MUTATION VECTORS

Status Update

Lots of stuff to share this week, so let’s just jump into it.

Democracy Desk

You’ll be seeing plenty of takes for the weeks to come. My main takeaway: You can’t buy an election. Sure money still matters. Talarico raised $155 million (not counting anything that might’ve come from PACs)! But it’s not the deciding factor, even when the ultrawealthy are pouring oceans of money into campaigns.

• The right spent $573.2 million supporting Paxton/opposing Talarico. $212 million of that came from Elon Musk.
• The right spent $183 million on anti-trans ads, and lost 107 of the 160 races with transgender implications tracked by Erin in the Morning.
• The cryptocurrency industry spent $250 million, $64 million of which was spent opposing Sherrod Brown, with very little to show for it.

There’s plenty of skepticism about how the Dems will rule. That’s fair. The Democratic Party has an infinite capacity to disappoint, and the new cohort will have a wide constituency with conflicting priorities. We don’t know what dirtry tricks the Trump administration might still be planning. But the American people saw what’s been going on for the past few years and said “no more.” That’s worth celebrating.

Democracy Desk, Part 2

This year we’ve also seen the end of Viktor Orbán’s premiership in Hungary, Serbia’s Aleksandar Vučić concede defeat, and Lula defeat Bolsonaro 2 in Brazil. It’s all nice to see, though I recommend reading Vincent Blevins on why one shouldn’t draw too many parallels between Brazil and Serbia (he doesn’t mention Hungary). There have also been right-wing, authoritarian gains elsewhere, including Europe. Much work to be done still.

Security Desk

In the last newsletter I wrote about how security issues and AI-driven exploitation could destroy the internet as we know it. But that’s just one facet of life that’s dependent on networked technology. Over the past week we’ve seen two cyber-physical attacks that should serve as wake-up calls:

• An attack attempted to destroy blood stocks by heating them to over 110ºC. Fortunately, it was reportedly detected before any actual damage was done.

• A previous attack on supermarket fridges swept Europe, leaving food spoiled.

Meanwhile, here’s the opening of 404 Media’s article on what the CEO of VPN and encrypted email service Proton has said to employees about AI and security recently:

Andy Yen, the CEO of Proton, had a message for an employee in the company’s security Slack channel who urged the company to at least take a few days to pentest newly written code before pushing it live. “That’s bullshit and loser thinking. Of course it’s possible to be fast and secure,” Yen wrote in the channel at the end of August. “Stop thinking always of how to be slower, and focus more on how to be faster.”

Yen’s solution was to prompt better.

Other Stuff

• Our podcast on Vamps by Elaine Lee and William Simpson is up.

• This lengthy interview with B. Everett Dutton, the creator of the FIST tabletop role playing game, is wonderful. I’ve written a couple of FIST adventures* but didn’t know anything about Dutton or the game’s origins before. It will only make sense to people pretty steeped in role playing theory, but I love this line: “The PbtA/OSR/trad setup is gonna be as outmoded as GNS theory soon.” There’s also talk of hypersigils.

• Joanne McNeil wrote about the legacy of Blade Runner.

• And the introduction to her most recent newsletter is worth reading.

• My adventures are: ZOW and Morning Star Retreat.

Logoff

Alright, that’s quite enough out of me!