Abundance

Welcome back.

The digital divide is a theory of inequality, first devised to reflect on the lack of access to the internet. Over the twenty years of the smartphone revolution, the theory evolved into a framework to study deeper social disparities related to skills, usage, and the impact of networked technologies on human daily life. Now that access is almost universal, we understand that the stakes are higher. A global seat at the table is both not enough and too much to handle.

Generative artificial intelligence has been described as the new nuclear power, which is an equally absurd and revealing metaphor. The distributed, open-source, and chaotic adoption of large language models has of course nothing to do with the cold war. However, the two technologies seem to be emerging, simultaneously, from decades of fruitless research into a unique space of mainstream credibility and uncharted influence. Nuclear fission and fusion are no longer forbidden words in business and politics. They begin to sound like an exciting new secret, a credible and lucrative way out of the climate and energy predicament – and like AI, or the internet, most people won’t see it coming.

The cascading effects of clean, abundant energy are much harder to predict than the approaching climate catastrophes, but then again so was social media and the reconfiguration of the nation state. The laws of probability operate everywhere, and at every scale. Somewhere in that spectrum of possibilities is a path to a future where a few of the things we consider inevitably scarce will in fact become plentiful: like water, time, culture, or the ability to reorder matter in any desirable fashion. These wonders would challenge the most basic human assumptions. If another, better world is possible, one should be prepared.


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Listen to our playlist on Spotify, a careful selection of old & new futures.

Thank you for being here.

MapLab: The Secret History of GPS

In brief, here’s how it works: Each satellite in the GPS constellation, which is maintained and updated by the US Space Force, carries with it an extremely accurate atomic clock. These satellites beam down radio signals that carry two key pieces of information: the satellite’s current location (i.e., latitude and longitude) and its onboard clock time.

These signals move at the speed of light to reach GPS receivers on the ground. Based on that constant rate of motion, a receiver is able to tell how far away a satellite is by calculating the difference between the satellite clock time and the local clock time whenever it hears a signal. If there are at least four satellites overhead (which the current constellation of 24 satellites, plus a few extra, all but guarantees), the receiver can use trilateration to figure out its location on earth. Some 95% of the time, the system is accurate within seven meters.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-09-28/maplab-the-secret-history-of-gps

Living in the Future

Making long-term bets on emerging technologies isn’t easy. It’s not guaranteed to work, and it’s certainly not cheap. It’s also one of the most valuable things a technology company can do — and the only way to remain relevant over the long run. Seeing Meta’s two biggest long-term technological bets both mature and intersect this year has been an extremely powerful reminder of the importance of maintaining a healthy investment in future technologies. And it has given us an even clearer view of the innovation we need to deliver over the coming decade.

In AI, this means full steam ahead on what’s next: what comes after today’s generation of LLMs and generative AI? Most researchers agree that there’s still plenty of opportunity to build bigger and better language, image, and video models with the technologies we have today. But there are still fundamental breakthroughs and entirely new architectures to be discovered, and our AI research teams at Meta are on track to discover them.

https://about.fb.com/news/2023/12/metas-2023-progress-in-ai-and-mixed-reality/

Inside the world’s first reactor that will power Earth using the same nuclear reaction as the Sun

In the heart of Provence, some of the brightest scientific minds on the planet are setting the stage for what is being called the world’s largest and most ambitious science experiment.

The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) project agreement was formally signed in 2006 by the US, EU, Russia, China, India, and South Korea at the Elysée Palace in Paris.

There are now more than 30 countries collaborating on the effort to build the experimental device, projected to weigh 23,000 tonnes and withstand temperatures of up to 150 million°C when complete.

“In a way, this is like a national laboratory, a big research institute facility. But it’s the convergence of the national laboratories, really, of 35 countries,” Coblentz, ITER’s head of communications, told Euronews Next.

https://www.euronews.com/next/2023/12/17/inside-the-worlds-first-reactor-that-will-power-earth-using-the-same-nuclear-reaction-as-t

Pantheon – The History of Black Superheroes

The blow-up of black superheroes has been a long time coming.

https://historyofblacksuperheroes.com/

Watch the Best Short Films | Short of the Week

Short film is where innovative storytelling is born. With the internet, the quality and diversity of fresh voices is exploding, yet it’s harder than ever for emerging filmmakers to reach a wider audience and break into the industry.

We are the launchpad for a new generation of filmmakers to share their stories on a larger stage.

https://www.shortoftheweek.com/

Europe’s massive money laundering and corruption problem; crime gangs exploit fintech, vIBANs and DeFi, Europol warns in report

EUROPOL: The agency’s chief Catherine De Bolle today released the worrying report which found a massive money laundering corruption problem in Europe. Gangs were also using new methods such as BNPL. The report said: “Buy now pay later (BNPL) financing, also known as point-of-sale instalment loans, has also grown recently and criminals have been exploiting current weaknesses in the BNPL application process for theft. Since BNPL services do not conduct formal credit checks, offenders can often pass the algorithmic checks and use legitimate users’ accounts to illicitly order items. Machine learning, artificial intelligence (AI) and deepfake technology can be used for virtually all types of financial and economic crime. Chat-bots based on AI, such as ChatGPT, could be easily used in online fraud schemes. Deepfake technology can help circumventing remote on-boarding measures. CEO fraud is a particular risk, as information on high-profile figures at financial institutions is publicly available.”

https://www.amlintelligence.com/2023/09/breaking-europes-massive-money-laundering-and-corruption-problem-crime-gangs-exploit-fintech-vibans-and-defi-europol-warns-in-report/

Mafia and Organized Crime in Europe

It does not stop at the ‘Ndrangheta, Camorra, and Cosa Nostra. In the European Union’s 28 Member States, about five thousand organized crime groups are under investigation according to the Europol 2017 report.

Of course, few of these are as deep as the Italian mafias, under 145 investigations on a European level, coordinated by Eurojust from 2012 to 2016. Seven out of ten of these operate in more than one country, and they split an illegal market, including drugs and counterfeiting, which Transcrime estimates at almost 110 billion euro, about 1% of EU GDP. Investigations and reports highlight the importance of Russian-speaking and Turkish mafias, the rise of Albanian clan bosses in marijuana trafficking and other areas, the danger of lesser-known groups at an international level, biker gangs spreading in Northern Europe, and Vietnamese clans active mainly in Eastern Europe. No country can consider itself immune, as our interactive map shows. This even goes for even countries with excellent civic traditions and levels of crime decidedly under control, as the case of the Syrian mafia in Sweden shows.

https://www.ilfattoquotidiano.it/longform/mafia-and-organized-crime-in-europe/map/

Drugs, violence and organized crime in Belgium

The answer is, of course, cocaine.

Antwerp, Europe’s diamond capital, is now better known as a key way station on the drug superhighway into the EU from Panama, Ecuador and Paraguay.

Customs officers have seized 110,000 kilograms of cocaine here in the last year alone, and U.N. figures show that organized crime networks are turning over around €130 billion a year from the cocaine trade.

Four-fifths of the drug consignments that arrive in Antwerp are subsequently transported across the border into the Netherlands to be cut, packaged and distributed across the Continent. And Europe’s insatiable appetite for cocaine means drug mafias now have industrial quantities of cash at their disposal — plenty to buy off prying eyes.

https://www.politico.eu/article/belgium-antwerp-drugs-violence-organized-crime/

Bending a mysterious world to your will was the goal of esoteric practices. Now it’s the unashamed aim of the tech titans

It’s possible, of course, to read ‘manifesting’ as yet another vaguely spiritual wellness trend, up there with sage cleansing or lighting votive candles with Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s face on them. But to do so would be to ignore the increasingly visible intersection of occult and magical practices and internet subcultures. As our technology has grown ever more powerful, our control over nature seemingly ever more absolute, the discursive subculture of the internet has gotten, well, ever more weird.

The canny reader may note that magic as I’ve defined it sounds an awful lot like technology, given a somewhat spiritualised sheen. This is no coincidence. The story of modernity and, in particular, the story of the quixotic founders of our early internet (equal parts hacker swagger and utopian hippy counterculture) is inextricable from the story of the development and proliferation of the Western esoteric tradition and its transformation from, essentially, a niche cult of court scientists and civil servants into one of the most influential yet least recognised forces acting upon contemporary life.

https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-internet-became-the-modern-purveyor-of-ancient-magic

Fishing in the Shadow of Oil

Even the price of fish is tied to the price of oil. As one Omani fisherman on TikTok noted last year, “The main reason for the soaring cost of tuna is petrol.”

Fossil fuel also looms over the region’s fisheries in other, less apparent ways. That day on the boat, I noticed how the byproducts of the oil industry saturate the work of fishing. Our small vessel was cluttered with commodities downstream from oil—nylon lines, plastic buckets, polystyrene buoys and coolers, squid-shaped lures made from rubbery plastisol—all strewn upon the fiberglass-reinforced plastic skiff. It is perhaps because of this saturation that lost and abandoned fishing gear accounts for the majority of ocean plastic worldwide, including the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

https://www.sapiens.org/culture/oil-fishing-persian-gulf/

What Netflix Got Wrong About Indigenous Storytelling

Within days of its release last June, the Netflix animated series Trese—based upon the award-winning Filipino comic book series of the same name—landed on the top 10 lists of most streamed television shows in 19 countries.

Two anthropologists look back on one of the year’s most binged animated shows on Netflix—and what it missed about the stories of Indigenous peoples.

https://www.sapiens.org/culture/busaw-trese/

5 Muslim Women Take on Reviving Lost Cultural Practices

Slow, connected living is another treasure that I see (and experience in my own life) lessening as the years pass. My mind once again wanders to my grandmother, who warms charcoal on an open flame, before lovingly scenting every corner of the home with sweet bakhoor scents. Who carefully dries out fragrant fresh herbs and spices before grinding them down by hand in a pestle and mortar for optimal layers of flavour in her saalans. Romantically, I love the idea of this wholesome process, but have never found it in me to use anything other than pre-packaged, imported herbs and spices… My mother and grandmother both have a meticulous eye for detail, especially when it comes to textiles. They source and commission the finest hand embroidered designs on silks and chiffons to wear as saris and shalwar kamees outfits, favouring artisanal, slow fashion. The trends I see around me within my own generation in contrast are far more centred around quantity rather than quality, with fast fashion booming.

https://www.amaliah.com/post/66728/muslim-women-revive-lost-cultural-practices

Frontex and the pirate ship

The EU’s border agency Frontex and the Maltese government are systematically sharing coordinates of refugee boats trying to escape Libya with a vessel operated by a militia linked to Russia, human trafficking, war crimes and smuggling.

https://www.lighthousereports.com/investigation/frontex-and-the-pirate-ship/

First gallery show dedicated to Ghanaian photography pioneer will display previously unseen works capturing life under colonial rule

Few people photographed as many major events and notable figures in Ghana’s pre and post-colonial history as the late J.K. Bruce-Vanderpuije.

On 28 February 1948, he captured on camera the fatal shooting of three local ex-servicemen who were on a march to the seat of the British colonial government, protesting unpaid war allowances. Riots and further protests broke out in response to the shooting, and Bruce-Vanderpuije’s images were tendered as evidence in a commission of inquiry that was set up to investigate. The 1948 Accra riots, as they are now known, are said to have been a pivotal moment leading to the independence of Ghana and other African countries.

https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2023/12/15/first-gallery-show-dedicated-to-ghanaian-photography-pioneer-will-display-previously-unseen-works-capturing-life-under-colonial-rule

EI Weekly Listen — Philip Bobbitt on the new global disorder

We cannot understand what is going wrong in the international order without first understanding what is going wrong in the constitutional order of states. Read by Leighton Pugh.

https://open.spotify.com/episode/4kbACcTTUOhyNDKUyLl5an

Google DeepMind used a large language model to solve an unsolvable math problem

Google DeepMind has used a large language model to crack a famous unsolved problem in pure mathematics. In a paper published in Nature today, the researchers say it is the first time a large language model has been used to discover a solution to a long-standing scientific puzzle—producing verifiable and valuable new information that did not previously exist. “It’s not in the training data—it wasn’t even known,” says coauthor Pushmeet Kohli, vice president of research at Google DeepMind.

Large language models have a reputation for making things up, not for providing new facts. Google DeepMind’s new tool, called FunSearch, could change that. It shows that they can indeed make discoveries—if they are coaxed just so, and if you throw out the majority of what they come up with.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/12/14/1085318/google-deepmind-large-language-model-solve-unsolvable-math-problem-cap-set/