Month: June 2022

On the rainy evening of November 6, a man and a woman arrived in a beat-up car. The man was wearing a Nike baseball cap, the bill obscuring his face. He held a large fountain soda in his left hand, frustratingly disregarding the sign asking visitors not to bring food or drink inside. The woman seemed younger, in jeans and some kind of poncho, with a wet grocery bag in her hand. The two of them walked to the register, where the woman opened the bag to reveal some of the rarest games the staff had ever seen, then arranged them on the glass checkout counter, hoping to make a deal. One of the clerks, Spidey sense triggered, called the Voegeles at home. Mandi came in.

“We want to see what’s an impossible target,” McCormack said.

Kolodziejzyk and Miller and others like them — YouTubers like Drew Gooden and Danny Gonzalez — don’t just inform you about internet ephemera; they also reveal the shady online courses, moneymaking conventions and NFT hype that some of the internet’s influential celebrities have had their hands in. (Celebrities whose audiences, it must be said, consist largely of teenagers.)

“One of two things must be true,” they wrote. “Either the majority does not really believe in its own reasoning. Or if it does, all rights that have no history stretching back to the mid-19th century are insecure. Either the mass of the majority’s opinion is hypocrisy, or additional constitutional rights are under threat. It is one or the other.”

The recent history of the Internet, however, warns that we shouldn’t necessarily expect the endearingly homegrown nature of these 1,000 True Fans communities to persist. When viable new economic niches emerge online, venture-backed businesses, looking to extract their cut, are typically not far behind

Referring to “expensive digital images of monkeys” as “100% based on greater fool theory,” Gates drove home the point that assets like NFTs are entirely contingent on a consumer market that believes they have value. Unlike, say, a house, which retains the intrinsic value of being a place to live, no matter what extrinsic value is conferred upon it by demand in the real estate market, an electronically unique picture of a cartoon monkey does nothing for you, unless everyone believes it is a desirable object. Hard to believe, but there you have it.

This made for compelling congressional testimony. I cannot think of any other instance in American history when a former Attorney General of the United States has accused the President who appointed him of peddling “bullshit” to the American people.

One of the Nerf gunfighters was Joshua Schulte—his real name. A skinny Texan in his twenties, he had a goatee and a shaved head. In what may have been a preëmptive gambit, Schulte gave himself the nickname Bad Ass, going so far as to make a fake nameplate and stick it on his cubicle. But others in the office called him Voldemort—a reference to the hairless villain in the Harry Potter books

The rise of social networks in the twenty-tens made this model only more dominant. Our digital posting became concentrated on a few all-encompassing platforms, which relied increasingly on algorithmic feeds. The result for users was more exposure but a loss of agency. We generated content for free, and then Facebook mined it for profit.

In the seventeen months since the insurrection, Cohen said, a unit of some nine hundred analysts had picked up on a number of disturbing patterns. “Anti-government militia, hard-core white supremacists, and even people more from the anarchist movement have come together,” he said. Their goals are explicit: “assassination of elected officials, and violent activities to resist government activities, or programs.”