It was a simple concept: a cryptocurrency whose units were always and constantly worth exactly one dollar, because they were backed by dollars held in a bank. Voila: dollars with the powers of crypto, such as the ability to quickly and permissionlessly transfer an arbitrary amount … and, er, a certain lack of pesky regulations.

Now there are $2.7 billion worth of Tether in circulation, and they are anything but simple. (Euro Tether also exist but they’re a rounding error.) Who created Tether? The same people behind the exchange BitFinex, with whom Tether shares a CEO, a CFO, and (until recently) a Chief Strategy Officer. That much we can be fairly confident about. But everything else about this money is shrouded in a deep fog of mystery tinged with misconduct.

Who buys Tether? It’s hard to say; you can trade USD for them at a couple of crypto exchanges, notably Kraken in addition to the BitFinex exchange, but I haven’t been able to find any recent public examples of anyone, institution or person, actually buying newly issued Tethers from Bitfinex. So who provides the US dollars which are said to back all newly issued Tether? It’s very hard to say.

Who audits them, to ensure those dollars are there? Well — actually — nobody, despite their web site‘s assurances that their reserve holdings are “subject to frequent professional audits” and “Our reserve account is regularly audited.” But they “dissolved” their relationship with their first auditors, Friedman LLP, without an audit ever being completed, and the “proof of funds” “transparency update” so prominent on their home page stresses it “should not be construed as the results of an audit.”

Do we have any reason to believe those dollars actually exist? Well, yes. The fact their “transparency report” is not an audit makes it very limited, questionable evidence, in my book … but it’s some evidence nonetheless. (It’s really quite something that we’re talking about some evidence, rather than an actual audit, for the existence of nearly three billion, with a “B,” dollars which are theoretically backing a very widely used asset.) Furthermore they appear to have banking relationships in Puerto Rico, and/or with ING, and the massive growth in total bank deposits in Puerto Rico over the last year or so roughly corresponds with the number of Tethers which have been issued in that time.

How do you redeem Tether for US dollars? That’s … both hard and easy to answer. I’ve been following the Tether saga with some interest for a full year and I have yet to come across any public example of Tether actually doing this for anyone. Ever. Their most recent public announcement on the subject, from the end of last year, says “exchanges and other qualified corporate customers can contact Tether directly to arrange for creation and redemption. Sadly, however, we cannot create or redeem tether for any U.S.-based customers at this time.”

However! The most interesting thing about Tether is that you don’t need to redeem them for dollars. As long as a cryptocurrency exchange believes that one Tether is worth one dollar, you can just use your Tether to buy bitcoin, or ether, or whatevercoin, and then transfer / convert that to dollars. It’s those cryptocurrency:Tether exchange rates which actually matter. As long as those are maintained, it’s actually irrelevant to the average user whether Tether is actually backed by dollars … which obviously opens up a lot of space in which shenanigans might occur.

What are those whiffs of misconduct to which I previously referred? I mean. How much time do you have? One passionate critic, known as Bitfinexed, has been writing about this for quite some time now; it’s a pretty deep rabbit hole. University of Texas researchers have accused Bitfinex/Tether of manipulating the price of Bitcoin (upwards.) The two entities have allegedly been subpoenaed by US regulators. In possibly (but also possibly not — again, a fog of mystery) related news, the US Justice Department has opened a criminal investigation into cryptocurrency price manipulation, which critics say is ongoing. Comparisons are also being drawn with Liberty Reserve, the digital currency service shut down for money laundering five years ago:

So what the hell is going on? Good question. On the one hand, people and even companies are innocent until proven guilty, and the opacity of cryptocurrency companies is at least morally consistent with the industry as a whole. A wildly disproportionate number of crypto people are privacy maximalists and/or really hate and fear governments. (I wish the US government didn’t keep making their “all governments become jackbooted surveillance police states!” attitude seem less unhinged and more plausible.)

But on the other … yes, one reason for privacy maximalism is because you fear rubber-hose decryption of your  keys, but another, especially when anti-government sentiment is involved, is because you fear the taxman, or the regulator. A third might be that you fear what the invisible hand would do to cryptocurrency prices, if it had full leeway. And it sure doesn’t look good when when at least one of your claims, e.g. that your unaudited reserves are “subject to frequent professional audits,” is awfully hard to interpret as anything other than a baldfaced lie.

How can we ever find out? I see four plausible answers: 1) a serious, competent, trustworthy, professional organization actually performs a full audit; 2) a legal / regulatory / criminal investigation forces Tether to open up their books; 3) a whistleblower tells all; 4) we don’t, ever. In the interim, this misconduct-tinged fog will continue to cover their entire enterprise … and their users won’t care, as long as one Tether buys you exactly as much bitcoin as one dollar, on every cryptocurrency exchange which supports them.

Spotify’s lack of full lyrics support and its minimal attention to voice are beginning to become problems for the streaming service. The company has been so focused on the development of its personalization technology and programming its playlists, it has overlooked key features that its competitors – including Apple, Google, and Amazon – today offer and are now capitalizing on.

For example, in the updated version of Apple Music rolling out this fall with iOS 12, users won’t just have access to lyrics in the app as before, they will also be able to perform searches by lyrics instead of only by the artist, album, or song title.

And Apple Music is actually playing catch up with Amazon on this front.

Amazon Music, which has quietly grown to become the third largest music streaming service, allows users to view the lyrics as songs play, and ties that to its Alexa voice platform. Amazon Music users with an Alexa device can also search for songs by lyrics just by saying “play the song that goes…”.

The company has been offering this capability for close to two years. While it had originally been one of Alexa’s hidden gems, today asking Alexa to pull up a song by its lyrics is considered a standard feature.

Though Google has lagged behind Apple, Spotify and Amazon in music, its clever Google Assistant is capable of search-by-lyrics, too. And as an added perk, it can also work like Shazam to identify a song that’s playing nearby.

With the rise of voice-based computing, features like asking for songs with verbal commands or querying databases of lyrics by voice are now expected features.

And where’s Spotify on this?

It has launched lyrics search only in Japan so far, and refuses to provide a timeline as to when it will make this a priority in other markets. Even tucked away in the app’s code are references to lyrics tests only in the non-U.S. markets of Thailand and Vietnam.

Those tests have been underway since the beginning of the year, we understand from sources. But the attention being given to these tests is minimal – Spotify isn’t measuring user engagement with the lyrics feature at this point. And Spotify CEO Daniel Ek wasn’t even aware his team was working on these lyrics tests, we heard, which implies a lack of management focus on this product.

Meanwhile, competitors like Apple and Amazon have dedicated lyrics teams.

We asked Spotify multiple times if it was currently testing lyrics in the U.S. (You can see one person who claims they gained access here, for example.) But the company never responded to our questions.

Image credit: Imgur via Reddit user spalatidium

Some Spotify customers who largely listen to popular music may be confused about the lack of a full lyrics product in the app. That’s because Spotify partnered with Genius in 2016 to launch “Behind the Lyrics,” which offers lyrics and music trivia on a portion of its catalog. But you don’t see all the song’s lyrics when the music plays because they’re interrupted with facts and other background  information about the song, the lyrics’ meaning, or the artist.

That same year, Spotify also ditched its ties with Musixmatch, which had been providing its lyrics support, as the two companies could no longer come to an agreement. There was expectation from users that lyrics would return at some point – but only “Behind the Lyrics” emerged to fill the void.

Demand for a real lyrics feature remains strong, though. Users regularly post on social media and Reddit about the topic.

A request for lyrics’ return is also one of the most upvoted product ideas on Spotify’s user feedback forum. It has 9,237 “likes,” making it the second-most popular request.

(The idea has been flagged “Watch this Space,” but it’s been tagged like that for so long it’s no longer a promise of something that’s soon to come.) There is no internal solution in the works, we understand, and it’s not working on a new deal with a third-party at this time.

The lack of lyrics is becoming a problem in other areas, as well, now that competitors are launching search-by-lyrics features that work via voice commands.

In fact, Spotify was late, in general, to address users’ interest in voice assistance – even though a primary use case for music listening is when you’re on the go – like, in the car, out walking or jogging, at the gym, biking, etc.

It only began testing a voice search option this spring, accessible through a new in-app button. Now rolled out to mobile users on Spotify Premium, the voice search product works via a long-press on the Search button in the app. You can then ask Spotify to play music, playlists, podcasts, and videos.

But the feature is still wonky. For one thing, hiding it away as a long press-triggered option means many users probably don’t know it exists. (And the floating button that pops up when you switch to search is hard to reach.) Secondly, it doesn’t address the primary reason users want to search by voice: hands-free listening.

Meanwhile, iPhone/HomePod users can tell Siri to play music with a hands-free command; Google Assistant/Google Home users can instruct the helper to play their songs – even if they only know the lyrics. And Amazon Music’s Alexa integration is live on Echo speakers, and available hands-free in its Music app.

Even third-party music services like Pandora are tapping into the voice platforms’ capabilities to provide search by lyrics. For example, Pandora Premium launched this week on Google Assistant devices like the Google Home, and offers search-by-lyrics powered by Google Assistant.

Spotify can’t offer a native search-by-lyrics feature in its app, much less search-by-lyrics using voice commands option, because it doesn’t even have fully functional lyrics.

Voice and lyrics aren’t the only challenges Spotify is facing going forward.

Spotify also lacks dedicated hardware like its own Echo or HomePod. Given the rise of voice-based computing and voice assistants, the company has the potential to cede some portion of the market as consumers end up buying into the larger ecosystems provided by the main tech players: Siri/HomePod/Apple Music vs. Google Assistant/Google Home/Google Play Music (or YouTube Music) vs. Alexa/Echo/Amazon Music (all promoted by Prime).

For now, Spotify works with partners to make sure its service performs on their platforms, but Apple isn’t playing nice in return.

Elsewhere, Spotify may play – even by voice – but won’t be as fully functional as the native solutions. With Spotify as the default service on Echo devices, for example, Alexa can’t always figure out commands that instruct it to play music by lyrics, activity, or mood – commands that work well with Amazon Music, of course.

Other cracks in Spotify’s dominance are starting to show, too.

Amazon Music has seen impressive growth, thanks to adoption in four key Prime markets, U.S., Japan, Germany and the U.K.. With now 12% of the music streaming market, it has become the dark horse that’s been largely ignored amid discussions of the Amazon vs Spotify battle. But it’s not necessarily one to count out just yet.

YouTube Music, though brand new, has managed to snag Lyor Cohen as its Global Music Head, while Spotify’s latest headlines are about losing Troy Carter.

Meanwhile, Apple CEO Tim Cook just announced during the last earnings call that Apple Music has moved ahead of Spotify in North America. He also warned against ceding too much control to algorithms, in a recent interview, making a sensible argument for maintaining music’s “spiritual role” in our lives.

“We worry about the humanity being drained out of music, about it becoming a bits-and-bytes kind of world instead of the art and craft,” Cook mused.

Apple was late to music streaming, having been so tied to its download business. But it also had the luxury of time to get it right, knowing that its powerful iPhone platform means anything it launches has a built-in advantage. (And it’s poised to offer TV shows as a part of its subscription, too, which could be a further draw.)

How much time does Spotify have to get it right?

Despite these concerns, Spotify doesn’t need to panic yet – it still has more listeners, more paying customers, and more consumer mindshare in the music streaming business. It has its popular playlists and personalization features. It has its RapCaviar. But it will need to plug its holes to keep up where the market is heading, or risk losing customers to the larger platforms in the months ahead.

So, to recap: Satellite communication systems worldwide are “protected” by easily cracked hard-coded passwords. The private internet connecting the world’s mobile phone operators remains replete with vulnerabilities. Russia has successfully hacked into American power-plant control systems. Oh, and voting machines in use in 18 states can be remotely hijacked.

Do you see a theme here? We assume that everything is fine, that the world in which we live rests on solid foundations, that competent grown-ups are in charge of the fundamental infrastructure on which our society rests, which have been constructed as fault-tolerant, resilient systems. We assume somebody somewhere is at the switch, keeping a sharp eye on things.

In some cases, such as aviation, that does indeed seem to be the case. In others, the infrastructure is too decentralized and disconnected to be seriously at risk. But in far too many others, our we have constructed a perfect-storm-in-waiting of tightly coupled networks, zero oversight, and laughable attempts at security. Authority without responsibility, in other words. And in those cases, the assumption that our structural foundations are fine is a laughable pipe dream.

Reminders of this state of affairs come every month, with every infosec conference, every excited burst of news coverage following the discovery of a new high-profile hole. We patch the holes — maybe — but we don’t change our approach. At last week’s Black Hat conference, its creator Jeff Moss mused: “attackers have strategies, but defenders only seem to have tactics.”

This is tacitly deliberate. We could have a strategy of hardening our collective infrastructure to improve its security, but the daunting list of upgrades (or downgrades) that would require would be ruinously expensive. This isn’t a problem unique to information security: for instance, 54,000 bridges in America need repair, too. Are we going to repair all 54,000 anytime soon? Don’t make me laugh.

I’ve observed while travelling that one of the most striking differences in quality of life, between nations with comparable wealth, is simply what’s culturally acceptable. (A famous example: in Japan it is not culturally acceptable for trains to be late. In wealthier America … not so much.) The only way we’re going to harden our infrastructure, and fix our bridges, if it becomes culturally unacceptable for them not to be fixed.

I don’t see that happening. Instead, in a wealthy world of increasing economic disparity, I expect us to increasingly see two-tier infrastructure; stable, secure, reliable infrastructure for the 20%, and a haphazard, kinda-mostly-functional, vulnerable tier for the 80%. “Natural monopolies” such as power grids will be replaced by e.g. private solar power and PowerWalls. At some point one of the US mobile phone provides may well decide that it’s strategically worth it to become the Apple of phone service, charging twice as much for far better service and security. Etcetera.

Unless, of course, some kind of perfect storm arrives first, and our security problem turns into a genuine crisis, or even catastrophe. I’m an optimist; I don’t think that will happen. But it’s increasingly hard to ignore the possibility.

Another week, another high-profile hack. This week it was (checks notes) Reddit. What makes this one marginally more interesting is that the victims were using two-factor authentication, i.e. SMS codes texted to them to verify their identities when their accounts were accessed — which turned out to be little more than a speed bump for the attackers.

This surprised exactly zero (good) security people. It has long been known that your phone service can be hacked either via SS7, the ancient and insecure system used to interconnect the planet’s phone networks, or by the more old-fashioned but even more effective method of walking into a store and talking a callow undertrained clerk into transferring your number to the attacker’s phone. Phone companies are trying to remediate both of these attack vectors, but you can’t trust them to protect you; not yet, and possibly not ever.

But you have to trust someone to protect all the things you hide behind passwords. You have no real choice but to implicitly trust your network, and your phone’s manufacturer, and the manufacturer of its baseband chip, and the whole basic stack from your BIOS to your browser.

You can choose Apple over Android, or Pixel over third-party Androids. But whichever choice you make, you are basically pledging your trust in all that you hold dear to Apple or Google. It’s sad to say, in an era when the tech giants are already too powerful and growing moreso every day, but from a security perspective, that is, for most people, probably currently the right thing to do.

Google’s security team is probably the best on the block, and its Pixel phones are more secure than other Androids, partly because they get the latest updates first, partly because they’re free of possibly vulnerable or even malicious pre-installed bloatware. I don’t like Apple’s hegemonic attitude towards software, philosophically; but its security people know what they are doing, and its strict gatekeeping of its App Store has very real security benefits.

But wait: this trust in those twin giants probably needs to extend beyond your phones to your computers and your emails, too. We’ve all been told again and again: don’t open email attachments. They’re not safe. And we are all told again and again, probably on a daily basis, by our family and/or co-workers, who may or may not have just been hacked themselves: open this email attachment, it’s something important you need to deal with right now. How to deal with this conundrum? The answer is, essentially: GMail, Google Docs, and Google Drive, on an Apple device or a Chromebook.

The new new security message is: “don’t use SMS authentication.” (Mind you, most Americans have never even heard of two-factor authentication full stop, and SMS two-factor is still better than one-factor, modulo the false sense of security it may instill.) What to do instead? Well, you could buy a Yubikey or a SecurID token, which is insanely, ludicrously, non-starter inconvenient for most people. Or you could use a phone app, such as, most commonly — yep, you guessed it; Google Authenticator.

Over the last few decades the tech industry has built systems so fundamentally insecure, so rotten to their core, that we now have no real choice but to trust its largest and most powerful companies to protect us. I’m all too aware of the grim irony. (Though in fairness the telecom industry has much to answer for too.) Things weren’t supposed to be this way; things didn’t have to be this way; but here we are.

For being the richest company ever with $243 billion in cash, Apple sure cuts corners in the stingiest ways. The hardware giant became the first trillion-dollar company week. Yet it’s tough to reconcile Apple earning $11 billion in profit per quarter with it still screwing us over on cords and keyboards. The “it just works” philosophy has slipped through the cracks of the money-printing machine. It’s not that Apple couldn’t afford to fix the problems, it’s just ensnared in hubris such that it doesn’t see them as important.

We still turn to Apple because it makes the best core products. But the edges of the customer experience have frayed like the wires of a Lightning cable. The key to Apple’s fortune is obviously selling high margin iPhones, not these ways it nickels and dimes us. But the company has an opportunity to raise its standards after this milestone, and win back the faith that could push it to a $2 trillion market cap.

1. Frayed Charging Cables

Apple gives you that tingly feeling in the worst way. Can it not build Lightning cables and MacBook chargers a little sturdier? If you avoid losing one long enough to put in some serious use, it inevitably ends up splittling where the cord meets your iPhone or exits the laptop power supply. Whether it’s wrapping them in electrical tape or the spring of a retractable pen, people have come up with all sorts of Macgyver methods to make their Apple chargers last. It got so bad that Apple was sued into offering a MacBook charger replacement program, but that expired years ago. If these are what allow us to play with the fancy devices it invents, shouldn’t they get the same quality of industrial design?

Image via Sophia Cannon

2. Buried iTunes Subscriptions Cancellation

Want to cancel your Apple Music subscription or some other service you got roped into with a free trial? It’s SUPER easy. First, click the totally unlabeled and generic circle with a blotch in it that’s supposed to be a profile picture icon. You should see a “Manage Subscriptions” option…but you don’t. Instead, you’ll have to know to tap “View Apple ID”. Once you auth in with the same face or thumbprint that opened your phone in the first place you’ll find the option to cut them off. And as thank you for this convenience, you’ll get to pay 30 percent extra on some subscriptions if you pay through Apple. It’s clearly exploitative dark pattern design.

3. Keyboard Claptrap

The MacBook keyboard is the on-ramp to the information superhighway, yet a single grain of sand can cause a pile up. Renowned Apple pundit John Gruber called it “one of the biggest design screwups in Apple history”. The new butterfly key design Apple rolled out in 2016 can get jammed by dust, requiring a lengthy disassembly process often requiring a professional to fix. Suddenly your work grinds to a halt. Apple wouldn’t always cover this repair, even under warranty. It took a lawsuit and tons of public backlash for Apple to offer free fixes, and that still typically leaves you without a laptop for a few days. I’m typing this article on a cracked-screen 2013 MacBook Pro because I refuse to upgrade until they make the keyboard design more resilient.

4. Killing Affiliate Fees Blogs Rely On

Apple benefits from a legion of blogs obsessing over its hardware and software, hyping up everything it sells. Just this week it returned that favor by announcing it will cut off one of their core sources of revenue. Websites would previously earn a 7 percent commission from Apple in exchange for affiliate link clicks leading to purchases on the App Store. But over the past few years, Apple has begun to sell ads inside the App Store too, competing for advertisers with those external blogs. It’s also built up its own editorial team that curates what’s featured, and apparently doesn’t want competition in being a king-maker. So in October Apple is shutting down the affiliate program that app review sites like TouchArcade and AppShopper depend on, potentially spelling their doom.

5. Dongle Hell

What’s the opposite of “it just works”? Paying extra to lug around a slew of gangly cord connectors you need just to plug things into your laptop or phone. Dongles are the emblem of Apple’s abandonment of the user experience. A Thunderbolt 2 to Thunderbolt 3 dongle runs $50 while it will cost you $9 to plug in any pair of headphones from the past half-century once you’ve inevitably lost the Lightning dongle you’re allocated. Apple loves pushing us towards its vision of tomorrow, like Bluetooth headphones (that it sells) and USB-C fast-chargers (that it sells). But ditching headphone jacks and old school USB ports makes Apple’s latest devices incompatible with sanity. Even its own commercial shows musician Grimes struggling with her dongles. Sorry you can’t pass me the aux cord. I’m from the future.

Image via Notebookcheck

[Featured Image via Instructibles]

I love Hollywood box-office numbers because they provide a hard statistical view of cultural currents. Did you know, for instance, that there had never been a weekend when 8 of the top 10 movies in America were sequels — until this month? Or that, while almost 400 movies were released in the first half of 2018, nearly 40% of their total accumulated revenue came from just four releases, all of which were superhero sequels?

This is not what was supposed to happen. Ten years ago people thought that visual storytelling would be democratized; that new cameras, new editing suites, cheap streaming, and BitTorrent would combine to render high-cost obsolete-infrastructure Hollywood irrelevant. A worldwide cohort of genius independent filmmakers would use this new generation of accessible tools to slowly supplant Hollywood studios and producers as the drivers of visual and narrative culture.

Hoo boy, did that ever not happen. Instead we just added a few new gatekeepers to the entertainment oligarchy: YouTube, Amazon, Netflix. Instead of a new era of auteurs, of unique voices and stories, the entertainment industry has had enormous success doing the complete opposite: doubling down on sequels, and expanding brands and franchises into massive worlds of corporate-licensed, committee-written, producer-driven branded entertainment, often spanning movies, television, books, video games, and amusement parks. The Marvel Cinematic (and televised) Universe. Worlds of DC. Star Wars. Star Trek. The Wizarding World of Harry Potter. Jurassic World.

This is not in and of itself a bad thing. I’m a fan of most of those myself. But it’s worth asking; why didn’t we get that decentralized diaspora of auteurs that was once widely predicted? And what are the longer-term effects of the triumph of Branded Worlds on the grassroots, and the next generations, of pop culture?

There are two answers to the first question: cost and time. Maybe it’s a lot easier to shoot and edit movies/TV than it used to be, but sets, locations, actors, scripts — those are all expensive and difficult. Better amateur work is still far from professional. And while it’s true we’re seeing interesting new visual modes of storytelling, e.g. on Twitch and YouTube,  it’s very rarely narrative fiction, and it’s still  distributed and monetized via Twitch and YouTube, gatekeepers who implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) shape what’s popular.

More importantly, though, democratizing the means of production does not increase demand. A 10x increase in the number of TV shows, however accessible they may be, does not 10x the time any person spends watching television. For a time the “long tail” theory, that you could make a lot of money from niche audiences as long as your total accessible market grew large enough, was in vogue. This was essentially a mathematical claim, that audience demand was “fat-tailed” rather than “thin-tailed.”

But it seems that the demand for entertainment is quite thin-tailed indeed. The more options we have, the more we seem to want characters we already know, in worlds with which we’re already familiar. This makes sense — it takes a lot of work to engage with a new world and a new cast, with no guarantee at all that they will be worth the effort. But the result is that Branded Worlds increasingly feel like vast open-world video games, even including side quests (Rogue One or Ant-Man And The Wasp) along with the “main story,” and a seemingly endless amount of new downloadable content.

I also suspect that many-chaptered, many-charactered worlds are more viable than they used to be because we’re more connected to them. Did you miss a Marvel movie leading up to Infinity War? Well, you can recap its handful of key and killer scenes on YouTube, in fifteen minutes, without having to rent/watch the whole thing. Did you miss the last episode of a TV show, or do you just want to skip to its conclusion? If it has enough cultural resonance, Vulture or The AVClub probably posted a recap you can use as quick Cliff’s Notes. We can dip our toes into Branded Worlds whenever we like, in between diving into them at a movie theater or serious bingewatching session.

The other interesting question is: what does the growing supremacy of Branded Worlds mean for the next generation of writers, directors, and producers? Obviously producers will try to turn tentpoles into sequels, and sequels into franchises, as before; but now they have a new goal, that of transforming a franchise into the apotheosis of a Branded World. (Game of Thrones, The Hunger Games, and Westworld are obvious candidates, though each faces its own set of hurdles.)

Obviously writers and directors are incentivized to create what is most likely to be successful. This doesn’t mean the complete absence of standalone one-offs — we’ve also seen that horror, long a springboard for auteurs breaking into the biz, seems to give us one surprise crossover hit every year, such as Get Out and A Quiet Place. But it does mean that creators will focus on worlds as much as stories, and that fanfiction will become a completely viable path into the industry — after all, writing within a Branded World is simply paid fanfiction. (Creators will also be incentivized to write stories which might do well in China’s burgeoning market, but that’s a different post.)

Again, none of this is intrinsically bad. What I worry about a little, though, is whether the demand for entertainment is so thin-tailed that, as the number of Branded Worlds increases, that demand begins to end with them. It’s pretty clear that once a Branded World gets big enough it doesn’t necessarily have to be good to be successful. (See Age of Ultron, Batman v Superman, the bad Star Trek movies, arguably Solo, etc.) Left-field hits like Get Out are funded because their collective batting average is acceptably high. If Branded Worlds take enough of the mindshare of the masses that the batting average of original works drops faster than their production cost, then we’ll start seeing even fewer of those.

Will that happen? I can’t say — but I can tell you that a good way to measure whether it’s happening is to look at the weekend box office a few years from now and see if, for the first time, fully 9 out of the top 10 are sequels. Watch the numbers; they rarely lie.

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Hey KIDS!

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Exciting News!

First up: Exciting news! We’re going to be migrating the Club Newsletter to a new format from next month that will be delivered in person! In virtual reality! This means you’ll be able to feel like I’m sitting right next to you saying this stuff right in your face instead of just passively reading it off a screen and maybe getting distracted by other less important stuff. Myself and your Totally Lost Boys (TLB) Club Committee are so excited that we can bring you this amazing experience before any other Youth Club in the world! #awesome

Here’s a taster from a VR trip I took recently to check out the totally awful devastation in Puerto Rico:

Now you’re probably asking how can we bring this exciting new technology to your friendly neighborhood Youth Club, right?! I’m pleased to say that the 2,500% increase in Newsletter Sponsor Messages over the past ~two months has really helped bulk up the Club Money Pool. Rest assured, we’re ploughing all these revenues into product development to continue to make BH&FA YC the most innovative Youth Club on Planet Earth!

Of course we don’t want the Club to fall behind Lindenwood or Farm Hills YC either, which — as we’ve told you in recent Newsletters — have been busy developing ‘innovative’ newsletter solutions of their own. (I say ‘innovative’ but we all know the YC of MZ Yours Truly is the real innovator around these hills!!) But — and it’s a BIG ONE kids! — if the Club Committee were to allow another club to get ahead of BH&FA (brisket forbid!!!), say by offering better Member facilities, then we’d risk Membership declining — instead of benefiting from the continued year-on-year growth that _we_all_enjoy_. It would also mean less money for the Club Treasurer to spend on buying up neighborhood housing to knock down in order to expand the size of the Clubhouse and keep you all entertained right here on campus! And you really don’t want to be bored do you?! (NB: The date for opening the infinity pool waterpark is still tbc. We found a leak on several floors and given there’s a risk of electrical fire death if we get this wrong it’s taking a little longer than hoped.)

Of course the impending mandatory migration to VR Newsletters also means we’ll be able to bring you more immersive Newsletter Sponsor Messages in future! YAY! Which will be great for the Club Money Pool too. So double YAY!

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Of course we know that not everyone in Our Community has had a chance to purchase our great Oculus Rift VR headset yet :( Only 0.3% of you have done so! :((( Even though we’ve made sure to tell you all about how great it is for, like, the past several years. (You’ll remember we also ran VR Summer Club Camp last year in Black Chasm Cave. However attendance averaged <1% — and there was that unfortunate incident with the toxic frog — so your Club Committee knows it has a lot more work to do!). So, after a long talk at our last #awesome TLB Brisket Cook-Out^MZ I’m really excited to announce an amazing Discount for Club Members that have shown the most dedication to Our Community over the years! This means all of you will very soon enjoy the benefits of Oculus VR! Zero excuses!

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(NB: If you’re wondering how exactly we’ll be calculating personalized Oculus discounts we can tell you it involves a proprietary formula that Your Club Committee developed based on your lifelong Participation & Attendance Metrics (PAM). We can’t say too much, in case the formula were to be maliciously leaked to Lindenwood — or even, brisket forbid! Staumbaugh Heller!!! — (NBNB: For a reminder about penalties for leaking proprietary Club Information see the base of this newsletter; but, tl;dr, don’t do it!!! Remember the Club Motto: ‘Speak Don’t leak!’).

What we CAN tell you is we’ve been busy number-crunching PAM for the past several years, and those Club Members who have shown not just a consistent commitment to Our Community (which is mandatory) but who have shared their increasing enthusiasm for the Club Program (which Your TLB obviously works 24/7 to bring you!) will be given the biggest discounts — of up to 6.8%! Everyone else will get a smaller discount (based on your unique PAM-based relationship with the Club Program). So basically you only have yourselves to blame if you get offered a discount of sub-0.5%. (And don’t forget we’ll be sharing PAM scores with parents/guardians at the upcoming mandatory BH&FA Club Regulations Awareness Program.)

As you know, Membership of the Club is dependent upon reading Our Newsletter — which includes all Our Sponsor Messages. (Our Sponsors wouldn’t pay us if you didn’t read their messages now would they!?!) So unfortunately Your Club Committee is prepared to say goodbye to any Members who aren’t able to access the Newsletter in future. (NB: Saying you don’t have a VR headset will absolutely not be an acceptable excuse!!! We are, however, open to suggestions for expanding cross-platform support if Members have already bought other VR headsets. (Although we might question your loyalty to BH&FA YC if you do that!!! ;)))

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Your Awesome TLB Club Committee Update!

So what’s on the boys’ discussion agenda this week Mark!?!

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Mmmmmm! Just getting ready for some more crispy brisket!

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Okay, time for the customary run down of Important Issues Your TLB is really busy managing around the BBQ while you guys kick back and do wtf you like on campus… Mmm brisket! #Brisket #CookOut #Meat #Mmmm

• Participation & Engagement Metrics — as you should really know by now Your Committee’s ‘prime directive’ is 100% attendance & program engagement at all times! PAM! PAM! So frankly you guys are always a total disappointment :( BUT! — this week Boztank said he’s going to bring some of his special Ideas Envelopes for us to push around while we’re BBQing brisket — so consider yourselves totally warned!!!! PAM! PAM!
• Takeover of Woodside Heights YC — yes we are still finalizing our takeover of Woodside Heights. But we now expect members to be migrated to BH&FA by 06:00 on Saturday 4 at the very latest. Issues we have encountered with the migration include some outgoing Woodside members objecting to the razing of their Clubhouse and the mandatory requirement to travel to BH&FA’s campus because it’s so much further away from where they live and their moms and pops are at work so can’t always taxi them over. However we have pointed out that the facilities we offer here are by far superior. Sheryl has been working super hard (including on Saturdays) to get the message to Woodside parents that their kids will absolutely have the best development opportunities at BH&FA. To ease the transition we have also decided to offer Uber coupons (valid: Tuesday afternoons, for two weeks of August) and some pretty substantial Oculus discounts — although both are provisional on the new recruits completing a Club Reorientation Attendance Probation period of no less than 180 months (achieving weekly PAM average of 95.8%). (So if you hear them say ‘Oh CRAP’ you’ll know why.) We’ll be discussing ideas for hazing the newbs in a forthcoming Newsletter. So stay tuned! And get ready to burn all that Woodside Heights smoke out of em!!!
• Parental Concern — unfortunately we have been informed that a few responsible adults have been expressing concern over what Members might have been exposed to via the Club Program. We are investigating to determine whether there are any identifiable issues of concern, and so far have compiled a list of about ~2,500,000 items for possible follow-up — including reports of screenings of human beheadings in the cinema; animal torture in the yard; misogynistic graffiti all over the place; human trafficking; and even bomb-making classes and/or fascist memorabilia being distributed by a small number of members (!!!). While some of this stuff does sound kind of alarming, in truth we’re generally pretty stoked about the rich diversity of expression that’s evidently thriving within Our Community. Although we are still investigating to determine whether there are any specific issues we need to follow up on — like, in case we need to add an additional rule to our strict ‘Zero Nudity (no, not even fine art or war reportage nudes you sick f—)’ Club Policy. We’ll keep you posted if we decide to amend the Charter. But for now we just ask that you carry on being your richly expressive selves. (As we like to say on the Committee: ‘If you feel it, f—ing say it!!!!’)
• Member Behavior — it has also come to our attention that a small number of Members have been getting increasingly loud and disruptive on campus. However, in the BH&FA YC Founding Charter, we do make it very clear that any attempts to curtail or moderate freedom of expression will _not_be _at_all_ tolerated_. We therefore want to reassure all Club Members that when you are here, under our watchful care, you can say anything at all you want to anyone you fancy — no matter how horribly wrong or hurtful it might be. (As the TLB like to say at the start of a Cook-Out when we’re fighting over whose turn it is to poke the fire: ‘Sticks & stones will break your bones but names can never hurt you!’). That said, we have noticed an uptick in some very nasty name calling; blatantly false and/or ridiculous rumors (no, my parents were not lizards!!!); and people trying to start *actual* fights and/or fires during Club Events. One particularly unruly member — who shall remain nameless (but rest assured We Know Who You Are!!! NB: We discuss this person’s behavior in more detail below, in our Newsletter ‘Hard Issue of The Day’ — and who, let it be known, we also know has a record of threatening behavior outside the Club (because Sheryl read about it in the Menlo Park Tribune)), has been passing off some very ‘creative fictions’ on campus — we suspect as a sort of post-modern art project. But still, we’re keeping an eye out. For example, Adam says he’s seen instances of this person telling others in Our Community that Members’ dead relations didn’t really exist at all, and, furthermore, that corpses laid out in the morgue were just so-called ‘crisis actors’ paid by kids’ parents to pretend to like them. While we’re admittedly impressed with the avant-garde creativity of this particular Member, we recognize that they have also been saying a lot of other absolute tosh — like that flu shots give you cancer or make you gay or turn you into a toxic frog. And that President Trump is the literal lovechild of a Republican Senator (who we’re not naming for libel reasons) and the Angel Gabriel. Like, frankly speaking, we’ve lost track of the amount of garbage this particular Member has been spouting but that’s 100% okay because keeping track of how Members freely expressing themselves is totally not our job at all. We’re just here to make sure the BH&FA campus is massive enough to house all the billions of Members that now make up our richly diverse Community — which also means making sure Our Club Charter enshrines an absolute right to be an utter f— to anyone you please. Kids, we really can’t start cherry picking or where would it end?! The bottom line is that here at BH&FA YC, Your Committee is proud to preside over a marketplace of brainfarts of every possible flavor, toxic or otherwise. So we would like to take this opportunity to remind Members about our very firm *non-discrimination policy* — of welcoming absolutely anyone as a Member, no matter how disgusting your personal views. (And, sheesh, you kids really do have some pretty icky stuff on your mind sometimes!!!) Your Committee would also like to suggest all Members reread Boztank’s 2009 addendum to the Club Charter (entitled: ‘Why you kids need to learn to suck it up’). The TLBs never let anything as non-formulaic as emotional distress get in the way of the campus expansion roadmap. After all, we’ve got a mission to bring the benefits of BH&FA to every person (*13 years or older*) ON THE PLANET! (Shoot for 100% or kill everyone trying!!! — as we like to joke around the BBQ! Or as Boztank’s knuckle tattoo actually reads: ‘We grow PAM, period.’ So, as ever, eyes on the bigger prize, kids.)
• Brisket cook out! — yes! It’s back by popular demand! This time I will personally be bringing a small herd of live Dexter cows on campus and everyone will watch while I tear them apart with my bare hands. Chunks of brisket will be distributed according to the standard Club Formula and each Member will be responsible for cooking their own chunk (or not!). But please no squabbling over the meat!!! And definitely no pushing! You can shout insults at each other in the hopes of being able to distract another Member and grab yourself a tastier chunk but do please keep acts of physical aggression *off campus*. It’s a waste of energy anyways as everyone will definitely get some brisket, even if not everyone can get the delicious deep pectoral I will personally be chowing down on. (It is, however, inevitable that some members will have to wait longer than others to get some meat. But given Our Community is now 2.5BN Members strong & counting! — suck that up Staumbaugh Heller!!! >:-) — we absolutely must have a formula to manage the distribution of the Club Program, fair or otherwise. NB: Having a formula is the important bit, kids. As your parents should tell you, that’s called ‘Leadership’.)
• Proposal to livestream the urinals — as part of our ‘Next-Gen YC 2.0 Moving Fwd Brainfart Sessions 2018 Summer Season Sponsored by Y Combinator’ Boztank suggested the (IMO) pretty wild idea of putting a livestreaming unit in the urinals (!) — pointing down at the pee stream. He thinks it could be a good idea to collect yet another data-point on top of the ~hundreds of thousands we already record per Member for some interesting new engagement metric that we haven’t bothered to think of yet. We’ll let you know at least a day in advance if we decide to move forward with this plan. (NB: We’re still discussing whether it’s a good idea to livestream the girls’ toilets. Or we might just unilaterally replace all Club loos with unisex urinals. tbc). tbh the urinal idea was a lot better than Boz’s other suggestion which was a livestreamed ‘loudest fart’ competition. We might revisit that next fall, for our next Camp Cook-Out
• Committee ‘Diversity’ — we are aware that some Members are continuing to complain about the lack of so-called ‘diversity’ on the TLB Committee. However we would point out we are a truly open-minded bunch of — yes, okay, sure, whatevs — entirely white guys but who are nonetheless willing to entertain the wild and crazy notion that there’s no box at all to think inside of. So, frankly, we don’t understand what your problem is. Also we’re not *all* guys — that’s what Sheryl’s here for
• ‘Leadership elections’ — it has also come to our attention that a very small number of Club Members have been spreading some very malicious, gossipy and totally fake rumors claiming the Club Charter is going to be rewritten to create fixed leadership terms and allow for future Leader Elections. I personally want to make it very, VERY clear that this is 100% FAKE NEWS. Your Committee will not be discussing any changes to the Committee’s structure at all. At any point. Ever. Period.
• Under-13s YC — a brief update on the amazing traction we’re seeing for our ‘Horizon Newborn’ under-13s YC which continues to deliver major wins for BH&FA by onboarding all your siblings from the moment of birth to get them prepped & primed for life in the excitingly breakneck ‘fast-lane’ here on the 13+ campus (NB: Under-13 Memberships are automatically migrated to a full BH&FA YC Membership on your siblings’ thirteenth birthday; but remember, it’s your responsibility to let them know that if they want to collect any cuddly toys or other mementos they’ve accidentally left at the under-13s campus they will have to come here and sign the Membership form to release them from our Cryogenic Cold Storage Unit — where you should warn them they will otherwise languish for all eternity.) The committee is currently discussing whether to turn some of the old Woodside Heights YC campus into an Under-13s soft play foam-axe room. Alternatively we might turn it into a child-friendly sand & gravel mine. tbc
• ‘Odd’ sponsor message content — just a quick note on this last line item but we are aware of a few Members — and in fact the heads of some other Youth Clubs — raising concerns about things they’ve seen in our Sponsor Messages. We’re really not at sure what the issue/s of concern might be but we’re 100% sure that the notion of there being any problem at all with any of the stuff Our Sponsors are paying us to tell you is, like, a _totally_crazy_idea_. So, respectfully, we suggest you drop it. (NB: Also if you want to be able to keep swimming in the Club Money Pool you need to stop asking awkward stuff or we might have to close the pool to non-Committee Members.)

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Hard Issue of the day :/

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Trouble With A Member

Sheryl making her really scary face (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

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I know we’re almost out of time for this week’s newsletter but — following on from the note about ‘Member Behavior’ — I wanted to take a short moment to remind all Members of the Club’s foundational commitment to freedom of expression at all costs.

Kids, if your reading level is strong enough you will understand that “at all costs” means there is actually a cost (but don’t worry, we’re not going to start charging you Membership fees!!! it’s not that kind of really bad cost) to the freedoms we enjoy here on campus. And, well, sometimes that cost means being forced to be bullied in public by an angry mob or having to know that some Members are going around campus telling others that your cherished siblings were in fact just a figment of your imagination and the tragic death they suffered at the hands of a gun-touting maniac is just your totally delusional fancy. Yep, life really can be that shitty sometimes! We’re not gonna lie to you!

Regretfully, this ‘cost’ also means that members of Our Community who are Jewish may well also hear some pretty random and totally untrue stuff being spread about their community on campus. Like that time one of our Member Societies put on an ‘alternative’ WWII fictional reconstruction in the theatre. Now Your Committee doesn’t for a moment believe that anyone on campus could have viewed this work as anything other than the piece of avant garde theatre it very obviously was (IMHO). (I mean, maybe a few Members thought it was an historically accurate reconstruction but really it’s the job of the rest of you kids to make fun of anyone crazy enough to believe such stupid stuff!!!) We sure don’t believe that kind of absolute crap. But, nonetheless, we’re 100% comfortable with our decision to operate an entirely open-door Membership Policy because Your TLB is entirely incapable of discriminating. I mean, if we did, where on Earth would it end?!? So even if a Member of Our Community happens to be a renowned fantasist with a record of shouting FIRE in theaters, or even a paid up member of a neo-nazi group which routinely denies historically verified episodes of ethnic cleansing, that’s totally not our problem — it’s theirs! We just provide the world’s over-13s with a soapbox to express their unvarnished selves, globally. What Members choose to do with the tools we provide to help them get their message out there is obviously none of our business!! (Although it is literally BH&FA YC’s business but how else would we fund the platform in the first place?!)

In any case, fact-checking is for qualified professionals who probably work for newspapers. And we are totally not that at all!!! [Edit note from Adam: Are there any newspapers left? Didn’t the Tribune close when you made the Newsletter a daily?] (Supplementary note from Boztank: Remember kids, Mark himself is Jewish. So if he can suck up Holocaust denial, so can you! As my grandpops used to say: ‘If a piece of baloney hasn’t blown your face off you’re winning because you’re not dead yet so stop whining ya cream-faced loon!’)

Last word from Mark: As Boztank has been saying for, like, almost before some of you were born, speech that is “distasteful and ignorant” is nothing to be worried about so long as you kids are totally prepared to just laugh it off (NB: We might use laughing gas for this too — see the Newsletter endnote for more on what we’re cooking up in the Innovation Labs). And, well, frankly speaking, a lot more people really need to grow up and learn that maniacs spouting total rubbish are just an unfortunate distraction from great Sponsor Message content. In any case, fact-checking is expensive — far too expensive for the Club Treasurer’s tastes!!

So, to wrap up, Your Committee wants to make it totally plain we’re 110% here to entertain your behavior — unruly, unreasonable or just plain stupid! Whatever the f— you like! (Just plank safely, eh! There have been a number of deaths related to selfie challenges lately and we’d really prefer you enjoy rather than kill yourselves!!!) And while we may not always be 100% comfortable about the views you’re espousing on campus, or via Club equipment (NB: We have another shipment of 200M Wi-Fi enabled megaphones arriving Wednesday so get gargling!!), we want all Members to know we’re fully behind you being a totally offensive f—. Period.

(Actually, if you or your parents bothered to read the small print that’s literally what our Founding Charter says. In any case, like Sheryl says, there’s no way Our Community would keep growing like the weed it has if we hadn’t let in any shitty idea that wants to crawl in off the street and set up a stink, crawl in off the street and set up a stink. She also says that BH&FA YC is like a compost heap: All shits are 100% welcome here. And: If it stinks, the Club Treasurer winks!!)

All we ask is that you kids play nice together. Because, regretfully, the bill for Clubhouse security staff has been rising alarmingly over the past several months — as more bouncers have been needed around campus to break up several pretty serious brawls. And, well, we have already stuffed the Newsletter to bursting with Sponsor Messages. So we do have some concerns about the depth of the Club Money Pool, going forward. We’ll be bringing you a more fulsome update on Club Finances in a future Newsletter (tbc — Wehner).

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One more thing!

Exciting Announcement… of a beta test to a Clubhouse Rule change!

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FIRE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Yes! Shouting fire in the cinema is now provisionally acceptable!!!

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We wanted to end the Newsletter with a bit of good news, so the TLB has decided to beta test letting Members yell “fire” or even “bomb” during screenings in the cinema. Or actually anything you fancy (why not get creative — like, by yelling ‘argh! alien facehugger squirting acid on my eyeballs!!!’).

Why? Because the TLB has decided that having a space where Members’ speech is constrained — even as a narrow health & safety precaution — was just FAR too risky for Community cohesion. So we’re removing it and saying ya-boo-sucks to the consequences!

But don’t worry! We’re putting Community Safety first by taking precautions to keep all Members safe. (For example, we’ve covered all sharp edges in the cinema with foam padding to prevent anyone from being impaled during any panic-induced stampedes for the exit. But please remember there’s only one exit — so play safe kids! Definitely try not to crush each other to death!!! (NB: The Committee would like to take this opportunity to remind all Members that an ‘in the event of my death and/or horrific personal injury’ legal waiver was signed by all of you when you joined the Club so anyone with litigious parents should warn them not to get any ideas. (Yes, we know Colin is leaving but that’s not until after Thanksgiving.))

The Committee is also considering installing facial recognition technology in the cinema Wi-Fi-connected to laughing gas canisters which would be triggered in the event of anyone getting overly emotional in there. Our idea is that the gas could be automatically dispensed if any Members became hysterical, or, well, overly sad — thereby distracting people and preventing risky stampedes. (NB: This exciting Club innovation is still a work in progress but we’ll be sure to keep you updated on progress in future Newsletters. See our quasi-regular: ‘What’s Mark Cooking In The Lab’ section)

And that’s about all for today kids! Feel free to unstrap from your Oculus for now (for those of you special early adopters out there!) — and it’s adios amigos until tomorrow, when we’ll be right back in your face with more exciting BH&FA YC news!!!!

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Warning: Anyone caught leaking Club policies or information WILL HAVE THEIR MEMBERSHIP REVOKED AND BE BANNED FOR LIFE. Members contravening this rule will also be physically removed from campus (should they be here at the time) with zero opportunity to collect any personal belongings or say goodbye to any friends. Personal items will be piled in the yard and used as fuel for the next Club Cook-Out which will kick off with a competition to see which member can shout ‘Speak don’t leak!’ the loudest. One winner will be selected by Mark and given a bite of his prime brisket. Appeals are impossible.  

Photo: paylessimages/iStock

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Still here?!?!?!?!!!!!!!!

Additional really important information from the committee: Uhhhh, Alex just told me that the Committee room where we keep the PAM records, going back to ~2005, was left unlocked for, like, the past decade(ish). A quick review of our CCTV records appears to show a small army of unknown persons coming and going pretty steadily over the years. It looks like these complete strangers were systematically helping themselves to PAM stored in the Club register. Some of these non-members appeared to have used the same Clubhouse parking lot as our ~3,000 regular campus data partners — arriving in vans painted with names like ‘N.Y. Data uLike UnLtd’ and ‘Other Peoples’ info 4 you Inc.’ — perhaps seeking to blend in beside the totally reputable businesses we’ve been sharing all your information with for, like, ever, in order to undertake their totally nefarious theft of your PAM. So we’re really sorry about that! Sheesh! If it helps Sheryl was super mad with us and didn’t speak to us for, like, a week after she found out :o( Anyway it’s totally fine now because we have put an actual lock on the door. Phew! (NB: Anyone wondering if they can claim competition for the Committee’s total failure to protect your privacy should refer to the Compensation Claims Waiver Clause in the Club Charter which everyone signed by default when they joined (by clicking a button saying ‘yes I want to collect my free Brisket hamburger! & register for Club Membership! & I’m super happy to let Mark be totally responsible for all my data’). Feel free to ring Colin for a cry if you like. Thanks! – Your MZ) 

© BH&FA YC
MZ: Winners don’t leak — they speak!

Prepare for the invasion of the unskippables. If the Stories social media slideshow format is the future of mobile TV, it’s going to end up with commercials. Users won’t love them. And done wrong they could pester people away from spending so much time watching what friends do day-to-day. But there’s no way Facebook and its family of apps will keep letting us fast-forward past Stories ads just a split-second after they appear on our screens.

We’re on the cusp of the shift to Stories. Facebook estimates that across social media apps, sharing to Stories will surpass sharing through feeds some time in 2019. One big reason is they don’t take a ton of thought to create. Hold up your phone, shoot a photo or short video and you’ve instantly got immersive, eye-catching, full-screen content. And you never had to think.

Facebook CPO Chris Cox at F8 2018 charts the rise of Stories that will see the format surpass feed sharing in 2019

Unlike text, which requires pre-meditated reflection that can be daunting to some, Stories are point and shoot. They don’t even require a caption. Sure, if you’re witty or artistic you can embellish them with all sorts of commentary and creativity. They can be a way to project your inner monologue over the outside world. But the base level of effort necessary to make a Story is arguably less than sharing a status update. That’s helped Stories rocket to more than 1.3 billion daily users across Facebook’s apps and Snapchat.

The problem, at least for Facebook, is that monetizing the News Feed with status-style ads was a lot more straightforward. Those ads, which have fueled Facebook’s ascent to earning $13 billion in revenue and $5 billion in profit per quarter, were ostensibly old-school banners. Text, tiny photo and a link. Advertisers have grown accustomed to them over 20 years of practice. Even small businesses on a tight budget could make these ads. And it at least took users a second to scroll past them — just long enough to make them occasionally effective at implanting a brand or tempting a click.

Stories, and Stories ads, are fundamentally different. They require big, tantalizing photos at a minimum, or preferably stylish video that lasts five to 15 seconds. That’s a huge upward creative leap for advertisers to make, particularly small businesses that’ll have trouble shooting that polished content themselves. Rather than displaying a splayed out preview of a link, users typically have to swipe up or tap a smaller section of a Story ad to click through.

And Stories are inherently skippable. Users have learned to rapidly tap to progress slide by slide through friends’ Stories, especially when racing through those with too many posts or that come from more distant acquaintances. People are quick with the trigger finger the moment they’re bored, especially if it’s with an ad.

A new type of ad blindness has emerged. Instead of our eyes glazing over as we scroll past, we stare intensely searching for the slightest hint that something isn’t worth our time and should be skipped. A brand name, “sponsored” label, stilted product shot or anything that looks asocial leads us to instantly tap past.

This is why Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg scared the hell out of investors on the brutal earnings call when she admitted about Stories that, “The question is, will this monetize at the same rate as News Feed? And we honestly don’t know.” It’s a radically new format advertisers will need time to adopt and perfect. Facebook had spent the past year warning that revenue growth would decelerate as it ran out of News Feed ad inventory, but it’d never stressed the danger as what it was: Stories. That contributed to its record-breaking $120 billion share price drop.

The shift from News Feed ads to Stories ads will be a bigger transition than desktop ads to mobile ads for Facebook. Feed ads looked and worked identically, it was just the screen around them changing. Stories ads are an entirely new beast.

Stories ads are a bigger shift than web to mobile

There is one familiar format Stories ads are reminiscent of: television commercials. Before the age of TiVo and DVRs, you had to sit through the commercials to get your next hit of content. I believe the same will eventually be true for Stories, to the tune of billions in revenue for Facebook.

Snapchat is cornered by Facebook’s competition and desperate to avoid missing revenue estimates again. So this week, it rolled out unskippable vertical video ads it actually calls “Commercials” to 100 more advertisers, and they’ll soon be self-serve for buyers. Snap first debuted them in May, though the six-second promos are still only inserted into its longer-form multi-minute premium Shows, not user-generated Stories. A Snap spokesperson said they couldn’t comment on future plans. But I’d expect its stance will inevitably change. Friends’ Stories are interesting enough to compel people to watch through entire ads, so the platform could make us watch.

Snapchat is desperate, and that’s why it’s already working on unskippable ads. If Facebook’s apps like Instagram and WhatsApp were locked in heated battle with Snapchat, I think we’d see more brinkmanship here. Each would hope the other would show unskippable ads first so it could try to steal their pissed-off users.

But Facebook has largely vanquished Snapchat, which has seen user growth sink significantly. Snapchat has 191 million daily users, but Facebook Stories has 150 million, Messenger Stories has 70 million, Instagram Stories has 400 million and WhatsApp Stories (called Status) leads with 450 million. Most people’s friends around the world aren’t posting to Snapchat Stories, so Facebook doesn’t risk pushing users there with overly aggressive ads, except perhaps amongst U.S. teens.

Instagram’s three-slide Stories carousel ads

That’s why I expect we’ll quickly see Facebook start to test unskippable Stories ads. They’ll likely be heavily capped at first, to maybe one to three per day per user. Facebook took a similar approach to slowly rolling out auto-play video News Feed ads back in 2014. And Facebook’s apps will probably only show them after a friend’s story before your next pal’s, in-between rather than as dreaded pre-rolls. Instagram already offers carousel Stories ads with up to three slides instead of one, so users have to tap three times to blow past them.

An Instagram spokesperson told me they had “no plans to share right now” about unskippable ads, and a Facebook spokesperson said “We don’t have any plans to test unskippable stories ads on Facebook or Instagram.” But plans can change. A Snap spokesperson noted that unlike a full 30-second TV spot, Snapchat’s Commercials are up to six seconds, which matches an emerging industry trend for mobile video ads. Budweiser recently made some six-second online ads that it also ran on TV, showing the format’s reuseability that could speed up adoption. For brand advertisers not seeking an on-the-spot purchase, they need time to leave an impression.

By making some Stories ads unskippable, Facebook’s apps could charge more while making them more impactful for advertisers. It would also reduce the creative pressure on businesses because they won’t be forced to make that first split-second so flashy so people don’t fast-forward.

If Facebook makes the Stories ad format work, it has a bright future that contrasts with the doomsday vibes conjured by its share price plummet. Facebook has more than 5X more (duplicated) Stories users across its apps than its nearest competitor Snapchat. The social giant sees libraries full of Stories created each day waiting to be monetized.

Data, they say, is the new oil, and open public data is the new commons. Give the people the facts, and they will use them to make informed decisions. Right? Except that’s not the bureaucratic instinct. Bureaucrats fear the free flow of information. And all too often they’ll try to quench it by intoning the magic word “security,” and if that doesn’t work, “terrorism!“, in the most idiotic ways and places possible.

This is a wide and general rule: whenever some tinpot official says something painfully dumb has to be done Because Security, the odds are better than even that they’re lazy, lying, and/or incompetent. (Think of this every time e.g. your work password expires and you’re required to change it.) There are so many specific examples that it’s hard to choose just one — but, conveniently, recently an old friend of mine stumbled across an example of this so vivid and unforgettable that I can’t not write about it.

The situation is explored in depth here, but to summarize: Gavin Chait, an independent development economist, asked local authorities in the UK to provide data on business properties registered in those areas, including whether those properties were vacant or not. A fifth of them were already publishing that information to their open-data websites; easy enough.

The value of that information should be obvious: determining economic trends over time, and making predictions; tracking the retailpocalypse, if and when it occurs; measuring the lifespan of businesses; more precisely estimating values and the timing of business real-estate development and investment; etcetera. Quite dry, if you ask me, but the kind(s) of thing which economists love.

So, naturally, Westminster City Council basically responded by claiming that this kind of open data would breed terrorism. No, wait, it gets worse! The forms of malicious activities which they claim would be encouraged by the open publication of registered business property data include, as mentioned, terrorism, but also identity fraud, money laundering, drug consumption, crack houses, and … wait for it … the horror! the horror! … “meeting places for young people, and rave parties.”

Obviously the vast pool of nefarious young people, terrorists, crack house builders, and ravers who are apparently poised to invade, once this Maginot Line of obscurity is breached, would never be able to find any vacant properties without the publication of this data. Truly, Westminster City Council is holding back a veritable tsunami of terror, identity theft, and drug abuse by keeping this toxically dangerous data away from our collective prying eyes.

It’s absurd, it’s painfully stupid, and I hope that Gavin’s forthcoming appeal overturns this risible idiocy. But it also an example of two worrying trends: locking up data which should be open, and the notion that the claim “it’s for security reasons,” no matter how ludicrous those reasons may be, is an unchallengeable magic spell which trumps any other consideration.

Public data should be a commons, not a treasure hoarded behind lock and key. But data can be the new oil. I suspect that’s one big reason why bureaucrats instinctively want to keep it to themselves. (Before you quote “information wants to be free” at me, please keep in mind that that’s only half of what Stewart Brand said.)

“It’s for security,” though — that’s what really enrages me. No one should ever get to shut down conversation with the magic word “security.” Indeed, the opposite should be true: that claim should require far more supporting evidence than any other justification. Let’s hope we get to live in that world some day.

In a rare moment of agreement, members of the House Judiciary Committee from both major political parties agreed that Facebook needed to take down Pages that bullied shooting survivors or called for more violence. The hearing regarding social media filtering practices saw policy staffers from Facebook, Google, and Twitter answering questions, though Facebook absorbed the brunt of the ire. The hearing included Republican Representative Steve King ask “What about converting the large behemoth organizations that we’re talking about here into public utilities?”

The meatiest part of the hearing centered on whether social media platforms should delete accounts of conspiracy theorists and those inciting violence, rather than just removing the offending posts.

The issue has been a huge pain point for Facebook this week after giving vague answers for why it hasn’t deleted known faker Alex Jones’ Infowars Page, and tweeting that “We see Pages on both the left and the right pumping out what they consider opinion or analysis – but others call fake news.” Facebook’s Head of Global Policy Management Monica Bickert today reiterated that “sharing information that is false does not violate our policies.”

As I detailed in this opinion piece, I think the right solution is to quarantine the Pages of Infowars and similar fake newers, preventing their posts or shares of links to their web domain from getting any visibility in the News Feed. But that deleting the Page without instances of it directly inciting violence would make Jones a martyr and strengthen his counterfactual movement. Deletion should be reserved for those that blantantly encourage acts of violence.

Rep Ted Deutch (D-Florida) asked about how Infowars’ claims in YouTube videos that Parkland shooting’s survivors were crisis actors squared with the company’s policy. Google’s Downs explained that “We have a specific policy that says that if you say a well documented violent attack didn’t happen and you use the name or image of the survivors or victims of that attack, that is a malicious attack and it violates our policy.” She noted that YouTube has a ‘three strikes’ policy, it is “demoting low quality content and promoting more authoritative content”, and it’s now showing boxes atop result pages for problematic searches like is the earth flat?’ with facts to dispel conspiracies.

Facebook’s answer was much less clear. Bickert told Deutch that “We do use a strikes model. What that means is that if a Page, or profile, or group is posting content and some of that violates our polices, we always remove the violating posts at a certain point” (emphasis mine). That’s where Facebook became suddenly less transparent.

“It depends on the nature of the content that is violating our policies. At a certain point we would also remove the Page, or the profile, or the group at issue” Bickert continued. Deutch then asked how many strikes conspiracy theorists get. Bickert noted that ‘crisis actors’ claims violate its policy and its removes that content. “And we would continue to remove any violations from the Infowars Page.” But regarding Page-level removals, she got wishy-washy, saying “If they posted sufficient content that it would violated our threshold, then the page would come down. The threshold varies depending on the different types of violations.”

“The Threshold Varies”

Rep Matt Gaetz (R-Florida) gave the conservatives’ side of the same argument, citing two posts by the Facebook Page “Milkshakes Against The Republican Party” that called for violence, including one that saying “Remember the shooting at the Republican baseball game? One of those should happen every week.”

While these posts had been removed, Gaetz asked why the Page hadn’t. Bickert noted that “There’s no place for any calls for violence on Facebook”. Regarding the threshold, she did reveal that “When someone posts an image of child sexual abuse imagery their account will come down right away. There are different thresholds for different violations.” But she repeatedly refused to make a judgement call about whether the Page should be removed until she could review it with her team.

Image: Bryce Durbin/TechCrunch

Showing surprising alignment in such a fractured political era, Democratic Representative Jamie Raskin of Florida said “I’m agreeing with the chairman about this and I think we arrived at the same exact same place when we were taking about at what threshold does Infowars have their Page taken down after they repeatedly denied the historical reality of massacres of children in public school.”

Facebook can’t rely on a shadowy “the threshold varies” explanation any more. It must outline exactly what types of violations incur not only post removal but strikes against their authors. Perhaps that’s something like ‘one strike for posts of child sexual abuse, three posts for inciting violence, five posts for bullying victims or denying documented tragedies occurred, and unlimited posts of less urgently dangerous false information’.

Whatever the specifics, Facebook needs to provide specifics. Until then, both liberals and conservatives will rightly claim that enforcement is haphazard and opaque.

For more from today’s hearing:

Once America had an unassailable advantage, an economic flywheel that spun off innovation and Fortune 500 companies like a perpetual-motion machine. Bring in the best, brightest, and most driven from around the world; educate them or their children at its universities; then watch them start companies, succeed wildly, give back to their alma maters, and recruit new talent as the virtuous cycle began again.

It hardly mattered whether these immigrants came in as students (think Satya Nadella, Sundar Pichai, and Steve Jobs’ father Abdul Fattah Jandali) or with their families (Sergey Brin and Jerry Yang) or as refugees (eg Alexis Ohanian’s father’s family) or as undocumented immigrants (eg Ohanian’s mother.) Meanwhile, the UK, thanks to its Commonwealth connections and universities like Oxbridge and Imperial College, did much the same on a smaller scale. It was a self-sustaining wealth-generation and nation-strengthening machine of gigantic proportions, and it would take colossal idiocy to want to interfere with it.

Enter Brexit. Enter Donald Trump. Enter their implicit and explicit rejections of immigration, including serious barriers to and discouragement of legal and skilled immigration, such as H-1B visa holders and international students — along with the general sense of “you’re not welcome here” that they’re clearly doing their damnedest to convey.

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, that other great immigrant nation, France, has been working overtime for the last four years to open both its economy and its borders to tech startups. I was skeptical of these efforts a couple of years ago, but two days ago I sat down with former Cisco CEO John Chambers and Accel partner Joe Schoendorf to talk tech in France, and they’ve convinced me that under President Macron, “everything has changed.”

It’s not just that Macron’s reforms have made it far easier to hire and fire in France, making labor costs far more understandable and predictable — although this is a huge deal and a major sea-change. It’s not just that France is offering easy-to-access French Tech visas to founders, employees, and investors alike, so that it’s never been easier for techies to live and work in France — which, as a former Paris resident myself, I can tell you is pretty great.

It’s not just access to a sizable pool of relatively inexpensive engineers. It’s not just openness across academia as well as the private sector (41% of France’s 75,000 Ph.D students are not French.) It’s not just Paris beginning to surpass London in investor interest generally, not just in technology.

It’s also the transformation of the French population as well as the government. 50% of French youth aged 18-24, and 70% of students at the École Polytechnique, France’s flagship technical university, want to go work for startups rather than enterprises — and their ambitions are now European and/or global, not merely French. There’s strength in depth there, too; Chambers compares the raw engineering talent at the Polytechnique to that at Stanford, and France is one Fields Medal away from overtaking the USA in total numbers won.

I can aver that all this is a massive change from when I lived in France a decade ago. Schoendorf says he can think of only one comparable example of a major developed democracy changing so much, in such a short time, as France over the last four years: the UK under Thatcher. Regardless of whether you lionize or demonize Thatcher, that gives you an idea of the scale of the transformation. (And it’s nationwide: 75% of France’s members of parliament are new, and there are twice as many women as ever before.)

I don’t want to pretend that Silicon Valley is at risk of being supplanted by the Île-de-France. The Valley is and will remain the sun at the center of tech’s solar system. But France has now graduated from “asteroid” to “planet,” and is well on its way to “gas giant.” Not least because of its spectacular timing: inviting immigrants just as the US and UK are in the midst of the spectacularly stupid process of dissuading them, and just as the Valley has gotten so expensive, courtesy of NIMBY housing paralysis, that leaders there are looking for any way to diversify to other locales.

All this is beginning to have a measurable effect. There were 274 French companies at the latest CES, up from 13 less than a decade ago. There were more than 700 VC investments in French tech companies last year, which rivals the UK, and more than 50 had American VC involvement. Also, I don’t want to put too much weight on anecdotal data, but two serious, impressive tech people I know have, independently, moved from America to Paris in the last few months.

My chief complaint two years ago was that the French government wanted startups to make their big enterprises better and more competitive, rather than wanting startups to become their big enterprises. That has changed. As Schoendorf says, “Macron sees the world’s five most valuable companies, all tech companies on the West Coast of America, and thinks: we need one of those.” Pascal Cagni, chairman of Business France, has a more accessible intermediary goal: a French “NATU”, meaning Netflix / AirBNB / Tesla / Uber.

And he’s right. France’s transformation into Europe’s primary technology power is real and ongoing, among all of government, academia, big business, and startups; but what they really need is a big hit and a cohort of successful entrepreneurs, a French equivalent of what the PayPal Mafia became. (Xavier Niel is having an enormous effect — see Ecole 42 and Station F, “the world’s largest startup facility” in southeast Paris — but he can’t do it alone.) If and when that happens, though, France will lead Europe for the foreseeable future … and help lead the globe, too.

Technology companies have a privacy problem. They’re terribly good at invading ours and terribly negligent at protecting their own.

And with the push by technologists to map, identify and index our physical as well as virtual presence with biometrics like face and fingerprint scanning, the increasing digital surveillance of our physical world is causing some of the companies that stand to benefit the most to call out to government to provide some guidelines on how they can use the incredibly powerful tools they’ve created.

That’s what’s behind today’s call from Microsoft President Brad Smith for government to start thinking about how to oversee the facial recognition technology that’s now at the disposal of companies like Microsoft, Google, Apple and government security and surveillance services across the country and around the world.

In what companies have framed as a quest to create “better,” more efficient and more targeted services for consumers, they have tried to solve the problem of user access by moving to increasingly passive (for the user) and intrusive (by the company) forms of identification — culminating in features like Apple’s Face ID and the frivolous filters that Snap overlays over users’ selfies.

Those same technologies are also being used by security and police forces in ways that have gotten technology companies into trouble with consumers or their own staff. Amazon has been called to task for its work with law enforcement, Microsoft’s own technologies have been used to help identify immigrants at the border (indirectly aiding in the separation of families and the virtual and physical lockdown of America against most forms of immigration) and Google faced an internal company revolt over the facial recognition work it was doing for the Pentagon.

Smith posits this nightmare scenario:

Imagine a government tracking everywhere you walked over the past month without your permission or knowledge. Imagine a database of everyone who attended a political rally that constitutes the very essence of free speech. Imagine the stores of a shopping mall using facial recognition to share information with each other about each shelf that you browse and product you buy, without asking you first. This has long been the stuff of science fiction and popular movies – like “Minority Report,” “Enemy of the State” and even “1984” – but now it’s on the verge of becoming possible.

What’s impressive about this is the intimation that it isn’t already happening (and that Microsoft isn’t enabling it). Across the world, governments are deploying these tools right now as ways to control their populations (the ubiquitous surveillance state that China has assembled, and is investing billions of dollars to upgrade, is just the most obvious example).

In this moment when corporate innovation and state power are merging in ways that consumers are only just beginning to fathom, executives who have to answer to a buying public are now pleading for government to set up some rails. Late capitalism is weird.

But Smith’s advice is prescient. Companies do need to get ahead of the havoc their innovations can wreak on the world, and they can look good while doing nothing by hiding their own abdication of responsibility on the issue behind the government’s.

“In a democratic republic, there is no substitute for decision making by our elected representatives regarding the issues that require the balancing of public safety with the essence of our democratic freedoms. Facial recognition will require the public and private sectors alike to step up – and to act,” Smith writes.

The fact is, something does, indeed, need to be done.

As Smith writes, “The more powerful the tool, the greater the benefit or damage it can cause. The last few months have brought this into stark relief when it comes to computer-assisted facial recognition – the ability of a computer to recognize people’s faces from a photo or through a camera. This technology can catalog your photos, help reunite families or potentially be misused and abused by private companies and public authorities alike.”

All of this takes on faith that the technology actually works as advertised. And the problem is, right now, it doesn’t.

In an op-ed earlier this month, Brian Brackeen, the chief executive of a startup working on facial recognition technologies, pulled back the curtains on the industry’s not-so-secret huge problem.

Facial recognition technologies, used in the identification of suspects, negatively affects people of color. To deny this fact would be a lie.

And clearly, facial recognition-powered government surveillance is an extraordinary invasion of the privacy of all citizens — and a slippery slope to losing control of our identities altogether.

There’s really no “nice” way to acknowledge these things.

Smith, himself admits that the technology has a long way to go before it’s perfect. But the implications of applying imperfect technologies are vast — and in the case of law enforcement, not academic. Designating an innocent bystander or civilian as a criminal suspect influences how police approach an individual.

Those instances, even if they amount to only a handful, would lead me to argue that these technologies have no business being deployed in security situations.

As Smith himself notes, “Even if biases are addressed and facial recognition systems operate in a manner deemed fair for all people, we will still face challenges with potential failures. Facial recognition, like many AI technologies, typically have some rate of error even when they operate in an unbiased way.”

While Smith lays out the problem effectively, he’s less clear on the solution. He’s called for a government “expert commission” to be empaneled as a first step on the road to eventual federal regulation.

That we’ve gotten here is an indication of how bad things actually are. It’s rare that a tech company has pleaded so nakedly for government intervention into an aspect of its business.

But here’s Smith writing, “We live in a nation of laws, and the government needs to play an important role in regulating facial recognition technology. As a general principle, it seems more sensible to ask an elected government to regulate companies than to ask unelected companies to regulate such a government.”

Given the current state of affairs in Washington, Smith may be asking too much. Which is why perhaps the most interesting — and admirable — call from Smith in his post is for technology companies to slow their roll.

“We recognize the importance of going more slowly when it comes to the deployment of the full range of facial recognition technology,” writes Smith. “Many information technologies, unlike something like pharmaceutical products, are distributed quickly and broadly to accelerate the pace of innovation and usage. ‘Move fast and break things’ became something of a mantra in Silicon Valley earlier this decade. But if we move too fast with facial recognition, we may find that people’s fundamental rights are being broken.”