Week of January 14, 2019

A few things of note from around the Internet this week:

Utopia

A truly heartbreaking story about who should be held accountable when a tragedy occurs.

The horror followed by sadness followed by horror followed by sadness flowed and overflowed and kept overflowing. There was no way to contain it, nor should it have been contained.

Fake

In a sense, we already live in the Matrix.

What’s gone from the internet, after all, isn’t “truth,” but trust: the sense that the people and things we encounter are what they represent themselves to be. Years of metrics-driven growth, lucrative manipulative systems, and unregulated platform marketplaces, have created an environment where it makes more sense to be fake online — to be disingenuous and cynical, to lie and cheat, to misrepresent and distort — than it does to be real.

Post-Artifact

Craig Mod updates his seminal work on the production, distribution, and consumption of books after seven years. It’s a must read.

Our Future Book is composed of email, tweets, YouTube videos, mailing lists, crowdfunding campaigns, PDF to .mobi converters, Amazon warehouses, and a surge of hyper-affordable offset printers in places like Hong Kong. For a “book” is just the endpoint of a latticework of complex infrastructure, made increasingly accessible. Even if the endpoint stays stubbornly the same—either as an unchanging Kindle edition or simple paperback—the universe that produces, breathes life into, and supports books is changing in positive, inclusive ways, year by year. The Future Book is here and continues to evolve. You’re holding it. It’s exciting. It’s boring. It’s more important than it has ever been.

Canada

The most interesting fact in this article is that Tilray is headquartered in Nanaimo, Vancouver Island, Canada; a place that I have been several times (long before they were cultivating cannabis there, though). The ascendance of these pot stock billionaires is concerning given the lack of criminal justice reform related to marijuana convictions and long prison sentences. However, it’s encouraging to hear that the issue is at the forefront of Brendan Kennedy’s mind.

If Kennedy were setting a line in Vegas, he likes to say, he would pick 2021 as the year the U.S. will legalize cannabis. If he’s wrong, and the U.S. doesn’t budge? Not the end of the world, he says; he expects medical legalization to double to 70 other countries by then. Sure, as an American business leader, he’d feel let down by his government: “They’ll basically be ensuring that the companies that dominate this industry in the next decade are all based outside the U.S.” For the CEO of a Canadian company, though, that’s not really a problem.

Short

Fahmi Quadir is trying to make a name for herself in a high stakes world dominated mostly by men. This article fills in a lot of details that Dirty Money left out.

If big institutions balk at her lack of experience, a select few relish the fire in the belly that often comes with youth. “I want them hungry. I want them eager,” says Donna Walker of Sire Management, a \$150 million fund-of-funds that was one of Safkhet’s first investors.If big institutions balk at her lack of experience, a select few relish the fire in the belly that often comes with youth. “I want them hungry. I want them eager,” says Donna Walker of Sire Management, a \$150 million fund-of-funds that was one of Safkhet’s first investors.

Fast

Before you click, imagine what it would be like to go 184 MPH on a bike. Now, click.