Memia 2022.04: Value capture - a trojan horse?🐴// house prices yay🤦// FloC flop🛑// dead Diem⚰️// cash lightning⚡// philosophy of the metaverse💭// griftech💸

Remain free…*initially

Feb 1

Kia ora,

Welcome to the Memia newsletter… your weekly scan across emerging tech and the unfolding future from Aotearoa New Zealand. Thanks for being here!

🗞️Memia on Sunday is a new ~weekly edition for Memia paid subscribers (thank you!), exploring 2-3 current topic areas in more depth and also some extra links and suggested weekend reading.

Memia on Sunday 30 Jan 2022 went *wide-angle*:

BYOJ - Bring your own job
- Importing “one-person exporters”: a new remote-work economic attraction strategy for Aotearoa’s regions?
Transhuman evolutionary logic and synthetic wombs
- Artificial pregnancy viewed through the lens of accelerating co-evolution of biology and technology.
Weekend reading links
- The history of the end of poverty
- The housing theory of everything
- Covid’s winners and losers: Bernard Hickey on the zero-sum outcomes of the RBNZ and government’s Covid-19 policy response (see below)
- Honey we bought a forest: ecological investment
- CryptoBros: McDonalds is hiring

Get your own copy of Memia on Sunday for Waitangi Weekend here:

Weekly roundup

The most clicked link in last week’s newsletter (13% of openers) was the super-fast liquid 3D printer.

Also in the last week…

🦠Omicron origins

The Omicron variant “just came out of nowhere” with a host of unusual mutations at the end of last year, when it was first detected in South Africa. Nature explores the science of where did Omicron come from?

“scientists are investigating three theories. Although researchers have sequenced millions of SARS-CoV-2 genomes, they might simply have missed a series of mutations that eventually led to Omicron. Alternatively, the variant might have evolved mutations in one person, as part of a long-term infection. Or it could have emerged unseen in other animal hosts, such as mice or rats.”

No certain answers so far…

🤦House prices yay

This week, average Aotearoa house prices tipped over double their value 10 years ago to more than NZ$1 million. (RBNZ’s inflation calculator tool shows even higher numbers below). The whole system remains fundamentally broken…

…Especially when you factor in the last two years: Covid’s big winners and losers revealed by Bernard Hickey goes through the financial data on the RBNZ’s money printing of the last 2 years… it’s just brutal:

“the Government’s Covid policies made the rich almost NZ$1t richer, while the poor were allowed to get NZ$400m further in debt to the Government itself, and were forced to apply for more than twice as many food parcels in our largest city.“

RNZ reports that the rising cost of living in Aotearoa may trigger civil disobedience. D’ya reckon?😣

🐴Value capture - a trojan horse?

Last week’s announcement of the chosen route for the Auckland airport light rail link raised two primary questions:
- Should it ever get built at all? The scale of construction required for the selected half-tunnelled option means significantly higher levels of embedded carbon (mainly from concrete and steel production) compared to surface-only Light Rail. Either way, *none* of the options considered comes anywhere near the He Pou a Rangi / Climate Change Commission emissions budget of 63% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2038.
  Source: Light Rail Business Case, download from https://www.lightrail.co.nz/light-rail/resources/
  So…do the math on GHG, stick it in an appendix but then let’s just build it anyway…? There have to be more environmentally sustainable options, think outside the square.
- Is the proposed “value capture” tax a trojan horse? - Finance Minister Grant Robertson wasted no time saying the government is investigating a “value capture” tax, to take a share of any “windfall” in land values along the proposed Auckland Light Rail corridor.
  - A similar idea for a house price “windfall tax” was suggested by the Productivity Commission in 2018.
  - There is international precedent for retrospective windfall taxation: in the UK in 1997 Tony Blair’s incoming Labour Government introduced a Windfall Tax on excess profits of privatised utilities.
  - If the precedent can be established that “windfalls” in property values are taxable… then does this give the Greens (and TOP…see Raf Manji below) a policy platform to stand at the next election for a one-off, retrospective “windfall tax” on the crazy tax-free capital gains of the last several years?

🆓Remain free…*initially

The wholesomely addictive word game Wordle sold to the New York Times for a reported US$ 7-figure sum (apparently not disappearing behind a paywall just yet…). The NYT company said:

“the game would initially remain free to new and existing players”

As I covered in Memia 2022.02, the exquisite viral sharing mechanic (black/yellow/green squares) is the secret sauce behind Wordle’s success… I hope Te Whanganui-a-Tara -based inventor @irihapeta is looked after!
So far there are three tweets with the hashtag #wordleDAO. I suspect there may be a few more to come.😜 (See also HelloWordl below…)

[Weak] signals

Memia’s weekly curation of signals from near and far futures…

🌎🌍🌏2022 Geopolitics on a page

US-based strategic think tank The Atlantic Council published its list of Top 12 Risks and Opportunities for 2022. An accessible read covering the biggest currents in global geopolitics right now, with some hope in there! (h/t spotting Rob Warner).

🛑FLoC flop

Google replaced its frankly confusing FloC proposal to replace 3rd party cookies with “Topics”:

“With Topics, your browser determines a handful of topics, like “Fitness” or “Travel & Transportation,” that represent your top interests for that week based on your browsing history. Topics are kept for only three weeks and old topics are deleted. Topics are selected entirely on your device without involving any external servers, including Google servers.”

Early digital advertising industry reception is mixed.

⚰️Dead Diem

Meta finally pulled the plug on its vision for a private global digital currency … selling the assets of the Diem association (formerly Libra) to private crypto-focused bank Silvergate for only US$200M after being effectively blocked by regulators for years:

“it became clear from our dialogue with federal regulators that the project could not move ahead” - Diem CEO Stuart Levey

Here’s an inside story:

Christian Catalini @ccatalini

1/13 Four years ago we came together as the founding team of ≋Libra to use crypto to democratize access to the financial system. As the last person from the original ≋ founding team involved in this phase of Diem, here are some personal thoughts and reflections on the journey.

However, Meta simultaneously joined the board of the Crypto Open Patent Alliance - pledging not to enforce its core cryptocurrency patents against anyone, effectively making these patents freely available for all to use. So Diem’s innovation still lives on, even if Diem doesn’t. And those regulators may have won a battle, but…

⚡Cash lightning

…Faring slightly better in the same problem space, Block (formerly Square, now with *full-time* CEO Jack Dorsey) announced that its Cash App supports free Bitcoin payments over the Lightning Network, rolling out to all US customers in the next few weeks. Cash App users can send Bitcoin internationally to other wallets or to any merchant that accepts Lightning Network payments, with zero fees. Watch this space if it takes off, could be like WeChatPay or AliPay in China 5 years ago.

(I’ll be covering the potential implications and other recent developments in CBDCs in this weekend’s Memia on Sunday).

🥽Augmented reality upgrades

Amid all the Metaverse hype, there’s still lots of core platform investment happening in AR:

Tom’s Guide: Apple Glasses: Everything we've heard so far
Magic Leap (remember them?), now focusing on “Enterprise AR”, are dripfeeding mouthwatering technical details of the forthcoming Magic Leap 2:
Nike want you to go shoe shopping in AR:
And Trimble released what looks like a revolutionary AR solution for construction site layout working with Microsoft Hololens (Inside story here):

🦑Switched off for Squidcraft

All internet access was brought down in the tiny European country of Andorra by a suspiciously timed targeted DDoS attack on Andorra Telecom. At the time, players from Team Andorra were well positioned to win a US$100,000 prize pot in the “SquidCraft Games” tournament on Twitch…until they all got disconnected simultaneously.🤔

Chasing Oumuamua

Project Lyra is a plan to launch a high-velocity spacecraft to chase down the mysterious first-known interstellar visitor Oumuamua which briefly passed through our solar system in 2017.

Mind expanding

Lots to read as always…

Mind reading

The science of Mind Reading in the New Yorker (thanks Matt McKevitt)
State of the art: Bryan Johnson’s Kernel helmet reads the brain of a gaming champion:

💭Philosophy of the metaverse

Philosopher David J. Chalmers considers the possibilities of VR: Adventures in Technophilosophy, On the Reality of Virtual Worlds. Deep and recursive:

At this point, we can ask, “How do you know you’re not in a computer simulation right now?”

Rollcall

Around the motus (North, South and West) this week:

Sydney-based Airtree Ventures, an active investor in Aotearoa tech have raised a new AU$700M in funding, including starting a new dedicated “Web3 Fund”. VC in this region has changed so much in the last few years, eh?🤯

🗳️Congratulations to friend and Memia reader Raf Manji who has been selected as the new leader of TOP (The Opportunities Party).
- Raf gets my nod for Finance Minister in a Labour-Green-TOP coalition in a shot - he’s got intellectual horsepower that’s sorely missing in most of our political discourse these days, he’ll be a refreshing voice to hear out there. Plus he’s more battle-tested than most: as a two-term Christchurch City Councillor, he was pivotal in steering that organisation successfully through the bruising financial convulsions of the post-earthquake years.
- TOP’s policy platform will resonate with a growing proportion of the electorate given everything that’s going on in the economy:
  - Affordable housing and rent,
  - Climate friendly recovery, and
  - (*Finally* someone’s standing on this!) Universal Basic Income.
- Here’s Raf on his first Radio interview this week - the TOP policies and his rational, informal, relaxed (too relaxed?) style could well resonate with >5% of voters feeling unheard by the other parties...TOP polled 2% in this week’s Kantar poll, need 3% more in 2 years - good luck and enjoy the ride, chap!
🎉Congratulations also due to Sam Ramlu and the team at Tāmaki Makaurau-based studios M-Theory and Oddboy for releasing their groundbreaking time-travelling-action-adventure VR game Wanderer, to rapturous reviews worldwide. Looks amazing, awesome work.

Hidden gems

Keeping me amused this week…

💸Griftech

A group of NFT grifters tried to “Mint” NFTs of colours, which would then incur royalties when used in other NFTs. The hilarious Dan Hon went to town on Twitter (click for full thread):

Dan Hon @hondanhon

Jesus. Fucking. Christ.

…which ended up here (I just heard Bertrand Russell gut-laughing from his grave…):

Mike Riverso @MikeRiverso

I mint the set of all sets.

Dan Hon @hondanhon

Holy shit wait until the set theory mathematicians discover NFTs

…one of the funniest threads I’ve ever read (including Dan’s coining of the term “Griftech”). But more substantially, unequivocally demonstrating the illogical absurdity of the Western concept of copyright.

Guinness, surfer, white horses, Leftfield

If you’re old enough like me to remember the classic Guinness “Surfer” TV ad from 1999… this thread tells the whole story of its conception and production (although omits the brilliance of UK techno band Leftfield’s Phat Planet soundtrack). Groundbreaking visuals for its time.