The question...
Why are people acting so weird?
Talking Points
- Islamic State-linked fighters killed five Israelis in separate attacks
- Nigeria was shocked after bandits raided a rural train
- Tunisia's illiberal President Kais Saied dismissed parliament again
- Sri Lanka's crisis worsened with storming of the president's home
- A flurry of execution notices in Singapore startled legal scholars
- The Met got ready to hand out fines in the 'Partygate' saga
- The UK was rocked by the extent of the NHS maternity care scandal
- Kentucky banned abortions post-15-weeks
- Meta and Apple handed over reams of sensitive data to hackers
- Bruce Willis bowed out of acting after an aphasia diagnosis
Dive deeper
How do you lose $625,000,000 on a blockchain browser game? This week we are going to Axie Infinity, and beyond the realms of common sense.
This is a (joy)stick-up
Imagine, if you will, a graph plotting the number of US$100 bills stolen in a caper, against the difficulty of making off with the proceeds. The US Bureau of Engraving and Printing informs us that each unadulterated bill weighs one gram. Pinching one crumpled up Benjamin from the church plate? Spiritually taxing but relatively easy. One million dollars in freshly printed $100 bills? You'll be struggling to look inconspicuous with 10 kilograms of currency inside a large briefcase and sweat pouring down your brow. A few hundred million? You are going to need heavy machinery to move those tonnes. Best of luck to you.
Like any number of labour-saving technologies, computers have made theft that much easier. But for a decade on either side of the new millenium online theft still remained the preserve of select white collar criminal types. Shonky market manipulation, insider trading, Nigerian investment scams, and the like. But over the last ten years, as the internet emulated and then swallowed the architecture of modern life, a new type of theft has burgeoned. Technically savvy but morally unmoored computer engineers, systems administrators, and 16-year-olds have spied a shortcut to digital riches. Call it the democratisation of computer-based crimes; a throwback to when just about anyone could commit wire-fraud for the hell of it.
Last week a bunch of hackers made off with $625,000,000 and there wasn't a forklift in sight. It is a sign of our times.
Neopets with added crime
Given inkl's chosen medium, there's a high probability that you are connected to the internet (although we do know of at least one occasion on which this column has been printed and shared). As such you are also likely to be familiar with browser games. They range from internet 1.0 favourites like RuneScape to garish, inexplicably-strobing games of online chess. Prior to this week, you'd have thought them mostly harmless .
In 2018, Trung Nguyen and Aleksander Larsen had a novel idea. They designed a game (under the developer Sky Mavis) that was part-character collector, and part-PvP battle; all splashed about with cartoon-colourful swatches. The characters in the game are floating technicolour puffer-fish called Axies — see above.
What makes Axie Infinity unique is that it is the most successful browser game to incorporate non-fungible tokens. Yes, your lurid, combative balloon is an NFT. Which means you are buying, trading, and upgrading it with cryptocurrency bought with real cash; the most expensive Axie sold for $820,000. The appeal is simple: the more you play, the more you can earn (a horrific example of the so-called 'network effects' at the heart of venture capital economics) . Last year Axie crossed $4bn in lifetime NFT sales. The blockchain on which Axie Infinity runs — most importantly for regulating the in-game currency , Shards — is called Ronin. But you can't just go out and buy Shards with your pocket-money. You first have to purchase Ethereum or USDC (a cryptocurrency pegged to the USD). Then you deposit these funds on Ronin via a piece of software called a bridge, and voila - you have Shards. The bridge gets you from one currency to another.
And whenever there's a threat of attack, bridges (including this one) need to be guarded. Each transfer to Ronin must be authenticated. But by whom? Mostly Axie Infinity and several third-party watchers. But as Axie Infinity ballooned in size they roped in the developer itself. Sky Mavis was "allowlisted" to validate transactions and help cope with Ronin's massive influx of transfers. You see where this is going, don't you? The guards hold the keys to the kingdom. And if one of them, Sky Mavis for example, had their digital key stolen, well, the thief could withdraw $625m of cryptocurrencies — no questions asked.
Cash back, no guarantee
Axie Infinity has told its distraught million-plus daily users that it remains "fully committed" to reimbursing them , though it remains unclear how it plans to stump up $600m. What is becoming clear though is that the users, a majority of whom live in developing nations, put a disproportionate amount of their savings into this newfangled technology. And unfortunately their non-fungible tokens have been well and truly funged. Perhaps Axie Infinity will get the Ethereum and USDC back. Perhaps the hackers will do as others have done and return all small-scale deposits while keeping the institutional crypto. Perhaps not. You might feel a distinct lack of sympathy for those who have lost by trusting something as tacky as a browser game, but are they truly less gullible than the millions plunged into debt by the con artists of yore?
Worldlywise
A blizzard of bad behaviour
This week Activision Blizzard, the gaming giant with a $62bn market cap, settled an $18m sexual harassment suit that has dogged the company. For years, there were rumours of repeated workplace safety issues. Now, the "frat boy culture" (read: culture of rampant discrimination) has been outed thanks to the bravery of those victimised by it. Public accusations of wrongdoing were rarely acted upon — a problem not uncommon in the overwhelmingly male-dominated industry. Despite a "zero tolerance" policy for unwelcome sexual advances and derogatory comments, last year it was revealed that the CEO Bobby Kotick had filed away roughly 700 employee complaints stretching back to 2016.
But the suit, brought by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, is only the tip of the iceberg for the beleaguered company. The California Department of Fair Employment and Housing, arguing that they had sued Activision Blizzard first, asked to delay the settlement approval for a higher number. They, along with shareholders and former employees, form a long list of aggrieved parties waiting for their day in court.
The main issue is that the $18 million settlement — to be disbursed from a fund — may only just scratch the surface of what is owed. The fund, which requires employees to opt-in and waive their rights to any further compensation in future related suits, has been slammed as “disappointing and premature”, “woefully inadequate”, and tellingly “a clear win for Activision”. And with its prospective new owner Microsoft promising not to interfere in a unionisation drive, the troubles seem far from over for the game producer.
As part of the settlement the company has officially denied all wrongdoing and has set up a three-year program of regular audits, changes to workplace policies and anti-harassment training. This looks to be a band-aid for a bullet wound. Microsoft’s $68.7bn acquisition of the company may signal major internal cultural changes at the company, but with another sexual harassment suit filed as recently as last week, the company – and victims – are looking at several more years of lawsuits. As a managing partner involved in the Microsoft purchase noted, whoever inherits the issue, be it Kotick, Microsoft, or an outside agency, “will have a lot of cleaning up to do” .
Old and new blood runs in the DRC
All too often the phrase "Congo unrest" appears in your newsfeed only to disappear in the slipstream of unindividuated content. Let's try and anchor some ideas for a moment. Lake Tanganyika may be the most recognisable on the eastern border of the Democratic Republic of Congo, but we'd like to draw your attention further north. The easternmost Ituri and North Kivu procines are arranged around a gentle crescent of lakes: Kivu, Edward, and Albert. The Congolese border bisects each body of water, and the space between them is lush, rich land of wooded hills and gentle valleys. It is also where the DRC touches Rwanda and Uganda.
The tri-border area should be familiar to all our readers. It has been criss-crossed by insurgents, colonists, armies, and genocidaires time and time again in the last century. Both sides in the Ugandan Bush War skirmished here. Paul Kigame's Rwandan Patriotic Front hopped the border into Uganda to train beyond the reach of the Hutu government at home. Robert Kajuga's ruthless Interahamwe chased blood-streaked Tutsis into the DRC in 1994, and were promptly chased back by Kigame's vengeful militia. The destabilisation from these conflicts helped tip the DRC into two of its own civil wars before the turn of the millennium. North Kivu and Ituri are as far from Kinshasa as you can be in the DRC — these are regions well beyond the effective control of the government, vigilantly aided by the United Nations but regularly swayed by neighbours .
On Tuesday, rebels downed a United Nations reconnaissance helicopter , killing eight on board. The name ' M23' might be new to you, but for the people in DRC it's an old and unwelcome returnee. The name refers to a Tutsi militia which was due to be integrated into the Congolese armed forces as part of the March 23 peace agreement of 2009. That integration never happened. And in 2012 disaffected elements of the rebel group seized the border city of Goma. But within months they gave up their prize and slunk back across the Rwandan border to relative safety. A decade on, they are back. This time they are fighting an organised assault across the entire tri-border region. North Kivu is again the scene of intense upheaval — 35,000 have been internally displaced and 11,000 have crossed into Uganda. M23 has new blood and old grievances, turning the wheel of violence once again.
The best of times
Persistence
The Sumatran rhino is on the verge of disappearing. There are fewer than 80 of them left in their stomping grounds of Sumatra and Borneo. As such, breeding programs are working overtime to nudge up the populations of these gentle creatures. One rhino, Rosa, has had eight miscarriages over the last 17 years of captivity in Indonesia's Way Kambas National Park. This week, after all that heartache, she gave birth to a rare and precious calf.
Justice for Pluto
One of the great travesties of modern science was stripping Pluto of its planethood in 2006. This week it was breathlessly shared that data from NASA's New Horizons 2015 flyby is certain: Pluto is not just an inert sphere of ice floating about in outer orbit. It has ice volcanoes . Who are we to spurn a dwarf planet with ice volcanoes and a rich interior life?
The worst of times
Don't ask, don't tell, don't say anything at all
Florida's "Parental Rights in Education" bill, which prohibits discussions about gender identity and sexual orientation in classrooms up until fourth grade, was signed into law this week. Opponents slammed it as the "Don't Say Gay or Trans" bill and a direct attack on the LGBT+ community. The resurgent Christian Right in the US has rallied around the perceived "gay agenda" in schools in recent years.
Insomnia is getting worse
An app won't fix it, neither will melatonin .
Weekend Reading
The image
Robot dog patrolling the streets of Pompeii. No quips to be made here. Image supplied by Forbes .
The quote
"Trump, either canny or technically-inept, or perhaps both, is known to avoid email, depriving prosecutors of potential evidence showing that he ordered valuations to be inflated with malign interest."
– Joshua Chaffin of the Financial Times on how Cy Vance's case against Trump collapsed. There's a lesson in here for younger generations: don't record yourself doing crimes.
The numbers
50 million strikers
- Indian unions were left downtrodden when a paltry 50,000,000 of their countryfolk walked off the job for a two-day strike this week. The organisers had expected four times that number to take part and call for higher wages, jobless support, and measures to tamp down inflation on essentials.
180,000,000 barrels of oil
- US President Joe Biden signed an order to release one million barrels of oil from federal stocks every day for six months. 180m will draw down the strategic reserve by just over a third. Given Americans use 23m barrels per day, it should go some small way to easing the price pressure.
The headline
"The Battle For Your Toilet Paper Is On" — Bloomberg .
The special mention
Of all the applicants, this week's special mention received a standing ovation from the judging panel. In the category of "Wingman of the Year" a clear winner was the big boss of the Russian Orthodox Church. This week the Patriarch Kirill ran some spiritual interference for Putin by hyping the "metaphysical significance" of the invasion to his flock. It's about as convincing from him as Pope Urban II ordering a crusade.
A few choice long-reads
- A compelling argument from The New York Times... We're all back at work. We probably shouldn't be.
- The Financial Times wants to know how to go to war with Russia (asking for a friend). The Finns might just have the answer.
- Is peace in space possible while war rages on Earth? Businessweek with a cracking story.
The answer...
Obtuse star signs? Boredom? Hunger? This article from The Atlantic has the answers.
