👁️ Tim Pool is a Russian Agent
Hello and welcome to your weekly Dark Markets news roundup. We’re a bit late this week because, frankly, I’ve been celebrating both Labor Day and the full reveal of my book deal. And oh boy, did the Gods gift me with a rich bounty in the intervening days.
In this edition: Russia’s Post-RT influence campaign; Watch: Lucio Fulci’s Conquest; is Nvidia’s crash the start of AI’s unwind?; Iggy Azealia vs. Eric Wall; NEAR Protocol fakes its own hack; Donald Trump’s Looney-Tunes DeFi Grift; Telegram founder Pavel Durov arrested in France.
Writing today’s headline feels just about as good as writing the phrase “Craig Wright did not invent Bitcoin” - because Tim and Craig are equally execrable human beings, and we now know that their entire existences are equally fake.
The DOJ has indicted two Russians who covertly funded and directed a media company called Tenet, which was founded by a former RT columnist. RT was pulled from almost all broadcast channels after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and Tenet became a cutout to continue RT’s propaganda work. The charges allege $10 million was funneled through the company since its 2022 founding.
Tenet’s lineup ranges from heinous to comical, including names like Lauren Southern (an outright white supremacist) and Benny Johnson, who mostly seems sad and desperate. Somewhere in the middle is Tim Pool, who made his bones by cynically exploiting and undermining the Occupy movement.
I specifically loathe Pool because of that contact with Occupy, which I was closely involved with in Florida, and which for all its faults was one of the most genuine and hopeful political moments of my lifetime. Not least, that’s because it was a genuine, non-astroturfed mass movement that actually crossed traditional political lines. To be as close to it as Tim was and take nothing at all positive from it implies a true hollowness of the soul … or a long-term monetary motive to sow division and despair.
While I’m not specifically aware of Pool going overtly fascist, his “antifa” screeds are certainly doing the far right’s work, and has said that “one of the greatest enemies of our nation right now is Ukraine.” When he says “our,” I’m assuming he’s talking about the U.S., but really who knows.
The indictment, significantly, neither charges nor names Pool or other recipients of Russian government incentives. In fact, it doesn’t even name the Russian-funded media company that funneled payment and direction to those media figures. Media reporters for both NPR and the Daily Beast confirm that the subject is Tenet Media, and the Tenet-linked influencers have issued statements in response, confirming their involvment but denying awareness of the source of funds.
(You’re still a foreign agent even if you’re an unwitting foreign agent.)
But Tenet’s founders, Lauren Chen and Liam Donovan, were allegedly aware of the Russian source of funds, and passed on content direction to Tenet’s stable of influencers. And the details here make the denials from Pool and others much harder to swallow: the influencers were getting paid $100,000 per YouTube video under the deal. At that price point, if you’re not asking some fairly tough questions, you’re simply stupid. Very profitably stupid.
As funny and revealing as this is, though, it shouldn’t distract us from the real issue: Most right-wing and neoliberal media content is just as astroturfed as RT propaganda, but it’s perfectly legal because it’s funded by domestic billionaires.
Watch: Lucio Fulci’s Conquest
An absolute fever dream of barbarians, crude magic, fog, and cheap monsters, this (from the legendary Italian director of “Zombie”) is a dirt-cheap Conan knockoff that, thanks to thegenuinely incredible mood and cinematography, feels like an art-house precursor to Bertrand Mandico’s “After Blue (Dirty Paradise).”
“Conquest” hasn’t been commercially available for a minute, and I had previously only seen it in grainy YouTube rips that accentuated its air of mystery. But now it’s available on Prime Video, and it’s actually even better in full definition.
Nvidia is Eating Shit
Nvidia has had a really tough week in the market, including losing nearly 10% on Tuesday - that amounts to the the most market cap a public stock has ever lost in one day. It seems quite likely that this is the first stumble in a much longer series of AI-related drawdowns, as companies like OpenAI face mounting legal action on copyright matters, and enterprise returns on AI use cases fail to materialize, as with Microsoft customers rejecting its new AI features.
Worth noting that I suggested taking Nvidia profits on July 9, the day before a near-ATH picotop of $134.91. Today Nvidia is trading at $107.
Iggy Azalia vs. Eric Wall
The funniest thing about this is that Australian Blackvoice Savant Iggy Azalia is spending any time on it at all, instead of like, making music. But she did launch a celebrity memecoin (MOTHER), which I’d say there’s a 70% chance winds her up an SEC defendant. But more to the point, my fellow crypto OG Eric Wall is set to debate Iggy on the question of whether these celebrity cash-ins are bad for crypto, which is a very funny sentence.
Eric, a goddamn hero, has previously debated such charlatans as Pulse’s Richard Heart … and two years later, Heart is now literally a fugitive from the law. Things with Iggy are already degenerating into name-calling, in classic WWE promo style, so this one should be good
Near Protocol’s Boneheaded Fake Hack
A third-string (though legitimate) blockchain called NEAR this week pretended its social media had been hacked, with the attacker posting weird anti-crypto messages. It turns out that it was all a marketing stunt, and NEAR is rightly getting roasted by crypto commentators.
First, because “crypto bad” reverse psychology anti-marketing is super cringe and basic. But more seriously, hacks are a genuinely widespread problem, withing crypto and more broadly. Joking about them for clout both trivializes the broader problem and - NEWS FLASH, DUMBASS - makes people trust you less because now you’re associated with hacking. Jesus christ people, do better.
Why AI will Never Make Art
Ted Chiang has a good new essay in the New Yorker about AI and art. The core of his argument is that art is about making choices, and LLMs, because they’re based entirely on an analysis of existing data, cannot make meaningful choices. Chiang also offers a very useful counterexample in the Dall-E based work of Bennett Miller, who churned through thousands of iterations and arguably “hacked” the image generator to produce work like the below.
I think there is very much an argument to be made that image generators can be used to make art, by artists. I particularly follow quite a few people who make interesting use of AI, such as Tim Molloy, who is notably also a very skilled traditional illustrator. Older image generators in particular have been very, very good at producing weird, off-putting monsters (which is why I for now am using an AI-generated header for this newsletter).
But LLMs are not going to magically shortcut a non-artist to “creating something.”
Donald Trump’s Looney-Tunes “DeFi” cash-in
Way the hell back in 2020, a low-rent influence grifter/coach named Tai Lopez bought Radio Shack, then used the brand to launch a series of really stupid crypto ventures, including a “Decentralized Finance” platform. None of that actually went anywhere (except the cash going straight in Lopez’s pocket), but credit where it’s due: Lopez was way ahead of his time.
Because now Donald Trump and his team are doing the same thing! World Liberty Financial is being touted as a DeFi service built using AAVE and Ethereum. But it is, like most things Trump associated, a craven cash grab against his followers, and a convenient channel for influence peddling.
Specifically, my incredible former colleagues at CoinDesk have detailed that the technical team behind World Liberty Finance previously ran a small-time protocol called DOUGH, which got hacked for $2 million. Presumably, as with Tim Pool, getting paid to do something fake is hard to turn down (or think too hard about) after you fail miserably at doing something real.
Even Nic Carter, perhaps the only public Trump supporter alive who I genuinely like and respect, sees the DeFi play as a serious risk to the Trump campaign.
Apropos of nothing, here’s the chart of Donald Trump Media ($DJT) over the past six months.
Telegram founder Pavel Durov Arrested in France
I have complicated thoughts about the arrest of Telegram founder Pavel Durov in France. The charges reportedly hinge on Durov’s supposed failure to moderate content on Telegram, including blocking communications involving crime and terrorism.
But the only reason this is a plausible charge is that Telegram is not a truly encrypted messaging service. Durov has done some genuinely heroic things, including standing up to Putin in the face of demands for Vkontakte data, a stance which ultimately forced Durov out of Russia. That he fled Putin’s grasp only to be locked up on France is definitely some kind of manifestation of Horseshoe Theory.
But the hard truth is that Telegram isn’t and never has been a real cypherpunk tool. If you can arrest the head of a company and force him to use a system’s back door more, it’s not secure. Period.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-coward-and-phony-tim-pool-became-one-of-the-biggest-political-youtubers-on-the-planet
I am amazed whenever someone goes so in depth about something or someone I had no idea existed. And I read it all. Impressed by the thuroughness and reporting diligence. And yet, at no point while reading it, am I convinced the entire effort is an acceptable use of my time. That I ever really needed to learn about the subject matter, at least in the context of my many responsibilities that also vie for my time. And it's so long, it takes multiple trips to the web page to finish. And as I get closer to the end, it has difficulty loading so as to bring me back to where I left off reading. But I did it. I read the entire thing. And should "Tim Pool" ever come up in conversation, I am definitely prepared.
I say this with total respect for a really well written article. But, man, was that long.
My comments, of course, are a great use of my writing time and anyone else's reading time.
As for NEAR being legit... Eh, I always come back to this graphic https://raw.githubusercontent.com/RektHQ/Assets/main/images/2021/09/sol-messari.png . The more "insiders" the pie, and the less "public sale," the less respect I have for it. Especially since the other pie pieces can be as illiquid as is convenient to insiders.
Later this substact references this total sh**coin: https://www.coindesk.com/business/2024/09/04/in-trump-backed-crypto-project-insiders-are-poised-for-unusually-big-paydays/ . And yet that sh**coins 30 percent public sale is /still/ more than what Celo, Solana, or Near got.