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May 24, 2021: Listeners banning tech

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Tonight: Listeners banning tech

On the April 26 show we spoke with Dennis Glover about his novel Factory 19, in which a group of people in Hobart, Australia ban all technology invented after 1948. I asked listeners to send in short audio reflections describing what one tech they would ban. We'll hear them tonight.

Links:

• Dogecoin Is Up Because It’s Funny (by Matt Levine in Bloomberg, May 6, 2021): “At some point, something is just real,” said Sam Bankman-Fried, the Hong Kong-based chief executive officer of the FTX crypto exchange. “If Dogecoin is stupid and valueless, it shouldn’t be worth $90 billion. How about gold or Bitcoin or euros? Our collective imagination has given them value, and now we just think about them having value.”
. . .
Dogecoin, started in 2013 as a joke based on the Shiba Inu breed of dog, may become so accepted by the mainstream it might evolve into a payment option at retailers . . . Just imagine traveling 10 years back in time and trying to explain this to someone; just imagine what an idiot you’d feel like. “There’s going to be this online currency that people think is a form of digital gold, and then there’s going to be a different online currency that is a parody of the first one based on a meme about a talking Shiba Inu, and that one will have a market capitalization bigger than 80% of the companies in the S&P 500, and its value will fluctuate based on things like who is hosting ‘Saturday Night Live’ and whether people tweet a hashtag about it on the pot-joke holiday, and Bloomberg will write articles and banks will write research notes about those sorts of catalysts, and it will remain a perfectly ridiculous content-free parody even as people properly take it completely seriously because there are billions of dollars at stake.”

• A Dogecoin cocreator called Elon Musk a 'self-absorbed grifter' in a now deleted tweet after Tesla said it would stop accepting payment in bitcoin (Business Insider, May 14, 2021): "Jackson Palmer said, 'Reminder: Elon Musk is and always will be a self-absorbed grifter.' He also said in a follow-up tweet that he would be 'removing this in 1 min as that's all I have to say and I enjoy the quiet life.'"

• Citizen CEO Offered To Personally Fund La Arson Manhunt — For The Wrong Person (by Scott Morris in The Verge, May 21, 2021): "As wildfires raged through Southern California last weekend, an app called Citizen offered an unorthodox bounty over livestream and in push alerts to local residents: “hunt down” the alleged arsonist, and we’ll give you $30,000 cash. In the hours that followed, it became clear the app was mistaken. The man pictured had no connection to the fires, and once he was located by law enforcement, he was quickly released for lack of evidence. 'We are actively working to improve our internal processes to ensure this does not occur again,' the company said in a statement after the release. 'This was a mistake we are taking very seriously.'"

Mark's pointers:

• Apple is rotting. Live Photos shows why - Mark's most recent column (May 20, 2021)

• Mark's weekly email newsletter <- sign up here

• You can also join Mark's Creative Good community.

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