Welcome back to the Stove Top weekly newsletter. As usual, each edition has a few brief stories and finishes with a mix of interesting links, hot takes, and good reads.

Tech/Culture

The End Of End-To-End Encryption

Privacy is one of those things you don’t think about in the moment, but really notice when it’s gone. The best description of this phenomenon comes from Bruce Schneier:

It’s why 1984 is so fucking scary: if you’re always being watched, you can’t be yourself. And if you can’t be yourself, what are you even living for?

This is something that cypherpunks understood decades before anybody else. That privacy is the basis of basically every other Human right, and without it, we are all just hoping the Government boot doesn’t stomp on us.

A lot of the cypherpunk’s work centers around cryptography, aka encryption, aka making it so that messages can’t be read without a key, preserving their privacy. This is not a new thing; governments and militaries have been encrypting messages for centuries now. But, although they themselves use it, the powers to be hate encryption (and privacy more generally).

The reason is the same as why the government hates anything: it’s out of their control. Encrypted messages are secret, which means the government can’t read them, which means they can’t control their contents, which means they don’t like it.

For evidence, look no further than the EU’s push to ban end-to-end encryption. The proposed law would require tech companies to scan every private message for illegal material. Basically, everything you say is now monitored by Big Tech and the Government. What could go wrong?

Of course, the Governments pitch the idea as necessary to prevent child sex trafficking and other horrific acts, which is great. But, how about this, why don’t we work on building a society where that doesn’t happen? Or, think of ways to catch these scumbags without needing to violate the privacy of the 99.9% of people who are not criminals?

As Schneier put it, you change if you know you're being watched. The provocative and most productive discussions become a bit more muted. People start conforming to what they think will keep them out of trouble. Dissent against authority slowly becomes impossible.

It’s a dystopian scenario that can easily lead to devastating consequences. We shouldn’t give them a way to make it happen, even if they tell you that doing so will stop all crime.

Because it will also stop all free thought and free speech.

And no amount of hypothetical crime-stopping is worth that price.

Politics/Culture

I’m a big believer that the country would be better served by more immigration. It’s just demographics and numbers at this point1:

• There are 10 million open jobs but only 6 million unemployed people, and it’s going to get much worse once the Baby Boomers retire.

• You’re not going to fill those jobs with good-old natural US births, as the fertility rate is below replacement level.

• Beyond filling numbers, immigrants also are a main source of high-skilled labor, having produced a large percentage of the nation’s patents, Nobel Prizes in science, and unicorn startups.

Basically, we either recruit more immigrants, build AGI, reverse a generational trend toward having fewer kids, or suffer a slow decline into irrelevancy. The easiest option by far is to recruit more immigrants.

But the US just isn’t doing it. There haven’t been serious immigration reforms in decades, and nowhere is this better seen than the disaster that is H-1B Visas.

H-1B Visas are the hall passes that enable highly-skilled (translation: college-educated) foreign workers to work in the US for 3-6 years at a time. Because the US is the greatest country in the world to go to if you’re a smart and ambitious person, there is intense demand for these Visas. But, the country only hands 65,000 (plus 20,000 for those with Master’s degrees) each year in a lottery system. That means there are hundreds of thousands of highly skilled workers who want to be here that we are just kicking out because they weren’t chosen in a lottery.

It makes absolutely zero sense.

If we don’t get our shit together soon, then we will lose out to the other countries who realize that immigration is key to keeping the Ponzi going.

Culture

For the first 24 years of my life, I thought memes were really freaking stupid. That they were useless and beneath a “serious” writer like myself.

As usual, I was dead wrong. In my new estimation, memes are the greatest tool to grow your online audience2 that currently exists. Or, as my good friend Jason Levin says, “Memes make millions”.

What really opened my eyes to the potential of memes is this person named 0xgaut. They are the founder of a crypto company, but they never tweet about crypto. The dude just constantly shitposts, and now has 110,000 followers on Twitter, a bunch of which have definitely gone on to become customers at his startup.

Another great example is this dude Eric Zhu. I had a call with him the other day, and he’s extremely smart, funny, and obviously in-tuned with the internet (and only 15!). His shitposting has turned into a venture-backed startup and his own $20M fund. At 15!.

Or take Turner Novak. He’s not some Harvard grad who worked at a FAANG and then went into VC. He’s a dude who lives in Michigan, knows a lot about tech, and posts funny shit on the internet. Sounds simple, but he’s parlayed that into his own $30M fund and successful newsletter.

I could go on and on, but the point is this: memes really do make millions.

So, from this day forward, I am dedicating myself to become a memelord. The road will be long and arduous, but mark my words, I will get there.

Extras

• The Supreme Court sent the Clean Water Act to Valhalla. Idk, doesn’t sound great.

• PayPal discriminates against Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. To me, this is the best argument for CBDCs: it ends FinTech’s being able to decide who and when gets to partake in the financial system. Of course, it means the government then gets to decide. So, definitely a best-of-two-bad-options situation. Crypto fixes this by the way.

• All the Western homies hate China.

• If you want to win a high-school debate these days, you better agree with the Judges’ politics.

• FBI spies are now hanging out in internet chat rooms. Nowhere is safe anymore.

• AI is being used to autonomously fly F-16 fighter jets. This seems like a horrible idea.

• As you’d probably guess, data has a dark side. 

• The US banned Pegasus spyware, so they are just using Paragon Graphite instead. Aka Pegasus, but called Paragon Graphite. And, Paragon is working their damndest to stay in the US’s good graces.

• Employee surveillance should be illegal.

• The EU has a problem in that those that make tech decisions aren’t those actually involved in tech. This partly explains why the EU hasn’t invented anything of importance in God knows how long.

• In more EU news, they now claim they are independent from Russian energy. If true, that’s pretty bad news for old Vladdy.

• Wall Street is an insider game.

• Surprise surprise, there’s another popular app that’s been spying on you.

• Reflections on Ten Years Past Snowden is the best thing I read this week.

• Burn longevity to the ground.

• And while we’re at it, throw noncompete clauses in there too.

• WordPress is getting into the paid newsletter game way too late.

• AI is economically dystopian as fuck.

• Bank deposits are down-only.

• Forever chemicals are bad for you, and the chemical industry has been trying to cover it up. Just wait until the ills of the food industry fully come to light.

• AI luminaries say that AI is as existential a threat as a pandemic and nuclear war. Is that not crazy to anybody else?

• Nuggets in 5.

Until next time, ✌️

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