👁️ Are USAID Attacks Elon's Vengeance For the End of Apartheid?
Also - Donald Trump liquidated $10B in crypto longs; FTX biotech clawbacks, unlocked posts, and a Ziz podcast.
A Welcome and Unlocked Posts
It has been a stretch of incredible growth for the newsletter, thanks above all to massive viral uptake of DeepSeek and the AI Murder Cult, my rundown tracing the role of Yudkowskyite Rationalism in shaping both the Zizian splinter group and broader disinvestment in AI development. Since starting this project in earnest 16 months ago, I have treasured both the process of creating it and every scrap of growth, because it’s something that comes from me and me alone. So this surge - a staggering 25% subscriber growth over the last 30 days - is exhilerating.
For new subscribers, a brief note on what I do here: Every week you’ll get a free news post, and at least twice a month paying supporters get a more in-depth analytical post. For the next few weeks still, those paid posts will mostly be excerpts from my upcoming book on Sam Bankman-Fried and techno-utopianism, coming in October from Repeater Books. Click here for more detail about that project, and about Repeater.
If you’re new here, below are links to a few notable Dark Markets posts. As a welcome to all the new subscribers, and a thank you to those who have been reading for a while, I’ve unlocked a pair of key book excerpts, and also below is one more that was previously unlocked. As I often point out, these are drafts, and sometimes they’re drafty, in various ways.
What is TESCREALISM? Mapping the Cult of the Techno-Utopia
The Boy Who Wasn’t There: Why Sam Bankman-Fried Matters
Stolen FTX Money Supported Richard Hanania and Other Racist “Rationalists”
Books That Are Bad For Your Soul
The Computibility of the Universe is Political
(Newly Unlocked) The Kwisatz Haderach Who Failed: Why Sam Bankman-Fried Defrauded the World
(Newly Unlocked) Techno-Rationalism And the Denial of Death
(Unlocked) Sam Bankman-Fried and the Stanford Parent Experiment
Podcast - On Rationalism and Ziz
I was excited to be invited on The Farm podcast over the weekend to talk about Rationalism in the context of the Zizian-linked killings. It was recorded on somewhat short notice, and more has been reported about the group since, so we only touched on the basics of the events themselves. But the bulk of the discussion, right up front, focuses on rationalism itself and its underlying dynamics.
The Farm Podcast - Thiel, Yudkowsky, Rationalists & the Cult of Ziz w/ David Z. Morris & Recluse
Chaos is Coming
By way of thanks, readers should also check out Freddie DeBoer’s thoughts about Ziz, in which he links to my piece: I Told You, Chaos is Coming places the shootings in the context of a broader rise in violence. De Boer also offers a welcome caution against “nutpicking” - that is, in this case, taking a particularly wild outlier like the Zizians as indicative of the overall dynamics of Rationalism. I agree with the general principle, and would have been much more perspicacious about this whole thing if it weren’t for the many other disturbing threads - Leverage, the Vassarites, multiple suicides linked to CFAR, and the steady drumbeat of sexual misconduct allegations.
Thanks also to Wisdom of Crowds, which featured the piece and described me as a “muckraker” - which I take, and I think was intended, as the highest of compliments.
Did USAID’s Role in Ending Apartheid Motivate Elon Musk’s Attacks?
I present this merely as an interesting theory, twigged by software engineer Daniel Feldman. But it seems terrifyingly plausible. USAID, the frankly somewhat obscure agency that Elon Musk has made the target of his nerd wrath, played a key role in overthrowing the Apartheid regime in South Africa in the 1980s. We know that Elon has inherited many of the resentments (and predilections) of his bizarro father Errol, and that Musk’s maternal grandparents were avowed Nazis who moved to South Africa because they loved racism. Now Musk has specifically accused the current South African government of “anti-white racism.” Administration allies Peter Thiel and David Sacks are also white South African immigrants.
So, yes, it seems very plausible that Musk is leveraging his relationship to Trump to enact generational vengeance on the legacy of Nelson Mandela. Fun times we’re living in.
Purpose Life Sciences Returns $16m to FTX
Courtesy of the biomedical outlet Do Your Own Research: I haven’t yet looked closely at Latona Biosciences, one of the cutouts Sam Bankman-Fried created specifically as a channel to put commingled customer funds into biotech companies, and run by someone named Ross Rheingans-Yoo. One of those, Purpose Life Science, has been sued by the FTX estate as part of the recovery process, and recently settled for $16m. That’s only about 1/3rd of roughly $53.5m invested in PLS, which claims it has spent much of the funding and can’t raise more to fulfill the clawback. PLS is reportedly running a clinical trial in Brazil on treatments for Long COVID, which would put it in line with SBF’s extinction-risk concern about pandemics - though notably, PLS has almost no public profile.
Here is a complete rundown of the funds distributed by Latona, totalling $71.5 million. The rest of the recipients have reportedly already settled with the estate’s clawback efforts. We’ll see if I have time to dig into these more.
Trump Tarrif Bluster Wiped out $10B in Crypto Longs
Ben Zhou, CEO of the crypto exchange ByBit, estimates that between $8-10 billion in leveraged long crypto trades were liquidated Feb 1-3rd amidst market-wide terror over Donald Trump’s threatened trade war with, um, Canada and Mexico. If you’re of a certain mind, there’s some schadenfreude to be had in the thought that a lot of people who were bullish on what Trump would do for crypto, and voted for him for that really shortsighted and self-interested reason, were among the rekt. But the truth is they likely made up a tiny portion of the overal liqs, and a lot of non-Trumpy traders were among those wiped out over an empty threat that accomplished nothing except some border guards who had already been committed in December.
Air Force Redacts Entire AI Contract from FOIA
404 Media has come across an interesting black hole - after FOIAing information about a $100,000 Air Force payment to a generative AI firm Ask Sage, reportedly a firm that allows government workers to use generative AI models with more security and compliance than retail frontends. But when documents came back from the FOIA for what appears a superficially innocuous tool, they were entirely redacted - covered in blackout boxes from head to toe.
Coinbase Users Scammed Out of $300m
Coinbase is rightly lauded for being the rare crypto exchange that hasn’t been hit with a serious hack in a very long time. But an on-chain investigation by ZachXBT has found that around $300m has been taken from users by social engineering schemes. The exchange seems to have responded by locking down a lot more legitimate users’ accounts seemingly (from the user’s perspective) at random. So, no hacks, but maybe they could refine their anti-fraud detection algorithms.
ICO-Era Scammers Are Making a Comeback
A good post from Scamurai here on lingering threads from Centra Tech, and ICO con featured in a Netflix documentary.