Issue 14 - Don't flush the Skibidi Toilet 🚽

Welcome to issue fourteen of the Eco Punks Gazette. Published on a Tuesday! Which means we may be moving so fast that our issues may be published twice a week? No promises, but be warned, we’re picking up speed.

If you’re new to the Eco Punks, welcome! We’re here to serve and stimulate you, so please let us know if there are subjects or topics that you would like us to cover. We can always be reached by replying to this email or contacting us via email, [email protected] or [email protected].

Upcoming Event

Dec 19th at 11am EST - The Power of Open Source

Fellow eco punk and President of the Mozilla Foundation, Mark Surman, will be joining us for an open discussion reappraising the power and role of open source, both as a concept and as the software the enables our connected world. Whether AI, IoT, health tech, farming, EVs, green energy, and smart cities, open source can and should play a role. Yet is it? Is open source living up to the potential and promise set decades ago?

This salon is in some respects a sequel. If you want to watch part one, you can do so here.

If you’re not already participating in these salons, email [email protected] to get the details and join in.

Celebrating Aging

Our podcast is growing and evolving, and you can find it via your platform of choice or our YouTube channel.

This week Jan and David sat down to discuss and plan out our focus on the virtues of aging and the wisdom we all need to pay more attention to. Celebrating the process of aging is something we need to do more of, and moving forward into the new year, we’re going to do this as a means of better understanding ourselves and our society.

Skibidi Toilet the sleeper hit of 2023

If anyone reading this knew of Skibidi Toilet before this month, then please, reply to this email so we can understand how. Statistically that should be easy, given that the series has earned 65 billion views on YouTube this year alone. That’s right. Billions.

How? Kids, of course. Though as with all kid based culture, there’s more than kids watching the serialized animated drama now.

Created using Valve’s Source Filmmaker, the videos look a lot like a video game, and tell a story that is surreal at best, borderline incoherent most of the time. But it nonetheless provides a narrative that young and old are digging.

On the surface, it is easy to dismiss this as literal toilet humour. Yet there is a deeper trend here that is worth paying attention to.

While the history of the Internet may be accelerated and condensed, with memes rising and falling within days or weeks, there is nonetheless an accumulated culture that can be mined. The following video argues that the success of Skibidi Toilet rests in the synthesis of memes and aesthetics found in the narrative, and how it speaks to a larger battle between mainstream media and Internet culture.

In a media saturated society where attention is power, young people and the youngest in particular, have an outsized amount of power, as they have ample attention to offer up. Skibidi toilet is an example of how this power is evolving, and how kids will increasingly exercise more and more influence on the cultural industries as a whole.

Life is still about Life - for now.

‘Tis the season, again, of taking stock, checking life’s balances and making resolutions and predictions for the future, particularly the immediate future. This week, LinkedIn published what they identified as the 34 leading trends for 2024 as per their illustrious thought-leading members and participants:

Neither the topics, nor their advocates are surprising: the auto guy has a prediction on autonomous driving, the tech people have ideas about tech and so forth. What does surprise in the most delightful way is the order in which those “trends” have been ranked. #1 - we’ll increasingly live past 100 years of age, #2 it’s not longevity, but quality of life that counts; then, and only then do we stumble across political, financial and tech- / AI-related themes and topics. We like that hierarchy of trends. And maybe we try to convince ourselves by stating it so overtly, but could it be that life truly IS about life after all, and that politics, money and technology’s roles are primarily to support just that: Life? You are onto something there, LinkedIn, let’s make 2024 THE YEAR OF LIFE. 

How to Hack AI Chatbots?

As part of our expanding focus on cybersecurity, we’ve been researching how to hack AI, in particular the large language models (LLMs) that are currently driving the hype around chatbots and predictive text.

While a lot of the OpenAI drama was around safety concerns, little attention was placed on what safety measures are in place, and why people are concerned about the power these systems possess.

For example, can these systems be used to facilitate illegal activity? To prevent this, service providers enact guardrails which are intended to prevent the chatbots from providing information which could be used for malicious purposes. Unfortunately these guardrails are designed to prevent humans from abusing the system, but do not apply to other chatbots messing with said chatbot.

One way to define “hacking” is the art and science of lying to machines. Since machines cannot think for themselves, lying to them is remarkably easy. Humans defend said machines by embedding logic that counters potential lies, but when a machine can invent a near infinite number of lies, some of them are going to work, and fool or rather compromise the targeted system. For further reference, here’s the study cited in the article above:

Hack or be hacked!

Worth Reading: Rutger Bregman - Humankind

In his book “Humankind”, he continues to point out where society and our systems have failed us while also showcasing projects and experiments that provide hope for the better—and are more in line with nature and the systems that we all are born into. Humans ARE capable of being kind to one another and we ARE collaborators. According to Bregman, we survived the physically and intellectually superior Neanderthals because we are kinder and better collaborators. Survival of the Friendliest - a heartwarming and optimistic read.

Notable Punk: Jenny Hofmann

Jenny Hofmann, a Harvard physicist, broke the world record and became the fastest woman to run across the country in 47 days plus change. She beat the world record by a full week, and as a point of reference, 8 days faster than acclaimed UK male athlete and model William Goodge who took 55 days:

Goodge’s run is classified as an ‘unofficial’ attempt, was significantly slower (you could even say ‘meaningless’ if you consider times and how many people have done this before him) but got significantly more attention than Hofmann’s —which proves that society and even the otherwise very liberal running communities have long ways to go. Take a look at this very neat, matter-of-fact piece about Hofmann though:

The thing that killed us and convinced us to make her the notable punk is why she did it: because she felt she had to. And shouldn’t that be the main reason, always, in everything we do. Well done Jenny, thank you.

Congrats to Notable Punk Taylor Swift

Time person of the year!? To celebrate we made this:

@academyoftheimpossible

Ronces is available for adoption in Lanark County! 🐶 #august #taylorswift #augustchallenge #lgd #livestockguardiandog #livestockguardiando... See more

We’ve created a Signal group for Eco Punks to share links, ideas, and get a friendly reminder about salons and events. If you’d like to join us on Signal, email [email protected]. If this is the first time you’ve heard of Signal, or if you’re not already using it, this video will bring you up to speed and explain why Signal is the choice for Eco Punks:

Hey you made it this far! Here’s your bonus: