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In early March, about fifty investors received links to an anonymously created, password-protected Web site. On the site was a seven-page white paper, which opened with the question “What Is BitClout?” BitClout, the paper explained, is a social network that runs on blockchain technology, allowing users to “speculate on people and posts with real money.” Every user is given a public price, which is the amount of money that it costs to buy his or her “creator coin.” With the platform’s native cryptocurrency (also called bitclout), users could buy the coin of any other user on the site. Purchasing a creator coin is a way to invest in someone’s reputation. According to the white paper, the coin is meant to be “correlated to that person’s standing in society.” If Elon Musk launches a rocket to Mars, his value should go up. If he uses a racial slur during a press conference, then, as the paper explained, “his coin price should theoretical
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This reporting was supported by the McGraw Center for Business Journalism at the City University of New York.
France Brunel, who is thirty-six, first considered freezing her eggs after ending a two-year relationship, in 2018. She’s not sure she wants children, especially if she remains single, and she knows egg-freezing does not guarantee her a baby. But she felt it was the best chance she had to preserve the option. “I don’t want to regret it at thirty-nine if I meet someone, and want kids at that time, to say, ‘Shit, I should have frozen my eggs,’ ” she told me.
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Not long after midnight on February 1st, a squad of Myanmar Army soldiers surrounded a housing complex in the nation’s capital, where elected leaders had gathered before parliament was to convene that morning. Another team was descending on the data centers of one of the largest telecommunications companies in the country. Inside, engineers were up late, upgrading the networks while there was minimal traffic. According to one senior engineer, the soldiers forced the team to turn off some equipment, and cut the wires to other systems. At another major telecommunications company, this one co-owned by the military, there was no need to slash cables; employees obeyed the shutdown orders, an engineer said. But, at both locations, the soldiers stood guard over the data centers with guns.
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In computer science, the main outlets for peer-reviewed research are not journals but conferences, where accepted papers are presented in the form of talks or posters. In June, 2019, at a large artificial-intelligence conference in Long Beach, California, called Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, I stopped to look at a poster for a project called Speech2Face. Using machine learning, researchers had developed an algorithm that generated images of faces from recordings of speech. A neat idea, I thought, but one with unimpressive results: at best, the faces matched the speakers’ sex, age, and ethnicity attributes that a casual listener might guess. That December, I saw a similar poster at another large A.I. conference, Neural Information Processing Systems (Neur