters. Back in May, The New Yorker ran an interview with a young woman who uses the moniker Tinx. An influencer with more than two million social media followers, she has become, the magazine says, “the arbiter of all that is worthy: boyfriend behavior, bachelorette destinations, where to order shrimp cocktails and Martinis in many a metropolis.”
Tinx has a podcast, a radio show, and a line of merchandise, including clothing and salad dressing. And she has now written a book, The Shift, which is billed as a guide “to becoming the main character of your life.” What are her qualifications for all this? “The goal is to know yourself, completely. And by that metric, I’m wise as fuck.”
All of this would be harmless, a great example of good old American brassiness, except for the nagging sense that there is nothing but the consensus of the crowd holding it all up, no criterion external to the opinions and tastes of the hyperconfident influencer and those who follow her advice. That’s OK if we are talking about condiments and cocktails, but what about issues of great public moment, issues of war and peace, the quality of our leaders, and the health of our families and our common life? What if there is no general standard to recur to? What if the logic of the social media world continues to envelop our discourse, so that all issues, not merely the marketplace choices of consumers, are being addressed by people who are influencers, rather than authorities?
And it’s worth remembering who the biggest influencers are. We’re not talking about the next generation of Walter Lippmanns or George Wills. We’re talking about Kylie Jenner, Ariana Grande, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, Kim Kardashian, Demi Lovato, Justin Bieber, and Katy Perry (just a few representative names taken from a list of the top 35 influencers on Instagram in 2023). In other words, these are celebrities, valued more for style than substance, famous for being well-known, and glamorous beyond the reach (but not the dreams) of ordinary mortals. They have an ability to draw others into the force-field of their manufactured charisma, and induce the faux-intimacy that weds followers to what amounts to a cult of personality, complete with knowing winks and in-crowd signaling.
by Wilfred M. McClay, Hedgehog Review | Read more:
When we find words being used in a novel way, our countenances tend to stiffen. What’s going on here? Is this a euphemism? Is there a hidden agenda here?
Such is unquestionably the case of the new/old word influencer. At first glance, it looks harmless and insignificant, a lazy and imprecise way of designating someone as influential. But the word’s use as a noun is the key to what is different and new about it. And much as I dislike the word, and dislike the phenomenon it describes, necessity seems to have dictated that such a word be created.
The necessity to which I refer, the raison d’être of influencer, is the rise of social media, the ever more pervasive and enveloping interactive networks made possible by the Internet—X (the social networking service formerly known as Twitter), Facebook, Instagram, Amazon, TikTok, Snapchat, et alia, ad infinitum—into which and through which so much of our lives are now being poured. This is not the place to evaluate the pluses and minuses of these arrangements, except to point out that they have destabilized, if not demolished, all the conventional means by which we have determined what counts as an authoritative view of a subject. The Wikipedia entry for social media says it all in one dry sentence: “Social media can also be used to read or share news, whether it is true or false.” That the same can be said of open-sourced Wikipedia itself does not detract from the truth of this particular statement.
It has not helped matters that the rise of social media has coincided with a serious decline in the general public’s faith in experts and other trusted sources of objective knowledge—a term we are now too often tempted to put between scare quotes. The debacle of the public health establishment’s response to the COVID pandemic is only the most recent of blows to our confidence in the competence and disinterestedness of our accredited experts. One could cite a great many more examples, including the declining status of my own demimonde, the world of higher education.
So what to believe? And whom to believe? In the night all cows are black, and in the social media age, all opinions become equal. People will turn to whatever sources they trust, for reasons both good and bad, the only stipulation being that these sources be easily available online. And thus enter the influencers, and the need for a word to describe them.
A recent study by the Reuters Institute at the University of Oxford found that 55 percent of TikTok and Snapchat users, and 52 percent of Instagram users, get their news from influencers, rather than conventional news sources. The numbers are less startling for older platforms such as X and Facebook, but the figures for general distrust of the news media—32 percent in the United States—are alarming enough.
In the newspaper era now passing, if not already past, figures like Walter Lippmann, Anthony Lewis, A.M. Rosenthal, Meg Greenfield, George F. Will, and Joseph Alsop were called “opinion leaders,” because they not only had access to large audiences but also were thought to be intelligent, informed, broadly well educated, and well acquainted with the various aspects of our political and cultural life. They were not infallible, and they could be opinionated, but they had authority. Their readers learned to trust them not because they were pretty faces or led enviable lives but because their opinions were reliably thoughtful and usually persuasive.
Influencers have some of the same characteristics, but there are two big differences. The term influencer is entirely functionalist and results oriented. There is no credentialed baseline of presumed or demonstrated authority. You don’t need a degree; you don’t even have to have graduated from high school. You become an influencer not because you know anything, or are accredited in any way, but solely on the basis of your demonstrable influence, the size of the audience you are able to gather around you and hang on to—in other words, your ability to carry out the function of influencing. As that audience grows and comes to believe that you know what you are talking about, it follows you and follows your instructions. By their fruits ye shall know them, and the influencers’ fruits are precisely measurable: in followers, and in the promotion and sale of consumer goods.
For make no mistake, and this is the second big difference, the chief importance of the influencer is his or her effectiveness in moving goods. That’s what they do. (When opinion leaders do it, it’s a grave ethical lapse.) Influencers generally do not produce the goods or run the businesses that distribute those goods, but they provide outsourcing for the promotion and marketing of products, and in time develop a brand identity around the products they flog, and if they’re very successful, are sought out in turn by the producers of those goods. The brand identity provides the audience a kind of Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval, for whatever standard of good housekeeping one might have in mind.
Successful influencers need to have a lot of self-confidence, stepping out there as they do. They have to believe that their seal of approval matters. Back in May, The New Yorker ran an interview with a young woman who uses the moniker Tinx. An influencer with more than two million social media followers, she has become, the magazine says, “the arbiter of all that is worthy: boyfriend behavior, bachelorette destinations, where to order shrimp cocktails and Martinis in many a metropolis.”
Tinx has a podcast, a radio show, and a line of merchandise, including clothing and salad dressing. And she has now written a book, The Shift, which is billed as a guide “to becoming the main character of your life.” What are her qualifications for all this? “The goal is to know yourself, completely. And by that metric, I’m wise as fuck.”
All of this would be harmless, a great example of good old American brassiness, except for the nagging sense that there is nothing but the consensus of the crowd holding it all up, no criterion external to the opinions and tastes of the hyperconfident influencer and those who follow her advice. That’s OK if we are talking about condiments and cocktails, but what about issues of great public moment, issues of war and peace, the quality of our leaders, and the health of our families and our common life? What if there is no general standard to recur to? What if the logic of the social media world continues to envelop our discourse, so that all issues, not merely the marketplace choices of consumers, are being addressed by people who are influencers, rather than authorities?
And it’s worth remembering who the biggest influencers are. We’re not talking about the next generation of Walter Lippmanns or George Wills. We’re talking about Kylie Jenner, Ariana Grande, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, Kim Kardashian, Demi Lovato, Justin Bieber, and Katy Perry (just a few representative names taken from a list of the top 35 influencers on Instagram in 2023). In other words, these are celebrities, valued more for style than substance, famous for being well-known, and glamorous beyond the reach (but not the dreams) of ordinary mortals. They have an ability to draw others into the force-field of their manufactured charisma, and induce the faux-intimacy that weds followers to what amounts to a cult of personality, complete with knowing winks and in-crowd signaling.
by Wilfred M. McClay, Hedgehog Review | Read more:
Image: Shutterstock
[ed. Pretty sure this misses the point. Influencers exist because they've learned how to navigate all the pitfalls and barriers of media, branding, income, and celebrity - no small achievement in itself - something their followers would probably all like to emulate. But there are downsides too - constantly being on a treadmill to produce endless content would be one of them.]
Steph Curry Full Court Shot
[ed. Superhuman. This guy can hit 'em from anywhere (even leaving the arena). See also: Steph Curry’s full-court shot from the tunnel needs to be seen to be believed (SB Nation).]
Nature Has Value. Could We Literally Invest in It?
“Natural asset companies” would put a market price on improving ecosystems, rather than on destroying them.
Picture this: You own a few hundred acres near a growing town that your family has been farming for generations. Turning a profit has gotten harder, and none of your children want to take it over. You don’t want to sell the land; you love the open space, the flora and fauna it hosts. But offers from developers who would turn it into subdivisions or strip malls seem increasingly tempting.
One day, a land broker mentions an idea. How about granting a long-term lease to a company that values your property for the same reasons you do: long walks through tall grass, the calls of migrating birds, the way it keeps the air and water clean.
It sounds like a scam. Or charity. In fact, it’s an approach backed by hardheaded investors who think nature has an intrinsic value that can provide them with a return down the road — and in the meantime, they would be happy to hold shares of the new company on their balance sheets.
Such a company doesn’t yet exist. But the idea has gained traction among environmentalists, money managers and philanthropists who believe that nature won’t be adequately protected unless it is assigned a value in the market — whether or not that asset generates dividends through a monetizable use.
The concept almost hit the big time when the Securities and Exchange Commission was considering a proposal from the New York Stock Exchange to list these “natural asset companies” for public trading. But after a wave of fierce opposition from right-wing groups and Republican politicians, and even conservationists wary of Wall Street, in mid-January the exchange pulled the plug.
That doesn’t mean natural asset companies are going away; their proponents are working on prototypes in the private markets to build out the model. And even if this concept doesn’t take off, it’s part of a larger movement motivated by the belief that if natural riches are to be preserved, they must have a price.
Beyond Philanthropy
For decades, economists and scientists have worked to quantify the contributions of nature — a kind of production known as ecosystem services.
By traditional accounting methods, a forest has monetary value only when it has been cut into two-by-fours. If a forest not destined for the sawmill burns down, economic activity actually increases, because of the relief efforts required in the aftermath.
When you pull back the camera, though, forests help us in many more ways. Beyond sucking carbon out of the air, they hold the soil in place during heavy rains, and in dry times help it retain moisture by shading the ground and protecting winter snowpack, which helps keep reservoirs full for humans. Without the tree-covered Catskills, for example, New York City would have to invest much more in infrastructure to filter its water.
Natural capital accounting, which U.S. statistical agencies are developing as a sidebar to their measurements of gross domestic product, puts numbers on those services. To move those calculations beyond an academic exercise, they need to be factored into incentives.
The most common way to do that is the social cost of carbon: a price per ton of emissions that represents climate change’s burdens on humanity, such as natural disasters, disease and reduced labor productivity. That number is used to evaluate the costs and benefits of regulations. In some countries — notably not the United States, at least on the federal level — it is used to set taxes on emissions. Efforts to remove carbon can then generate credits, which trade on open markets and fluctuate with supply and demand.
But carbon is just the simplest way of putting a price on nature. For the other benefits — wildlife, ecotourism, protection from hurricanes and so on — the revenue model is less obvious.
That’s what Douglas Eger set out to address. He wanted to work for an environmental group after college, but on his conservative father’s advice he instead made a career in business, running companies in pharmaceuticals, tech and finance. With some of his newly built wealth, he bought a 7,000-acre tract northwest of New York City to preserve as open space.
He didn’t think philanthropy would be enough to stem the loss of nature — a seminal 2020 report found that more than $700 billion was needed annually to avert a collapse in biodiversity. Government wasn’t solving the problem. Socially responsible investing, while making progress, wasn’t reversing damage to critical habitats.
So in 2017, Mr. Eger founded the Intrinsic Exchange Group with the goal of incubating natural asset companies, NACs for short. Here’s how it works: A landowner, whether a farmer or a government entity, works with investors to create a NAC that licenses the rights to the ecosystem services the land produces. If the company is listed on an exchange, the proceeds from the public offering of shares would provide the landowner with a revenue stream and pay for enhancing natural benefits, like havens for threatened species or a revitalized farming operation that heals the land rather than leaching it dry.
If all goes according to plan, investments in the company would appreciate as environmental quality improves or demand for natural assets increases, yielding a return years down the road — not unlike art, or gold or even cryptocurrency.
“All of these things, if you think about it, are social agreements to a degree,” Mr. Eger said. “And the beauty of a financial system is between a willing buyer and seller, the underlying becomes true.”
In discussions with like-minded investors, he found an encouraging openness to the idea. The Rockefeller Foundation kicked in about $1.7 million to fund the effort, including a 45-page document on how to devise an “ecological performance report” for the land enrolled in a NAC. In 2021, Intrinsic announced its plan to list such companies on the New York Stock Exchange, along with a pilot project involving land in Costa Rica as well as support from the Inter-American Development Bank and major environmental groups. By the time they filed an application with the S.E.C. in late September, Mr. Eger was feeling confident.
That’s when the firestorm began.
The American Stewards of Liberty, a Texas-based group that campaigns against conservation measures and seeks to roll back federal protections for endangered species, picked up on the plan. Through both grass-roots organizing and high-level lobbying, they argued that natural asset companies were a Trojan horse for foreign governments and “global elites” to lock up large swaths of rural America, particularly public lands. The rule-making docket started to fill up with comments from critics charging that the concept was nothing but a Wall Street land grab.
A collection of 25 Republican attorneys general called it illegal and part of a “radical climate agenda.” On Jan. 11, in what may have been the final straw, the Republican chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee sent a letter demanding a slew of documents relating to the proposal. Less than a week later, the proposal was scratched.
by Lydia DePillis, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Alex Merto
One day, a land broker mentions an idea. How about granting a long-term lease to a company that values your property for the same reasons you do: long walks through tall grass, the calls of migrating birds, the way it keeps the air and water clean.
Such a company doesn’t yet exist. But the idea has gained traction among environmentalists, money managers and philanthropists who believe that nature won’t be adequately protected unless it is assigned a value in the market — whether or not that asset generates dividends through a monetizable use.
The concept almost hit the big time when the Securities and Exchange Commission was considering a proposal from the New York Stock Exchange to list these “natural asset companies” for public trading. But after a wave of fierce opposition from right-wing groups and Republican politicians, and even conservationists wary of Wall Street, in mid-January the exchange pulled the plug.
That doesn’t mean natural asset companies are going away; their proponents are working on prototypes in the private markets to build out the model. And even if this concept doesn’t take off, it’s part of a larger movement motivated by the belief that if natural riches are to be preserved, they must have a price.
Beyond Philanthropy
For decades, economists and scientists have worked to quantify the contributions of nature — a kind of production known as ecosystem services.
By traditional accounting methods, a forest has monetary value only when it has been cut into two-by-fours. If a forest not destined for the sawmill burns down, economic activity actually increases, because of the relief efforts required in the aftermath.
When you pull back the camera, though, forests help us in many more ways. Beyond sucking carbon out of the air, they hold the soil in place during heavy rains, and in dry times help it retain moisture by shading the ground and protecting winter snowpack, which helps keep reservoirs full for humans. Without the tree-covered Catskills, for example, New York City would have to invest much more in infrastructure to filter its water.
Natural capital accounting, which U.S. statistical agencies are developing as a sidebar to their measurements of gross domestic product, puts numbers on those services. To move those calculations beyond an academic exercise, they need to be factored into incentives.
The most common way to do that is the social cost of carbon: a price per ton of emissions that represents climate change’s burdens on humanity, such as natural disasters, disease and reduced labor productivity. That number is used to evaluate the costs and benefits of regulations. In some countries — notably not the United States, at least on the federal level — it is used to set taxes on emissions. Efforts to remove carbon can then generate credits, which trade on open markets and fluctuate with supply and demand.
But carbon is just the simplest way of putting a price on nature. For the other benefits — wildlife, ecotourism, protection from hurricanes and so on — the revenue model is less obvious.
That’s what Douglas Eger set out to address. He wanted to work for an environmental group after college, but on his conservative father’s advice he instead made a career in business, running companies in pharmaceuticals, tech and finance. With some of his newly built wealth, he bought a 7,000-acre tract northwest of New York City to preserve as open space.
He didn’t think philanthropy would be enough to stem the loss of nature — a seminal 2020 report found that more than $700 billion was needed annually to avert a collapse in biodiversity. Government wasn’t solving the problem. Socially responsible investing, while making progress, wasn’t reversing damage to critical habitats.
So in 2017, Mr. Eger founded the Intrinsic Exchange Group with the goal of incubating natural asset companies, NACs for short. Here’s how it works: A landowner, whether a farmer or a government entity, works with investors to create a NAC that licenses the rights to the ecosystem services the land produces. If the company is listed on an exchange, the proceeds from the public offering of shares would provide the landowner with a revenue stream and pay for enhancing natural benefits, like havens for threatened species or a revitalized farming operation that heals the land rather than leaching it dry.
If all goes according to plan, investments in the company would appreciate as environmental quality improves or demand for natural assets increases, yielding a return years down the road — not unlike art, or gold or even cryptocurrency.
“All of these things, if you think about it, are social agreements to a degree,” Mr. Eger said. “And the beauty of a financial system is between a willing buyer and seller, the underlying becomes true.”
In discussions with like-minded investors, he found an encouraging openness to the idea. The Rockefeller Foundation kicked in about $1.7 million to fund the effort, including a 45-page document on how to devise an “ecological performance report” for the land enrolled in a NAC. In 2021, Intrinsic announced its plan to list such companies on the New York Stock Exchange, along with a pilot project involving land in Costa Rica as well as support from the Inter-American Development Bank and major environmental groups. By the time they filed an application with the S.E.C. in late September, Mr. Eger was feeling confident.
That’s when the firestorm began.
The American Stewards of Liberty, a Texas-based group that campaigns against conservation measures and seeks to roll back federal protections for endangered species, picked up on the plan. Through both grass-roots organizing and high-level lobbying, they argued that natural asset companies were a Trojan horse for foreign governments and “global elites” to lock up large swaths of rural America, particularly public lands. The rule-making docket started to fill up with comments from critics charging that the concept was nothing but a Wall Street land grab.
A collection of 25 Republican attorneys general called it illegal and part of a “radical climate agenda.” On Jan. 11, in what may have been the final straw, the Republican chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee sent a letter demanding a slew of documents relating to the proposal. Less than a week later, the proposal was scratched.
by Lydia DePillis, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Alex Merto
[ed. Long overdue. The economic value of natural, unspoiled ecosystems and wilderness-related benefits are frequently downplayed or ignored but can be greater than the material products they produce (minerals, timber, water, wildlife, wetlands, etc.), because they extend over time. The value of animals themselves can be estimated using a process called contingent valuation.]
The New Luddites
Eliezer Yudkowsky, a 44-year-old academic wearing a grey polo shirt, rocks slowly on his office chair and explains with real patience – taking things slowly for a novice like me – that every single person we know and love will soon be dead. They will be murdered by rebellious self-aware machines. “The difficulty is, people do not realise,” Yudkowsky says mildly, maybe sounding just a bit frustrated, as if irritated by a neighbour’s leaf blower or let down by the last pages of a novel. “We have a shred of a chance that humanity survives.”
It’s January. I have set out to meet and talk to a small but growing band of luddites, doomsayers, disruptors and other AI-era sceptics who see only the bad in the way our spyware-steeped, infinitely doomscrolling world is tending. I want to find out why these techno-pessimists think the way they do. I want to know how they would render change. Out of all of those I speak to, Yudkowsky is the most pessimistic, the least convinced that civilisation has a hope. He is the lead researcher at a nonprofit called the Machine Intelligence Research Institute in Berkeley, California, and you could boil down the results of years of Yudkowsky’s theorising there to a couple of vowel sounds: “Oh fuuuuu–!”
“If you put me to a wall,” he continues, “and forced me to put probabilities on things, I have a sense that our current remaining timeline looks more like five years than 50 years. Could be two years, could be 10.” By “remaining timeline”, Yudkowsky means: until we face the machine-wrought end of all things. Think Terminator-like apocalypse. Think Matrix hellscape. Yudkowsky was once a founding figure in the development of human-made artificial intelligences – AIs. He has come to believe that these same AIs will soon evolve from their current state of “Ooh, look at that!” smartness, assuming an advanced, God-level super-intelligence, too fast and too ambitious for humans to contain or curtail. Don’t imagine a human-made brain in one box, Yudkowsky advises. To grasp where things are heading, he says, try to picture “an alien civilisation that thinks a thousand times faster than us”, in lots and lots of boxes, almost too many for us to feasibly dismantle, should we even decide to.
Trying to shake humanity from its complacency about this, Yudkowsky published an op-ed in Time last spring that advised shutting down the computer farms where AIs are grown and trained. In clear, crisp prose, he speculated about the possible need for airstrikes targeted on datacentres; perhaps even nuclear exchange. Was he on to something?
Along way from Berkeley, in the wooded suburb of Sydenham in south London, a quieter form of resistance to technological infringement has been brewing. Nick Hilton, host of a neo-luddite podcast called The Ned Ludd Radio Hour, has invited me over for a cup of tea. We stand in his kitchen, waiting for the kettle to boil, while a beautiful, frisky greyhound called Tub chomps at our ankles. “Write down ‘beautiful’ in your notebook,” encourages Hilton, 31, who as well as running a podcast company works as a freelance journalist. He explains the history of luddism and how – centuries after the luddite protesters of an industrialising England resisted advances in the textile industry that were costing them jobs, destroying machines and being maligned, arrested, even killed in consequence – he came to sympathise with its modern reimagining.
“Luddite has a variety of meanings now, two, maybe three definitions,” says Hilton. “Older people will sometimes say, ‘Ooh, can you help me with my phone? I’m such a luddite!’ And what they mean is, they haven’t been able to keep pace with technological change.” Then there are the people who actively reject modern devices and appliances, he continues. They may call themselves luddites (or be called that) as well. “But, in its purer historical sense, the term refers to people who are anxious about the interplay of technology and labour markets. And in that sense I would definitely describe myself as one.”
Edward Ongweso Jr, a writer and broadcaster, and Molly Crabapple, an artist, both based in New York, define themselves as luddites in this way, too. Ongweso talks to me on the phone while he runs errands around town. We first made contact over social media. We set a date via email. Now we let Google Meet handle the mechanics of a seamless transatlantic call. Neo-luddism isn’t about forgoing such innovations, Ongweso explains. Instead, it asks that each new innovation be considered for its merit, its social fairness and its potential for hidden malignity. “To me, luddism is about this idea that just because a technology exists, doesn’t mean it gets to sit around unquestioned. Just because we’ve rolled out some tech doesn’t mean we’ve rolled out some advancement. We should be continually sceptical, especially when technology is being applied in work spaces and elsewhere to order social life.”
Crabapple, the artist luddite, broadly agrees. “For me, a luddite is someone who looks at technology critically and rejects aspects of it that are meant to disempower, deskill or impoverish them. Technology is not something that’s introduced by some god in heaven who has our best interests at heart. Technological development is shaped by money, it’s shaped by power, and it’s generally targeted towards the interests of those in power as opposed to the interests of those without it. That stereotypical definition of a luddite as some stupid worker who smashes machines because they’re dumb? That was concocted by bosses.” (...)
There are techno sceptic sceptics, of course, those who would think Yudkowsky a scaremonger, the modern luddites doomed to the trivia bin of history, along with their 19th-century antecedents. In 2019, the political commentator Aaron Bastani published a persuasive manifesto titled Fully Automated Luxury Communism, describing a tech- and AI-enriched near-future beyond drudgery and need, there for the taking – “if we want it”, Bastani wrote. Last year, the Tory MP Bim Afolami published an editorial in the Evening Standard that called pessimism about technology “irrational”. Afolami advised the paper’s readers in bold type: Ignore the Luddites. His boss, Rishi Sunak, recently used his position as the leader of the nation to serve as a sort of chatshow host for the tech baron Elon Musk. On stage at an AI summit in Lancaster House, London, in November, Musk described AI as the “most disruptive force in history”, something that will end human labour, maybe for good, maybe for ill. “You’re not selling this,” joked Sunak at one point.
Why are we being sold this? In an early episode of his luddite podcast, Hilton pointed out that to do away with work would be to do away with a reason for living. “I think what we’re risking is a wide-scale loss of purpose,” Hilton says. (...)
[ed. See also: The Rise of Techno-Authoritarianism (The Atlantic).]
It’s January. I have set out to meet and talk to a small but growing band of luddites, doomsayers, disruptors and other AI-era sceptics who see only the bad in the way our spyware-steeped, infinitely doomscrolling world is tending. I want to find out why these techno-pessimists think the way they do. I want to know how they would render change. Out of all of those I speak to, Yudkowsky is the most pessimistic, the least convinced that civilisation has a hope. He is the lead researcher at a nonprofit called the Machine Intelligence Research Institute in Berkeley, California, and you could boil down the results of years of Yudkowsky’s theorising there to a couple of vowel sounds: “Oh fuuuuu–!”
Trying to shake humanity from its complacency about this, Yudkowsky published an op-ed in Time last spring that advised shutting down the computer farms where AIs are grown and trained. In clear, crisp prose, he speculated about the possible need for airstrikes targeted on datacentres; perhaps even nuclear exchange. Was he on to something?
Along way from Berkeley, in the wooded suburb of Sydenham in south London, a quieter form of resistance to technological infringement has been brewing. Nick Hilton, host of a neo-luddite podcast called The Ned Ludd Radio Hour, has invited me over for a cup of tea. We stand in his kitchen, waiting for the kettle to boil, while a beautiful, frisky greyhound called Tub chomps at our ankles. “Write down ‘beautiful’ in your notebook,” encourages Hilton, 31, who as well as running a podcast company works as a freelance journalist. He explains the history of luddism and how – centuries after the luddite protesters of an industrialising England resisted advances in the textile industry that were costing them jobs, destroying machines and being maligned, arrested, even killed in consequence – he came to sympathise with its modern reimagining.
“Luddite has a variety of meanings now, two, maybe three definitions,” says Hilton. “Older people will sometimes say, ‘Ooh, can you help me with my phone? I’m such a luddite!’ And what they mean is, they haven’t been able to keep pace with technological change.” Then there are the people who actively reject modern devices and appliances, he continues. They may call themselves luddites (or be called that) as well. “But, in its purer historical sense, the term refers to people who are anxious about the interplay of technology and labour markets. And in that sense I would definitely describe myself as one.”
Edward Ongweso Jr, a writer and broadcaster, and Molly Crabapple, an artist, both based in New York, define themselves as luddites in this way, too. Ongweso talks to me on the phone while he runs errands around town. We first made contact over social media. We set a date via email. Now we let Google Meet handle the mechanics of a seamless transatlantic call. Neo-luddism isn’t about forgoing such innovations, Ongweso explains. Instead, it asks that each new innovation be considered for its merit, its social fairness and its potential for hidden malignity. “To me, luddism is about this idea that just because a technology exists, doesn’t mean it gets to sit around unquestioned. Just because we’ve rolled out some tech doesn’t mean we’ve rolled out some advancement. We should be continually sceptical, especially when technology is being applied in work spaces and elsewhere to order social life.”
Crabapple, the artist luddite, broadly agrees. “For me, a luddite is someone who looks at technology critically and rejects aspects of it that are meant to disempower, deskill or impoverish them. Technology is not something that’s introduced by some god in heaven who has our best interests at heart. Technological development is shaped by money, it’s shaped by power, and it’s generally targeted towards the interests of those in power as opposed to the interests of those without it. That stereotypical definition of a luddite as some stupid worker who smashes machines because they’re dumb? That was concocted by bosses.” (...)
There are techno sceptic sceptics, of course, those who would think Yudkowsky a scaremonger, the modern luddites doomed to the trivia bin of history, along with their 19th-century antecedents. In 2019, the political commentator Aaron Bastani published a persuasive manifesto titled Fully Automated Luxury Communism, describing a tech- and AI-enriched near-future beyond drudgery and need, there for the taking – “if we want it”, Bastani wrote. Last year, the Tory MP Bim Afolami published an editorial in the Evening Standard that called pessimism about technology “irrational”. Afolami advised the paper’s readers in bold type: Ignore the Luddites. His boss, Rishi Sunak, recently used his position as the leader of the nation to serve as a sort of chatshow host for the tech baron Elon Musk. On stage at an AI summit in Lancaster House, London, in November, Musk described AI as the “most disruptive force in history”, something that will end human labour, maybe for good, maybe for ill. “You’re not selling this,” joked Sunak at one point.
Why are we being sold this? In an early episode of his luddite podcast, Hilton pointed out that to do away with work would be to do away with a reason for living. “I think what we’re risking is a wide-scale loss of purpose,” Hilton says. (...)
Maybe luddism is the answer. As far as I can make out, talking to all these people, it isn’t about refusing advancement, instead it’s an act of wondering: are we still advancing our relish of the world? How queasy or unreal or threatened do we need to feel before we stop seeing these conveniences as convenient? The author Zadie Smith has joked in the past that we gave ourselves to tech too cheaply in the first instance, all for the pleasure, really, of being a moving dot on a useful digital map. Now bosses can track their workers’ every keystroke. Telemarketing firms put out sales calls with AI-generated voices that mimic former employees who have been let go. A few weeks back, in January, the largest-ever survey of AI researchers found that 16% of them believed their work would lead to the extinction of humankind.
“That’s a one-in-six chance of catastrophe,” says Alistair Stewart, a former British soldier turned master’s student. “That’s Russian-roulette odds.”
“That’s a one-in-six chance of catastrophe,” says Alistair Stewart, a former British soldier turned master’s student. “That’s Russian-roulette odds.”
by Tom Lamont, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Lisa Sheehan/The Guardian
Saturday, February 17, 2024
Starfish Prime
The idea of a nuclear detonation in space is not new. Both the Soviet Union and United States conducted high-altitude nuclear detonation (HAND) tests in the 1950s and 1960s, including the U.S. Starfish Prime test in 1962 when the United States detonated a 1.4 megaton warhead atop a Thor missile 250 miles above the Earth. The explosion created an electromagnetic pulse that spread through the atmosphere, frying electronics on land hundreds of miles away from the test, causing electrical surges on airplanes and in power grids, and disrupting radio communications. The boosted nuclear radiation in space accumulated on satellites in orbit, damaging or destroying one-third of them.
Is This a Sputnik Moment? (NYT)
Image:Dimitar Dilkoff/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
[ed. Some nuclear weapons history I wasn't aware of. Learn something new every day. Re: Purported Russian plans to deploy nuclear weapons in space.]
[ed. Some nuclear weapons history I wasn't aware of. Learn something new every day. Re: Purported Russian plans to deploy nuclear weapons in space.]
Friday, February 16, 2024
Aleksei Navalny, Russian Opposition Leader, Dies in Prison at 47
Aleksei A. Navalny, an anticorruption activist who for more than a decade led the political opposition in President Vladimir V. Putin’s Russia while enduring arrests, assaults and a near-fatal poisoning, died Friday in a Russian prison, according to Russia’s Federal Penitentiary Service. He was 47.
Kira Yarmysh, Navalny’s press secretary, said in a live broadcast Friday that Navalny’s advisers were not yet able to issue an official confirmation of his death but believed that he had perished. And while acknowledging that the United States did not know the details of what happened, President Biden at a White House news conference said, “Make no mistake: Putin is responsible for Navalny’s death.”
Mr. Navalny had been serving multiple sentences that would most likely have kept him in prison until at least 2031 on charges that his supporters say were largely fabricated in an effort to muzzle him. Despite increasingly harsh conditions, including repeated stints in solitary confinement, he maintained a presence on social media, while members of his team continued to publish investigations into Russia’s corrupt elite from exile.
Mr. Navalny was given a three-and-a-half-year prison sentence in February 2021 after returning to Russia from Germany, where he had been recovering from being poisoned the previous August. In March 2022, he received a nine-year sentence for embezzlement and fraud in a trial that international observers denounced as “politically motivated” and a “sham.” And in August 2023, he was sentenced to 19 years in prison for “extremism.”
Mr. Navalny had effectively returned from the dead after he was poisoned with a nerve agent in Siberia in 2020, and he conducted multiple hunger strikes to improve his treatment. During his detention, Mr. Navalny was repeatedly placed in solitary confinement and complained about severe illnesses. In December, he disappeared for three weeks during his transfer to a penal colony 40 miles north of the Arctic Circle.
Yet even from prison, Mr. Navalny remained an unflinching critic of Mr. Putin, a former K.G.B. officer whom he accused of corruptly skimming the country’s oil profits to enrich his friends and entourage in the security services. Mr. Putin’s political party, he once said, was a party of “swindlers and thieves,” and he accused the president of trying to turn Russia into a “feudal state.” (...)
Mr. Navalny was known for his innovative tactics in fighting corruption and promoting democracy. Defying expectations, he cannily used street politics and social media to build a tenacious opposition movement even after much of the independent news media in Russia was squelched and other critics were driven into exile or killed in unsolved murders. In the years before Russia invaded Ukraine, many of Mr. Navalny’s associates, and in some cases their relatives, were arrested or forced into exile.
At his death, he was the most prominent critic of Mr. Putin still standing in Russia, at a time when the president has engineered a path to remain in power until at least 2036. (...)
He had spoken openly of the possibility that he might be assassinated.
“I’m trying not to think about it a lot,” he said in an interview with CBS News in 2017. “If you start to think about what kind of risks I have, you cannot do anything.”
On Aug. 20, 2020, Mr. Navalny became violently ill and fell into a coma shortly after boarding a flight from Siberia, where he had met with opposition candidates for local office.
The flight made an emergency landing in the Russian city of Omsk, where doctors for two days resisted his wife’s pleas that he be transferred to Germany for treatment.
Mr. Navalny was eventually evacuated to Berlin on an air ambulance flight after a team of German doctors who had arrived in Omsk stated that it was safe for him to travel. A little more than a week later, the German government announced that he had been poisoned with a nerve agent from the highly potent Novichok family of toxins. The evidence, German officials said, was “unequivocal.”
“Mr. Navalny has been the victim of a crime,” Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany said at the time. “It raises very serious questions that only the Russian government can and must answer.” (...)
Despite the attacks and the jail terms, Mr. Navalny persevered, he said, out of a desire to change the course of his country and not let down the people who worked with him. He was angry at what he called Mr. Putin’s self-dealing inner circle and the security services that protected it.
“I do this because I hate these people,” he said in an interview with The New York Times in 2011, before he rose to prominence.
Still, he struggled to unite the feuding pro-democracy opposition parties, a fractured state of affairs that has plagued Russia’s politics since the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991.(...)
Mr. Navalny’s support among the middle class — mostly in the capital, Moscow, where he ran unsuccessfully for mayor in 2013 — brought a new type of politics to the country, one focused not on the woes of striking miners or the aloof intellectual class but on bread-and-butter issues of the new capitalist era, like protecting home equity and investments in stocks.
Social media outlets like Twitter, now rebranded as X, and Vkontakte, a Russian analogue to Facebook, propelled Mr. Navalny’s rise. A breakthrough came in 2011, when he used social networking sites to promote street protests opposed to Mr. Putin’s return to power for a third presidential term. The protests breathed new life into a beleaguered opposition, and he came to be seen as the movement’s leader.
Years of arrests and attacks followed. (...)
In one searing exposé in 2017, he laid out a web of foundations and shell companies, all connected to former President Dmitri A. Medvedev, whose mansions, country estates, 18th-century palace in St. Petersburg and vineyard in Tuscany were displayed in the video.
“The system has turned so rotten that it doesn’t have any healthy parts at all,” Mr. Navalny said.
Mr. Navalny was detained so many times that he once joked to a judge that he wouldn’t take up the court’s time with a final statement before sentencing, because he would surely have another chance to do so again.
“The last word of the accused should be a dramatic moment in his life,” he said. “But they opened so many cases against me that this will not be my last chance to have a last word.”
by Valerie Hopkins and Andrew E. Kramer, NY Times | Read more:
The prison authorities said that Mr. Navalny lost consciousness on Friday after taking a walk in the Arctic penal colony where he was moved late last year. He was last seen on Thursday, when he had appeared in a court hearing via video link, smiling behind the bars of a cell and making jokes.
Mr. Navalny had been serving multiple sentences that would most likely have kept him in prison until at least 2031 on charges that his supporters say were largely fabricated in an effort to muzzle him. Despite increasingly harsh conditions, including repeated stints in solitary confinement, he maintained a presence on social media, while members of his team continued to publish investigations into Russia’s corrupt elite from exile.
Mr. Navalny was given a three-and-a-half-year prison sentence in February 2021 after returning to Russia from Germany, where he had been recovering from being poisoned the previous August. In March 2022, he received a nine-year sentence for embezzlement and fraud in a trial that international observers denounced as “politically motivated” and a “sham.” And in August 2023, he was sentenced to 19 years in prison for “extremism.”
Mr. Navalny had effectively returned from the dead after he was poisoned with a nerve agent in Siberia in 2020, and he conducted multiple hunger strikes to improve his treatment. During his detention, Mr. Navalny was repeatedly placed in solitary confinement and complained about severe illnesses. In December, he disappeared for three weeks during his transfer to a penal colony 40 miles north of the Arctic Circle.
Yet even from prison, Mr. Navalny remained an unflinching critic of Mr. Putin, a former K.G.B. officer whom he accused of corruptly skimming the country’s oil profits to enrich his friends and entourage in the security services. Mr. Putin’s political party, he once said, was a party of “swindlers and thieves,” and he accused the president of trying to turn Russia into a “feudal state.” (...)
Mr. Navalny was known for his innovative tactics in fighting corruption and promoting democracy. Defying expectations, he cannily used street politics and social media to build a tenacious opposition movement even after much of the independent news media in Russia was squelched and other critics were driven into exile or killed in unsolved murders. In the years before Russia invaded Ukraine, many of Mr. Navalny’s associates, and in some cases their relatives, were arrested or forced into exile.
At his death, he was the most prominent critic of Mr. Putin still standing in Russia, at a time when the president has engineered a path to remain in power until at least 2036. (...)
He had spoken openly of the possibility that he might be assassinated.
“I’m trying not to think about it a lot,” he said in an interview with CBS News in 2017. “If you start to think about what kind of risks I have, you cannot do anything.”
On Aug. 20, 2020, Mr. Navalny became violently ill and fell into a coma shortly after boarding a flight from Siberia, where he had met with opposition candidates for local office.
The flight made an emergency landing in the Russian city of Omsk, where doctors for two days resisted his wife’s pleas that he be transferred to Germany for treatment.
Mr. Navalny was eventually evacuated to Berlin on an air ambulance flight after a team of German doctors who had arrived in Omsk stated that it was safe for him to travel. A little more than a week later, the German government announced that he had been poisoned with a nerve agent from the highly potent Novichok family of toxins. The evidence, German officials said, was “unequivocal.”
“Mr. Navalny has been the victim of a crime,” Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany said at the time. “It raises very serious questions that only the Russian government can and must answer.” (...)
Despite the attacks and the jail terms, Mr. Navalny persevered, he said, out of a desire to change the course of his country and not let down the people who worked with him. He was angry at what he called Mr. Putin’s self-dealing inner circle and the security services that protected it.
“I do this because I hate these people,” he said in an interview with The New York Times in 2011, before he rose to prominence.
Still, he struggled to unite the feuding pro-democracy opposition parties, a fractured state of affairs that has plagued Russia’s politics since the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991.(...)
Mr. Navalny’s support among the middle class — mostly in the capital, Moscow, where he ran unsuccessfully for mayor in 2013 — brought a new type of politics to the country, one focused not on the woes of striking miners or the aloof intellectual class but on bread-and-butter issues of the new capitalist era, like protecting home equity and investments in stocks.
Years of arrests and attacks followed. (...)
In one searing exposé in 2017, he laid out a web of foundations and shell companies, all connected to former President Dmitri A. Medvedev, whose mansions, country estates, 18th-century palace in St. Petersburg and vineyard in Tuscany were displayed in the video.
“The system has turned so rotten that it doesn’t have any healthy parts at all,” Mr. Navalny said.
Mr. Navalny was detained so many times that he once joked to a judge that he wouldn’t take up the court’s time with a final statement before sentencing, because he would surely have another chance to do so again.
“The last word of the accused should be a dramatic moment in his life,” he said. “But they opened so many cases against me that this will not be my last chance to have a last word.”
Image: Sergey Ponomarev/Associated Press; Anatoly Maltsev/EPA, via Shutterstock
[ed. And just like that, a nation's hopes are dashed. See also: Navalny Challenged Russians to ‘Live Not by Lies’ (NYT); Trump, Putin, Carlson and the Shifting Sands of Today’s American Politics (NYT); and The Republican Party has grown much more supportive of Russia in recent years (NPR).]
[ed. And just like that, a nation's hopes are dashed. See also: Navalny Challenged Russians to ‘Live Not by Lies’ (NYT); Trump, Putin, Carlson and the Shifting Sands of Today’s American Politics (NYT); and The Republican Party has grown much more supportive of Russia in recent years (NPR).]
Vault 7: CIA Hacking Tools Revealed
Press Release
Today, Tuesday 7 March 2017, WikiLeaks begins its new series of leaks on the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. Code-named "Vault 7" by WikiLeaks, it is the largest ever publication of confidential documents on the agency.
The first full part of the series, "Year Zero", comprises 8,761 documents and files from an isolated, high-security network situated inside the CIA's Center for Cyber Intelligence in Langley, Virgina. It follows an introductory disclosure last month of CIA targeting French political parties and candidates in the lead up to the 2012 presidential election.
Recently, the CIA lost control of the majority of its hacking arsenal including malware, viruses, trojans, weaponized "zero day" exploits, malware remote control systems and associated documentation. This extraordinary collection, which amounts to more than several hundred million lines of code, gives its possessor the entire hacking capacity of the CIA. The archive appears to have been circulated among former U.S. government hackers and contractors in an unauthorized manner, one of whom has provided WikiLeaks with portions of the archive.
"Year Zero" introduces the scope and direction of the CIA's global covert hacking program, its malware arsenal and dozens of "zero day" weaponized exploits against a wide range of U.S. and European company products, include Apple's iPhone, Google's Android and Microsoft's Windows and even Samsung TVs, which are turned into covert microphones.
Since 2001 the CIA has gained political and budgetary preeminence over the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA). The CIA found itself building not just its now infamous drone fleet, but a very different type of covert, globe-spanning force — its own substantial fleet of hackers. The agency's hacking division freed it from having to disclose its often controversial operations to the NSA (its primary bureaucratic rival) in order to draw on the NSA's hacking capacities.
By the end of 2016, the CIA's hacking division, which formally falls under the agency's Center for Cyber Intelligence (CCI), had over 5000 registered users and had produced more than a thousand hacking systems, trojans, viruses, and other "weaponized" malware. Such is the scale of the CIA's undertaking that by 2016, its hackers had utilized more code than that used to run Facebook. The CIA had created, in effect, its "own NSA" with even less accountability and without publicly answering the question as to whether such a massive budgetary spend on duplicating the capacities of a rival agency could be justified.
In a statement to WikiLeaks the source details policy questions that they say urgently need to be debated in public, including whether the CIA's hacking capabilities exceed its mandated powers and the problem of public oversight of the agency. The source wishes to initiate a public debate about the security, creation, use, proliferation and democratic control of cyberweapons.
Once a single cyber 'weapon' is 'loose' it can spread around the world in seconds, to be used by rival states, cyber mafia and teenage hackers alike. (...)
Analysis
CIA malware targets iPhone, Android, smart TVs
CIA malware and hacking tools are built by EDG (Engineering Development Group), a software development group within CCI (Center for Cyber Intelligence), a department belonging to the CIA's DDI (Directorate for Digital Innovation). The DDI is one of the five major directorates of the CIA (see this organizational chart of the CIA for more details).
The EDG is responsible for the development, testing and operational support of all backdoors, exploits, malicious payloads, trojans, viruses and any other kind of malware used by the CIA in its covert operations world-wide.
The increasing sophistication of surveillance techniques has drawn comparisons with George Orwell's 1984, but "Weeping Angel", developed by the CIA's Embedded Devices Branch (EDB), which infests smart TVs, transforming them into covert microphones, is surely its most emblematic realization.
The attack against Samsung smart TVs was developed in cooperation with the United Kingdom's MI5/BTSS. After infestation, Weeping Angel places the target TV in a 'Fake-Off' mode, so that the owner falsely believes the TV is off when it is on. In 'Fake-Off' mode the TV operates as a bug, recording conversations in the room and sending them over the Internet to a covert CIA server.
Today, Tuesday 7 March 2017, WikiLeaks begins its new series of leaks on the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. Code-named "Vault 7" by WikiLeaks, it is the largest ever publication of confidential documents on the agency.
The first full part of the series, "Year Zero", comprises 8,761 documents and files from an isolated, high-security network situated inside the CIA's Center for Cyber Intelligence in Langley, Virgina. It follows an introductory disclosure last month of CIA targeting French political parties and candidates in the lead up to the 2012 presidential election.
"Year Zero" introduces the scope and direction of the CIA's global covert hacking program, its malware arsenal and dozens of "zero day" weaponized exploits against a wide range of U.S. and European company products, include Apple's iPhone, Google's Android and Microsoft's Windows and even Samsung TVs, which are turned into covert microphones.
Since 2001 the CIA has gained political and budgetary preeminence over the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA). The CIA found itself building not just its now infamous drone fleet, but a very different type of covert, globe-spanning force — its own substantial fleet of hackers. The agency's hacking division freed it from having to disclose its often controversial operations to the NSA (its primary bureaucratic rival) in order to draw on the NSA's hacking capacities.
By the end of 2016, the CIA's hacking division, which formally falls under the agency's Center for Cyber Intelligence (CCI), had over 5000 registered users and had produced more than a thousand hacking systems, trojans, viruses, and other "weaponized" malware. Such is the scale of the CIA's undertaking that by 2016, its hackers had utilized more code than that used to run Facebook. The CIA had created, in effect, its "own NSA" with even less accountability and without publicly answering the question as to whether such a massive budgetary spend on duplicating the capacities of a rival agency could be justified.
In a statement to WikiLeaks the source details policy questions that they say urgently need to be debated in public, including whether the CIA's hacking capabilities exceed its mandated powers and the problem of public oversight of the agency. The source wishes to initiate a public debate about the security, creation, use, proliferation and democratic control of cyberweapons.
Once a single cyber 'weapon' is 'loose' it can spread around the world in seconds, to be used by rival states, cyber mafia and teenage hackers alike. (...)
Analysis
CIA malware targets iPhone, Android, smart TVs
CIA malware and hacking tools are built by EDG (Engineering Development Group), a software development group within CCI (Center for Cyber Intelligence), a department belonging to the CIA's DDI (Directorate for Digital Innovation). The DDI is one of the five major directorates of the CIA (see this organizational chart of the CIA for more details).
The EDG is responsible for the development, testing and operational support of all backdoors, exploits, malicious payloads, trojans, viruses and any other kind of malware used by the CIA in its covert operations world-wide.
The increasing sophistication of surveillance techniques has drawn comparisons with George Orwell's 1984, but "Weeping Angel", developed by the CIA's Embedded Devices Branch (EDB), which infests smart TVs, transforming them into covert microphones, is surely its most emblematic realization.
The attack against Samsung smart TVs was developed in cooperation with the United Kingdom's MI5/BTSS. After infestation, Weeping Angel places the target TV in a 'Fake-Off' mode, so that the owner falsely believes the TV is off when it is on. In 'Fake-Off' mode the TV operates as a bug, recording conversations in the room and sending them over the Internet to a covert CIA server.
by Wikileaks | Read more:
Image: CIA
[ed. I don't recall hearing anything about this issue. Must have gotten downplayed somehow, or I just wasn't paying attention. Got it from this story, about The Artist Holding Valuable Art Hostage to Protect Julian Assange (using a thirty-two-ton Swiss bank safe, Andrei Molodkin says he will destroy works by Picasso, Rembrandt, and Warhol if the WikiLeaks founder dies in prison - New Yorker).]
Thursday, February 15, 2024
My Time with Kurt Cobain
My Time with Kurt Cobain (New Yorker)
by Michael Azerrad
Images: Adams Carvalho, Charles Peterson
"In early 1992, when I first met Kurt Cobain, he and Courtney Love were living in a little apartment in a two-up-two-down building on an ordinary street in the Fairfax section of Los Angeles. I had flown there from New York to interview him for a Rolling Stone cover story, the one with a famous photograph of him wearing a homemade T-shirt that said “Corporate Magazines Still Suck.” I was nervous. Not much was known about Kurt at that point, other than he was this guy from Seattle who screamed in his songs, smashed his guitars, and might be a heroin addict. He was also the most celebrated rock musician on the planet. (...)
Images: Adams Carvalho, Charles Peterson
"In early 1992, when I first met Kurt Cobain, he and Courtney Love were living in a little apartment in a two-up-two-down building on an ordinary street in the Fairfax section of Los Angeles. I had flown there from New York to interview him for a Rolling Stone cover story, the one with a famous photograph of him wearing a homemade T-shirt that said “Corporate Magazines Still Suck.” I was nervous. Not much was known about Kurt at that point, other than he was this guy from Seattle who screamed in his songs, smashed his guitars, and might be a heroin addict. He was also the most celebrated rock musician on the planet. (...)
“Hi,” he said, and two things struck me instantly. The first was: oh, wow, I know this guy. He wasn’t some sort of rock-and-roll space alien—he was actually like a lot of the stoners I went to high school with. (I was kind of a stoner in high school myself.) All the nervousness went away. The other thing I realized is uncomfortable to say: I sensed that he was one of those rock musicians who dies young. I’d never met someone like that before or even known many people who had died at all. I just sensed it. It turns out that a lot of other people around him did, too: his bandmate Dave Grohl sensed it, and so did Kurt’s wife, Courtney Love. Even Kurt’s own mother acknowledged it. It just wasn’t something that anyone would say out loud at the time."
Wednesday, February 14, 2024
This Drug Can Mend a Broken Heart
Though the details of each case vary, romantic betrayal through infidelity, abandonment, or emotional manipulation can upend one’s life in an instant. For Lantoine, her future plans, and the person they were attached to, were suddenly gone, and her functioning along with them.
Exhausted and an emotional wreck after almost a year, Lantoine learned about a clinical trial at the Douglas Mental Health University Institute, a Canadian psychiatric hospital in Montreal, that sought to ease the pain of romantic betrayal. The study did not rely on traditional psychotherapy sessions. It claimed it would dampen the emotional reverberations of what happened to her by pairing a beta-blocker medication called propranolol with a series of “memory reactivation sessions.” She signed up.
It sounds like science fiction, or science romantic-fiction. The 2004 movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind often gets brought up, says Michelle Lonergan, now a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Ottawa who led the trial as part of her Ph.D. In the film, a couple, post-breakup, use a service to erase their memories of one another in response to the suffering of heartbreak.
But the experiments that Lantoine enrolled in were an attempt to use a very real feature of the brain—albeit one we’re still learning the ins and outs of—called memory reconsolidation to attenuate agonizing romantic memories.
“Memory reconsolidation” describes how, when we recall a memory, it can become pliable. There is hope—and some intriguing early data—that, at the moment of recollection, we might be able to intentionally change a memory and make it less burdensome. This ability to modulate distressing memories is being investigated as an intervention to treat post-traumatic stress disorder, addiction, phobias, and is thought to have promise for depression or anxiety more broadly. It rests on an idea that’s emerged from our understanding of memory over the past few decades: Memories are not fixed, even the ones that haunt us the most.
Described this year in the Journal of Affective Disorders, the study Lantoine enrolled in is the first application of a memory reconsolidation-focused treatment for adjustment disorder resulting from romantic betrayal. (Adjustment disorder is defined as an emotional and behavioral maladaptive reaction to a stressful event, but not a life threatening one, so it doesn’t meet criteria for PTSD.)
Unlike Eternal Sunshine, Lantoine’s memories didn’t vanish in a dramatic collapse of a beach house into the Montauk coastline. She still had the declarative memory of what had happened. But, as Lantoine describes it, the memories were no longer debilitating.
“The treatment doesn’t remove the remembrance of the events,” Lantoine says. “It just removes the pain that was associated with the events. It doesn’t erase what happened to you. It just changes the impact it has on your life.” (...)
Exhausted and an emotional wreck after almost a year, Lantoine learned about a clinical trial at the Douglas Mental Health University Institute, a Canadian psychiatric hospital in Montreal, that sought to ease the pain of romantic betrayal. The study did not rely on traditional psychotherapy sessions. It claimed it would dampen the emotional reverberations of what happened to her by pairing a beta-blocker medication called propranolol with a series of “memory reactivation sessions.” She signed up.
But the experiments that Lantoine enrolled in were an attempt to use a very real feature of the brain—albeit one we’re still learning the ins and outs of—called memory reconsolidation to attenuate agonizing romantic memories.
“Memory reconsolidation” describes how, when we recall a memory, it can become pliable. There is hope—and some intriguing early data—that, at the moment of recollection, we might be able to intentionally change a memory and make it less burdensome. This ability to modulate distressing memories is being investigated as an intervention to treat post-traumatic stress disorder, addiction, phobias, and is thought to have promise for depression or anxiety more broadly. It rests on an idea that’s emerged from our understanding of memory over the past few decades: Memories are not fixed, even the ones that haunt us the most.
Described this year in the Journal of Affective Disorders, the study Lantoine enrolled in is the first application of a memory reconsolidation-focused treatment for adjustment disorder resulting from romantic betrayal. (Adjustment disorder is defined as an emotional and behavioral maladaptive reaction to a stressful event, but not a life threatening one, so it doesn’t meet criteria for PTSD.)
Unlike Eternal Sunshine, Lantoine’s memories didn’t vanish in a dramatic collapse of a beach house into the Montauk coastline. She still had the declarative memory of what had happened. But, as Lantoine describes it, the memories were no longer debilitating.
“The treatment doesn’t remove the remembrance of the events,” Lantoine says. “It just removes the pain that was associated with the events. It doesn’t erase what happened to you. It just changes the impact it has on your life.” (...)
It soon became clear that memory reconsolidation could be a powerful therapeutic tool. But the methods used in animal studies to interfere with reconsolidating were often harmful to humans. Enter propranolol: a common beta blocker used for lowering blood pressure as well as for treating anxiety and preventing migraines. Propranolol impairs adrenaline hormones in the brain and is thought to impact the production of other molecules needed for memory reconsolidation.
Starting in the early 2000s, researchers showed that, in rats, the drug could have similar post-retrieval effects as the more toxic compounds. And in 2009, researchers found that propranolol could help people disengage from a learned fear response. In this study, scientists showed human participants images of spiders, paired with an electric shock. One day later, some were given propranolol and others a placebo. On the third day, when participants saw the same images, those who had received the placebo noticeably startled, a physical manifestation of the fear response usually paired with a negative emotional state. But those who had been given the propranolol no longer had that reaction. These participants could still remember what had happened to them; propranolol didn’t erase the facts. But they no longer exhibited the biological signs of being afraid.
Starting in the early 2000s, researchers showed that, in rats, the drug could have similar post-retrieval effects as the more toxic compounds. And in 2009, researchers found that propranolol could help people disengage from a learned fear response. In this study, scientists showed human participants images of spiders, paired with an electric shock. One day later, some were given propranolol and others a placebo. On the third day, when participants saw the same images, those who had received the placebo noticeably startled, a physical manifestation of the fear response usually paired with a negative emotional state. But those who had been given the propranolol no longer had that reaction. These participants could still remember what had happened to them; propranolol didn’t erase the facts. But they no longer exhibited the biological signs of being afraid.
by Shayla Love, Nautilus | Read more:
Image: Max4e Photo/Shutterstock
[ed. See also: The Curse of Valentine's Day (UnHerd). Certainly has been cursed for me.]
[ed. See also: The Curse of Valentine's Day (UnHerd). Certainly has been cursed for me.]
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