I don’t believe in covering Europe if it can possibly be helped, but this one from Ireland is part of a much broader trend throughout the English-speaking internet, and as we’ve seen for years, now, he who regulates abroad tends to shape the world. Such is the price of your cheap junk in our highly-interconnected global economy. Now, Irish politicians are attempting to ban ‘bad’ memes, a very evil, stupid thing that will absolutely happen, eventually — in some Frankensteinian form — here at home (it will definitely be California).

Last week, amidst rising tension over the destabilizing impact of mass immigration throughout the Western World, an Algerian man knifed a bunch of kids in Dublin, and the city lost its mind. In response, the Irish government determined their problem was not the wildly destabilizing impact of their own immigration policy (as bad as ours, if with a population even less interested in assimilating), but the ability of men and women to criticize the government’s immigration policy on the internet.

“All legislation is about the restriction of freedom,” said Irish Senator O’Reilly. “If your views on other people’s identities go to make their lives unsafe, insecure, and cause them such deep discomfort that they can not live in peace, then I believe that it is our job as legislators to restrict those freedoms for the common good.”

Discomforting words — FORBIDDEN! But don’t worry, it’s all for “the Common Good”™.

As with all ‘hate speech’ legislation, the argument presented by these most recent Irish psychopaths holds that marginalized groups of people are in critical danger simply by virtue of people online saying nasty things about them on the internet. In practice, however, the law is sufficiently ambiguous as anyone can be tried, for any political reason, at almost any time. But the aggression of this most recent bill is new, and horrifying. Not only will creating “hate speech” be illegal (again, we are talking about mean words here), but mere possession of “hate speech” will be illegal.

That based Pepe meme in your camera roll saying something naughty? That mere picture, unshared, and buried in your photos, but deemed sufficiently problematic by your local representative from longhouse Marxist hell? Enjoy prison.

Throughout the United States, demand for similar legislation is endless, but difficult for the government to really press until it reworks our Supreme Court in such a way as the Deep State is placed in permanent legislative power. This is why censorship has rather taken the form of unofficial alignment among the most influential players in technology, media, and unelected governance. Nonetheless, legislation in Europe will inevitably fall on the shoulders of executives in San Francisco. Their choice will be thus: assist a foreign government in jailing a middle-aged British woman who said something dumb on Facebook, or lose your business abroad. All available evidence indicates each of our executives, including Elon, will choose to assist the foreign government.

But then again?

Last night, right as I was attempting to conclude this bastard letter, Elon sat down for an interview with — for reasons I will never understand — the New York Times, rather than Pirate Wires. From his casual declaration that he is in fact the greatest human force for climate good in history, to “Jonathan, I’m only here because you’re a friend” (he was being interviewed by Andrew Sorkin), there were many great gems in this bad boy, which you can watch in full on X. But the most charming by far followed Andrew’s pressing Elon on advertisers, invoking Walt Disney’s Bob Iger in particular. As we’ve covered for months now, in pursuit of more aggressive political censorship on X, major advertisers across the country have withdrawn from the platform.

“I hope they stop,” Elon said of the advertisers advertising on X. “If someone’s going to try to blackmail me with advertising? Blackmail me with money? Go fuck yourself.”

“But…” Andrew attempted.

“Go. Fuck. Yourself,” said Elon.

A moment passed. The audience laughed nervously.

“Hi, Bob,” he said.

My friends, there is always hope.

THE FIFTH ESTATE

NOTABLE INDUSTRY TRENDS

Black Friday is dead (?), long live Black Friday. Winter holiday shopping kicked off with what the National Retail Federation (NRF) projected to be a record breaking year for retail, with 182 million people expected to shop in-store and online from Thanksgiving to Cyber Monday — 15.7 million more than last year, and the highest number on record since NRF began tracking this data in 2017. 

Both Adobe’s and Stripe’s final recaps of Black Friday through Cyber Monday have not yet been released as of yesterday, but according to Adobe, online sales up to and including Black Friday were a record $9.1 to $9.8 billion — up around 7% from last year — and Black Friday foot traffic to brick-and-mortar shops was up 4.6% compared to last year according to SensorMatic (amidst a four-year decline in in-store Black Friday week sales). Though it’s difficult to find comprehensive data on YoY online vs. retail for Black Friday over the past decade, online is almost certainly seeing more growth. For example, compared to last year, device purchases were up 10.4%, online orders using Buy Now Pay Later are up 72%, and Shopify merchants sold a record $4.1 billion. Great news!

On the other hand, nobody is dying in a mall stampede anymore, or knifing a mom over the last Beanie Baby, and that’s just kind of sad. My God, we used to be a proper nation.

Black Friday morning, no doubt still hungover (he tried to get out of writing this), River Page visited his local mall, and wrote about his bleak experience.

Pirate WiresBlack Friday is DeadFor most of my life, Black Friday has been a bloodbath of libidinal consumerism. Every year, we turned housewives into gladiators, arguing and beating each other over discounted bath towels at JC Penny. Black Friday meant pulling a gun in a Toys “R” US…Read morea month ago · 31 likes · 3 comments · River Page

How the hell is Gawker still alive (“racist” kid edition). Monday, former Gawker sports site Deadspin attempted to cancel a small child at an NFL game for finding “a way to hate Black people and the Native Americans at the same time.” 

My expectations were low, but holy shit. In a flood of photos that followed, it became obvious Deadspin’s Carron J. Phillips purposely concealed the fact that the other half of the kid’s face was painted red. Because red and black are the team’s colors. You absolute monster.

As of yesterday, Deadspin’s article still only shows the black side of the kid’s face, and is captioned “Chiefs fan on Sunday in Native American headdress and Black face.” Later in the article: “This is what happens when you ban books, stand against Critical Race Theory, and try to erase centuries of hate.”

Can AI replace these people already?

Turns out maybe! Anti-tech media entity Futurism accused Sports Illustrated of AI generated content (mortal sin in their culture). Evidence for the claim consisted of AI-generated author profile pics, and weird phrasing scattered throughout the site’s articles. Arena Group — the company in control of the magazine’s online presence — denied the writing was AI-generated, and said it originated from a third-party agency running their eCommerce content.

In any case, there’s really no scoop here. In the words of Pirate Wires managing editor Brandon Gorrell, this is just “naivete” on the part of clueless writers who have somehow not yet realized the macro conditions for new media, and legacy entities that have long since refashioned themselves as such, are apocalyptic. In this environment, the orgs have traded domain authority for what little cash their legacy brands are still worth, “because absent a loyal readership that can distinguish your content from everyone else's, survival is a race to the bottom that requires all manner of compromise and indignity.”

Content farms, in other words. All of these writers have been minting actual trash for years. Did they not realize? I guess it’s possible they really are this clueless. But it’s still not worth feeling bad when idea garbage men lose their jobs to robots, who are also minting trash. In my opinion!

INDUSTRY LINKS

BROAD TECH:

• Yesterday evening OpenAI made it official: Sam is back as CEO (see his brief thread about it here), Mira Murati is CTO, Greg Brockman is now President of the company, and the new board is Bret Taylor (Chair), Larry Summers, and Adam D’Angelo. Also last night, former board member Helen Toner ‘resigned’. (OpenAI)

• Amazon is looking for 50,000 square feet of office space in Miami, where it has over 400 employees. This news comes on the heels of Bezos’ announcement that he’s moving from Seattle to Miami with his crowned Latina goddess. (Bloomberg)

• Anduril’s Palmer Luckey tweeted “e/acc,” setting the anti-doomer internet ablaze. If you haven’t yet, definitely check out my interview with Palmer, which we ran just before Thanksgiving. (@PalmerLuckey)

• DevTernity, an online developers conference, has been canceled after the organizer was accused of using fake female profiles to boost gender diversity in their speaker lineup, causing real, actual speakers to cancel. No offense, but this is just technically speaking incredibly funny. (Bloomberg)

• GM is “substantially” cutting costs at its Cruise autonomous driving unit, with CEO Mary Barra saying they “must rebuild trust” with regulators, first responders, and communities. (NYT)

• Waymo co-founder Anthony Levandowski has re-launched his AI church “Way of the Future.” The church, founded in 2015 and shuttered in 2020, aims to focus on “the realization, acceptance, and worship of a Godhead based on Artificial Intelligence developed through computer hardware and software.” (Bloomberg)

• Amazon roll-up startups are in a “cycle of survival,” suffering from rising rates and the fallout from poorly-diligenced ZIRP-era acquisitions. The category raised $16 billion during the pandemic ecommerce boom. (FT)

• Proptech unicorn Veev is shutting down after abruptly canceling a fundraising attempt. The company raised $600 million. (TechCrunch)

• Elon has reached an agreement with Israeli officials to offer Starlink internet in Israel and Gaza — with the approval of the Israeli Ministry of Communications. (The Hill)

• NAFO, an online activist group, is making a coordinated effort to take down Truth Social via trolling. One of their tactics: make trojan-horse hashtags such as #ErectionFraud go viral on the platform. (Wired)

• Jack Dorsey led a $6.2 million seed round for Ocean, a decentralized Bitcoin mining pool.

• Legendary investor and Warren Buffet’s right hand man Charlie Munger has died. (CNBC)

Human resources:

• Crypto exchange Coinbase posted about their “five new measures to increase talent density” at the company, which include cognitive testing and a target of 20% of hires in product, engineering, and design to have gone through their internship program. (Coinbase)

• Sierra Space laid off 165 people after completing the build for its spacecraft Tenacity, the “world’s sole commercial runway-capable spaceplane,” in a “workforce realignment.” (SpaceNews)

• ByteDance will cut “several hundred” people from its Nuverse gaming division (Bloomberg)

• Amazon workers at locations in the UK, Germany and other countries walked out on Black Friday as part of a “Make Amazon Pay” union protest. (The Hill)

• Several people on X went on record this week to confirm that some teams at Google don’t call their all-hands meetings “all-hands meetings” because some people don’t have hands. (@bencasnocha)

$$$:

• The tender offer for OpenAI shares is back on schedule after the company’s failed coup earlier this month (I broke down the entire saga here). Investors led by Thrive Capital will buy up to $1 billion in stock from employees or other investors later this month in a deal that values OpenAI at $86 billion. (The Information)

• Neuralink has raised another $43 million in a round led by Founders Fund, with 31 other investors contributing. The company has raised over $320 million to-date. (Business Insider)

• Reddit is in talks with potential investors to consider an IPO as soon as Q1 2024. Cloud and data security startup Rubrik and Kim K’s Skims underwear brand are two other companies discussing IPOs next year. (Bloomberg)

• Activist investor Anson Funds is urging Twilio to divest its data and applications business, and to commit the resulting funds to stock buybacks or acquisitions. $TWLO is down more than 4x from its 2021 high. (The Information)

• Singapore-based online retailer Shein has filed confidentially for a US IPO, reportedly seeking a $90 billion valuation (the fast-fashion company does more sales than Zara and H&M in the U.S. market). (Bloomberg)

Last week, a contingent of effective altruist doomer board members succeeded in briefly ousting Sam Altman from OpenAI. Then the plans completely blew up in their faces. I recapped the entire saga in a piece for Pirate Wires last week. Check it out:

Pirate WiresOpenAI, the Complete Story: Corporate Giants, Religious Fanatics, and Chaos in the Heart of Tech“In a decel society, it is not enough to be non-decel, we must be anti-decel.” Knife fight in a clown car. By yesterday, at least 700 of 770 OpenAI employees vowed to leave the company following the board’s incomprehensible decision to fire CEO Sam Altman…Read morea month ago · 131 likes · 18 comments · Mike Solana

Litigation and regulation:

• X is suing “media watchdog” group Media Matters for allegedly “creating an account that followed only fringe figures and big advertisers, excessively refreshing its feed, with the intent of generating rare pairings of ads next to objectionable content to take misleading screenshots,” after which “several advertisers including Apple, NBCUniversal, and IBM pulled their advertising from” the platform. (@xDaily)

• 33 states are accusing Meta of knowingly allowing millions of under-13-year-olds to use Instagram. Fines for each individual violation can be as high as $50,120; if the suit finds Meta at fault, the company could be dealt an “unprecedented” judgment. (Business Insider)

• FTX investors are suing MLB, Formula 1, and Mercedes-Benz’s racing team for allegedly “facilitating” the crypto company’s $11 billion fraud, expanding a suit that already includes celebs such as Tom Brady and Steph Curry. (Bloomberg)

• Binance’s Changpeng Zhao can’t leave the U.S., prosecutors say, after the CEO pled guilty to felony money laundering and sanctions violations. CZ has entered a plea deal that will allow Binance to continue operating and could lighten his prison sentence to as little as 18 months. Not a bad outcome, in 2023 crypto terms. (Bloomberg)

• California’s privacy regulator has published draft regulations for the use of AI in rules that draw inspiration from Europe’s GDPR legislation. Sparknotes: it covers opt-out rights, pre-use notice requirements, and user data access rights. (TechCrunch)

• Just the latest chapter in the unholy Brussels-Sacramento anti-tech alliance. FAI’s Luke Hogg covered the story for The Industry in August. 

• Yesterday the Commerce Department announced a plan to create DEIA (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Accessibility) best practices for the private sector. Companies will not be required to legally required follow the recommendations — not yet, anyway.

AI:

• Some 400 U.S. government agencies are scrambling to find “Chief AI Officers” to fulfill a requirement that’s part of Biden’s AI executive order. Maximum pay for this role is $212,100. (Axios)

• Stability AI, maker of the Stable Diffusion image generator, is under pressure from investors to explore a sale. Coatue Management last month called for Stability CEO Emad Mostaque to step down. (Bloomberg)

• Vitalik Buterin has dropped a 10,000-word piece titled “My techno-optimism,” which covers AI existential risk as well as decentralization’s potential role in safe acceleration. “We need to build, and accelerate. But there is a very real question that needs to be asked: what is the thing that we are accelerating towards?”

• Amazon unveiled Q, a chatbot for businesses that can access a company’s data and enterprise suite as well as troubleshoot issues with AWS. (CNBC)

• A Spanish design agency is apparently banking $11k a month on sponsored content and Fanvue (OnlyFans competitor) revenue with its hot AI influencer Aitana. Suffice to say, the Pirate Wires team saw this coming quite a long time ago. (NYPost)

• Runway released Motion Brush, which allows users to simply fill in areas of an image they want animated. Check out one of their eye-popping demos here.

“Friends,” “allies”:

• Canada and Google have reached an agreement just three weeks before the country’s Online News Act goes into effect. In exchange for the privilege of linking to Canadian news sites, Google will pay roughly $100 million annually to these organizations. Meta will likely choose not to play, and continue restricting Canadian news on its platforms. (CBC)

• Funding for European tech companies is expected to decrease by almost half in 2023, with EU startups projected to raise $45 billion, down from $82 billion in 2022. U.S. VC investment remains triple the level of Europe (FT). Read Atomico’s full State of European Tech survey here.

• While Elizabeth Warren frantically oscillates between totally invented portraits of crypto and the righteous war against Big Sandwich, European lawmakers are targeting Big Roomba. Brussels is objecting to Amazon’s planned $1.45 billion acquisition of iRobot, maker of the Roomba robot vacuum, saying the move could harm other vacuum robot companies. Which are also not made in Europe. (FT)

• Fourteen months after it was announced, Adobe’s proposed acquisition of Figma is still taking flak, this time from the UK antitrust regulator, who says the deal “has the potential to impact the UK’s digital design industry [NOTE: it does not] by reducing choice, innovation and the development of new competitive products [NOTE: literally none of these things exist in Britain].” (FT)

• Tesla has sued Sweden’s postal agency after the country’s postal workers blocked the delivery of license plates to Tesla out of solidarity with the 130 Tesla workers who went on strike earlier this month. (Swedish courts have sided with Tesla, ordering the Transport Agency to deliver the plates.) (The Verge)

• Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo is quitting X, saying that the platform is “an impressive tool for destroying our democracies.” No word yet on Angela Merkel’s role. (Business Insider)

Trade war:

• Friday, Putin unveiled plans for a new national AI strategy that aims to scale up Russia’s supercomputing capabilities and improve AI education, saying that existing AI models could lead to “a kind of [digital] abolition” of Russia. (Business Insider)

• Russia’s courts have added Meta spokesperson Andy Stone to a “wanted” list for “aiding terrorism,” without providing many other details. The Kremlin blocked Russian access to Meta’s platforms in 2022. (Axios)

• Chimera, a Chinese-linked hacker group, infiltrated NXP, a Dutch semiconductor giant, from late 2017 to early 2020, a new report shows. (Tom’s Hardware)

In the weeks following the death of George Floyd, San Francisco mayor London Breed announced the city would defund its police department to the tune of $120 million and use the money to fund racial justice initiatives. What resulted was the Dream Keeper Initiative, a program that funds direct cash transfers to one-person-run "companies" with almost no audience/clients, a web of nonprofits with shady connections to the city's mayor and supervisors, and $500,000, no-interest down payment loans for black San Franciscans (to mention just a few). Read Sanjana’s explosive piece of local reporting below (and btw, city residents are already reading the article, out loud, to the Board of Supervisors at City Hall).

Dolores ParkThe Dream Keeper Initiative: How San Francisco Defunded the Police for a Historic Racial Equity Cash Grab“The scale of investment [in Dream Keeper] is still not enough: according to one grantee, ‘you are in the desert, and you get a glass of water: sure, tastes good, but damn, I could use some more.’” — from 2022 Dream Keeper Initiative impact report In June 2020, a week-and-a-half after George Floyd was killed, San Francisco Mayor London Breed and District…Read more2 months ago · 65 likes · 29 comments · Sanjana Friedman