Primed Panic: October 22, 2017 Snippets
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This week’s theme: recent legislative attempts to fight fake news, why they won’t work, and a comparison to other kinds of panics that spread through primed audiences. Also introducing Relativity Space, a new member of the Social Capital family.
Earlier this week, US Senators Mark Warner, Amy Klobuchar and John McCain introduced a bill to regulate political ads on the Internet in response to increasing concerns about fake news and the integrity of our elections. It’s called the Honest Ads Act, and it mandates that any campaign seeking to spend more than 500 dollars on political ads must disclose information to the public on who is paying for them.
Honest Ads Act: Bill Text | United States Senate
However, as we now know (and really should have known all along), the overwhelming majority of total “fake news” impressions on Social Media before and following the election were not paid ads, but organic sharing. It’s native reach based on authentic feelings, not sponsored impressions promoting fake facts, that are really driving the bus here. This shouldn’t come as a surprise for anyone who has been reading along for the past few weeks, as we’ve worked through the differences between the negative feedback cycle that helps correct factual errors versus the positive feedback cycle that amplifies feelings and emotions. By focusing on real versus fake news, rather than facts versus feelings, we’re again targeting the wrong facet of the problem and will likely make the problem worse, not better. Furthermore, by putting “standards” in place to prevent the spreading of false news, all we’re doing is helping Kayfabe artists by putting superficial rules in place that only need to be obeyed in letter, not in spirit (as we learned about last week).
Online trolls would love the Honest Ads Act | Leonid Bershidsky, Bloomberg
In order to understand the bigger threat, we need to really wrap our heads around the true goal of these social media posts and of those who are seeding them. The overarching goal of these campaigns is not to spread false information, it’s to amplify and reinforce certain emotions: fear, mistrust, hate, and panic. The object of this mistrust and fear is less important than the subject, which is everybody on all sides of any divisive issue. That’s why we see ample evidence that overseas troll farms and fake news artists are in fact quite generous with their targeting: they’ll take both sides of nearly any subject. Take the Black Lives Matter movement, for instance: ads and posts on every possible side of this social conflict have been traced back to overseas trolls farms. The goal is not to spread information, true or false, or on Side A or Side B — the goal is to incite fear, panic and anger in general.
This isn’t a brand new tactic that suddenly sprang into possibility with the advent of social media; the strategy of attacking other countries and institutions by exploiting primed fear to incite discord and unrest within its own people is as old as time. Some people are just better at this new online version than others. Social media allows malicious actors to start with 1000 potentially inflammatory stories (whether they’re real or fake; it doesn’t matter), pump up social media posts about all 1000; wait 24 hours, see which 100 out of them have started to go viral, and put resources into those; then wait another 24 hours and double down on the 10 that are really working, and so forth. By the time it reaches broad public consciousness, it’s completely become an organic phenomenon. It’s like a fire spreading through dry brush: it’s hard to know which initial spark set it off when the entire landscape could combust at any moment.
RT, Sputnik and Russia’s new theory of war | Jim Rutenberg, NYT
One of the best recent articulations of this danger came from an unlikely source this week: the professor and Nobel laureate economist Robert Shiller. He wasn’t writing about fake news though — he was writing on the 30th anniversary of the October 1987 stock market crash, which was this past Thursday. The cause of this flash crash — the largest one day percentage drop in Wall Street history — is frequently blamed on certain types of then-popular automatic portfolio insurance, which triggered cascading sequences of sell orders that drove the market down twenty percent in manner of hours. But a trading insurance strategy of “If other people are selling, then sell first” isn’t terribly different than the basic social phenomenon of “if other people are afraid, be afraid.” Shiller compares this crash, and others which he warns may come in the future, to the airport panic at LAX last year. Loud noises were perceived by a crowd of travellers as gunshots; they immediately began to run for the exits, causing other people to run, and turning into a full-blown panic. Twitter erupted with news of a gunman at LAX; the airport went into lockdown. And as we now know, it turned out to have started from nothing but a perception. But we were primed; this behavior didn’t come out of thin air. And as we know by now, perception has a way of becoming reality. In our always-on, networked age of internet connectivity and social media, this will be increasingly so. Eventually we will grow resilience to these types of perceptions and panics, as we have in the past. But it will take time; and the meantime won’t be pretty.
Alphabet gets into city building, starting up north:
Alphabet’s Sidewalk Labs eyes Toronto for its digital city | Mark Bergen, Bloomberg
Sidewalk Labs chose Toronto despite pushback from Larry Page | Cory Weinberg, The Information
Code and Collisions:
Interview podcasts with creative minds:
Grand Theft Life with Tim Urban of Wait But Why | Investor’s Field Guide Podcast
BoJack Horseman’s creator ponders when — if ever — the series should end | Todd VanderWerff, Vox
Jenn Schiffer relates to developers | Track Changes podcast with Paul Ford and Gina Trapani
Other reading from around the Internet:
Why the Krack wifi mess will take decades to clean up | Brian Barrett, Wired
Dollar General hits a gold mine in rural America | Mya Frazier, Bloomberg
As 747 begins its final approach, a pilot takes a flight down memory lane | Mark Vanhoenacker, NYT
Free insurance service could solidify Alipay’s lead in the payments sector | Sheila Yu, Technode
And finally, another edition of Social Capital Book Club: some of the books we’ve been reading around the office:
Once in Golconda: a true drama of Wall Street | John Brooks
Blitzed: drugs in the Third Reich | Norman Ohler
Creation: Life and how to make it | Steve Grand
The Speed of Sound: breaking the barriers between music and technology, a memoir | Thomas Dolby
In this week’s news and notes from Social Capital, we have another new member of the family to introduce: Relativity Space, a company that… wait for it… builds 3D printed rockets.
These giant printers are meant to make rockets | Ashlee Vance, Bloomberg
How to get to space on the cheap (video) | Bloomberg
Relativity Space is the genesis of founders Tim Ellis and Jordan Noone, two aerospace engineers (from Blue Origin and SpaceX, respectively) with a big 3D printer and even bigger ambitions. With an underlying conviction that the future of humanity will be interplanetary, Relativity Space is built with a monumental goal in mind: to move towards the future of space travel with technology that also betters life on Earth. How so? By building an orbital launch company that deploys and resupplies satellite constellations that connect and improve our planet, all facilitated by a fundamentally new approach to building and flying rockets. That new approach, explained by Ellis and Noone, is by reducing complexity: “The space shuttle had 2.5 million parts. We think SpaceX and Blue Origin have gotten that down to maybe 100,000 moving parts per rocket. We want to get to 1,000 moving parts, fewer than a car.”
This approach is more just a simplified manufacturing process; it’s an entirely reimagined paradigm of how to iterate and mass-produce rockets quickly, and eventually to build the future of human capabilities in orbit and beyond. If the time and effort currently spent designing and assembling rockets can be redirected into new aerospace applications of those rockets, we can decrease the cost of orbital launches by an order of magnitude while at the same time creating an entirely new sandbox for people to try new things in space. There may be a useful analogy here with the early days of computing. Reimagining giant mainframe computers as desktop workstations and eventually personal desktop machines accomplished much more than reducing costs; it opened the door to far more interesting use cases that were never imagined at the beginning of computing. Relativity Space can potentially do the same thing for, well, for space: If NASA is like IBM and SpaceX and Blue Origin are DEC, Apollo or Sun Microsystems, then it’s fun to imagine what it might mean if Relativity Space’s printed rockets were the Compaq PC or even the Apple II.
It’s therefore no surprise that the working environment at Relativity Space is unlike anywhere else you’ve ever seen, and has its little elements of absurd humor that you might expect. Ashlee Vance (who many of you know from his biography of Elon Musk) gives many great anecdotes of what it’s like working to 3D print rockets: “Most of the grunts and groans heard in Relativity’s factory are from the stuntmen training at the gym next door. The printer arms do the startup’s heavy lifting, streaming 8 inches worth of liquid metal per second onto a garbage-can-size turntable that looks like a futuristic potter’s wheel. A few hours in the lasers’ immense heat has kicked the temperature at the top of the factory up to 140 F. Ellis and Noone’s team keeps things from getting too humid on the ground by covering the laser machines with nylon tents originally meant for indoor marijuana growers.”
We’re very lucky to get to work with founders as talented as Ellis and Noone, and the incredible crew they’ve put together. And in a broader level, we can’t tell you how excited we are to participate in exploring space as a re-opened frontier: there’s so much to explore, and we’re only just getting started. (Stay tuned for more announcements soon, although we can’t say much in the meantime.) In the meantime, we’ll leave you with a short video from Relativity Space: please watch, enjoy, and be inspired. There’s so much inspiring work ahead, and so much to explore. We can’t wait.
Everything Evolves | Relativity Space
Have a great week,
Alex & the team from Social Capital
