This week…
Having left Facebook recently, and reducing time on Instagram and Tiktok, Twitter became the only true social media platform that I genuinely spend significant online time on. I even have a second, semi-anonymous account for low-quality postings (mostly bad takes about sports and films). Lately, though, I’m having a bit of a strange feeling about Twitter. Anyone else feels the same? Any idea why? Hmm?
Here’s a selection of long reads on (dis)trust in tech, as well as a few personal recommendations, and the chart of the week.
9.2% and the Master of Twitter
Ranjan Roy for Margins, on Elon Musk’s stake in Twitter:
Deception, exploited workers, and cash handouts: How Worldcoin recruited its first half a million test users ($)
Eileen Guo and Adi Renaldi for MIT TR:
On a sunny morning last December, Iyus Ruswandi, a 35-year-old furniture maker in the village of Gunungguruh, Indonesia, was woken up early by his mother. A technology company was holding some kind of “social assistance giveaway” at the local Islamic elementary school, she said, and she urged him to go.
Ruswandi joined a long line of residents, mostly women, some of whom had been waiting since 6 a.m. In the pandemic-battered economy, any kind of assistance was welcome.
At the front of the line, representatives of Worldcoin Indonesia were collecting emails and phone numbers, or aiming a futuristic metal orb at villagers’ faces to scan their irises and other biometric data. Village officials were also on site, passing out numbered tickets to the waiting residents to help keep order.
Ruswandi asked a Worldcoin representative what charity this was but learned nothing new: as his mother said, they were giving away money.
Gunungguruh was not alone in receiving a visit from Worldcoin. In villages across West Java, Indonesia—as well as college campuses, metro stops, markets, and urban centers in two dozen countries, most of them in the developing world—Worldcoin representatives were showing up for a day or two and collecting biometric data. In return they were known to offer everything from free cash (often local currency as well as Worldcoin tokens) to Airpods to promises of future wealth. In some cases they also made payments to local government officials. What they were not providing was much information on their real intentions.
This left many, including Ruswandi, perplexed: What was Worldcoin doing with all these iris scans?
Inside the Bitcoin bust that took down the web’s biggest child abuse site
Andy Greenberg for Wired:
Early one fall morning in 2017, in a middle-class suburb on the outskirts of Atlanta, Chris Janczewski stood alone inside the doorway of a home he had not been invited to enter.
Moments earlier, armed Homeland Security Investigations agents in ballistic vests had taken up positions around the tidy two-story brick house, banged on the front door, and when a member of the family living there opened it, swarmed inside. Janczewski, an Internal Revenue Service criminal investigator, followed quietly behind. Now he found himself in the entryway, in the eye of a storm of activity, watching the agents search the premises and seize electronic devices.
They separated the family, putting the father, an assistant principal at the local high school and the target of their investigation, in one room; his wife in another; the two kids into a third. An agent switched on a TV and put on Mickey Mouse Clubhouse in an attempt to distract the children from the invasion of their home and the interrogation of their parents.
Janczewski had come along on this raid only as an observer, a visitor flown in from Washington, DC, to watch and advise the local Homeland Security team as it executed its warrant. But it had been Janczewski’s investigation that brought the agents here, to this average-looking house with its well-kept yard among all the average-looking houses they could have been searching, anywhere in America. He had led them there based on a strange, nascent form of evidence. Janczewski had followed the links of Bitcoin’s blockchain, pulling on that chain until it connected this ordinary home to an extraordinarily cruel place on the internet—and then connected that place to hundreds more men around the world. All complicit in the same massive network of unspeakable abuse. All now on Janczewski’s long list of targets.
What I read, watch, and listen to…
I’m reading about why a universe without mathematics is beyond the scope of our imagination, by Peter Watson for The Conversation.
🥶 I’m watching Snowpiercer.
I’m listening to a guide to pronouncing names of global tech companies by Rest of World.
More stray links:
When it comes to how journalists use it, there’s no such thing as ‘Twitter’ by Jon Allsop for CJR.
The New York Times would really like its reporters to stop scrolling and get off Twitter (at least once in a while) by Joshua Benton for Nieman Lab.
Chart of the week
The world’s biggest R&D spenders by Anna Fleck for Statista.