How Elon Musk and Dogecoin Will Change the World 🤖 🐶

🔦This week's spotlight: Tesla is Changing the World and All People Talk About is Elon Musk's Text Messages

My go-to trick to keep myself awake while driving at night is to wonder whether I am on the autistic spectrum. For the record, I don't think I am. Yet many people's feedback on me remains that when they meet me for the first time, they feel I am "weird".

Elon Musk, the world's richest person, identifies as having Asperger's syndrome. Due to me doing so much research and self-questioning about ASD myself, I think I have more sympathy for Musk's quirks than most people. As a result, I generally abhor his media coverage. I'm not saying we shall worship him. We should, though, recognize he does not process and communicate information and emotions as a typical person would.

All of this is to say that if you laugh at Musk's SMS over his Twitter takeover bid and bromance with Jack Dorsey, I think it says more about you than about Musk himself.

The focus on Musk's personality also leaves behind how much Tesla will change labour dramatically in the next 15 years. I don't think we're ready for this.

🐶 Musk's SMS Reveal Ambitions for Twitter and Social Media Rooted in Web3 Principles

As part of the Twitter v. Musk trial over the billionaire's retraction (now apparently back on track) to buy the social media platform, the latter's text messages were submitted to the courts and thus made public. TechCrunch is my top resource for tech news, but the writers here really cranked up the schadenfreude to 11.

For example, the journalists laugh at the idea of using Dogecoin to Tweet. Yet Musk's idea to open source the algorithm and to have tweets on a blockchain where users would need to "pay" with crypto and where they would earn tokens with likes is already happening in web3! I have joined decentralized social media Dbuzz and while yes, the content is nowhere as relevant as Twitter itself, this is a promising avenue for digital communities whose existence is not threatened by a corporation's arbitrary power.

Don't sleep on Dogecoin!

One mistake many people do is looking at the problem from a partisan perspective. Musk associates himself with repellent right-wing personalities Ron DeSantis and Joe Rogan. However, tendencies change. Would you feel the same about Musk if people with more liberal views felt threatened? It sort of baffles me to see conservatives being worried about "Big Tech". Aren't the liberals supposed to be the ones who challenge corporations?

The root of social media platforms' problems is that you do not own your audience or community - the platform does. The platform sells your audience's attention to advertisers. Decentralized social media platforms could become the next generation of "open source" knowledge and creativity with direct payments from the audience to the creator. I'm not saying Instagram and Tiktok will decline. What I am saying is that it is dangerous to make a living off of social media platforms because it could be taken away anytime.

But there's more!

🤖 Musk's Optimus Robot is Not the Best in The World And That's OK

The biggest news of the week is by far the reveal of Musk's Optimus robot. Not that the robot in itself is impressive. As stated in The Verge's coverage, Boston Dynamics and Honda's humanoid robots have fine motor skills and global movement capabilities. What the Optimus has, though, is mass-scale production capability. I'm not even talking about the ridiculously low $20,000 price tag! It's not unimaginable to see one or many of these in every business within 10 years! Optimuses will change our rooftops, move around boxes in warehouses, clean up toilets, and even serve coffee!

The Optimus robot's reveal has to be put in parallel with the new mind-boggling stat that Tesla now has 160,000 customers running its Full Self Driving Beta. Even more impressive is "Dojo", the supercomputer that controls Tesla's "hive mind" of cars. Assuming another decade's worth of incremental changes to the technology, I expect most delivery trucks to be replaced as well.

All in all, Elon Musk's ambition and impressive R&D team are shaping a future where labour will completely, completely change. The impacts will be profound. I cannot overstate how damaging this will be to the identities of men in rural areas. All the "salt of the earth", "blue collar" work will be replaced by robots. The 2008 Crisis changed the US economy through and through: this New York Times piece illustrates how "gig jobs" such as Uber drivers replaced traditional factory work in industries that moved their production to China. As Steve Jobs famously said to Barack Obama about outsourcing to China: "These Jobs Are Not Coming Back". What we're about to witness is round two of the disruption wave.

Think about the consequences. I strongly believe Donald Trump's "Make America Great Again" campaign to be a direct result of the traumas to the job markets that happened before and after the 2008 Recession. Now robots will take over.

Unless we can convince these men that "nurse" can be manly enough for them, I think we're headed for a Trump 2.0. So yes, let's find ways to make these jobs to be badass. Because we will need nurses and teachers even when robots take over labour.

🥑Privacy Place

🍪Brave Browser to Block Cookie Banners is Not What We Need

Crypto and privacy-focused browser Brave announces its upcoming version will block cookie consent banners. The blocking does not guarantee cookies will stay away from your browsers. The feature's goal is not privacy but rather cleaning the web of annoyances. Cookie banners have grown into "dark patterns" that trick users into unknowingly giving consent to being tracked.

Blocking cookie banners is a loose-loose proposition, not unlike ad-blockers. A version of the Web was built on awful advertising that tracks and tricks users. Opera and Brave now block ads natively. We created laws to manage the tracking and thus were born cookie banners. Banners became awful to the point where we now have to block them. It's a cat-and-mouse game. It shouldn't be this way.

I keep coming back to Tim Berners-Lee's Solid pods model and the web3 for a winning proposition. Browsers should not reactively block annoying banners! Users should embed their preferences into their browsers and websites should tailor the experience based on such preferences. People have been the product for too long. We need to take power back over our data.

🎯InfoSec Stories

📧Another Exchange Zero Day Puts our Email in Danger from Chinese Attackers

In what can only be called catastrophic news, Microsoft confirms two major zero-day vulnerabilities on Exchange servers. Microsoft Exchange is by far the most popular e-mail server in the world, especially in enterprises. Many if not most of them keep an on-prem version of Exchange servers for archive, backup, or retroactive compatibility purposes. Exchange updates typically take multiple hours.

Details of the vulnerabilities remain scarce. We know the attack has been carried away by Chinese threats and that the bug likely comes from Chinese characters encoding. It uses the same "AutoDiscover" feature as ProxyShell to deliver a payload. Auto Discover allows Exchange clients (your Outlook app) to configure themselves with minimal user input. ProxyShell, and this new Zero-Day, are able to send specially crafted URLs to Auto Discover in order to trick the feature into sending commands to the Exchange Server.

If you are in a position of influence within your company's IT department, my recommendation is to explore the full retirement of your on-prem Exchange servers. It may be complex, but in the long run, it will save you time.

The full breakdown from security researcher Kevin Beaumont:

🗣️Social Media Chronicles

🔎Google Reveals Plans to TikTok its Flagship Search Product

Sometimes I hate being right. In last week's CYOF, I wrote: "we should prepare for the worst from Google. We will suffer in real-time from various iterations of "enhanced" search interfaces." Google didn't disappoint, as per The Verge!

Google reveals how it will basically get rid of any result that does not appear on its front page in favour of more "featured content" such as videos. So basically: more of what you already get in Google's side panels plus the ads. Google is obviously attempting to fully capture the audience's attention. Its main value driver is ads placed on its landing search page.

While I admire Google's ambitions to reinvent the "10 blue link" to deliver more visual recommendations, I think Google exposes itself to a big risk from a user experience perspective. Google is our portal to the web. If Google only provides "Google-ized" content, I feel we are missing out. This is what differs between Google and Instagram or Tiktok. Tiktok is your hub for silly content. Instagram is where you fantasize about sunset on the beach. Google is your window on the world. Big difference. I hope they figure it out.

🥴️WHAT IS PSYOPS??? AND WHY IS THE USA DOING IT???

If you had asked me a week ago about psyops, I would have thought you talked about extraterrestrial psychic powers. I nearly fell off my chair when reading about the Pentagon ordering a review of US psyops on social media like it was a mundane thing. US authorities seemingly lead "influence operations" in countries like China, Russia and Afghanistan to "promote pro-Western narratives".

That sounds like particularly bad timing in coincidence with Joe Biden's announced presidential order to replace the US-EU Privacy Shield, which was invalidated due to the US's surveillance operations.

The US government's alleged tactics leveraged AI to create fake users, fake media, fake narratives, fake pictures...

Fake Chihuahuas?

The future will compromise much more of these fake accounts, and deepfake individuals. We will need to design increasingly complex detection mechanisms to ensure people's authenticity.

🤖AI Almanac

🎥Meta Reveals AI Video Generator

Did you think DALL-E, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion's AI image generators were impressive? Get ready because Meta unveiled a new system, Make-A-Video, that will blow your mind (sample videos in The Verge's article). Meta's endgame is evident: advertisers will be able to pick their audience and automatically generate a video ad within seconds, with a simple prompt. The whole chain will be automated! Media and marketing agencies will be hit hardest by the commoditization of video advertising via AI generation.

I see the same potential in Make-A-Video as image generators. We will see a new wave of creativity based on "prompt engineering". Design classes must begin teaching these now. These tools will become the new normal.

⛓️Web3 Trippin'

🏹Artemis Will Have NFTs and the Metaverse, Whatever That Means

Whenever I discuss video games, I feel like an impostor. I had to Google what "PUBG" meant! PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds is one of the most popular video games of all time, and its creator's next game will feature NFTs, per IGN.

Why this matters? Brendan Greene hit the nail on the head when he described blockchain's potential for interoperability between games and, more importantly, players' potential to extract value from their in-game creations.

I feel I am out of my league here, so take my opinion with a grain of salt. I see the NTFs and crypto as big facilitators for the gaming industry. I think of them as Twitch's "bits", yet far more removed from "real-world" money. Crypto enables a more self-contained digital good ecosystem with high-speed transactions. Gamers earn coins for their creations, exchange them for other skins, take them to another game for power-ups, tip a streamer, subscribe to a channel, pay for software... That's an economy!  Yes, all this can happen with standard money, but I don't think at the same scale and speed!

The biggest question will be taxation. Trade and labour take place. Only taxing the exchange from crypto to "real" money seems to miss the breadth of transactions that are happening. Yet taxing a crypto asset with real-world money, in a highly volatile currency setting, would create unbearable pressure on blockchain operators and worldwide tax authorities.

🐾Meanwhile, Wal-Mart Misses the Point on Metaverse

Wal-Mart released "Wal-Mart land" in Roblox to capitalize on the "metaverse" hype. Let's be charitable and call this a creative marketing effort. The contrast with Brendan Greene's vision is stark. On one hand, the biggest retailer in the world rents space in a video game to sell its product. See the example given in the article: "a virtual dressing room lets you spend coins collected in Walmart Land to deck out your avatar with Skullcandy headphones". On the other, thousands of small creators get value out of their creations in a peer-to-peer setting. It's very easy to see the interest in a decentralized web3 right there! Centralized entity Roblox owns its audience and rents its audience's attention to the highest bidder, who in return sells its partner's brands. Decentralized gaming allows a more "organic" experience where everybody still makes money.

🤠Closing Rant

Whether we look at Elon Musk or web3, look past the criticisms. Look past the toxic people or scammers supporting them. Find the innovation behind the hype. What problem can these technologies solve, and at what scale? Maybe it's a niche product. Maybe it'll change the world. Choose your own future.