Won't Shut Up - Speech, MrBeast, Oceans, and Cat Bonds
Speech
Like most things American, speech is unevenly distributed - those in power have far greater leeway to say and do what they want, while the less powerful or those who seek to challenge power are being silenced.
We see this everywhere right now - legislatures are using 'antisemitism' as a Trojan horse to pass state laws intended to chill dissent. In the aftermath of George Floyd, states passed laws against protest - restricting speech under the flimsy guise of public safety.
Then there's the single greatest threat to speech in America - college students with opinions. If we were able to bottle the energy expended to attack, shame, and restrict what students are allowed to say and do within the confines of their campuses, we could power all the new AI datacenters.
When they aren't threatening legal repercussions for expressing support for Palestinians, governors spend their time concocting new ways to insulate children from divisive liberal ideas like diversity, history, and civil rights. The conservative idea of education closely resembles willful ignorance, despite overwhelming evidence that students - even those identifying as Republican - care more about guns on campus and access to reproductive health care. Kids want to be exposed to challenging ideas, while half the country's power apparatus has moved aggressively to ensure they don't.
What of the the elites whose words are credulously covered by the media, whose every vile thought is explained away by a obsequious press? Not only can they say whatever they want, but they can use the legal system to threaten and punish anyone who dares read their words back to them.
Elon Musk, self-proclaimed Free Speech Warrior, is perhaps the thinnest-skinned of the bunch. When a nonprofit organization tracking hate speech pointed out that he'd turned Twitter into a haven for neo-Nazi and white supremacist speech, Musk sued in an attempt to 'punish' it and 'dissuade others who might wish to engage in such criticism,' according to the California judge who just threw his suit out.
Not content to throw his money around to silence his own critics, Musk has offered to cover the legal bills of other purveyors of digital filth - a Canadian doctor who racked up a million dollars' worth of debt suing people who criticized her for spreading COVID-19 disinfo is one of his beneficiaries.
Musk may have cribbed the strategy of bankrolling legal complaints to silence critics from his old PayPal buddy Peter Thiel, who famously funded Hulk Hogan's spurious lawsuit against the website Gawker, leading to its demise and the financial ruin of some of its employees.
Or, if you're a rich guy with way too much time on your hands, you can write a 77-page letter (!) in lieu of a lawsuit, demanding a publication delete accurately-reported information about your wife, and the press will report it, achieving your goals without the need to pay attorneys.
Nor do the rich necessarily need to spend their own time or money to go after the people exposing their unpleasant behavior. Journalist Tim Burke found Kanye West footage with Tucker Carlson, after a source tipped him to some of the interview's outtakes sitting in a streaming service's open directories.
The government says that by acquiring demo credentials and downloading the videos, Burke violated federal law and has charged him with federal felonies.
It has long been the case that the wealthy could use the courts to muzzle private citizens, whose right to speech extends only as far as they can defend in a courtroom. Meanwhile, those same thin-skinned oligarchs can make whatever disparaging and false remarks they want on platforms happy to amplify their speech, with no fear of reprisal.
The media has framed the 'debate' over speech as a problem occurring in classrooms and on college campuses, and spilt ink to fabricate this reality in the public consciousness. Meanwhile, the powerful silence dissent in the courts and via the justice system, while the same reporters look passively on, transformed into impartial transcribers.
Some say the media needs to wake up, because eventually the elites will turn on them, dismantling their newsrooms in an attempt to extinguish voices other than their own. What that gets wrong is that they need the media to craft and disseminate their narrative. Rather than speaking truth to power, many of our most influential outlets sound like echoes.
MrBeast
Other than writing about his burger chain, I have managed to completely avoid coming into contact with the work product of Jimmy "MrBeast" Donaldson (I wrongly referred to him as 'Mr. Beast'). Judging by the size and breadth of his audience, I may be one of the few. His YouTube channel has 239 million subscribers, and his video production and food empire brings in more than half a billion a year.
What does he actually do to capture so much of the world's attention? He began his days (as a teenager) being mean to other YouTubers:
In 2015 and 2016, Donaldson began to gain popularity with his "Worst Intros on YouTube" series poking fun at YouTube video introductions.
But his first viral video was an over-the-top stunt that would set the tone for his future production style:
In January 2017, Jimmy Donaldson published an almost day-long video of himself counting to 100,000, which became his breakthrough viral video. The ordeal took him 40 hours, with some parts sped up to "keep it under 24 hours."
Do you ever feel a thousand years old reading about what kids watch on YouTube? Anyhow, from then on, Donaldson centered his brand around doing crazy stuff, like paying contestants to reenact video game combat or playing rock, paper, scissors for six figure prizes.
As his fame grew, Donaldson's stunts became more expensive, more professionally produced, and more viral. But what did his style of virality do to YouTube itself?
At first, YouTube prized authenticity, and the prototypical creator was likely recording out of their bedroom on an iPhone. Once real money came into the picture, the same creators who built the platform became brands who made a living off of their popularity.
Donaldson was able to capitalize off brands' desire to connect with younger audiences to convince them to subsidize hugely expensive stunts and cash giveaways, while glorifying the accumulation of wealth and - in his own words - the tireless grindset required to be the best at...influencing:
In podcasts, Donaldson tells hosts that he goes so hard, he won’t stop working until he burns out and isn’t able to do anything at all. With a laugh, he admits that he has a mental breakdown “every other week.” If he ever stops for a breather, he says, he gets depressed. MrBeast is so laser-focused on generating content on YouTube that he describes his personality as “YouTube.” He acknowledges that this brutal approach to videos, which has cratered many creators over the years, is not healthy. “People shouldn’t be like me. I don’t have a life, I don’t have a personality,” he said in a podcast recorded in 2023.
That is...not healthy! Nor is it healthy that YouTube has amplified Donaldson's content to such an extreme degree that its algorithms are now full of copycats, influencers trying to copy the MrBeast ethic, chasing precious views and followers.
Was it always going to end up like this? Was it only a matter of time before someone took influencing to such an extreme that they bent the attention economy to their will? And what did we get out of it, as a culture?
Though he’s been under scrutiny for his part in the warping of YouTube as a content ecosystem, you will never see something outwardly controversial or offensive in a MrBeast video. For a long time, Donaldson admits in a number of podcast appearances, he was afraid of putting anything complex in his videos — what if a viewer didn’t get it and stopped watching? Donaldson might very well be an advertiser’s absolute dream, the logical endpoint of an internet that’s been flattened into a samey, straightforward sludge of optimized content.
Of course the first person so popular they broke the Internet did so with mindlessly inoffensive, brand-friendly content. And now, thanks to the way platforms work, it will be a race to the bottom to see who can be the most Beast-like, because one of the few channels left for artists (now 'creators') to make money has been homogenized by a mediocre white dude who drops Lamborghinis into industrial shredders for clicks.
Oceans
Another fun byproduct of two hundred million people streaming rapid supercar disassembly is that those server farms - as we've discussed - also contribute significantly to global warming.
Many companies are working on 'carbon capture' technology, most of which does not currently work, or would not work on the scale required to remove the requisite amount of carbon from the atmosphere.
There is one extremely effective carbon capture technology and it is called an ocean. It is not the ocean itself that sucks up all the nasty emissions - it is all the stuff that lives in the ocean. Kelp and other ocean plants feast on CO2, using it for food. Phytoplankton may consume and photosynthesize as much carbon dioxide as all the land plants combined.
Therefore! It is pretty important that we do not turn our oceans into giant boiling cauldrons and kill the plants and animals within. Bad news on that front:
Now, the unprecedented streak of ocean heat is entering a second year. Scientists say it could represent a major change to Earth systems that cannot be reversed on any human time scale.
Let us pause to unpack that last sentence. If the worst fears of climate scientists come true, oceans could become so irreparably fucked we'd be talking geologic timelines for them to return to normal.
Now, there is still significant uncertainty, and we've talked about a few other recent trends that could be making oceans warm at unprecedented levels, but that doesn't mean we've got any damn solutions for it either! It sucks!
Nor are the oceans our only problem, because everything else is hot too:
The ocean heat waves coincide with the warmest conditions ever observed in the atmosphere, too. Last year, average global air temperatures rose higher than humans have ever known, perhaps bringing the planet to its hottest in more than 100,000 years. Climate scientists predict 2024 could be even warmer.
Wonderful. And, unfortunately, our best bet at this point is to hope the scientists are wrong, because humanity is not making anywhere near the required sacrifices and changes to our behavior to reverse the trends. We're increasing our emissions each year, and meager investments in green energy simply can't keep pace.
Cat Bonds
One indication we as a society are not serious about combatting climate change is that hedge funds are making billions betting on weather catastrophes. We have talked about what might happen when places in America become too expensive to insure, but it's worth examining the financial markets that underpin our insurance system more broadly.
I will let the Bloomberg authors illustrate the purpose of cat bonds:
When thousands of homeowners in Florida and Louisiana purchased their hurricane insurance, they probably had no idea that John Seo stood to make a big profit if their properties got through the next three years unscathed.
Unbeknownst to them, Seo, a 57-year-old hedge fund manager in southern Connecticut, is the reason why millions of people from New Zealand to Chile have financial protection against natural disasters. His fund, Fermat Capital Management, owns the world’s biggest collection of catastrophe bonds — complex financial instruments that insurers issue to cover risks they can’t handle.
I do not know what I expected the answer to 'how are insurers able to pay out massive claims resulting from natural disasters' was, but I definitely did not consider 'a hedge fund in Connecticut run by scientists.'
Cat bonds investors are gambling on nature. If a disaster they’ve bet on occurs, their money is used to settle insurance claims. If it doesn’t, they get handsome returns. For decades, the instruments were a last resort reserved for super-rare events, such as a cataclysmic storm on the scale of Hurricane Katrina. But multibillion-dollar calamities have become alarmingly frequent on a warmer planet.
Huh, yeah, sure. The problem with cat bonds becoming more widely used is that means one of two things is happening - either insurers are paying out a lot more in claims due to disasters, or the hedge funds lending them money at steep interest rates are making big profits.
Cat bonds are expensive, so the best case scenario is insurers are spending money on disaster insurance instead of investing those funds to cover future claims, like they're supposed to.
This system cannot continue forever. Either cat bonds will cease to be profitable for the hedge funds involved and they will simply withdraw from the market, or insurers will be forced to hike rates (more) to pay for cat bonds.
And, as the article notes, lots of places don't have cat bonds or robust systems of profit-seekers layering complex financial instruments on top of one another:
Less than a third of last year’s $380 billion in global climate losses was covered by insurance, according to broker Aon Plc.
In response, the World Bank is attempting to increase its cat bond fund to $5 billion, which - again with the math - is a lot less than the $126 billion in damages last year alone.
And so the game of climate musical chairs continues - we allow capital to pollute and destroy the planet for profit, and shift the cost of the resulting disasters onto governments, while still managing to squeeze profits from the insurance system in the process. It's not sustainable, and the layers of insurance upon which even the richest countries rest are wearing thin.
Short Cons
New Republic - "At the time he filed this declaration, Johnson himself was in the midst of a malpractice lawsuit involving a patient he treated in March 2018, who arrived in the emergency room in respiratory distress and showing signs of sepsis."
Bleeping Computer - "Google's new AI-powered 'Search Generative Experience' algorithms recommend scam sites that redirect visitors to unwanted Chrome extensions, fake iPhone giveaways, browser spam subscriptions, and tech support scams."
NYT - "The story of how Mr. Barreto, a California transplant with a taste for wild conspiracy theories and a sometimes tenuous grip on reality, gained and then lost the rights to Room 2565 might sound implausible — another tale from a man who claims without evidence to be the first cousin, 11 times removed, of Christopher Columbus’s oldest son."
Forbes - "A super PAC affiliated with Sen. Ted Cruz reported receiving $215,000 in “digital revenue” from iHeartMedia on Wednesday—despite a spokesperson for the Republican from Texas previously denying there was an ethical issue with the company producing his podcast and saying it was no different from Cruz appearing on a cable news show."
WaPo - "According a study commissioned by the advocacy group Black Footballers Partnership and published in 2022, 43 percent of the players in the English Premier League, arguably the world’s top professional league, are Black... Yet across all four divisions, the group found, only 4.4 percent of managing/coaching jobs and 1.6 percent of executive positions in the game go to Black candidates."
ProPublica - "From California to Maine, Chinese organized crime has come to dominate much of the nation’s illicit marijuana trade, an investigation by ProPublica and The Frontier has found."
Know someone still thinking about climate change on a 'human' time scale? Send them HERE!