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September 27, 2020
This week: Mike Murphy talks through the good, bad and weird of Amazon's recent event; Issie Lapowsky explains the Justice Department's proposal for rethinking Section 230; and Twitter data protection officer Damien Kieran talks about this summer's big hack and how Twitter's planning for the election.
For more on the topics in this episode:
David Pierce
David Pierce ( @pierce) is Protocol's editor at large. Prior to joining Protocol, he was a columnist at The Wall Street Journal, a senior writer with Wired, and deputy editor at The Verge. He owns all the phones.
Politics
'Woke tech' and 'the new slave power': Conservatives gather for Vegas summit
An agenda for the event, hosted by the Claremont Institute, listed speakers including U.S. CTO Michael Kratsios and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.
The so-called "Digital Statecraft Summit" was organized by the Claremont Institute. The speakers include U.S. CTO Michael Kratsios and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, as well as a who's-who of far-right provocateurs.
Photo: David Vives/Unsplash
January 16, 2021
Emily Birnbaum ( @birnbaum_e) is a tech policy reporter with Protocol. Her coverage focuses on the U.S. government's attempts to regulate one of the most powerful industries in the world, with a focus on antitrust, privacy and politics. Previously, she worked as a tech policy reporter with The Hill after spending several months as a breaking news reporter. She is a Bethesda, Maryland native and proud Kenyon College alumna.
Issie Lapowsky (@issielapowsky) is a senior reporter at Protocol, covering the intersection of technology, politics, and national affairs. Previously, she was a senior writer at Wired, where she covered the 2016 election and the Facebook beat in its aftermath. Prior to that, Issie worked as a staff writer for Inc. magazine, writing about small business and entrepreneurship. She has also worked as an on-air contributor for CBS News and taught a graduate-level course at New York University’s Center for Publishing on how tech giants have affected publishing. Email Issie.
January 16, 2021
Conservative investors, political operatives, right-wing writers and Trump administration officials are quietly meeting in Las Vegas this weekend to discuss topics including China, "woke tech" and "the new slave power," according to four people who were invited to attend or speak at the event as well as a copy of the agenda obtained by Protocol.
The so-called "Digital Statecraft Summit" was organized by the Claremont Institute, a conservative think tank that says its mission is to "restore the principles of the American Founding to their rightful, preeminent authority in our national life." A list of speakers for the event includes a combination of past and current government officials as well as a who's who of far-right provocateurs. One speaker, conservative legal scholar John Eastman, rallied the president's supporters at a White House event before the Capitol Hill riot earlier this month. Some others have been associated with racist ideologies.
<p>Government officials listed on the agenda include United States Chief Technology Officer Michael Kratsios and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who is leading a multi-state antitrust lawsuit against Google and is currently <a href="https://www.texastribune.org/2020/11/17/texas-ken-paxton-fbi/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">under federal investigation</a>. A source familiar with Kratsios' planned remarks said he intended to speak about artificial intelligence and China. Also on the agenda: Josh Steinman, the White House National Security Council's recently departed senior director for cyber, who now describes himself as the founder of a "stealth startup" on LinkedIn. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="1">
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</div></p><p>Newly confirmed FCC Commissioner Nathan Simington was also listed on the agenda, but he told Protocol he did not end up attending. "Despite initial plans to do so, I did not attend or otherwise participate in the Claremont event this weekend, and I did not prepare or submit remarks," Simington said. </p><p>The event is happening as Las Vegas <a href="https://lasvegassun.com/news/2021/jan/13/las-vegas-hospital-capacity-crisis-covid-19-soar/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">experiences a spike in COVID cases</a>.</p><p>Claremont Institute President Ryan Williams refused to answer Protocol's questions about "the new slave power" panel, what COVID-19 safety protocols are in place during the in-person gathering or the range of speaker backgrounds on the agenda.</p><p>"The Claremont Institute has been a leading voice against political censorship by the Big Tech oligarchs, and we have no interest in commenting on an obvious hatchet job by a publication so clearly beholden to the pieties of Silicon Valley," Williams said in an email to Protocol. "Your questions are riddled with false premises, but we welcome the fire."</p><p>The list of speakers included several people with controversial pedigrees. One speaker, blogger Curtis Yarvin, otherwise known as Mencius Moldbug, has written that there is "no question that biological differences made Africans better slaves than indigenous Americans" because they were less susceptible to tropical diseases. He also once <a href="https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2007/11/why-i-am-not-white-nationalist/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">wrote</a> in a blog post, "although I am not a white nationalist, I am not exactly allergic to the stuff." Yarvin was listed to speak on the panel about "the new slave power," along with Michael Anton, former deputy national security adviser under President Trump, who recently wrote an essay in Claremont's The American Mind publication suggesting that Democrats were "openly talking about staging a coup." </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="2">
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</div></p><p>Another speaker on the agenda, Adam Candeub, is the current acting head of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration. Previously, as a lawyer, he <a href="https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2020/05/trumps-commerce-department-just-hired-a-lawyer-with-ties-to-white-nationalists/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">represented</a> white nationalist Jared Taylor in a lawsuit against Twitter. Eastman recently retired from his position as a law professor at Chapman University amid an <a href="https://www.ocregister.com/2021/01/13/controversial-law-professor-john-eastman-retires-from-chapman-university/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">uproar</a> over a speech he gave alleging election fraud at the pro-Trump rally preceding the Capitol attack on Jan. 6.</p><p>One of the final speakers listed on the agenda, Soylent founder Rob Rhinehart, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/28/technology/politics-tech-start-ups-culture-war.html?" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">made waves earlier this summer</a> with a 5,300-word blog post about why he <a href="https://www.robrhinehart.com/why-i-am-voting-for-kanye-west/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">supported hip-hop artist Kanye West</a> for president. "I am so sick of politics. Politics are suddenly everywhere," he wrote, before jumping into a lengthy post about Joe Biden, why the media is "actually evil" and the importance of biofuels. </p><p>One attendee said they had not been given any information on who would be speaking as of midday Friday, hours before the event was set to kick off, and Claremont Institute did not appear to be promoting the event on social media Saturday as the first panels began. "Maybe they're trying to keep it under wraps," the attendee said. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="3">
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</div></p><p>The attendee said they understood that the tenor of the weekend would be "very critical of tech, very pro some type of intervention."</p><p>"There's going to be some discrepancy and debate around what intervention looks like," the attendee said.</p><p>The other topics on the agenda include a panel on "restoring law" and a fireside chat titled, "What happened?" The summit takes place 10 days after a violent mob of Trump supporters breached the Capitol Hill complex, resulting in five deaths and forcing a reckoning within the Republican Party over its alignment with Trump and right-wing conspiracy theorists.</p>
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Emily Birnbaum ( @birnbaum_e) is a tech policy reporter with Protocol. Her coverage focuses on the U.S. government's attempts to regulate one of the most powerful industries in the world, with a focus on antitrust, privacy and politics. Previously, she worked as a tech policy reporter with The Hill after spending several months as a breaking news reporter. She is a Bethesda, Maryland native and proud Kenyon College alumna.
People
One man’s plan to build a new internet
Dfinity Chief Scientist Dominic Williams comes on the Source Code Podcast.
Dfinity's founder and chief scientist, Dominic Williams.
Photo: Dfinity
January 13, 2021
David Pierce ( @pierce) is Protocol's editor at large. Prior to joining Protocol, he was a columnist at The Wall Street Journal, a senior writer with Wired, and deputy editor at The Verge. He owns all the phones.
January 13, 2021
Much is wrong with the internet we have now. But what does better look like?
Dominic Williams, the founder and chief scientist at Dfinity, thinks he has an answer. It's called the Internet Computer, and it builds on top of the internet's most basic protocols to create a new generation of the web that doesn't exist on a bunch of private networks controlled by tech giants, but is run by the network itself. It's zero-trust and unhackable and yeah, you guessed it, it's blockchain. But blockchain that works "at web speed," Williams said.
<p>Williams' idea isn't the only one about what it would take to reinvent the internet, but it's a serious player: Dfinity, a nonprofit, has raised $195 million to build what Williams hopes will be a hack-proof, monopoly-proof, totally free and open internet. He came on the Source Code Podcast to explain his vision, how it might work and what it'll take to take on the tech giants.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="1">
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</div></p><p><br></p><div class="rm-embed embed-media"><iframe frameborder="no" height="200px" scrolling="no" seamless="" src="https://player.simplecast.com/366f9db5-d751-4b2d-8678-35f6e71eb5b2?dark=true" width="100%"></iframe></div><p><strong>Subscribe to the show: <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/protocols-source-code/id1497440658" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/1mc6ODYq0nZ8hrVDuvQfeL?si=HDPznyjDSEqv5EvMZxhKxQ" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Spotify</a> | <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5zaW1wbGVjYXN0LmNvbS95OVNfTjJfaw==" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href="https://pca.st/7ktyvlll" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Pocket Casts</a> | </strong><a href="https://feeds.simplecast.com/y9S_N2_k" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"><strong>RSS</strong></a></p><p><em>Below are excerpts from our conversation, lightly edited for length and clarity.</em></p><p><em></em><strong>I want to start by kind of defining the problem of the internet now. We talk a lot in this industry about the way the internet is broken, and it's about moderation and business models and identity and data collection and Facebook ruining democracy and all sorts of things. As you think about what needs to be solved about the way the internet works now, how do you think about it?</strong></p><p>So the internet itself is one of mankind's greatest inventions and achievements. It's a public network, created by an open, decentralized protocol that combines millions of private networks to create this meta-network that connects everybody and everything. And the internet does a number of wonderful things. It's unstoppable: It was designed to withstand a nuclear strike, and that's a very valuable property. </p><p>Because it was a decentralized protocol, many independent parties were able to build out at scale rapidly. If you remember the 1990s, there was this sort of Cambrian explosion of internet service providers and backbone providers and so on. And what's most important is that it creates an open, permissionless environment. So let's say you and I create two competing websites. I can't pick up the phone to the owner of the internet and say, "Hey, if you slow down David's website, I'll give you some stock in my company," right? It created this amazing global free market, which has provided a very firm foundation for an enormous amount of innovation and economic growth. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="2">
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</div></p><p>However, the internet this far is only really a network. And if you want to build a service that you want to connect to the internet, that service itself must be built entirely on a proprietary stack. So today, people wanting to build services or enterprise systems, they'll get to an account with a cloud services provider like Amazon Web Services. And they'll install a whole load of traditional software building blocks on the instances or platform that they've rented: databases, web servers and so on. And that that's just how it's done today. </p><p>The Internet Computer believes, in various subtle ways, that has led to the internet becoming very monopolistic and fragile. And our solution is to extend the internet. So while today, the internet provides a public network that connects everybody and everything, tomorrow it's also going to be the platform that people build on.</p><p><strong>In spirit, what you're describing is not necessarily all that different from what the internet was supposed to be when we were talking about it 25 or 30 years ago, right? I feel like everybody in the open source community is listening to this and sort of nodding furiously, like, "this is what I've been talking about for three decades!" Right?</strong></p><p>Absolutely. The current internet ecosystem is antithetical to the ethos of the internet. And we want to enable the world to reinvent the internet ecosystem, reimagine it in a better way, through converting the internet into something that's more than just a network. Extending it so that as well as a network, the internet is a compute platform, and that people can build anything from a website and an enterprise system through to an internet service and DeFi just by writing code to the internet, where it's hosted within the protocol along with the data it processes. That enables people to build systems that are unstoppable and tamper-proof.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="3">
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</div></p><p><strong>With that kind of high-level thinking in mind, give me the 5-year-old level version of what Dfinity is trying to build, and how the internet computer works.</strong></p><p>Unfortunately, there's no really easy explanation because there's a lot of advanced computer science.</p><p><strong>It's a series of tubes.</strong></p><p>Yeah! But OK, highest level: So the internet itself is created by a protocol called IP. And this protocol is able to combine millions of privately operated networks to create this single public meta-network. That simplifies everything. My software that's recording sound and sending it to you only needs to know the IP address of the computer you're using. That's it, it's just like a telephone number. </p><p>So the Internet Computer is created by a protocol called ICP: Internet Computer Protocol. And ICP runs over the top of IP. It combines the compute capacity of special node machines that are run en masse by independent data centers around the world, and it combines that compute capacity to create a single public compute platform, which is seamless, and can scale out and has unbounded capacity. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="4">
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</div></p><p>It's a completely novel kind of compute platform. It even reimagines how software works in various significant ways: The platform is stoppable, it's tamper-proof, you don't need to protect things you built on the internet computer with a firewall. And you don't need to use any of the traditional legacy building blocks. You don't need a cloud service, you don't need a content distribution network, you don't need a database, don't need a web server, don't need web memcached. You literally just write your code to the internet.</p><p><strong>It seems like, structurally, the simplest thing that it provides is to get all of that control that you're talking about out of the hands of a few companies and into the hands of the ecosystem in a broad way. Is that one of the organizing principles here?</strong></p><p>It's true that the Internet Computer can be used to build open alternatives to big tech services that can out-compete them because of various advantages they have. But the Internet Computer was conceived just because it's technically possible, and is a superior way for humanity to build its compute infrastructure. </p><p>We have 7.8 billion people on this planet, and we can only sustain the lives of that many people through automation. Modern society and the modern world depends upon heavy computerization to exist. If you look at supermarkets, well, you've got zero-day inventory, there's a complex supply chain that moves produce almost directly from farms with minimal waypoints into the supermarkets, and so on. And generally now, families depend upon internet services for communication. When President Trump talks about banning WeChat, Chinese expats in America are terrified that they'd lose contact with people back home. This stuff just has to be unstoppable. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="5">
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</div></p><p>The internet itself was designed to be unstoppable because of the Cold War. And yet here we are 70 years later, and the network is robust, but the services we're connecting to it aren't. And they become more and more fragile not only because of the way they're built, but because of their concentration in the hands of a few big tech mega-monopolies.</p><p><strong>So then why isn't your argument to nationalize the internet? Why aren't you advocating for my tax dollars to pay for data centers the same way that they pay for roads?</strong></p><p>Well, it's not just about data centers. The problems go really deep. It's about the entire stack, and what the stack can and can't do. I don't believe hyperscale data centers are the way to go, I think it's really about pushing computation to the edge.</p><p>But the way it enables you to build internet services, in open form, is what really kind of provides a solution to the problems of Big Tech and mega-monopolies, because it changes the incentives and ways that you can provide new ways to win by designing systems in a more open way.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="6">
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</div></p><p>We first saw it on the Bitcoin ledger: There's little access to control scripts. Bitcoin was the first stateful decentralized network. And when I saw Bitcoin, I had a kind of epiphany. The Bitcoin ledger doesn't reside anywhere, it just lives in cyberspace. The whole world can agree on this ledger, and it's tamper-proof, there's no way of hacking it. Otherwise, obviously, somebody would do that because they could transfer billions of Bitcoins to themselves. </p><p>Now, a Bitcoin ledger has three columns, if you like, it's like a spreadsheet with three columns. The first column is the address. The second column is the balance of Bitcoins at the address. And the third column is an access control script, which you need to unlock to move the bitcoins. So where does that code live? Who's responsible for it? The answer is, it's really autonomous. It just lives in cyberspace. </p><p>And Ethereum obviously took that a step further: They took that ledger, and they swapped the order of the last two columns. So now you had address, script — which is now a smart contract, and it's Turing complete, so you can credit create vastly more things with it — and then balance of coins. And actually, the coins move between the scripts on Ethereum. So the Internet Computer, of course, is an evolution of blockchain. It's the world's first unbounded blockchain computer that can run at web speed and doesn't have capacity limitations. So it can scale out its compute capacity as needed. Which means that you can rethink how you rebuild everything. You can essentially build on cyberspace. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="7">
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</div></p><p><strong>The thing that I keep coming back to is that we are in this place where to tear down the internet and rebuild it again just seems impossible! There are just so many entrenched players that getting in and trying to reinvent it from the inside just seems impossible. From your perspective, what does it look like to figure out what steps one and two of this process are supposed to be?</strong></p><p>I think any major undertaking can feel impossible until you've succeeded. And I think that's the case here. </p><p>My view is that DeFi will replace traditional finance, because it has certain fundamental advantages. It's just difficult to see and comprehend that now because you look at this heavily entrenched industry that's protected by regulators. So, staring at the mountain, it seems inconceivable that it can be climbed, but climbed it will be.</p><p>Legacy, proprietary, closed Big Tech infrastructure and services won't just disappear. We're still running COBOL, right? So it's not just going to disappear. It doesn't work like that. But I think five years from now, there's going to be a huge amount of excitement, people are going to see mass-market, open internet services that are beginning to edge out big tech services in various areas. Ten years from now, it'll be sort of widely seen which way the wind is blowing. Twenty years from now, the open internet will be far, far bigger than the internet we have today.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="8">
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David Pierce ( @pierce) is Protocol's editor at large. Prior to joining Protocol, he was a columnist at The Wall Street Journal, a senior writer with Wired, and deputy editor at The Verge. He owns all the phones.
People
‘Everyone's in the space industry. They just don't know it yet.’
Dylan Taylor, CEO of Voyager Space Holdings, comes on the Source Code Podcast to talk about the big business of space travel.
Thanks to companies like SpaceX, the space business is heating up fast.
Photo: SpaceX
January 6, 2021
David Pierce ( @pierce) is Protocol's editor at large. Prior to joining Protocol, he was a columnist at The Wall Street Journal, a senior writer with Wired, and deputy editor at The Verge. He owns all the phones.
January 6, 2021
A few hundred people have been to space. Just shy of 250 have been to the International Space Station, and all of two dozen have been on the moon. Pretty soon, though, all of those numbers are about to get a lot bigger.
The space industry is booming, as companies and governments alike vie to create new ways to get people into orbit and new things to do once they get there. They're trying to figure out what space tourism might look like; how to design a space hotel; what life might look like on Mars; and how to train a whole lot of astronauts in a really short time. And, eventually, how to bring the cost of a ticket down to something more than a handful of people can afford.
Dylan Taylor is one of the people leading the charge. He's the CEO of <a href="https://voyagerspaceholdings.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Voyager Space Holdings</a>, a holding company whose teams are working on everything from launch capabilities to in-orbit services to an oven that can cook in zero gravity. He came on the Source Code Podcast to talk about the state of the space business, what the next few years might look like and whether he's reserved his spot in line for a space flight.<p><br></p><div class="rm-embed embed-media"><iframe frameborder="no" height="200px" scrolling="no" seamless="" src="https://player.simplecast.com/f317f866-69e4-4d64-aa44-28f69a4f999a?dark=true" width="100%"></iframe></div><p><strong>Subscribe to the show: <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/protocols-source-code/id1497440658" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="" target="_blank">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/1mc6ODYq0nZ8hrVDuvQfeL?si=HDPznyjDSEqv5EvMZxhKxQ" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="" target="_blank">Spotify</a> | <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5zaW1wbGVjYXN0LmNvbS95OVNfTjJfaw==" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="" target="_blank">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href="https://pca.st/7ktyvlll" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="" target="_blank">Pocket Casts</a> | </strong><a href="https://feeds.simplecast.com/y9S_N2_k" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="" target="_blank"><strong>RSS</strong></a></p><p><em>Below are excerpts from our conversation, lightly edited for length and clarity.</em></p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="1">
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</div></p><p><em></em><strong>One thing I've learned about this industry is that it's actually newer than I realized, at least as a private enterprise. It seems like really in the last decade, but even in the last several years, space has really ramped up in a big way. So can you give me a brief history lesson on private space enterprise?</strong></p><p>Oh boy, yeah. I think it's true what you just said, but it's also not true, in the sense that we had the Apollo program, which inspired a whole generation of scientists. What we were missing, and I think where we went a little bit sideways, is our transportation. </p><p>If you think about the Apollo program, what was promised was a daily shuttle to space, the so-called Space Shuttle. And that was going to open up "the high frontier," as it was called, and it was going to bring all this infrastructure to space and allow us to live and work in space. This was in the 1970s, the 1980s. And what ended up happening, unfortunately, is the space shuttle became a bit of a problem program. And instead of it being a daily shuttle, it became a couple-of-years Space Shuttle. And it ended up being hundreds of thousands of dollars a pound to get mass to orbit. So that's really where we stubbed our toe. </p><p>And then fast forward to the early '90s, when you had other space entrepreneurs that were trying to crack the nut. You know, famously, a group took over the Mir space station, which was the Russian Space Station. So we had a lot of — call them renegades, or, frontier-pioneer types in space. But what was always missing is access. If you look at all the business plans, they all presuppose you can get to space. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="2">
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</div></p><p>So what has changed? Well, what's changed is SpaceX, frankly. That totally changed the game. Elon, coming from outside the industry, looked at it from a first principles standpoint. He looked at it from base physics, and said, "Why is [it] costing so much? I don't get it." So now that we've opened up inexpensive access to space, we now have the ability for all these different business plans to flourish. And so I think that's what we're seeing now.</p><p><strong>The other side of the time horizon also seems really interesting. A lot of the conversations I have with folks about space, they presuppose that we are all going to live on Mars, or that there's going to be some Wall-E ship in space that we all spend a lot of our time on. The question of how we get there is really interesting, but so is how long it takes. You're a guy who's running a business, you're not doing government-funded science for its own sake. So when you spend your time thinking about this stuff, what time horizons are useful to think about? Is it even useful to spend your time thinking about what life is going to be like when we all live on Mars?</strong></p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="3">
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</div></p><p>It is! Because that's what inspires me. What inspires me is, I think space is transformational for humanity. I think it's the next big thing. I think it allows us to imagine what humanity 2.0 could be. So I'm inspired by that. And so for me being from the business world, and believing in free markets and capital markets, it's more about, how do we build the sustainable economic business case to make sure that we can open up the high frontier? So I'm inspired by Mars, I'm inspired by the moon. I'm inspired by having infrastructure and free space, you know, space stations and the like. </p><p>But just to reinforce the point you made, the Space Station is at 240 miles above the Earth, the moon is at 220,000 miles away from the Earth. And Mars is 35 million miles away from the Earth. So just in terms of order of complexity, it's not 10x more complex, it's 1,000x more complex to go to Mars. And I don't know if people fully appreciate that.</p><p><strong>In the here and now, it seems to me that the two most obviously interesting space businesses are satellite internet and the actual work of launching stuff into orbit. What am I missing?</strong></p><p>Well, I would expand satellite internet to Earth observation in general. If you think about the dataset being created with all these constellations, certainly internet access is one thing, transmitting ones and zeros. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="4">
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</div></p><p>But also just data <em>collection</em>, whether it's for climate or whether it's for economic optimization of shipping routes or rail routes for logistics. Google has built a trillion-dollar dataset organizing known terrestrial information: telling you what's happened or if a store is open or whatever the case may be. Think about a database that's even more robust, that's persistent, that's always-on and is predictive in its qualities about the global economic paradigm we live in — what's that database worth? I don't know. But it's worth more than a trillion dollars. </p><p>To me, it's a bit like ecommerce. I don't think anybody would have had the Amazon lottery ticket in the '90s, saying a bookseller was going to capture 80% of ecommerce. But if you would have just bet the sector — bought pets.com, beyond.com, amazon.com — you would have killed it. I think of Earth observation like that as well. </p><p>In terms of what else is out there, there's a lot of other business plans that I'm excited about. One is what I'll call generally "on-orbit or in-orbit servicing." And essentially, this is robotics in space. We have a space debris issue. This allows us to clean up space debris, capture satellites, refuel satellites, extend their useful life, raise their orbit, push them down and burn them up. This enables things like space manufacturing, this enables private space stations, space-based power, space-based communication. A lot of these business plans are enabled by advanced robotics in orbit. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="5">
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</div></p><p>And then the last one I'll mention is really planetary resources. We are going back to the moon. There are a lot of these rare earth minerals on the moon. So that could be another business case to go back to the moon.</p><p><strong>And that stuff is, it sounds like, more immediate than I would have guessed. It's interesting that you're already deep in the "how do we mine the moon?" kinds of questions, which I think to a lot of people still feel like decades-away science fiction.</strong></p><p>I think it'll happen in the 2020s. I mean, we are going to go back to the moon. I'm skeptical that it'll happen in 2024 as planned. But I think 2026 is gonna happen. And when we go back, we now have the technology to extract oxygen from moon regolith. We have the ability to make steel on the moon. We have the ability to make habitat on the moon. And if we can do all those things … you have unlimited energy, by definition, there's unlimited solar on the moon. You can do things like mine rare earth minerals. That's possible.</p><p><strong>That's really exciting. So you mentioned the "don't buy Amazon, buy the sector" approach. Is that how you feel about Voyager Holdings? You're just betting on space, and who knows exactly how it'll all shake out, but you're confident enough in the sector?</strong></p><p>I certainly have done that for my private space investment, but Voyager's a bit different. The thesis there is that the industry is very healthy. Early-stage capital is abundant. However, we're not scaling particularly well. Even SpaceX is not a big company in the whole scheme of the world. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="6">
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</div></p><p>And part of the issue is a lot of the aggregators for industries — like private equity or strategic buyers — aren't particularly well-suited to space. A lot of the value creation is by marrying different capabilities. If you have a launch capability, and you have a hardware spacecraft capability, and you have a data and analytics capability, and that's all within the same vertically integrated company, you're capable of capturing more of the value in the industry. And that's really an operating challenge. </p><p>The way we're thinking about it is, what capabilities can you assemble over time to essentially capture the flag? The flag being the capability to bid for the most complex missions that are awarded by the government or by other commercial buyers. So it's all about capability. And it's all about what do you have in-house that you're able to deliver in an integrated way?</p><p><strong>Why do a bunch of separate companies? My guess is this has to do with how funding works, and how money sources move in this industry. But why do that, as opposed to trying to build one company with one CEO that does everything under one roof in one name?</strong></p><p>Because you don't want to stifle innovation. Pick any industry you've ever been involved in. The innovators, the people at the very leading edge, do they want to be a badged employee for IBM or Microsoft or Lockheed Martin? The answer is no. And a lot of them came from those companies to start whatever venture they're in. So you can't stifle the innovation. And that's really the challenge. At the very top of the industry, you have companies that are very, very, very capable, but they're not terribly innovative. And so what we're trying to do is thread the needle between not stifling the innovation and entrepreneurial spirit, but yet providing the scale and integration that you need to create value.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="7">
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</div></p><p><strong>And as you think about who belongs in the Voyager portfolio, you mentioned robotics, right? Robotics is obviously overlapping with space, but it's also very much its own industry. And then you talk about data analytics, which is also very much its own industry. How broad does that make your purview? Space is eventually going to be kind of about everything, right? You could buy a real estate company and call it a space company!</strong></p><p>You nailed it. I joke with my friends that everyone's in the space industry. They just don't know it yet. </p><p>I think of it in terms of actual space capabilities, things you would only be able to do in space. And then functional areas that essentially create more robustness around your capability. Robotics is one of those things, but it applies to many industries: AI, data analytics, edge computing, even biotech. So we think of those in terms of things we need to do really well, or find really good partners to do. But then, of course, there are areas of the space industry that are really specific to space, like life support. Other than going to the bottom of the ocean, you don't really have that environment here on Earth. So there are definitely areas that are space-specific, and then other areas that span other industries.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="8">
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</div></p><p><strong>Am I right in thinking that kind of the first version of this is going to be basically, space tourism, where regular people — first with a lot of money, and then with less money — can get on a spacecraft and fly around the Earth? Is that the next goal post here?</strong></p><p>Yeah, I think so. Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin should be flying soon. Virgin just had a test a couple of weeks ago, which didn't go particularly well, unfortunately. But it didn't go horribly either, they didn't have an accident or anything. So I think that is going to happen. </p><p>And just to be clear, that's crossing the Kármán line, which is 62 miles above the Earth, 100,000 kilometers. You will get your astronaut wings, but essentially, it's a bit of a joyride. You're gonna get a little bit of microgravity, but round-trip it's something like 20 minutes max. This is compared to other space tourists who actually went to the International Space Station. And not only is that $50 million, round numbers, but you have to train for months. So it's a big commitment. It's a totally different level of space tourism, if you will. But I think when people see people they know going to space on a regular basis, I think it'll change the world. I really, really believe that.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="9">
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David Pierce ( @pierce) is Protocol's editor at large. Prior to joining Protocol, he was a columnist at The Wall Street Journal, a senior writer with Wired, and deputy editor at The Verge. He owns all the phones.
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How to build a better Facebook
MeWe CEO Mark Weinstein comes on the Source Code Podcast to talk privacy, regulation and how to beat Facebook by being absolutely nothing like Facebook.
MeWe looks a little like Facebook — but it wants to act completely differently.
Image: MeWe
December 23, 2020
David Pierce ( @pierce) is Protocol's editor at large. Prior to joining Protocol, he was a columnist at The Wall Street Journal, a senior writer with Wired, and deputy editor at The Verge. He owns all the phones.
December 23, 2020
Many have tried to take on Facebook over the years, and none have succeeded. But Mark Weinstein thinks he might have a shot. Weinstein is the CEO of MeWe, and while he's not crazy enough to think he can completely take down the Big Blue app, he's pretty sure he can win over a few hundred million of its users.
MeWe has some things in common with Facebook — it has a news feed, you can post pictures and status updates, there are lots of groups — but its business model and view of the world couldn't be more different. It has no algorithmic timelines, no personalization and no ad business. It's up to 13 million users now, twice the number it had a year ago, and Weinstein thinks it's only just beginning to take off.
<p>Weinstein came on the Source Code Podcast to talk about advertising, censorship, social networking, regulation and much more. He has some seriously strong feelings, and levied some strong accusations, some of which I don't agree with. But his perspective on the space is fascinating, and after eight-plus years of telling anyone who will listen about the perils of the social networking space, it seems like more people than ever are listening.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="1">
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</div></p><div class="rm-embed embed-media"><iframe frameborder="no" height="200px" scrolling="no" seamless="" src="https://player.simplecast.com/502c688a-d535-40f0-b63b-490cb4383da2?dark=true" width="100%"></iframe></div><p><em>Below are excerpts from our conversation, lightly edited for length and clarity.</em><br></p><p><strong>Let's start at the beginning. One of the things we've talked about a lot with Facebook is that you can't sort of change some things about Facebook without fundamentally changing what Facebook is, right? Facebook minus personalization just isn't Facebook anymore. You'd have to tear the thing down and build it again. But you have kind of gone through this process of trying to figure out, what does social plus privacy look like? What was your sense of what it looked like to do social in what you felt like was the right way?</strong></p><p><strong></strong>It's fundamentally, to me, very simple. Imagine a social network where the only content, the only thing happening, is you connecting with your friends, with your family and with whatever you're choosing to connect with. Pages and groups that you're in, or following hobbies, philosophies, influencers, et cetera. So your whole news feed is just everything that you're actually truly interested in, because you've made that choice. Is that so radical?</p><p>This is the whole idea of social networking. And because you're not Facebook's customer, but the advertiser and marketer is, then they just turn that whole idea of a news feed upside down, because everything now has to serve their business model of taking care of their customer, who is the advertiser, the marketer, the politician, the government, et cetera.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="2">
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</div></p><p><strong>But that's just a totally different thing, right? This has been talked about with Facebook, but they say, look, we could charge people money to use Facebook, and some people would do that. But they believe there's a social good in having something that's free and accessible to everybody. And I'm guessing you don't buy that idea. But I don't know that that's a totally impossible one.</strong></p><p>Oh, hold on. With all due respect to you, David, I don't buy for one second Facebook's blasphemy that they're doing social good. And when Mark Zuckerberg stands on a podium and says, "We're the champion and the bastion of free expression" — I mean, give me a break.</p><p>Facebook is manipulating people's thoughts and minds. They have thousands of data analysts and psychologists, analyzing everything that's going on in people's conversations so that they can instantly, through algorithmic modeling, identify what your mood is, how to persuade you, how to persuade your mind or your purchase decision about an idea or an object. </p><p>It's so massively sophisticated, what they're up to. And it is so utterly simple, what MeWe's up to. MeWe's free, by the way, MeWe's free forever. It says it right on the start button. We do have a freemium business model. Now, will we be as profitable as Facebook? Probably not. Will we be nicely profitable? Absolutely. But Facebook is not a social network. Facebook is a data company. Let's just be clear about that.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="3">
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</div></p><p><strong>So what does it look like to decide to be the privacy option? What does that mean you definitely can't do? It feels so easy to just sort of slowly, one drip at a time, start to do things that get messier. What does it look like to you to maintain privacy?</strong></p><p>That's such a beautiful question, because what you just described is what happened to Pinterest, and Snap, and Instagram. And it's because their business models, from the beginning, had the same fundamentals as Facebook. They're ad-driven business models, and at a certain point, you know, Snap decided to turn on the algorithms, Instagram decided to turn on the algorithms. That's the slippery slope. As soon as you do that, then the whole schema of the site and of your experience becomes completely different.</p><p>At MeWe, there is not really this drip-drip risk, because we started with a fundamentally different business model. So not only can an advertiser or marketer not target you, but what this also means is that you can't pay us to boost your thoughts into unsuspecting news feeds of innocent people who have no idea what you're thinking about, and didn't ask for that in their news feed. </p><p>Remember, it's not just privacy we're talking about. MeWe also doesn't engage in this very bizarre censoring that has become commonplace on Facebook and Twitter, for example, and even on YouTube and Pinterest. And that is so counter to democracy. The idea of social media is: Keep it clean, have your conversations and we're not going to get in the way. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="4">
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</div></p><p>Now, I'm not [an] anything-goes guy, I want to be very clear. This is a clear distinction between MeWe and Parler or 8chan. I think sites where anything goes are terrible, terrible. At MeWe we have strict rules in our terms about inciting violence — you better not do it — about posting hate, about bullying, breaking the law. We have a laundry list. And we have a great Trust and Safety team, we have Report and Block on every post and every profile and every group and every page, and our Trust and Safety team will investigate. We're for the good guys. But we're not going to censor a conversation by conservatives or progressives, or health advocates of one health remedy versus another. Because, you know, their opinion might differ from mine. Why is that any of my business? </p><p><strong>Yeah, but couldn't you argue that it's inciting violence to recommend that somebody drink bleach to get rid of coronavirus? That's inciting violence!</strong></p><p>Luckily it didn't happen on our site.</p><p><strong>Fair enough. But one thing that we've learned over the last few years is, in a funny way, writing a Terms of Service has become way more important than anybody realized. Because I think what we know now is that having a proactive set of rules, that you then can attempt to apply consistently, makes everything better. When people know what the platform is supposed to be, it becomes way less of a problem to try and enforce that, as opposed to saying "anything goes!" and then try to walk that back. That's what Facebook is trying to do, and Twitter has tried to do and Reddit has tried to do, and it's just a mess.</strong> </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="5">
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</div></p><p><strong>But you do get into positions where you have to do things like define censorship. A lot of the things that you're describing, like hate, people will call those things censorship. If I say a horrible thing to somebody, and you say, "You're not allowed to do that," I'm going to scream censorship, because that's what people do on the internet. To say, not anything goes but we don't censor … there is a middle ground there, but I think it's maybe messier than you're giving credit to.</strong></p><p>I didn't say we don't censor. I said that we don't censor based on ideology. And what is clear and clearly evident on Facebook and Twitter, with Jack Dorsey and with Mark Zuckerberg is that there is ideological censorship going on. There has been for a few years.</p><p><strong>I don't agree with that, for the record.</strong></p><p>That's what I see very clearly. I see when Facebook decides to take down several hundred, or a few thousand, conservative groups, because they're conservative groups, which they've done a few different times in their history. I scratch my head and go, "Wait a minute, a lot of these people are not saying kill the other guy. They're not inciting hate or violence, but you don't like their ideas." Same thing on the Twitter side. As long as you can't boost your thought, I should not be getting in the way unless you're breaking our terms.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="6">
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</div></p><p><strong>You're bringing up something really interesting, which is this idea of freedom of speech versus freedom of reach. We've been talking about that a lot over the last couple of years. There is an increasingly loud idea that one simple way to solve a lot of these problems is just to turn off the algorithms. That if I actually know why I'm seeing what I'm seeing, I'm suddenly in a whole other level of control over what's going on. It sounds like A, I think you agree with that theory, and B, that it's actually really useful for MeWe to not be that, that it suddenly frees you of all kinds of questions that you don't even have to ask yourself, by virtue of you're not deciding what people see.</strong></p><p>Absolutely. We're about to launch a feature called MeWe Recommends. If we're Facebook, if it was Facebook Recommends, the thing would be completely algorithmic, based on the analysis of every syllable and every idea that you talk about in your account. But for us, it's very straightforward. There's no algorithmic, deep-state analysis of you and your psyche and what you're talking about. Our team simply looks at those categories and says, here are our best groups on our platform today for, you know, football. So simple. Again, there's no need for a slippery slope.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="7">
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</div></p><p><strong>But that's a step one, right? And then step two is like, well, what if we reorder the list based on what we know people like? And now you're freedom-of-reaching me again, right?</strong></p><p>Listen, I don't even know why you bring this up. It's just not needed. We've already proven that a news feed, a completely organic news feed, works perfectly. There's data that says people spend almost twice as much time on our site [compared to Facebook]. Why? Because they're having real conservations. What I always like to say is, Facebook is the facade of your life and MeWe is your real life.</p><p>Also, remember, a Google crawler can't get in. What's on MeWe stays on MeWe. You can't Google me to see what I said on MeWe yesterday. If they're members on MeWe, it just depends on your settings inside MeWe.</p><p><strong>A lot of the stuff you're describing is just growth hacking, right? That's the game: You get more people to use it more often by having web crawlers and turning on algorithms, so people keep coming back and getting new followers. You can make business cases for all those things. Is it easy not to make those cases?</strong></p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="8">
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</div></p><p>People are already coming back. Our site data is good, our MAUs, or DAUs. We have almost 13 million members, and we have never paid to acquire a member. Our user acquisition cost is zero. And most people don't know about us. So, you know, the sky's the limit. </p><p><strong>What do you make of this moment that we're in? I've read a lot of headlines that include you and Parler, and I get the distinct sense that you don't particularly like that comparison. But what do you make of the fact that you're on the list of places conservatives fed up by Twitter are fleeing to? Do you read that as good news or bad news?</strong></p><p>Oh, I think it's great news. Now remember, Parler competes with Twitter. And you know, on the one hand, my hat's off to Parler, because they've done a good job at establishing a beachhead competing with Twitter. </p><p>But Parler has two issues, as I see it. Number one is that they're just an echo chamber for conservatives. And a social network is never going to become ultimately successful as an echo chamber for one opinion or another. The second thing is that Parler is anything goes, and I'm completely, completely against anything goes. I don't think a society is based on any kind of civil notion that anything goes is a good thing. </p><p>So I understand why the press bundles us because they see Parler as potentially an alternative to Twitter, and they see us as the new Facebook. So they bundle us. And I welcome all the conservatives that are coming, because they understand that we're not going to censor them. Just like we're not going to censor progressives. And we're not going to censor people based on their religion or their political beliefs. You know, MeWe [is] very welcoming. And MeWe has common rules of decency.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="9">
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</div></p><p><strong>As you look around the rest of the social space, some of the things that are going wrong are increasingly obvious. But are there things you see that you feel like other folks are getting right? I mean, some of the stuff you've described sounds a bit like, how Discord thinks about its community as well. And there's like little bits of sort of LinkedIn in what you're talking about. As you look around, are there others who are pushing in the same direction you are?</strong></p><p>I think Apple. Now, we're not talking social networking, we're looking at Safari, we're looking at the settings that you have, we're looking at their new fight with Facebook around the ad models. I mean, this is big-time stuff. I look at Tim Cook. I think Tim Cook is an American hero. I think Tim Cook gets it. </p><p>I think a lot of people, because we live in such an open and free society, a lot of people don't understand that this is something we had to fight for. That our parents and previous generations had to fight in wars for. And so you know, that we have somebody like Tim Cook, who totally gets it and stands up and says, "No, I'm not giving you a backdoor, you know, even at the risk of that there might be some terrorists harbored. But the greater good is privacy."</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="10">
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David Pierce ( @pierce) is Protocol's editor at large. Prior to joining Protocol, he was a columnist at The Wall Street Journal, a senior writer with Wired, and deputy editor at The Verge. He owns all the phones.
Tech fights the government. And itself.
On Facebook vs. Apple, the U.S. vs. Big Tech and Robinhood vs. its users.
Photo: Stefani Reynolds/Getty Images
December 21, 2020
David Pierce ( @pierce) is Protocol's editor at large. Prior to joining Protocol, he was a columnist at The Wall Street Journal, a senior writer with Wired, and deputy editor at The Verge. He owns all the phones.
December 20, 2020
This week on the Source Code podcast: Emily Birnbaum comes on the show to talk about the latest antitrust lawsuits, and which ones have an actual chance of succeeding. Then, Shakeel Hashim joins to talk about what's going on with Robinhood, and why regulation might hit fintech sooner than it hits the rest of tech.
For more on the topics in this episode:
<ul class="ee-ul">
<li><a href="https://www.protocol.com/big-tech-antitrust-case-ranking" target="_self">Emily's ranking of the antitrust lawsuits</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.protocol.com/are-tech-workers-playing-games-with-money" target="_self">Anna Kramer on the tech workers turned Robinhood day traders</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/robinhood-to-pay-65-million-to-settle-sec-probe-11608213680" target="_blank">"Robinhood financial to pay $65 million to settle SEC probe" — WSJ</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/massachusetts-regulators-to-file-complaint-against-robinhood-11608120003" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">"Massachusetts regulators file complaint against Robinhood" — WSJ</a></li>
</ul><div>
<strong>Subscribe to the show: <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/protocols-source-code/id1497440658" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/1mc6ODYq0nZ8hrVDuvQfeL?si=HDPznyjDSEqv5EvMZxhKxQ" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Spotify</a> | <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5zaW1wbGVjYXN0LmNvbS95OVNfTjJfaw==" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Google Podcasts</a> | <a href="https://pca.st/7ktyvlll" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Pocket Casts</a> | <a href="https://feeds.simplecast.com/y9S_N2_k" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">RSS</a></strong><strong></strong>
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David Pierce ( @pierce) is Protocol's editor at large. Prior to joining Protocol, he was a columnist at The Wall Street Journal, a senior writer with Wired, and deputy editor at The Verge. He owns all the phones.
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