Memia 2022.25: 20 million lives saved💉// American Taliban🤬// post-America🔜// crungus goes shopping👹🛒// G1 Summit🪑// Kondratieff waves〰️// defining the polycrisis😵💫
so that my grandchildren will remember me as a voice option on a small round device
Kia ora,
Welcome to this week’s Memia newsletter…your regular scan across the latest emerging tech and thinking about the future from Aotearoa New Zealand. Half way through the year already!
(Reminder, these weekly emails are *way* too long for most email clients. iOS users - you can read Memia in the Substack app (click below). Gmail users, you can click on the email title above to read online and avoid the annoying “[Message clipped]” link.)
ICYMI, Sunday’s instalment of my book in 30 Sundays, ⏩Fast Forward Aotearoa took a deeper look into the geopolitical tectonic forces at play in the world right now, particularly those driven by accelerating technological changes:
This coming weekend I’ll continue to enumerate the key underlying forces and then start mapping out a set of geopolitical scenarios to help frame the ongoing threads in the book:
The scenarios:
Scenario 0: Nuclear winter
Unfortunately we still have to plan for it to avoid it
Scenario 1: Rejuvenated US hegemony
A.S Lyons’ “Trans-Atlantis”
Scenario 2: Fractured US, ascendant China
US Presidential election 2024 → Trump V2, Fascist state
Distracted US government shifts away from international focus
Southern states led by Texas secede… who gets the nukes?
Russia takes what’s left of Ukraine with 1 nuke
Meanwhile China freely walks into Taiwan
Scenario 3: Expansionist China
Taiwan plus: South China Sea, Solomon Islands, Pacific Islands…why not Aotearoa?
(Plus Eastern Russia?)
Scenario 4: Google-Starlink Nation
Western corporate control of the entire tech stack underpins many governments around the world
cf. Infomocracy
Scenario 5: Worldcoin and Web3 network states
What would this look like…?
Scenario 6: Colony Luna
Mass emigration to the Moon to escape boiling, warring Earth
(Paid subscribers only… you know you should!)😇
Weekly roundup
The most clicked link in last week’s edition (6% of openers) was the LMAO video of cryptocurrency values expressed through the medium of a model airplane accident.
Also in the last week…
💉20 million lives saved
The Economist ($wall) reports on a new UK medical study which estimates how many lives have been saved by covid-19 vaccines around the world?
Answer: The study found found that in the first year of rollout, vaccinations saved the lives of between 19.1m-20.4m people - greater than the population of Chile.
(4th jabs are now available to over-50s in Aotearoa… #justsayin)
However, we’re by no means out of the woods yet. US physician Eric Topol who has been posting regularly on the latest Covid-19 research discusses worrying evidence that reinfection with an Omicron variant significantly increases all-cause mortality, cardiovascular and lung adverse outcomes, 3-fold risk of hospitalization, and impacts other health domains.
Mask staying on here…
🤬American Taliban
Fair to say that the US took a significant step further away from the rest of the West with this week’s SCOTUS 6-3 decision to overturn the landmark 1973 Roe vs. Wade Supreme Court decision, fundamentally altering healthcare rights for women in the US.
This week’s ruling (a hangover from the Trump era when he stuffed the court with far-right lifetime-tenured Christian appointees) jerks the US straight back into its internal culture wars…drowning out any chance of consensus-based legislation or rational dialogue on social media.
Those six members of SCOTUS who voted for the decision are indeed worthy of the title “American Taliban” for their theocratic position:
Digital civil liberties group the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) put out a clear statement about the now-very-real risks of the use of personal health data collected by 3rd party software (eg period tracking apps) being used for enforcement of these new laws (my bolding):
“Today's decision deprives millions of people of a fundamental right, and also underscores the importance of fair and meaningful protections for data privacy. Everyone deserves to have strong controls over the collection and use of information they necessarily leave behind as they go about their normal activities, like using apps, search engine queries, posting on social media, texting friends, and so on. But those seeking, offering, or facilitating abortion access must now assume that any data they provide online or offline could be sought by law enforcement.
People should carefully review privacy settings on the services they use, turn off location services on apps that don’t need them, and use encrypted messaging services. Companies should protect users by allowing anonymous access, stopping behavioral tracking, strengthening data deletion policies, encrypting data in transit, enabling end-to-end message encryption by default, preventing location tracking, and ensuring that users get notice when their data is being sought. And state and federal policymakers must pass meaningful privacy legislation. All of these steps are needed to protect privacy, and all are long overdue.”
(The detailed OpSec discipline that they suggest for those individuals seeking an abortion reinforces just how deeply the surveillance state has penetrated in the West. Don’t write off “Web3” just yet…)
🔜Post-America
For those of us looking on from the outside with incredulity, the SCOTUS decision emphasises again how unfit-for-purpose and vulnerable the aging US constitution, electoral system, political and legal institutions are for the 21st century context. Despite its renewed assertiveness on the world stage, the most powerful country in the world seems ever more on the verge of falling apart unless it can somehow rapidly upgrade its democratic political systems to remove the weaknesses.
Two pieces I came across this week predict the rapid fragmentation and disintegration of the US as we know it:
Andrew Tanner - The American Divorce Is An Unstoppable Force:
“In 2024 America will be exhausted and afraid, facing what feels like the third repeat of an awful election, the Trump years now a distant memory of a time when everyone was screaming a lot but property values were rising and the stock market was booming.
Add to that the near certainty of a disruptive third party bid and you have a recipe for a maelstrom. All signs point to Republicans in key state legislatures intervening to make sure their boy is made President no matter what the rest of the country says.
It’s what their voters want. It’s what they’re willing to pay for — even at the cost of half the country breaking off and going its own way.
No longer holding the same truths to be self-evident, Americans primed to take the Constitution and go their own way based on where they live.
America wants to divide, and so it will, like every other empire has before, no matter how blessed its snowflake leaders thought they were.”
John Robb - Sanctuary networks covers similar themes (paywalled - recapping an article he wrote in 2019):
“The Supreme Court ruling on abortion is rocket fuel for sanctuary networks that allow people to opt-out of federal and state laws. A loss of institutional legitimacy has led to a devolution of political power in the US. States and counties have banded together in rapidly growing sanctuary networks to opt out of federal and state laws.“
What happens to the world’s most advanced nuclear arsenal?
Jomini returns
🇺🇦 Not forgetting the other war which is *actually happening now*… the latest thread from Twitter accoint Jomini of the West (previously covered in Memia 2022.22) dropped yesterday covering 11-27 June: …slow, grinding advances by both sides in hot summer temperatures.
🪑G1 Summit
Meanwhile… at the G7 meeting in Germany, Bojo and Justin Trudeau were joshing matily about taking their shirts off and going on a “bare-chested horseback ride” to imitate Putin’s penchant for action-man photos (Johnson actually said “show them our pecs”🤡).
Vlad the disinvited invader had to enjoy his own company…just days before Russia defaulted on US$100M in debt servicing repayments, its first default in more than a century.
Russian disinformation
Joking aside.
A new report from Microsoft, Defending Ukraine: Early Lessons from the Cyber War delivers a comprehensive analysis of recent cyber offensive and defensive capabilities which have previously mostly operated hidden from view. It’s a robustly worded report. Microsoft President Brad Smith states in the foreword:
“…The Russian invasion relies in part on a cyber strategy that includes at least three distinct and sometimes coordinated efforts—destructive cyberattacks within Ukraine, network penetration and espionage outside Ukraine, and cyber influence operations targeting people around the world...
The cyber aspects of the current war extend far beyond Ukraine and reflect the unique nature of cyberspace. When countries send code into battle, their weapons move at the speed of light. The internet’s global pathways mean that cyber activities erase much of the longstanding protection provided by borders, walls, and oceans. And the internet itself, unlike land, sea, and the air, is a human creation that relies on a combination of public and private- sector ownership, operation, and protection.
This in turn requires a new form of collective defense.
This war pits Russia, a major cyber-power, not just against an alliance of countries. The cyber defense of Ukraine relies critically on a coalition of countries, companies, and NGOs”
Although Aotearoa is not one of the countries where Russian cyber-espionage was detected since the outbreak of the Ukraine war, there is an analysis of how Russian-sponsored disinformation spread into Aotearoa in 2021:
“These ongoing Russian operations build on recent sophisticated efforts to spread false COVID-19 narratives in multiple Western countries. These included state sponsored cyber influence operations in 2021 that sought to discourage vaccine adoption through English-language internet reports while simultaneously encouraging vaccine usage through Russian-language sites. During the last six months, similar Russian cyber influence operations sought to help inflame public opposition to COVID-19 policies in New Zealand and Canada.”
“An assessment of the stories driving Russian propaganda consumption in New Zealand in late 2021, including below, shows a clear focus on COVID-19 issues. The top two stories, for example, drove narratives that questioned the efficacy of vaccines and suggested that they had life-threatening side effects. While it would be premature to draw concrete conclusions at this point about cause and effect, this spike in Russian propaganda consumption in New Zealand preceded an increase in public protests in early 2022 in Wellington, the nation’s capital.”
Food for thought.
[Weak] signals
This week’s collection of tech signals from near and far futures… I’ve been a bit more pressed for time than usual this week so mostly just links to tweets!
🔑🟤[e-]tāra
The topic of CBDCs has gone quiet for a while… Te Pūtea Matua / Reserve Bank of New Zealand is considering its next steps after completing a series of recent consultations on the Future of Money.
Commemorating our first ever Matariki public holiday, Bernard Hickey made the case for “Matariki money” - the creation of a new Reserve Bank accounts for every resident of Aotearoa-NZ as soon as they were born, that could be accessed by an app or debit card connected to the EFTPOS payment system, and which provide the option for “helicopter money” rather than asset-inflating QE monetary policy.
“I’d suggest the accounts be called Matariki accounts and the currency be called the e-tāra. Every child born here could be granted a starting payment of, say, $10,000, which would be linked to the parents’ or guardians’ Matariki account. That could be used to help families in those tough early years, but also create a base of usage that meant people and shops were familiar with the Matariki cards, the Matariki app and the e-tāras. In time, the accounts could be used for benefit payments and, if people chose, as their main transaction account that employers, the IRD, Government departments, ACC and others would use. Anyone being granted residency would be given a Matariki account.”
Totally sensible and simply achievable financial innovation… and furthermore, arguably the Government already owns Kiwibank and so has the basic financial infrastructure in place already. (Likewise I suggested the creation of a new national digital currency called the Aotearoa Tāra back in Memia 2020.37 (don’t need the “e-” prefix… it’s not 1997! )
What would be more innovative and more transformative would be mobile peer-to-peer app instant payments using the same accounts.
This is a necessary component of implementing a UBI policy too, @rafmanji!
👹🛒Crungus goes shopping
Comedian Guy Kelly was messing around with DALLE Mini when he decided to put in the made-up word "crungus". With rather scary results:
(Check out the thread below — if you have an hour or more to spend — lots of variations on the “Crungus does X” theme…! Very replicable - both DALLE and GPT-3 think that “Crungus” is a monster). One of my favourites:
The weird thing is, though…so far no-one seems to know where the images are coming from… the word “Crungus” doesn’t seem to refer to a monster anywhere in the internet training set for OpenAI/DALLE - reinforcing the maxim that although we can build machine-learning AI, often we don't know precisely how the algorithms actually work.
(Update: actually anything containing the phrase “-rungus” seems to generate a pretty scary monster But still no source of understanding of why…).
(Cue jokes about summoning demons…)
Web3 smartphone
Solana Labs announced a Web3 smartphone. Ambitious launch date.
Plural noun for “robot dog”?
A “terror”. Imagine the spec for version 2, but with weapons attached and swarm formation capabilities.
Metaversal standards forum
Qualcomm, Huawei, Microsoft and Adobe are some of the heavyweight tech firms who have formed the Metaverse Standards Forum to drive open metaverse interoperability.
Quantum integrated circuit
The team at Australian deep tech startup Silicon Quantum Computing, led by Scientia Professor Michelle Simmons has claimed a breakthrough by creating the world’s first integrated circuit manufactured at an atomic scale. (New Industry and Science Minister Ed Husic promised significant support from government to retain the world-leading team in Australia - the new Aus government has committed AU$1Bn for critical technology as a fund that will help support the evolution of deep tech companies.)
Farming upwards
Arama Kukutai, keynote speaker at last week’s Boma E Tipu conference talks to Stuff about the future of indoor farming:
Creepy or USP?
At an Amazon conference in Las Vegas last week, Alexa AI showed off new deepfake demo of the device taking on the voice of dear departed grandma to read a bedtime story… (I’d love to see the user story behind that feature… “As a person who is still alive today I want to [pay to] get my voiceprint preserved for eternity so that my grandchildren will remember me as a voice option on a small round device…!”)
Flying ferry
The world’s fastest electric ship, the hydrofoiling Candela P-12 Shuttle, is set to hit Stockholm’s waters next year and aiming to make Stockholm’s waterborne public transport faster than cars and subway.
Mind expanding
Three links to share this week to tickle those neurons…
〰️Kondratieff Waves
Given the discussion of the potential terminal decline of the US discussed earlier, I came across the concept of Kondratieff Waves (named after Russian economist Nikolai Kondratieff, 1892-1938). Also known as a super-cycles, K-waves, surges, and long waves - the concept refers to economic cycles, lasting about 40 to 60 years, experienced by capitalist economies in recent history.
A Kondratieff Wave is a long-term economic cycle believed to be born out of technological innovation, which results in a long period of prosperity. This theory was founded by Nikolai D. Kondratieff (also spelled "Kondratiev"), a communist Russia-era economist who noticed agricultural commodity and copper prices experienced long-term cycles. Kondratieff believed that these cycles involved periods of evolution and self-correction.
Economists have identified the following Kondratieff Waves since the 18th century.
The first resulted from the invention of the steam engine and ran from 1780 to 1830.
The second cycle arose because of the steel industry and the spread of railroads and ran from 1830 to 1880.
The third cycle resulted from electrification and innovation in the chemical industry and ran from 1880 to 1930.
The fourth cycle was fueled by autos and petrochemicals and lasted from 1930 to 1970.
The fifth cycle was based on information technology and began in 1970 and ran through the present, though some economists believe we are at the start of a sixth wave that will be driven by biotechnology and healthcare.
Additionally, each cycle can have four sub-cycles, or phases, that have been dubbed after seasons.
Spring: Increase in productivity, along with inflation, signifying an economic boom.
Summer: Increase in the general affluence level leads to changing attitudes toward work that results in a deceleration of economic growth.
Autumn: Stagnating economic conditions give rise to a deflationary growth spiral that gives rise to isolationist policies, further curtailing growth prospects.
Winter: Economy in the throes of a debilitating depression that tears the social fabric of society, as the gulf between the dwindling number of "haves" and the expanding number of "have-nots" increases dramatically.
2022 feels like we may be entering Autumn…
(The theory was not welcomed by officials in Kondratieff's home country of Russia, particularly by Josef Stalin. Kondratieff ended up in a concentration camp in Siberia and was killed by a firing squad in 1938.)
😵💫Defining the PolyCrisis
Economist Adam Tooze has a decent go at Defining the PolyCrisis — from crisis pictures to the crisis matrix. (US-centric but useful analysis).
Running down and up
From the Foresight University website, a chapter on acceleration: Entropy and Information: Our Universe is Running Down and Running Up:
“Two of the most fundamental and important facts we have identified about our universe are that it is simultaneously running down, or increasing in entropy as a global system, and at the same time it is running up, or increasing in useful order, in evolutionary and developmental complexity, everywhere that adaptive structures have emerged. This running down, in our global energy potential, is somehow driving this running up, in our local adapted complexity. That’s quite interesting, but our universe is stranger still. Not only are we both running down and running up, our universe is accelerating in both directions, doing an ever-faster job of both global entropy creation and of local order creation.”
(This phenomenon increasingly underpins pretty much my entire model of everything…)
Rollcall
Some notable mentions around the motu this week:
Ecologist Mike Joy has been hyperactive on social media recently, stepping up his ongoing campaigning for restoring Aotearoa’s environment. This latest 15min video from Newsroom - Changing South - Dairy Farming on the Plains - in which he clearly, calmly and articulately argues the reasons why the number of cows on the Canterbury Plains urgently need to be reduced at least twelve-fold to have a hope of achieving healthy, fresh drinking water: that means from 1.2 million to 100,000 cows.
Luna calling
Rocket Lab’s CAPSTONE launch to lunar orbit went off successfully!
(Also next week, the annual University of Otago Foreign Policy School sets its focus on space.)
Wireless city
Christchurch City Council and Enable Networks unveiled the super fast Christchurch Free Wifi network with coverage in the Ōtautahi CBD to start with:
CCC head of Smart Cities Michael Healy took it for a test drive:
Awesome for those of us who haunt local cafes with our laptops…
Nuggets and gems
A trio of links to end the week:
300 years later I still have those tabs open
Chilly down South
I’m a Train
And finally for something completely, er, *different*.
Spotted on Facebook (thanks to my primary schoolmate Simon H back in the UK for sharing)… comedian / artist / surrealist Quentin Smirhes (an alter ego?) interprets I’m a Train in his own inimitable style. Can’t stop replaying this…hilarious and bizarrely compelling to watch (and the YouTube comments are hilarious too … (“This would've wiped the floor with Eurovision“ / “Imagine if this was the only thing left of humans for aliens to find”).🤣
(Check out Quentin’s other work on The Wrong TV channel 27…if you dare)
That’s it for yet another week…as always thanks to everyone who gets in touch with ideas, thoughts, feedback, links - appreciated!
Ngā mihi
Ben
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