#004

gm. Happy SXSW and Happy St. St. Paddy's Day to all who celebrate. It's the perfect  intersection of festivities for Cybermonk. If it’s still unclear who writes this, allow Cybermonk to dox itself.

With that out of the way, let’s dive in to what will 100% be the weirdest thing you read today.

The Arsenal of Democracy

Credited to FDR, arsenal of democracy refers to wartime industrial mobilization  to arm America and the Allies. Roosevelt delivered his famous fireside chat and introduced the term to the world on Dec. 29, 1940...a full *checks notes* 344 days before he gave the "day that will live in infamy" speech. Prescient as ever, FDR's first broadcast was ~1yr before Pearl Harbor, and it was a plea with a weary American public to stave off complacency and fight against inclinations toward isolationism. 

But here's a fun fact: FDR didn't coin arsenal of democracy. That distinction goes to one Herbert S Houston, a publishing exec who used the term 20+ years before FDR. As WWI drew to a close, Herbert wrote "Blocking New Wars," and here's the key point for our purposes: 

Overly idealistic? Maybe. Well-articulated? Sure. Have you heard the best part yet? Definitely not. Cybermonk pulled this passage from The Furniture Worker, "a monthly magazine of furniture progress." The Roaring 20s were lit—You could get furniture pricing advice and trenchant geopolitical commentary all in one place.   

Returning to the task at hand: a seamless segue from the black-and-white digitized pages of a furniture periodical back to the present day.

Arsenal of democracy now has a new lease on life for all the wrong reasons. But the term must be recast for *cringes* the *winces* information age *cries*. Put more elegantly, a century after it was coined, we need a new way to describe arsenal of democracy in 2022.

The FDR model doesn't perfectly fit the bill for obvious reasons. All-encompassing war isn't fanning out across multiple continents. Friends of Ukraine won't put boots on the ground for fear of triggering escalation ladders that could lead to a MAD place that nobody wants to go to. And nation-states sitting on the sidelines aren't coopting production capacity, because they're not in total war/territorial defense. But, in a Rooseveltian sense, liberal democratic societies are putting the arsenal lite to work, arming Ukrainians and accepting (some) economic sacrifices at home to (attempt to) deter Russian aggression abroad. While tech, the US's most powerful economic sector, is hardly a plaintive pushover for the powers that be in DC, the industry has nonetheless shown a willingness to toe the Washington line and sever the flow of US-origin technology into Russia. 

So, let's fork this Rooseveltian lite arsenal of limited hard power (military intervention/arms transfers), a supportive (but not commandeered) industrial base, and full-blown campaign (in Ukraine) to rally public support for the cause and fight complacency. And we'll merge that with the Furniture Digest view (lol), which emphasizes the primacy of free-flowing, uncensored information (which Herbert called freedom of the press). Cybermonk knows this paragraph is now in the pantheon of top-10 stupid things you've ever read and anticipates a lot of unsubscribes. 

For those of you who haven't churned, though, we'll dig a bit deeper on the FDR-Furniture thread. Cybermonk absolutely loves alliteration, so we'll do so by only using words that start with D:

Democratization: The now-deprecated, dirty D word, once a buzzword of bright-eyed Silicon Valley upstarts, actually does double duty here. For starters, a nascent democracy is fighting for its life against a fascist invader. Less literally, though, the arsenal isn't just nation-states or too-big-to-fail megacorps pulling the levers across the liberal democratic/quasi democratic world. While those actors still play the biggest role in potentially steering the outcome of the war, there are a lot of other players shaping public opinion or playing a meaningful part in some capacity. More on that below.  

Deplatforming: Tech culture wars brought this word into vogue, but who cares about that first-world problem right now. At Russia's borders, there is a very real and consequential two-way deplatforming taking place. As discussed in #003, Russia appears to be in the process of de facto and de jure excommunicating Western social media networks from its soil. 

Disconnecting: At the infrastructure level, one of the world’s largest internet backbone providers cut off service to Russian state-owned telco, with the CEO saying it doesn't intend “to hurt anybody," he just didn't want to give Moscow "another tool in their war chest." AWS, the unofficial backbone of the internet, also stopped letting Russian and Belarusian users open new accounts. This is a tool in the arsenal but probably one with a lot of unintended and consequences. Cutting off core backbones will wipe independent sources of information, increasingly hard to come by in Russia, from the Russian internet. In effect, it seems counterproductive. 

• The White House came around to this view, too, apparently, with a spox telling Axios that "it would be ill-advised to limit the people of Russia’s access to the Internet, and the US government has not taken any actions to block the people of Russia’s access to the internet...There is nothing that Putin would like better than to keep the people of Russia from learning the truth about its unjustified war against Ukraine and about what is happening on the ground."

Disinformation: Or, maybe a better way to put it, propaganda. Cybermonk was wrong in #003 and got duped by @Ukraine's tweets about The Ghost of Kyiv and the 'Russian warship, fuck off' story. Both Kyiv and Moscow are manipulating and suppressing information as a means to an end. Moscow is doing a very bang-up job, and has seemingly thrown in the towel on trying to tow any party line that makes any sense. Kyiv-allied democracies place credibility in Kyiv's party line, even if narratives are embellished, while also acknowledging the fog of war and taking a 'trust, but verify' posture. 

~Dark web~: Twitter launched on the Tor onion service, a fingerprinting-resistant, anonymity-preserving, multi-layered encrypted internet browser. It’s a tool for untraceable navigation of the world wide web. If you wanted to access or browse the infamous and now-defunct Silk Road for illicit goods/services, you would have used Tor. 

• Ironically, Tor’s underlying technology was developed by the US Navy. Now it's used by people who want to avoid being spied on by the US military or intelligence community, among other users. That's not to say certain governments couldn't find you on Tor. It's still possible, but more difficult.

• Related to the deplatforming point, Twitter's new onion service may enable ordinary (if not digitally savvy) Russians to still stay connected. As Motherboard put it: “The site may become the most significant onion service created if it allows people to access Twitter from censored countries.” As it so happens, VPN usage is way up—like, +2,692% up—in Russia these days.

Etc, etc...

More Ds in brief, either because they were explored at length in #003 or because fleshing them out would make this absolutely ridiculous FDR/Furniture/Farmer thesis longer than it needs to be.

1. Digital assets: Ukraine has received $100M+ of crypto donations in the last 3 weeks. It's a fraction of fiat donations but not a drop in the bucket. Someone airdropped a CryptoPunk to a donation wallet; a DAO raised $10M+ for Ukraine; Zelenskyy yesterday signed a law legalizing crypto in Ukraine; and the country has spent some of its no-strings-attached crypto immediately on fuel, military-grade food rations, bulletproof vests, night-vision goggles and other non-lethal supplies. Ukraine's using a multisig crypto wallet, configured so that at least three of five signatories must sign to authorize transfers/payments. “The process has been put in place in order to avoid a situation in which signatories are stuck in bunkers or incommunicado,” an official told CoinDesk. Some Ukraine arms vendors are accepting crypto directly. Even the most handwavy, dismissive gadflies in the commentariat corners of Twitter, when presented with this information, would be hard-pressed to deny crypto is moving the needle Ukraine. And, conversely, for Ukrainians who own crypto and for one reason or another can't access their fiat money at the moment. Cybermonk is no crypto proselytizer, but this feels like breakout moment for the magic internet money.

2. Distributed security: For cyber defense and offense, the lines between state hackers, or state-"sponsored" hackers, completely stateless hackers, and hackers sympathetic to one state are more blurred than ever. Ukraine is getting slammed by DDoS attacks, and as discussed in #003, it's enlisted non-state entities and non-Ukrainian nationals to help.

3. Decarbonization: Solar, batteries, nuclear, and other green energy technologies suddenly look more enticing to a whole lot of countries. Even though it will be a painful and very protracted process—and some things, like at scale energy storage—aren't ready for primetime, an accelerated pivot away from hydrocarbon-driven geopolitics seems to be in the cards. We shouldn't soft-pedal that the process will be painful and protracted, because it will be, but it definitely just sped up a whole lot.

4. Degens: The big meme accounts (Disclosure: Cybermonk has internet friends in this community) have picked a side in this conflict (spoiler alert: they're in the arsenal) and have dutifully fallen in line with sh*tposting. The infamous Russian trolls and bot farms are not a nothingburger, but they're not the omnipotent psychological puppeteers that some have made them out to be. Moscow's information warriors are still active and wreaking havoc on Telegram and other services, but on public platforms, they're getting out-memed at every turn. In any event, Cybermonk would take its fintwit internet friends in a meme-off over IRA trolls 10 out of 10 times.

5. Deere & Company: The Ukrainian farmer brigade and their John Deere tractors, at current rates, will have the largest military in Europe within a few weeks. (See below). Semi-seriously, the social videos and photos of these tractors towing tanks and mobile AA guns have probably earned billions of impressions. As crazy as it sounds, as this content continues to surface and linger on social media feeds, it makes it harder for attention-addled societies out of harm's way to completely tune out the war, try as they may. Anything that can extend the half-life of Western empathy for Ukraine and stave off complacency is probably welcomed by Kyiv.

6. Drones (civilian): Consumer drones (à la DJI) have been used time and again around Ukraine to show the devastating effects of indiscriminate Russian attacks on civilians. These off-the-shelf, inexpensive drones give anyone a vantage point and elevated space that was once exclusively the domain of the State. It also gives anyone—combatants or non-combatants—a way to share a panoramic view of on-the-ground conditions with the world.

7. Dafuq? Didn't have this one on the 2022 bingo card: The White House is is briefing the biggest US TikTokers with real-time war updates. TikTok as POTUS's new bully pulpit sounds silly at a surface level, but actually, that's a boomer take. The top TikTok accounts are clearly agenda-setters with a unique influence over their fanbase and distribution that approaches or eclipses traditional news shops.

Closing thots 

• That was then....In the 20th century, to reach a population in a contested, conflict-ridden, or otherwise closed-off place, you could airdrop pamphlets, sneak in bullhorn speakers, or seize the spectrum by beaming in radio broadcasts from nearby territory.

• And this is now....You send in satellite internet terminals. You squat on key digital real estate—ie, Russian Yelp—to flood the zone (restaurant review pages) with updates on what's really happening with that "special military operation" in Ukraine. Or, you could retool your service to work with fingerprinting-free web browsers.

We're bearing witness to a stranger-than-fiction storyline play out in this brave new FDR-Furniture Digest™ world. Ukraine is executing the FDR doctrine—as traditionally defined, with all-of-society mobilization. But in other democracies, it's a more limited Rooseveltian footing and more emphatic Furniture Digest mobilization. The truly bizarre twist to it all, though, is that in 2022, democracies' arsenals include not just Stingers and Javelins, but also meme "warfare," vigilante hacking, volunteer cyperphunk collectives, and anons sending jpegs on the blockchain to a sovereign nation. 

LIL' FOOTNOTES

1 // To preempt some possible criticisms and pushback, there's room to quibble at the margins of everything here, as this whole essay is pretty absurd. It's not intended to make light of a horrific situation but to point out the truly surreal dimensions of how countries, companies, and people are engaging with this conflict—and how everyone's collective responses are taking shape.2 // Freedom House last classified Ukraine  as a "transitional or hybrid regime" and assigned it "partly free" global freedom and internet freedom scores. But even more recently than that, Freedom House wrote that "democratic societies everywhere must support the Ukrainian people in their struggle for peace and freedom...The Russian regime’s invasion of Ukraine is not only an attack on a peaceful and democratic country. It is also an attack on democracy itself—on fundamental human rights and the freedom to exercise political and civil liberties." That's pretty unequivocal, no?3 // This is not to be read as a rah-rah jingoistic love letter to the US, nor is it to be approached with the presupposition that that America is a perfect democracy or that Americans are totally free. As noted, we get spied on by our government too!!!

Presents of Mine

(link dump and assorted thoughts)

🐦 Dept of dark patterns: Twitter shipped an iOS app update that lets users swipe between the algorithmic home feed and the reverse chronological one (ie, latest tweets). At first, users couldn’t opt out of the feature, which always defaulted to the algorithmic feed. After an uproar, Twitter reversed course. Clearly, the algo feed drives higher engagement than the reverse chron, and Twitter tried to pull a fast one by prioritizing engagement over better UX. 

👁️ Dept of Panopticon: IMARC, a market research group, pegged the global biometrics market at $28B in 2021, and forecasts it to grow to $75B by 2027. Big Brother is Big Business.

🌪️ Dept of force majeure I: Ingas and Cryoin, Ukrainian firms that make 45%–54% of global semiconductor-grade neon, have halted operations. Cybermonk's running list of crazy events that have disrupted chipmaking production over the past few years include a pandemic, a deep freeze in Texas, factory fires, flooding in Taiwan, and now, war.  

• ...& II: When China gave crypto miners the boot, a significant share of them relocated to Kazakhstan. Now, amid widespread domestic civil unrest and countrywide energy blackouts, the miners are on the lam yet again (via Rest of World).

• ...& III: ~20% of the world’s high-purity nickel—a key ingredient for EV juice packs—come from a Russian company. Nickel prices are going bonkers. (😍 via Emerging Tech Brew 😍)

🏝️ Dept of monopoly continuity: Taiwan and its semi industry are standing up specialized chip schools to ready the next generation of engineers. Chip fabs need specific, highly advanced know-how to run—ie, highly trained humans. Fabs may be highly productive, ultra-automated, and labor-light, but by no stretch do they just run on autopilot. 

🏰 Dept of digital fortresses: TikTok is nearing a deal w/ Oracle to store US user data in-country and ringfence it from ByteDance, in an effort to head off US national security concerns about the parent company and its coziness with the PRC (via Reuters). TikTok a codename for this effort—Project Texas—to retool internal systems and the crown jewel algo for US-only ops (via Buzzfeed). The nickname is a nod to Oracle's HQ in ATX. TikTok plans to eventually Ctrl C + V Project Texas in the EU. Project Brussels? 

🤖 Dept of automation: NHTSA, the US road safety regulator, issued final rules removing requirements for automated/autonomous vehicles to have manual controls (steering wheel, pedals, etc) and backup human safety drivers. Big step! Also, a Black Hawk flew unpiloted for the first time, powered by DARPA-developed proprietary software. Low key, or maybe high key, full-autopilot aircraft may be ready for primetime before L5 self-driving. Of course, which comes first and when it arrives in its full-fledged form isn’t purely a technological question but also a regulatory + policy matter. 

📛 Dept of original sin: The FT’s weekend magazine cover story picks apart the dead-on-arrival Facebook Libra/Diem crypto project. Shot: “It had the blue-chip partners, the tech and the right players.” Chaser: "the very fact Facebook had conceived the idea, doomed it.” One regulator told the FT that FB/Libra/Diem “spent years trying to reverse engineer their project to fix all of its faults. But they could never fix being linked to Facebook. It was their original sin.” But.............hey, Instagram is gonna let users mint NFTs! 

And with that we bid you adieu, Cybermonk 

🤠.FM / @ryandoofy / 🚁