Issue 41 - From Goats to Hollywood: Leadership and Crises

Welcome to issue 41! One more issue until the answer, which offers a good opportunity to remind us why we’re here. As Eco Punks we seek to understand the ecosystems we live in and find interesting. Our gazette, which you’re currently reading, is intended to be a glimpse into our work, offering insights into relevant ecosystems. This issue stays within our wheelhouse of power and culture, crisis and response.

How are you faring during the dog days of summer?

Table of Contents

• Who will be the AI President?

• It wasn’t the Last Supper

• Goats and Leadership

• The Cascading Failures of CrowdStrike

• Hollywood Faces a Reckoning

• Will the MrBeast Drama Increase?

• ClockWorkPi: And Their Uber Nerd Phone

• Spread the Word!

Who will be the AI President?

The volatility of the current US Presidential election has increased public interest and encouraged widespread participation, which is fundamentally a good thing. At this point, if one were to assume that the election would be fair, Kamala Harris has an excellent chance of being the first black woman to serve as POTUS. Unfortunately assumptions like this can be dangerous. Especially when we’ve already witnessed an attempted assassination.

Let’s recap what has happened since our last issue. The GOP presidential candidate got shot at. Then the aspiring “Nerd Reich” aligns themselves with the GOP campaign, appointing their guy JD Vance as the VP candidate. Followed by Biden ending his campaign for re-election, and then a day or two later the party consolidating around Harris.

The pace of these events created a range of competing narratives attempting to understand what was happening and what it meant. No surprise, we feel this is fundamentally about AI, and the subsequent control of the economy and society.

Kamala Harris is a strong candidate for a range of reasons, yet one of the lesser known, is the VP’s role in leading the work the executive branch has done on AI. Even though our last issue argued that POTUS is not an individual, it is still ludicrous to elect a chief executive who has not spent time trying to understand the political economic impacts of AI and the wealth driving it.

Similarly JD Vance is not the VP candidate because he’s from a swing state or has the right connections in DC. He’s on the ticket because the barons of Silicon Valley paid for him to be there. He is the AI (accelerationist) candidate. His political (and religious) views are extreme, and they represent a powerful/wealthy element of the AI industry (and the Bitcoin bros). This has led some to argue that Peter Thiel is the actual VP candidate.

What Harris has done, that Biden could not, is rally an alternate side of Silicon Valley to fund her campaign and present an alternate view of our AI future.

We already knew that this would be an election that featured lots of AI in the campaign. Now we can confirm that this election will directly impact the future of AI as we know it.

@mouanon2_

#CapCut

It wasn’t the Last Supper

Speaking of narcissistic religious extremists, the opening of the Olympic Games in France got all sorts of attention, and a modest amount of controversy over a perceived mocking of the “Last Supper”. Unfortunately the organizers actually apologized, when instead they should have stood their ground, and defended their aesthetic choices. It was not a depiction of the Seder that Jesus and his crew supposedly had, but was rather a scene from the feast of Dionysus. Why didn’t they defend this and argue that those who were offended were simply wrong in their interpretation and fault finding?

@a.bath

Goats and Leadership

We wrote a story about our goats, dogs, and horses. About leadership, talent, and diverse teams. How to get a motley crew to work together and make life easier, or in the business context, accomplish complex tasks.

The Cascading Failures of CrowdStrike

The world of Microsoft Windows came to a cascading crash last week when an update from security provider CrowdStrike went awry and sent millions of machines into boot loops that were initially difficult and cumbersome to fix.

We did a podcast analyzing the catastrophe that you can listen to here?

If you want to get deeper into the potential remedies or fixes to these kinds of problems, which we can expect to see more of, cybersecurity guru Bruce Schneier has some excellent analysis that informs our own.

Hollywood Faces a Reckoning

While it doesn’t seem to be getting a lot of coverage or attention outside of industry circles, there is growing anxiety in Hollywood and the extended cultural industries that a day of reckoning has come. There is currently a massive slowdown in production, resulting in lots of people out of work.

The perceived reason is the failure of streaming services to find a sustainable business model, combined with the uncertainty around the ongoing rise of AI. However there may be an additional reason, which is a risk averse culture, that doesn’t want to try anything new, especially in a period of uncertainty and volatility.

Yet what if this is the delayed impact of the Internet. What if what happened to print/news media is now happening to video. Call it the second major wave of consolidation. The first was consolidation within the industry, going from a range of studios down to a few. And now the second consolidation results in the tech giants owning everything.

For example, what is the current largest and most successful entertainment platform? YouTube! Watch Apple, Amazon, or Meta buy Netflix if Trump wins or if the regulatory climate permits.

Will the MrBeast Drama Increase?

Speaking of YouTube, MrBeast may be encountering his first bit of significant trouble amidst his meteoric rise.

Jimmy Donaldson, o/k/a MrBeast, is the current reigning champion of YouTube, with over 307 million subscribers. His status on top is a perfect representation of the contemporary cultural industries, as Jimmy’s trade is not so much art or culture as it is attention. He is where he is because he has dedicated his (YouTube) career to playing the algorithm. There’s arguably nothing Jimmy wouldn’t or won’t do to win the algorithm over, and that’s why he’s number 1. Take a look at his videos (over time) and you’ll understand this, but he’s also now actively covered/scrutinized by a range of media.

The latest and largest drama surrounds his collaboration with Amazon’s Prime Video and their production of what’s called the “Beast Games”. Think of it as a reality game show that takes place on both YouTube and Prime, with different content for each platform, and contestants competing for cash. As others have noted, Jimmy is the kind of guy who looks at the Hunger Games or Squid Games and thinks, “ya, that’s a cool idea, but I can do it better”, without realizing these are dystopian works of fiction.

@hopeyoufindyourdad

@Rosanna Pansino Mr Beast and Amazon are producing the Beast Games and it is not going well #mrbeast #beastgames #amazon #drama #influence... See more

Will Jimmy improve his damage control skills and adapt his management methods or is this the early days of MrBeast as arch villain?

ClockWorkPi: And Their Uber Nerd Phone

We normally end our issues with some tunes for you to use, but we’re still listening to the last tunes we shared on repeat. So here’s some cool tech you can use, that you’ll probably never hear of from any of your other sources. Click through on the link for more info.

Spread the Word!

Hey! If you actually made it this far, you’ve agreed to the Eco Punk social contract that you will share this with your frenemies! Email it, post it, reuse it, whatever, just help spread the word please! Thank you. 😍