Share with:The Business Blockchain charts new territory in advancing our understanding of the blockchain by unpacking its elements like no other before. William Mougayar anticipates a future that consists of thousands, if not millions of blockchains that will enable not only frictionless value exchange, but also a new flow of value, redefining roles, relationships, power and governance. In this book, Mougayar makes two other strategic assertions. First, the blockchain has polymorphic characteristics; its application will result in a multiplicity of effects. Second, we shouldnt ask ourselves what problems the blockchain solves, because that gives us a narrow view on its potential. Rather, we should imagine new opportunities, and tackle even more ambitious problems that cross organizational, regulatory and mental boundaries.Drawing on 34 years of technology industry experience as an executive, analyst, consultant, entrepreneur, startup mentor, author, blogger, educator, thought leader and investor, William Mougayar describes a future that is influenced by fundamental shifts brought by blockchain technology as the catalyst for change. William Mougayar has been described as the most sophisticated blockchain business thinker. He is a blockchain industry insider whose work has already shaped and influenced the understanding of blockchain for people around the world, via his generous blogging and rigorous research insights. He is a direct participant in the crypto-technology market, working alongside startups, entrepreneurs, pioneers, leaders, innovators, creators, enterprise executives and practitioners; in addition to being an investor, advisor, and board member in some of the leading organizations in this space, such as the Ethereum Foundation, OpenBazaar and Coin Center.Founder of industry publicationBlockchain News, partner at ICO services collectiveCryptoAsset Design Group(helped raise over $200m+), director of education companyBlockchain Partners(Oracle Partner) and ICO event organiser at leading industry event CryptoFinancing(first ICO event in Europe) -RichardKasteleinis an award-winning publisher, innovation executive and entrepreneur. He sits on the advisory boards of half a dozen Blockchain startups and haswritten over 1200 articles on Blockchain technology and startups at Blockchain News and has also published pioneering articles on ICOs inHarvard Business ReviewandVenturebeat. Kasteleinhas spoken (keynotes & panels) on Blockchain technology in Amsterdam, Antwerp, Barcelona, Beijing, Brussels, Bucharest, Dubai, Eindhoven, Gdansk, Groningen, the Hague, Helsinki, London, Manchester, Minsk, Nairobi, Nanchang, San Mateo, Shanghai,Tel Aviv and Venice. His network is global and extensive. He is a Canadian (Dutch/Irish/English/Mtis) whose writing career has ranged from the Canadian Native Press (Arctic) to the Caribbean & Europe. He's written occasionally for Harvard Business Review, Wired, Venturebeat, The Guardian and Virgin.com and his work and ideas have been translated into Dutch, Greek, Polish, German and French. A journalist by trade, an entrepreneur and adventurer at heart,Kastelein's professional career has ranged from political publishing to TV technology, boatbuilding to judging startups, skippering yachts to marketing and more as he's travelled for nearly 30 years as a Canadian expatriate living around the world. In his 20s, he sailed around the world on small yachts and wrote a series of travel articles called, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Seas' travelling by hitching rides on yachts (1989) in major travel and yachting publications. He currently lives in Groningen, Netherlands where he's raising three teenage daughters with his wife and sailing partner, Wieke Beenen.Unchained: Big Ideas From The Worlds Of Blockchain And Fintech Virtue Poker is a peer-to-peer online poker platform that enables the self-custody of player funds and aims to eliminate security and game integrity issues inherent to existing poker sites by using Ethereum smart contracts. The post Virtue Poker []Lendingblock is a cross-blockchain lending and borrowing platform for cryptoassets. The post Lendingblock token sale (ICO): A platform for Cryptoasset based lending appeared first on Smith + Crown. []Traceto.io is a decentralised Know Your Customer (KYC) service provider incorporating third-party identity verification providers, community feedback, machine learning and smart contract technologies to establish continuous compliance with []FIC Network is an institutionally-focused blockchain-based platform that will enable users to list, buy, and sell any type of crypto- or fiat-denominated fixed income financial instrument. The post FIC Network (ICO): Fixed Income on the Blockchain []Auctus is a retirement savings platform that allows users to manage portfolios of bonds, stocks and cryptoassets via a single portal. The post Auctus Token Sale (ICO): Retirement Planning on the Blockchain appeared first on Smith + Crown. []

At the end of December 2019, Cocos-BCX released the MainNet Ecosystem Buidlers & Angels incentive plan 1.0, which was correspondingly optimized the TestNet plan in terms of selection rules, income and cycles. At the same time, we launched an intention survey. Cocos-BCX continued to improve the incentive mechanism of the COCOS ecosystem Buidlers & Angels incentive plan to ensure that the contributions and rewards of the ecosystem Buidlers & Angels are equal. Cocos-BCX has optimized [MainNet Stage] COCOS ecosystem Buidlers & Angels incentive plan 1.0, increased the total amount of rewards and optimized some rules. Therefore, the was released. On March 26, Cocos-BCX announces the first batch of MainNet Ecosystem Buidlers & Angels and formally implements incentive plan to promote the healthy development of Cocos-BCX ecosystem. 01 Qualified Selected InstitutionsAccording to the Cocos-BCX MainNet Ecosystem Buidlers & Angels incentive plan 2.0, as long as the Buidlers & Angels are successfully selected in the TestNet stage and meet the requirement of open positions which is not less than 3 million COCOS, they can apply for the first phrase of COCOS MainNet Ecosystem Buidlers & Angels before March 25, 2020. Therefore, the following eligible individuals/institutions were successfully selected as the first phrase of COCOS MainNet Ecosystem Buidlers & Angels. 2. White Matrix, 3. CocosABC (named Pure Wallet during the TestNet stage), 4. COCOS Terminal, 5. Cobo Wallet, 6. Bitpie Wallet, 7. SlowMist Zone. 8. TOKEN PLANETS, 9. Chainplay, 10. DappOS, 11. boom.game (named as Crypto Tanks during the TestNet)， 12. CardMaker. 13. IMCOCOS, 14. Cocos Block, 15. Gyro Finance, 16. HICOCOS, 17. CocosX, 18. DAppChaser, 19. BitFlower COCOS, 20. FansCOCOS, 21. GBAC, 22. BitMoreFUN, 23. HelloPool, 24. COCOS Weibo Influencer Coalition, 25. Asia Blockchain Accelerator. 26. SP Expansion Machine ( Spain ), 27. Cryptoblarabi ( Arab ), 28. COCOS Angel Community, 29. AiWen Community, 30. SSSnodes Super Nodes (named Cocos-BCX UN during the TestNet), 31. PANDA Community, 32. TokenHODL, 33. Hongmeng Capital Community, 34. Interstellar Community. 02 Added InstitutionsBesides, Cocos-BCX welcomes individuals/organizations to participate in our ecological construction to contribute to the development of blockchain games. Therefore, the organization who has not been selected as a COCOS Ecosystem Buidler or Angel during the TestNet phase, can re-filled the application. After being selected, the Cocos-BCX Foundation will verify their open positions and qualified individuals/organizations can become the MainNet Ecosystem Buidlers & Angels. After intention survey and Cocos-BCX Foundation review, Small Target Communities, DAPPX, COOC-BCX Sri Lanka and Coin-net.com were all successfully selected as COCOS MainNet Ecosystem Buidlers & Angels. In summary, a total of 38 COCOS MainNet Ecosystem Buidlers & Angels were successfully selected. Starting from the announcement of the COCOS First Batch of MainNet Ecosystem Buidlers & Angels List, the incentive plan will be officially launched. Everyone is welcome to build the healthy development of Cocos-BCX from the four aspects of tools, games, contents and communities. 03 Special Cases OptimizationCombining the TestNet Ecosystem Buidlers & Angels incentive mechanism and feedback from communities, the Cocos-BCX Foundation added the token pledge and locking mechanism in the. The Cocos-BCX Foundation decided to allow some particular Ecosystem Buidlers & Angels with significant contribution capabilities without 3 million COCOS pledge, and the Cocos-BCX foundation help mortgage after careful discussion and consideration with many parties. However, 0.5% interest on the mortgage amount should be paid to the Cocos-BCX Foundation each month. And the rewards during the contribution period must be put into the pledge account until it reaches 3 million COCOS. In addition, the COCOS MainNet Ecosystem Buidlers & Angels incentive plan will be effective for a long time, and everyone is welcome to participate. The Cocos-BCX Foundation will issue a review announcement on the 15th and 28th of each month. For any questions during the application, please join and ask admins for assistance. We will help you resolve the problems as soon as we can. DappReview is the world’s leading Dapp ecological platform subordinated to Binance. Currently, it has collected 13 main chains with a total of more than 3900 Dapps, providing accurate Dapp data, user insights and market analysis. Committed to discovering more interesting Dapps, it helps developers better promote Dapps, and tries to help blockchains land in large-scale applications. It is a technology research and development company that focuses on the core technology of the blockchain. Its ChainIDE and MoveCastle are the world’s largest blockchain developer traffic inlet. It has provided more than 600,000 smart contracts compilation to developers in more than 100 countries. CocosABC is a startup team from Tencent. At present, they have ten members, all of whom have extensive experience in the blockchain development industry. At present, MAU of their product PureWallet is 10,000, and its users are mainly distributed in China, the United States and countries in Southeast Asian. Their team members are good at the development of blockchain solutions and peripheral tools. They are composed of CocoaChina community contributors, blockchain senior developers, blockchain technology investors, algorithm engineers, big data analysis and B / S architecture application developers. They are currently developing and operating Cocos-Terminal for Cocos-BCX. Cobo Wallet is committed to building a one-stop digital asset storage and management platform. Through technological innovation to optimize the product experience, Cobo provides users with safe and reliable storage and payment environment and uses wallets to create application scenarios such as Staking and DApp portals. Bitpie.com, headquartered in Hong Kong, is one of the world’s earliest teams engaged in the field of blockchain wallets and has created a number of wallet products such as Bitpie Wallet, ETH wallet, and BitShield hardware wallet. Bitpie Wallet has securely served 5 million users worldwide in the past six years and is the largest blockchain wallet in the Asia-Pacific region. Xiamen SlowMist Technology Co., Ltd., which focuses on the ecological security of the blockchain, is headquartered in Xiamen. It was created by a team with more than a decade of front-line cybersecurity offensive and defensive actual combat team members, who have created security projects with world-class influence. Token Planet is the first game on the EOS MainNet and has been on the DAU top charts for six months. The team members all have more than ten years of game development experience and blockchain industry experience. Chainplay is a team dedicated to the development of blockchain games. It is committed to using blockchain to empower games and create a more interesting game experience than ever. Team members have more than 10 years of traditional game development experience, and experience in R & D and operation of various DApps. Among them, the “Crypto Knights” game has won multiple 2019 best blockchain game awards, and the Cocos-BCX public chain version is now available. DappBirds, a subsidiary of DappOS, is the world’s leading DApp ecological service platform. It integrates DApp data analysis, design, chain reform, distribution, operation, cross-chain, and transaction all in one. At present, DappBirds has connected more than 14 public chains, including nearly 4,000 DApps, chain reforms and issued dozens of blockchain games. It is currently the only platform in the industry that has independently developed access to wallet services and can be directly downloaded in the global AppStore. boom.game is a chain game development team with four members. It launched “Crypto Tanks” in 2019, and launched ‘EOS Farm’, ‘Game of Thrones’, ‘Solitaire’ and other blockchain game in 2018. Crypto Tanks is now available on Cocos-BCX chain. CardMaker develops games with the Cocos engine and lasted more than one year. It is currently one of the longest-running blockchain games in the world. It has been running on three public chains for a long time, with cross-chain trading, PVP, other exciting designs, and experience carrying out globally. Besides, their products are continually improving. Also, they have signed for the game circle release, which is preparing for the final opening of the game circle. The peak DUA is 4000 plus. They have won the NEO Developer Contest Double Crown, as well as many awards from Chain Tea House and Sina. They have vibrant experience in the operation and development of the currency blockchain projects and also have dozens of ranking, communities and media resources. Members have participated in the development of well-known Chinese public chains, Japanese legal digital exchange, participated in the EOS project code contribution, and they are familiar with blockchain technology. Cocos Block is a community focus on the production of Cocos-BCX content. It gathers dozens of blockchain professional authors, including not only high-quality authors of content platforms such as Bihu, Cailu, Lichang, etc., such as editor-in-chief of Shirley Finance — Su Banyue, the founder of the Bihu Jinwang Award, SuperMario, and senior blockchain game player, Bird God. Gyro Finance is a mainstream blockchain media platform that positions in the blockchain industry as new finance and new digital entertainment. HICOCOS team members all have project development experience from zero to one. They are composed of senior web engineers, full-stack engineers, blockchain media operations, and wallet development engineers. The Cocos-BCX Q & A community has been set up to gather all kind of questions about Cocos-BCX. DAPPX is positioned as a blockchain application of public recommendation community, and it also supports blind box transactions. Users can share and recommend their favourite blockchain applications and information in DAPPX. CocosX is positioned as the first marketing team focused on providing multimedia visual communication for Cocos-BCX, spreading Cocos-BCX brand through the funniest and most abundant pictures and videos. DAppChaser was established in January 2018. It is committed to tracking global blockchain innovations, focusing on DApp professional evaluation and development progress, and contributing hundreds of blockchain popular science articles. They have the first active crypto social media in China that focuses on worldwide news, KOL opinions and market analysis of the blockchain. It consists of six Tencent employees, all of whom are blockchain enthusiasts. They have rich experience in blockchain technology and have participated in EOS code contributions. They have shared several technical documents on blockchain within Tencent and has created specific blockchain original contents. It is a team of more than 20 famous authors on blockchain content platforms such as Bihu, Lichang, Jianshu, etc., with diverse content styles and users in different attribute circles. HelloPool originates from the HelloBTS community established in 2014. It has in-depth research and practice on the DPoS consensus algorithm. It is the earliest DPoS & PoS node team based on the graphene underlying public chain in China and has accumulated prosperous operation and maintenance experience and broad blockchain community influences. It is a blockchain technology company that cultivated by the Tsinghua Yangtze River Delta Research Institute. It is a Weibo KOL alliance. The team members are all Weibo KOL with the number of fans exceeding 300,000, and the team has more than one million followers. The leader of the COCOS Weibo Influencer Coalition is “Blockchain William”, an in-depth Weibo marketer and the original content creator. GBAC (Graphene Blockchain Application Center) is a non-profit organization co-sponsored by the core members of the graphene blockchain ecosystem worldwide having technology communities, blockchain R & D companies, investment institutions, media, exchanges, and network security team resources covering millions of blockchain users worldwide. Taiwan’s first accelerator with the blockchain as the central axis, ‘ABA’, covers the service clients include the Taiwan blockchain industry and foreign companies who want to land in Taiwan. They offer a series of services like blockchain industrialization counseling, global marketing resource assistance, professional financial and tax law support, comprehensive online and offline services such as business resource docking, etc. Besides, ABA (Asia Blockchain Accelerator) assembled ACE fiat currency-digital currency exchange (ACE Exchange), ABM (Asia Blockchain Media), Einstein Dream Family Fund resources. They aim to create Taiwan’s most complete blockchain ecosystem, ACE Blockchain Ecosystem (ABE), and help Taiwan to be the №1 blockchains center among Asian. They have rich experience and is good at various services such as content output, translation, and community operation in Spain. At present, the Cocos-BCX project progress has been updated on Spanish Medium, and the Spanish version of the Cocos-BCX white paper has been translated. Cryptoblarabi is committed to spreading and promoting cryptography and blockchain knowledge to the Arab and has attracted widespread attention from the Arab blockchain industry with its rich and timely content information and accurate market positioning. It is an organization composed of Sri Lankan blockchain developers and Cocos-BCX investors. The team includes professional book writers and traders in the blockchain field. It is a turkey community that has been rapidly digitizing since the day it started its broadcasting life, has been aiming to share the latest development of the blockchain technology and the latest news, articles and the development of the market with its readers targeted. AiWen community is a high-quality KOL community. The team members have experience in the blockchain industry and have attribute members, including media, project parties, exchanges, KOL, etc. The community is highly cohesive and their impression is up to 100,000. COCOS Angel is a pioneer who has accompanied the community along the way. Based on the Cocos-BCX ecosystem, it strives to explore and make the blockchain world a more exciting adventurer. The original intention is to achieve true distributed collaboration. Through the use of individual flexible advantages and resources, they will ultimately maximize the benefits and potential of nodes. SSSnodes is a Staking ecological node company bases on Shenzhen and Hong Kong. It is committed to building high-quality and stable project nodes. The company has full-cycle node operating experience of several well-known public chains. They have many advantages like the specific person in charge, zero faults, zero penalties, low node fees, high profit. Also, they are establishing investment and incubation channels for potential projects to build community ecology. TokenHODL is a professional service provider in the blockchain field and a well-known Blockchain branded community in China. TokenHODL aims to incubate high-quality blockchain projects, assist in the construction of blockchain ecological landings, dock head resources of investment banks, and provide professional data analysis for users. The scope of business involves projects and capital, airdrops, quantification, meetings, etc. PANDA blockchain community core members consist of 12 blockchain enthusiast, including senior editors, technical experts, top investors, designers, fund managers, etc. At present, the PANDA community has a complete blockchain service product system, including a 10,000 members community, the blockchain education mini-program, and market information. We media author Lin Yu launched the small target community in 2017 which has gathered a group of members with the same interests and has been active in the field of finance and blockchain. They are committed to jointly creating a valuable, fun, trustworthy, non-evil communication space. The Hongmeng Capital Community was established in the bear market in 2018. The team counterstrikes in the bear market and became a huge community organization in the Chinese area. Currently has 30,000 members and 50 management teams. In 2018 and 2019, they successfully cooperated with 45 blockchain projects. This is a team specializing in node investment and community construction for high-quality projects. Follow Cocos-BCX at: | | | | | | | Written by

Clinton began his second term as President of the United States. Titanic dominated the box office. Hanson’s “MMMBop” stormed music charts. The year, 1997, also turned out to be when two cranks, fringe thinkers, wrote The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age (TSI), published by Simon & Schuster. Catastrophic impresarios James Dale Davidson and Lord William Rees-Mogg wrote a curiosity: a history book focused upon the coming future. Humanity, they urged, was involved in a great transition. Audacious, weird, and at times just plain creepy, the duo managed to hammer out what amounts to cryptocurrency in eerie exactness to its real-life form, bitcoin, a full ten years before anyone, including Satoshi Nakamoto. Also read: New Wallet from Opendime, the Coinkite Coldcard, is Cypherpunk Cool “Now the advent of the Information Age implies another revolution in the character of money,” a subsection at almost the exact middle of TSI, written in the late 1990s, starts. “As cybercommerce begins, it will lead inevitably to cybermoney. This new form of money will reset the odds, reducing the capacity of the world’s nationstates to determine who becomes a Sovereign Individual. A crucial part of this change will come about because of the effect of information technology in liberating the holders of wealth from expropriation through inflation,” they write. Lord William Rees-Mogg died in 2013 at the age of 84. He was a man of letters, having spent a notable stint as editor at the venerable Times of London, the youngest to have ever held the job. He was known throughout his life for adhering to the pinstripe suit long after everyone else had gone casual. He wrote by hand, even with the ubiquity of computers and word processors. He even refused to drive a car. His editorials were filled with gems. When polite British society, of which he was surely a member, tutted at 60s boy band The Rolling Stones for their drug usage, and cheered their potential caging, his Lordship castigated, “If we are going to make any case a symbol of the conflict between the sound traditional values of Britain and the new hedonism, then we must be sure that the sound traditional values include those of tolerance and equity,” he wrote, defending the then-lads. The title of that defense bears reprinting, “Who Breaks a Butterfly on a Wheel?” He also wrote a great deal about economics, and was a fan of the gold standard. He was around 67 years old when he and his co-author, Mr. Davidson, continued in TSI during the late 1990s, “Soon, you will pay for almost any transaction over the Net or World Wide Web at the same time you place it, using cybercash. This new digital form of money is destined to play a pivotal role in cybercommerce. It will consist of encrypted sequences of multi-hundred-digit prime numbers. Unique, anonymous, and verifiable, this money will accommodate the largest transactions. It will also be divisible into the tiniest fraction of value. It will be tradable at a keystroke in a multi-trillion-dollar wholesale market without borders,” they predict.  James Dale Davidson, an American and a much younger man, is renown for making predictions, not all of which came about. He’s famously a Bill Clinton hater, but Mr. Davidson is best known for making the consistent prediction of the US economy being just this close to disaster. In 2008, of course, he was right. He’s a founder of the National Taxpayers Union, and is a frequent contributor to Newsmax. Mr. Davidson met Lord Rees-Mogg while at Oxford nearly forty years ago. A chance encounter over antiquarian book searches ended up in a friendship and a working relationship lasting decades. It first evolved into newsletters, which then became books such as Blood in the Streets, The Great Reckoning, and, of course, The Sovereign Individual, the subject to which we return. “Inevitably, this new cybermoney will be denationalized. When Sovereign Individuals can deal across borders in a realm with no physical reality, they will no longer need to tolerate the long-rehearsed practice of governments degrading the value of their money through inflation. Why should they? Control over money will migrate from the halls of power to the global marketplace,” the claim, again twenty years ago. The Sovereign Individual is an argument, and a great deal of it presupposes an inchoate sense of American libertarianism upon the rest of the world. That’s problematic for a host of reasons, not least of which is, well, most of the world worships governance at various forms of state levels. Talk is incessant about what government should be doing, not how less of it should exist, and this has been a trend for as long as anyone can remember. That aside, Mr. Davidson and Lord Rees-Mogg believe a kind of 21st century clash of Western Civilization to be coming. Governments are inherently parasitical, taking from the productive classes and redistributing based upon favored groups. Governments are able to be this perverse middle-person, picking winners and losers, because of the power of its purse. A kind of borderless, untethered digital currency would be, if popularly adopted, its sure demise. The Atlas shrugging, if you will, of the world will begin as more of the productive sectors take their lives online, the book insists, and away from landed government. All of human life will radically change under the rubric of encrypted technologies. Free from governmentalism, state nannies, and minders, the productive will be free to streamline goods and services and labor in ways previously not considered. Even government’s main reason for existence, the monopoly on violence, will be virtually done away with as a result. Mr. Davidson and Lord Rees-Mogg make no bones about what might happen in the wake of government services, the welfare and warfare states, being diminished. It will not be pretty. At least the engine of society, its movers and shakers, the natural aristocracy, will be able to start civilization anew, going where they’re appreciated rather than being chained to ethnic or political country-persons. Freeing money means freeing people. They explain, “Each transaction will involve the transfer of encrypted multi-hundred-digit prime number sequences. Unlike the paper-money receipts issued by governments during the gold-standard era, which could be duplicated at will, the new digital gold standard or its barter equivalents will be almost impossible to counterfeit for the fundamental mathematical reason that it is all but impossible to unravel the product of multi-hundred-digit prime numbers. All receipts will be verifiably unique,” which is so exactly spot-on it can take a reader’s breath.  “The verifiability of the digital receipts rules out this classic expedient for expropriating wealth through inflation. The new digital money of the Information Age will return control over the medium of exchange to the owners of wealth, who wish to preserve it, rather than to nation-states that wish to spirit it away.” “Use of this new cybermoney will substantially free you from the power of the state,” becomes their almost anarchic thesis, though they do allow for government in pockets. Bitcoin doesn’t require all of the above to work. It works on several levels, as governments could just as easily adopt a version and restrict pathways and physical transacting in any number of procedures. I do not believe it will snuff out fiat currency nor bring down governments. So on that score, I disagree with TSI, though I root for much of its conclusions. Governments are unnecessary as they are evil, and they exist solely on their ability to bully and cajole. Try leaving. Try not paying taxes. Try to live just a tad outside of its vast laws. You’ll find quaint notions like consent of the governed to be grave myths right up there with Santa Claus. Bitcoin can a be a way to escape some of government’s machinations, for sure. However, governments are proficient in exactly two areas: expropriation and killing. The latter enforces the former. That a great many, perhaps the vast majority, of humans believe their very lives are the result of government policies also does not bode well for predicting its demise. Whatever the case, TSI borders on the brilliant, and as a thought experiment is well worth your time. Do you think they predicted bitcoin? Let us know in the comments section below. Need to know the price of bitcoin? Check this chart. Disclaimer: This is an Op-ed article. The opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own. Bitcoin.com does not endorse nor support views, opinions or conclusions drawn in this post. Bitcoin.com is not responsible for or liable for any content, accuracy or quality within the Op-ed article. Readers should do their own due diligence before taking any actions related to the content. Bitcoin.com is not responsible, directly or indirectly, for any damage or loss caused or alleged to be caused by or in connection with the use of or reliance on any information in this Op-ed article. https://t.co/MEllI7R6jt #bch pic.twitter.com/5W0utZBfYP This week the Bitcoin ABC developers officially announced the much anticipated Bitcoin Cash network hard fork on May 15… read more. https://t.co/vRHIpxTpKd #bitcoinjobs #jobhunt #cryptojobs pic.twitter.com/4gs4muoiiP News.Bitcoin.com is Hiring Editorial Staff – In Tokyo, Stockholm and Your Town. Are you an experienced news editor or a news reporter with a nose for crypto? We are on a roll – increasing our readership every day – serving millions of readers each month… read more. Introducing the Simple to Use and Robust https://t.co/UtJJm8netW Wallet https://t.co/w5xA4uDpU9 #bitcoinwallet pic.twitter.com/hB4KCBzqjL Download the Bitcoin.com Wallet right to your device for easy and secure access to your bitcoins. Perfect for beginners, the Bitcoin.com Wallet makes using and holding bitcoins easy. No logins required. Facebook has recently made some changes to show you less news and more family-oriented pics and videos – even though you’ve previously subscribed. Here’s how to make Facebook show you our content again; Facebook has recently made some changes to show you less news. Here’s how to make Facebook show you our content again; a. Visit our Facebook Page https://t.co/d5QIuhCFPt b. Click the “Follow” button under our cover image. c. Select the “See first” option. pic.twitter.com/tFmrF73WQ7 — Bitcoin News (@BTCTN) February 19, 2018 1. Visit the Bitcoin.com Facebook Page. 2. Click the “Follow” button under our cover image. 3. Select the “See first” option. Get the latest price charts, statistics and our news feed on your site. Check out our widget services. We also deliver bite-sized news to your favourite messaging app; join our Telegram channel.

Ajit Tripathi is a partner at ConsenSys, where he specializes in global financial services business development, corporate venturing and strategy.The following is an exclusive contribution to CoinDesk’s 2018 Year in Review. One year ago, I wrote an article for CoinDesk in which I humbly argued that the price of ether didn’t matter and what everyone in the blockchain community should focus on is building useful applications instead.A few short months later, CryptoKitties were chased away by the bears, the initial coin offering (ICO) boom was gone, and the euphoria of $1,000 ether and $20,000 bitcoin had been replaced by the dire prognostications that crypto was “ded.”Below I review what I regard as the major developments of 2018, and what lies ahead in 2019. And at the risk of being accused of double-spending, I’m going to quote freely from my earlier article, since many of the points I made have been vindicated or bear repeating.Until June 2018, enticing crypto engineers to work on any enterprise product was hard, very hard. The lure of tokens ran rampant.Most people in my dot-com generation learned the hard way that showing up at 8 a.m. and burning brain fuel until 10 p.m. is kinda the only way. But what 24-year-old who can write a grammatically correct sentence with “token” and “moon” in the same breath wants to do that?When the dot-com microcaps were booming, I didn’t either. What exactly are these cash flows… duh! But, as I wrote a year ago:“One day everyone in crypto will have to generate fiat revenues and profits in some form.”When most of the tokens later crashed spectacularly, moon and lambo swiftly retreated from the social discourse and boring middle class concepts like enterprise technology, real human users and a fiat salary re-entered human conversation.I quote myself, yet again: “Dealing with other people’s money is always going to be regulated”.In 2018, when folks in crypto weren’t talking about the tanking prices, we were talking about regulation or hoping it’d go away. Well, it didn’t.In February, Chairman Christopher Giancarlo of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission advocated a “do no harm” approach to crypto regulation, referring to the erstwhile U.S. approach to the internet.The clearest and most concise guidance from a regulator came in February from the Swiss, who, to their credit, have been forward-looking in their acknowledgment of the potential of blockchain technology so far. The Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority, or FINMA, clearly laid out the various types of tokens and what makes a token a payment token or a utility token or a security.Both sides of the securities law debate were woken up by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) director of corporate finance, William Hinman, when he stated in June that to his understanding, “the ethereum network and its decentralized structure, current offers and sales of ether are not securities transactions.”We the British, maintained our classical studious approach, studying and further studying the space and to our credit, doing no damage, either in support or opposition of the crypto space while calling for good behavior and manners… yes, manners all this time.On the policy front, the European Commission led the way with a systematic approach to engaging with the blockchain community through the EU Blockchain Observatory.That said, the news flow in 2018 was dominated not by hardworking engineers building great technology but by traders and bankers mooning and REKTing things, as they do best.“I suspect that each year, half of the ICO-funded startups from the previous year will die – if they even make it that long.”“86% are now below their listing price; 30% have lost substantially all value. An investor purchasing a portfolio of The Class of 2017 ICOs on 1 January 2018 would most likely have lost 66% of their investment. Of the ICO start-ups we looked at from The Class of 2017, only 29% (25) have working products or prototypes, up by just 13% from the end of last year.”So many many folks mused that since ICOs were doing so badly and since most ICOs were launched on ethereum, ethereum must also be “ded.” Well, the price chasers were wrong then and they are wrong now.As I said to CoinDesk editor in chief Pete Rizzo in a video interview at Consensus 2018, “cryptocurrencies are online community assets.”Any token that has survived at least one boom or bust and has a thriving community (of people, not trolls and trading bots) has the potential to be used by many many more people over the next two decades as this technology matures and as these platforms scale.We haven’t even scratched the tip of the iceberg with our ice skates yet. Further, ethereum is the leading platform today because of its ecosystem, which only seems to grow and accelerate…Turns out, the price of ether is the least interesting feature of ethereum. I said back then…“Ethereum has momentum, developer adoption, and a team that is willing to address the technical limitations even at risk to the price of ether. This is why I am making a big bet of time on ethereum rather than a bet of money in crypto. It has people who are serious about the Web 3.0 vision and solving real consumer and business problems.”At DevCon4, Joseph Lubin, the illustrious co-founder of ethereum, made his famous “killer ecosystem” speech. The way I understood it was that we’re so early in this technology that it’s the quality and depth of the ecosystem surrounding a blockchain platform that’d define its long-term success or failure.Waiting for a killer app is a fool’s errand because killer apps don’t quite tell you in advance that they are killer apps. The way to get to a whole range of killer apps is to unleash the creative power of developers, enterprises, investors and other agents of society.That to date has been ethereum’s singular achievement.The week before, Joe received a memorable reception at Sibos, the biggest conference in banking. Sibos featured enterprise platforms like komgo, Adhara and Trustology in addition to solutions from DAH, Hyperledger, Corda and Ripple and ran talks to packed business audiences.At the end of Sibos, the most common refrain from the attendees was… “blockchain is here to stay”.Indeed, the crypto ecosystem of hoodies had just started to merge with the enterprise ecosystem of suits“The question is what did we solve, enhance, or deliver that will make individuals, companies or governments produce more, be more efficient, or enjoy their lives and relationships more?”In my book, the crowning glory of the year for the entire enterprise blockchain community, and not just the ethereum community, was the production release of VAKT, a platform for trading of physical commodities and komgo, a trade finance platform for commodities that interoperates seamlessly with VAKT. These two platforms were built from start to finish within 2018 on ethereum and marked the arrival of enterprise ethereum in real production use.The coolest piece of kit produced by enterprise blockchain in 2019 was Kaleido. Built by ex-IBM engineers at ConsenSys, Kaleido enabled one-click industrial-grade deployment and support of enterprise ethereum-based applications. This is a much bigger deal than it sounds.Development is arguably less than 20 percent of the effort over the lifetime of any enterprise application. Deployment and support are the other 80 percent. Kaleido took 80 percent of the effort out of that 80%.The most valuable piece of engineering in blockchain was Open Law which enabled the creation of smart contracts whose execution corresponds demonstrably with the underlying legal contracts. In essence, Open Law put the “contract back in smart contracts” and opened up a vast range of real-world applications in financial and non-financial asset markets.The most readable news in blockchain was Evan Van Ness’ “This Week in Ethereum,” a relentlessly BUIDL focussed newsletter that was a source of perspective through the amusing hysteria and paranoia of the #crypto investor community.While no one was watching, tokens came to enterprise financial services as Euronext and other ecosystem partners went to pilot at Liquidshare, a consortium re-engineering the interaction between post-trade parties by leveraging blockchain technology and developing a new infrastructure for small and medium-size enterprises (SMEs) in Europe.In June, the South African Central Bank. working on Project Khokha, proved that a new wholesale payment system built on ethereum can process a day’s worth of interbank payments in less than two hours, that too with full confidentiality and finality.The Monetary Authority of Singapore and SGX, the city-state’s stock exchange, announced in September that they have successfully developed delivery versus payment (DvP) capabilities for the settlement of tokenized assets across different blockchain platforms.The public blockchain space started to create enterprise-friendly (and -unfriendly) fiat tokens at pace. As CoinInsider reported, 45 stablecoin projects had raised $350 million in funding by November.The jokes about a stablecoin going to the moon suddenly didn’t sound like jokes anymore.When you follow the market news too closely, it’s difficult to not be blinded by the obvious. So what’s really going on?It turns out that the first killer app of the internet was not email. It was the ridiculously simple web page. The first killer app of blockchain is the ridiculously simple token.A token is a mere smart contract that encapsulates the rules governing the exchange of an asset. Once this contract can be generated from an underlying legal contract and shown to execute in line with the legal contract, regulated, legally sound applications of blockchain become possible. This is a big deal.It turns out, all economic activity, micro or macro is built on top of legal contracts. Unfortunately, because of information asymmetries, cost of enforcement, the risk of disputes and uncertainty in legal systems, the cost of contracting in too many transactions can exceed the benefit of the transaction.Smart contracts that execute in line with legal contracts provide evidence of state on-chain and ship with dispute resolution systems can dramatically reduce the costs of contracting and the cost of enforcement, unlocking economic activity across industries and economies.“Does that mean you should buy ether today? I can’t and don’t offer investment advice.”In 2019, tokens will invade the enterprise in full force. The de-siloing of systems that began with multiple energy and bank companies creating VAKT and komgo will accelerate exponentially across applications such as gaming, securities markets, trade finance, intellectual property, digital collectibles, patents and licenses, real estate and many many more, and by 2020, start to show what all the fuss around blockchain was really all about.Even more importantly, the boundary between public and private networks will start to disappear as assets on one network need to be exchanged with assets on another. Ethereum is uniquely position to grow from this phenomenon.To conclude, indulge me as I quote myself one last time:“When we are dead, it’s not what we HODL or SODL that matters. It’s what we BUIDL.”The leader in blockchain news, CoinDesk is a media outlet that strives for the highest journalistic standards and abides by a strict set of editorial policies. CoinDesk is an independent operating subsidiary of Digital Currency Group, which invests in cryptocurrencies and blockchain startups.

It was cold. It was raining. And it was the final gathering in a week of back-to-back cryptocurrency and blockchain conferences. Attendees should have been inclined to flake or tempted to sell their tickets for a tidy sum. Instead, rumor was that, for the $349 ticket, scalpers were charging a bitcoin — about $2,500 these days. The morning of, 70 ticketed guests, some of whom had flown in from foreign countries, had to be turned away, raindrops pelting them as they went. Inside, the 560 who remained -- about half of whom were entrepreneurs, with investors and ancillary service providers such as lawyers making up the other half -- mingled over coffee and pastries. They then filed in to an NYU auditorium to fill every seat, each outfitted with a folding desk. It was a conventional setting for what would be a day of unconventional thinking. Thus began the wildly anticipated Token Summit. That morning, despite the legitimate claims of scams and a bubble in the space, bitcoin was reaching a new high, nearing $2,800, Ether was trading in its highest ranges — around $200 — and the total market capitalization of all cryptocurrencies was trading near the all-time high it hit the day before, $91 billion. (It hadn’t hurt that a couple days before, Fidelity CEO Abigail Johnson had expressed her “love” of Bitcoin.) But in a day of 15 sessions with 40 speakers, the euphoric prices came up only briefly. Business models, fundamental price analysis, regulations and ways of governing blockchain-based projects were on the agenda, and meetings outside the packed auditorium initiated deals in what everyone was comparing to the dot-com revolution. “This is not about the price of tokens and the price of cryptocurrency. This is a conference about the business models behind the cryptocurrencies and tokens. That is what we’re here to explore,” said organizer William Mougayar, a venture capitalist and author of the book The Business Blockchain, in his opening remarks. His cohost Nick Tomaino, principal at Runa Capital and author of the blog The Control, about the token economy, said, "The price of these tokens is the most interesting thing for people outside of this ecosystem to talk about, but the long-term success of this ecosystem is really about what the entrepreneurs and investors are building right now." (Both were recent guests on my podcast.) A panel on business models at Token Summit. From left, William Mougayar, organizer, Muneeb Ali of Blockstack, Juan Benet of Protocol Labs, Shawn Wilkinson of Storj and David Vorick of Sia Coin But the attendees, who came from 44 countries including Brazil, Estonia, Japan, Belarus, France, Colombia, Croatia, and Singapore, were only at the earliest stages of building their vision of a blockchain-based world of multiple tokens that power decentralized businesses. When Mougayar asked who owned cryptocurrency or a token, such as bitcoin or Ether, everyone raised their hands. When he queried who was using them in a utility (meaning who was using them not just for speculative purposes but because they were the central function of a service), only a dozen or so hands went up. The recognition that the few hundred people in the room had barely started their journey was reflected in remarks by NYU Stern Business School professor Luke Williams. “It takes a long time for people’s thinking to catch up to the technology,” he said. “One of the reasons we’re here today is to allow our thinking to keep track with the mechanism of technology. Thinking changes much slower because we’re dealing with really well-established concepts like money.” The data showed that something new was afoot. In a panel on data about the industry, Brian Lio, CEO of industry data site Smith and Crown, showed that the amount raised in “initial coin offerings” — crowdsales of new crypto assets — in 2017 has already eclipsed the total from 2016. It also already surpasses seed and Series A venture funding in the space. The average project raised $2 million, and while more than half of funds went to the top 10% of projects, a massive long tail of shows that even smaller, less well-known projects are raising money this way. While those numbers seem impressive, the comparisons to venture capital are not entirely apt. A significant portion of the ICO money likely went to projects that would not have gotten venture capital anyway — whether due to lack of access or quality of project or another reason. Plus, in many cases, because the token is integral to the functioning of the network and would need to be widely distributed for the ecosystem to work, it wouldn’t even make sense to give a venture capitalist a substantial cut. “You generally need an ICO just for distribution,” said Sid Kalla of Smith and Crown. Also, despite the amount of money flowing in the space, the audience fueling the trend was decidedly niche. According to a survey by CoinFund, a blockchain technology research investment company, 91.5% of respondents were male, two-thirds were between ages of 25-40, 60% worked in technology and 26% had participated in equity crowdfunding, suggesting they’re accredited investors. “It’s still a very niche market. It could probably have a few more women in it,” said CoinFund cofounder Jake Brukhman to the almost entirely male audience, which erupted in laughter. The mostly male audience at Token Summit CoinFund survey respondents also seemed to be a highly (and dangerously) risk-tolerant crowd. The average respondent had invested 50% of all their investment capital in blockchain assets, and one out of three had more than 75% of their investment capital in blockchain. The same foolhardy thinking has also created a bubble in tokens, the existence of which attendees widely recognized. Explaining that companies receiving seed funding typically get valuations around $5 million, and firms raising series A funding are valued on average at $15 million to $20 million, Alex Sunnarborg, research analyst at industry trade publication CoinDesk, said, “This morning when I logged into Coinmarketcap” — a resource for data such as price and market cap of the top cryptocurrencies — “every single coin on the top 100 page had over a $10 million valuation. That’s pretty crazy. A seed round is hard enough to raise. A series A requires you to have a decent traction and revenue model.” But others in the space are already thinking up better ways of evaluating the assets to make smarter financial choices. Chris Burniske, blockchain products lead at ARK Investment Management, the first public fund manager to invest in bitcoin, explained, “It’s important for us to figure out what’s utility and what’s speculative, because in times of correction, we will likely compress through speculative value until we hit utility value.” He walked through an example in which one might project, say, that bitcoin will someday account for 10% of the $500 billion remittance market, which would require bitcoin to facilitate $50 billion of transactions. Assuming that the bitcoins turn over five times a year, bitcoin would need to store $10 billion in value to facilitate 10% of remittances. Burniske said the current value of any token, which he refers to as network value, would take into account the current utility value, the expected utility value out to the year the investors plan to make their investment, the annual rate of inflation for the number of tokens, and the discount rate, which, for his example of privacy coin Zcash, he estimated at three to four times that of tech stocks. He also described a metric created by cryptocurrency investment analyst Willy Woo, that he called the crypto equivalent of price-earnings (P/E) ratio: market cap divided by daily transaction value. He then emphasized the financial value of developers contributing to the code, which can be estimated by dividing the market cap by the number of code repository points, a proxy for developer activity on that token. But the majority of the day was focused on other issues such as what business models are enabled by tokens, how these open source protocols should be governed, and how the laws and regulations around these tokens are developing, among other subjects. Many companies are willing to blaze the trail. The biggest news of the day was an announcement by chat service and unicorn Kik, which as 50 million monthly users, that it would be launching a token, and a number of other well-known projects took the stage to present their efforts, such as smart contract system Tezos, peer-to-peer exchange 0x, decentralized court system Aragon, and identity startup Civic. Fireside chats were held with luminaries of the space such as Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong (who was also the subject of my magazine feature on the company), Erik Voorhees, CEO of Shapeshift, and Fred Wilson, managing partner at Union Square Ventures. In that last session, fielding an audience question about why a startup would go for an ICO in which it would raise a lot of money but also give away much of the company with a low probability of being able to get more funding, Wilson responded, “If you think about it as just a way to finance your company, you’re not thinking about it properly. The way to think about it is that the token is also the native monetization model for your business, and if you execute your business well, the value of that token should rise as the utility of the product you ship goes up in value.” Then, he said, though you’re giving away a lot of the tokens right away, the value of the tokens you keep should rise substantially and net you a tidy profit. For example, he and Mougayar speculated that Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin had a half percent of all Ethers, which at that moment was about $90 million. The crowd seemed largely to agree that despite the current scams and price bubble, the tokens were mostly about a new business model — one that could someday prove highly valuable. “The ICOs are highly unstable, but … I can imagine the utility value,” said Catherine Wood, CEO of ARK. Noting how far these projects are from pulling off their vision, she said, “but you have a few of these networks showing the network effect. It’s going to be boom-bust-boom-bust, I think. It’s going to be unstable but very exciting. I was there at the beginning of the internet, and this is more exciting than that.” As for the current irrational exuberance, Wood noted that the internet bubble popped at about $3 trillion, which would be $5 trillion in today’s dollars. But today, the network value of all crypto assets is less than $100 billion. One prominent skeptic, Tone Vays, of the CryptoScam podcast, reflected the stance of much of the world outside: “We are standing at almost the pinnacle of the dot-com bubble.” He put tokens in the same category as tulip mania, the South Sea bubble and the dot-com bubble, and asserted that after this flourishing of multiple tokens, many would fail, leaving only bitcoin. But as people exchanged cards and email addresses over wine and beer in the post-conference reception, Olaf Carlson-Wee founder and CEO of hedge fund Polychain Capital (and a recent guest on my podcast), which has backing from Andreessen Horowitz and Union Square Ventures, summed up the most common sentiment. As the first employee of Coinbase, and as someone who spent the greater part of the last several years earning and spending almost exclusively cryptocurrency, he had a long-term perspective. “This is my favorite conference since the San Jose Bitcoin conference in 2013,” he said, referring to the first bitcoin conference ever. “This is the same buzzy energy.” As the event came to a close, the attendees convened again at a separate reception a few blocks away. They were eager for more face-to-face time before they would each fly back to their homes around the world, from which they would keep building the decentralized web. I'm a senior editor covering crypto assets and host the crypto/blockchain podcast, Unchained (Google Play, iHeartRadio, iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn). Follow me at @laurashin.

Sign in to your Forbes account or register For instructions on how to disable your ad blocker, click here. Or Sign In To Continue Using An Ad BlockerIf this is your first time registering, please check your inbox for more information about the benefits of your Forbes account and what you can do next! Forbes takes privacy seriously and is committed to transparency. We will never share your email address with third parties without your permission. By signing in, you are indicating that you accept our Terms of Service and Privacy Statement.BETAThis is a BETA experience. You may opt-out by clicking here|Oct 5, 2017,10:03am EDTWhat Are All These Blockchains And Crypto Assets Building?Senior ContributorOpinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.I write and podcast about crypto/blockchain technology.This article is more than 2 years old. Clockwise from top left, Naval Ravikant, Meltem Demirors, Brian Armstrong and Jalak Jobanputra A $140 billion total crypto market cap. Goldman Sachs considering trading Bitcoin. Celebs launching tokens. Fidelity mining cryptocurrencies. Even North Korea mining them. Crypto is a silly circus with serious consequences. But amid the hoopla about prices and bubbles and celebs, a group of technologists, investors, lawyers, entrepreneurs and dreamers are working on bringing about societal revolutions through blockchains. They’re all convinced it will transform our lives — but how? Twenty-five crypto luminaries shared their thoughts via email. They are reprinted here lightly edited. Kathryn Haun, board member, Coinbase Kathryn Haun, ex-federal prosecutor & digital currency coordinator, U.S. Department of Justice; Coinbase board member What cell phones did to pay phones, cryptocurrencies will do to ATMs and bank branches. As cryptocurrencies scale, people will use them for payments because of lower fees, less friction, and greater privacy. Today In: Financial institutions that have historically provided trust will no longer be necessary to complete many transactions. This is already happening where people have no access to traditional financial institutions. At the same time, blockchains and decentralized networks promise greater security and accountability. One day identity and other records that can now be easily stolen will be put on distributed ledgers. It’s now cheaper and faster to Fed Ex a box of cash than to send an international wire. Cryptocurrencies are poised to change that calculus. Erik Voorhees, CEO of Shapeshift Erik Voorhees, CEO of Shapeshift The original blockchain application, cryptocurrency (such as Bitcoin), remains the most exciting and consequential. Cryptocurrencies will outcompete and displace government currencies. Centrally planned national monies will fade away, perhaps slowly like castles or all at once like slavery. Cryptocurrency moves anywhere, instantly, at near-zero cost, and natively digital money will become fundamental to a digital, borderless internet-based society. Governments will lose the ability to conjure money out of thin air. Budgets will derive purely from taxation and borrowing. Inflation will disappear. Prices will no longer rise each year. Bread will be no more expensive to a son than a father. Humans will again build upon an honest, market-based financial system, having escaped fiat currency debasement, the most egregious financial scam of all time. Jamie Smith, global chief communications officer at Bitfury and CEO of the Global Blockchain... [+] Business Council Jamie Smith, global chief communications officer of Bitfury and CEO of the Global Blockchain Business Council Thanks to blockchain technology we will begin to live in the world we deserve, where governments work better for the people. A world where our contracts cannot be altered, where the electronic transfer of our records and the tracking of our goods are fast, inexpensive and simple. A world where cybersecurity is not just a hope – but a reality. And most importantly, thanks to blockchain technology, we will be able to vote wherever we want, whenever we want, from the palm of our hands from our phones – and our voices, will be counted. Naval Ravikant, Co-founder of AngelList, Partner at Meta Stable Capital Naval Ravikant, cofounder of AngelList, partner at MetaStable Capital Humans are the winning species because we network -- nations, corporations, and money are networks. Networks are governed by leaders, elites, corporations, or crowds. Power makes them kings, aristocracies, monopolies, and mobs. Blockchains allow the people to operate the network, merit based. The people govern, provide resources, get paid in coins. They create electronic gold, currency, financial contracts, without rulers. Internet protocols to allocate bandwidth, computing, and storage. Self-organizing markets for power, water, Internet, and autonomous cars. Social networks and digital matchmakers without tech monopolies. Bulletproof electronic ballot boxes. Wherever a ruler is exploiting a digital network, blockchains will disrupt. Elizabeth Stark, CEO & cofounder of Lightning Labs Elizabeth Stark, CEO & cofounder of Lightning Labs It's easy to send someone a photo or animated gif, but why can't you embed value in an app? In the future waiting three days to Venmo someone funds or using a paper check will feel like ancient history. You'll send and receive money across devices and within various applications instantly. You'll be able to set specific conditions, such as paying your favorite band 5 cents every time you listen to their song, automatically, on any device. And you'll be able to interact with machines that pay other machines, like a self-driving car paying to charge itself or replace a part. Brian Armstrong, cofounder and CEO of Coinbase Brian Armstrong, Coinbase cofounder and CEO People will earn income in digital currency via activities online, such as upvotes on Reddit, likes on YouTube, or answering questions on Quora. In the developing world, people will control more of their wealth in digital money and earn/spend it their mobile phones, connecting to the global economy. The developed world will hold it as an investment but increasingly use it for money on the internet as more blockchain-based apps are developed. In three to five years, a growing body of people will earn most of all of their income online in crypto, and this will bleed into the physical world — meaning they’ll want to go 100% crypto, prompting merchants in brick and mortar to cater to them. Balaji Srinivasan, 21.co CEO (Steve Jennings/Getty Images for TechCrunch) Balaji Srinivasan, 21.co CEO The internet meant programmable information; blockchains mean programmable scarcity. The internet unified previously disparate forms of information (photos, music, movies, maps, books, news, telephony, mail). It added informational aspects to things we didn't think were informational in 1990 (your followers, likes, and steps). Information became ubiquitous, and everything became searchable, sortable, and social. In the same way, blockchains will unify previously disparate forms of scarcity (cash, currencies, commodities, stocks, bonds) and add financial aspects to things we previously didn't think of as financial. You'll get a spot price for the cost of storing 1MB on 1,000 remote hard drives, or the cost of one minute of time from 10,000 JavaScript programmers worldwide. Everything will become fairly priced, consensually transactional snd freely tradable. Fred Ehrsam, cofounder of Coinbase Fred Ehrsam, cofounder of Coinbase There are hundreds of specialized AI clones of you. A few write emails for you, some attend meetings as you, and others decides what clothes to order for you. To spin a new clone up, just feed its smart contract with digital currency and watch it buy all the resources it needs to accomplish your tasks. Joey Krug, cofounder of Augur and co-chief investment officer of Pantera Capital Joey Krug, cofounder of Augur and co-chief investment officer of Pantera Capital Apps and services serving as centralized middlemen in two-sided marketplaces will no longer be operated by traditional companies. Instead, they'll be operated by peer-to-peer networks that effectively serve as coops. Why pay Airbnb, Mechanical Turk, Betfair, etc., 10-30% in fees when you can use a P2P application charging the bare minimum (around 1%) in fees? Blockchain technology enables cost savings, more efficient markets (and thus economies as a whole), and limits the role of middleman and counterparty risk. Users will benefit from cheaper fees for goods and services but not know it’s powered by blockchain tech. Companies like Apple will survive, but rent-seeking platforms milking users for fees, watch out, software is coming for you! Jalak Jobanputra, founder of Future Perfect Ventures Jalak Jobanputra, founder of Future Perfect Ventures All seven billion people have digital identities they control. Data we now hand over to banks, Facebook and insurance companies will reside in secure vaults and we’ll mete pieces of it out. Data will become currency. We’ll transact with disparate data – akin to a “digital barter” system. Your medical history, medications, and surgeries will be discrete pieces of data on a blockchain. You’ll authenticate and send data to, say, a doctor, a research study, or a relative without fears of being hacked. You’ll create an immutable record of your home’s data on a blockchain – repairs, chain of ownership, history of electricity – for potential buyers, enabling you to better negotiate a sale. Blockchains will give rise to billions of efficient micro-marketplaces. We will securitize our tangible and intangible assets and move on to a world of radical transparency and opportunity: Capitalism 2.0. Jake Brukhman, managing partner of CoinFund Jake Brukhman, managing partner of CoinFund Over the last 20 years companies like Google, Facebook and Amazon have connected people globally and set humanity up for exponential growth. But the downsides of this efficiency are data silos, monopolization and proprietary control of networks by private interests. Decentralization technology is returning ownership over data and value creation back to individuals. It prepares us for a future where our technology providers are not private companies. They are services that live on the internet, give users self-sovereignty over their data, fairly compensate content creators for their efforts, are agnostic of the content that flows through them, community-owned and governed, and built exclusively for users. Sandra Ro, former head of digitization at CME Sandra Ro, former head of digitization at CME Blockchains create a world where organizations and corporations are decentralized to enable a transparent and fairer society. Blockchain challenges the notion of ownership and control by a few institutions. Individual power to control personal data and wealth will increase, while government influence will diminish. Coupled with internet and smart phones, blockchain infrastructure will enable greater democratization of financial access as well as increase efficiencies across many industries. Individuals will decide what has value. The most significant positive impact will be felt by those most vulnerable, excluded, and forgotten today. William Mougayar, investor/advisor and author, The Business Blockchain William Mougayar, investor/advisor and author, The Business Blockchain Banks will no longer be our primary financial destinations. Earning cryptocurrency will be the smart way of earning money via a novel variety of work that might be as passive as sharing our data, brain cycles, time or influence. Every asset will be on the blockchain, allowing anyone from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe to create their own wealth in a world where nation-state jurisdictions are a thing of the past, upended by blockchain-governed and autonomously-run decentralized institutions. As you watch the future of money, work, society, software, government, and business, you will unearth a common fiber: the blockchain, that blockbuster mega-trend for the next quarter century. Kathleen Breitman, cofounder of Tezos Kathleen Breitman, Tezos cofounder Decentralized blockchains enable global coordination. Parties around the world enter into agreements which can be arbitrated and enforced at very low cost. When trade barriers open, globalization lifts billions out of poverty.Cryptographic ledgers open new barriers by lowering coordination costs, ushering in an era of prosperity. Chris Burniske, partner at Placeholder Capital Chris Burniske, partner at Placeholder Capital The native business model of the most successful Web companies involves harvesting data from users, and then charging others for access to that data, or providing a proprietary service based on that proprietary data. Cryptoassets and their underlying protocols, on the other hand, create shared data layers from which all users can contribute, access, and benefit. Standardization upon an open data layer will collapse the cost of innovation, opening up an entirely new set of markets and services, which will empower the end user and neuter the business models of existing tech incumbents like Google and Facebook. It is the innovator’s dilemma come to today’s tech titans. Joe Lubin, cofounder of Ethereum, founder of ConsenSys Joe Lubin, cofounder of Ethereum, founder of ConsenSys The core value proposition of Ethereum's decentralized application platform is, along with complementary decentralizing technologies (e.g. for storage, bandwidth and high throughput computation), to create a new substrate for next-generation economic, social and political systems. Financial, governance, and other systems are being redesigned according to the principle of decentralization. One such system is identity. Currently, over two billion people do not have access to a government-issued identity. Those of us that do are at the mercy of identity providers who control and use our information for their profit and power. But Ethereum allows for identities that individuals control. For the first time in history, we can have a global, democratized identity system. Meltem Demirors, Digital Currency Group's director of development Meltem Demirors, Digital Currency Group's director of development Digital currencies represent sociotechnical systems – values and principles expressed in code, in the way the blockchain protocol is designed. This provides humanity an opportunity to create a new economic, political, and social systems – systems that are more transparent, more resilient, and more empowering to the individual. For centuries, our identity has been defined by our affiliation with a nation state, and our existence by the rules of that nation state. This technology will usher in new models for economies and marketplaces, governance, identity, and more. While we’re still in the very early stages, each experiment teaches us something new and valuable about the social, behavioral, and technical design criteria for these new systems. Will Warren, cofounder and CEO of 0x Will Warren, cofounder and CEO of 0x We are observing the early stages of a technological renaissance. Today, blockchains are rewiring the global financial system to be more efficient, open and resistant to government intermediation. In the future, blockchains will fundamentally change the way humans organize, govern and identify themselves. By giving individuals the ability to opt-out of any particular economic system that they might have inherited, power will shift from the state to the governed. The geopolitical consequences will be jarring. Demian Brener, cofounder and CEO of Zeppelin Solutions Demian Brener, cofounder and CEO of Zeppelin Solutions Blockchains have laid the foundation for a new, open and global economy. Unlike current economies and networks owned and managed by centralized authorities, this new economy is built on a set of open protocols and standards. Businesses and individuals will make use of these protocols — based on crypto assets -- to buy and sell digital commodities in global markets (e.g. storage, processing power). Furthermore, these crypto assets will act as a mechanism for groups to more effectively coordinate and earn from the value they co-create around shared goals. What the internet did to communications, blockchains will do to economic interactions. Primavera De Filippi, research fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society Primavera De Filippi, researcher at CERSA/CNRS and faculty associate at Berkman-Klein Center/Harvard As a new platform for distributed collaboration, blockchain technology can help society move from the paradigm of competition to that of cooperation. Most organizations today are defined by strict organizational boundaries, incorporating a variety of functions that already exist elsewhere -- for instance, finance, marketing, IT, etc. In the near future, new organizational structures may emerge, consisting of a network of functional elements interacting with one another in an open and distributed way. Instead of competing at the level of the organization, competition can be done at the edges, at the level of the functional elements focusing, almost exclusively, on their core competencies. Brian Lio, CEO of Smith + Crown Brian Lio, founder and CEO of Smith + Crown As we begin to realize the potential of blockchain technology, the first effects will be behind the scenes. They will manifest themselves primarilyas additional options to control the services and systems that are already part of our lives:secure, frictionless and private payments; control and management of our digitalidentitiesand reputations; a staggering array of new financial products; powerful tools for creating, managing and governing organizations of every size and type.One experience,service and app at a time, we'll gain the ability to control our information and money, secure our actions, and organize ourselves in ways that have never before been possible. Adam Ludwin, cofounder and CEO of Chain Adam Ludwin, cofounder and CEO of Chain Cryptocurrencies enable decentralized, peer-to-peer versions of services that have previously required a central party, like payments (Bitcoin vs. Visa), file storage (Filecoin vs. Dropbox), and computing (Ethereum vs. AWS). These decentralized models sacrifice the benefits of centralization – namely scalability, efficiency, and simplicity – but provide users with censorship resistance. This is only a good trade-off for a small number of people today, but that could change if the technology, or the world around us, evolve in unexpected ways. Joseph Poon, coauthor of the Lightning Network and Plasma Joseph Poon, coauthor of the Lightning Network and Plasma Humanity has always entrusted authorities to build companies and civilizations, else life is "nasty, brutish, and short." In the interest of building good works, we needed accountability of authority -- hence open Social Contracts in all aspects of society. The blockchain is about resolving the social contract dialectic away from the Principal-Agent Problem by making all principals be able to efficiently and economically also be agents. Though the blockchain will produce problems as well, I worry that a counterfactual future without the blockchain could be incredibly dark. I hope blockchains will enable humanity to be collectively more giving, loving, and actualized. Zooko Wilcox, founder and CEO of Zcash Zooko Wilcox, founder and CEO of Zcash When historians look back on this time, they will talk about the networks being built today as the foundations of the resulting global economic evolution. The peace and prosperity gained from breaking down the barriers to economic inclusion will open up infinite opportunities. Already, these new financial tools offer individuals and businesses around the world the ability to interact seamlessly across borders, resisting censorship and introducing new markets. From the family in Venezuela devastated by the country's hyperinflation policies to New Hampshire's Bardo Farm serving their community with sustainable meat and vegetables, cryptocurrency is an idea who time has come. Update October 5, 2017, 5:48pm EST: This article initially misstated the title of Naval Ravikant. He is the cofounder but no longer the CEO of AngelList. Follow me on Twitter or LinkedIn. Check out my website. I’m a crypto/blockchain journalist and host of the Unchained and Unconfirmed podcasts. I’m working on a book about the history of the crypto space to be published by … I’m a crypto/blockchain journalist and host of the Unchained and Unconfirmed podcasts. I’m working on a book about the history of the crypto space to be published by PublicAffairs/Hachette. As a former senior editor of Forbes, I was the first mainstream reporter to cover crypto assets full-time. I graduated Phi Beta Kappa with Honors from Stanford University and have a master of arts from Columbia University’s School of Journalism. Sign up for my crypto newsletter at https://unchainedpodcast.com.

This is not to say that contracts cannot be executed without computers. In a world without vending machines, in the vast majority of instances, a seller would give the soda once money has been tendered. But introducing humans into the equation does introduce some uncertainty and cost. By some measures, employee theft accounts for over $40 billion a year in the United States. See Anne Fisher, U.S. retail workers are No. 1. .. in employee theft, FORTUNE (Jan. 26, 2015), http://fortune.com/2015/01/26/us-retail-worker-theft/ [https://perma.cc/7F86-G8D3]. The courts would be needed to rectify this, but as mentioned, the costs of litigation, especially for these relatively small amounts (they are likely to be small by their very nature) make such litigation prohibitive.The contract at its most essential can be written in the following way: Seller agrees to release one can of Dr. Browns Cel-Ray Soda if Buyer inserts one Krugerrand into this vending machine. The Seller here is not the vending machine, in contradistinction to our Whiteacre property sale, where Richard was the Seller. Instead, the Seller is effectively outsourcing the contract execution, with the vending machine merely acting as his third-party distribution agent and enforcement mechanism. Buyer inserts his Krugerrand, and vending machine performs by releasing one Cel-Ray Soda.During the transaction, the computer inside of the vending machine is presented with a factual situation, i.e. the insertion of a Krugerrand and selection of Cel-Ray as the Buyers choice. Next, the vending machine applies the contractual rules to the instant case, leading to a judgment output, i.e. dispensing one Cel-Ray Soda, which is the benefit of the bargain. The computer then directs the physical mechanisms of the vending machine to enforce the contract between the Buyer and the Seller. Had the factual situation been slightly different, for example Buyer inserted a penny, then our computer-judge would have rendered a different output and would have directed the vending machine to a different action, i.e. returning the penny without dispensing the Cel-Ray Soda.One reason for the existence of contractware may be the lowering of costs through the ensuring of performance without recourse to the courts.28 The lowering of transaction costs does not mean their abolition. When vending machines malfunction a typical self-help remedy is to pound the machine with a fist in the manner of Fonzie. A manufacturers allowance of this remedy may lower the cost of enforcement by avoiding the courts, but it may also increase the risk of illegitimate whacks to the machine. The point here being that so long as self-help is a less costly alternative than judicial recourse, it is a worthwhile alternative. As we will be shown now, another reason may be the subordination of state authority to individual autonomy. The vending machine demonstrates this clearly in both its utilitarian and utopian purposes.The Radical History of the Vending MachineThe first known reference to a vending machine came in 215 B.C. in Pneumatika, a book by the Greek mathematician, Hero.29 See G.R. SCHREIBER, A CONCISE HISTORY OF VENDING IN THE U.S.A. 9 (Vend 1961). In it, he detailed a machine that dispensed holy water for use in Egyptian temples. The user would put a coin in a particular spot, which would trigger a lever that opened a valve that dispensed the water.30 See SEGRAVE, supra note 35, at 4. Fear of divine retribution would combat the use of fake coins.Although coin-activated snuff and tobacco boxes were used in England in the 17th century, one of the most conceptually important early uses of vending machines was as a means of evading censors.31 Id. at 5. The British bookseller, Richard Carlile, invented a book-dispensing machine so as to avoid prosecution under the countrys libel and sedition laws.32 See id. He had been jailed previously and wanted to avoid any future liability, so the idea was to make it impossible for the Crown to prove that any individual bookseller actually sold the blasphemous material.33 Id. He argued that it was purely a contract between the buyer and the machine with the publisher having no formal involvement.Here is Carliles description of the machine as it appeared in The Republican:Perhaps it will amuse you to be informed that in the new Temple of Reason my publications are sold by CLOCKWORK!! In the shop is the dial on which is written every publication for sale: the purchaser enters and turns the hand of the dial to the publication he wants, when, on depositing his money, the publication drops down before him.34 Richard Carlile, To the Republicans of the Island of Great Britain, REPUBLICAN, No. 16 Vol. V, (Apr. 19, 1822).The Crown, however, was not amused. Use of the device was ineffective and both Carlile and his employee were convicted of selling blasphemous literature through the device.35 See SEGRAVE, supra note 35, at 5. Although unsuccessful in this instance, the vending machine demonstrated its ability both to help achieve political and economic ends.36 Opposition to the Crowns system of licensure and seditious libel laws were some of the driving forces behind the First Amendment. MICHAEL PAULSEN ET AL., THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES 839-49 (2d ed. 2013). The fact that Carlile flaunted his attempts to evade prosecution would make this an easy case for the court, but this articlediscussed belowwill deal with the theoretical question of how a court should approach a less flagrant smart contractor. Before moving onto this question, a second technological advancement will be highlighted.Decentralized LedgersAs mentioned above, contractware solves the problem of performing contracts by eliminating the human element ex post. From a technical sense, if nothing intervenes to prevent the machine from working, then, by definition, it will ensure performance. Yet a machine owned by one of the parties of a contract does not solve the problem of interpreting or writing the contract. The problem, briefly stated, is that an independent third party must interpret the contract in accord with the intentions of the parties.37 This is not to say that courts try to divine out party intent to the exclusion of the text of the contract, but rather contract law is about agreements between autonomous parties whose intentions are the foundation of the agreement. This is a problem that public courts often try to solve. Another solution to this problem is blockchain technology.A blockchain is a decentralized collection of data that is verified by members of a peer-to-peer network.38 For an explanation of the mechanics of a blockchain, see Rainer Bohme et al., Bitcoin: Economics, Technology, and Governance, 29 J. ECON. PERSPECTIVES 213, 213-238 (2015). The concept most famously arose in the context of bitcoin, where the data collection is a ledger of time-stamped financial transactions.39 See Nakamoto, supra note 5, at 2, 4. The bitcoin blockchain, like all others, is a solution to the double-spend problem, a variation of the above problem of human interpretation and the possibility of judging ones own case.40 See Jaap-Henk Hoepman, Distributed Double Spending Prevention, ARXIV (2008), https://arxiv.org/pdf/0802.0832.pdf [https://perma.cc/PSX3-MG4D] (describing double spending as the risk that many copies of the same bitstring are spent at different merchants.).Modern industrial society requires trust. As an example, Americans generally trust that corrupt officials have not doctored the states real property records. If a malicious county clerk were to forge a deed, it could cause all sorts of problems for bona fide property owners. Although this is not a huge problem in the developed world indeed, our world is developed because this is not a huge problem in countries with less of a commitment to the rule of law and property rights, property recordation is a problem. Citizens in other countries do not have such trust.41 Laura Shin, Republic of Georgia to Pilot Land Titling on Blockchain with Economist Hernando de Soto, Bitfury, FORBES (Apr. 21, 2016), fury/#1dc086c26550 [https://perma.cc/Q9UD-WNE6]; see also Kenneth W. Dam, Land, Law and Economic Development (John M. Olin Law & Econ., Working Paper No. 272, 2006).Another example of faith that is placed in centralized institutions is in the banking system. Americans generally trust our banking institutions to keep an accurate reading of the balance on our checking accounts. While these banks have redundancies in the form of backup servers, they are still centralized institutions and, in some sense, judges in their own cases until brought before a court. If a bank asserts an individual has a balance of $1,000 and the individual claims a balance of $10,000, then a third party is likely needed to adjudicate the dispute.This is what blockchains seek to solve: the problem of establishing consensus without the need for a centralized repository of information. Blockchains are decentralized collections of data. The unit of a blockchain is a block, which contains certain information, such as credits and debits or property ownership. A block is verified by a large number of computers in a network, called nodes, and then tacked on to the previously verified blocks. This chain of data blocks is known as a blockchain.42 See generally, Bohme, supra note 47.A well-known blockchain is the Bitcoin blockchain; it encodes data that has a market capitalization of $9 billion as of August 28, 2016.43 Market Capitalization, BLOCKCHAIN.INFO, https://blockchain.info/charts/market-cap (last visited Aug. 28, 2016) [https://perma.cc/BYF2-LBYD]. The data stored on each block consists of transactions, which are debits and credits to bitcoin accounts. Murray paid Reuben 10 bitcoins on March 2 at 4 p.m. is an example of a transaction that would be recorded on the Bitcoin blockchain.44 The block would not include the proper names Murray and Reuben, but rather their public addresses. One such public address is: 15KGAfhff1B15nsrhbLYHH9WpHvpCaKPK5. That block of data would then be verified by a large number of nodes and then tacked on to the previous chain, so that the blockchain would be one block longer. As it currently exists, the Bitcoin network has amassed the worlds largest amount of computing power.45 Reuven Cohen, Global Bitcoin Computing Power Now 256 Times Faster than Top 500 Supercomputers Combined, FORBES (Nov. 28, 2013), 828b7 [https://perma.cc/6BWX-9E2C]; Eric Limer, The Worlds Most Powerful Computer Network Is Being Wasted on Bitcoin, GIZMODO (May 13, 2013), was-504503726 [https://perma.cc/N8ZG-R4AF].What makes the Bitcoin blockchain novel is that it relies on a decentralized network to verify the data as valid according to a set of shared rules. Information already contained in a verified blockchain cannot be overwritten without reaching consensus with the entire network to propagate the altered information. So, while this is not to say that the invalid data cannot be posted, a strong effort is needed to do so.46 See, e.g., Michael del Castillo, Ethereum Executes Blockchain Hard Fork to Return DAO Funds, COINDESK (July 20, 2016), dao-investor-funds/ [https://perma.cc/S2DV-7FZE]. In the case of a single bookkeeping instrument, all a malicious actor would have to do to credit himself a million dollars would be to gain access to the instrument. The security of the Bitcoin blockchain and other blockchains is beyond the scope of this Article. Although this has been borne out by recent history, it is an assumption of this paper that individuals will trust blockchains.47 See, e.g., The Trust Machine, ECONOMIST (Oct. 31, 2015), in-could-transform-how-economy-works-trust-machine [https://perma.cc/K5UB-7EV6].The implications for the smart contract are that terms of the contract and the state of facts relating to the performance of the contract can be programmed into a decentralized blockchain that cannot be overridden by any individual malicious or mistaken node. If millions of computers verified that Murray paid Reuben $100 on March 2 at 4 p.m. and these computers are disinterested and do not make computational mistakes, then one can assume with an exceptionally large degree of certainty that Murray did, in fact, pay Reuben $100 on March 2nd at 4 p.m.48 It is possible to nearly instantaneously transfer from U.S. dollars into bitcoins, such that there is an identity between $10 and some amount of bitcoins that would actually be recorded on the blockchain or in the records maintained by the provider of the merchant service.The implications are vast.49 David Yermack, Corporate Governance and Blockchains, J. FIN. (forthcoming Jan. 2017), http://ssrn.com/abstract=2700475 [http://perma.cc/F8VY-CHRL]. Stock recordation, corporate governance, and auditing have all been proposed as areas where blockchains can increase efficiency. Whether the benefits of adopting blockchains outweigh the costs of doing so is beyond the scope of this article.The starter interrupter combined with a decentralized ledger offers a powerful example of the combination between these two technologies. Instead of programming the contractware so that its inputs and outputs are determined and executed by the creditors software, a cars contractware can be programmed so that its inputs and outputs are determined and executed by a neutral blockchain. Suppose the relevant term of the contract is that If Murray does not pay Reuben $100 by March 2nd at 4 p.m., then Murrays car will be rendered immobile, and Reuben can repossess. The contractware will search the blockchain for such a transaction, and if it finds it, will allow the car to start. If it does not find such a transaction, it will prevent the car from starting. Neither of the parties must trust the other for the contract to be performed. They must trust the disinterested blockchain, which is capable of enforcing the relevant terms.The contractware reifies the terms of the contract in such a way that technology can compel performance. The decentralized ledger ensures that such contractware operates in an independent manner, free from the problems of self-help. It therefore makes sense to call it a smart contract because it is able to do more than a traditional contract. It can endogenously enforce an ex ante bargain (contractware) and can also allow neutral, third-party enforcement (decentralized ledger).History of the Idea and Some Preliminary ObservationsSmart contracts have existed long before they were consciously described as such. They are the result of human action, not human design.50 ADAM FERGUSON, AN ESSAY ON THE HISTORY OF CIVIL SOCIETY 305 (5th ed. 1767). This means that contracting parties were incentivized to lower costs without consciously heeding the advice of academics.51 Example of smart contracts throughout history abound. See infra pp pages 15-16. More contemporary uses include subway tokens, bike sharing programs, and E-ZPass.Smart contracts were first described by lawyer and technologist, Nick Szabo, in 1997.52 Nick Szabo, Formalizing and Securing Relationships on Public Networks, 2 FIRST MONDAY (1997), http://ojphi.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/548/469 [https://perma.cc/EWU2-VM35] (discussing the refinement of smart contracts since the early 1990s); see also Mark S. Miller, Computer Security as the Future of Law, Presentation on Aug. 15, 1997, http://www.caplet.com/security/futurelaw/; f0fe84ec57af [https://perma.cc/W49B-S4WU] Szabo defines smart contracts as contractual clauses embedded into hardware and software in such a way that makes breach more expensive.53 See Szabo, supra note 17. (The basic idea behind smart contracts is that many kinds of contractual clauses (such as collateral, bonding, delineation of property rights, etc.) can be embedded in the hardware and software we deal with, in such a way as to make breach of contract expensive (if desired, sometimes prohibitively so) for the breacher.). He provides two examples: vending machines and devices for repossessing automobile-collateral. By decreasing the costs of mediation, self-enforcement, and arbitration, Szabo saw smart contracts as representing a fundamental shift in the world away from paper and towards digital systems, like the banking backed by computers and digital databases.54 Id. This shift was not to take place immediately, however, as Szabo recognized the value of the long history of paper.55 Id.Long before Szabo, however, financial institutions were using computer code to facilitate transactions, like options contracts and bookkeeping.56 John Markoff, Hewitt D. Crane, 81, Early Computer Engineer, Is Dead, N.Y. Ts (Jun. 21, 2008), http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/21/us/21crane.html [https://perma.cc/G6PZ-WS5D]. The real breakthrough for smart contracts came with the advent of bitcoin and the proliferation of blockchain technology. First proposed in 2008, the Bitcoin protocol was a successful experiment in the mass usage of decentralized ledgers, which form an important basis of smart contracts.57 Max Raskin, Realm of the Coin: Bitcoin and Civil Procedure, 20 FORDHAM J. CORP. & FIN. L. 969, 971 (2015).The proliferation of decentralized ledgers led to a new discussion of using technology to enforce agreements between individuals without recourse to third parties. New companies and protocols have aggregated the essential code to write smart contracts. This code exists apart from the bitcoin ecosystem. These new companies are building an ecosystem for experimentation with an implementation of smart contracts.58 See, e.g., Gavin Wood, Ethereum: A Secure Decentralised Generalised Transaction Ledger (Apr. 2014) (unpublished manuscript), http://gavwood.com/paper.pdf [https://perma.cc/6C8D-3CB8]; Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum: A Next-Generation Cryptocurrency and Decentralized Application Platform, BITCOIN MAGAZINE (Jan. 24, 2014), DJQ8-NB7P]. There has been a proliferation of writing about the subject, mostly from a technical or financial perspective.59 See Aaron Wright & Primavera De Filippi, Decentralized Blockchain Technology and the Rise of Lex Cryptographia (March 10, 2015) (unpublished manuscript), http://ssrn.com/abstract=2580664 [https://perma.cc/2UGR-ZFFF] (describing and analyzing the benefits and drawbacks of decentralized technology, and predicting the rise of a Lex Cryptographia, which they define as rules administered through self-executing smart contracts and decentralized (autonomous) organizations.).Place in Existing Contract LawA contract is a legally enforceable agreement.60 RESTATEMENT (FIRST) OF CONTRACTS 1 (1932). The novel issue of smart contracts is what happens when an agreement can be enforced not by public law enforcers, but through the terms and mechanisms set forth in the terms of the contract itself. The typical legal action for breach of contract involves an aggrieved party going to a court of law or equity to demand money damages, restitution, or specific performance.61 Id. at 326. With a smart contract, the aggrieved party will need to go to the court to remedy a contract that has already been executed or is in the process of being performed. This is because, by definition, a strong smart contract is already executed or in the process of being executed by the time the court hears the case. So the remedy must come after the fact to undo or alter the agreement in some way.The three phases of contract law this section will address are formation, performance, and breach. Each of these phases will be covered to understand how these new contracts can be placed in the context of traditional doctrines and concepts.FormationThe initial stage of a contractual agreement is not markedly different between smart and traditional contracts. This is because before any contractware can operate, two parties must agree to some set of terms that initiates the program.62 Id. at 3. In the realm of smart contracts, unlike traditional contracts, acceptance comes through performance. An individual can say they will initiate a smart contract, which may be a contract in regular law, but until the program initiates, there is no smart contract. Smart contract code can be posted to a ledger as an offer though. Once an action is taken to initiate acceptance, such as by ceding control over a certain amount of money to the code, the contract is formed.Just as there is bargained-for consideration in a traditional contract, there is consideration in a smart contract. One of the reasons for have the doctrine of consideration is that courts believe that mutuality of obligation distinguishes a contract from a gift, for which parties do not have the same rights of legal enforcement.63 Val D. Ricks, In Defense of Mutuality of Obligation: Why Both Should Be Bound, or Neither, 78 NEB. L. REV. 491, 494 (1999) (Courts have held a promise traded for another promise to be enforceable for well over 400 years, since the early to mid-1500s. Courts currently say that a mutual (or reciprocal, or bargained-for) promise constitutes consideration for a promise, causing it to be enforceable.). As will be shown below, where a gift induces action, that action can serve as a substitute for consideration.64 Id. Smart contracts have the potential to formalize the instances where courts will allow contracts to be enforced. This is because the terms of the smart contract are explicitly laid out and each sides obligations and benefits are immediately apparently.In a contract, the bargain can be presented unilaterally, like a vending machine, or can be bargained-for as in the terms of a loan agreement.65 Todd D. Rakoff, Contracts of Adhesion: An Essay in Reconstruction, 96 HARV. L. REV. 1173 (1983). But what happens in a smart contract when there is no consideration? A foundational contracts case will be analyzed through the lens of both traditional and smart contracts.In Ricketts v. Scothorn, a grandfather promised to his granddaughter a sum of money, inducing her to quit her job. The grandfather dies and the executor of the estate refuses to pay her.66 Ricketts v. Scothorn, 77 N.W. 365 (Neb. 1898). The granddaughter brought an action against the executor of his estate, claiming that she relied on the grandfathers promise. The court held that the daughter could recover money damages because she detrimentally relied on the promise of her grandfather.67 Id.But imagine a situation where the grandfather wrote into the gift-promise code that he or his estate could retain the right to change his mind or explicitly wrote into the code that he or his estate could not change his mind. This would be done using a smart contract. In this instance, it would be impossible for the grandfather to change his mind if the computer program did not allow for a change. The grandfather then writes the terms of this gift-promise into computer language that is readable by his bank including terms that do not allow for revocation.An ability to write into the code options to change ones mind or the mind of ones assignees would make the doctrine of detrimental reliance less important because recipients of gifts could demand that their gifts come with a promise of finality; thus, the ability to recant the promise becomes a disclosed term of the contractA new technology called smart contracts has emerged. What makes these legal agreements innovative is that their execution is made automatic through the use of computers. This Article examines smart contracts from a legal perspective. Specifically, this Article explains smart contracts operation and place in existing contract law. It introduces a distinction between strong and weak smart contracts, as defined by the costs of their revocation and modification. The article concludes that smart contracts are simply a new form of preemptive self-help that should not be discouraged by the legislatures or courts. While certain unconscionable examples of strong smart contracts may need to be policed, judges and policymakers should foster a climate that treats smart contracts as another form of more traditional agreements.IntroductionSelf-help is nothing new. Whether building walls to stymie trespassers or changing locks to evict squatters, individuals regularly act on their own before invoking the formal legal system. Over the past few years, a group of innovators have begun designing computer technologies that bring self-help to the realm of contracts.1 See infra pp. 41. Such technologies are discussed below. They range from options contracts that automatically trigger on certain conditions (prediction markets) to fundraising platforms that automatically disburse funds when funding thresholds are met. They call these new contracts smart contracts. Their aim is to allow contracting parties to ensure their agreement is enforced by raising the costs of any breach by a prohibitive amount.Smart contracts are defined as agreements wherein execution is automated, usually by computers. Such contracts are designed to ensure performance without recourse to the courts. Automation ensures performance, for better or worse, by excising human discretion from contract execution.One example of a smart contract is the humble vending machine. If the machine is operating properly and money is inserted into the machine, then a contract for sale will be executed automatically. This is a smart contract. Such a contract poses no legal problems if the machine were to dispense soda, but legal questions arise if the machine instead dispenses heroin. Should laws be passed to ban vending machines because they can be used to further illegal ends? Or should their use be regulated ex post?Certain situations will arise that will force the law to deal with smart contracts, and the purpose of this article is to assess their legality and demonstrate that there is little difficulty situating smart contracts within existing contract law. Innovative technology does not necessitate innovative jurisprudence, and traditional legal analysis can help craft simple rules as a framework for this complex phenomenon.2 Compare Frank H. Easterbrook, Cyberspace and the Law of the Horse, 1996 U. CHI. LEGAL F. 207 (1996) (arguing that the best way to learn and craft the law of a particular field is to study general rules), with Lawrence Lessig, The Law of the Horse: What Cyberlaw Might Teach, 113 HARV. L. REV. 501 (1999) (arguing that the nature of cyberspace is unique and can reveal general principles of law); and RICHARD A. EPSTEIN, SIMPLE RULES FOR A COMPLEX WORLD, (Harv. Univ. Press. 1995) (arguing that basic legal principles can and should govern a complex, industrial society).The Article begins with a definition of smart contracts and an explanation of the interplay between legal prose and machines. This analysis will also engage with the existing smart contract research, which is often written from a computer science perspective. The salient features of smart contracts differ between the technical and legal discussions, a fact which is lost in the existing literature. To help clarify, the article will introduce a classification of strong and weak smart contracts. To provide context to the above discussion, a short history of the idea will be included.Next, the two technological components that have enabled smart contracts will be explained. The first component will be termed contractware, which can be defined as the physical or digital instantiations of contract terms onto machines or other property involved in the performance of the contract.3 The pieces of property do not need to be tangible; software systems can be embedded with contractware.4 The term contractware has appeared elsewhere to refer to commercial software offerings that facilitate the workflow and writing of traditional contracts. By instantiation, we mean taking the terms of the agreement and either writing them into previously existing software or writing them into software that is connected in some way to a machine that implements the contract. Take, for example, the innards of our aforementioned vending machine. A physical device within the machine is encoded with a sellers offer. The machine will only dispense a soda if the terms of the agreement are met, for instance, by depositing a Krugerrand into the device. In addition to discussing the legal theory behind the vending machine, the contraptions radical history will also be discussed to remedy the paucity of vending machine literature that exists in legal academia.5 Cf. Orin Kerr, The Influence of Immanuel Kant on Evidentiary Approaches in Eighteenth Century Bulgaria, 18 GREEN BAG 2d 251 (2015); see also Chief Justice of the United States John G. Roberts, Jr., Interview at Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals Annual Conference (June 25, 2011) (much like how Professor Kerrs work remedied the paucity of legal literature on the influence of Immanuel Kant on evidentiary approaches in eighteenth century Bulgaria, a paucity that was observed by Chief Justice Roberts). This history sheds light on the power of the smart contract to protect individual autonomy over state diktat.There is a second technological component this article will discuss: decentralized ledgers, also known as blockchains. These are databases of information that are created by a network with no central authority.6 See, e.g., Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System, BITCOIN PROJECT, http://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf [https://perma.cc/GXZ8-6SDR]. For instance, instead of a public recordation system that exists on paper files stored in city hall, a blockchain system would keep a decentralized ledger on the computers of every node running the software.7 Id. at 2, 4. It has become easier to build and enforce secure contracts without recourse to the state through the use of shared, instead of centralized, consensus-establishing mechanisms. The combination of these componentscontractware and blockchainshas made smart contracts that are enforced by a decentralized, third-party network possible.8 Other systems of verification are possible, but blockchains have become a sort of Schelling point. Attention from the media and capital have established this particular technology as the one to work with.Part *TK* of the Article will analyze smart contracts through the lens of existing doctrines in contract law. The section will provide an overview of the classic stages of contract formation and pose a series of observations and questions that are implicated by smart contracts. In particular, this section will discuss consideration, formation, avoidance, performance, breach, and remedy. Section TK will explore one existing application of smart contracts: automobile starter interrupters. These are devices that are installed in cars by creditors, allowing them to remotely disable the car if a debtor has breached the terms of an agreement. The subject of this section will be how courts and legislatures have dealt with these devices. This is a current instance where courts have passed judgment on the legality of smart contracts, albeit not self-consciously. They were not setting out to rule on legality, but implicitly did so as a collateral matter.Next, the Article will examine the benefits of smart contracts. Like many technologies, the creators and early adopters of smart contracts are ideologically driven and believe that the invention can radically alter the nature of society and its relationship with the traditional centralized state. Many believe that private enforcement of contracts can reduce the need and extent of monopolized police and legal services provided by the state.9 See, e.g., ROBERT NOZICK, ANARCHY, STATE, AND UTOPIA (1974); MURRAY ROTHBARD, THE ETHICS OF LIBERTY (1982); DAVID FRIEDMAN, THE MACHINERY OF FRIEDMAN (1973); EDWARD STRINGHAM, ANARCHY AND THE LAW (2007). However, the vision of the first movers often gives way to the realities of a conservative world that looks askance at new technologies. There are, however, benefits of smart contracts that do not upend the existing social order, but instead decrease transaction costs by cutting out intermediaries. This allows for industrial society to operate more effectively. These benefits extend to financial transactions, corporate governance, financial products, and a host of other potential applications that have been analyzed by economists.The final section of the Articlediscusses both a philosophical and practical set of problems with smart contracts. The benefits of smart contracts must be viewed in light of their inherent limitations. A smart contract asks its parties to tie themselves to the mast like Ulysses and ex ante commit to abiding by the terms of the agreement.10 HOMER, THE ODYSSEY, Book XII, 36-54 (A.T. Murray trans.) (c. 800 B.C.E.), http://www.theoi.com/Text/HomerOdyssey12.html [https://perma.cc/WSP5-VGPN] (describing Ulysses commands that his troops tie him to the mast of his ship so that he would not be tempted by the Sirens and their alluring voices, which would have resulted in his death). In certain instances, the state may want to prevent individuals from committing themselves if the terms of the contract are substantively unconscionable.Smart Contracts: Strong and Weak DefinitionA smart contract is an agreement whose execution is automated.11 Alternative and broader definitions of smart contracts exist and these may be better for computer science purposes, but for legal purposes, what is relevant is the excision of human control. See, e.g., Christopher D. Clack et al., Smart Contract Templates: Foundations, Design Landscape and Research Directions 2 (Aug. 4, 2016) (unpublished manuscript), http://arxiv.org/pdf/1608.00771v2.pdf [https://perma.cc/8Z5P-QRM9] (A smart contract is an agreement whose execution is both automatable and enforceable. Automatable by computer, although some parts may require human input and control. Enforceable by either legal enforcement of rights and obligations or tamper-proof execution.). Much of the remainder of this paper will discuss under what conditions smart contracts are legally enforceable, but if they have been executed, then the agreement has been enforced in some sense. The cogs of a vending machine enforce the agreement, even if ex post a court finds the sale to be impermissible. This automatic execution is often effected through a computer running code that has translated legal prose into an executable program.12 Automation is generally taken to mean being executed by one or more computers. Smart Contract Templates. For a discussion of this translation process see Tom Hvitved, Contract Formalisation and Modular Implementation of Domain-Specific Languages (Mar. 2, 2012) (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Copenhagen) (on file with author). It is an open area of research as to whether computers can actually affect this execution, but for the purposes of this paper, what poses the most novel legal questions is what happens when human legal prose and execution are subordinate to mechanical execution. This program has control over the physical or digital objects needed to effect execution. Examples are a car that has a program installed to prevent ignition if the terms of a debt contract are not met or banking software that automatically transfers money if certain conditions are met. A smart contract does not rely on the state for enforcement, but is a way for contracting parties to ensure performance.For legal purposes, I will further differentiate between strong and weak smart contracts. Strong smart contracts have prohibitive costs of revocation and modification, while weak smart contracts do not. This means that if a court is able to alter a contract after it has been executed with relative ease, then it will be defined as a weak smart contract. If there is some large cost to altering the contract in a way that it would not make sense for a court to do so, then the contract will be defined as strong.Numerous alternative definitions of smart contracts have been proposed.13 See, e.g., Clack et al., supra note 9; Josh Stark, Making Sense of Blockchain Smart Contracts, COINDESK (June 4, 2016, 18:36 GMT), http://www.coindesk.com/making-sense-smart-contracts/ [https://perma.cc/37QL-6TCN]. In a paper outlining a template for creating standard smart contracts, Clack et al. proposed a broader definition of smart contracts that bifurcates into what they call traditional and non-traditional methods of enforcement.14 Clack et al., supra note 9, at 4. Clack et al. define traditional means of enforcement as those through institutions like arbitration or courts of law these are weak smart contracts in our classification scheme, because the costs to change or revoke the contract are not high enough to proscribe courts or arbitrators from doing so.15 Id. An example of a weak smart contract would be an easily revocable money transfer between two large financial institutions where a court could simply order the transfer undone or modified if necessary. They define non-traditional means of enforcement as those through tamper-proof technology with the assumption that in a perfect implementation of the system wrong-performance or non-performance become impossible.16 Id. This narrower set of smart contracts is what I deem the strong variety. The reason is that the execution of the contract can be tampered with by the courts in the sense that the court can alter the original intentions of the parties.From the perspective of innovators, this bifurcation makes sense because as a practical matter, technology and society are far away from the pure, strong smart contract definition this paper considers. For instance, personal service contracts are not subject to computer control.Clack et al.s broad definition does not capture what is unique about smart contracts from a legal perspective. The broad definition that includes instances where courts can interpret and enforce the contract is indistinguishable from a traditional contract law. If a court has power to interpret and then enforce a contract, then it is the smart actor and will abide by previous precedential rules and statutory frameworks. Traditional enforcers who are confronted with contracts that use technology, but ultimately rely on some form of alterable behavior, will be able to award damages, issue injunctions, or enforce criminal penalties to enforce their understanding of the law. For instance, consider a smart contract that requires a party to mow a lawn if funds are dispersed. And suppose the mechanism for enforcing the dispersal of funds was a sensor that measures the lawns average grass length. Although one side of the contract could be automatically enforced, because the behavior of the human party is alterable by a court, i.e. a court can excuse performance, the contract will not necessarily execute.But traditional enforcers who are confronted with strong smart contracts will be helpless ex post. This is the novel situation that a legal definition of smart contracts needs to address. Unlike non-smart contracts whose performance can be stopped by the parties either voluntarily or by court order, once a strong smart contract has been initiated, by definition, it must execute. If, for instance, an individual in our above hypothetical were to install a device in his brain that would cause crippling pain if the lawn was not mowed, there is a case that the contract is in a stronger sense self-enforcing. This is the novel question posed to courts, and so this article will examine this second set of contracts. Much of this article will deal with smart contracts whose execution is contrary to governing law.ContractwareContracts are most often enforced by the parties to the contract. This is because most contracts do not end in breach and rancor, but rather in performance and completion. Modern industrial society would not be possible if this were not the case.It is only when there is a dispute over a contract that there is a need for enforcement. Yet resorting to the court system is a resource-intensive process.17 See Paula Hannaford-Agor & Nicole L. Waters, Estimating the Cost of Civil Litigation, 20 NATL CTR. STATE CTS. 1, 7 (2013), /CSPH_online2.ashx [https://perma.cc/E3FV-AK8P]. The opportunity to ensure performance ex ante is a preferable situation if the expected value of the costs of litigation outweigh the expected value of the contract. Because litigation can be a resource-intensive undertaking, the rise of contractware qua enforcer could be a welcome possibility.I will define contractware as the physical instantiation of a computer-decipherable contract.18 Nick Szabo, A Formal Language for Analyzing Contracts, NICK SZABOS ESSAYS, PAPERS, & CONCISE TUTORIALS (2002), ture/LOTwinterschool2006/szabo.best.vwh.net/contractlanguage.html [https://perma.cc/N8LX-9FXG] (refers to a similar idea as proplets.); see also Ian Grigg, The Ricardian Contract, IANG.ORG, http://iang.org/papers/ricardian_contract.html (last visited Feb. 6, 2017) [https://perma.cc/M2S5-9EJF]. The terms of many contracts can be written in programming languages that are communicated to a machine.19 See, e.g., Szabo, supra note 26; Simon Peyton Jones et al., Composing Contracts: An Adventure In Financial Engineering, 5 P. ACM SIGPLAN INTL CONF. ON FUNCTIONAL PROGRAMMING I CONF. F P 280 (2000); see also The Solidity Contract-Oriented Programming Language, GITHUB, https://github.com/ethereum/solidity/ (last visited Feb. 6, 2017) [https://perma.cc/K8AN-DX3Z] (displaying the Ethereum platforms Solidity language for programming smart contracts). The reason for this is that performance and enforcement of a contract essentially boils down to conditional statements, which are foundational to computing.20 Computers take inputs and apply functions to them to derive outputs. John McCarthy, Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions and Their Computation by Machine, Part I, 3 Comm. ACM 184 (1960).For example, in a secured auto loan, if a certain amount of money is not received by a certain date, then the car can be repossessed. While many contracts are certainly more complex, at base, conditional statements stand behind all enforcement.21 As a theoretical matter, perhaps not all conditionals in law can be reduced to code, but parties can certainly reduce many conditionals to code, and where they cannot, they should not consider using a smart contract. Whether interpreting private contracts, statutes, or the Constitution, American courts take a series of inputs, run them through a series of conditionals, and then have an executor to enforce their output. For instance, if a city tried to segregate its schools, a court would run this factual input through the conditional of Brown, viz. if segregation, then enjoin, and have someone enforce the output.22 Admittedly, equitable doctrines complicate matters and nebulous judicial standards, such as with all deliberate speed and rational basis, escape formulaic application, likely by design. But outside of the realm of constitutional law, courts tend to value the law be settled than that it be settled right. Burnet v. Coronado Oil & Gas Co., 285 U.S. 393, 406 (1932) (Brandeis, J., dissenting).It is important to mention that the instantiation of the contract need not be in a physical piece of property or hardware, but can instead be in another piece of computer code. For instance, a bank account could include contractware that interacts with the banks systems. As an example, such contractware could commit a buyer to send money to escrow once certain external conditions were met. Automatic payment of credit card bills, such as the service offered by Chase, are already in operation.23 Cf. CHASE, ONLINE SERV. AGREEMENT, https://chaseonline.chase.com/Content.aspx?ContentId=COLSA1A_LA (last visited Feb. 6, 2017) [https://perma.cc/76BC-6ZWJ] (Some Chase Loan and Credit Accounts will allow you to set up automatic payments. Automatic payments differ from repeating payments in that automatic payments are triggered based on the associated billing date and the payment amount may vary each month. Terms and conditions for automatic payments to Chase Loan and Credit Accounts will be presented to you at the time you set up the payments.). As a technological matter, until the advent of computers, it was difficult to use contractware. This left a larger role for courts and their agents to enforce contracts. Now, however, with increased digitization and the so-called Internet of Things, the feasibility of installing contractware has increased dramatically.24 For example, even refrigerators can now connect to the Internet. See, e.g., Folasade Osisanwo et al., Internet Refrigerator A typical Internet of Things (IoT), 3 INTL CONF. ADVANCES ENGG SCI. & APPLIED MATHEMATICS 59 (2015), http://iieng.org/images/proceedings_pdf/2602E0315051.pdf. [https://perma.cc/R9BB-DYJ9]. Consider a world where HVAC systems are connected to the internet. Smart contracts can be used to ensure payment and services altered if customers are in default.On the above view, the enforcement of a contract is nothing more than the running of a circumstance through a conditional statement. The central question to ask is: who runs the conditional statement? The most common and least disputed enforcement of a contract comes from the parties themselves. Take the contract, Max agrees to buy Whiteacre from Richard for 500 Krugerrands. The conditional can be written If Max pays Richard 500 Krugerrands, then Richard will sign a piece of paper granting Max legal title to Whiteacre. In most instances, Max gives Richard 500 Krugerrands and Richard then signs the document granting him Whiteacre. The parties themselves interpreted and enforced the contract.When things go wrong, however, a third party can be invoked to interpret and enforce the conditional statements. The most familiar example of such a third party is a common-law judge using his legal reasoning combined with his sheriff to physically enforce the output of the conditional statement. At base, the judge is nothing more than a computer who applies a series of rules to a set of facts and then instructs others to enforce his output.25 Cf. Anthony DAmato, Can/Should Computers Replace Judges?, 11 G. L. R. 1277, 1277-1301 (1977).But judicial enforcement of contracts is not the only way that contracts can be enforced. Instead of having a judge interpret and enforce the statements, it is possible to have a machine do so. Such a machine would need to have two abilities. First, it must be able to render correct outputs from given factual inputs. Second, its output needs to be reified some way in the real world. The vending machine is the archetypical example of a self-executing smart contract. Vending machines have been defined as self-contained automatic machines that dispense goods or provide services when coins are inserted.26 KERRY SEGRAVE, VENDING MACHINES: AN AMERICAN SOCIAL HISTORY 1 (McFarland & Co.) (2002). In other words, they complete one side of a contract once unilateral acceptance in the form of money tender has been effected.27. In Ricketts, it is likely that the grandfather would have happily tied his executor to the mast. If the counterparty did not give this additional promise in the code, then the gift recipient would be able to act accordingly; if the counterparty did give the promise, rights are more clearly defined.Smart contracts solve the problem of gift-promises by giving both the promisor and promisee the ability to encode finality so that parties can organize their behaviors around a mechanical certainty or lack thereof.Instead of going to court to ask the state to enforce the contract, the parties can agree to a cheaper enforcement mechanism. This is the method by which smart contracts reduce transaction costs. In the realm of wills and estates, like in Ricketts, smart contracts can be of particularly high value because they will bind the hands of the executor to the will of the testator, with little room for deviation.Some of the most difficult problems of early contract law involved defenses of misunderstanding and mistake.68 See, e.g., E. Allan Farnsworth, Meaning in the Law of Contracts, 76 YALE L.J. 939 (1967); E. Allan Farnsworth, Precontractual Liability and Preliminary Agreements: Fair Dealing and Failed Negotiations, 87 COLUM. L. REV. 217 (1987). With respect to interpretation, the use of computer code has the potential to minimize future conflicts over terms.69 This potential is not certain, as examples of fraud abound in the world of computer code. We discuss the DAO incident is discussed below, infra p. 37. Much like contracts of adhesion, many lay individuals will not comb through the code of their contract. But like open source software, granting everyone access to potentially review the code is a strong bulwark against fraud. Code can minimize, but not completely erase these problems because humans and their misunderstandings of code could provide a basis for contract rescission. In Raffles v. Wichelhaus a controversy arose over a cotton shipment contract when two ships named Peerless could both fulfill the terms; one party claimed he intended one ship, the other party, the other.70 Raffles v. Wichelhaus, 2 H. & C. 906 (1864). Such problems are virtually non-existent now, at least in the shipping world, but for similar problems that may exist, the precision of cryptographic identifiers is able to dispatch with such issues.71 David Wu et al, Privacy, Discovery, and Authentication for the Internet of Things (Feb. 28, 2017) (unpublished manuscript), https://crypto.stanford.edu/~dwu4/papers/PrivateIoTFull.pdf [https://perma.cc/PXQ6-ZGMY]. Although ambiguity certainly exists in programming languages, these ambiguities are less than in the real world because of the fact that there are simply fewer terms that a computer can recognize than a human can recognize.72 While computer code is subject to the same human error that written language is, it is much less subject to uncertainty. Two humans may read the same words and ascribe different meaning. Two compatible computers reading the same piece of code will not, although that code may not be the correct code that was meant to be written by the programmer; average adults have a vocabulary of between 20,000 and 35,000 words. See Vocabulary size: Lexical Facts, ECONOMIST (May 29, 2013), http://www.economist.com/blogs/johnson/2013/05/vocabulary-size [https://perma.cc/UQV4-3W32]. Because computer programs are written by humans, anything a human can write into code, a human can at least recognize as a word or signifier.Ambiguity is celebrated in human language. It is a central feature of literature, poetry, and humor. Ambiguity is anathema to computer language. An ambiguous computer language is a nonsensical concept because the predictability of computers is what gives part of their value; imagine a computer that was asked, what is 1 and 1 it randomly returned either two or 11. Although it is debatable whether every contract can be translated into machine language, many of them can be.73 See, e.g., Ian Grigg, The Ricardian Contract, IANG http://iang.org/papers/ricardian_contract.html (last visited Apr. 1, 2017) [https://perma.cc/8PS3-YCLP]. When lawyers or the programmers they hire write contracts in code, there is less of a chance for ambiguity than in natural language if only for the simple fact that artificial language must be complete and predefined, whereas natural language is infinite.74 See CARL A. GUNTER, SEMANTICS OF PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES: STRUCTURES AND TECHNIQUES, 4 (Perhaps the most basic characteristic of the distinction is the fact that an artificial language can be fully circumscribed and studied in its entirety.); John W.L. Ogilvie, Defining Computer Program Parts Under Learned Hands Abstractions Test, 91 MICH. L. REV. 526 (1992), http://digital-law-online.info/misc/ogilvie.htm [https://perma.cc/58SG-HC6U]. That is to say a person can walk around and verbally recite lines of code and people can at least understand what he is saying; a machine cannot understand human language that it is not programmed to understand. All of this is simply to say that the problem of ambiguity is reduced in the smart contract context.Finally, all of the usual defenses to formation of a contract also apply in the realm of smart contracts, although as will be seen later, enforcing the remedy against a strong smart contract may prove problematic to a court. Take unconscionability and illegality, for instance. If a vending machine were to sell alcohol to minors or sell alcohol in a dry jurisdiction, then the contract could be voided as illegal.75 Modern Cigarette, Inc. v. Town of Orange, 774 A.2d 969, 97071 (Conn. 2001). As will be discussed, the remedies will be either ex post through legal action or ex ante through regulation. In this instance, the illegal contract can either be policed through a prohibition on alcoholic vending machines76Or a prohibition on filling the vending machines with illegal substances. or a system of preclearance where a drivers license scanner or some mechanism are required to ensure compliance with age requirements. Similarly, suppose the vending machine charged $1,000 for a can of Coke and a court were to find this to be substantively unconscionable. The remedies would again either be in damages or in policing the use of such vending machines before the contract could be formed.Because the possibility of policing and damages exist, the issues of contract formation are largely the same in the traditional and smart contract world. The main difference is in the precision with which terms can be defined and inserted. Ambiguities must be taken care of by a functioning program and there is no I do not know. The history of computing shows that programs do not always operate as their designers expect, but when code is executed, the code does operate.77 This is true of human contracts too, at least in the sense that something always happens. But with code these happenings are predetermined and predictable and therefore parties can have certainty to organize around. Although the actual output of a smart contract may differ from the intentions of the parties, this system provides a more optimal first approximation. This is because computer code can be predicted according to a set of rules, whereas the ambiguity in human interpretation is less robotic by definition.Performance and ModificationA contract can be performed, modified, or breached. This section addresses performance and modification issues.The performance phase is made easier with smart contracts as they offer a tool to solve ambiguity problems addressed above. A potential problem here, however, comes with imperfect performance. Courts in the United States do not demand perfect performance for a contract to be recognized and enforced.78 See RESTATEMENT (SECOND) OF CONTRACTS 237 cmt. d (1981). The common law doctrine of substantial performance permits a contract to be recognized even if the performance does not fully comport with the express terms laid out.79 Id. This is the kind of leeway that a computer program cannot recognize because it involves an outcome that was not contemplated and specified by the parties. Imagine, for instance, a contract for a painting that is contingent on the reasonable personal satisfaction of the buyer. One way parties can deal with this is by baking in a certain degree of discretion into the terms of the contract initially or by simply not using a smart contract if discretion is a necessary part of the contract. However, if the terms were to diverge from what the law recognizes, the law would have to again decide between ex ante and ex post solutions to the problem.Most conceptually challenging, however, is how smart contracts will deal with modification. The law recognizes certain excuses that will absolve a party from performance or require some sort of modification.80 See, e.g., RESTATEMENT (FIRST) OF CONTRACTS 456 (1932). Impossibility and impracticability are two such excuses. When a contract becomes illegal after it is formed, then the parties can be excused from performance and there is generally no remedy for an aggrieved party.81 See id. at 598. This poses a problem for the smart contract.There needs to be a method by which smart contracts can be updated to incorporate changes that may be required by the evolving legal landscape. Suppose that at the time of contract formation, the time a debtor needs to be in default for the creditor to repossess is 30 days and that after the contract is executed, a legislature changes the law requiring that time period to be 90 days.82 Other examples of changing provisions include retroactive protection for veterans against foreclosure. See, e.g., 50 U.S.C.A. 3958. There are numerous ways of addressing this situation, ranging from state-backed to purely private. One method could be a system in which the relevant jurisdiction creates a publicly available database and application programming interface (API) of relevant legal provisions. These would be provisions related to the terms of the contract. The smart contract would call these terms and would be able to update those provisions terms in accord with the jurisdictions update of the database.83 Updating the code of a smart contract is a technically difficult task, but for the purposes of this paper, it will be assumed that it will become possible.Another method would be through ex post policing of the parties; this puts the burden on the parties or their agents to update the code. The benefit of this option is that there is no need to rely on the third-party government to create a new infrastructure, while the downside is that the parties themselves can potentially unilaterally change the terms of the contract, which is one of the problems smart contracts try to rectify. This could be obviated by leaving certain terms of the contract modifiable, while restricting others from modification. That payment is necessary could be an immutable term, whereas the length of time a debtor has before he is in default could be modifiable. This suggests that government APIs may have a master override over contract terms, which reflect the application of prevailing law over contracts in certain circumstances.84 Further, a similar override can be installed as between federal and state governments, as the software of the Supremacy Clause. U.S. CONST. art. VI, cl. 2.Finally, computer programs are regularly written with the option of inserting code later. Only those contracts that would involve some kind of irrevocability would force courts hands. This is because a court would be tasked with enforcing a law that would override the terms of the contract; there would be conflicting dictates. Party autonomy does not trump all other values in state-based legal systems.Enforcement, Breach, and RemediesThe central problem in the final question of contract law is what happens when the outcomes of the smart contract diverge from the outcomes that the law demands. Above are numerous examples where the technical outcome of the smart contract would not be permitted by a court under existing law, e.g. the heroin vending machine.As a threshold, it is possible that contract law and the actual written contracts would have influence on each other so as to minimize these divergences. Courts are going to be more likely to enforce smart contract terms because the courts will have more certainty as to party intent because the parties explicitly laid out their terms. Smart contracts drafters are going to be more likely to write smart contracts that comport with extant law and write terms that are variable to accommodate future changes in the law. The terms of a lease, for instance, will change to accommodate the property law of the jurisdiction. Additionally, torts could emerge for negligent coding or negligent update that would further ensure smart contracts are drafted in accord with existing legal standards. But what happens when these forces are not enough to overcome the divergence?It is a good rule of thumb that the entity with more guns wins. Here, governments generally have more guns than private parties and so the states courts are in a position of enforcing their law over the private law. Enforcement either occurs before or after the damage has occurred. This damage is not to either of the contracting parties because they are getting, by definition, their bargain.85 It may be the case, as with the decentralized autonomous organization, that the parties regret their decisions ex post. But in their agreement, the code was the code they signed on to. Instead, the damage is done to the exogenous laws of the society and not the parties themselves.86 Damage may also be done to efficiencysmart contracts prohibit or make more costly efficient breach. If two parties contract to buy liquor, both are satisfied with the bargain ex ante. If one of those parties is below the drinking age, he is still satisfied with the bargain. The only one ex ante not satisfied is the government and the government is in a position to respond to that dissatisfaction in some way.In the United States and other common law systems, ex post enforcement is the preferred system and there are many reasons to believe why this is a system conducive to greater prosperity and vibrancy.87 Samuel Issacharoff, Regulating after the Fact, 56 DEPAUL L. REV. 375, 377-78 (2007). In the sections below this article will discuss the merits of these two positions, but here it suffices to say that the two likely categories are regulation/policing and criminal/civil actions. There is a spectrum on which these remedies should be offered. In the United States, it is the exception that the government bans certain objects because their possession is per se problematic for society. Automatic weapons and child pornography both fall into this category.88 18 U.S.C. 922. If the government does not take this tack, then it is largely left with ex post enforcement.Some unenforceable contracts result in criminal prosecutions, while some result in non-enforcement.89 See RESTATEMENT (SECOND) OF CONTRACTS 178 (1981). It is too speculative at this point to see how the governments will respond to smart contracts because these technologies have yet to reach a level that requires a government response. They may not reach this level because individuals may not want to change their current contracting patterns because they are fine with the level of leeway and ambiguity that currently exists. It is unlikely, for example, that individuals will want to implant mini-bombs in themselves to ensure compliance with credit card payment. Because egregious bargains like those using the mini-bomb are unusual, it is likely that responses to unenforceable private contracts will remain in the ex post phase and tend towards civil, not criminal enforcement.It will be helpful to solidify the above discussion in a law that is embryonic, but at least extant: starter interrupters.Case Study: Starter InterruptersThe existence of a public court system is the antithesis of private self-help because the parties seek external recourse from a third party.90 For a discussion of self-help see infra p. 31. There are reasons for this, including a desire to prevent might from making right.91 Cf. Kirby v. Foster, 22 A. 1111, 1112 (R.I. 1891) (The law does not permit parties to take the settlement of conflicting claims into their own hands.). But recourse to courts is not without its costs.92 Douglas Lichtman, How the Law Responds to Self-Help, 1 J.L. ECON. & POLY 215, 257 (2005). Forcing a landlord to go through a lengthy eviction process raises the costs for non-breaching tenants, for example.93 Cf. Berg v. Wiley, 264 N.W.2d 145, 148 (Minn. 1978) (awarding tenant $31,000 for lost profits and $3540 for lost chattels resulting from a wrongful lockout). The situation is similar to when automobiles are collateral. In an attempt to increase recovery rates for their collateral, automobile lenders have turned to using devices called starter interrupters.94 See Michael Corkery & Jessica Silver-Greenberg, Miss a Payment? Good Luck Moving That Car, N.Y. TIMES DEAL BOOK (Sept. 24, 2014), g-that-car/?_r=0 [https://perma.cc/ZK4J-J96R] (This is not technically a smart contract because the creditor here has discretion, but as the technology proliferates and this becomes automated, the salient features are the same in this nascent state, so it is an appropriate case study.)Starter interrupters are an archetypical example of a smart contract and how the law deals with them is instructive in crafting appropriate legal regimes. A starter interrupter is a device that is installed in an automobile that allows for a remote party to prevent the engine from starting.95 Kwesi D. Atta-Krah, Preventing A Boom from Turning Bust: Regulators Should Turn Their Attention to Starter Interrupt Devices Before the Subprime Auto Lending Bubble Bursts, 101 IOWA L. REV. 1187, 1191 (2016). It allows a user who controls the starter interrupter to remotely shut off an automobile. These devices often also include global position systems, so that the collateral can be located.96 Id. The New York Times reported on an Arizona company, C.A.G. Acceptance Corporation, which offers its automobile loans on a condition that if the debtor is in default, the company reserves the right use the device to prevent the car from starting.97 Corkery & Silver-Greenberg, supra note 103. Such devices are estimated to be installed in over two million automobiles.98 Id.; see also Sydney Ember, Morning Agenda: Devices Fuel Subprime Auto Boom, N.Y. TIMES DEAL BOOK (Sept. 24, 2014), bprime-auto-boom/?_php=true&_type=blogs [https://perma.cc/J68M-E6B9]. The analogy to the housing crisis is inapt because the marginal loans given out are based solely on the new ability to repossess or have assurances about collateral. There does not seem to be evidence that lenders are extrapolating the marginal increase in recovery rate to a greater belief in the value of the collateral, for instance. Auto lenders generally do not believe that their collateral will appreciate in value with usage; there are standardized depreciation schedules in contrast with the value of real estate.There are a number of safeguards to the power of the starter interrupters that companies use to ensure that there are not egregious problems with their use.99 Eric L. Johnson & Corinne Kirkendall, Starter Interrupt and GPS Devices: Best Practices, PASSTIME GPS (Jan. 14, 2016), es/ [https://perma.cc/7QSU-A6UU]. For instance, a starter interrupter cannot disengage a car while it is currently running, which would have the obvious potential of causing accidents. The starter interrupter can be manually overridden with a code in certain instances in cases where life and limb are at stake. The creditor can give a sheet of a number overwrite codes, each of which can only be used once to prevent abusing the leniency for exigent circumstances. These common-sense exceptions to the power of the starter interrupters are included in best practices guidelines for the industry.100 Eric L. Johnson & Corinne Kirkendall, GPS & Payment Assurance Technology: Are You Compliant?, PASSTIME (2015), NABD_PAT_GPS_Compliance_Presentation_1.2015.pdf [https://perma.cc/GC7C-XPSZ]. This would allow the companies to comply with existing law that prevents, for instance, tortious conduct on highways.The cost of locating and then repossessing automobiles is a significant one and the starter interrupter, a form of contractware, is a powerful tool to drive down these transaction costs. This technology is currently being used and developed by creditors who are able to increase their collection rates by locating their collateral and preventing its misuse.Some critics view such use by creditors to collect collateral as unfair to those debtors who rely on the collateral for transportation to work.101 Corkery & Silver-Greenberg, supra note 103. Other critics in response point to the lower interest rates that debtors can afford because of the increased rates of recovery and therefore the systemically lower credit risk.102 Thomas Hudson, The Consumer Wins Argument For Starter Interrupt Devices, AUTO DEALER MONTHLY (Aug. 2006), /08/the-consumer-wins-argument-for-starter-interrupt-devices.aspx [https://perma.cc/XAQ7-QC5Z]. This debate is beyond the scope of this article, but if there is an economic incentive for both creditors and debtors to use these devices, the law will be forced and indeed has been forced to determine the legality of their use.Contract law is generally governed by states and there is no preempting federal law specifically dealing with starter interrupters,103 Atta-Krah, supra note 104, at 1201 (federal regulations do not provide any direct guidance relating to the use of SIDs by auto dealers and lenders.); Consumer Information: Vehicle Repossession, FED. TRADE COMMN, http://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/0144-vehicle-repossession (last visited Jan. 13, 2016) [https://perma.cc/HM9D-GRT9] (noting that [d]epending on [the borrowers] contract with the lender and [the borrowers] states laws, [a lenders use of an SID] may be considered the same as a repossession or a breach of the peace). but there is not much state law applicable to contractware. As one recent survey of the extant law concluded, generallySIDs [starter interrupter devices] may be legal in most states due to the secured partys right to the self-help repossession provisions of Uniform Commercial Code (UCC) section 9-609.104 Atta-Krah, supra note 104, at 1207.Section 9-609 of the Uniform Commercial Code, as adopted in various forms by the states, governs self-help of secured creditors. The UCC gives a secured creditor the right to either take possession of the collateral or render equipment unusable without judicial process so long as the action proceeds without breach of the peace.105 U.C.C. 9-609. A rich case law exists on what constitutes a breach of the peace, and as will be shown below, it will not be difficult to fit starter interrupters into this existing corpus.California, Colorado, and Connecticut all explicitly affirm the legality of starter interrupters but place certain restrictions on their use.106 See Colo. Rev. Stat. 4-9-609(e); 4-9-629; Conn. Gen. Stat. Ann. 42-419; 42a-2A-702; 42a-9-609; Cal. Civ. Code 2983.37. The primary concerns of the state legislatures are both that the debtor has notice that the device has been installed and has a right to cure the breach.The rights of debtors under the Bankruptcy Code add another wrinkle in the straightforward use of starter interrupters. A bankruptcy court in Arkansas ruled that the installation of a starter interrupter, while not per se illegal, violated the Bankruptcy Codes automatic stay because it prevented the debtor from the normal use of her car.107 11 U.S.C. 362. The court noted that the creditor could have remedied the situation by taking action to ensure that Debtor had the correct code to operate her car each month, such as by mailing the correct code to Debtor each month.108 In re Hampton, 319 B.R. 163, 175 (Bankr. E.D. Ark. 2005). A line of code written that would honor a courts grant of an automatic stay motion by allowing the car to operate is another potential remedy.The automatic stay, like the prohibition on selling alcohol to minors, acts as an external condition that the smart contract must incorporate into its terms if it is to comply with the law. The reason is because an individual cannot contractually waive his right to file for bankruptcy as a matter of public policy.109 In re Citadel Properties, Inc., 86 B.R. 275 (Bankr. M.D. Fla. 1988) (A total prohibition against filing for bankruptcy would be contrary to Constitutional authority as well as public policy.). As seen before, this can either be solved ex ante or ex post. This situation seems ripe for private solution, as it is not difficult to determine whether a party has filed for bankruptcy, given the public nature of these proceedings. A simple conditional could be written that if bankruptcy has been filed, then the starter interrupt cannot be engaged.As blockchains currently exist, starter interrupters are operated by the creditor and done so with the use of discretion.110 May 2012 Payment Devices Best Practices NABD Study #3, NATL ALLIANCE OF BUY HERE PAY HERE DEALERS (Apr. y-2012-Payment-Devices-Best-Practices.pdf [https://perma.cc/H3B9-TFM2]. But large corporations, like Toyota, have contemplated using blockchains to enforce their contractual arrangements.111 Peter Coy & Olga Kharif, This Is Your Company on Blockchain, BLOOMBERG BUSINESSWEEK (Aug. 25, 2016), -on-blockchain [https://perma.cc/Q49W-CXUC]. By invoking a blockchain for third-party verification, this discretion would be lost, but the debtor would be able to ensure that an interested party did not have the unilateral ability to control his collateral. The lower interest rates that come along with the blockchains assurances may provide a valuable option to some debtors who view the rigidity as enticing.Self-Help and Smart Contracts Private Enforcement and Political PhilosophySelf-help remedies have been defined as legally permissible conduct that individuals undertake absent the compulsion of law and without the assistance of a government official in efforts to prevent or remedy a civil wrong.112 Douglas I. Brandon et al., Self-Help: Extrajudicial Rights, Privileges and Remedies in Contemporary American Society, 37 VAND. L. REV. 845, 850 (1984). Automated execution of a contract is a preemptive form of self-help because no recourse to a court is needed for the machine to execute the agreement. A smart contract may not, however, meet the first terms of the definition because of illegal contracts like the vending machine that dispenses heroin or the implanted bomb that explodes when a debtor defaults. These contracts are outliers that must be dealt with, but the background approach the state should take towards smart contracts is a liberal one.113 See Richard A. Epstein, The Theory and Practice of Self-Help, 1 J.L. ECON. & POLY 1, 26 (2005) ([W]hat the law should do is to supply a second legal remedy that offers the complete relief (or at least more complete relief) that the self-help remedy could not supply.).Smart contracts offer a wider range of assurances to parties who previously had to use other mechanisms to ensure performance. For example, without smart contracts parties are more likely to prefer instantaneous performance or overvalue the reputation of the counterparty. These are good proxies for ensuring performance, but not ironclad and come with their own costs.114 Id. at 22-23 (To be sure, there are risks even in this context. Against these perils, the simplest form of protection is a simultaneous exchange in which each side gets to inspect the goods or services provided by the other before going through with the dealThe situation gets more difficult when the exchange takes place sequentially, that is, when one side performs before the other. But once again these trading systems do not suffer a total meltdown. The potential for long-term gain may be sufficient to induce individuals from taking what is left in the first round.). Much of the literature on self-help in contract law has dealt with how a party who has been aggrieved can remedy the wrong that has been committed against him.115 See, e.g., Mark P. Gergen, A Theory of Self-Help Remedies in Contract, 89 B.U. L. REV. 1397, 1449 (2009) (The primary goal was to give a general account of the rules that regulate the powers to withhold or refuse performance in response to breach, and the power to threaten to do so to extract concessions, which is normatively appealing and well-grounded in the laws specifics.). The advent and proliferation of the smart contract will focus the attention on the harms done to the breaching party, ensuring that party autonomy take a backseat to other norms that society wishes to enforce. In what follows, this Article will examine the potential benefits to non-breaching parties and society at large and then examine the costs to breaching parties and what limits the state will place on the use of smart contracts.As with many new technologies, behind bitcoin stood a political ideology skeptical of centralized power and supportive of capitalism and free markets. Although he116Some will object to using he as the personal pronoun for Nakamoto when it is not known if Nakamoto is a male, let alone an individual. This article uses he for brevitys sake, fully aware that this footnote defeats this purpose. never identified himself as such, many describe the creator of bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto, as a libertarian. Certainly many of the early adopters of bitcoin were self-described libertarians.117 Max Raskin, Meet the Bitcoin Millionaires, BUSINESSWEEK (Apr. 10, 2013), onaires [https://perma.cc/P4LQ-C87Y] (The surge in a Bitcoins value has made millionaires out of people who loaded up on them early onhowever briefly. Many of them are self-described libertarians, drawn by the idea of a currency that exists outside the control of governments. Some were so taken with the concept that they launched Bitcoin businesses, such as exchanges where people can buy the coins or exchange them for dollars.). Szabo has been called libertarian and his writings emphasize alternatives to the states enforcement of rights.118 See, e.g., Nick Szabo, Ten ways to make a political difference, UNENUMERATED BLOG (Aug. 12, 2007, 2:10 PM), tml [https://perma.cc/D9Q8-BERY] (Advising those who want to make a political difference to, among other things, Be prepared to vote with your feet.make your own lawdonate to or get involved with the [libertarian/conservative] Institute for JusticeTell us about your good research and good ideas.). Traditionally, states have been defined as monopoly holders of force with a power to tax.119 MAX WEBER, POLITICS AS A VOCATION (1919). Among the most radical visions for smart contracts is that the technology will subject the provision of justice to market forces and break the states monopoly over the court system. This is an idea that has been discussed by many libertarians, including Robert Nozick, Murray Rothbard, and David Friedman.120 ROBERT NOZICK, ANARCHY, STATE, AND UTOPIA (1974); MURRAY ROTHBARD, THE ETHICS OF LIBERTY (1982); DAVID FRIEDMAN, THE MACHINERY OF FRIEDMAN (1973); EDWARD STRINGHAM, ANARCHY AND THE LAW (2007).For many libertarians, the purpose of civil government is to protect private property and enforce natural rights.121 JOHN LOCKE, TWO TREATISES OF GOVERNMENT, Chapter VII, 85 (1689). Most fundamental here is the harm principle that an individual should be free to do as he chooses, coterminous with the rights of others.122 JOHN STUART MILL, ON LIBERTY, 2122. (1859). This implies a strict adherence to freedom of contract.123 Cf. Michael W. McConnell, Contract Rights and Property Rights: A Case Study in the Relationship Between Individual Liberties and Constitutional Structure, 76 CALIF. L. REV. 267 (1988). On this view, smart contracts use technology to enforce party autonomy in a more effective manner because they prevent external interference. If contractware progresses to a point where there is truly no need for third-party enforcement, there would be no need for a state and the attendant costs that many libertarians see as unjustifiable.Smart contracts could be used to encode certain constitutional principles into armaments, such that weapons would not work if certain conditions were not met, e.g. if Congress does not declare war, weapons will not function on foreign soil. Although fanciful, applications like this limn the concerns animating many early proponents.124 In the recent novel Seveneves, Neal Stephenson imagines a gun that fires robots as projectiles and can only respond to a certain user futuristic smart bullets. NEAL STEPHENSON, SEVENEVES 676 (2015).This speculative and radical vision of smart contracts is not held by all proponents of the technology. Rather, some proponents are primarily focused on the capability of smart contracts to reduce transaction costs. Instead of fundamentally changing the nature of political governance, a new wave of smart contract proponents is concentrating on the idea that their use can make the economy and corporate governance more efficient. I call these individuals the Coaseans because they care about reducing transaction costs.125 See Ronald Coase, The Nature of the Firm, 4 ECONOMICA 16, 386-405 (1937). One of the main areas to do so is corporate governance within firms, where a number of proposals have been discussed.126 See Yermack, supra note 58. These proposals include improving shareholding voting systems, tracking debt and equity issues, and enabling triple-entry accounting.127 Id.; Ian Grigg, Triple Entry Accounting, IANG (Dec. 25, 2005, 11:04 PM), http://iang.org/papers/triple_entry.html [https://perma.cc/2FDZ-38YG].An example of a firm that utilizes smart-contract technology to execute its corporate-governance rules is a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO). One way of thinking of a DAO is that it is an organization where the rules of management are predetermined and run on computers.128 Decentralized Autonomous Organization, WIKIPEDIA, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decentralized_autonomous_organization (last visited Feb. 13, 2017) [https://perma.cc/3FVN-4PP9]. One such DAO was formed in 2016.129 Coy & Kharif, supra note 120. The idea was to create an investing entity that would not be controlled by any one individual, but by shareholders voting based on their stakes on a blockchain. This would reduce transaction costs by obviating the need for a management team.130 Don Tapscott & Alex Tapscott, The Impact of the Blockchain Goes Beyond Financial Services, HARV. BUS. REV. (May 10, 2016), cial-services [https://perma.cc/ES9W-XHPX]. The entity was funded with $150 million.131 Coy & Kharif, supra note 120. Soon after this money was raised, about $40 million of those funds were diverted from the organization by a hacker who used the code in an unanticipated way.132 Izabella Kaminska, Legal Exploits and Arbitrage, DAO Edition, FIN. TIMES (June 21, 2016), trage-dao-edition/ [https://perma.cc/DW5A-KTVY]. Strictly speaking, however, the hacker did not hack the code in a malicious way, but rather used the terms of the existing smart contracts to accomplish something others later found objectionable, i.e. the diversion of their money.133 Id. Consider this using a legal loophole to effect a result that was clearly within the letter of the law, but not within its spirit.134 Id.Another example of smart contracts enabling novel corporate-governance procedures is the use of prediction contracts. A prediction contract is a binary option contract whose value is contingent on an events occurrence.135 Prediction Market, WIKIPEDIA, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prediction_market (last visited Feb. 13, 2016) [https://perma.cc/3DNG-PPLE]. These contracts are often cited as predictors of presidential elections, where market participants buy and sell contracts in accord with shifting beliefs in a candidates probability of being elected.136 Adam Mann, The Power of Prediction Markets, NATURE (Oct. 18, 2016), http://www.nature.com/news/the-power-of-prediction-markets-1.20820 [https://perma.cc/V8QF-CRUD]. But, they can also be viewed as a form of smart contract that can be executed on a blockchain without any input from a single third party. In many credit default swaps, for instance, a third party, the International Swaps and Derivatives Association, will determine whether a credit event has been triggered.137 Credit Derivatives Determinations Committee Rules, INTL SWAPS & DERIVATIVES ASSOC. (2016), __Jan_2016_Update.pdf [https://perma.cc/8HRK-LKU3]. With a smart contract using a decentralized blockchain for authorization, a network itself can verify whether an event took place and whether the contract will pay out. This has applications in the realm of corporate governance, where decisions can be automated based on discrepancies between the option price and the stock price, directing a board of directors to take one course of action over another.138 Robin Hanson, Markets for Telling CEOs to Step Down, GMU.EDU (Apr. 26, 1996), http://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson/dumpceo.html [https://perma.cc/Q6QD-4H4G]. These contracts also act as a potential hedge of political or event risk for companies, see also MICHAEL ABRAMOWICZ, PREDICTOCRACY: MARKET MECHANISMS FOR PUBLIC AND PRIVATE DECISION MAKING 87.Limiting PrinciplesThe above has shown the benefits that come from judicial recognition and enforcement of smart contracts. Some of the believers in smart contracts think that these benefits can be appreciated without judicial recognition and enforcement because smart contracts can supplant traditional judicial systems enforced by a centralized state.139 See, e.g., Atzori, Marcella, Blockchain Technology and Decentralized Governance: Is the State Still Necessary? (Dec. 1, 2015) (unpublished manuscript), https://ssrn.com/abstract=2731132 [https://perma.cc/B2F6-8UBX]. This section of the Articleanalyzes the positive question of where the outer-bound of a states acceptance of smart contracts lies. Three examples along a spectrum will demonstrate the degrees to which states and their judicial systems can approach smart contracts. On the one end of the spectrum is permitting the use of smart contracts use and recognizing them in collateral matters, e.g. recognizing a smart contract when going through the probate process. On the other end of the spectrum is prohibiting the use of smart contracts or banning certain forms of contractware. Similar to the manner in which non-smart contracts cover a variety of different agreements employment contracts are different from marriage contracts smart contracts will likely be adapted to cover a wide range of subject matter. The application of a particular contract will likely be relevant to which attitude the courts adopt, much as not all non-smart contracts are the same; employment contracts are different than marriage contracts.Starter interrupter devices are illustrative of the permissive side of the spectrum. As was shown, courts have recognized these devices as legitimate and allowed companies to use them to repossess vehicles, provided there is no violation to external laws, including the Uniform Commercial Codes breach of peace provision and the Bankruptcy Code.140 U.C.C. 9-609. How courts treat violations will likely be instructive. Suppose a starter interrupter is placed in a truck that is essential to a business. Instead of merely shutting the car off, this starter interrupter will permanently damage the cars engine, rendering it unusable, if payments are not received on time. Then, suppose the debtor files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The debtor-in-possession or trustee could charge that the use of the starter interrupter is a violation of an automatic stay, as it is an attempt by the creditor to control the property of the estate, even though the control is automatic and out of the creditors hands.141 11 U.S.C. 362. The question then put to the court is whether starter interrupter can be used at all if they have such potential.A second example in the middle of the spectrum, would be a modern version of Williams v. Walker-Thomas Furniture Co. In Williams, the court set forth a standard of unconscionability by asking whether the terms of a particular cross-collateralization contract were so unfair that enforcement should be withheld.142 Williams v. Walker-Thomas Furniture Co., 350 F.2d 445, 44950 (D.C. Cir. 1965). Imagine, however, that the furniture in that case was installed with contractware that blasted an annoying siren if payment was not received. Further, imagine that this was explicitly agreed to by the debtor ex ante. A court bound by Williams, could easily deem the contract unconscionable. This would leave the court to determine the proper remedy. The court could award damages to account for the harms caused by the automatic execution of the contract, which damaged the collateral in an unacceptable way. In this instance, such a remedy seems appropriate because the damage is not irreparable. It is likely that what the court would do is create a new breaching the of peace doctrine that creditors and the contractware would have to abide by.The final, and most egregious, example is contractware installed into humans. Although certainly a dystopian gedankenexperiment, it is worth imagining a scenario where creditors can install devices into the bodies of debtors and have the device force them into slavery or some state of impaired consciousness if they default. Such a scheme would certainly be unconstitutional as a violation of the Thirteenth Amendment even if the debtors supported the scheme as a way of securing lower interest rates. This is not the interesting question, however. What is worth analyzing is how a court would deal with such installation. Despite consent by each party, the court would likely nullify the contract. But will the court prevent the installation of the contractware into the body? Much more likely than judicial intervention is a legislative solution. States can and have banned objects that are not per se violative of rights, but pose an unacceptable risk to the morals of the community.143 Cf. Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coal., 535 U.S. 234, 251 (2002) (The case reaffirmed that where the speech is neither obscene nor the product of sexual abuse, it does not fall outside the protection of the First Amendment.). This can be a legitimate exercise of the police power of the state, such as, for instance, when the government bans the private possession of bazookas.144 18 U.S.C. 921(a)(4).What the above illustrates is that smart contracts exist in preexisting legal structures that do not unequivocally value party autonomy with respect to the formation and performance of contracts. The central question, however, is whether the state can use prior restraint to prevent the formation of contracts that have the potential to become contrary to public policy, but are not necessarily contrary to public policy themselves.The likely answer is yes. It is hard to imagine a state sitting idly by while devices are installed to self-enforce contracts that are contrary to the states own interests and policies. Although, the proposition is not black-and-white. When dealing with any question of prior restraint, the magnitude of the mischief must be weighed against the likelihood of its occurrence. The Supreme Courts First Amendment jurisprudence provides a useful model; n that realm, the Court has erred on the side of respecting autonomy and policing ex post.145 See, e.g., Near v. Minnesota, 283 U.S. 697 (1931). In this instance, contractware ought not be analyzed in toto, but discrete devices and software applications should be evaluated. This evaluation should be based upon the rights implications, as opposed to the particular functions of the contractware device. So, while devices that prevent the usage of personal property could be allowed, implants that enforce unconstitutional contracts or contracts that are unconscionable or void against public policy would not be permitted.These are questions for judges to decide on a case-by-case basis.146 Lichtman, supra note 101, at 257 (arguing that private self-help mechanisms should be analyzed on a case-by-case basis). Common law principles ought to form the background of such analysis.ConclusionThe creators of smart contracts have invited society to a party they are throwing. They say that this party has better food, booze, and music than the party being thrown down the street. But the other party has all of the people, even if the amenities are not as good. Whether society shows up to this new party is an open question. This is because legacy systems exist for a reason. By definition, they work. Both switching costs and uncertainty stand as barriers to the adoption of any new technology. Yet if the value of the new technology is overwhelming, such a change is more likely to occur.One way of reducing uncertainty is by situating the new in the old. While there may be many barriers to the adoption of smart contracts, legal uncertainty need not be one of them. Courts need not upend extant jurisprudence to accommodate smart contracts.. All Rights Reserved. 2016.Privacy | Alumni

Please do not replace or remove without starting a new thread. Token Black and Token Crip. The Token Minority is a character designed to get more minority groups into the plot. This serves several purposes: Allows the producers of the show to broaden the appeal of the show by giving more viewers protagonists they can identify with. Is useful for bringing in discussions of racial issues, gender issues or homophobia into the plot. Helps the producers feel a little better about using a Scary Minority Suspect in every other case. Allows the producers to make race jokes related to minority without any shame. Allows the producers to avoid criticism from minority groups. Fulfills the executives' desire for the show to be more ethnically respectful. Depending on the setting, it can merely be an accurate representation of demographics in that region or industry. In some casts of animal, alien, or monster characters, World of Funny Animals or not, there is a majority species and one or more minority species. Often the majority of the animal cast is made up of mammals and there is a token non-mammal. Usually, the token non-mammal is a bird, but reptiles, amphibians, and even invertebrates are certainly not unheard of. Sometimes, there are token Petting Zoo People in a group of Funny Animal /Civilized Animal tier animals. Sometimes, there are token animals, aliens, or monsters representing ethnic minorities in a group made of supposedly "white" ones. You might see this term used derisively in most contexts. This isn't out of contempt for minorities; this trope simply causes problems with representation, where, for example, the single black guy is forced to be exemplary of his entire race. This is very likely to lead to Positive Discrimination and make him The Scrappy . If there are instead four minorities (assuming a sizable cast), they can all have different strengths and flaws which round them out and make them generally equal to the rest of the cast. Taking this approach, Unfortunate Implications are unlikely to happen unless you somehow subject them all to the same stereotypes. You can even have one be explicitly antagonistic. However, this can be Truth in Television in cases where the prevalence of the minority, combined with the size of the cast and the demographics of the setting make it genuinely unlikely that there will be more than one member of the minority present (not that this would justify stereotypes, but it would justify having only one minority). For instance, a show set in rural Maine would strain credulity if its cast of five main characters included multiple racial minorities (simply because rural Maine is overwhelmingly white), and a show set in the American Bible Belt would have a hard time convincingly justifying multiple self-professed atheists in a cast of ten (unless a major theme of the show is nonconformity or religious/atheist tensions). Compare Captain Ethnic , Token Nonhuman , Token Human , Token Enemy Minority , Token Minority Couple , Token White , Twofer Token Minority , Five-Token Band , Informed Judaism , Black Vikings , Black Best Friend , and The Smurfette Principle . Examples: open/close all folders Advertising TV Ads in Australia sometimes have this (especially in "hip" young thing products like Coke). May have 1 Asian Woman, 1 African Woman, 1 White Girl, 2 White Guys and 1 Aboriginal or Middle Eastern Male. Target ads are particularly well-known for this. There will always be one blonde white girl, one brunette white girl, one Asian girl and one black girl. Always. University brochures also do this. You'll always see at least one black person and Asian person for every two white people. In brochures for traditionally black schools, there's a token white on every page. Further proof that Covers Always Lie. A controversy erupted after it was revealed that a photograph used to adorn the front of a University of Wisconsin-Madison undergraduate application booklet for the 2001-02 school year was altered to add the image of a black student among a sea of white faces. A Veet ad has this. When they state that eight out of ten women were happy with the product, they showed a lineup of eight women with one of them being black. Curiously, they are all dubbed over with the same voice. Anime & Manga Poor Hans, in The Daughter of Twenty Faces, is seemingly the only non-Japanese member of a group of burglars led by Gentleman Thief "Twenty-Faces" that is ostensibly a globe-trotting organization. He often uses Gratuitous German, to boot. Super Dimension Fortress Macross/Robotech had Claudia Grant/Claudia LaSalle, apparently the only black woman on the entire ship. Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross had Bowie Emerson, seemingly the only black man on the entire planet Glorie. In Robotech, he was re-written to be Claudia's nephew (and given a new surname of "Grant"). Rakshata and Viletta of Code Geass, as they're the only Non-white/Chinese/Japanese characters of any plot importance, and of the two, Rakshata is the one who gets played in a more positive light. Of the others, we have a supposedly elite pilot who dies mere seconds after she first appears on screen, and King. And Nunnally fits in to the paraplegic category. Mobile Suit Gundam 00: In the first season of Gundam 00, Daryl Dodge has the honor of being the only black person at all. He's also killed off in episode 23. Season 2 does introduce another black man as president of the Earth Sphere Federation, although that might be more to reflect the real world than tokenism. However, he has little impact on the plot. A minor example with Setsuna F Seiei-whilst he does appear to fit this trope both within Celestial Being and in the wider Gundam metaverse in regards to protagonists, his middle eastern homeland forms a two episode story arc in the first season and plays a large role in his interactions with the princess of a neighbouring country. However, the middle eastern aspects of the story only serve to represent the region and 21st century problems to Japanese audiences, and beyond that, has no real importance to the story as the series progresses. Mobile Suit Gundam 0080: War in the Pocket has Professor Lunland as the sole black character, and Gabriel as the sole Latino. Mobile Suit Gundam ZZ has the black Shinta and Ambiguously Brown Qum, but that's about it. Later in the show, Judau ended up befriending a young pilot from Africa, but his time on the show was very brief. Simon is the only black character in Durarara!!, though a black gangster is also seen in the episode "Heaven's Vengeance". It's also implied that minor character Tom Tanaka might be part black, though it's never clarified either way. Sailor Moon: Elza Gray was the only black character in Sailor Moon. There was also the Ambiguously Brown Sailor Pluto, depicted as noticeably dark-skinned in comparison to other Senshi, and moreso in the manga. Some say she's of Romani descent. Indian student Akira is the only non-Japanese member of the main cast of Tsuritama. Kate, the grandmother of one of the other protagonists, is French, while several black and Arabic members appear in the show's villainous Cosmopolitan Council. Bob from Tenjho Tenge would count as this. He's the sole black member of the otherwise Japanese cast. Similarly, Central High's Vice President is the only black character in Daily Lives of High School Boys. Understandable since the series is set in a small Japanese town, and usually it tends to be large cities that take part in student exchange programs with other countries. Yasutora "Chad" Sado in Bleach is half-Japanese, half-Latino in an otherwise manga-typical all-Japanese cast. Jun Hono, the half-black, half-Japanese pilot from Great Mazinger and Mazinkaiser. Jose Rodriguez, the nerdy Afro-Latino doctor from Kyo Kara Maoh! Mikasa from Attack on Titan is one of the very few Asians alive, if not the last one, at the time of the story. She serves as a deconstruction; she's a token minority because her mother's people have been nearly wiped out. The fandom sometimes jokingly speculates that she's the beneficiary of Conservation of Ninjutsu because of this, resulting in Positive Discrimination. It's ultimately subverted when we find out that Levi's surname is Ackerman, indicating that Mikasa's badass qualities are inherited from her European father's lineage, not her Asian mother's. Choe Gu-Sung from Psycho-Pass is the only Korean character in a series that takes place in Japan. In Saki, an inversion happens for Rinkai, whose mahjong team is otherwise composed of transfer students. Satoha, the vanguard player, is the only Japanese member of the team, partly because of the rules requiring a Japanese player as vanguard, and partly because she is the ace. Played straight with Aislinn of Miyamori's team, who is from New Zealand and is on an otherwise entirely Japanese team. Fullmetal Alchemist: The Conqueror of Shamballa takes place in early 20th century Germany. Of the main characters Noah is the only non-white character, being Romani. Audio Play Lampshaded in The Firesign Theatre's "High School Madness" sketch, from the album Don't Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers, where Mexican-American students come out of nowhere just to ask the white protagonist for advice (then promptly disappear). Comic Books Adam Brashear, the Blue Marvel who featured in the eponymous mini series of 2009, represents a rather awkward representation of this trope. He is for all intents and purposes (in the context of the story) a Black Superman from a time when the adjective was quite emphatically capitalized. And applied as a noun. It doesn't help that even without his powers, Brashear is a super-man - an athlete, military hero and scientific genius who gained ultra-super-powers when the experimental anti-matter reactor he was creating exploded. For about a year, he was the primary hero of the Marvel Universe (perhaps coincidentally around the same time the Sentry was supposedly very successful), but then it was discovered he was black, which immediately led to outrage and uproar among both black and white communities, until the President (JFK) gave the Blue Marvel the Congressional Medal of Honor and told him to quit being a superhero. Which he did until the present day. He is now a member if the Mighty Avengers. Under the "women as minorities" category (which, in superhero comics, they definitely were until much later and in many books still are) every superhero team used to have exactly one female member. The Avengers had The Wasp (later replaced by the Scarlet Witch), the Fantastic Four had the Invisible Girl (later Invisible Woman), the Justice League had Wonder Woman (or the Black Canary, depending on when you asked), the Teen Titans had Wonder Girl, the original X-Men had Marvel Girl, and the second team of X-Men had Storm (who was also, for quite a while, the only black X-Man. She joined the team along with Sunfire, a Japanese man who left almost immediately, and Thunderbird, a Native American man who died almost immediately, making her also the only active non-white X-Man for a good while). All those teams except the FF tend to have more female members these days (though the JLA goes through periods of focusing on D.C.'s "Big 7" wherein Wonder Woman is the only female member) and some have gone through stretches where the women outnumbered the men. Blindside in the comic series Relative Heroes. Notable in that the series was about a family of superheroes, and Blindside was explained as having been adopted in order to justify having a black kid as part of the main cast. The Justice League goes back in forth on this, with some eras (such as the Meltzer and McDuffie years) having very diverse casts, while others, like the James Robinson run, were criticized for having no minority members whatsoever. During the New 52 relaunch, Cyborg was retconned into being the sole non-white founding member of the original team, presumably to make up for the extended periods of whiteness. Lampshaded in Grant Morrison's JLA run. Plastic Man jokingly states that Steel can't quit the Justice League because then the team would lose its only minority member. Archie Comics: In order to keep up with changing American trends, the comic added some ethnic characters in the 70's: African-Americans Coach Clayton, his son Chuck (who, like many Africans of the day, sported a righteous 'fro) and Chuck's girlfriend Nancy, as well as the Hispanic Frankie Valdez & his girlfriend Maria. As of 2010, the former three continue to appear quite regularly (and Chuck has naturally lost the 'fro). The latter two, not so much. The company later introduced Kevin Keller, the first gay character in the series. Kevin was met with backlash by some conservative Christian groups but his debut issues sold very well and he was even given his own mini-series. Later Archie comics have also introduced some other minority characters, including Ginger Lopez (who works for a teen fashion magazine) and Raj Patel (an Indian student interested in film). Ginger shows up fairly regularly (moreso than Maria). In Archie Comics (2015) Jughead is asexual. He's the only known ace character. Debuting in 52, Batwoman managed to provoke a Broken Base even before this due to press releases touting her as DC's first lesbian hero, who would be receiving DC's full support. Then DC promptly didn't do anything with her outside the series for over a year (and even in the series, she received little attention, as she was more supporting cast for her girlfriend, Renee Montoya). In all that time, she had very little storyline, so her characterization was mostly as a closeted lesbian and a Jew. When she came back in her own series, she was retconned into having a much more butch look and having come out several years before her first appearance. The Falcon was this in-universe. He was added to The Avengers because Gyrich insisted that the team should have more black members; he didn't actually want to join. According to Christopher Priest, Falcon's nickname in the Marvel offices throughout the 70s and early 80s was "Fal-coon". No, Priest wasn't alright with it, though being a lowly intern at the time, he didn't raise a big stink. In his blog, he refuses to name the co-workers who used it for fear of burning his bridges. Years later, Triathlon served the exact same role (again, in-universe) during Kurt Busiek's run. Later iterations of the team were thankfully more diverse. Rage also had bits of this in his debut story. He was given a spot on the Avengers line-up after picking a fight with Captain America over the lack of minority heroes on the team. Empress was the sole minority member of the original Young Justice team, and was added relatively late into the run after some complaints about the Monochromatic makeup of the cast. Lampshaded in Peter Milligan's X-Force run with Anarchist, a black superhero who opposes the decision to add another black member to the team. His reasoning? Since most superhero teams rarely have more than one minority member, another black guy on the team means that one of them will inevitably die. Averted in the X-Statix series that followed, which has an additional black member (Venus), plus a Latino member (El Guapo), and two gay members (Vivisector and Phat). In the 2005 Marvel comic Wha...Huh?, one of the stories reimagines Black Panther as a white man from South America, who is upset when he learns that The Avengers just want a token black superhero in their team and thought he was misrepresenting his race (also, Black Widow is just there to fill the "woman quota".) Though Runaways had a more diverse cast than most other mainstream comics, the team has only ever had two black members, neither of whom stayed until the end of the series, and one of whom was actually a Skrull. Superman comics Ron Troupe started as the only black recurring staff member working at The Daily Planet. Jem and the Holograms: Jetta, the token British character. She was the only non-American until The Stingers showed up. Jetta's also the only non-white member of her band, but this is downplayed as the series has a diverse cast. Blaze is the only confirmed transgender character thus far. Fan Works The "black guy in the corner" from Sherlock Season 4. The author even explicitly states that he added him so his story wouldn't be racist. In the early days of the My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fandom, Twilight was often portrayed the only POC in Ponyville when the cast was "humanized" in fan works, usually as black or Indian. Nowadays, more diverse interpretations are becoming more popular in the fandom, such as Middle Eastern Fluttershy and Rarity, Black or biracial Pinke Pie, Applejack and/or Rarity being trans mares, varying sexualities amongst the Mane Six, and Rainbow Dash being a black or latino lesbian showing up sometimes. Film Parodied by Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle with posters advertising the first movie as starring "That Asian guy from American Pie" and "That Indian guy from Van Wilder". In terms of film, equally well parodied/referenced by the "Token Black Guy" in Not Another Teen Movie. Named Malik Token, the Genre Savvy token helpfully explains the joke to the audience by introducing himself as the person that stays out of conversations and says "Damn!", "Shit!", and "That is whack!" At a party later in the film, he sees another black guy, played by Sean Patrick Thomas, Token Minority from Cruel Intentions, and tells him that he was at the party first and the other man apologizes and leaves the party. Malik's Crowning Moment of Awesome was when he got to say, "Damn, that shit is whack!" There's also the musical number: "I'm only in this song because I'm a black guy" Star Wars After Episode IV became a blockbuster, numerous people noticed that an entire galaxy of humans were all white. (Which was not entirely true; it was just that the main characters were all white.) Episode V introduced Billy Dee Williams as Lando Calrissian, the Token Minority Black. Samuel L. Jackson in the prequels may also be a example of this, as his character serves as little more than a background character until Revenge of the Sith (excluding his excellent use in the Clone Wars shorts). Casting Temuera Morrison, who is a Mori, as Jango Fett and by retroactive consequence, his clone Boba Fett and every single clonetrooper reduces all other characters in the series (black, white or green) to token minorities by sheer weight of numbers. The initial casting announcement for the first episode of the third trilogy included another black actor, but not Billy Dee Williams. Meaning, as of this writing there are now three black guys in the Galaxy Far, Far Away, but in accordance with this trope, only one is allowed to be alive at any one time. Since then, they've also added Lupita Nyong'o to the cast of Episode VII (but she voices an orange-skinned alien, so the actress's race is not visible). While the 2006 historical film Flyboys was already heavily criticized for its historical inaccuracies relating to its World War I setting, one of the more amusing ones came from the film's fictional Token Minority, Eugene Skinner, a black boxer who joined the squadron to 'pay back' his adopted homeland. Mainly because the end of the movie showed a picture of the real-life squadron which was composed of exactly zero minorities. A rare moment where a film actually seems proud to reveal when it didn't do its research. The Other Wiki's entry on the film points out that the film confuses the Lafayette Escadrille with the Lafayette Flying Corps with whom Eugene Bullard (the real person Skinner was based on) actually flew. Harvey Weinstein loved using this trope for his productions back in the late 1990's and early 2000's. Starting with Scream 2, nearly all of his teen-aimed productions had at least one token black character (often played by a rapper) solely to bump up the box office. He seemed to stop this after Shall We Dance?, which had an Advertised Extra in the form of Ja Rule (who appeared in one concert scene and had no purpose to the plot). Mercutio is a black Drag Queen in the Baz Luhrmann film of Romeo & Juliet. Also a case of Black Dude Dies First. Rochelle in The Craft, the only black girl of the four member witches' Coven, not that it make her more sympathetic than the rest at the end though. Both versions of Stephen King's It, the Made-for-TV Movie It (1990) and the theatrical It (2017) have the character of Mike, the only African-American kid of the Losers' Club, who is also in the novel. Literature The Animorphs series was actually pretty groundbreaking in its handling of minorities. In the '90's, it was extremely unusual for a middle-grade novel to have a minority protagonist at all, let alone four of them. (Rachel and Jake were Jewish, Cassie was black, and Marco was hispanic). It also got away with discussing prejudice a few times, a biracial relationship (and it was even acknowledged a couple times), and a little racism portrayed when the ultimate message wasn't about the evils or racism (specifically, the society at the beginning of the third Megamorphs, and the racist guy Cassie meets when she travels through time). They even acknowledged the existence of gay people, which was almost never done. Oh, and there were two female protagonists, and they weren't treated any differently than the males in terms of their ability to kick ass, making the series one of the first middle-grade series to have a cross-gender appeal. All in all, it was one of the most inclusive series of its day. And in later books, K. A. Applegate proved even more that she was dedicated to diversity without stereotypes. One of those later books was the Remnants series, which had several black, Hispanic, and Asian characters, a character who had a messed up face because it was burned in a fire (2Face), and Noyze, who grew up deaf. They even tried to put a lesbian in this kids series from 2001, but sadly, it didn't quite work as planned. Invoked in a short story "Papanin's Mauser" by Michael Veller. It depicts a drift-ice research unit of four people. Three of them are Russians and Communists and the last one is a nonpartisan German. According to the Soviet laws three Communists is enough to constitute a Party cell, so every day they have to conduct a Party meeting, for members only. During these meetings the German has to leave the "meeting room", that is the tent where they all live and spend time tramping around it in the bone-chilling cold. Eventually he applies for membership in the Party to end this nightmare but is rejected on the following ground: as he is he symbolizes the international nature of the Soviet people and the unbreakable ties between partisans and nonpartisans. Jessi (black), Claudia (Asian), and Abby (Jewish) in The Baby-Sitters Club. Lheorvine is the only black man in Black Legion, and one of precious few in Warhammer 40,000. Before Matt Ward retconned their dark skin into a "mutation" the Salamanders space marines, and the people of their homeworld, Nocturne, were an entire planet of token blacks. Post-Ward, it's assumed that the denizens of Nocturne are white, but "turn black" when they become Salamanders. In How to Build a Skydeck, fish-out-of-water protagonist Stan realizes that all his co-workers avoid him for being a Token Minority. Specifically, being the only white guy on the construction crew. Lord Wulfston in The Savage Empire books by Jean Lorrah is the only black person we see in the first five books or so. On the other hand, nobody makes a big deal about it; he just has a hard time being anonymous. Harry Potter's school Hogwarts has a few, including the very Irish Seamus Finnegan (although there may be others who are less obvious), the Indian Patil twins, the Jewish Anthony Goldstein, the Chinese Cho Chang, and the black Dean Thomas, Lee Jordan, Angelina Johnson, and Blaise Zabini. To Mrs. Rowling's credit, no ado is made of any of these characters' ethnicities, nor are they ever described as such. In fact, Word of God has been needed to identify some of the black characters in the series. Sisterhood Series by Fern Michaels: Yoko Akia is the Token Asian, and Alexis Thorne is the Token Black of the Sisterhood or the Vigilantes. The other women are white. The two characters' nationalities definitely play a role in the series. Oddly, Alexis reveals in her thoughts that she knows that she was framed for crimes she did not commit because she was a poor black woman, but in the book starring her called Lethal Justice, that was not brought up at all! Gone has a very large and very diverse cast, with multiple black, Asian, Latin, and gay characters, and even one character with severe autism. The Mortal Instruments: Simon is Jewish, Maia is biracial, and Magnus is part Asian. The House of Night: Kramisha is the only black Red Fledgling. She is portrayed as a Soul Sister who speaks mostly in jive. Shaunee, the only black member of the "nerd heard" (and the only black lead for the first several books) and who we're constantly reminded is black. In the book "Come a Stranger" by Cynthia Voigt, the main character gets to be the only black girl at an exclusive summer camp. After the camp gives her a lame reason for kicking her out, she gets asked "How does it feel to be an ex-token minority?" Both Jem Carstairs and Magnus Bane from The Infernal Devices are part Asian. Radar from Paper Towns; he even lampshades this by referring to himself as the "token black friend" of the group. Mike in Stephen King It (see the film version). Live Action TV Teen Wolf seems to maintain a slot for a recurring gay extra (Danny in seasons 1-3, Mason in season 4). These characters are usually only in about half the episodes in any given season, onscreen for less than two minutes if they do appear and may not have any actual dialogue. They occupy the roles of best friends of secondary characters. If they have dialogue, it almost invariably contains some reminder that they are gay. The tokenism appeared to be broken in Season 3 with the introduction of gay werewolf Ethan. But he also occupied a minor role, did not always have lines and was only present for the one season. 30 Rock Lampshaded when, to call attention during a GE exclusive lunch, Jack calls out, "Gentlemen... token ladies." The character Toofer is named for the Twofer Token Minority trope. In a transparent attempt to say "we had a gay regular on the show," Law & Order had Serena Southerlyn come out as lesbian to the audience in the last minute of her final episode. Worth noting that actress attended the same school of Mona Lisa Smile as listed above. Law & Order: Special Victims Unit lampshades it when Detective Fin replaces Detective Jeffries (both are black). The show also averted it in later seasons with the addition of M.E. Warner and Dr. Huang to the regular cast. As of Season 15 this trope is entirely averted, as of the five members of the main cast two are Latino and one is black. Rajesh "Raj" Koothrappali of The Big Bang Theory was born and raised in New Delhi, a reference to his actor, Kunal Nayyar, having spent most of his life growing up in the city. Averted in Grey's Anatomy, in which almost half the regular cast is non-white. The production team is, however, very aware and tellingly proud of the fact. The GA staff used racial-blind casting, when you start auditions without picking the ethnic background of the characters. However as the show continued and a load of new cast members were added, the majority of them were white. Brooklyn Nine-Nine averts this trope. Of the seven members of the main cast, three are female, two are Latina, two are African-American, and one is Jewish. Captain Holt, is both African-American and gay, though neither he nor his partner fall easily into stereotypes. Argentine-born actress Stephanie Beatriz said that when she and Cuban-American Melissa Fumero realized they were both members of the main cast, they were sure there had been a mistake and that one of them was going to get fired Subverted on The Red Green Show, with the character of Edgar K.B. Montrose, played by First Nations actor Graham Greene. Greene himself approached producer Steve Smith, asking to be on the show after enjoying it on TV. The role they gave him was essentially colour-blind - that of an explosives "enthusiast" who can't really call himself an expert, since experts have the proper license and permits, and more training in handling dynamite than just watching a lot of Road Runner cartoons. Edgar was Too Dumb to Live, but that also described everybody else on the show. The only reference to Greene's ethnicity in his time on the show was a humorous Shout-Out in his first appearance, when Edgar commented about the film Dances with Wolves, and stated that the "Native guy" (Greene himself), should have gotten the Oscar. Similarly, the only non-white main character on Corner Gas is Davis Quinton, the Sergeant of Dog River's two-member police force. He (and the actor who plays him, Lorne Cardinal) is a member of the Cree Nation, hardly a rarity in Rural Saskatchewan. However, this is incidental to his character; it's only brought up once, at the end of the first season, when Karen suggests going to a ticket scalper and he acts offended. Also, both bartenders (Phil and Paul) appear Cree. One of them speaks some Cree, enough to know the original name of Dog River. Referenced in Star Trek: Voyager (itself a very racially diverse show) where Janeway and Chakotay discuss the issues involved in a ship crewed by both Federation members and Maquis separatists. Janeway notes that by making the Maquis Chakotay her second in command she hopes she has already shown that she can be tolerant of them, and Chakotay responds, "I have no intention of being your token Maquis." Back in the original series, the creators had to fight Executive Meddling to get two Token Minorities, Sulu and Uhura, on the bridge, and some nonwhites among the extras. The original pilot pushed further with a female second in command, and Spock was considered to be radical at the time as an Alien, especially with the original plans being for Spock to have either green or red skin. Also notable that both lead characters of Spock and Kirk were played by Jews. Then there's the gutsy move of creating a Russian main character at the height of the Cold War. Deep Space Nine, with a somewhat varied cast itself, has an odd class example. Miles O'Brien is heavily played up as a Closer to Earth blue-collar NCO in a staff of implicitly elite Officer and a Gentleman types, complete with a labour-movement martyr in his ancestry. (Granted, one can call Captain Sisko upwardly-mobile, as the son of a restaurateur, but this was revealed much later and never emphasised). Though the Federation is supposed to be truly egalitarian, classless meritocracy, so the whole issue is a little murky. Star Trek: The Next Generation of course had Worf as an in-universe example, the only Klingon in all of Starfleet, having been adopted by humans in his youth. Quite a bit of Character Development resulted from his dealings with born-and-raised Klingons who variously failed to live up to his idealized image of Klingon honor or disapproved of his choice to stay with the humans instead of returning to his people (where his family was disgraced anyways). Another in-universe example would be Data as the only Android of the Starfleet (and one of the very few Androids of the whole universe). In The Class Kyle's boyfriend Aaron is introduced as a secondary character to counteract the Monochrome Casting. Averted in the original Battlestar Galactica, especially in the episode "Fire In Space" which was nominated for an NAACP Image Award for Boomer and Tigh's extensive roles. Pete Ross from Smallville is an especially funny example, as his comic book counterpart is white. Both radio experts on Hogan's Heroes were token black characters. Given that they were all prisoners and obviously not all from the same unit, WWII segregation wasn't really an issue. Sgt. Kinchloe (played by Ivan Dixon) was more than the radio expert - he was second-in-command. He also had at least three episodes showcasing him. And his role was prominent enough that the practice of cutting out the black characters for the "Southern Version" (practiced up to the late 1960's) wasn't usually possible. Sgt. Baker (played by Kenneth Washington) was a better fit when he took Kinchloe's place, having previously been the one black guy in the mob of line-less background prisoners. It is still notable that most of Kinchloe's spotlight episodes were the only ones to feature a black Girl of the Week (an African princess and an old high school girlfriend respectively). Saturday Night Live has been guilty of this at multiple points in its run. Garrett Morris in the 70s. Eddie Murphy in the early 80s. While certainly nobody would question Murphy's right to be there, the fact remained that the show felt no obligation to have another black in the cast as long as Murphy was there. (In fact, Robert Townsend, who was originally hired to be the token black guy, was let go once Murphy showed up.) In the early 90s, the show for a change had multiple blacks in the cast. However, when SNL turned over most of its cast in 1995, they kept Tim Meadows on primarily to avoid giving the impression that the show was trying to rid itself of all its black performers. For the past few years it's been just Kenan Thompson. Season 35 introduces Jay Pharoah alongside Kenan. As a matter of fact, he's beginning to take some precedence over Kenan, especially to play the skinnier, more handsome African-American celebrities such as Denzel Washington. But it helps that his impressions are spot-on for nearly anyone. However there's also the non-black but non-white characters, like Nasim Pedrad, who is Iranian (notwithstanding the controversy over whether Iranians should be lumped in with Arabs and other Semitic peoples, or whether they are "dark whites"), or Fred Armisen who is part German, Japanese and Venezuelan. He is both the second Asian and second Hispanic cast member of SNL. The first Hispanic cast member was Horatio Sanz, a white Hispanic from the looks of him. He was often cast as Italian characters. In late 2013, SNL received a lot of criticism for their relative lack of black female cast members throughout their almost 40 year history. They held a casting call and ended up casting Sasheer Zamata, who is only the fifth black female cast member in the history of the show and the only one on the show since Maya Rudolph's departure in 2007. Benson from Soap (made in the 70s, mind) was the only black character in the show for the first three seasons and he was the butler. He was never used to put across any racial message and if anything he was the Only Sane Man in the entire show. When Benson got replaced in season three, there was Saunders the Expy, also black. In season three only there was Polly Dawson, a black woman who dates Danny who was there to try and push a racial message around. They do get some racial attacks and eventually Danny gets paranoid about everybody staring at the two of them in public. MADtv was guilty of this with Bobby Lee, the only Asian on the show. He even played a stereotypically Asian recurring character. Ricky and later Junito (Latino) of Noah's Arc, which has a predominantly African-American cast. In fact, they are the only non-African-Americans of the cast. A sketch on Dead Ringers lampshaded this with the Schwarzenegger film Shooting Lots and Lots of Bad Guys with my Very Big Gun- Arnie shouts "Noooooo! Token Black Buddy!" after his sidekick is killed by Token British Bad Guy. Dreama (black) in Sabrina the Teenage Witch. Buffy the Vampire Slayer Both subverted and played straight. Instead of bringing a token gay character onto the show, the writers had one of the three central characters turn out to be a lesbian. On the other hand, it wasn't until the seventh season that there was an important character who was black, and when he did show up he was the token black guy. Season 3 had the Genre Savvy (and sadly under-used) villain Mr. Trick, a modern black vampire who commented on the fact that there were very few people of color in Sunnydale. There were also a few other black characters, like Absalom and Olivia, as well as Rona in season seven. Before coming out as Lesbian, Willow was already the Token Jewish Girl. Of course after her outing she became Twofer Token Minority. The U.S. black music program Soul Train had some token white dancers in the audience. The character of Charlie Young was added to The West Wing just because the NAACP was criticizing the show for not having a Token Minority. Charlie's "token minority" status is particularly interesting in this case, as the only two of the shows main characters are white and Protestant (and that is if one guesses on Sam, whose religion is not mentioned but can be presumed not to be Catholic or Jewish). Two of the main characters are Jewish, four are Catholic, making the show's main cast far more diverse than the actual US population, even without Charlie in the mix. Star Trek: Enterprise, unlike the previous shows (which were such aversions of Humans Are White they were often accused of being Five Token Bands by some), has a black guy, a Asian woman, and everyone else is white. And also note that, in order to make it obvious to the audience he was only on the show so they could say they had a Token Minority, the black guy was a glorified extra... Subverted on ''Sue Thomas F. B. Eye" where the main character is a deaf female FBI agent. Scrubs had the great feature of JD and Turk's College Brochure. Turk is photoshopped in twice to make it appear more diverse. Lampshaded in the episode My Long Goodbye when Turk struggles to think of other black members of staff. He gets himself and Nurse Roberts (whom he is speaking to), Snoop Dog Attending, and Leonard the Security Guard... Turk:This is a white-ass hospital. He then adds that if this were a horror movie, he'd be getting nervous. Venus Flytrap on WKRP in Cincinnati, although the show made a strong effort to depict him as a well-rounded individual. Parodied in an episode of The Real Husbands of Hollywood where George Lopez guest-stars as himself, with his introduction caption stating "Helping attract Latino audience." On House, Omar Epps was the only series regular of color for three seasons, until House hired three new underlings, at which point Kal Penn became the token South Asian guy. Having said that, Wilson, Cuddy and Taub are all Jewish to varying degrees of obviousness. And Thirteen is bisexual, and House is an atheist. And his atheism is portrayed... well, not negatively, at any rate. They do okay. Robin Hood has David Harewood as a black Friar Tuck in 12th century England. Van-Pires had Snap, who is really blatantly this (just look at that nickname!) Bonnie Bennett in The Vampire Diaries TV show. She has her own storyline for a bit, but it turns out to exist only to facilitate the (white, male) lead vampire's storyline. She was white in the books - but they completely erased the existence another extremely prominent female character who was Latina and definitely minimized Bonnie's personality and agency. Joss Whedon's Firefly Zoe, the second in command on board Serenity, is both black and a female in a position of authority. And she's badass! Shepherd Book is black, old, religious and badass! There are, however, no Chinese people. The villain from the Big Damn Movie, a Wicked Cultured black Well-Intentioned Extremist with a katana who avoids every Scary Black Man trope apart from being both black and fucking terrifying. Showtime's Dexter manages to avert this. In adapting from the book, the producers were given the liberty to change the ethnicity of any character based on the actors they wanted to hire. Instead, they hired a genuinely racially diverse cast and nobody got a Race Lift. However, the issue of tokenism is addressed; LaGuerta got her position based on her ability to spin things to her advantage and her Twofer Token Minority status (black Hispanic woman), and when she pisses off her boss, he very carefully replaces her with a second twofer-token (a black, Haitian woman) who got her rank as an officer the hard way. Captain Matthews: (referring to LaGuerta's replacement) Turns out she's an actual hero. Khaleel "Kenny" Al-Bahir is the Token Middle Eastern in The War at Home. Also token gay. In Flashpoint, we have Lewis Young, Winnie the dispatcher and after Lewis's death Leah Kerns as the Token Minorities. Spin City had Carter Heywood, a Twofer Token Minority who averted both Positive Discrimination and plain old discrimination by being a well-rounded character. Michael Boatman was the only regular black cast member. Lost, despite having a huge cast from a diverse range of backgrounds, only ever had one gay character, Tom Friendly. And his sexuality wasn't even confirmed until after he'd been killed off. Some Disney Channel shows include a rich, intelligent, yet conniving and selfish Latino as a token minority character. Some examples: That's So Raven, The Proud Family and Hannah Montana. Earth 2 had a token black character who was a violent criminal whose "reform" consisted of a chip in his brain when the chip malfunctioned, he tries to kill everybody. Carrusel has a few. Cirilo is Black. David is Ashkenazi Jewish. Kokimoto is Japanese. Bibi is North American of English Ancestry. Jim Carrey launched his career being the only white guy (most of the time) on the predominantly black In Living Color!. Modern Family has Gloria and her son Manny, who fit Hispanic stereotypes perfectly. They are also used as an excuse to use Hispanic jokes shamelessly. There are also two gay men who are raising an adopted Vietnamese child. Boy Meets World had two separate token blacks a different points: Eli Williams in season 3 and Angela in seasons 5-7. Angela lampshades this a few times: "Gosh I got to get some black friends." Transparently present every single time a British channel is presenting Association Football. The usual line up is "old white managernoteCoach, for American audiences.", "middle-aged white recently retired ex midfielder/defender/goalie", "just-retired black forward/midfielder". Sometimes they even try to claim "Scottish" as equivalent to "black." Infrequently but annoyingly, the channel ends up with someone from Francophone Africa whose grasp of the English language simply isn't up to the job, making the tokenism at play especially obvious (and presumably depriving Francophone viewers of the much better standard of commentary he could offer in his native tongue). The modern Charlie's Angels revamp adds a black Angel in order to appeal to modern audiences. Stockinger, the spinoff of the Austrian show Inspector Rex, has Antonella Simoni, a cheerful Italian-Austrian cop and the first female cop to appear in the Inspector Rex franchise. A few Australian cop shows have had a single token Polynesian cop - Water Rats, Rush, and East West 101 are good examples, although East West 101 had a Muslim Arab-Australian cop as the main character, so in that case 'token' would be stretching it. Regardless, whether this represents a trend in the Real Life Aussie police force, or just actor availability, is unknown. All 3 CSI series had one black character each. CSI had Warrick first and then Ray Langston, though with his departure, there aren't any. CSI NY had Sheldon Hawkes. CSI: Miami had Alexx (season 1-6), Tara (season 7), and Walter (season 8-10). There are quite a few black characters on Supernatural, but somehow none of them come even as close to being core cast as the women. In fact, the only one who managed to be seriously recurring was the psychotic Vampire Hunter who eventually became a vampire. His Scary Black Man traits were played with initially in that Dean thought he and his badass attitude toward decapitation was awesome, and then the guy turned out to be a hateful extremist who'd offed his own little sister after she was vamped, which pushed Dean's Berserk Button, and who didn't make any distinction between Friendly Neighborhood Vampires and the dangerous kind. The archangel Raphael, the one who never really does anything or gets much characterization, is the one linked to a bloodline of black people. He never even wears the same black person for more than a couple of appearances, because after he burns them out and dumps them they're in no condition to consent again. That poor family. Also, those poor actors. The guy who he wore in 'Free to be You and Me' was pretty impressively creepy. There was a married black couple of hunters, one of whom was British, who were rude and overconfident. The husband died in their first appearance, and the wife was not very useful and never came back. First-season psychic character Missouri Moseley could have been useful on a number of occasions since when they've been desperate for allies, including on a couple of occasions specifically a psychic, but has never even been referenced, even when they went back to her town, although it was too late for help by that point. In seasons two and three there were a few appearances by hard-assed Cowboy Cop Victor Hendriksen, the black FBI agent assigned to the Dean Winchester case. He had an Enemy Mine when the station in which he was holding the boys fell under demonic siege, and after they left he was killed. He reappeared as an angry ghost at the beginning of season four. There's also Bobby's old partner Rufus Turner, gruff old bastard with a taste for fine scotch. Minorities other than black generally don't even get token appearances, though there were some hot Asian fanservice girls, at least one with a small speaking part. The longest running non-white character is probably Kevin Tran, who showed up at the very end of season 7 and made sporadic appearances throughout seasons 8 and 9. His mother, Linda, also premiered around the same time, but has been in even fewer episodes than him. And as of the mid-season 9 finale, Kevin has been killed off. He showed up as a ghost a few episodes after that, and left with Linda. Neither have been back since. This is a show about two white guys, with the addition of up to two other white guys, where a supermajority of women with speaking roles are blondes. Everything but white males appear only as token, although a couple of white women have gotten to the level of supporting cast before dying. Or, in one case, being given Laser-Guided Amnesia so they wouldn't be traumatized by their kidnapping, or miss Dean after he left them for their own good. Initially played straight and later subverted in The Walking Dead with T-Dog, who is the only major character in the series not to have any sub-plots and little dialog. Extremely apparent in Season 2 episode "Judge, Jury, Executioner" in which the group deliberates whether or not to kill Randall, the episode focuses on the opinions of every member of the group except T-Dog whose one line of dialog is cut off by Dale. Also played straight in Season 3. T-Dog is killed off, shortly after they gain a new black cast member. The new black guy is then killed off later, just as Tyreese, another black guy, shows up. Later, Tyreese and his sister Sasha join the main cast, though Tyreese died in the episode after Beth. Add in Michonne at the start of Season 3, and she is easily one of the most prominent female characters on the show, being an undeniable badass with a sword. Additionally, both Michonne and Sasha are still alive and important to the show, as of the mid-season finale for Season 7. Angel had Charles Gunn as the only black guy, though Doyle and Lorne might count as token demons. In Chuck, it's lampshaded that Morgan only manages to keep his job at the Buy-More because of his Hispanic descent, fulfilling the ethnic that she's a transgender. She does this before providing little else in the context of the game. In StarCraft, the only black fellow in the entire Colonial/UED Marine Corps drives the SCV. I get that Terrans are space hillbillies, but wow... Ace Combat series' Constructed World of Strangereal seems to have no equivalent of Africa or East Asia, yet some token characters obviously representing those regions' ethnic groups come included: The most egregious case is the Series Mascot Kei Nagase, who has appeared in some form (i.e. as one of mostly unrelated women who just happen to have exact same name, looks, and similar personalities) in Ace Combat 2/Ace Combat: Assault Horizon Legacy , Ace Combat 3: Electrosphere, Ace Combat 04: Shattered Skies, and Ace Combat 5: The Unsung War despite being the only apparently-Japanese person in world where no Japan exists (she also pops up in Ace Combat: Assault Horizon and Ace Combat Infinity but those are set on alternate Earths, making her appearance more plausible, if still token). As noted, no equivalent of Africa exists in Strangereal, so Keith Bryan from Ace Combat 3: Electrosphere and Marcus Snow from Ace Combat 5: The Unsung War seem to be the only black guys in the world so far. Harvest Moon occasionally has a few. For example, Harvest Moon 64 has a black fisherman and Ambiguously Brown Kai in a town full of mainly white (and a few Asian) people while Story of Seasons introduced the first explicitly gay character in the series. Body Blows: The British boxer Junior is the only black guy among the human characters. Though Junior does make up for this somewhat as being a prominent character in that he is one of the only two characters to be in all of the games of the series. Web Comics Alice in the Loserz strip. As she says in one strip, one of the few black kids in school. The character of Kay Wheeler in Misfile exists solely to try and crack open Emily's Transparent Closet. Missi Fuller's ethnicity, while lampshaded in her intro comic, serves no plot purpose other than to bring a bit of variety to the cast and the sole black character who's particularly recurring, Eponine, only in later times started getting attention. Grace and Nanase in El Goonish Shive. Sort of. Sensei Greg too, but he's become a Brother Chuck. And Nanase doesn't even look very Japanese. Clark is probably this in Shape Quest. Subnormality: Lets not forget to always give them One Award. Homestuck: The Webcomic within the MS Paint Adventure Homestuck, Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff has the most pointless of Token Minority characters with Geromy. Introduced as "The new friend", he has never moved, spoken, or been aknowledged by another character. He's even called the token black friend in the theme song! Amusingly enough, he is actually the third black character introduced after Barack Obana and The Big Man, with both actually having at least a minimum of a role in the comics. Interestingly, in Homestuck itself, Word of God has given a similar, though less cynical, rationale for having Jade, Nepeta, and Equius be furries. Hilariously subverted in Errant Story by Bani, who's well aware of her status and doesn't want to become the black dude who dies first. Axe Cop does it with as crazy a twist as everything else: When asked whether there will be "members of other races" in Axe Cop's team, they introduce a merman team member. Parodied in a Shortpacked! strip dealing with the controversy around Michael B. Jordan being approached to play the Human Torch. An irate comic fan complains to Jacob about this development and states that this would likely make the Invisible Woman (Torch's sister) black as well, and when Jacob doesn't see a problem with this, the fanboy responds by claiming that having two black people in the cast would be "unrealistic". The fanboy then runs off screaming when Lucy, the strip's other major black character, shows up. Web Original Satirized by The Onion, after the embarrassing event of University of Wisconsin-Madison (see Advertising folder). Invoked/parodied in the third episode of Corrupting the Classics with Contemporary Crap. "Project Playwright" has five contestants: David Mamet, Harold Pinter, Anton Chekhov, Nol Coward, and For Colored Girls author Ntozake Shange. Celebrity judge Oscar Wilde implies that Shange is only there because she is a black female, which Shange doesn't take kindly to. Hilarity Ensues. The Channel Awesome sites: Krissy Diggs, a.k.a. That Chick With The Goggles, was the only black person on any of the sites (doesn't help that her video postings are extremely sporadic). That is until The Rap Critic was added. Krissy is now (as of January 2011) off the site, leaving Rap Critic as the Token Black. Angry Joe was the only Hispanic member as well, and Benzaie is the only open bisexual. He's now joined in the Hispanic representation by The Blockbuster Buster. Ma-Ti, the only non-white hero in Suburban Knights. The Gaming Pixie and Mike Maverick are the only two black people on Reviewers Unknown. Inverted in Funday Night Gaming's cast, as all but one of the main cast is gay. Achievement Hunter had Ray Narvaez Jr. as the only Hispanic member, being of Puerto Rican descent. Lindsay Jones (ne Tuggey) is the only woman who commonly appears on camera and for awhile was the only woman in Achievement Hunter, but they have since added Steffie as an off-camera helper. There's also the very British Gavin Free. The Ultimate Sidemen have Vikram Barn (Vikkstar123) as their only member who is neither white or black; he is of Indian descent. Vik is also the only member in the group who does not play FIFA on a regular basis; it's Minecraft and Call of Duty for him. DC Superhero Girls has Bumblebee (who is black) and Katana (who is Japanese) as the two non-white main characters. Western Animation Parodied in Token Black (formerly named Token Williams), the only black kid in South Park. Part of the joke is that all the other characters think he's the token rich character the only one to regularly call attention to Token's blackness is Cartman, who has been shown in other contexts to be quite racist. And his parents own the Hooters expy restaurant Raisins. Which is done as a deliberate subversion of this trope. For some reason, the Vampire kids have one Angry Black Man among their group, which leaves the goth kids slightly confused. Superfriends was notorious for that kind of character, with a bunch of obviously non-white superheroes; Apache Chief (Native North America), Black Vulcan (Black), Samurai (Asian) and El Dorado (Latin American). The final season tried to address the black issue by replacing Black Vulcan with Cyborg of the Teen Titans, a character that Marv Wolfman and George Perez worked hard to create as a legitimate original character. Justice League: John Stewart, the black Green Lantern. Less "token" because not only does he have the same nom de guerre as a major member of the original team, but he has worked with the League in a number of stories in the comics when he was Hal Jordan's backup, thus giving the character's inclusion some credibility. Furthermore, in the Unlimited phase of the series, the producers strove to dilute the issue by bringing in many of DC's other minority superheroes like Mr. Terrific, Vixen, Steel and Doctor Light. Note that, save for Batman and Superman, both of whom had a previous series unto themselves in the DCAU, John Stewart is the most featured character in the DCAU, having the most Limelight episodes on Justice League and getting a good amount of plot in Justice League Unlimited. In addition, the second season of Unlimited featured the Ultimen, straight (and far better done) versions of many of the Superfriends token characters. Shayera Hol (Hawkgirl), from the planet Thanagar, was deliberately given a Hispanic voice actor as well. Out of the Original Seven, Batman is the only one without super powers. But who needs that when he's Batman? Superman is Kryptonian, Martian Manhunter is Martian, Hawkgirl is Thanagarian, Wonder Woman is Themysciran. The only people who aren't minorities on the team are Batman and Flash. Superman: The Animated Series had Angela Chen, who was essentially a race-swapped version of Cat Grant from the comics, right down to being a catty gossip columnist and Lois Lane's rival at the Daily Planet. Beware the Batman looked to be doing this by using Katana as Batman's sidekick instead of Robin or Batgirl. Noticeable in that she was explicitly touted as "the new Robin" in press releases. Seeing how the show was canned after a mere 26 episodes, forbidden from being aired after September 28, 2014, and written off by the company we will never know. In order to have some racial diversity in the cast of Bionic Six (despite the main characters all being related), the Bennetts were given two adopted sons who were African American and Japanese respectively. Clerks: The Animated Series also added a token minority, Lando (named for the only person of color in the original Star Wars trilogy), who rarely did anything other than show up to showcase his non-whiteness. This was expressly parodying this trope, however. Black Johnathan Reed in Davey and Goliath was added by the Lutheran Church to make the series more diverse in post Civil Rights 1970s America, followed by the Hispanic Cisco, Mr. Lee, an Asian barber, and George Soaring Eagle, a boy of Native American descent, to name a few. The Extreme Ghostbusters team was compiled of all minorities. Roland a black man, Eduardo a Hispanic, Garrett a white guy in a wheel chair and Kylie a "Goth" chick. Egon was the only non-minority but he didn't always go out with the team, but held a figure head position. Their receptionist, Janine Melnitz is Ambiguously Jewish (considering her last name). The original animated series, The Real Ghostbusters, had the movie version of the team so there is only a token black guy instead of a whole token team. Also parodied in Family Guy, in which the TV newscast's (a Show Within a Show) on-site reporter is consistently referred to by the anchors as "Asian Reporter Trisha Takanawa." One episode also introduced us to "Hispanic Reporter Renee Jimenez." Interestingly, though, she's depicted as an otherwise baseline white woman who speaks with a slight Spanish accent. Talk about having your cake and eating it too.... And then there's Cleveland Brown, the token black guy who in the later seasons becomes a portmanteau for black stereotypes that had nothing to do with his established personality. And you can't bring up minorities on the newscast team without talking about "Blackuweather forecaster Ollie Williams." Another episode, perhaps unintentionally, provided an explanation: most black residents of Quahog are disguised as whites to avoid police harassment. One example when Cleveland is in the golf course the second time with a Richard Nixon mask. Another parody in Futurama, where the characters sometimes watch the soap "All My Circuits", which features a cast of robots and a single token human. Fry: What's he do? Bender: Eh, the usual human stuff. He laughs, he learns, he loves. Fry: Boring! In Daria, Jodie Landon and Mack Mackenzie seem to be the only black students at Lawndale High, and they are apparently the only people (other than possibly Andrea) who Daria and Jane respect in that school. Jodie and Mack are painfully aware of their status and are uncomfortable being effectively examples of their race; for instance, Jodie complains how she has to be "Queen of the Negroes" at school. This includes when they were dubbed school parade King and Queen consecutively over multiple years, which they suspect is possibly in part because it disguise how little real diversity there is at the school. However, Jodie notices a little black girl looking awestruck at her being so honored, and decides she can put up with it for the greater good of inspiring other minority kids to dream. On the other hand, Jodie's parents are a pair of jerks, Tiffany of the Fashion Club is an Asian Airhead, and the school's principal, Angela Li (also Asian ethnicity) is a strutting self-important dictator. Spyke in X-Men: Evolution is not only the token black member of the team, he's related to the only other black person in the cast. Spyke was so unpopular that he was written out of the series and made to live in the sewer (no, really). His eventual guest-star role as a vigilante was more well-received by the show's fans than his entire run as a cast member. By that time they had balanced things out a bit by adding a few other minority kids to the cast, notably Sunspot (Afro-Brazilian), Magma (Race Lifted into a dark-skinned Brazilian) and Jubilee (Chinese-American). Though of course Jubilee herself was also Put on a Bus until the finale. Transformers Armada had token Hispanic Carlos. The fact that his catchphrase was "holy frijoles" should tell you how badly that turned out. Alexis was also supposedly Vietnamese, according to Word of God. Uh huh. Animaniacs has Dr. Scratchansniff who is German, The Goodfeathers who are Italian and Flavio and Marita who are Spanish. Averted amongst the humans in Transformers Animated, where there are a number of prominent nonwhite characters. However, it's notable that when the Autobots turn human in "Human Error", there's one black kid - and it's Bumblebee. This is because of the voice actors - Bumblebee is the only main-cast Autobot with a black voice actor (Bumper Robinson). The children's television series Dragon Tales has a dragon in a wheelchair, he can't fly either. Most of the plot of the episode where Lorca is introduced, "A New Friend", hinges on this. John Thunder, the Native American member of the Centurions. Maybe one of the best out there. Orange Blossom and Ginger Snap of Strawberry Shortcake, though later seasons introduce more characters. Doozy Bots, the attempt to adapt Gundam to American audiences in the early 90s (That thankfully never got past a short 5 minute preview video) featured the Black Kid of the gang who also happened to be in a wheelchair. To make matters worse (or funnier, depending on how you see it) when the main characters all transform into the eponymous super-deformed chibi Gundams/Mobile Suits, he gets stuck being the Guntank - which is the top half of a Mobile Suit attached to a set of tank treads. In Teen Titans there is Cyborg as the only African-American in the team and Robin who is Romani even though he looks white. Raven is an apparently white Half-Human Hybrid and the other two have orange and green skin (though Beast Boy was born white before turning green). Herald and Bumblebee are black while Mas y Mens are Hispanic. The Simpsons episode "A Streetcar Named Marge" mentions "Token black panelist, Drederick Tatum!" Subverted in Mucha Lucha!, where the whole main trio is non-white. Rikochet is somewhat dark-skinned, and Buena Girl and Flea's skin looks sort of Mest Indian. However, many secondary characters are white. The show is set in Mexico (or at least a Mexican-American community), where everyone is perceived to be "foreign" and "exotic" in some way. Phineas and Ferb: Baljeet is Indian, the Fireside Girl Holly is African-American, Stacy and the Fireside Girl Ginger are Asian, and Buford seems to have some kind of Dutch heritage. The show in general obviously tries to be very cosmopolitic. Isabella Garcia-Shapiro is Mexican (ethnic minority) and Jewish (religious minority) so she's both this trope and Twofer Token Minority. Though one episode has the cast visiting the "Mexican Jewish Cultural Festival" so Danville might just have a particularly large population of Mexican-Jews... The Famous Five were reimagined for a Disney cartoon series, starring the children of the original Five. George's daughter Jo (Jyoti) is half-Indian. Compare the extremely white originals with the next generation. Frosty the Snowman: Sarah from The Legend Of Frosty The Snowman is African. Mostly averted in Challenge Of The Go Bots, where A.J. and General Newcastle are both black, and Anya Turgonova is Russo-Chinese. Anya didn't show up as often after the Five-Episode Pilot, but A.J. was a main character and Newcastle was the most important human supporting character. Spoofed in the Robot Chicken sketch 12 Angry Little People, when the lone black juror points out that not every black person needs to be a positive role model. The whole main cast of The Weekenders. Though Tino's race isn't mentioned, Word of God states hes Italian American who is probably Pagan. Lor's Scottish American, Carvers African American and Tish is an Eastern European Jew. Averted in Young Justice. As of the end of season one, four of the core cast members are people of color (Aqualad and Rocket are both black, Robin is Romani, while Artemis is half-white and half-Vietnamese). In season two, Blue Beetle (Mexican American), Bumblebee and Mal Duncan (both African American) join the team as well. While they don't join the team, that season also adds recurring characters Virgil Hawkins (African American), Ed Dorado (Latino), Asami Koizumi (Japanese), and Tye Longshadow (Apache). Valerie from Josie and the Pussycats was black. Of course, she was this in the comic book beforehand. The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes! has Black Panther, an African king who's proven himself a very competent fighter and quite knowledgeable about science and magic. However, he sometimes goes whole episodes without saying anything. Some unused production art shows that at some point before the series finally aired, Black Goliath was apparently supposed to take Giant-Man's spot on the team. The short-lived The Avengers: United They Stand had Falcon as the sole minority member of the team. Somewhat funny since in the comics, Falcon was added to the team to fill a diversity quota and quit when he decided he didn't want to be included simply for being black. Perhaps in response some of the complaints about the racial and gender disparity in the live-action movie, Avengers, Assemble! has The Falcon added to the film's Avengers roster, making him the sole person of color. However, he has a very large role in the show, and is the Audience Surrogate of the team. Jonny from Ed, Edd n Eddy is implied to be black. Rolf may count, as he's Ambiguously Brown. Mee Mee and Lee Lee (Dee Dee's friends) in Dexter's Laboratory are black and Asian respectively. They might even be a light parody of this trope. Freight Train from Where's Huddles?. The only non-white Color Kid from Rainbow Brite is Indigo. She is Indian. Everyone in Bertha is white, except for the Indian Panjid. Plastic Man's sidekick Hula Hula in The Plastic Man Comedy/Adventure Show is Polynesian, whilst Plastic Man and his girlfriend Penny are white. Elena of Avalor: Elena's best friend Naomi Turner, a pale, blond-haired, blue-eyed girl with an English name in the Spanish-style Kingdom of Avalor; almost everyone else is dark-haired and tan. The Loud House has Lincoln and his family being white except for Lucy who has pale skin resembling a light shade of gray, Clyde being black with a black dad and a white dad, and of course, the Casagrandes as a Hispanic family with CJ having Down Syndrome. Token Non-Mammal Examples: Animated Film Jiminy Cricket and Cleo the goldfish from Disney's Pinocchio Abigail, Amelia, and their uncle Waldo (three geese) from The Aristocats Verne the turtle on Over the Hedge. Inverted in Rango, where most of the inhabitants of Dirt seem to be anything but mammals. Literature Lowly Worm from Richard Scarry's books. Mr. Toad in The Wind in the Willows Toys The Fabuland toy line by LEGO only had one crocodile and three birds among an otherwise all-mammal cast. My Little Pony: G1 had every princess with their own pet baby dragon: Spike, Prickles, Smokey, Fiery, Flash, Spiny, and Sparks. Majesty's dragon, Spike, is the most famous due to his use in adaptations such as the My Little Pony TV Specials, My Little Pony 'n Friends, and the British My Little Pony comics. Most of the dragons were scrapped in future generations though Spike returned in G3 and G4, where he is a main character in My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic. Of the "Pony Friends" Cutesaurus the Dinosaur is the only non-mammal. Princess Silverswirl from G2 has an unnamed pet dragon, which fans have nicknamed "Spike" despite the completely different design. Western Animation Looney Tunes: An inversion in the 1936 Merrie Melodies short I Love to Singa, Jack Bunny is the only mammal, the rest of the characters are birds. Inverted in SpongeBob SquarePants. Sandy Cheeks (a squirrel) and Pearl Krabs (a sperm whale) are the token mammals among the main, major, and supporting characters. Donald Duck started out like this, though his love interest and many family members were introduced later on. Inverted with Sleepy Bat in Birdz, the only reoccurring non-avian. Care Bears: Cozy Heart Penguin is the only avian member of the Care Bear Cousins. Arthur: This unnamed crocodile/alligator. There were also anthropomorphic ducks in "Arthur's Almost Boring Day". Several episodes of The Get Along Gang included a turtle named Braker as an ancillary member of the Gang, with the Cartoon Over-Analyzations blog describing him as "the Furry equivalent of a Token Minority," as he was the one reptile in a group of mammals. Token Minority Species Examples: Animated Film Ratigan, Fidget the bat, Felicia the cat, Toby the dog, and a lizard from The Great Mouse Detective among a cast made mostly of mouse characters. Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck are this in A Goofy Movie, being a mouse and a bird amongst dogs and cats. Zootopia has this as a significant part of the plot, with Judy Hopps being the first rabbit police officer of Zootopia and has to struggle against the label of being the Token Minority. Comics In Paperinik New Adventures, Angus is clearly meant to be a Funny Animal kiwi bird, the only one in Duckburg. He is not only explicitly said to be from New Zealand but also a Maori. Web Original In the cat video series The Six Cats Parade, Rico is the only black cat (and the only without white color) of the group in contrast with his three black and white and one siamese siblings and his mother, which is a gray and white cat. Western Animation Pete and P.J. are this in Goof Troop, A Goofy Movie, and An Extremely Goofy Movie are token cats, despite being treated like Dogfaces in those worlds. Also, Waffles and Chainsaw from Goof Troop are a token cat and dog in a world of Dogfaces. In My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, the majority of the population as well as the main six characters seem to be evenly distributed among unicorns, pegasi and earth ponies. However, there are several other intelligent species in the world. Cattle, sheep, donkeys, mules, buffalo, zebra and possibly goats are all people just as much as ponies, and the same goes for some mythological beings like minotaurs and griffons. However, these beings only have short gag cameos or one-shot appearances. The only exception is Zecora the Zebra. Token Petting Zoo People Examples: Film Beans the lizard and Angelique the fox from Rango Literature Stuart Little is far more anthropomorphic than the other animals in all his book and movie appearances and in the TV series. Note that in the original book he's human by heritage; his parents are his actual parents. He just happens to have been born with the approximate form of a mouse. How anyone worked out he was a viable life-form, let alone that he had the potential to grow up intelligent, when he was born so mutated and looking like a miscarriage is left to the imagination, because it is a children's book. Video Games Rouge the Bat from the Sonic the Hedgehog series, as far as games are concerned. Western Animation Minerva Mink from Animaniacs. Also, Wilford B. Wolf is this when he transforms into a werewolf. Mousey Galore from Pinky and the Brain. Julie Bruin, Margot Mallard, Binky Bunny, and Bimbette the skunk from Tiny Toon Adventures. Lola Bunny, Melissa Duck, and Hatta Mari (a pigeon from "Plane Daffy") from Looney Tunes, and Tina Russo from The Looney Tunes Show. Ren's parents from Ren and Stimpy Adult Party Cartoon are far more human-shaped than either he or Stimpy are. diversity quota set forth by company policy. Big Mike makes it clear the moment he finds another Hispanic nerd to do his job, Morgan is gone. Mixed-race Angel Coulby was the result of Ability over Appearance when it came to casting her as Guinevere on Merlin, and to their credit, the producers have never once defended or explained this decision beyond saying that she was the best for the role. However, one can't help but feel that the later inclusion of Gwen's brother Elyan was the result of this trope: he's the only black knight of the Round Table and doesn't really get to do much. His death, which seemed to only serve as an excuse for people to brush off Gwen's post-brainwashing strangeness, was far from encouraging. After Gwen returned to normal, he was forgotten. JAG had a few minorities represented in lead and recurring characters: Major/Lieutenant Colonel Sarah 'Mac' MacKenzie is multiracial (WhiteIranianCherokee), Commander Sturgis Turner and Congresswoman Bobbi Latham are African Americans, Gunnery Sergeant Victor Galindez is Latino and Harmon Rabb has a Russian half-brother. Mac's background is close to that of her actress, Catherine Bell. She was born in London to a Scottish father and Iranian mother. Leon from NCIS was one of the first recurring black characters - introduced in season five - though his race is rarely ever mentioned, and Agent Dorneget (a minor character introduced in season nine) is the only recurring gay character. Australian soaps tend to be about middle-class white people, and usually don't even bother to include a significant Token Minority character - Home And Away did have the Samoan Australian actor Jai Laga'aia's character, although the moment another non-white actor got a part Lagai'a was fired. Neighbours is a little less closed-off, having allowed an Indian Australian family, the Kapoors, to join the main cast. Invoked in-universe on Suits where Jessica Pearson's backstory reveals that she was originally hired by the law firm because she was a black woman and the firm decided it needed "diversity". She was initially told that she was hired strictly on merit but later saw a working memo which specifically had "diversity" written next to her name. What really pissed her off was the fact that the memo did not mention her being a top-of-her-class Harvard graduate or her work at the Harvard Law Review, which should have made her one of the top candidates for the job no matter what her race or gender is. She got even by rising through the firms ranks and then ousting the managing partner who wrote the memo. Habib (Asian and Muslim) and Gladstone (black Caribbean) on The Thin Blue Line. Of course, this is modern day London, so an ethnically diverse workplace makes sense. Fresh Off the Boat: Invoked; at one point Eddie Huang (the new kid) gets into a scuffle with an African-American kid who says that Eddie's the new token minority. On The Bachelor and The Bachelorette, every season will typically have one or two minority contestants who never win and rarely even get close to winning. These contestants also frequently fall into But Not Too Black. Lampshaded on Community (which actually did have a very diverse cast). Elroy Patashnik was introduced in Season 6 after Troy and Shirley, the series' other two major black characters, had both departed the show. One episode had a scene where he addressed his status as the sole black member of the group and stated that he would not allow himself to be treated like a token, saying "I'm nobody's fourth Ghostbuster." Parodied and enforced in the Key & Peele sketch "A Cappella," where the token black member of the otherwise all-white a cappella group treats a second black member joining as if his country was being invaded. The Good Wife had Kalinda Sharma (her ethnicity is never especified but is assume to be Indian or Persian) from season 1-6, later African-American Lucca Quinn became the Token Minority and also a Suspiciously Similar Substitute. Almost every team of Power Rangers consists of three white people (one of whom is also possibly Latino) and one black person and one person of Asian descent to form the token minorities. Human Aliens occasionally appear on teams as well. This multiracial team lineup also seems to apply to the non-human Alien Rangers of Aquitar, which includes the black Aquitian Blue Alien Ranger Cestro. Teal'c in Stargate SG-1, who, as well as being the token black guy, is also the token alien of the titular flagship off-world reconnaissance team SG-1. In the fifth episode of the first season, one of the first signs that the team have brought a highly contagious infection back from another world is an unprovoked assault on Teal'c, which, perhaps for the sake of not appearing racially aggravated, is instigated by another black man. Lampshaded in Jason King. King is adapting one of his adventures for a TV series. The television executive insists that the hero should have a sidekick, who is first portrayed as a white guy, only to change to a black guy to go with the latest trend, then ending up with an Asian guy to get a wider potential audience. Saved by the Bell has Lisa (played by Lark Voorhies), the Black Princess of the group and Slater (played by Mario Lopez) the Hispanic. How stereotypical they are depends on the episode, but according to the producers their characters were of no specific race and they were cast just because they were the best. They ethnicity does comes into play in some Very Special Episodes. American Horror Story: Coven has Queenie the only African American witch in the Institute, which became an important plot point when she begin contacts with other Black witches. Also Nan is a witch with Down Syndrome. Legend of the Seeker'': Chase is portrayed by a Maori actor, along with his family and many minor characters. On a lesser note, we see a single black Mord'Sith, and one played by mixed race actress Katrina Law, the rest being white (in the books, they all were). Lucas Sinclair in Stranger Things is the only Black character of the entire main cast. The show is Genre Savvy enough to lampshade this hillariously some times, like when the four main kid characters dress as Ghostbusters and he argues that the doesn't want to be Winston. Although only a recurrent character, Griff in Married... with Children played the part of Black Best Friend of Al, he even lampshade this in some episodes as when he objects to go firsts into dangerous situations because Black Dude Dies First. Another recurrent Black character is Corrupt Cop Officer Dan, who was member of mostly white NO'MAAM club. In an overwhelming Caucasian cast as Beverly Hills, 90210, Silver is Ambiguously Jewish. Sons of Anarchy deals with fictionalized versions of outlaw Motorcycle Clubs, most of the clubs are ethnically-exclusive in Real Life and the most they tend to mix is that those that are not White-supremacists or Black, admit White and Hispanics (case of Hell's Angels, which is the club the Sons are based on). On that note, Juan Carlos 'Juice' Ortiz is the only Latino character among the main cast and in the chapter of the city of Charming (that also happens to be the international headquarters). As sexual minorities go, Alex "Tig" Trager is bisexual (he starts a relationship with a transgender person). Near the end of the series they open the club to Black members. Veronica Mars has two examples: Veronica's best friend Wallace, who is Black, and biker allied Eli "Weevil" Navarro, who is Latino. Music Poor Niall Horan of One Direction. Simply known as "The Irish One" by non-directorners. He's also the only blond. Mel B from Spice Girls is the only non-white Spice Girl (although technically she is mixed-race). Mythology & Religion In Books of Samuel, Uriah is a Hittite resided in Israel, which was considered as an ethnic minority in Israel back then. However, he's not among the gentiles as he followed the Israelite belief, which is a requirement for him to marry Bathsheba, an Israelite herself in the first place. He also genuinely cares about his subordinate and refused to have sex with his wife while a war was going on, despite royal orders, because he didn't want to accept privileges that his men weren't being allowed. And after his death, Prophet Nathan promptly calls David out for inventing the Uriah Gambit. Balthasar, one of the threenoteWho, by the way, are neither named nor numbered in the Bible: it is only a mediaeval tradition that there were three or that their names were as here plus Caspar. Wise Men, has been depicted as black since Medieval times. Melchior is sometimes depicted as Asian as well, so the Wise Men represent the three continents of the Medieval world: Europe, Asia, and Africa. One researcher has found references in an ancient manuscript saying that the Magi came from a country called Shir, which was in the far east, bordered an ocean, and produced silk. The Magi might have actually been Chinese, or perhaps Persian. Newspaper Comics Peanuts: Even wasn't immune. Franklin joined the cast in a nod to the court-ordered busing that was going on at the time. As Chris Rock points out, he was the only one in the cast without any distinct personality. In one interview, Schulz admitted that he really didn't know what to do with Franklin, since he had no experience with black children. Ironically, the producers of one of the Peanuts animated specials found a role for Franklin here. Amusingly, cartoonists of Schulz's generation were not taught how to draw black characters without making them look like grotesque stereotypes, so for Franklin, Schulz just drew a "white" kid and then gave him curly black hair and lines across his face to symbolize dark skin. Snoopy's Beagle Scouts are a group of birds consisting of Woodstock and birds who are identical to Woodstock... except for the one called Raymond, who is noticeably darker than his peers. Monica's Gang had a few. The main gang had a black and a mute (who has been described as deaf as well), then added one that due to his inspiration (the creator's son) is ambiguously Asian, and both a blind girl and a wheelchair bound boy as well. The gang in a country setting has among its hillbillies an Asian (a nod to the the huge Japanese-descent community). Print Media MAD magazine referenced the trope back in 1966 (issue 101). In a parody of the movie The Sandpiper, a character refers to himself as the film's "token Negro". It was a long time ago indeed. Pro Wrestling Of the foreigners who came into FMW for Texas Street Fight, Sweet Georgia Brown became this among the FMW women's division. She spent an even longer time as the black one of the WWF's women's division until Jazz debuted. Black Warrior, the lone Mexican of the Japanese anti Mexican La Ola Amarilla Power Stable that periodically invaded CMLL between 2005 and 2013. He served as the group's Translator Buddy. Kenny King in the Full Impact Pro Power Stable Young Rich And Ready For Action. Kenny could be considered one of the "main" members, mostly by virtue of representing the group in Ring of Honor but nonetheless the rest (Jason Blade, Portia Perez, Claudio Castagnoli, The Lovely Lacey, Sal Rinauro, Radiant Rain, Daffney, Steve Madison, Becky Bayless, Chasyn Rance, SoCal Val, etc) were all white. Around 2010, the WWE Divas were sadly falling into this. Each brand had one (and in many cases, ONLY one) member of each minority group amidst the sea of blond hair on the rest of the roster. On Raw, as seen by the Fatal 4-Way Divas match, there was the white Maryse, black Alicia Fox, Asian Gail Kim, and Latina Eve Torres (although the then-recently-returning Melina shook that up, and with the Bella Twins, it appears that Latinas have become something of the majority on Raw.) On SmackDown, it doesn't even go that far. There's the British/Moroccan Layla who seems to be filling in for black despite being paler than some of the more tan-addicted Divas and the Latino Rosa Mendes, that's it. However, after the "Brand Extension" was first ditched in 2011, the "one diva per group" rule was been gradually averted. As of January 2018, following a second brand split, the ethnicities of the WWE women's roster are now pretty much downplayed. Just for completeness' sake, here's the rundown: White Alexa Bliss (blonde), Bayley (brunette), Becky Lynch (redhead), Carmella (blonde), Charlotte Flair (blonde), Dana Brooke (blonde), Lana (blonde), Liv Morgan (blonde), Maryse (blonde), Mickie James (brunette), Natalya (blonde), Paige (brunette), Ruby Riott (brunette), Sarah Logan (dark blonde). Ronda Rousey (brunette) has signed with WWE, but has not yet been put on the main roster. Black Alicia Fox, Naomi, Sasha Banks Latina Brie and Nikki Bella (half-Mexican, half-Italian) Asian Asuka Pacific Islander Nia Jax (half-Samoan, half-German), Tamina Snuka (half-Fijian, half-Samoan)noteher father Jimmy Snuka was Fijian but married into the Samoan Anoa'i family Concerning SHINE Power Stable Las Sicarias, it is easy to forget Amanda Rodriguez is "The Peruvian Princess" when every other member (Ivelisse Vlez, La Rosa Negra, Thea Trinidad, Mercedes Martinez) is Puerto Rican and 3/4ths of them are loud about it. Jonathan Gresham in Search And Destroy, although this wasn't by design so much as circumstance. One other did briefly make it to TV, but Lio Rush was Put on a Bus due to an attack from Shane Taylor of The Rebellion. Puppet Shows Lieutenant Green token black of Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons. The show also counts a Japanese and a black amongst its minor characters. Sport Manchester United have a large Asian fanbase and seem to ensure that they always have at least one Asian player in the squad, presumably to appeal to Asian fans: Park Ji-Sung (Korean, 2005-12) Shinji Kagawa (Japanese, 2012 - 2014) Tabletop Games In Privateer Press' tabletop war game WARMACHINE, Major Markus 'Siege' Brisbane is the game's only black warcaster. Before the release of the expansion book Pirates of the Broken Coast, he was the only black model in the game. Siege came out in Apotheosis, the third expansion of the game. Theatre Hamilton: Inverted with the original Broadway cast, in which the only white character in the main cast apart from the actor playing King George III was Christopher Jackson, who played George Washington. Toys Kimono from My Little Pony G3 is Japanese, as shown by her name and her occasional kimono wearing in the books. There's also Fiesta Flair, whose toy was actually cancelled for what fans speculate was due to being too stereotypically Mexican. Video Games Pokmon: There's the boss of the main character in Pokmon Ranger 2, and a Boisterous Bruiser as well as Da Chief. There was a young dark-skinned girl standing in the player's hometown in FireRed/LeafGreen. But the sprite for this girl doesn't appear anywhere else in the entire game. Pheobe, who showed up in Pokmon Ruby and Sapphire, is implied to be the Poke-verse's equivalent of Pacific Islander. Pokmon Sun and Moon later introduced a Hawaii-based region called "Alola". In Pokmon Diamond and Pearl, they did add another token minority, a Frontier Brain named Dahlia who is ambiguously latina. In Pokmon Black and White, minor NPCs of varying skin tone are common, and two noteIris's skin tone is Ambiguously Brown in the games and anime, though Sugimori's original art is darker skinned than her sprite and anime counterpart gym leaders are black. Granted, one can't help but slightly cringe that in Pokmon Black and White 2, the basketball team are the first black people you come across. At the very least, they provide the first truly challenging duels for the player. Averted in Pokmon X and Y - Not only do you have the option to customize the character's skin tone, but the player encounters a fair number of Ambiguously Brown and even black trainers (more than previous games). Nobody treats them any differently. That said, of the main characters Shauna is the only non-white one (unless your protagonist is brown). Grand Theft Auto IV had an ad for Weazel News, an Expy of the Fox News Channel, that parodied the use of token minorities on TV news programs. The voiceover for the ad explicitly mentioned the "diverse" news team as proof that they weren't racist, and when the Asian reporter was listed, an oriental gong sound was clearly audible. Harsher in Hindsight since correspondent Jesse Watters filmed this segment for the The O'Reilly Factor in 2016. Louis in Left 4 Dead is considered the game's token black guy. Veteran Bill is the token old guy, and Zoey is the token girl. Young white male biker Francis is the least mentally stable of the four, and some Fanon says he's gay. In Team Fortress 2, several of the classes are represented as clearly being of a certain nationality. The Demoman represents Scotland, however he is also the only black man in the game. He is also a drunk and a "cyclops", making him a "Threefer." The Team Fortress 2 team stated in their blog (providing some early concept art) that the Demoman was going to be a redheaded white guy, making him look more like the stereotypical Scot. Instead, they decided that he looked too much like Groundskeeper Willie, so they made him black. So this probably isn't a case of tokenism, but an attempt to break a stereotype. A better example might be the continuous hints of Pyro being the lone female class. The 'aggressive black Scotsman' with an absurdly broad accent is a stereotype of its own in the UK. Lampshaded in his intro video on the official site: Demoman: I'm a black Scottish cyclops! They've got more f-[extended censorship bleep] than thy do the likes of me! Ironically, it appears that in the world of Team Fortress 2, there is in fact a clan of black Scottish demolitions experts... but the Demoman is unusual in that he still has one of his eyes. In [PROTOTYPE], Dr. Ragland is the only black character of plot significance. Particularly egregious considering the game takes place in New York City. Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance has Devdan, the only black guy in the game. Sequel Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn adds Ambiguously Brown Fiona. The Final Fantasy series has two examples. General Leo Christophe from Final Fantasy VI and Barret Wallace from Final Fantasy VII. The latter was played perfectly straight amongst the heroes. Paradoxically, it wasn't done for the feelings of the fans, or for racial diversit. General Leo, however, is a slight inversion because the sprite has the same skin tone as the rest of the characters, while his art has a notably darker skin tone. Sazh Katzroy from Final Fantasy XIII is the token black guy. In Romancing SaGa 3, Harid "El Nool" Tornado is the lone black character you can choose. He's a mercenary Averted in the PC FPS Ethnic Cleansing, where almost all characters are of non-white races, save for the protagonist and few NPCs. The reason for this, as the name implies, is quite nefarious. Of the four player characters in the Konami arcade shoot-'em-up Sunset Riders, Cormano is the only Mexican. The other three are blond white cowboys. Sig in Jak and Daxter is apparently the only black guy on the entire freakin' planet, including the NPCs that just wander around. Chains from Payday The Heist is the team black guy. Bully each clique will have a girl, a black boy and a bisexual boy. The nerds clique have a Twofer Token Minority Black Bisexual Nerdy boy. Mass Effect: Mass Effect has an interesting take on this. While the crew of the Normandy consists mainly of humans with only one member of various other species present (one asari, one turian, etc.), those species are so common throughout the galaxy that most of your NPC interactions involve them. Tali'Zorah Nar Rayya, on the other hand, is the only quarian in the entire game, making her your token minority team member. She's also a Space Gypsy, making her and anyone of her race a barely tolerated outcast everywhere outside their fleet. Mass Effect 2 gives a double subversion, since Shepard's field mission squad consist of only three humans and seven aliens of different races, but when it comes to the human crew on Normandy SR-2, Jacob Taylor is the only black man on the whole ship, until you download the DLC and thus you have Token Minorities within token minorities. In the humans, you have an Australian (Miranda), a Canadian (Shepard, both sexes), an American (Jacob), a Brit (Zaeed), and a Japanese Genki Girl (Kasumi). Anthony Higgs of Metroid: Other M; he's the first major black character; there were a few black people on the Valhalla (key word being "few"). He's also the only supporting character who survives to the end of the game. In Night Trap, SCAT has both a token black guy and a token woman (if you don't count Kelly). In Silent Hill 4: The Room, Cynthia Velasquez, a Latina, is the only minority character, and also the first to die. Snake's Revenge has Nick Meyer, the only African-American in Snake's crew. The Persona series tends to have this, given its explicitly Japanese setting: Persona 2 has party member Lisa Silverman, the daughter of two white Americans. That said, she's been raised in Japan her entire life, cannot speak English, and her parents are extreme Japanophiles who desire her to behave like a traditional Japanese girl, much to her chagrin. There's also a minor character named Tony who goes around and takes lewd photos of women. Persona 3 has "Bebe", a French foreign exchange student and Japanophile, as your Temperance Arcana Social Link. Persona 5 has party member Ann Takamaki, a quarter-white girl who lived overseas for sometime before coming back to Japan. Her foreign background makes her the subject of numerous malicious rumors at her school, which is not helped by the volleyball coach treating her as an exotic Lust Object. The Elder Scrolls: In The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion there are exactly three non-Imperials among the nobles of Cyrodiil: Count Andel Indarys of Cheydinhal, a dark elf who is accused of having gotten his position via nepotism (he's supposedly friends with King Helseth of Morrowind); Andel's son Farwil, who is an idiot; and Imperial Battlemage Ocato, a high elf who only even appears twice. Note that it is made quite clear in books and dialogue (before, during and after Oblivion) and in a later game with an appearance that there are more non-Imperial nobles in Cyrodiil. It's just that the Elder Council is conspicuously missing from their meeting hall every time we go there in Oblivion. The "Hearthfire" DLC for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim adds a Redguard housecarl, Rayya. The rest of the housecarls are Nords. The story of Temple Run seems to be taking place in Asia (judging from the architecture and rainforest), but all characters but one is western. The one non-western character is Asian. Her name? "Karma Lee". The western characters are either white or afro-american. The white characters are explorers and escape artists and similar stuff that fit the setting, while the black characters have concepts such as football star - making one wonder how he ended up in an ancient Asian temple in the first place. The Rehda in Ys: The Ark of Napishtim are culturally reminiscent of Native Americans, although their chief, Ord, talks like an Afro-American in the English dub. Played straight and averted with Neverwinter Nights 1. Played straight with the Original Campaign and the NPC, Aarin Gend, but can be averted by module builders and players since both NPCs and player characters can have skin color matching anything in the game palette (including but not limited to green, blue, purple, yellow, gold, orange, red, mirror(!) and either solid flat white or solid flat black). In Killer Bear, the titular killer refers to Tracy as "the token black girl." Baldur's Gate: Siege of Dragonspear. was criticized for introducing several token minority characters. The one that got most attention was Mizhena, a female in which, upon first meeting her in the game, when you choose certain dialogue options about how she got her name, reveals

Jill Lepore deserves an award for her New Yorker essay against the gospel of disruption. The last paragraph alone is a sufficiently fine piece of writing to warrant reading the whole thing. For those of you blessedly unfamiliar with the theory of disruptive innovation, it goes like this: Everyone, every institution that is superb at providing a product or service is in truth a Goliath, merely waiting for a little innovative David to topple him with a better way to do his job. Why work up your muscles to carry a cudgel if you can deal death with a slingshot? Amazon has disrupted book-selling. Online commentary has disrupted journalism. MOOCs will disrupt the university (people swear). You who are merely doing your job exceptionally well and profitably – you are a complacent fool. In her essay, Lepore beats the tar out of the scholarship that gave rise to this preaching. Apart from pointing the article out to you, I want to comment briefly on how she says what she says. In truth, Lepore gives two arguments for the price of one, and it’s the second that I find more fetching and worth a little extra remark. Mainly, and entertainingly, she points out the entire theory of disruptive innovation is bunk on its own terms. It neither explains what it’s meant to explain, nor predicts what it’s meant to predict. It’s a fable that comforts the comfortable, by depicting their rapacious waste as the inevitable manner of capitalism’s progress. I won’t try to summarize what Lepore says about the embarrassing failures of the theory, because she already says it well. But Lepore makes a secondary argument you could almost miss. She notes that even if the theory of disruption were sound, there are certain human activities to which it should not be applied. Innovation and disruption are ideas that originated in the arena of business but which have since been applied to arenas whose values and goals are remote from the values and goals of business. People aren’t disk drives. Public schools, colleges and universities, churches, museums, and many hospitals, all of which have been subjected to disruptive innovation, have revenues and expenses and infrastructures, but they aren’t industries in the same way that manufacturers of hard-disk drives or truck engines or drygoods are industries. Journalism isn’t an industry in that sense, either. Lepore says all this, but spends little time on it; having noted that people aren’t disk drives, she spends most of her essay observing that the theory of disruptive innovation doesn’t really apply to disk drives anyway. I’d hazard a guess Lepore knows her essay works better this way. A significant portion of her readership would find it tedious to be told less briefly that we need to remember, or revive, the language of public trust, public interest, public service. Lepore’s choice of emphasis reminds me of the origins of American liberalism in a different age. Back in the early 1900s, Charles Beard noted that merely to tell Americans that their factories were injuring workers more wantonly than those of any other country would fail to move a nation so fixated on profit. You had, he said (and I’m paraphrasing, because I’m not able to look it up at the moment), to tell the American people that it was inefficient to keep killing workers – that it was a waste of human capital, an unproductive use of resources. This rhetorical tactic aims at moral ends by appealing to a venal calculus. Like the commuter who rescued his fellow-citizen from a train track because he didn’t want to be late to work, maybe we will rescue our public goods from disruption – not because it’s the right thing to do, but because we won’t profit if we don’t. William Timberman 06.24.14 at 6:02 pm I’d hazard a guess Lepore knows her essay works better this way. Framing again. Game theory again. Do I reveal my antediluvian origins if I say I regret the necessity? Well, so be it. Fortunately for all concerned, irony has no power whatever against the inevitable. (That roar you hear in the background is the sound of a global intelligentsia outsmarting itself yet again — a sound very like that, if memory serves, which attended my own intellectual individuation.) What’s driven me crazy from the start about the gospel of disruption is that on one reading it commits the naturalistic fallacy–we should change everything because this thing is happening. Even if it were true, there’s no evidence that we would know how to predict and act on the disruptive process. Or that we should act on it. But if you don’t assume that, you can’t make the money on disruption. Note that the New Yorker put Christiansen out there as some kind of profit earlier, which was extremely irksome. I literally cackled with glee about 2 paragraphs in. I’ve been desperately waiting for someone to puncture this balloon. Another glorious thing about her piece was that she really shows how the capacity to do actual historical analysis is necessary for these wanna-be gurus. (Well, necessary if they want to make claims approximating truth. It’s not necessary for them to make absurd ideological claims and make money doing so. Thomas Friedman’s house is proof of this.) And they don’t have a clue how to do history. You will not believe how hard it is for people to understand that secondary argument. Jaysus. Ah, I should explain just a bit more: The problem with intelligent people is that they can create elaborate arguments to buttress weak sentiment, e.g. Charles Murray. Because people are complex and contrary, such gossamer arguments usually depend on talking about essential aspects, where there aren’t any, of people. The arguments are constructed that way because it slants the playing field anytime the axiomatic stuff isn’t blasted to smithereens. Adversaries thus tend to find venally neutral terms in place of acid and evisceratory rhetoric, of course, in the name of decorum. We all then start talking as if capitalist utilitarianism is here, natural, and always the best dictionary and thesaurus, no matter how crazy the bland is… Quite a long article, so I’ll have to come back to this. There’s still a couple things I can say here: One, how did all the “Innovator’s Dilemma” discussion totally miss the phenomenon of the Hidden Champions (or the Mittelstand, as it was once called in Germany)? When these companies are “disrupted” it seems plain to me that we are likely looking at an opportunity for data point-picking, but the bulk of Hidden Champions continue along for the long run. Has there been a sustained critique of the idea before now? This blog post has some commentators already moving in the direction of questioning the possible value the “innovator’s dilemma” could have in, say, a discussion of healthcare. Jill Lepore mentions a facet of this that wasn’t immediately obvious to me: Not only are some types of job not ripe for innovation, but there are in fact many types of job those ethics are betrayed by the mindset of disruptive change. There is a great exchange here between Timothy Geithner and NPR host Robert Siegel, where Geithner argued that “banks are different.” The whole exchange is noteworthy, as Siegel presses Geithner with the point that the apparent complexity of banking looks like an innovation. Geithner denied this, stating that it was essentially a regulatory and scale problem: This was not a crisis caused by financial innovation on a massive scale. It wasn’t a crisis caused fundamentally by a set of new fancy things that, in retrospect seem very risky. It was a crisis caused because we had a long period of confidence that it was safe to lend a lot of money, safe to borrow a lot of money relative to income, that your house prices would never fall, that recessions would be short and shallow. We can believe Siegel, and we say that banking and innovation don’t mix. We can believe Geithner, and we still must say that innovation and banking don’t mix. In truth, how many bankers likely told their bosses at review that they “weren’t in the business of innovating?” How many shareholder packets claimed that? One final note. How much misplaced faith are people putting in “the innovator’s dilemma” as the answer to inequality? My guess is – a whole lot. I’m not sure how much it can do in most industries, where abuse of the patent system and high capitalization simply close off opportunities for prospective competitors. Yet this is probably likely to be presented as “the good part” of destroying established companies. Great post, Eric. Thanks particularly for the quote/paraphrase from Charles Beard. When you find or remember where it’s from, would you mention in a comment or update? Interesting. Maybe the way to sell gun control to Americans is to point out that massacres of schoolchildren result in the destruction of potentially valuable human capital, which is uneconomic. Wall Street spends 58 minutes of every hour trying to predict which technologies will prove to be disruptive and which will make little difference. History has proven definitively that despite all of energy and motion they can do this correctly exactly 50% of the time (less fees and expenses of course). (Before anyone asks, the other two minutes are spent pilaging innocents, maiming adorable puppies and otherwise causing global mayhem, unless of course they are simply wasted.) The Temporary Name 06.24.14 at 7:59 pm A sort of embarrassing response, I think: sponds-to-new-yorker-takedown-of-disruptive-innovation But Christensen understands a key point: Well, in the first two or three pages, it seems that her motivation is to try to rein in this almost random use of the word “disruption.” The word is used to justify whatever anybody—an entrepreneur or a college student—wants to do. And as I read that, I was delighted that somebody with her standing would join me in trying to bring discipline and understanding around a very useful theory. I’ve been trying to do it for 20 years. As regards Lepore’s secondary argument, in Systems of Survival Jane Jacobs argued at length that applying the values and goals of business to enterprises whose values and goals are different is problematic. Jacobs said that doing so produces “monstrous moral hybrids”. I’ll resume my role of third-grader here and ask: Didn’t Marx write ‘The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. … All that is solid melts into air,’ etc. So is Lepore and her fans here arguing against Marx, or is disruption different from revolutionizing the means of production? I’ve generally found that observation of Marx repeatedly confirmed in daily life, especially amid the corps, and it certainly seems to be functioning well to immiserate that part of the working class who still have jobs. I recently read a sort of biography of Western Electric, and while it was modest in its style, diction, and intellectual penetration, it chronicled a history of constant creative destruction well enough, right up to the point where it was finally creatively destroyed itself. No doubt the money men crawled out on top and went to infest some other wreck-to-be. That’s the way we do things, isn’t it? Stephenson quoter-kun 06.24.14 at 9:01 pm I always thought that “disruption” was something about how you can’t beat the local maximum by starting from the local maximum (because someone else is there already), so you have to start somewhere else (“downmarket” is the typical example); in turn, the occupier of the local maximum won’t be able to compete with you once you’ve found a higher maximum. Of course, that’s also pretty much tautological if you assume that incumbent businesses occupying the local maximum will refuse to leave it – you just need to assume that some greater maximum exists elsewhere, then start climbing a bunch of hills until you find it. It certainly makes a neat model. The problem is that Clay Christensen picked the aggressive-sounding word “disruption” for this concept, and people now think that calling their crummy new business “disruptive” makes them sound edgy and exciting. Rich middle-aged white men exhorting their naive proteges to be more “disruptive” is not a pretty sight for anyone with a modicum of self-awareness. These people are certainly distasteful. It does not follow, however, that they are necessarily wrong. Maybe the top of the hill that the MOOCs are climbing right now is going to turn out to be higher than the hill that traditional universities are sitting on. It’s probably worth finding out if that’s the case. In the abstract, the idea that new interactive and communicative technologies ought to change how we educate ourselves (and how much that costs) does not seem particularly outlandish. I can’t feel terribly upset that some people are trying it, even if I think they’re occasionally a tad obnoxious about it. Is being “disruptive” good for business? In a way, probably not. It rests on the assumption that the path less traveled does actually lead to a pot of gold, which probably isn’t true in most cases. Trying to disrupt an industry is hard and most of the time it won’t work. Most plans to disrupt existing, proven business models are simply going to fail. It might be better in most cases to aim lower and make some existing business a little bit more efficient. The flip-side is that improving existing institutions might be even harder. There’s good evidence that most improvements in productivity come about through the entry of new firms rather than the sudden improvement of existing ones (whatever Bain Capital might say otherwise). Hierarchical organisations really don’t like listening to the tier 7 functionaries even if they have a much better idea for how the business should work than the people who are in charge. It’s probably a good thing that some firms get disrupted, and the ones we should be really afraid of are the ones who seem to be immune to it. I’m not sure I get Eric’s point about why, then, some organisations – those consisting of “people”, as opposed to the soulless droids who start, own, operate or work for other organisations – ought to be immune from disruption. The example institutions were, in some cases, disruptive themselves once. Churches have pretty much always been in the business of disrupting each other, and using technology to do so. I’m going to hate myself for typing this, but many religious movements start off as downmarket outsiders, being dismissed as cranks by the establishment, which they eventually infiltrate and take over. At a sufficiently abstract level, that’s disruption in action. There’s no obvious reason why organisations of people cannot, or should not, be disrupted. I can understand people saying that they don’t like the specific disruptions on offer: disrupting education is simply not possible as universities represent a centuries-old tradition that cannot be improved upon by a team of Silicon Valley 20-somethings on caffeine drips; or, if it is possible, it will lead to education that is worse, not better, and therefore we must now allow it; or, even if it is possible to deliver better education by some measure, the wider costs make it undesirable. The problem is that if you’re picking your arguments from The Rhetoric of Reaction, you’re probably not making very good arguments. Sitting athwart history shouting “stop” has never worked very well, least of all in America. If I’ve understood correctly, the argument is that, since disruption isn’t the only way to improve things, we could profitably attempt to rediscover some of the other ways. To borrow from Hirschman again, we could use a bit more Voice and a bit less Exit. To which I would wholeheartedly agree, but I would point out that here the disruptionists have an advantage: they’re well-organised, well-funded and have a clear and ambitious program of action. Those of us who think that we could make institutions run better by, say, making them more democratic, are sadly reduced to carping about the excesses of the other side most of the time. Stephenson quoter-kun 06.24.14 at 9:05 pm (“…must not allow it…” in the middle of my penultimate para) The problem is that if you’re picking your arguments from The Rhetoric of Reaction, you’re probably not making very good arguments. Sitting athwart history shouting “stop” has never worked very well, least of all in America. The trouble is that that line of argument can be used to push any brand of snake oil or hucksterism or just plain bad idea under the sun. “There’s no point in sitting athwart history shouting ‘stop’; in the future everyone will be ordering their pet food online. You might as well get on board with the inevitable and buy as many shares of pets.com as you can…” I should probably re-read the Lepore article because on my first reading I thought “some good points, but it could have been a so much better article, with a bit more focus and details…” but then, innovation theory is something I’ve spent plenty of time with… 1) I think the point is that sometimes the theory of disruption breaks down and is effectively snake oil. For example, a lot of the stuff in healthcare about “using technology to overcome Baumol” is actually just about selling people on a lower, less effective service. Christensen would point out that it’s not real disruption if the original low-end product never gets better, but that rarely stops the hype machines… (And indeed, he also distinguishes the “good enough” low-end product due to tech advance as a separate case.) 2) If you look at studies from the US/UK you get mislead into believing productivity advances come from entry/exit. In Germany/S. Korea, pretty much the opposite. The evidence for exit is mostly sentimental trash from glibertarian romantics who like to believe in some non-existent underdog economy in the USA… “This rhetorical tactic aims at moral ends by appealing to a venal calculus. Like the commuter who rescued his fellow-citizen from a train track because he didn’t want to be late to work, maybe we will rescue our public goods from disruption – not because it’s the right thing to do, but because we won’t profit if we don’t.” This could very well work, and sometimes does; but then the problem is of course, what happens when we are faced with a situation where the right thing to do is not efficient, and does not save resources? 100+ years (at the least) of liberals making this tactical decision in terms of argument makes sense in the short term — it’s a good strategy — but is disastrous in the long term, as we actually feel awkward, queasy, and annoyed by argument about the public good and the ethical society. Since not enough people go ahead and make that argument, we lose the capacity to even make it a viable option, strategically speaking. The key to ‘disruption’, and what distinguishes it from the ‘creative destruction’ thinking which it draws on, is the premium it puts on the cheap and nasty: quality is the enemy, because mediocrity is cheaper and hence will outsell it. This in turn means that the people you want to empower are not the people doing the work – least of all if they’re doing the work because they believe in it – because they’ll just drag you down with their professionalism and their belief in a job well done. Disruption is explicitly anti-worker, and (incidentally) anti-Tom Peters and anti-Peter Drucker into the bargain. (Argument borrowed from here.) The primordial Real in which a (pre-Oedipal) human subject is born is differentiated from the real which a subject integrated into the symbolic order experiences. In the former, the real is the continuous, “whole” reality without categories and the differential function of language. Following the mirror stage, however, and the eventual entrance of the imaginary and the symbolic (the split of the subject between the conscious imaginary and the unconscious symbolic), the real may only be experienced as traumatic gaps in the symbolic order. An example of this are traumatic events such as natural disasters, which effectively break down the signification of everyday life and cause a rupture of something alien and unrecognizable, without the usual grammar of the symbolic that conditions how to make meaning of something and how to proceed. But that’s a little narrow and technical. We come into being as speaking subjects by means of a disruption in the Symbolic. And of course, what Anarcissie said. And also, the proletariat comes into class consciousness-for-itself by means of a rupture with the prevailing hegemony. Revolution is a rupture with atrophied institutions. Etc It is very bourgeois liberal to be frightened of a discourse of discontinuous change. And I didn’t even mention RBC theory and real shocks. Or Naomi Klein. The Lapore article is a great example of the kind of sensible writing that enforces and maintains an ontological hegemony. Phil’s comment, not surprisingly, is insightful (and his link foregrounds some things Lepore herself says (not all of which I agree with)). But the point of disruption, and you see this is you read Lepore’s article, is not that employees hold back companies from surviving. It’s that non-survival is a foregone conclusion. Disrupted companies can hold on for years, sometimes, but not forever, and they never come back to where they once were. That doesn’t mean–and no one says, except the kind of people who were chanting “paradigm shift” twenty years ago–that everyone is disrupted. It does mean that once no one wants minicomputers anymore, you can’t just make better minicomputers and still play in the big leagues. Back in 1990, companies were dealing with two disruptions: the PC and Microsoft. We are down to exactly one company that existed in 1980, out of a dozen or more, still making a good amount of money on state-of-the-art computers (and IBM and a few others in smaller markets). On the other hand, in 1995 it had been “decided” that nobody could compete with Microsoft and they’d have 100% of every software market, and that did change. 1) I think the point is that sometimes the theory of disruption breaks down and is effectively snake oil. For example, a lot of the stuff in healthcare about “using technology to overcome Baumol” is actually just about selling people on a lower, less effective service. Christensen would point out that it’s not real disruption if the original low-end product never gets better, but that rarely stops the hype machines… I don’t think it’s about selling people on a less effective service, although it can be about selling them a cheaper one. If you look at stuff like the increased use of robotics in surgery and IBM’s Watson as a diagnostic tool, the eventual hope is that you might be able to make health care cheaper and more reliable, especially if you don’t need doctors for a whole bunch of medical tasks. There’s definitely a “snake oil” element, although that’s mostly with the use of “disruption” as a selling point. It’s just a way to make startups that are usually too risky for banks to touch and too expensive for the entrepreneurs to self-finance to appeal to the vanity of rich would-be investors. There’s plenty of precedent for that – British banks in the late 18th century usually wouldn’t touch factories as investments because of the risk and perceived tawdriness of them, at least from what I remember of reading Peter Stearns. 2) If you look at studies from the US/UK you get mislead into believing productivity advances come from entry/exit. In Germany/S. Korea, pretty much the opposite. The evidence for exit is mostly sentimental trash from glibertarian romantics who like to believe in some non-existent underdog economy in the USA… South Korea had plenty of entry/exit, including among the Chaebol Conglomerates. That was something that Joe Studwell pointed out in his book about how East Asia industrialized while talking about South Korean industrial policy – most of the giant conglomerates around today are not the same ones that existed back in the 1960s and 1970s in South Korea. I’m not sure what the Marx quote has to do with disruption in this case, but it’s a point worth pursuing. The “innovators” really don’t care about the relationship between business or workers – hence SN’s mention of the naturalistic fallacy. The author’s focus on capitalism in America at a particular period in time does not mean that we can’t apply these same categories to relationships between workers. It’s an interesting omission. This Amazon review by Kartick Vaddadi of The Innovator’s Dilemma says the book contrasts three types of change. All of them are useful for consumers. Then there is a discussion of how it is that responsiveness to protecting particular kinds of change is useful and gets enshrined in companies, and where it isn’t. Kartick Vaddadi’s statement that SSDs in computers are “disruptive” over regular hard drives is right – if we mean what the difference is for consumers. If we’re talking about the difference to manufacturers, though, patent portfolio sharing and cross-licensing, as well as the expiration of many fundamental research patents, mean that there are a large number of companies that manufacture them. Many other recent technologies that are arguably “disruptive” have been developed within a notably stable industry. Take the video space: sedTV and FED could have been disruptive for providing great new displays, but cost ruled them out years ago. Digital coin miners have kept graphics hardware manufacturers nVidia and AMD well in the black for a period, though that party is now over. It’s not just external events that push these changes, though: AMD and nVidia seem to mirror each other when they roll out DX12 (from nVidia, in collaboration with Microsoft) after Mantle, or when AMD decides it needs FreeSync after nVidia announces G-Sync. These are two technologies (and standards) that provide that experience of a “disruptive” improvement to consumer technologies, and they appear to have been done through cooperation, instead of winner-takes-all strategies. Both companies are paying very close attention to ways in which they might be able to catch up their competitor dipping into forbidden secrets, in hopes of forcing a disruptive exit from the marketplace. But it’s not clear that this is anything more than just churning on. Even in the case where some company can force such an issue through the courts, the government has been cautious of throwing an established company overboard (when such a large part of the economy could trail behind it). At this scale, companies are more likely to settle for patent cross-licensing and royalties to evade criticisms of monopoly (which is basically one result of directionless “disruption” taken to the extreme), as with Intel and AMD. Yet the idea of disruptive technological development isn’t all bunk. Onto quoter-san’s point: The “local maximum” sounds close to saying that there is an upper bound of some type, like ‘how pure can we refine our materials,’ ‘how precise are the production processes,’ ‘which metallurgy and crystallography textbooks do we read.’ All these things can improve over time. But at every step the level of research and understanding is far less than it could be, so we never actually do what is “optimum” (or among the optimal choices) when imagining a complex piece of technology. Only relatively recently (I think in the mid-80s) did we really start moving computer modeling of technology to incorporate physical modeling. And of course there is a limit to how far we can spend calculating what is best. Electrical engineering textbooks state as standard that you can use a “lumped load” model for many tasks, and below certain frequencies you don’t need to pay close attention to RF effects and the like. The latter is an omission by design; the former is omitted by accident. The idea of “disruptive technologies” is best when it points out that not only do we somewhat lag behind achieving what is possible, but in fact whole fields of discovery often go unnoticed due to accidents of history, physiology, and everything else. Start thinking of “what would aliens value in technology?” or alternative histories (wouldn’t Neal Stephenson approve?) and this becomes clearer. What if IBM researchers hadn’t stumbled across the eclectic raft of insights (spin-coating, the analogy to vinyl discs) that made the magnetic rotary hard disk a reality in 1956? “Disruption’s” place in advancing technology seems way overrated. We can find Usenet posts from the early 1990s with people accurately predicting how much RAM people would have. Moves away from 2D manufacture to more 3D manufacture were known and used by Seymour Cray when his computer company was relatively young, even though only recently have such ideas started to be developed for consumer products. The basic problem seems to be a simple human one: It’s easy for bureaucracies to get too focused on things that are entirely extraneous to the decision making, and even if they try to do everything right, there’s still the possibility somebody else will find that low-hanging fruit first. The key, I think, is trying to figure out whether we actually need companies to become immortal institutions – are HP or IBM immortal? GM or Ford? – and also how it is that we can make sure that companies with the expertise and the people get rewarded. I’ll just end up by mentioning one of the all-time technology whoppers: Sight-shorted businessmen looking for something like the next “disruptive change” gave away one of the crown jewels of 20th century display technology, because the grass was greener on the other side. From the piece: The four Jewish men who worked in an almost-secret division called Autometric for Paramount Pictures on the project then called Chromatron—which after a handshake became the Japanese “invention” the Trinitron—are barely a footnote on Wikipedia, while the engineers at Sony live on in glory. Nobutoshi Kihara, who in 2011 died in Tokyo at eighty-four, was as celebrated in Japan for his role in the Trinitron’s invention as he was for inventing the Walkman. The project was sold for a mere one million dollars in a deal cooked up at a cocktail party. Within a few years it made billions, the Trinitron dominating the world market. Sony tweaked five years of research for sure, but in this daughter’s opinion they should share credit. Even if in my father’s opinion: “Who cares? I don’t think about it, only you.” The story as I have it so far, is that the stores wouldn’t stock color sets because the picture was so unsteady. Engineers were under fire to produce a bankable consumer model. The head office was always breathing down their necks. Someone was going to make a killing. If a man at RCA made the breakthrough, it would reestablish his company as the leader. The big executives visiting the floor would say things like, “That Tokyo fellow put SONY on top of the map with the transistor radio. Out of nowhere, they led the world.” Or: “Think bigggg. New ideas saved Ford, the ’49 Sedan was introduced in ’48 and saved the company from bankruptcy.” Finally, prediction #4 off this list should sound pretty familiar today. And sure, “big leagues” begs the question. If popularity doesn’t matter, and you think IBM’s or Honeywell’s product (whatever those are) are higher quality than a Lenovo laptop–and they probably are, in a lot of ways–pointing out that IBM doesn’t make PCs anymore and whatever acquisition of Honeywell’s, which used to do so doesn’t, either, is irrelevant. Sometimes I work hard to agree with you; more often I have difficulty getting past my initial “Oh, FFS.” If I say, “don’t think of a pink elephant!”, can you avoid imagining a pink elephant? The Lapore article is a great example of the kind of sensible writing that enforces and maintains an ontological hegemony. If I say, “don’t think of an ontological hegemony”, can you avoid imagining an ontological hegemony? “Ontological hegemony” is one of those big green things they put around large British estates, isn’t it? They used to hunt people in them. Hey! No fighting in the War Room more disruptions of the disruption thread! I have surely reached my quota for this thread Don’t want to derail substantive discussion here. But do want to note that the principle triumph of Reaganists is the invidious creep of market think into all aspects of life. I immediately thought of this thread when reading: ml The point about how hard the business press focuses on the non-normal-ness of Tesla sharing its patents is very applicable. We are encouraged to think of disruption in antagonistic, competitive ways. We are encouraged to think of cannibalistic business plans as being dangerous. It’s all about who’s winning and who’s losing in the papers, when disruptive change is fundamentally about the rewiring of networks and the construction of new networks of more modern conceptions. When Tesla wants to do a little mutualism, patent lawyers stand agape. They will not be disrupted. Schumpeter tried to reason out how it was that there were so many obvious market inefficiencies and so much obvious waste in the economy, when the invisible hand ensures that there will be hardly any waste or inefficiency. He argued that each industry inevitably approaches monopoly, and this makes it easier for innovators to come up with alternative technology. The old established industry has had a long time to improve on their learning curve, they will be somewhere near their local optimum. The innovators will be far from their own local optimum, but they must get better than the established approach before they can compete. Monopoly lowers the bar, and so helps to increase the rate of innovation. He argued that business cycles are a good thing because in recessions the least productive businesses fail and so release the resources they were inefficiently using to be available for new purposes. People see the inefficiency of recessions, but they don’t see the higher efficiency they cause. Left to itself, everything the economy does encourages creative destruction which improves the economy in the long run. Schumpeter made JustSo stories to explain the contradiction between observed facts versus the theory of efficient markets. Anyway, apart from the hoopla there is something important about the disruptive concept. If you are running a business in a particular market niche, and you get an innovation which results in that’s very good. Like, customers get improvements they are willing to pay more for, and also those improvements let them use your product more. Even after your competitors catch up with you, you get a slice of a bigger pie. But what if instead you get an innovation which results in 1. Lower costs 2. Lower or same sales. Then you can sell cheaper and increase market share. But when your competitors catch up, you get a slice of a smaller pie. If you already have a significant market share, you benefit from the first kind of innovation and you suffer from the second kind. But if you start out with no market share, you benefit either way. Assuming you have sufficient resources to actually break into the market with your cheap innovative product. There are various ways to assign importance to this. It’s a concept that has some uses. I don’t see that it has a lot of moral significance, unless you are in the market for moral justifications and you think this is a better fit to your needs than competing intellectual products. William Timberman 06.24.14 at 11:40 pm Bob, it’s no use. Ontological Hegemony, Inc. doesn’t need a standing army — there’s never any shortage of volunteer defenders both savage and genteel. Maybe if you called it Maggie’s Farm instead you’d seem closer to the soil, and therefore more trustworthy, more the sort of person they’d like to have a beer with. And then they’d listen, right? For what it’s worth, way back here in the last row, me, I’m listening, and I prefer it as it comes, if you please, without all the customary hail fellow well met. (It’s hard enough to think about these things as it is without the added burden of appearing respectable — let alone chummy — while I’m doing it.) Business is boring and discouraging for most of those participating. There’s a market for preachers, who can feed the spiritual need. Clayton Christensen, I’m sure, imagines himself a scholar and a theoretician, but what he is, is a coach-at-half-time of a losing game for dispirited salesmen, wishing they were doing anything half as meaningful as playing a high school basketball or football game. For this reason, the strongest parts of Jill Lepore’s essay, for me, concerned the concept of disruption as a cultural phenomenon, expressing the intense anxiety of the times. (And, bob mcmanus, with all the incisiveness of the impenetrable Nagel, may have been addressing this, I don’t know.) I wanted her to make the connection between the depth psychology of the faith in disruption and the yawning vacuum where public purposes and ethical commitment should be in the political and business discourse. I wanted her to make that connection and explain it, and I feel disappointed. She did try to challenge the pretension with which Christensen transforms his “case-studies” into just-so stories, decorated with bumperstickers masquerading as analytic concepts. It is kind of mean to challenge Christensen’s enthusiasm for “disruptive” innovation with the fact that Seagate, a focus of one of his first studies, is still the largest hard-drive maker, after more than 40 years. And, I like mean. But, it was not clear to me what her point was. Ditto, for the observation that U.S. Steel is a unionized workplace. And, for the record, journalism is a profession; journalists work for businesses that publish stuff. @30 So much of public discourse gets confused by the fact that journalists think journalism is a pure public good. The Temporary Name 06.24.14 at 11:58 pm For this reason, the strongest parts of Jill Lepore’s essay, for me, concerned the concept of disruption as a cultural phenomenon, expressing the intense anxiety of the times. I may not be a cheery and content person but I don’t recall the times that weren’t anxious. Maybe “disruption” is the Late, Great Planet Earth for suits. J Thomas @ 28 I agree, Christensen’s ideas do seem to be a recycling of Schumpeter’s in some ways. Schumpeter could use the term, economic rent, in a sentence and hope to be understood. He understood that the economy had a structure, and economic rents marked out power in that structure. Christensen’s ideas have evolved in the direction of emphasizing the business model, and the potential of a new technology to enable or require a different business model. Schumpeter would have understood “disruption” in terms of capturing or diverting sources of economic rent. Early Schumpeter celebrated the entrepreneur as a hero of wild spirit; late Schumpeter was very impressed by the organizational resources of the large American business corporation, with its R&D labs and planned obsolescence. In Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, when “Socialism” was closely associated with central planning, Schumpeter wondered aloud whether planning by giant corporations would not come close to driving what we would call start-ups — the founding of wholly new enterprise on new principles and producing new products — toward practical extinction. Schumpeter did not foresee just how far the processes of incremental improvements would carry us. Nor do we fully appreciate how very different the world of work and business seems as a result of the progress of incremental innovation in the processes of making things. The business model for building a railroad wasn’t so hard to figure out: you bought land along the route, in anticipation of the effect building the road would have on property values. And, once the railroad was built, the railroad had considerable advantages in speed and cost of transport with which to bargain over rates, though many roads went bankrupt discovering that merchants gained considerable leverage as well, knowing that the railroad was stuck with its sunk-cost investments and sizeable overhead. Still, the business model, so to speak, had tangible elements forming a visible outline. Did you know that a television network was originally based on ownership of a high-capacity transmission line connecting member stations? That was the eponymous “network” and its costs were considerable enough to form part of what economists used to call a barrier to entry, along with factors like the limited number of television channels in each market — there were only 12 on the VHF dial back in the day, and less than half of those available in any given city — and the huge costs of esoteric devices like cameras, not to mention the highly trained, unionized technicians. Now what’s a television network? A website and a Roku app? One of the biggest sunk-cost investments might be the marketing concept and the logo design. That’s an extreme example, but it’s the outcome of a general trend. The unit costs of manufactured goods has become remarkably low, and the proportionate effect of investments in intangibles like “brand” very large. Christensen is haunted, I understand, by a missed prophecy regarding the iPhone and Nokia, which he tries to explain away by a reference to smartphones competing with (disrupting) personal computers. But, personal computers are disrupting themselves, by becoming so cheap, that you cannot build a company with the overhead of a Dell or H-P around them. I wouldn’t recommend that anyone get their religion from the Harvard Business School, but I can see why businessmen might feel the need for one. The world must seem fragile, indeed, when business rests not on tangible brick-and-mortar and the quasi-rents of expensive machines or the expertise of loyal workforces, but on brand names, clever graphics and intellectual property claims. Temporary Name: I don’t recall the times that weren’t anxious. Yes, of course. To every age, etc. I thought Lepore was fairly clear, though, in tying this particular concept of disruption to the particular character of our anxieties, in contrast to other times. Ed Herdman 06.24.14 at 10:09 pm @ 20: ‘I’m not sure what the Marx quote has to do with disruption in this case…’ My thought was that disruption was not a novelty, but inherent in capitalism. Lepore says, very generally, well, it didn’t really happen, a lot of the old companies are still around, a lot of the new disruptive ones disappeared, and so on. The focus is on companies. However, to take one example, the PC didn’t disrupt the computer world; it disrupted the office, the workplace. In 1960, business offices were full of people typing, running mechanical calculators, running copiers, receiving and sending and carrying mail around and so forth. A lot of the jobs required a certain amount of skill and knowledge and were sometimes paid accordingly. Thirty or forty years later, most of those people were gone because their jobs were gone. Some of them wound up programming computers and some of them wound up as associate assistant manager of the produce department in the local Safeway. A good many of them went on Welfare or Disability or retired early. So the PC and related equipment were the means of chopping out a significant section of the middle working class, the substance of many communities. It was part of stopping the mill that turned immigrants, internal and external, into worthy citizens; it was part of the turn where ‘we’ started going down, although our companies and their leaders were continuing to go up. That is how this particular phase of disruption worked. The Temporary Name 06.25.14 at 1:00 am I thought Lepore was fairly clear, though, in tying this particular concept of disruption to the particular character of our anxieties, in contrast to other times. It does occupy a funny space as a manual for and justification of self-immolation. A lot of them went into administration and management and “services”. A kind of Jevons effect took over, but one with darker motives than just wasting paper on the long, long way to the paperless office. Administration began to busy itself with very complex administrative tasks, the better to make itself essential and valuable, re-organizing for the brave new world. “Disruption” could be a friend to a certain sort of administrative busywork. Isn’t that part of the message of Lepore reflecting on her early temp career? The growth of Administration drove out-sourcing, for example, and the use of temporary workers on contract. Administration began to eat the University alive. And, it’s goal is the MOOC, the equivalent of my television network qua Roku app, where all that’s left to do is administer the revenue stream. In 1960, business offices were full of people typing, running mechanical calculators, running copiers, receiving and sending and carrying mail around and so forth. Heck, in 1975 my Highlights magazine came with an address label written out longhand! In 1959 the US Government and General Motors sent out payroll checks engraved on rock–true fact! Seriously, trying to drum up sympathy for the person who lost their job saying “we need this in triplicate” and “that was a computer error” like they did in 1970, by claiming other industries not only caused their problems but that other industries didn’t have job losses themselves, seems to me terribly misguided. The Temporary Name 06.25.14 at 1:05 am Seriously, trying to drum up sympathy for the person who lost their job saying “we need this in triplicate” and “that was a computer error” like they did in 1970, by claiming other industries not only caused their problems but that other industries didn’t have job losses themselves, seems to me terribly misguided. Should sympathy be drummed up for that person? Should sympathy be drummed up for that person? The Temporary Name 06.25.14 at 1:10 am One kind. Do you figger that person deserves sympathy? Is that a question you really think the answer might be “no” to? What a craptastically insulting thing to say. The Temporary Name 06.25.14 at 1:20 am My apologies then. But why would sympathy from that angle be terribly misguided? I think I reached close to the same conclusion in my second overlong post, roughly. If you’re saying that there is a disruption inherent in capitalism and that focusing only on one aspect of it causes a disconnect with reality – then probably, yes, that appears to be the case. Not sure that it’s quite accurate to the history of IBM to say that the PC didn’t disrupt things – but it’s really beside the point (for reference, I remember an IBM insider saying “IBM at the time had the people, had the technology, everybody was ready to go…and the company just didn’t.”) The PC, and the Microsoft/IBM split, really was disruptive for IBM. The bigger story behind that, though, is this: IBM’s still around, and they’re still selling services and computers that would look fairly familiar to people who sold System 360s back in the day. So it turns out that protecting that market actually has kept IBM in good stead. They weren’t beating the world with software development, during the heyday of Microsoft, but they didn’t need to be. I’ve seen stacks of old printing plates used by IBM to print their punched cards. You can probably find them on eBay still. It’s not a stone tablet – but close enough, right? Interesting point on shifting blame. In this discussion, you often hear people say “we have to spin off a company to protect the main company (and also isolate the spinoff from entrenched staid corporate culture), and that “entrepreneurs” must always try on their own and fail repeatedly. There are lots of emotional reasons why these things might happen, but I can’t accept the argument that things must be this way, that companies can’t have internal leadership to follow a new vision while protecting old strategies. The idea that a spinoff is isolated from the main company seems silly, like moving an office across the street or into another state somehow means that it’s no longer in competition with the old markets. Because entrusting internet and cellphone technologies to a company with “telegraph” in its name has worked out so well. Lepore says, very generally, well, it didn’t really happen, a lot of the old companies are still around, a lot of the new disruptive ones disappeared, and so on. alu=972 But senor, the old nondisruptive company does not always lose. @ Bruce: You mean the company that invented many of those same technologies? There is the Bad Bell, which had to be fought on issues like Carterfone, but there is also a Good Bell which theoretically allowed stability, and developed a lot of the ubiquitous technology of the ‘net and telephony, either internally, or at Lucent, or whatever else got spun off. Simplistic, maybe. I’m more interested in restricting companies from doing bad than I am with blowing them up, and ensuring that the tech landscape is forever fragmented. Standardization could theoretically help but I don’t think a Kropotkinesque (“Fields, Factories, and Workshops”) view of small local players adhering to standards would help with economies of scale. But maybe I’m wrong in this – it’s been argued for a long time that you have to reach a critical mass in having the right people in the same place to do big things, but a lot of our big tech standards are done at cross-industry meetings, and Big Thinkers tend to step on each others’ toes anyway. okay, a bit OT, but what’s the deal with all the replies with comment numbers that don’t match? I’m having to work a bit harder to follow what’s going on. I am horrified to read that someone thought I might be trying to drum up sympathy for somebody. ‘The heavy is the foundation of the light; the still is the basis of the quick.’ Thus, if you dismember the infrastructure, the superstructure collapses. (‘That which is to be thrown down is first lifted up.’) If disruption is really inherent in capitalism, and as Marx says capitalist disruption destroys culture, and if you do not desire collapse, then either disruption must be managed, or the capitalist social order must be cleverly replaced by something else. (What a magic trick that would be!) But instead, disruption is being fetishized. (That is probably a symptom, rather than a cause.) In any case, collapse will not be averted. The only thing wrong with Uncle Karl’s little poem is the last line: ‘… Man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real condition of life and his relations with his kind.’ That seems most unlikely, going by how previous dissolutions of the established order worked out. William Timberman 06.25.14 at 2:31 am If we’re looking for concrete examples, what about Apple, Inc.? Apple, it seems to me, is the perfect embodiment not only of Christensen’s thesis, but of LePore’s antithesis as well. And if, a thousand years from now, archaeologists should uncover the remains of Apple’s apparently empty spaceship headquarters, and its thousands of apparently empty retail outlets, all emblazoned with Jony Ive’s tantalizingly reductionist version of the apple-with-a-bite-out-of-it corporate logo, what will they think they’ve found? The temples of a successor to Judeo-Christianity, maybe — the cross of humility replaced by the symbol of a belated, yet somehow insanely successful acceptance of the serpent’s gift? I’m indulging myself in a fanciful vision here, I suppose, but I’d argue that it’s not entirely inconsistent with what Apple does in fact represent. And what about that iPhone — what it is and what it does? Can you think of a more perfect symbol of both the streamlined moderne and the classic contradictions of capitalism? Mirabile dictu, it even fits in your pocket. Perhaps one area where the Marx quote is also relevant is that the orginal Marxist meaning of ‘destruction’ (whether creative or otherwise) is that it can lead to crises which existentially threaten any particular system as a whole (whether an industry, specific market, particular nation state’s economy, or capitalism as a whole). Disruptions can lead to the risk or reality of systemwide collapse. This is analogous to the insights of ecological theories on systems tipping points or collapse (ie Gunderson and Holling’s Panarchy) in which unpredictable disruptions can lead to cascading failures throughout interconnecting systems and thus shift them into a neew spahse space (ie a world in which large hard drives are no longer necessay – or in which VHS is the new agreed video technology). The problem seems to be is that Schumpeter (and those who have come after him like Christensen) are more than willing to valorise the destructive effects of disruptive innovations (clear away the dead wood!) while ignoring the original connotations of the concept. There’s a disconnect in scale between such sub-system disruptions and the overall pristine equilibrium of the system itself – sometime clearing away the dead wood is dangerous if it had other purposes or unintended side effects such as housing for small mammals in a forest (literal ‘dead wood’) or employment for citizens (and how archaic that word sounds!). Sometimes the cascading effects of disruptions are systemwide – these boosters don’t seem to acknowledge that. neew spahse space What happens when the ‘infinite number of monkeys’ are slysdexic? Obviously meant ‘new phase space’ :) If by the PC didn’t disrupt the computer world; it disrupted the office, the workplace you didn’t mean to imply that the significant effects of the PC revolution had nothing to do with the disruption of the workplaces of people who worked on and with computers even before the PC revolution, I apologize. I was annoyed by what I thought was the implication, which was apparently inadvertent, that technology is bad primarily because it eliminated the jobs of accountants and receptionists–and doubly annoyed by what I thought was the suggestion that if computer industry workers had suffered, their suffering didn’t matter, or that it was okay to explain it away, more okay to explain away one kind of workers’ suffering than another’s. And I couldn’t help pointing out that there was a lot of mechanization of office work already in the 1950s (my mother worked for a company that made that kind of equipment, I just finished Revolutionary Road, which in 1955 has machines for doing the kind of thing Francis Spufford describes the Soviets’ trying to do in Red Plenty), which helped the economy grow as much as it did, and which also led to a lot of jobs, but led as well to complaints about big bureaucracies that were also already tied to ideas about computerization. That part was meant to be a joke, sorry if it came off wrong. The temples of a successor to Judeo-Christianity, maybe — the cross of humility replaced by the symbol of a belated, yet somehow insanely successful acceptance of the serpent’s gift? Also don’t forget that the first Apple went on sale for $666.66 and the Apple start up sound is in fact the … Okay, you all, just wait one second… What is it when we’re talking about when we are talking about disruptive innovations? Going through this thread, it seems like “disruptive goods” seems to outweigh any other kind of innovation. Not disruptive logistical/backoffice/manufactoring device, nor do we talk about disruptive government services like the damming of the Colorado, victorious armies, or welfare programs. I mean, shouldn’t a big part of this discussion be about Obamacare and the theorizing/politics leading up to the startup, since a big part of health care reform was precisely how and how not to disrupt? If we’re talking about ideology, shouldn’t we be talking a bit more about the split between private and public good in more than just the sense that this managerialism helped to reduce the public infrastructure or bust unions? Where, how, and when discourse about disruption is probably important, as well as where the discourse is aimed it. I started thinking about this stuff because floopmeister @53 is talking about clearing away dead wood. All the leftover buggywhips? What? Okay, you all, just wait one second… What is it when we’re talking about when we are talking about disruptive innovations? Going through this thread, it seems like “disruptive goods” seems to outweigh any other kind of innovation. Not disruptive logistical/backoffice/manufactoring device, nor do we talk about disruptive government services like the damming of the Colorado, victorious armies, or welfare programs. I mean, shouldn’t a big part of this discussion be about Obamacare and the theorizing/politics leading up to the startup, since a big part of health care reform was precisely how and how not to disrupt? If we’re talking about ideology, shouldn’t we be talking a bit more about the split between private and public good in more than just the sense that this managerialism helped to reduce the public infrastructure or bust unions? Where, how, and when discourse about disruption is probably important, as well as where the discourse is aimed it. I started thinking about this stuff because floopmeister @53 is talking about clearing away dead wood. All the leftover buggywhips? What? William Timberman 06.25.14 at 3:01 am The fruit of the tree of knowledge. What could go wrong? Floopmeister, you seem to be barking up the wrong tree here. In other words, you seem to have misread my intent. Must I spell it out? William Timberman 06.25.14 at 3:20 am Point taken, floopmeister, and apologies for my own misreading. Given your previous post, it did seem unlikely, but like bob mcm at times, I can’t seem to color inside the lines, and have on ocassion been taken to task for crimes I haven’t actually committed. Less so here than elsewhere — the CT fathers and mothers are an admirably tolerant bunch — but still…. Whatever one’s fancies, one never likes to be mistaken for a snake handler. Of course Marx has something (important) to say about disruption. It is at the heart of his theory of relative surplus value. Lepore may be right to claim that “disruption” is used in a facile way – and is no doubt uttered a thousand times a day in pitches by 20-somethings to angel investors here in the Valley. But if you don’t think the phenomenon isn’t real you haven’t been paying attention – just spend a few minutes looking at the DRAM industry or considering the implications of Moore’s Law. William – no problem. The exact same thing has happened to me on numerous occasions (including one memeorable case here at CT where I entirely missed the joke). Sometimes I think what is really needed for online discourse is the worldwide online introduction of ‘Sarcastica’ font :) http://www.dafont.com/sarcastica.font I can understand why everybody missed it, but I believe I mentioned “Not disruptive logistical/backoffice/manufactoring device” arenas in my second post. Actually, in my draft I was even more explicit about this. List-o-mania: – Relations between workers and management – Bureaucracies (Gone Wild!) – Common artifacts (TVs) – Devices and techniques commonly used to create artifacts (metallurgy and the Heavy Press Program…speaking of that, I don’t think there has been any technology to disrupt the merits of the Alcoa-type presses, which remain useful in specialized industries. Likewise, the heavy engineering investments going into automotive weight reductions to meet the new CAFE standards would seem to put steel industries in a tight spot, but actually there’s a lot of room there, even if you don’t believe the bullish-on-steel reports out of ArcelorMittal.) – Space goat holy shrines! They like them apples. Lepore writes, “Beginning in the eighteenth century, as the intellectual historian Dorothy Ross once pointed out, theories of history became secular; then they started something new—historicism, the idea ‘that all events in historical time can be explained by prior events in historical time.'” Ross looks like an interesting scholar. However it should be pointed out that most scholars of the previous few generations would recognize this as Lovejoy’s argument of the relationship between the 18th century’s “temporalizing” of the great chain of being, and Leibnitz’ principle of sufficient reason. Lovejoy probably would have seen the current “disruption” rhetoric as yet another romanticist variation on the basic framework. It is remarkable how thoroughly the West is still ensconced in an era that started in the 18th century. I really don’t accept Amazon’s supposed disruption of the book selling business. Amazon “disrupted” the book selling business only because, for reasons I do not understand, its stockholders allow it to operate as basically a charitable enterprise dedicated to providing consumers with staff that’s really cheap because Amazon doesn’t need to turn a profit. I don’t think Amazon would be particularly disruptive if it had to turn a profit to stay alive. I think it would be out of business in a year or two. to turn a profit to stay alive. I think it would be out of business in a year or two. Yes, you would think we would have disrupted that whole Enlightenment thingee by now. William Timberman 06.25.14 at 4:46 am Every now and again one of us has, but after Blake, we’ve been afraid to mention it to anyone above the rank of corporal. So…what in the fullness of time ought to have become an Umwertung aller Werte is now generally considered a form of onanism. I see someone has mentioned the Bloomberg followup @9. I was surprised at Christensen’s dismissive attitude, his whining about how Lepore was “mean” and most telling, his continual use of her first name when he reveals, at the last, that he has never mee her. I couldn’t get past the sense of outraged entitlement that a womanhad dared to impugn his credentials. Between that and the revelation that the investment was nothing more than him selling his name, what credibility does he have left? This criticism seems narrow to me. It is more generally the market, of which one manifestation may be Schumpeterian disruptive innovation, from which certain institutions need to protected. For example, Richard Nelson argues that the provision of the news is a public service, but we can’t count on private institutions guided by profit made through paid subscribers and advertisers to provide the journalism that a democracy needs for its functioning. Disruptive innovations that take a lot of advertisers and paid subscribers elsewhere may further compromise the quality of the news, but even in the absence of disruptive technologies, the market already poses grave threats to the operation of some important institutions. This criticism, as quoted here, does not seem to cut deeply enough. But I look forward to reading the article. I am reminded that Nathan Rosenberg, most sympathetic to Schumpeter, once criticized his exaggeration of the economic importance radical innovations and relative neglect of the incremental innovations that were responsible for most technological progress. Another place to look here is Chris Freeman’s theory of national systems of innovation in particular at the performance of systems in which venture capital, looking for next big thing, has less power. If the market were 100% competitive, there were no barriers to entry and other restrictions (like patents and brand protection, for example), then there would’ve been disruption all the time, and nothing but disruption. No business would survive for more than a week. Disruption is limited to the extent that competition is restricted. I think it is important to understand that in Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, Schumpeter describes his idea of “creative destruction” in the context of a very careful argument that capitalism will destroy itself by setting up OTHER seeds of its own downfall. It is as if he wants to counter any opinion that “creative destruction” is part of that downfall process: “creative destruction,” he says, is really the process of capitalism being healthy. So don’t point to it, and say that is why capitalism will fail. Capitalism’s failure will come certainly, but for very different reasons. (In a similar way, his book starts out with a learned four-chapter criticism of Marx: Schumpeter dismisses some of Marx on the way to presenting his own theory of why capitalism will fail — and which he finally calls a Marxian analysis!) I think however as we enter an historical stage that uses fantasy rhetoric like “disruptive innovations” for what appear to be self-marketing ploys, Schumpeter himself might have wondered whether the real story here is that finally, capitalism is mentally imploding, which is indeed part of his argument about how capitalism will set up the seeds of its own downfall. Stephenson quoter-kun 06.25.14 at 7:10 am For all the talk of Schumpeter, I still think that Hirschman is more relevant. Hirschman’s conception of organisational ‘slack’ explains how, over time, a business can drift away from delivering the best possible value to its customers (indeed he thought it was inevitable, that organisations are “permanently and randomly subject to decline and decay, that is, to a gradual loss of rationality, efficiency, and surplus-producing energy no matter how well the institutional framework within which they function is designed.”). When this happens, customers can express their dissatisfaction by exiting the relationship or by speaking up in some way, and it’s only in response to this that the decline might be arrested or reversed. Hirschman was definitely interested in the question of which kinds of customers would be the canaries in the coal mine, and he hypothesised that some companies might actually be quite happy to lose their most troublesome customers in the short run, however deleterious this might be in the long run. However, where Hirschman thought that this might lead to a stable situation in which fairly mediocre near-monopolies could survive indefinitely, Christensen argues that such mediocrity will eventually create the possibility of disruption. The company simply drifts too far from its customers, or perhaps from a specific sub-group of those customers who demand the most innovative products, that it cannot anticipate future demand reliably. Moreover, this shift can appear sudden, because it’s not easy to measure the pent-up demand for alternatives to the current market leader. There are pretty good examples of this today. If you measure the market share of operating systems in the “personal computer” industry, you might conclude that MS Windows is still dominant. Until, that is, you consider smartphones and tablets as “personal computers” and you realise that Windows – despite the massive, corporate-policy-mandated install base that has existed since the 90s – is at around 35% and falling. There are more personal computers running Linux (Android) than Windows! Desktop PC sales are flat or declining. Microsoft, a mediocre (in terms of its operating systems) near-monopoly is being disrupted, and it’s pretty much explicable in terms that Christensen laid out. Microsoft was simply on to too much of a good thing with the Windows operating system and couldn’t figure out how to engage new markets without undermining the Windows revenue stream, and now those new markets are bigger than the old ones. I don’t think Schumpeter has anything particular to say about this. Sure, this process could be described as “creative destruction”, but that concept can be widely applied. Slack and disruption seem to capture a bit more about the dynamics – they provide mechanisms by which creative destruction can happen which makes saying “it’s just creative destruction” seem a bit empty. Disrupted companies can hold on for years, sometimes, but not forever, and they never come back to where they once were. But that (as Lepore points out) is the trouble with the ‘disruption’ story – it’s an each-way bet. $DISRUPTOR succeeds and $DISRUPTED goes bust? What did I tell you! $DISRUPTOR goes bust? Failure’s all part of the process! $DISRUPTED is still around and doing fine? Ah, but they’re not dominant any more… Like Lepore, I’ll take a disrupted Seagate over a disruptive MiniScribe any day. And this is also the point of the article I linked – not to discuss the details of Disruption, The Process but to identify the distinguishing marks of “Disruption”, The Snake Oil. Whether disruption corresponds to anything real or not, “disruption” is a very influential – and mostly pernicious – brand of management-speak; that article suggests where it came from and why. It’s not just Seagate, though – even if Seagate doesn’t get into the SSD business, there’s still Hitachi HGST, Western Digital, PNY, OCZ (well, Toshiba), even old standby Intel (bubble memory doesn’t cut it anymore). Within this space, disruption sure doesn’t seem to be the guiding pattern for industry. Disruptors seem at most to exist as fine grains floating with the currents, while companies exist, like sponges, to filter and trap them. Tech sponges. People love to talk about the failed companies of days gone by, but nobody seriously thinks that when DEC dried up, all its research into CPUs was reinvented by other players. That persisted and still exists as the kind of innovation that Congress sought to reward with the patent act. For every one of these companies, as well, I’d not be surprised if there are still other “Hidden champions” hanging around, like Texas Memory Systems. … we swapped paperback novels—Kurt Vonnegut… that kind of thing I feel strongly that Lepore’s article wants to be called Schumpeter, Foma and Granfalloons Feals like there are lots of emotions in this debate because distrutive innovation is such a right wing buzzword and because its now applied to Universities teaching methods. Dont see how the narrower model is worthless. Wont happen always everywhere obviously. The German mittelstand in particular is a very weak argument against disruptive innovation, since they sit on such small upmarket niches. They are often specialiced in the little part of the market with very high quality demands thats left, while the entire rest of the market is supplied by some Chinese factory. Everyone else in the west is usually doing bad or is bankrupt as predicted by the theory. To me, it seems like disruption is a misuse of Schumpeterian creative desctruction for tech-business guru purposes. The whole point of creative destruction is you can’t know where its coming from next; some people can make vaguely intelligent guesses. You just benefit from a good market position while you can. There is no way of taming it. In that sense, Lepore is right on target calling bullshit. But I think criticising creative destruction itself on the basis that these companies last longer than implied by supposedly overwhelming market forces slightly misses the point: we are fundamentally interested in profits going to firm owners or shareholders. The fact that firms themselves survive in some form by changes in ownership does not imply that creative destruction hasn’t taken place. Their products and practices have still been changed dramatically. The question is instead how long out-sized returns to existing owners are maintained. I think one does see large swings in returns on that front. You don’t do THAT well buying shares in already successful companies, and not consistently. Shareholders don’t benefit all that much when a big company they own stock in sucks in a new entrant – its actually a cost of maintaining their market position, while the owner of the new entrant walks away with millions or billions. While I think the concept of ‘disruption’ is massively over used it doesn’t mean that there aren’t in fact businesses and technologies which do prove to be very disruptive. You can say that Uber is just another way to call a cab and it doesn’t do anything a telephone couldn’t have accomplished but the fact is that because of the app they are taking millions of dollars of rides that the monopolistic taxi cab companies had always had for themselves and it has created thousands of job opportunities. Cab companies are more than a little afraid of being disintermediated and that makes Uber (and its peers) disruptive. Traditional taxis or rickshaws or hitchhiking doesn’t need to ‘disappear’ for Uber to have accomplished being disruptive. Equally – disruption doesn’t have to imply being cheaper or inferior. Cable TV and Sattelite TV has all but completely displaced over the air transmission of TV signal and the result is significantly more expensive for consumers, but they also get significantly more choice (opinions abound as to whether the content is better or just more). The point of the disruption here wasn’t to put anyone out of business – but to change the business itself and create a product (i.e. choice) where previously there was none. This is the far more common type of disruption. While I think Lapore did an excellent job of making her points, she never quite connected the dots to the point that dispruption can be about changing the playing field, not necessarily eliminating the game. In his Ethics Badiou reminds us that there was a time that Deleuze was for disruptive innovation–the creation of free, i.e. private-sector radio stations at the time that French radio was entirely state-run. Deleuze spoke of this as the conquest of a fragmented, multiform territoriality. Badiou grants that this was partly right. But notes that what took place was mostly the conquest of radio by capital. Badiou argues that to oppose capital we must oppose one univeralism against another, not merely react to it or counterpose particularism against universalism. Lepore seems to be saying that we should not simply welcome disruption of the status quo for a greater plurality of options as progress? Jill Lepore could have been writing about Apple’s Republican founders working in garages on their laptops from what I read. Or shopping at one of the +300 department stores that continue to dominate the US retailing scene as Kmart fades into history. Uber is another case where there really isn’t anything that should be considered patentable, and it will inhibit competition in other “uberable” areas, so to speak. I wonder how much of this “disruption” rhetoric is driven by winner-take-all strategies enabled by our ridiculous system of intellectual property. @Brett – Studwell’s book was pretty shallow and missed a lot of the real dynamics. Lots of the “bankruptcies” he cites were actually little more than bank enabled name changes. The book is a great illustration of how if you want to see Schumpeter/Christensen theories as the prime movers then you will, even when the evidence isn’t there… “I think the point is that sometimes the theory of disruption breaks down and is effectively snake oil.” I thought the point is that there is no theory of disruption to break down, for commonly understood definitions of ‘theory’, e.g. predictive utility. If “sometimes someone comes up with something new, and sometimes it works, and sometimes the someone in question is an upstart, and sometimes the upstart is successful, and sometimes that success topples some established giants, and sometimes the upstart eats them; but more often not”, now what? Companies and people come and go; disruption endures. I’m all for calling out people who pull technical jargon out of its proper context and apply it haphazardly to anything that interests them at the moment. The thing is–if you look at firms from the inside, from the point of view of people who work and (metaphorically) move around inside of them, not only from the point of view of academic economists–when you get disrupted, you damn well know it. It’s not something the boss has to explain to you. If a consultant has to explain it to you, using theory about what “has to” be the case and about how your employer doesn’t fit the narrative anymore so you’d better change the way you work to change your employer to a different kind of thing, it probably isn’t disruption. No one had to explain to the cabbies that Uber was “disrupting” them, and nobody is arguing they have to be more like Uber to survive either. I’m more interested in restricting companies from doing bad than I am with blowing them up, and ensuring that the tech landscape is forever fragmented. We don’t really know what’s possible along those lines. Standardization could theoretically help but I don’t think a Kropotkinesque (“Fields, Factories, and Workshops”) view of small local players adhering to standards would help with economies of scale. The way standards have been working, we start out with new technology where various competitors adopt things that are somewhat similar that are incompatible. Then at some point they agree on an interface standard, so that the various versions can be at least connected together and if possible in some context can become interchangeable. Or they fail to agree. A standards attempt that comes too early tends to fail because it isn’t quite clear what needs to be agreed on. Also each competitor wants it his way and not the other guy’s way. Given time they have a better idea who has won, or if there isn’t a clear winner they see how to make a good compromise. A standards attempt that comes late, is pretty much irrelevant. Economy of scale, that depends. Pretty often, when economy of scale is important the best scale involves just one production center. But customers demand two in case something goes wrong like a lawsuit that gets it shut down temporarily or permanently, or a civil war, or something. My tentative guess for what you would want, is you have some expensive parts that give you economy of scale, that are pretty much standardized and change slowly. And then you get stuff around them that allows lots of competing designs and that part gets lots of competition and improves fast. The stuff that’s hardest to make needs to provide a stable platform for the easier stuff to adapt to. The Temporary Name 06.25.14 at 4:09 pm Whether disruption corresponds to anything real or not, “disruption” is a very influential – and mostly pernicious – brand of management-speak; that article suggests where it came from and why. Speaking of disruption and Uber… one thing that Lepore doesn’t really get into the article (except for a bit about the financial industry) is the mystique and mystification of disruption. For example, Uber is not disruptive because it’s actually innovative – it really is just a car service that uses apps rather than a phone line. What makes it actually disruptive is that it’s turned its entire workforce into temp independent contractors, and thereby offloaded enormous costs when it comes to insurance, background checks, wages, employee benefits, etc. and that it’s blatantly defying regulations designed to ensure stability, profitability, and a living wage within the industry, to the benefit of itself and the detriment of others. But because it’s supposedly “disruptive” in the tech sense, it often gets given a pass and the negative side effects of Uber don’t get examined that closely. Likewise – take something like airbnb. Airbnb’s “disruptive” qualitities are that they’ve somehow conned people into letting them take their 18% cut instead of using a free intermediary like craigslist, and that they’ve been able to get away with massive tax evasion and regulatory evasion that would otherwise eat into their price advantage. And yet, “disruption” is often used to paper over the prosaic details of a shady business model. One thing I’m paying attention to, because so many finance bloggers are paying attention to it, is the potential disruption of international payment via online parabanking companies. Think: ments/ As with Bitcoin and money created by cell phone companies, I tend to view all this as being about the combat of networks rather than the combat of best practices. In this sense, I believe that there is going to be a major crash in the internet economy in Silicon Valley, leading to the resolution of a few, large, networks, whether that means a big company or some sort of cartel. The collusion lawsuit over tech pay is just one sense of what people are really trying to process, whether that was by one network or another. Since so much money is flowing into what is a business war zone, invariably the debt that supports this isn’t going to anything that will pay it back, even at .01% interest. When the money flows out, business is rationalized, and we see the processes and products that actually are winners, and then imagine that those things “disrupted” “uncompetitive” organizations. For instance, when we talk about Nokia, we talk a lot about Elop’s disastrous effort to change course, which had “disruptive intent” all over it, what with prematurely obsoleting the Symbian platform in favor of Microsoft OS, Cortez style, and then rushing out a product everyone hated, at least at first, Lumia. However, take a look at the sort of networks centered by Google, using the Android platform, or the sort of walled garden that Apple cultivates. It seems to me that the urgency of Elop’s actions were pretty much all about the fear of being left out of a vital international corporate ecology, and not quite about the lack of products or innovation in and of itself. In the end, the real record most of us has, aside from deep diving Google, are the products that we see on store shelves, and their commercial success/failure tends to mask everything that went on before it. Broader economic trends and geopolitics determines what new innovations are successful and what old innovations are obsolete, and not the inherent worth of the innovation. Nokia just picked the wrong alliances, is all. Equally – disruption doesn’t have to imply being cheaper or inferior. Cable TV and Sattelite TV has all but completely displaced over the air transmission of TV signal and the result is significantly more expensive for consumers, but they also get significantly more choice (opinions abound as to whether the content is better or just more). The point of the disruption here wasn’t to put anyone out of business – but to change the business itself and create a product (i.e. choice) where previously there was none. I may not understand how the authorities are using the term, but that doesn’t look like an example to me. With cable TV, the provider sells a TV product to you. With broadcast TV, the provider sells your eyeballs to advertisers. It’s two different markets. They only overlap if the time you spend watching cable cuts down on the number of eyeballs the broadcasters can sell, or if the number of people who think broadcast TV is good enough cuts down on the number of cable subscriptions sold. I prefer to look at disruption in terms of reducing the size of the market. Like, say you have a company that sells printers, scanners, copiers, and fax machines. That’s three kinds of inputs — computer files, scanning, and fax. and it’s three kinds of outputs, computer files, printing, and fax. printer: computer -> paper scanner: image -> computer copier: image -> paper fax: phone -> paper, image -> phone If you bought all four you would have 3 printers and 3 scanners embedded in them. It would make sense to have just a printer, and a scanner, and a computerfax card. But instead they sell printer combos that include printer, scanner, copier, and fax for hardly more than the price of a printer. Anybody who buys one of those is unlikely to buy a second product out of the four. Total industry sales go down. Why do they sell these things when it reduces total sales? For a long time they didn’t. When they did, maybe it was because there was enough competition that the first to do it thought they would gain more sales taken from other competitors than they would lose taken from themselves. But if they thought that, in the long run they were probably wrong. Disruption comes when a marketing possibility is there which, used by a currently-successful competitor, would be cutting their own throats. Possibly they go ahead and do that, or possibly somebody new comes in and does it. Sometimes the opportunity is there and nobody has done it, yet. Why cable and later satellite TV was disruptive relative to plain old broadcast TV is that it created 100s of new content producers. When they first started laying cable there was no CNN, no ESPN, no HGTV ….. none of it. They laid cable and broadcast things that were already in existence, but because for example CNN didn’t need to put up a tower in every city in America they could reach a national audience via the distribution chanel of cable, not via free airwaves. People were happy to pay for the ‘premium’ content of CNN, weather channel, sports channels etc. and it expanded the pie without canibalizing any of the incumbents. Simply put the creation of a distribution channel created its own product content – if you build it they will come. If that’s not distruptive I’m not sure what is. I have time to follow this thread because I’ve been disrupted. I went to law school before the warnings were issued and then lost my job in the depth of the recession. The good/bad thing is that there now exists the document review industry. Also, I got married while I was employed (allowing me to marry-up). The disruption caused a fair amount of suffering, not the least of which involved my increasingly Reaganist father arguing against unemployment insurance to a son who (hopefully) unbeknownst to him, was using UI to pay the mortgage. Should you feel sorry for me? Does it make a difference that under employment allowed me to discover serious joy as an amateur woodworker? That my wife and and now realize that we are very close to a goal we didn’t know we had: building a cabin in the woods? I don’t know the answer. It does seem to me that the renaming of some well known piece of the metaphysical world–a particular cause or event–has a long history and is itself a piece of the metaphysical world that could be named and get a book. I think the funny thing is that if you do a good job and identify a unique thing that has never previously been seen as a thing separate from other things, then no one will buy your book. They are too inside to see the shape of things (see, cf, business managers who think their skills qua “business managers” is a big part of their success). We didn’t actually need a book about tipping points or or a book about disruption. Thinking fast/slow, as near as I can tell, had two parts: the part that is interesting and the part that is noticed and discussed among academic economists. Really, the money is in finding a new way to say “you can’t step in the same river twice.” “Should you feel sorry for me? Does it make a difference that under employment allowed me to discover serious joy as an amateur woodworker? “ Sorry about your job loss and good luck with your new passion. The Temporary Name 06.25.14 at 5:51 pm In this sense, I believe that there is going to be a major crash in the internet economy in Silicon Valley, leading to the resolution of a few, large, networks Maybe it’s the job of disruption to convince the world that losing all their financial services to America is a good thing. @93. Thanks! Things are good. I get $30 an hour to review docs and $40 an hour as a handyman. Not to mention the ineffable joys of trying to understand the comments of unreconstructed Marxists, Hegelians, and whatever you call folks who love Schumpeter! “The problem with intelligent people is that they can create elaborate arguments to buttress weak sentiment, e.g. Charles Murray.“ “…He speculated further on the witty and the dull. These latter are the redoubtable body. They will have facts to convince them…Neither of them was like Mrs. Mountstuart, a witty woman, who could be hoodwinked; they were dull women, who steadily kept on their own scent of the fact, and the only way to confound such inveterate forces was, to be ahead of them, and seize and transform the expected fact, and astonish them, when they came up to him, with a totally unanticipated fact.” — George Meredith, The Egoist Too few Americans question this whole thing. They just seem to take it on faith that “creative destruction” is the norm, natural, the only way possible of doing things. .. and that humans are naturally competitive, blah blah blah. In reality, the vast majority of humans hate competition, run from it, and would rather cooperate with one another, peacefully, enjoy their free time with friends and family, kick back, perhaps even smell the roses from time to time. It’s always been a small percentage of humans that have a need to compete and win, to control others, to order others around. The alphas and the sociopaths among us — who, in America, mostly go into business. And the con has always been these alphas, these sociopaths, telling everyone else that we all share the same need and drive for competition and victory as those alphas and sociopaths. .. . which isn’t true. But it is an excellent way of ensuring “cooperation” and acceptance of our own exploitation. It is an excellent way of brainwashing us into believing that what the alphas and sociopaths do is perfectly “natural” to them and to all of us. In reality, however, the vast majority of us don’t seek competition — or at least competition of the decisive and far-reaching kind. We don’t want to be conquerors and world beaters. We’re cooperative, social beings first and foremost, and we need to stop buying into the con. God damn I love it when Plume posts. I find his optimistic view of human nature comforting in the extreme. “I get $30 an hour to review docs and $40 an hour as a handyman.” Hmmm. Perhaps I need to look into “laid off lawyer” as my next career move. /More seriously, glad to hear things are going well. :-) Of course, the other key thing we should be questioning is the waste. This “disruption” and endless “creative destruction” creates sooooo much waste. Companies building themselves up and falling to others. Duplication of products, energy, labor time, ending up in the trash heap. Literally and figuratively. Waste. To me, this is an insane way of organizing society. To do this on purpose, to set up a system that actually fights against itself, again and again and again, so that decades are wasted, with businesses overcoming each other, industries overcoming each other. .. and few people seem to get how grotesquely wasteful and inefficient this really is. .. . aside from the human factor of people losing their jobs, perhaps their homes, their chances for quality of life improvements, along the way. Cooperation across the economy would be far, far more efficient, and far, far less wasteful. And the earth is running out of time when it comes to that waste and that pollution to begin with. One day, it’s going to make the decision for us. Someday soon it’s going to remove us from the equation. It would be better to act before that day. Have finished my novel and am now starting another. Getting some friends to read the former before deciding what to do with it. @99 yeah, only 3,166 hours to go and my loans will be paid!!! Then it’s really easy street!! ;) Lee A. Arnold: I wonder how much of this “disruption” rhetoric is driven by winner-take-all strategies enabled by our ridiculous system of intellectual property. You use the case of Uber, which is attacking taxi service, and more pointedly, the public system of taxi service regulation, while also rather cynically abusing the intellectual property system. This goes back to the central point of the OP: drawing attention to the hidden, deprecated, second thesis of the Lepore article, deprecated because the OP speculates, ” A significant portion of her readership would find it tedious to be told less briefly that we need to remember, or revive, the language of public trust, public interest, public service.” Any long established way of doing business allows us to work out an ethic within that framework, an acceptable boundary between private interests and public values. The ethic is only sustainable in that business model framework, even though it may relate to some more transcendental standard of moral conduct and values. And, when the business model goes, the ethic — and often a whole slew of public administrative functions and understandings — get trashed as well. The question of a public interest does not go away, but the old answer no longer applies in the disrupted circumstance. Clayton Christenson takes a sidelong glance at this issue, by generalizing to the effect that the disruptive innovator is often introducing a product or service that doesn’t meet established expectations for “quality” and talking about how the incumbent is often inhibited by commitments to technical or engineering standards that are “higher” than apply in the brave new world of the disruptive innovator. Lepore may be taking notice, when she mentions that U.S. Steel is unionized, but the rival minimills are not. Certainly, as she takes up the case in relation to journalism, when she discusses the concept of a journalistic wall, which some think, with almost religious devotion, ought to separate editorial operations from publishing and advertising. As the old order of production is disrupted, the old order of ethics and public service is disrupted with it. Innovation is a strategic play, an attempt to change the game and the rules of the game. And, attacking, or leveraging, the institutions, including regulatory institutions, that define and enforce rules of the game in the public interest, is necessarily part of the game. The rules governing cellphones are different from the rules governing landlines. The rules governing newspapers are different from the rules governing blogs. The rules governing car service may be different from the rules governing taxi service. The rules governing international payments by innovative parabanking or bitcoin or whatever may be different from the rules governing clearing houses and correspondent banking. There’s a real risk, when innovation is a private affair, driven by private money seeking private gain exclusively, that the defense of the public interest becomes a reactionary and ultimately doomed activity. Public goods and public infrastructure are just opportunities to cannibalize, to be absorbed in privatization or discarded as obsolete. New Haven Lawyer 06.25.14 at 6:32 pm The “disruptive innovation” theory says, to oversimplify, that the key to success for a company is to pursue disruptive innovation and eschew merely sustainable innovation. Whether this is correct, of course, depends on what you mean by success and what you mean by innovation. Lepore and others have observed that the theory defines success narrowly in terms of making money, excluding other valuable measures. But even if we’re talking about making money, this discussion seems to reflect some confusion between the success of a company and the success of a product or service. (I’ll refer to products as shorthand but my argument applies equally to services and product-service hybrids.) As a financial or investment matter it’s meaningful to say that this or that company (as distinct from its operations or products) is successful—e.g., its profits and stock price increase and the company becomes more valuable. But although successful companies often make successful and profitable products, they don’t always—a company can be extremely successful as an investment without improving its products or increasing its sales or sales revenue, for example by cutting costs. (That’s the Bain Capital version of success.) Alternatively, a company can make very successful products, with a large market share and increasing sales at increasing prices, but be unsuccessful as an investment, for example because of excessive debt, litigation or similar costs, or just disappointing the expectations of the stock market. What strategy you adopt depends on what kind of success you’re looking for. There is also confusion between three dimensions of potentially innovative change (note that even radical change may not be truly innovative—business and product revolutions may be merely repeating history): change in the structure, financing, or management of the company; change in the means by which the product is made, packaged, delivered, etc.; and change in the product itself from the point of view of the purchaser or user of the product. Extreme leverage, lean management, and going private are examples of the first kind of innovation; just-in-time manufacturing and internet-based marketing a la Amazon are examples of the second; solid state drives to replace disk drives are an example of the third. Similarly, a university that moves from a faculty-dominated “academic” to a board-dominated “businesslike” management approach is changing in the first dimension. One that replaces large numbers of regular faculty with adjuncts or distributes videos of its courses online is engaged in the second kind of change. And one that develops curricula, teaching approaches, materials and evaluation methods that are tailored to the MOOC approach is changing—and presumably innovating—in the third way. A company and its products may display one, two, or three of these kinds of innovation (or none); if two or more kinds co-exist they can be complementary or symbiotic, or conflicting and destructive, or completely independent of one another. An innovation in one dimension can be incremental and “sustaining” while one in another dimension is revolutionary and “disruptive”—in the same industry or company at the same time. There is no one-size-fits-all explanation. Even assuming contra Lepore that Christensen’s examples are fairly chosen and accurately reported, what do they prove? He depicts established companies disdaining new products of poor quality introduced by upstarts. Presumably the established companies do so because management believes that customers won’t accept the low quality even for something new. Why do they believe that? Perhaps sometimes they’re narrow-minded and insular. But sometimes the usual sources of information based on which product development decisions are made (surveys, focus groups, observing trends elsewhere, etc.) don’t support the conclusion that customers will buy the new product. Customer response isn’t just hard to predict, it may be fundamentally impossible to predict. Maybe the established company is making a smart decision, and the upstart is making a foolish one—a foolish one that in this case (perhaps one out of ten or a hundred or a thousand) turns out to be correct. If “pursue disruptive technology” means “make dumb decisions and be extraordinarily lucky,” it isn’t much help. I’m confused about the import of your comment. In the case of Airbnb the public has an interest it not being ripped off and, not being discriminated against based on race, etc, just like in any hotel or motel. And, of course, the vast majority of the investment in this “disruptor” was from the DOD and other govt sources. Is it the latter (the source of the investment) that causes the former (the fact that our old regime of values is still applicable)? Is it just a lucky case? Or are you saying the total opposite? There’s a great article to be written about Uber, AirBnB and other examples from the emerging “sharing” economy, with biting and cynical wit. I’m just not the guy to write it. Sorry. What a coincidence. Here’s a puff piece about Christensen in the current issue of the Harvard alumni magazine: here. The point of “disruption” rather than the older concept of “improvement” is that the “disruption” makes something involved worse (but other things better) than the prior state of affairs. It is thus a horrible idea to apply to things like medicine or education because it allows massive failures to be swept under the rug. Nobody would say that a MOOC was better than in person education, but thanks to the concept of disruption they don’t have to. “Equally – disruption doesn’t have to imply being cheaper or inferior.” It is important to Christenson’s model that it is inferior in some way. Otherwise, the customer base of the original product will demand it and the original companies will try to provide it. “The problem with intelligent people is that they can create elaborate arguments to buttress weak sentiment, e.g. Charles Murray.“ Intelligent? That reminds me of Barney Frank’s comment on Newt: ‘He’s a stupid person’s idea of what a smart guy sounds like’. “‘He’s a stupid person’s idea of what a smart guy sounds like’.” The Temporary Name 06.25.14 at 8:47 pm It is important to Christenson’s model that it is inferior in some way. Otherwise, the customer base of the original product will demand it and the original companies will try to provide it. The disk-drive example is a weird one because I don’t really remember “worse” in an innovation except maybe for zip drives. But I haven’t read his book. @ lemmy / The Temporary Name on Christenson: There doesn’t seem to be a requirement that anything be inferior about the product at all. Trader Joe’s argument is okay, but I’d point out that there are plenty of cases (tho mostly in the sundry consumables / dry goods space) where advertising makes or breaks a product. Yes, the low margins for dry goods probably rarely (if ever) meet the other definitions put forth for a disruptive product, but it’s certainly possible for something to simply be [i]different[/i] without actually being so. I don’t want to get too far into the weeds over this, but I think that what determines disruption is what is said and believed about a product, popularly, regardless of whether it’s actually true. Part of the reason this happens is that techniques for discerning true comparative advantage of one product over another are rarely developed (at least in time to drum up support for sustaining the existing market). Companies have every incentive to distort these differences, because their belief that “in the future, Y product will be far better (at being future-proof in making $) than X ever was (it’s dead to us)” means they have to drum up support now. It’s also important to note that disruptive technologies often are known to be inferior by large groups of people, but depending on the type of product and the scale of production, large groups of consumers may be powerless to do anything but accede to the change. Some types of markets have built up accommodation for more maintenance/support-oriented companies servicing “disrupted” products. Others have barely any accommodation. hix / #77: If I had said that the Mittelstand was an absolutely universal alternative to market disruption, that would clearly be wrong for the reason you give. However, let’s note a couple things: The modern positioning of Mittelstand companies (or at least the conception of them) may turn out to be as much a historical anomaly as was the postwar era of low income and wealth inequality, though for very different reasons. If technology, and the economy at large, begin to afford less room for disruption, then it stands to reason that And there is also the not wholly minor question of the Mittelstand companies having the ability to endure for a very long time. It seems that in fact some types of company – even those involved with the supposedly chaotic world of consumer-oriented parts distribution – have a large amount of immunity from disruption (if that means having the ability to continue operating as a business. I also wonder whether your argument that Mittelstand-type companies are all sitting on “small upmarket niches.” There are plenty of companies which I think qualify as Mittelstand companies – i.e. http://www.goforward.com.tw/en/company.html with its claimed capitalization under $1M USD – in the rough and tumble of supplying major components for omnipresent low-market consumer appliances. We’ll see if that large sound of vast amounts of loose change (the average value of the what Dave Jones of EEVBlog unflatteringly calls “Shenzhen market” cheapies) starts to turn to hard dollars, or what will happen if the regulatory scene around China shapes up. But let’s not forget that there is a huge domestic demand as well. If the fly-by-nights end up being pushed into closing or becoming Mittelstand themselves, then where is the argument? (I wrote a bit more about this earlier, which I’m carrying over in my response to J Thomas Rakesh / #80: This is one of the most important points, for me, and nicely summarized. Not sure what I was thinking with dismissing Kropotkin – the increasingly decentralized manufacture of tech (in many arenas) is starting to extend to precision parts, so his example (industrial weaving) starts to look like today’s 3D printers. Some things (Heavy Press stuff) probably don’t need to be everywhere, and can be shared. Other things (semiconductor and other ultra-precision refinement, manufacture, and testing facilities) also seem like they work better when more centralized (but perhaps this can change in the future with different manufacture methods). And, even if we don’t get an “official” standard, I think that the emerging Mittelstand-type companies can become the de facto standard (I think this describes most early companies in the 3D printing realm, though some large companies from other industries – i.e., one manufacturer of CAD software – are trying to muscle in as well). I think a key element in this is the false technofuturist allure of ‘disruptive technologies,’ when ‘disruptive technologies’ mean you need a totally new design of physical plug for your new cable, with no parts in common, and this just to squeeze out people who previously made fine data cables, and who could easily upgrade their processes to meet the new standards. The dark side of IP, I suppose. Planned obsolescence, it’s been called, but here we have the specter of entire supply chains being flattened for no apparent reason other than pursuit of monopoly. It would be nice if consumers had some ability to push back against cosmetic / monopolistic disruptions. I think one of the potentials of the Mittelstand type company is its ability to use its smaller size to insulate itself against change, so if its main source of demand starts to weaken, perhaps it can start to make up those losses by back-channel or direct service sales. To achieve this, of course, it would be nice if the global market for service and maintenance of common goods was improved. Here we are in the year 2014 and we treat a startlingly high portion of the objects off assembly lines as one-off handcrafted, unserviceable, and irreplaceable works by artisans. The only thing that has changed is that no artisans can even service much of the new stuff. Not all of this is bad, though – in the old days, a lot of the functions we now take for granted in a computer required costly plug-in boards or extra modules, all of which represented extra points of failure; today a lot of that is down to one small chip which can be replaced with relatively little impact. So far, the argument against owning something forever (like a family buying an early cast iron stove might have thought about it) is that there are still sizable improvements being made from model to model. I think we may be in for this if the pace of technological improvements start slowing down notably. Of course, watch them scramble to protect their interests and deny this disruption. Banks are a puzzling fit in this discussion – clearly many of their functions don’t seem to be uniquely valuable, and all the competition promises to boost responsiveness to customer needs and pare back some of the most egregious tacked-on fees. But on the other hand, bank panic and the Great Depression. Maybe this just means we need a truly centralized bank serving microlenders and other smaller players who do not need to be enshrined as “too big to fail.” We would still have to police predatory and incompetent practices, but what’s new? I’m increasingly unclear on the concept. Some people talk like it’s disruptive if somebody gets disrupted. That implies that polio vaccine was disruptive because rather quickly the market for iron lung machines etc went away. A second version, it’s disruptive if the new product is in some way inferior to the old product. But there is always *some* way that the new product is inferior. Automobiles are worse than horses because your horse can find its way home when you are too drunk to, but the car can’t. I keep thinking it should be disruptive when it makes the market smaller. So for example, say you make a product which is important for computer chip design. If a company wants to equip 100 seats they need 100 copies of your product. But then somebody else comes up with a product which does 80% of the things yours does, for 20% of the cost. So the company with 100 seats then buys 80 of theirs and 20 of yours and they save 64% of the costs for that. The new product is inferior to yours but it dominates the market. Meanwhile the chip-design companies depend on you to make cutting-edge improvements and do new things they need done, and you have 20% of the budget you expected. That’s disruptive. And maybe you could have made the new product yourself but you didn’t want to. Because you would have cut your gross down to 36% of what it would have been if nobody introduced the new product. You don’t want that! But these new guys are happy to get 16% of what you would have been paid, because otherwise they would have nothing. I think this approach is clear, and you can often tell whether it’s happening or not which is harder to do with the first two. But I get the impression people mostly don’t use this meaning. In reality, however, the vast majority of us don’t seek competition — or at least competition of the decisive and far-reaching kind. We don’t want to be conquerors and world beaters. We’re cooperative, social beings first and foremost, and we need to stop buying into the con. Exactly! The application of the sterile ‘insights’ of orthodox economics to all fields of human endeavour (bye bye Gary Becker and good riddance to you…) is part of the con: “[evidence] from many fields indicates that cooperation and altruism are the statistical norm and represent the more typical, “normal,” spontaneous (or natural) and healthy behavioral pattern in primates. In fact, cooperative sociality is a necessity for well-being in anthropoid primates.” Sussman & Cloninger 2011, ‘Origins of Altruism and Cooperation’, Developments in Primatology: Progress and Prospects, Volume 36, Springer New Yorkp, pp. viii @114 FWIW in another thread today I was accused of being an idiot b/c I didn’t understand that North Korea is an example of what happens when a country is run “based on altruism.” It was a climate skeptic making the accusation in a thread on Bloomberg View where I was arguing that we sometime stop using a technology for reasons other than narrowly defined economic self interest (my example was slavery). Always avoid the comment sections of newspapers. They are where decency and good sense go to die. …North Korea is an example of what happens when a country is run “based on altruism.” Sounds like someone’s been rifling through their well-thumbed copy of Atlas Shrugs again. Never a good idea to base your worldview on a bad romance novel from the 1950’s. I find it interesting that in the discussion of Lepore’s article, which specifically talks about continuity and incremental innovation, these terms disappear – as though innovation and disruption were identical. Her point, I think, is that they are not, and that there is a lot to be said for institutional continuity. I think this is a very good point. There’s a myth that when a technology is superceded, somehow, it will fade away. But horses are still massively used for plowing and even in the military – Osama famously got away on a pony. And many companies keep on doing the same thing for decades and even centuries. The internal combustion engine, using gasoline, is still the major mode of transportation in the US and most of elsewhere. We haven’t much changed the way we build roads, sewers, and skyscrapers. There was a nyt magazine article about the pacifier last week – the form with the little bulb attached to a small shield has been around since 1901. Lepore isn’t denying that there are disruptive spillovers, but I do think the disruptive story of innovation is way overblown. Meanwhile, the destruction of r and d departments in favor of manic searches for disruptive apps is, I think, a fad that can’t last – although it can leave spillover damage. Here’s an article that seems pertinent, re the aging of our hard ware: 3A16%22%5D Really good article by David Graeber, over at The Baffler, talking about sociability and evolutionary patterns. He focuses on the element of “play,” posing some very interesting questions about it possibly existing in much less complex organisms. What’s the point if we can’t have fun? I love the Taoist story he uses as illustration: Zhuangzi and Huizi were strolling on a bridge over the River Hao, when the former observed, “See how the minnows dart between the rocks! Such is the happiness of fishes.” “You not being a fish,” said Huizi, “how can you possibly know what makes fish happy?” “And you not being I,” said Zhuangzi, “how can you know that I don’t know what makes fish happy?” “If I, not being you, cannot know what you know,” replied Huizi, “does it not follow from that very fact that you, not being a fish, cannot know what makes fish happy?” “Let us go back,” said Zhuangzi, “to your original question. You asked me how I knew what makes fish happy. The very fact you asked shows that you knew I knew—as I did know, from my own feelings on this bridge.” http://thebaffler.com/past/whats_the_point_if_we_cant_have_fun We are the primates who invented slavery. David Graeber. .. talking about sociability. . . But who is that “we”? I doubt that it consisted of more than a tiny fraction of the population, from start to finish. Our alphas and sociopaths, our Alexanders and Napoleons, who now take up their world-beater positions in the corporate world, largely. Again, I think they want us to accept responsibility, and that we’ve been brainwashed into believing that the pathologies of the richest and most powerful are shared equally among their victims. My observation of the human condition tells me this is pure propaganda and a con. Not to see we bear no responsibility. Sometimes the absence of action is the presence of guilt. But for the most part, that “we” is a tiny slice of humanity. . . As someone said upthread, there’s no point arguing with a load of bunk. “Disruption’ joins “re-engineering”, “flat structures”, “just do it” and much else as another fad – this time peddled from Harvard. There’s an endless appetite for being told that there’s a simple, easy way to do something complex and demanding. It is in particular vogue when the system elevates people who don’t have any real grasp of what they are running. The interesting thing is the kind of advice on offer: all these fads have a negative theme. They are not saying that aristocratic blood or the virtues of being white are enough to build an empire. Instead, they are saying that all you need to do is wreck something to make lots of money. As corporations become ever more powerful, they attempt to take over the mind as well as everything else. Teaching college, we hear of “productivity” and are given brilliant solutions such as cutting remedial classes as a means of reducing the students who need help. Get rid of the class, and voila! the students magically write at a higher level. Business is a lousy model even for business. That’s how we got in the mess we’re in now. @123, 125 & 126 Riffing off the idea of the alphas and psychopaths (my preferred phrasing for the people who brought us Reaganism is “grifters and sociopaths”) getting us to take responsibility and the way some dude from Harvard can come up with a clever name for a bogus phenomenon and sell a book, perhaps there’s a how to succeed in business trend book to be written about what I think is the quintessential strategy of the financial crisis: If it is legal and it makes money you are morally required to do it as a business, which includes spending millions of dollars on an ad campaign to convince Americans that individuals who make the legal and money saving choice to walk away from an underwater mortgage are immoral. Is there a one word description for that? Maybe if I ride in enough taxis with Tom Friedman I’ll come up with something pithy. Plume 06.26.14 at 6:16 am @ 123 — So you don’t think the state is (re)created in daily life? If only the leadership, the superstructure, is pathological, why can’t the rest of us just cast it off? @ generally — It is true ‘disrupt’ etc. are buzzwords. However, I believe Marx on this one: the disruption of human culture, institutions, and relations is inherent in capitalism, and, if you look at the situation with a long enough perspective, in the whole slavery-feudalism-capitalism sequence, just beginning to go really fast at the end (where we are riding along in the handbasket). The situation would be more hopeful if we could count on capitalism finally disrupting itself into nonexistence before it destroys the world physically. Like clichés and stereotypes, buzzwords often contain a core of truth. Stephenson quoter-kun 06.26.14 at 3:01 pm tldr; arguing about change vs. continuity is pointless, the real question is about direction of travel. Her point… [is] …that there is a lot to be said for institutional continuity. I think this is a very good point. Disruption causes discontinuity because, by definition, it’s about incumbents being overtaken by newcomers. The continuation of the institutions of the incumbents is rendered impossible. I’m not sure that this is so bad. Nothing is forever, we all die and we’re much better off for the fact that certain past institutions are now dead. The really important question is which institutions are dead, and which are likely to die in the future. I think this is what’s behind the fear of disruption. There’s nothing wrong with disruption per se, and I imagine that if capitalist behemoths were being disrupted by socialist enterprises or anarchist collectives there would be many fewer complaints (from the average CT commenter, that is; I imagine somewhere there’s a community where the exact opposite reaction would occur). We’re not afraid of disruption so much as we’re afraid of the specific individuals doing the disrupting, and the kind of values they bring. Alex Payne made a similar point recently in response to Marc Andreessen’s insinuation that people who are worried about robots are anti-robot, whereas in fact they’re just worried about Marc Andreessen owning lots of robots (read it, it’s rather good). To learn a bit from the other side, we might remember Friedrich Hayek’s “Why I am not a conservative”, in which he points out that simply resisting some idea of one’s opponents is never you paid 70% on income over $600k (2012 dollars) and yet, with no incentive, executives ran companies that invented everything that gets called “disruptive” and had the economy at full employment. The rich and poor abuse drugs at equal rates. More prime age French people get off their ass and go to work everyday than in America. At a more macro level, there’s all the incremental progress discussed above. The bottom line is this: disruption is neither a force for good or evil, but the belief that progress would never happen or that people would never get out of bed *but for* disruption, that idea is evil and it was put in our heads, against the evidence of our own eyes, by unpleasant self interested people. Somewhat counterfactually, “disruption” could be public entrepreneurship on behalf of expanding the scope of the commonwealth, using or reviving “the language of public trust, public interest, public service.” It doesn’t always have to be in the direction of “privatizing” wealth and socializing losses. We don’t have to look on, as at a car wreck, and say, oh well, accidents will happen. We could greet a financial crisis, for example, with a determination to exercise the bob mcmanus option. I find I agree with almost everything Plume says. I don’t think we can actually do away with hierarchy in the economy or wipe social domination out of the genome, but we can oppose it, and in opposing, tame it. The political pathology of our times isn’t the strength of the right so much as it is a product of the weakness of the left. Many of the impulses that seem to threaten the survival of civilization do so, only because they are so little constrained. They are part of a natural ambivalence in human nature, and useful when constrained and compromised. “Here’s a high-paying job. We estimate there will be 2000 new people hired doing this work by the time you are trained, so we will train 5000 unemployed people to do that job. The best of you will take jobs away from people who’re doing them now, by getting lower pay.” You’ve nicely identified one of my pet peeves. I love (hate) this variation even more: “I taught myself computer programming from a library book and now I make 6 figures. If your working conditions suck or you’re unemployed, you should just do what I did.” This is a Klein bottle of callous stupidity. If everyone could write decent software with the aid of a library book and a year of plinking away on a computer every evening, then it wouldn’t be a desirable job niche. “Software developer” would near-universally become a low-pay low-stability job like freelance journalist. Of course the pontificating adviser doesn’t really fear that the millions of unemployed can swoop into his role after a year of retraining or self-study. The only reason to give “advice” of this sort is to tell a story about how awesome you are, and to leave the idea unsaid but hanging out there that anyone whose job prospects are terrible deserves it. “The only reason to give “advice” of this sort is to tell a story about how awesome you are, and to leave the idea unsaid but hanging out there that anyone whose job prospects are terrible deserves it.” @151 It turns out that libraries were created by Andrew Caenegie for exactly this purpose. He extorted communities to commit future tax dollars to support the buildings that he built. If building learning palaces cured poverty, then Afghanistan would have it made! Europe has no libraries and more social mobility, we have billionaires comforted by the ability to point to buildings that could serve a million better purposes. 142, the history of the development of the graphite club seems to me to be a classic instance of incremental innovation. First you have wooden shafts, then in the twenties you have steel shafts which simply replace wood and do not call for any redesign of the club, then in the seventies you get the flex, parallel tip shaft which is especially designed for metal – which means that wood and steel shafts are no longer inter-substitutable – and finally you get experiments with less weighty shaft materials, like aluminum, until the kinks were worked out of graphite. There wasn’t, in the meantime, a whole lot of change in the courses or the game. According to wikipedia, the number of people playing golf twenty five times a year has actually decreased since 2000. The result of incremental change can be largescale change, but the problem with the disruptive model is it picks one event out of a series of events and ignores the other events in the series, as well as the structures – which are themselves constructed – in which the event takes place. Is the graphite shaft more revolutionary than the parallel tip shaft? How could it have even happened if it weren’t for the former change? I’m just going to leave this here:http://techpinions.com/disrupting-disruption-theory-2/31752 Like a lot of bad ideas, I think “disruption” might have been popularized by Neutron Jack Welch, who boasted of taking a staid, reliable, R&D-based, manufacturing company (GE) and turning it into something exciting (a stack-ranked, financial/insurance company with permanent floating layoffs), and is said to have whispered to his successor Immelt, “Blow it up!” You’re against public libraries? Really!? “You’re against public libraries? Really!?” Hmm. I read him not as being against public libraries but as saying that building libraries doesn’t solve the problem of social mobility. /likes libraries //also buys WAY too many books. He wrote that public libaries were buildings that could serve a million better purposes. A million sounds pretty “against” to me. Europe has no libraries, really? Germany spents over a billion a year on them (not even counting the scientific ones which are open with no charge to non students) The Temporary Name 06.27.14 at 7:03 pm I’m also thinking Thornton Hall is overestimating the palaces of learning in Afghanistan. They’re really in terrible shape. “He wrote that public libaries were buildings that could serve a million better purposes. A million sounds pretty “against” to me.” Good point. I probably read him wrong. /Still likes libraries. 160 – I have a card to the Paris public library. These libraries are scattered about the arrondissements, with a few of them having special collections – the Truffaut, for instance, which specializes in film, natch. It is open stacks and all that. Of course, you don’t get to check books out of the really big libraries, like the Beaubourg, but you can go in there and read to your heart’s delight. R I spent all my summers growing up spending a lot if time in the public library. It was great. Of course, where I should have been was in school. As a result of the policy choice of public libraries and summers off school, poor kids fall behind and the rich (like me) have a parent or nanny at home to drop them off at the library. And when in the past I commented that libraries were ubiquitous, I was corrected by several international people. And I think they were basically right: the American obsession with a public library in every town is unique and down to the benevolent choices of one of the most powerful men in the history of the world who decided he knew best and bought the right to spend my tax dollars. Libraries are great! They are where homeless people apply for jobs and health insurance. But they are an example of private money inefficiently and artificially directing the spending of public funds. On process alone they are horrible. And when you think about a century of opportunity cost that could have been spent democratically, really it’s too bad. I feel the same way about disease charities and their awareness campaigns. I’m not pro-breast cancer. But private money created a demand for a lot of public money to be spent on mammogram for perfectly healthy young women. When you look at the science: false positives, no change in survival down to early detection, and you remember that a certain percentage of surgery patients die from complications, you realize the net effect is actual an increase in deaths. If we are going to kill people with public funds, at least we could vote on it, yes? Thanks to those who thought the best of my unclear writing, but on balance, despite the great memories, I think I am against public libraries. Main Street Muse 06.28.14 at 1:45 am I do not view this article with the reverence others seem to view it. I have not read Christensen’s book; from Lepore’s book review, it seems he views some product evolutions (disk drives) as disruptive – I would say the initial concept of writing to a disk instead of printing to paper was (and remains) disruptive; that the size of the disks changed was evolutionary, not disruptive. But again, I have not read this book that occupies so much of this essay. From Lepore’s review, it sounds like some of Christensen’s research may be a bit shoddy (the part about hydraulic shovels as an example.) The name may be newish, but “innovative disruption” is not new. The printing press was disruptive technology. Industrialization was disruptive. The Internet has been enormously disruptive of virtually every sector in business and academia. Apple’s products – from the initial desktop computer to the sleek computers they sell today to the iPod to iTunes to the iPhone to their stores – this is a company that has massively disrupted so many industries. If b-schools are implying they can provide a code to determine future disruptive technology, that’s their egos talking. But true innovation inevitably brings disruption. From Lepore: “When the financial-services industry disruptively innovated, it led to a global financial crisis.” I do take issue with Lepore’s definition of what happens on Wall Street as “innovative disruption.” Wall Street bankers are using some of the oldest tricks in the book – packaging snake oil as something “good for you.” There is a level of corruption in finance that simply is not reflected in the idea that CDOs, CDSs etc are part of a benign goal to “disruptively innovate” the financial sector. They were created to disseminate risk by obscuring the risks inherent in these products. (See Kenosha County school district for more on this “riskless investment” http://bit.ly/1aBPZgS) From Lepore: “Disruptive innovation goes further, holding out the hope of salvation against the very damnation it describes: disrupt, and you will be saved.” Are business leaders throughout all sectors preaching this idea of disruption brings salvation? The business people I’ve worked with have not shouted out this buzz-word to their audiences at the corporate meetings. If academics/writers/b-school visionaries are preaching this gospel of disruption = salvation, then how silly! Perhaps this is why our economy is in the toilet now… The Tweets of the Gods 06.28.14 at 3:19 pm > Are business leaders throughout all sectors preaching this idea of disruption > brings salvation? The business people I’ve worked with have not shouted out this > buzz-word to their audiences at the corporate meetings. If > academics/writers/b-school visionaries are preaching this gospel of > disruption = salvation, then how silly! In Silicon Valley, this buzzword is all the rage now. > Perhaps this is why our economy is in the toilet now… At Harvard Business School, it is even worse. If you dare suggest that the theory of disruptive innovation is old hat, just old stuff, Christiansen (pronounced sometimes with accent on “Christian”) and his acolytes will not just disagree with you, they will actually punish you. In an indirect way, it is indisputable that this is why the economy is in the toilet. These fellows as well as many other professors who have acquired their own little kingdom of minions won’t let any actual research get done at the Business School. Business research is chiefly about monkeys throwing c**p at the disciples and leaders of rival factions. @The Temporary Name 161: I have no idea what kind of shape the things we have built in Afghanistan are. The point I was making was this: empirically it’s been shown that building schools is worse than useless because of the money it wastes. Poor folks don’t need buildings for their teachers, they need money to pay their teachers. Or, if it turns out they are starving, money to feed themselves. Building schools is literally the least we can do, the least effective use of our money. It has been demonstrated many times that poverty is a condition defined by the absence of money. The way to cure it is to give people money. See this piece by Dylan Matthews in Vox: ash-instead-of-food-it-worked Speaking of Dylan Matthews in Vox, he has another article where he uses the language of disruption to argue on behalf of prison abolitionism. (House arrest disrupts prison, basically.) Which aside from being an interesting idea, I think shows that disruption doesn’t really have to be a dehumanizing way of thinking about things. 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Why Apocalypse Now, Part 2 July 28, 2017 by John Little - OmegaShock.com | 63 Comments I was not intending to write a Part II, when I wrote last weeks article. But, a few things popped up that demonstrated a need to continue down this line of thought. This really is a perfect storm. There are so many threats that have moved into view, that I am surprised that we do not see some real hysteria over it all. Of course, the problem is our dumbed-down population and the evil cooperation by the morons in the mainstream press. Add in the Universities and their attempts at social engineering, and you truly have a recipe for disaster. So, lets look at some of the other pieces in our Apocalypse Puzzle. Subscribe to The Shock Letter and receive my articles in your inbox: http://theshockletter.com/ Or, get the Shock Letter via RSS Feed: http://www.omegashock.com/feed/ (If you need help with that, let me know JL) Why Apocalypse Now, Part 2 It is ironic that I would mention a perfect storm, since we have Severe Tropical Storm Nesat inbound. It wanted to be a Typhoon, but it just could get enough energy to make it happen. Maybe next time. But, lets look a bigger storm thats brewing. The Perfect Storm When the book hit the shelves in 1997, followed by the movie in 2000, The Perfect Storm grabbed and held peoples attention. Both the book and the movie were about a set of conditions that were perfect for the creation of something that would later be called, the 1991 Perfect Storm. From that moment on, any time we saw a series of events coming together perfectly to create a truly massive catastrophe we called it, A Perfect Storm. And, we have one of those brewing on the horizon. And, you will probably experience horrifying tragedy, if you do not prepare for this storm. The Apocalypse Puzzle Having said that, I called this Perfect Storm a puzzle an Apocalypse Puzzle. And, I laid out four pieces to that puzzle: PIECE #1: Energy PIECE #2: Cycles Of Empire And War PIECE #3: Grand Solar Minimum PIECE #4: Self Delusion Then Joel the Filipino left a comment, reminding me that there were OTHER pieces to this puzzle, notably Israel. You are absolutely right, Joel. Thank you for that reminder. I often get so caught up in one area, that I forget that theres a lot more to the picture. PIECE #5: Israel This is, by far, the most important piece, because it is Biblical. God has spoken of His promises to the Children of Jacob. He promised that He would return them to Himself. He promised that He would bring the children of Jacob back to the Land of Israel, and then cleanse them. And yes, you need to understand the order of events: 1 The Return 2 The Cleansing If you do not get that, then you have not been reading your Bible. Ezekiel 36 and 37 are very clear about this. Why this is so hard for people to understand, I really dont know. Its as if Christians have lost their minds. Now, if you need a clearer picture, let me point you to a website that I created a few years ago: http://www.ezekiel36-39.com/ That website focuses directly on the passages in scripture that describe Israels salvation. And, those passages are numerous. If you need a shorter, more concise discussion, go here: within-a-couple-of-decades/ But, when you are concise, you need to leave out a LOT of important detail. So, dont stick with just the concise version. Go for the whole thing. And, THAT means reading your Bible. Please also remember that it was God who established Zion. And yes, that means that God is a Zionist. I demonstrated that, here: http://www.omegashock.com/2017/06/09/god-is-a-zionist/ Im sorry that I didnt write that article sooner. The cries of outrage by anti-Semites were music to my ears. Why they should scream so loudly is a mystery to me. God is very clear about His views of that tiny patch of land. Please remember that Satan wants to supplant God as owner of Jerusalem. In fact, he wants to kick out God from the minds of everyone on Earth, and claim victory. And, Satan has his foul focus on a piece of land the size of the Island that Im currently writing from: Taiwan. Thats right. The Land of Israel is almost exactly the same size as this little island off the coast of China. The only real difference is the language, the amount of rainfall, the culture, the food, the religion and a few other things. Other than that, Israel and Taiwan are identical. (ahem!) Sorry, I couldnt help myself although, it is true that there really are quite a few similarities between them. Ive had more than one Israeli remark on this. PIECE #6: Anti-Semitism Satan has ALWAYS been an anti-Semite. Always. If you need a demonstration, just look at history. The only people that were more hated than the Jews, were the Christians. And no, I do not include the Catholics. The Roman Catholic Church murdered tens of millions of Christians throughout the Middle Ages and afterwards. Satan rules the RCC, and the RCC has hated the Jews with a passion. The same goes for the Orthodox Church. The OC has ALSO hated the Jews and Christians. And, lets not forget the Muslims. Muslim hatred of the Jewish people is incandescent. There is constant talk by Muslim scholars of the need to kill all the Jews. But, everyone knows about Muslim hatred of the Jews. But, why the rise in hatred of the Jews among christians? Ive been fighting against Christian Anti-Semitism for decades. I started in the mid-1990s, and have never stopped. And, I will never stop until the last christian anti-Semite chokes on his own evil words. How is it possible to be so anti-Semitic, while claiming to follow Christ? I am truly amazed by this, yet christian anti-Semitism is growing by leaps and bounds. It is reaching into churches everywhere, and it manifests itself most strongly among those who claim that the Rapture happens after the Tribulation. Thats why I wrote this chapter in Ezekiels Fire: http://www.ezekielsfire.com/section-one/twisting-the-bible/ Yes, I strongly disagree with the Pre-Trib position, but pretribbers are FAR better than the vast majority of post-tribbers. It would be far, far better for you to embrace a belief in a pre-trib rapture, than to rebel against God by rejecting His work in the Land of Israel. If you have hatred in your heart towards Israel, then you are serving Satan and not God. Satans sin was his rebellion against God, and you commit the same sin when you reject Gods promises for Israel. I dont expect you to love Israel as much as I do. We each have our burdens from God. But, if you dare to speak against the work of God, in the land where He placed His name well, I can only speculate on your place in eternity. Here, let me repeat a verse that I talk about often: For rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft, and stubbornness is as iniquity and idolatry. Because thou hast rejected the word of the Lord, he hath also rejected thee from being king. 1 Samuel 15:23 V PIECE #7: Demographics We are now in the midst of a gigantic shift in population. North America and Europe have declining populations as do Russia, China and Japan. In fact, the developed world is plagued by a shrinking population. The consequences of this situation will be nothing short of catastrophic. You will see some articles in the research section that deal with this, and this problem has been clear to everyone for a very long time. Unfortunately, they chose badly in how they decided to fix this. And yes, the flood of migrant barbarians into Europe was a part of this attempt to fix a declining population base. Its just more proof that you just cant fix stupid. (facepalm!) PIECE #8: The Rise Of Electronic Currency I remember the hubbub over the UPC labels that came out in the 70s. Everyone thought that they were The Mark Of The Beast. But, the hubbub died down, until a new-and-improved hubbub arose over implanted chips. We still have this hubbub, but Im afraid that its a tempest in a teacup. I believe that the true Mark of the Beast will be what it says: an mark. Its what the Bible says, and it makes more sense than a hackable implant. A mark is hard to hack, and those without The Mark will be unable to hide that fact. Why is this under the heading of Electronic Currency? Because you will probably need that mark to do electronic transactions. That mark might be your password, your cryptographic key or the ID that the system uses to track your electronic transactions. Whatever the case, this is really the first time that weve had a truly viable competitor to paper currency. Bitcoin has taken the world by storm, and the banksters are piling in. And, when you see the bankers pile in on ANYTHING, you know that there will be trouble ahead. PIECE #9: The Science Of Deception Last week, I talked about delusion. The Bible has spoken of it as being a part of the Last Days. God promised that He would send Strong Delusion to those who do not love the truth. (2 Thessalonians 2:10-13) And, our society often speaks of The Art of Deception. Well, there are major players out there that have perfect this art so well, that it would be more properly called a science. I ran into this, when doing research on MKULTRA. It was only one of the many mind control programs that the CIA was engaged in, and I believe that we see the CIAs footprints all over the massive deception campaigns that flash across our television and computer screens. Its really the only way that I can explain the utter insanity of what we are seeing today. And, journalists have come forward to speak of the influence of the CIA on their work. But, the CIA isnt the only culprit. I have an MBA and quite a bit of sales training. And, it took a while for me to realize that sales and marketing are just different words for manipulation. And, it has been perfected by big business for decades, to the point where the average person is quite vulnerable to the call of the shiny trinket. Our civilization has perfected deception upon a willing audience, and Im certain that the Antichrist and his minions will use those tools to great effect. A Unique Moment In Time We really live in a unique moment in time. Our forebears in faith have always wondered how The Last Days would look. Well, we know. The pieces are falling into place, and the picture of a perfect storm should be obvious for all to see if they are willing to see it. Note: Next weeks post will be late. Our church is holding a Vacation Bible School for the kids in our area, and Im the Bible teacher. Hopefully, next weeks article will come out on Saturday assuming that I survive! (And, pray for the little rug rats, that they see Christ as their Lord and Savior!) Read my book, Ezekiels Fire. Its the Fourth and final Edition Its free, and it may just save your life. Heres the website: http://www.ezekielsfire.com/ Or, download the PDF: http://www.omegashock.com/ef/ezekielsfire.pdf For E-Pub Format: http://www.omegashock.com/ef/ezekielsfire-epub.epub And, Kindle Format: http://www.omegashock.com/ef/ezekielsfire-kindle.azw3 THIS WEEKS RESEARCH My research sources are pretty wide ranging, and their number keep growing. So, instead of listing all of my sources, let me list the ones that deserve special mention: http://rebelplanetdispatch.blogspot.tw/ http://endoftheamericandream.com/ http://usawatchdog.com/ http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/ http://themostimportantnews.com/ https://srsroccoreport.com/ http://www.paulbenson.me/ http://www.peakprosperity.com/ https://www.jihadwatch.org/ http://www.acts17.net/ http://www.billstill.com/ http://honestreporting.com/ A big thank you to all who sent me articles. I appreciate all of it. IF YOU READ NOTHING ELSE Yup, more than just special, these links appear to be the most important of all. Seriously, start with these. And yes, these are pretty serious. Repentance, Salvation and The New Bible Versions: (Yes, it Really does matter!) Lets Get It Right! When I read this, I was shocked. Now, I understand why I get so much pushback from Christians, when I talk about the judgment of God. How utterly corrupt. How dare they do this to the Bible! HOW DARE THEY! There is a special place in Hell for the translators who took away the precious words of God from the Bible. Many already burn in Hell, and it is their truly just reward. I am sickened by this, and this is not new information for me. It has just been a while since I looked at this. If you have the NIV, or any other corrupted Bible, throw it away. Thank you, Paul Benson, for reminding us of the need to be careful in our choice of Bible. This really makes me angry that they would do this. Please do this before you get hacked | Sovereign Man Please pay attention to this article. I was going to put this in the PREPARATION section, until I realized that it was far more important than that. And yes, it really is THAT important. You MUST treat your online security as carefully as you can. The person who is the centerpiece of this article paid a VERY high price by making some mistakes in how they create passwords, how they connect to the Internet and what banks he/she chose. Some of the details of this article have been changed to protect the person that this article describes. The good thing is that he (or she) has made the changes that will keep him from being a victim in the future. How do I know this? Because I know the person in the article. (And no, its not me.) Please. Treat this seriously. The evil out there is truly diabolical, and YOU are their target. UN Document From 2000 Exposes Global Migration Replacement Solution To Developed World Demographics | Zero Hedge We knew that there was a reason for this massive wave of migrants from Africa and the Middle East. And, we were hearing people say things like, Theyll help us retirement programs going, and Theyll help build our economy. Where did that come from? Probably a lot of places, one document from the UN explained what they are doing NOW. That UN document appears to be a roadmap for what is happening now. The interesting thing is that the UN is right on the need for more, younger people to be added to the European population. They got the problem correctly defined. But, they got the solution so badly wrong, that you would laugh if the circumstances werent so terrible. The biggest reason why the hordes of Muslims and Africans cannot succeed is that they arent European and they dont WANT to be European. They want Europe to be like Africa and the Middle East, but with all the money that Europe has. Have you noticed what Africa and the Middle East look like? Corrupt, violent and insane all of which, causes poverty. Extreme poverty. Why were these UN morons so stupid? The answer is that they went to university and then worked for government. Ive done both, and suffered terrible brain damage, as a result. So, its no mystery to me, why the UN did this. Bureaucratic stupidity is truly awe inspiring. I will never forget that first experience, and the shocked look on my face must have been pretty obvious since several people told me what I looked like. Never, EVER, underestimate the power of stupidity. However, theres another factor, and thats the part played by Soros and others like him, who seek the destruction of Europe. They got embedded into this project, and their success will destroy the world. Its the End of the World, and Matthew 24:7 was ALWAYS going to be a part of that. Awan Brothers Busted => FBI Seizes Smashed Hard Drives From Debbie Wasserman Schultz IT Aides Home It looks like George Webb is finally being vindicated. If you dont know about George and what hes been up to, go here: https://www.youtube.com/user/georgwebb He has uncovered a Pakistani spy ring being run by Hillary Clinton and Debbie Wasserman Schutz. And, its probably one of the most serious breaches of national security in the history of the United States. And, this spy ring has been operating since 2005. Its time for Debbie and Hillary to have a swift trial, and a firing squad. FBI Seized Hard Drives From Dem IT Aide | The Daily Caller Here is even more information on the Pakistani spy ring. This was the article quoted by Gateway Pundit. Day 276.1. Hillarys Leakers Hackers and Henchmen YouTube Here is George Webb talking about his work, that led to the above disclosures. My question, is WHY ARENT THEY GIVING GEORGE MORE CREDIT??? Day 277.1 Summary For Hillarys Leakers Hackers and Henchmen YouTube Here is an excellent summary of what has been happening so far. And, its REALLY ugly. Hillary Clinton and Debbie Wasserman Schultz have teamed up with Pakistani Intelligence ISI to create a spy ring for their own profit, while sharing Americas most vital and sensitive secrets. This is Above Top Secret stuff. Will they do anything about it? They might, if George lives long enough to make it happen. BREAKING: Former Wasserman-Schultz IT Staffer Imran Awan Arrested at Airport While Trying to Flee U.S. ANNNNNNNND. it looks like the spy ring is beginning to be unwound. They still arent giving George Webb credit for starting this process and revealing the spy ring. Will Hillary Rodham Clinton and Debbie Wasserman Schultz go down? Debbie, maybe now would be a good time to do a deal. While youre at it, take out some life insurance by making a record of all that you know, in case Clinton decides to off you. Rep. Steve King: Imran Awan Had Access to All the Communication of the Foreign Affairs Committee Breitbart The bad news about Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Hillary keeps rolling in. Its too late to cover it all up, but theyre trying. But, three words have escaped into the public sphere: The Awan Brothers With those three words, the Democrats are in serious trouble. Their leadership ran a Pakistani spy ring deep in the heart of Congress, where Americas deepest and most important secrets were shared. This is pure treason, and I want to see quick trials and an over-worked firing squad. Cable Networks Black Out Coverage on Wasserman Schultz IT Scandal Nothing to see here. Move along. Move along If The New York Times, CNN and MSNBC arent reporting on this, its not important. If the Democrats think that its okay, its not important. If John McCain hasnt said anything, then its not important. Also, the world is flat. Up is Down. Good is bad. Black is white. These arent the droids you are looking for. Now, that we have that bit of sarcasm out of the way, isnt it refreshing to live in a world where you are only told what THEY want you to know? I mean, were talking awesome all the time. Everything is beautiful, except with you look behind the inch thick stage props and realize that you can only defy gravity for so long. Eventually, the truth comes out. But, the moron media havent quite figured this out. Wasserman Shultzs IT Staffer Imran Awans Wife Flees to Pakistan Makes Off with $295,000 (Video) And, the Awan brothers made off with lots and lots of cash. Theyd already squirreled away millions and transferred American secrets to Pakistan. Tell me again how these guys were only discovered when it was too late to do anything about them? COMPLETE MEDIA BLACKOUT on Wasserman Schultz IT Scandal This is a nice if you can call ANYTHING about this as nice summary of current details of this Pakistani spy ring in Congress, run by Diabolical Debbie, along with the media blackout on the issue. Im trying to think of D words to describe Debbie Wasserman Schultz. So far, I have Duplicitous, Diabolical, Damnable, Devil, Diablo and Dirty. Diabolical seems the most appropriate for now. Debbie Wasserman Schultzs Pakistani IT guy arrested at airport Washington Times Now, theyre calling the arrest of Imran Awan ISLAMOPHOBIA? I want to put this in the moron section, because it fits my personal definition of a true moron being stupid AND evil. Diabolical Debbie has some explaining to do assuming that she has enough brain cells to do it. Debbie Wasserman Schultz aide arrested for fraud | Daily Mail Online Gibby shared this from the comment section of last weeks post, and it adds more detail to the above articles. Of course, since its the Daily Mail, it emphasizes the claim that hes be prosecuted because he is a Muslim. There are lots of morons in Britain. Lots. Day 280.1 Hillarys Leakers, Hackers, and Henchmen YouTube Here is an excellent summary of what George has come up with. George Webb has done an exceptional job of tracking down the important details, and its positively incredible. IT BEGINS: Calls Grow For Debbie Wasserman Schultz to Testify Before Congress on IT Staffer Imran Awan Good. The word has gotten to Congress, and they look like they are going to appear to be doing something about it. Just remember that Congress is full of lying liars. Pretty much all of them. Wasserman-Schultz IT Aide Arrested While Attempting To Flee Country, Charged With Bank Fraud | Zero Hedge Even MORE details, including a list of Congressmen who were compromised by the Awan brothers. And, they were ALL Democrats. Arrested DNC Staffer Awan Retains Long-Time Clinton Associate For Legal Help | Zero Hedge Oh, and they have a Clinton lawyer to help out Imran Awan. Unfortunately, his initial press release seems to indicate that hes a bit of a moron. Or, maybe he thinks that WE are the morons. Debbie Wasserman Schultz Absolute Wreck Barely Able to Function Since Imran Awan Arrest Good. She knows that what she did was treason. Pure. Treason. She needs a trial and swift execution. And, I am sickened that Jeff Sessions, the Attorney General, has done so little about this. He knew about this for a long time, and sat on it. Its time to start looking a little more carefully into Mr. Sessions. Something smells fishy. Steven Wasserman, Brother of Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Overseeing Awan Imran Case? This is so sick, that it makes me want to scream. Debbie committed treason. Who was hired to investigate her treason? Her brother. Do you honestly think that there will be justice here? Me neither. Man Behind Trump Dossier Subpoenaed After Refusing To Testify, Will Plead The Fifth | Zero Hedge The Democrat tangle of lies is slowly being unwound. This lying liar has essentially claimed that he is guilty, by threatening to plead the fifth the right to not incriminate himself. So, as we look at the evil that is becoming easier and easier to see, what will the Democrats do? Jesses Caf Amricain: History Repeats: The Continuing Threat to Freedom and Democracy One of the greatest heroes in American history is someone that most Americans have never heard of: Major General Smedley Butler. His ethics and patriotism caused him to neutralize a threat to America that would have destroyed the US. But, the US government did very little to neutralize the foul men who tried to do this. The Wall Street Fascists who tried to take over America, turned and sent their support to a little-known moron called Adolf Hitler. If FDR had put those vile and disgusting men in jail, there might not have been a World War II. Unfortunately, we are recreating the conditions of that benighted era. And, we are fresh out of men like General Butler. oftwominds-Charles Hugh Smith: When We Can No Longer Tell the Truth We could call this piece, The Empire Of Lies, because that is what our modern civilization has become. Europe, North and South America and the rest of the world they have become a vast empire of lies. There are countries that seek to escape the lying liars of our age, but they are entangled by their connections with the liars, and their own corruption. China and Russia have been able to keep themselves outside of this foul web of foolishness, but they are also unbelievably corrupt, violent and repressive. Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic are trying to stay free, but with limited success. What about Australia and New Zealand? Weve heard little from them, but the rot is eating away there, too. Will the Empire of Lies fall with the coming of Ezekiels Fire? I believe so, but it will rise again stronger than ever and take over the world, with the Antichrist at its head. Another Benchmark in the Downfall of Modern Society YouTube Because Melissa Dykes isnt a Christian, she doesnt know this verse: And because iniquity shall abound, the love of many shall wax cold. Matthew 24:12 Im betting that you have people in your own family, whose love is so cold, that you doubt that they would care if you died. I have family like that. I had neighbors in the US like that. We are a civilization of psychopaths. Wolves have more care for each other than we do. NRA: Journalism Dies at the Washington Post Whoa theres a video in here that is hard hitting and utterly truthful. WaPo also known as the Amazon Post is one of the most disgusting rags in America. Lies from grimy page to grimy page. These foul fiends from Hell need to be left in the garbage heap of history, a reminder that lying liars will not be tolerated. Unfortunately, we have grown to love our lies, so the Amazon Post will continue to live on. Journalism dies, in Washington. TASS: Military & Defense Around 20 military bases to be established in western Russia before year-endLock Her Up Reboot: Trump Calls for DOJ to Reopen Hillary Case | LifeZette When will the United States government do its job and investigate Hillary Clinton? I Have Taken A Closer Look At The Data From EIA: Why Horseman Global Is Aggressively Shorting Shale | Zero Hedge You dont need to read this. You only need the title. When the debt dries up, so will shale oil. And, shale oil has been THE ONLY THING keeping us from seeing Peak Oil. It has all been a nice scam, while it lasted. But, you eventually need to pay the price for it. Peak Shale: Anadarko Just Became The First US Oil Producer To Slash CapEx | Zero Hedge Even more proof that Peak Oil has already occurred. Shale is the ONLY reason why we have been able to maintain such high oil volumes. Thats it. When shale dies, the perfect storm will hit. You need to wake up to the implications of this. This is the number one piece of the Last Days puzzle, and no one is paying attention. To those of you who ARE paying attention, you need to prepare for those who arent. I know that its not fair, but its our job to be merciful to those who cannot see. Just do your best. First Anadarko, Now Whiting: Second Shale Company Slashes CapEx Budget | Zero Hedge ANOTHER Shale Oil company is pulling back from shale. Im just curious about WHEN it will finally dawn on people that Peak Oil happened a decade ago? Maps: What Energy Sources Power the World? This is an interesting post that works on many levels. First of all, as we run into trouble with fossil fuels, a lot of lights will be turned out. Most of the lights are powered by coal, and the quality of our coal has been in sharp decline. But, that wasnt my initial thought. My initial thought was about Ezekiels Fire. The largest die-off will be in those areas that cannot survive without electricity, or do not know how to survive without electricity. How many of those areas will suffer massive die-off? Will you be one of those casualties? ARTICLES OF NOTE These articles have a more individual importance. They cross categories, and are often in their own category. And, I think that these should be your first stop in your reading. God and metal: scenes from a hardcore Christian music festival | World news | The Guardian Sorry, but this is straight up abomination. Christian? No, it drags the name of Christ through the mud. And, that is the essence of blasphemy. Teens filmed, mocked drowning man, Cocoa police say Again, this is ANOTHER example of what Jesus said that the Last Days would be like: And because iniquity shall abound, the love of many shall wax cold. Matthew 24:12 Because America has become a sin-ridden place where evil is celebrated, this is what happens. These foul teenagers laughed as a poor, disabled man drowned to death. He cried out for help, but they just mocked him. And, when he died they laughed again, and sauntered off. I always wish for repentance for anyone this evil. But, if they arent going to repent, then I wish that they meet an untimely and swift death soon. BREAKING: Charlie Gard Is NOT DyingHe Is Being Killed YouTube They want to classify spoon feeding as MEDICAL CARE? Welcome to the death for profit system. They make money when you die. So, guess what youre going to do, if you have a little problem? The insurance companies what their profits. Theyre making money, and they do NOT want to allow ANYONE to have health care that is affordable. Day 272.6. Hillarys Leakers Hackers and Henchmen YouTube Heres a short little four minute dump of info on the CIA. And yes, I know someone who was CIA and was involved in one of these trade expos. He never saw the drug side of it, but he saw enough of other stuff to get out before he was forced to do something that he would regret. The CIA, just one big happy drug family. Yes, There Is a Government Troll Training Program YouTube The United States government has spent a GIGANTIC amount of money on trying to figure out ways to manipulate your mind. And, this is a brief discussion of that program that has been in operation for more than 70 years. They have refined their techniques, and they are VERY good at making you think one thing, when the truth is another. The Art of Deception: Training for a New Generation of Online Covert Operations The Intercept This is the slide show that the video talked about. This mental manipulation is pointed at you. The question is whether you will fall for it. And yes, I believe that this Flat Earth nonsense is a part of their work. Consider it a fun research project, that probably goes like this: How many people can we fool into believing that the Earth is flat? So far, they are horrifyingly successful. And, I would prefer that they either go to jail, or be put in front of a firing squad. Disneys Next Movie Could Be Watching You, Too Okay, so this is a smart move by Disney to make sure that you are enjoying their movies. The same goes for the food industry and any other industry. They want to make you happy, so that youll keep buying your products. You want to be happy, right? But, the dark side of this is what should scare all of you, since this is the path to testing how effective their techniques for manipulation are. This is how they will refine them to the point where it will become a science. Deception is about to become a science if it isnt already. Brazilians funneled as slaves by US church, ex-members say | Charlotte Observer This is what happens when a church is founded by wolves. A sheep will never beat you, but a wolf will. A sheep will never use coercion, but a wolf will. A sheep will never enslave you, but a wolf will. Ive seen a lot of churches run by wolves, and our church here in Taipei had a wolf for a pastor, for a short time. My wife and I along with a couple others stood up to him and called him out on what he was doing, so he ran away. A wolf will destroy your church, whether in the congregation or in the pulpit. Weve had several wolves try to devour Calvary International Baptist Church, here in Taipei. We praise God that He has stood with us, every time. Cold sweeps the Southern Hemisphere, major crop damage Earth Changes Sott.net This comes from Chris in Poland. He just finished harvesting his fruit trees, and hes already seen the cost of fruit go up from last year. The problem with a Grand Solar Minimum, once you can see it, its already too late to prepare for it. I really hope that you are ready for this. Thanks, Chris! Wisconsin Firm Microchips Employees: Its Inevitably The Next Thing And We Want To Be Part Of It | Zero Hedge Okay, the Mark of the Beast will NOT be an RFID chip inserted underneath your skin. It wont work, because they can be hacked. But, it WILL lead to what CAN work and will work. However, we will need to survive Ezekiels Fire to see it. THE REPUBLIC OF EMOTION YouTube Heres a quote from the video that pretty much says it all: Hundreds of airplanes have crashed into mountains, and the mountain wins, every time. When will people wake up to reality? I dont know, but I bet that it will be too late to matter. Why Is TAIWAN Threatened By CHINA? VisualPolitik EN YouTube An interesting video that tries to describe Taiwans situation in just 13 minutes and ten seconds. THAT is NOT enough time to do the subject justice. Nor is my short comment, here. The problem that Taiwan has, is that it didnt declare independance from China, when it could have any time during the 1970s and before. And, it did not create a uniquely different cultural identity, when it should have. There are reasons for that, but theyre all stupid. I knew within two weeks of coming here, that Taiwan was finished. They have no chance of keeping themselves separate from China. The best that they can do is maintain their half-hearted attempts to remain separate. Every time the Taiwanese government screws up and allows corrupt politicians to have their way, Taiwan takes a step closer to China. If things go too far here, the average Taiwanese citizen will look at their government with such contempt, that theyll believe that Beijing wont be any worse than what they already have. The Taiwanese government needs to stop being so stupid. This is a great island, full of wonderful people. But, its run by morons. India-China on the verge of military conflict YouTube Some interesting insight on the conflict between India and China. This video is a bit anti-India since it does not describe Chinas invasion of India, with Chinese troops, every year. This is a constant provocation by China, and India must be getting a bit sick of it. Those who claim that China isnt expansionist, are idiots who do not know Chinas relationship with her neighbors. Just ask Russia and India about whether China is a good neighbor. Hegemony is a Three-Player Game The Daily Reckoning This is the third article from Jim Rickards that Im posting a link to. This is a new record. Either Ive gone nuts, or Rickards is on a roll. Hes also right. Trump has made a strategic pivot towards Russia, against China. And, the pressure will only increase, if China does nothing about the Norks. oftwominds-Charles Hugh Smith: In the Footsteps of Rome: Is Renewal Possible? This is an interesting snapshot of history, a history that Europe and North America appears to be duplicating. Will there be an existential crisis that will unite the tattered elements of empire, to reforge it into a stronger version of itself? Yes, I believe that this crisis is coming, in fact just around the corner. I call it Ezekiels Fire, but whatever name we choose to give it, death and destruction will forge something of stronger will than before. And, its goal will be the murder and destruction of all who name the name of Christ. Fake Twin Cities street signs warn of easily startled police StarTribune.com Well, the murder of Justine Damond by police officer Mohamed Noor is getting some notice. This officer needs to be tried for murder, and then executed when found guilty. Do NOT have Muslims as police officers. Instapundit: Fire Sessions Over Civil Forfeiture Stance, Not Russia Recusal Hit & Run : Reason.com Actually, I want him fired for not going after Hillary Clintons treason. She committed treason and murder. She has the blood of a multitude of civilians on her hands. She needs a quick trial, and a swift execution. Trump Attacks Attorney General Sessions For Failing To Investigate Crooked Hillarys Crimes & Russia Relations | Daily Wire And, heres Trump saying the same thing. Roomba maker wants to flog maps of users homes with Apple, Amazon and Google Guess what? That robot vacuum cleaner is now spying on you. The latest versions are actually mapping your house, the makers of Roomba want to sell that information. Isnt that wonderful? Im wondering if the neighborhood thief would be interested in this information? Palin to subpoena two dozen reporters in defamation suit | New York Post I really hope that she takes em down. I am tired of the prostitute press attempting to force their twisted views on the rest of us. Shock Claim: Florida County Has Thousands of Voters Over Age 100 | LifeZette Not only that, but SEIU is fighting to have those voters maintained on the rolls: After filing the suit, the local SEIU chapter representing health care workers in the county joined as an intervener, to defend against the charges and to prevent names from being removed from the Broward County voter roll. The group Demos, which has received hundreds of thousands of dollars in funding from George Soros Open Society Institute, is contributing to Snipes legal defense and working to prevent any and all names from being removed from Browards voter roll. Smell that? It smells like two weeks of garbage, rotting in the hot July sun, and its the smell of pure corruption. Disgusting. Foul. Vile. Diabolical and utterly Satanic. Lucifer is surely proud of Florida. Miss. cops fatally shoot man while serving warrant at wrong house NY Daily News It seems that, in America, you are in greater danger of being shot and killed by the police, than anyone else. Weve already proven that you are in greater danger of being ROBBED by the police, than anyone else. Wanna bet that there were no recordings of this interaction by the police? Banks Are Scheming to Dominate a Future Cashless Society Thats right, the Banks and the New World Order are coming together to destroy physical currency. And, they are doing it for one, very big reason: Profit. Lots and lots of profit. Its the love of money kids, and its the root of the evil that encroaches upon us. Bankers Ditch 7-Figure Salaries To Climb Aboard The ICO Rocketship | Zero Hedge When the bankers jump in be careful. Sharks in the water. This, to my mind, is a powerful reason why electronic currency will take off. The bankers are in on it. Greece Arrests Russian Mastermind Behind $4 Billion Bitcoin Laundering Scheme | Zero Hedge This also illustrates a tiny little problem with cryptocurrencies. The US government has ways of reaching out and grabbing you. The Globalist One World Currency Will Look A Lot Like Bitcoin Im not a fan of Brandon Smith, but he has laid out an accurate picture of where the banks are taking us. The future in one of the electronic currencies that they are rolling out. It wont be Bitcoin. Theres not enough control. But, it will look like it. Time Is Running Out China Is Planning For A Crisis Along North Korean Border | Zero Hedge War drums are beating on the border between North Korea and China. It looks like China has finally figured out that something must be done about the Norks. Theres a limit, and it looks like we have reached it. And, for the sake of the Christians that have been massacred by the North Koreans, and for those Christians who still survive there, I want something to be done as soon as possible. The Myth of Indias Information Technology Industry | And, just in case you were wondering about the Indian Elephant in the room well, wonder no more. India will collapse in upon itself, before it has a chance to fix its own foolishness. The insanity of India is incredible, and its roots lie in Hinduism. Rebel Planet Dispatch: Americas First Coup & Violent Storms Coming From Every Direction Another dispatch from the Rebel Planet. The storm clouds have gathered. The only question is when it will hit. TRUTH ABOUT TRUMP Right now, Trump is a distraction. Some call him savior. Others call him devil. And YOU are probably being distracted by all this. Please dont be. Trump is just a guy who wanted political power, and got it. He likes winning, and he won. He still likes winning, and he will try to keep doing so. Hes also smart, which means that he will probably succeed at least, some of the time. But, he isnt going to save America. He isnt going to chart a new course. He isnt going to make America great again. And, its becoming more and more clear that he has been lying to us. The best that he will do, is not be as bad as the alternative. But, Im afraid that he will be AS BAD as the alternative. He certainly looks like hes selling Israel out. Please get this into your head: AMERICA IS LOST. The sooner that you get this point, the better. Those of you living outside of America already see this, and YOUR concern is the fallout from Americas fall. The only thing that I can point to, for you is the Bible and Ezekiels Fire. The Rutherford Institute :: Policing for Profit: Jeff Sessions & Co.s Thinly Veiled Plot to Rob Us Blind [SHORT] If there is one thing that gets me boiling over Trump and his side-kick Jeff Sessions, its this vile and evil Policing For Profit. Corrupt police departments are using the opportunity provided by Sessions and Trump, to steal EVEN MORE money from us. It is evil, and it needs to stop. Dont tell me how wonderful Trump is, until you show me that he has stopped this evil and vile activity. What The Heck? Man Who Runs Firm Behind Trump-Russia Dossier to Plead the Fifth | Law News So, the lies are unraveling. The problem is no one in the media seems to care that they are lies. They like their lies. The media lied about Trumps Poland speech YouTube The lying liars of the media are at it again. They straight-up lied about Trumps speech in Poland. How do these people sleep at night? Muellers New Lawless Prosecutor, 1720 YouTube The Thot Plickens! This situation with Mueller gets uglier by the day. I am indifferent to Donald Trump as president, but I am deeply opposed to corrupt and obscene politics. And, this is CERTAINLY obscene. Former CIA Director Calls For A Coup If Trump Fires Mueller | Zero Hedge Ive always considered John Brennan to be a traitor, who has betrayed the US to Saudi Arabia and Islam. And, the fact that he spoke beside another traitor, James Clapper, underscores my point. They both need to be investigated for treason. If guilty, they need to be executed. I know that Ive been calling for a lot of executions, but I have justice and history on my side. Treason is treason, and there is only one possible sentence for those whose position is this high and whose criminality is this bad. Media Feigns Outrage After Trump Ends CIAs Syria Program Just when you thought that the media couldnt get more disgusting they do. Journalists have no shame, none at all. These people are some of the most revolting and disgusting prostitutes out there. And yes, they are prostitutes. Just ask John Swinton. WILLIAM SHATNER Blasts Social Justice Warriors Who Criticize Trump * 100percentfedUp.com Wait. Shatner is a conservative? He believes that reality is not what you want it to be? I bet that he even thinks that the world is a GLOBE! Hes a GLOBIST! Or, is that better said, Sphericist. Well, my respect for William Captain Kirk Shatner just went up. The fact that he loves to make SJWs scream is an added bonus. Scaramucci: 150 Years Ago, People Would Have Been Hung for Leaks Like This Theyre Treasonous :: Grabien News Hes absolutely right. These leakers are engaged in treason. They should be granted a quick trial, and a quicker execution. Who Is Michael Vickers? The CIAs Afghan Jihad Architect Declares War On Trump | Zero Hedge This is one more positive for Trump. If he is truly shutting down this program, then he deserves some kudos for that. Graham Dares Trump: Holy Hell To Pay if You Fire Sessions | Zero Hedge Okay, if Graham is against the firing of Sessions, then Im for it. THE ORGANIZED RAPE OF CHILDREN I hope that you will forgive me for wanting these people dead. With a thorough trial, first to establish the facts then, a swift execution. God help us all. Patreon: Hampstead Dearman Case YouTube Okay, now this a case where the ones claiming pedophilia are lying through their teeth. Now, I would not have given credibility to this body language analysis, if I had not heard her other analyses of other victims that really were telling the truth. I think that Mandy the woman doing the analysis really is extremely credible and consistant. False accusation is a foul abomination in the eyes of God. And, a psychopath has used her children as tools to slander and destroy her husband and the school where her children went. So, think of this as a bit of good news. Here is one case where the organized rape of little children DID NOT happen. ISAIAH 19 This category has expanded significantly. Its as if the flood gates on this issue have opened. Its an indication of the seriousness of the situation. And, its very serious, indeed. Ethiopia is an extremely corrupt government and has made worthless promises that they will carefully fill the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam. I believe that they will fill that dam as fast as possible, drying up the Nile, just as chapter 19 of Isaiah said that they would. It is said that they will begin filling the dam, next year. This is going to be traumatic for Egypt just as Isaiah said. Water pictured around Renaissance Dam alarms Egyptians Um is it FINALLY beginning to fill? The Ethiopian government says no, but you cant trust them to tell the truth about ANYTHING. The GERD was supposed to begin filling two years ago. And, and it should be filling now. And, when it starts, things will get difficult for Egypt. ECONOMIC AND FINANCIAL COLLAPSE Weve been talking about the collapse of the economy and financial system for a very long time, and every day that collapse is delayed well the collapse just gets worse and worse. Eventually, it will be an explosion that will devastate the world and lead to chaos, confusion, death, destruction and war. Lots and lots of war. In fact, it has begun already. By the time that you see it, it will be too late to do anything about it. The Elites Are Privately Warning About a Crash The Daily Reckoning Heres another one from Jim Rickards. Im not used to publishing so many links to his articles. But, his point about the elites operating in plain sight are actually quite true. You just need to know how to read, and where to read. The main point is that the Elites are preparing for disaster, and you should too. And, he says that the time to act is NOW. Will you be ready for this? 720Global 22 Troublesome Facts All 22 of those facts tell me to run away from the Stock Market as fast as I can. Yes, there are ways to make money on such information, by shorting the market. But, that takes an amount of time and effort that would keep me from writing Omega Shock articles. Are We There Yet? Here Is Howard Marks Bubble Checklist | Zero Hedge YUP. Almost there. Get out, if you are in. Total Government And Personal Debt In The U.S. Has Hit 41 Trillion Dollars ($329,961.34 Per Household) Um thats a LOT of money. It cannot be paid back, so it wont be paid back. GOLD AND SILVER When economic and financial collapse comes your way, you need something tangible to weather the storm. Right now, I cannot think of anything tangilble that is so fiercely undervalued and universally recognized as gold and silver. There might be other things that are better. I just cant see em. If you can think of something better, share it with us. Psycho | Zero Hedge The title is Psycho, but the story is about gold, global stock markets and cognitive dissonance. When I was a professional finance guy, it didnt take long for me to figure out that psychology is everything in the stock market at least in the short term. In the long term, the fundamentals always win. Having said that, it can take a distressingly loooooong time for fundamentals and reason to make their appearance. The last line of this article is instructive for all who have ANY money ANYWHERE in the financial system: In the end, fundamentals always win. But in the short term, markets are Psycho. The truth, and nothing but. HUMOR These are at least worth a chuckle. And, it might save you from going nuts. I had a bit of a laugh at these, and I hope that you will too. Youve Gotta Love Millennials Micah Tyler YouTube You hafta listen to all of this, because theres a serious message at the end of it. And, it points to more reasons why these are the Last Days. Youll understand what I mean, when you get to the end of this video. But, this is such a good video, I laughed and clapped at the end of it even though I was alone in our apartment. (Mrs. Little was off, teaching some munchkins.) Serious but funny and fun. Perfect. FUNNY DESIGN FOR MUSICIANS Jennifer shared this in last weeks comment section, and I LOVE IT! I was once a musician in high school and even reached category one in the national music competition that is held every year. But, since I knew that I would never be a professional, I dropped out. But, I really know those difficult times, and have even played them. Thanks, Jennifer! Everything OK | Funny Pictures, Quotes, Memes, Jokes Oh dear, this is me. Poor Mrs. Little. You REALLY dont want to be married to me. Better Dressed | Funny Pictures, Quotes, Memes, Jokes And, we all need a good insult. In fact, I often resemble this one. I am hungry | Funny Pictures, Quotes, Memes, Jokes Yes a hungry. Gold Stars | Funny Pictures, Quotes, Memes, Jokes Hey, its Facebook. Herding Cats Imgur Awwwwwww. Now THAT is cute. Blowing a kitten Imgur Okay, this kitten knew what was next, and wasnt having any of it. Incoming! Imgur This is for Mrs. Little. She LOOOOOOVES Sugar Gliders! Silence Is Golden Unless You Have A Puppy Pictures, Photos, and Images for Facebook, Tumblr, Pinterest, and Twitter Oh dear, this one is true. Ive had several dogs, and silence is often not a good thing. Thanks, Jennifer! All Food Must Go To The Lab For Testing Humoar.com Ive several food items disappear for um testing. Another good one from Jennifer. I Wish | Funny Pictures, Quotes, Memes, Jokes Ummmm wellll this is my wish too. Good Morning | Funny Pictures, Quotes, Memes, Jokes How can you resist a fur face like that? Silence And Duct Tape | Funny Pictures, Quotes, Memes, Jokes This might actualy go in the gold and silver category, but nah. It goes here. Hey buddy, let me in! GIF on Imgur Awwwwww now, THAT is what friends are for! I Too Was Once A Male All that I can say to this one is ME TOO! Meanwhile In Iran | Zero Hedge Nothing to see here Look! A butterfly! Retailer apologizes after font makes glitter appear to read as Hitler | Articles | Main Oh wow. Thats BAAAAD! MORONS AND MORE MORONS WERE SURROUNDED BY MORONS Im sorry, but I cant stand it anymore. There are just too many morons, so it needs its own category. And, I do this to maintain my own sanity. Theyre driving me THAT crazy. Now, heres my rule for who appears in this section: A person or organization who is EVIL ANNNND STUPID. People who are just stupid, deserve our compassion. My heart goes out to them, because their life is going to be painful until they stop being stupid. But, those who are evil? Well, I want them to repent. I really do. I do NOT want ANYONE who is evil to suffer an eternity in Hell. But, if they refuse to repent, I want them destroyed. May the wrath of God be upon all who refuse to repent. May the blessings of God be upon those who turn from their wicked ways and acknowledge God. Senator Kid Rock. Dont Laugh. POLITICO Magazine Laughing? No, no, nooooo. NOT laughing. Groaning. Nausea. Headache. Depression. THAT might be happening, but NOT laughing. Im sorry, but if America votes for Kid Rock America will DESERVE Kid Rock. Inflation nightclub shooting: Couple shot at nightclub to sue police Well, it looks like we have some morons in uniform in Australia. Of course, the people shot were also morons, which balances things out a bit. Swinging clubs are straight up evil, so its harder to condemn the police in that situation. They were still stupid, and require better training than they have obviously received. Clean up your act, Victoria. FLASHBACK: ABCs 08 Prediction: NYC Under Water from Climate Change By June 2015 Okay, this article is more than a year old, and the title is all that you need. When will these morons stop being evil AND stupid? I dont know about you, but I feel a bit insulted that these morons would think that their idiocy would be so compelling that we would willingly hand over our lives to them. Come on. If youre going to be evil, at least have the decency to be smart about it! Al Gore Humiliation: NASA Study Confirms Sea Levels Are FALLING Poor Al. Id feel sorry for him, if he wasnt so evil. Drooling idiots deserve our compassion, even when they are trying their very best to destroy everything. Poor Al. Hes tried so hard to be an evil minion of Satan. But, he just cant get it right. Now Al, wipe the drool from your chin and try again This time, you need to scream that we are all going to freeze to death. New NASA Climate Data is Inconvenient For Al Gore , 1723 YouTube Did I say that Al Gore was a moron? I did? Well, everyone knows it, now. (Or, they SHOULD.) Snopes Begs For Money While Owner Allegedly Indulges Porn Star Wife | Daily Wire Snopes has been wrong so often, that Im surprised that anyone pays attention to them, anymore. And, this is probably the reason why they are in need of so much money in addition to their missuse of funds and embezzlment. Why are we not shocked that these socialists are spending money on prostitutes, cheating on each other and granting themselves lavish vacations all at the expense of their company? Yeah, I dont know why Im not shocked, either. House Overwhelmingly Passes Veto-Proof Russia Sanctions Deal | Zero Hedge How did America elect such stupid and evil people to be there politicians? Americas representitives want war. And, they are declaring that they want Russia destroyed. And, they know that their public reasons are all lies. Its pure corruption, and I am literally sickened by this. I am truly ashamed of my country. Obamacare Repeal Collapses as Senate GOP Blocks Health Bill Bloomberg Well, the lying liar did it. The dirtbag came out of the hospital, so that Obamacare could continue. John McCain. A dirtbag of dirtbags. ISLAM Islam is the most vile and Satanic religion on the planet. It is violent, repressive, racist and supremacist. It isnt just a religion. Its an ideology that seeks to destroy any nation, country and government that it comes in contact with. These are the articles that demonstrate what Islam REALLY is. Hero Imams Are the Muslims FINALLY trying for a reformation? Heres the summary: More than 60 Islamic leaders and imams from France, Belgium, Britain, Tunisia, and of different Islamic faiths in a move that may be unprecedented, are touring Europe to denounce Islamic terrorism and to pay homage to the victims of terror in Europe by visiting many of the sites of terror attacks. The idea seems to have shaken extremists to the core. They have been sending these imams death threats. It is therefore high time, as mankind faces a crucial turning point, that people will pull together and support any voices of peace such as those of the marching imams, and restrain any hands that would try to sabotage their noble mission. This is a good thing, short term. If this process gains ground and takes off, this movement will be used by the Antichrist. And, I smell Vatican involvement, here. MATTHEW 24:7 We are seeing the fulfillment of the words of Jesus, right now. And, it seems that Islam is leading the way. What insanity! What is wrong with North America and Europe? Have they and we gone insane? Sweden: A Failed State? But, of COURSE! Remember what I said about, The Empire of Lies? Well, the Empire is alive and well in Sweden. The only question is about which will fail first, the lies or the state. So far, the lies are winning. Heres a summary: The Swedish state, in true Orwellian style, fights those Swedish citizens who point out the obvious problems that migrants are causing. When police officer Peter Springare said in February that migrants were committing a disproportionate amount of crime in the suburbs, he was investigated for inciting racial hatred. Currently, a 70-year-old Swedish pensioner is being prosecuted for hate speech, for writing on Facebook that migrants set fire to cars, and urinate and defecate on the streets. Sixty one no-go zones and a police chief at the end of his wits, and then investigated. Where will it end? How? #DefendEurope : The Far Lefts Attempt to Silence REALITY YouTube Well, it looks like the LEFT is upping its game. Theyre going after the money streams that allow alt-media to tell the truth about what is happening. The LEFT know that people like Lauren Southern and Black Pigeon speaks cant do what they are doing, if they dont have food to eat, clothes to wear and a place to live. And, as the LEFT ramp up their efforts to destroy Europe, they need to silence those who are speaking out against them. What an evil world that we live in. SOMALI MUSLIMS TAKE OVER A SMALL TOWN IN TENNESSEE In Globalist Plan For A New America [Video] * 100percentfedUp.com If even HALF of this is true, Obama needs to be tried for treason, and then executed by firing squad if found guilty. Unfortunately, this story is completely believable. I understand why the top elites want to do this. They serve Lucifer, and Lucifer wants the world thrown into chaos and destruction. So, I understand the upper levels of this foul effort. But, the lower levels? The lower levels of this effort BELIEVE that what they are doing is good and right. And, THAT is a level of stupidity that is hard to understand. How can people be this stupid? A Month of Islam and Multiculturalism in France: June 2017 This is the summary I am in fundamental disagreement with these left-wing people who do everything to dissociate fundamentalism from Islam. Islam has been radicalized for fifty years. On the Shiite side, there was Imam Khomeini and his Islamic revolution. In the Sunni world, there was Saudi Arabia, which used its immense resources to finance the spread of this fanaticism of Wahhabism. But this historical evolution took place within Islam and not outside. When the people of the Islamic State attack, they do it by saying Allahu Akbar. So how can we then say that this has nothing to do with Islam? It must be stopped. Sir Salman Rushdie, author of the novel The Satanic Verses, who has been hunted to be killed by Muslim extremists for nearly 30 years. Residents of the Paris suburb of Me-sur-Seine complained that a mosque was blasting prayers on outdoor loudspeakers well beyond midnight each night during Ramadan. Mourad Salah, a local Muslim leader, said the city council was to blame for the noise because of its failure to provide Muslims with a larger mosque: The ball is in the mayors court. Until we have a place of prayer worthy of the name, with a greater capacity, things will be difficult. An online petition Women: An Endangered Species in the Heart of Paris accused Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo of allowing a large swathe of the city to become a no-go zone for women. Every night, hundreds of migrants from Africa and the Middle East line the pavements to form an intimidating gauntlet for women walking from the Gare du Nord and Gare de lEst railway stations to their homes, the petition said. Shouts of bitch and dirty whore are common. but it does not begin to describe the horror that has descended upon Europe. The women, the children and the elderly of Europe have now become the prey of the barbarian hordes that have invaded their cities and towns. What an utterly evil thing that has happened. Gang of thugs rampaged through Liverpool city centre attacking strangers who were white non-Muslims | Metro News Its not like you need more proof but, heres more proof. When will the West wake up? Girl, 15, is raped by two men including one she flagged down for help | UK news | The Guardian Notice how they describe the attackers as Asian. No, they do not mean Chinese or Southeast Asian. They mean Pakistani. These are Muslims raping girls, because Muhammad (eternal suffering be upon him) said that it was their right to rape non-Muslim girls. Swedish Shop Refuses Woman Service For Not Wearing Hijab They should change the name of the country from Sweden to Swedistan. And, this quote makes me sick: Some Swedish feminists say that the real problem in the suburbs is not the Islamic hardliners but rather men in general. Head of the Swedish feminist political party Feminist Initiative (FI) Victoria Kawesa said, the common denominator is mens oppression and domination. Oh right. Nothing to do with Islam. EU To Force Poland, Hungary And Czech Republic To Accept Refugees | Zero Hedge I think that its time for Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic to leave the EU. Those are the only countries in the EU that have ANY sense at all. Get out, while you still have your sanity! GOG AND MAGOG Ive been writing about the coming of Gog and Magog for a while. You can find a lot of that, here: http://ezekielsfire.com/ And, the articles below point to that coming. I really, Really, REALLY hope that youll be ready for this. Please read Ezekiels Fire to make sure. (And yes, its free.) Is Turkey Becoming Another Iran? BigJon shared this in the comment section of last weeks article, and its another signpost on the way towards Gog and Magog. I sensed the darkness in Turkey, even before the AKP took over and started Islamizing the place. Its a darkness that is full of genocide of the foulest kind. Germany sought to expiate that darkness, and I truly hope that it is enough in the eyes of God. Turkey is another matter, and Im afraid that they will turn again towards genocide. Thank you again. BigJon. Im glad that youve been able to see the land that I love more than any other. A coup in the House of Saud? | Asia Times You hafta be a bit careful with the writer of this piece, Pepe Escobar. He gets a bit fast and loose with details. Ive seen it myself, so be careful. Having said that, this looks pretty legit. His explanation certainly seems to fit the facts. The new crown prince is a loose cannon, and Im betting that he will help set off Gog and Magog. Around 20 military bases to be established in western Russia before year-end TASS This is another link from Chris. And, its a whole lot more personal for him and his wife, since they would be right on the front lines of any conflict that breaks out. Kaliningrad borders Poland to the North, and Poland is the only invasion route for either Russia or NATO. And, it is a reminder of Americas awful foreign policy efforts that led to this buildup to war. We Americans did this, and people like Chris and his wife will pay the horrifying price. It is a shameful thing that we have done! Erdogan urges all Muslims to visit and protect Jerusalem | Daily Mail Online Well, it looks like the moron who is ruling Turkey is attempting to become Gog. It looks like hes laying the foundation for an invasion of Israel. This moron will cause millions and with Ezekiels Fire, even billions of people to die. Im not looking forward to that, but since you cant fix stupid bne IntelliNews Erdogan lashes out at Germany, Nato, says God willing hell have Russian missiles soon ANNNNND there goes Turkey. This is NOT a surprise. Im just surprised that it took this long. So, when will the Syrian conflict end? When will Iran, Russia, Central Asia, Libya and Somalia get together for some war planning? North Korea threatens merciless blow to US as data shows Moscow aiding regime This does NOT surprise me. Its a cheap way for Russia to divide Americas military resources, and Russia gets cheap labor out of it, as well. For those of you who sympathise with Russia, please remember that the Russian government is as corrupt as Americas. The difference is that America has more money and bigger guns. Russias Real Endgame The Daily Reckoning Jim Rickards gets it. Why is it so hard to understand Russia? I find this myopia to be perplexing. Its as if we have all decided that being able to think is just too hard, so weve decided not to. Russia doesnt want to rule the world. What Russia wants, is what it has always wanted to not be invaded. For centuries, everyone has been invading Russia, and they want it to stop. This doesnt mean that Russia is good. They arent. Although, they arent especially bad. Theyre just Russia. Having said that, the globalists do not want Russia to be just Russia. So, they will attempt to invade, and have attempted to invade. Russia has been forced to push back. This is why they are allied with Iran, and are working on forging an alliance with Turkey. Unfortunately, it will result in Gog and Magog. The Current Big Lie Is There are so many big lies out there, that its hard to keep track. However, this is a pretty big one. And, it was created by some of the most evil people on the planet. And, this lie that Russia invaded Ukraine and stole Crimea will play a huge role in the fulfillment of prophecy. We will call it the coming of Gog and Magog, and the blame will rest upon the dirtbags in Congress and the foul fiends from Hell of the US Dept. of State. Russia To Stay In Syria For The Next 50 Years | Zero Hedge And, that one isnt a surprise, either. There is joy in seeing the prophecies that God gave to the prophets, come to fruition. But, I shudder at the numbers of dead and dying that will be the result. The world has been warned, and God is just. The Saudi Power Balance Is On A Knife-Edge | OilPrice.com Wait, the health of the Fish King is declining? King Salman? And, hes appointed his son to be king, after him? Trouble in River Cit I mean Saudi Arabia. In fact, if MBS becomes king any time soon there will be war. The Historical Turning-Point Has Arrived Please remember that the weakening and fall of an empire, always leaves a power vacuum. Always. And, global politics abhors a vacuum. I believe that Gog and Magog will be a part of an effort to fill that vacuum. ISRAEL The Land of Israel and the People of Israel are at the heart of what is happening in these Last Days. God is at work IN Israel and WITH Israel. If you are against Israel, then you are a supporter of Islam and Satan. If you are FOR Israel, then you support the work of God and the victory that God will have over Lucifer. Please join me in that battle. Jordan wont let Israeli Embassy guard, who shot 2 after being stabbed, leave the country | The Times of Israel Events continue to escalate. Unless someone steps in to calm things down, soon, I think that well be having a Third Intifada. The second one did not end well for the Palestinians, and this one will be worse. Federal Judge Blocks Mass Deportation of Iraqis NBC News Here is even more information on the stabbing of the Israeli guard, and his self defense. Amman had better get the situation under control, before they LOSE control. Israel removes Temple Mount metal detectors that enraged the Muslim world Israel News Jerusalem Post Well, that didnt last long. It looks like Israel took down the metal detectors to get back the security guard from Jordan. Well see how well that works out. The morons are spoiling for a fight. Israel National Trail YouTube This made me a little homesick. Taiwan is beautiful, but theres nothing, NOTHING like Israel. If you get the chance, go and see what Im talking about. Rebel Planet Dispatch: A Weakened Israels Appeasement of Islam Has Failed I try to stear clear of criticism of Israel, for a number of reasons that are too long to list here. Suffice it to say that Israel generally knows what its doing, and it has a very strong moral compass. And, dumping on Israel is just plain wrong. They have a hard enough time trying to survive, without having us add our own ignorant outrage to their problems. But, Marcel is right. In fact, Marcel is so right, all the time, that I recommend that you read everything that he posts. How is Marcel right, this time? Because Israel forgot that the only thing that the Arabs respect is strength and determination. Arab culture is violent, everywhere. Thats just the way that it is, and Islam is a reflection of that culture. And, Israelis dont really understand Islam. I know that this sounds strange, but its true. Ive noticed this, myself. For Netanyahu, who was an officer in Israels most elite special forces The Sayeret RamatKal to take this step I have to wonder if he has lost his mind. This appeasement is setting up Israel for Gog and Magog. Eventually, Israel will be backed into a corner, and her inevitable response will lead to world condemnation and invasion by Russia, Iran, Turkey, Libya, Somalia and a host of other nations. All of this was prophesied, so we must sit back and watch. We still need to yell as loudly as we can, and Marcel is doing that. But, the cost I truly hope that youll be ready for this A prudent man foreseeth the evil, and hideth himself: but the simple pass on, and are punished. Proverbs 22:3 - If you find a flaw in my reasoning, have a question, or wish to add your own viewpoint, leave a comment on the website. Your input is truly welcome. Click the following link and SHOCK your inbox with The Shock Letter: http://theshockletter.com/ Or, get the Shock Letter via RSS Feed: http://www.omegashock.com/feed/ (If you need help with that, let me know JL) Be Sociable, Share! Tweet Related Categories: Antichrist, Banksters, Israel, Prophecy | Tags: 1 Samuel 15:23, 2 Thessalonians 2:10-13, Anti-Semitism, Cryptocurrency, Deception, Demographics, Electronic Currency, Ezekiel 36, Ezekiel 37, Ezekiel Tetrad, Rebellion, Taiwan, The Perfect Storm, Zion, Zionism | Permalink Author: John Little - OmegaShock.com John Little knows that Jesus Christ is the only way of salvation. A writer who currently lives in Taipei, John still considers southern Jerusalem home. He holds an MBA and is married to the most beautiful woman on the planet. John has lived in Asia for 22 years and strongly dislikes writing these doom-and-gloom articles. Unfortunately, your survival is at stake, so he will keep writing them.

Letter from CaliforniaMay 18, 2015 IssueTomorrows Advance ManMarc Andreessens plan to win the future.By Tad FriendAt his firm, Andreessen Horowitz, the venture capitalist routinely lays out what will happen in the next ten, twenty, thirty years.Photograph by Joe PuglieseOn a bright October morning, Suhail Doshi drove to Silicon Valley in his parents Honda Civic, carrying a laptop with a twelve-slide presentation that was surely worth at least fifty million dollars. Doshi, the twenty-six-year-old C.E.O. of a data-analytics startup called Mixpanel, had come from San Francisco to Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, where many of the worlds most prestigious venture-capital firms cluster, to pitch Andreessen Horowitz, the roads newest and most unusual firm. Inside the offices, he stood at the head of a massive beechwood conference table to address the firms deal team and its seven general partnersthe men who venture the money, take a seat on the board, and fire the entrepreneur if things go wrong.Marc Andreessen, the firms co-founder, fixed his gaze on Doshi as he disinfected his germless hands with a sanitizing wipe. Andreessen is forty-three years old and six feet five inches tall, with a cranium so large, bald, and oblong that you cant help but think of words like jumbo and Grade A. Two decades ago, he was the animating spirit of Netscape, the Web browser that launched the Internet boom. In many respects, he is the quintessential Silicon Valley venture capitalist: an imposing, fortyish, long-celebrated white man. (Forbess Midas List of the top hundred V.C.s includes just five women.) But, whereas most V.C.s maintain a casual-Friday vibe, Andreessen seethes with beliefs. Hes an evangelist for the church of technology, afire to reorder life as we know it. He believes that tech products will soon erase such primitive behaviors as paying cash (Bitcoin), eating cooked food (Soylent), and enduring a world unimproved by virtual reality (Oculus VR). He believes that Silicon Valley is mission control for mankind, which is therefore on a steep trajectory toward perfection. And when he so argues, fire-hosing you with syllogisms and data points and pre-refuting every potential rebuttal, hes very persuasive.Doshi, lean and quizzical in a maroon T-shirt and jeans, began his pitch by declaring, Most of the world will make decisions by either guessing or using their gut. They will be either lucky or wrong. Far better to apply Mixpanels analytics, which enable mobile-based companies to know exactly who their customers are and how they use their apps. Doshi rapidly escalated to rhetoricWe want to do data science for every single market in the worldthat would sound bumptious anywhere but on Sand Hill Road, where the young guy in jeans is obligated to astound the middle-aged guys in cashmere V-necks. Mediocre V.C.s want to see that your company has traction, Doshi told me. The top V.C.s want you to show them you can invent the future.If you have a crackerjack idea, one of your stops on Sand Hill Road will be Andreessen Horowitz, often referred to by its alphanumeric URL, a16z. (There are sixteen letters between the a in Andreessen and the z in Horowitz.) Since the firm was launched, six years ago, it has vaulted into the top echelon of venture concerns. Competing V.C.s, disturbed by its speed and its power and the lavish prices it paid for deals, gave it another nickname: AHo. Each year, three thousand startups approach a16z with a warm intro from someone the firm knows. A16z invests in fifteen. Of those, at least ten will fold, three or four will prosper, and one might soar to be worth more than a billion dollarsa unicorn, in the local parlance. With great luck, once a decade that unicorn will become a Google or a Facebook and return the V.C.s money a thousand times over: the storied 1,000x. There are eight hundred and three V.C. firms in the U.S., and last year they spent forty-eight billion dollars chasing that dream.Doshi had run the gantlet before. In 2012, he tracked down Andreessen and his equally if less splendidly bald co-founder, Ben Horowitz, at a Ritz-Carlton near Tucson. Then he pitched them in the lobby (having made sure that his parents Honda, which contained his father, was well out of sight). Doshi mentioned that hed become so dissatisfied with the incumbent database software that hed built his own. Andreessen later told me that this was like a cub reporter saying, I need to write the Great American Novel before I can really file this story. A16z gave Doshi ten million dollars, and he gave it twenty-five per cent of his company.Now he was back for more. He zipped through his slides: hundred-per-cent growth rate; head count doubling every six to nine months; and he still had all the money hed raised last time. As Andreessen drank an iced tea in two gulps and began to roam the room, Doshi called up a slide that showed his competitorsLocalytics, Amplitude, Google Analyticsgrouped into quadrants. Then he explained how hed crush each quadrant. I want to buy a machine-learning team, I want to buy cutting-edge server hardware, he said. Indicating his all-but-obliterated competitors, he added, I want to buy stuff no one here can afford. He jammed his hands in his pockets: questions?While entrepreneurs attack with historiographyThe great-man view of history is correct, and I am that great man!V.C.s defend with doubletalk. Youre definitely going to get funded! means But not by us. Who else is in? means Besides not us. And Im not sure I would ever use your product myself means So long! But the best V.C.s test the entrepreneurs mettle as well as their own assumptions. Andreessen gripped the back of his chair. So one way to describe what youre doing is a network effect, he said. More data gives you more customers, which allows you to build more services, which gives you more data, which allows you to get more customers, and you just turn the crank. Doshi thought this over and said, Sure! Andreessen grinned: hes a systems thinker, and hed grasped how Mixpanel fit into the system. After the pitch, he told me that Mixpanel is a picks-and-shovels business right in the middle of the gold rush.When a startup is just an idea and a few employees, it looks for seed-round funding. When it has a product that early adopters likeor when its run through its seed-round moneyit tries to raise an A round. Once the product catches on, its time for a B round, and on the rounds go. Most V.C.s contemplating an investment in one of these early rounds consider the same factors. The bottom seventy per cent of V.C.s just go down a checklist, Jordan Cooper, a New York entrepreneur and V.C., said. Monthly recurring revenue? Founder with experience? Good sales pipeline? X per cent of month-over-month growth? V.C.s also pattern-match. If the kids are into Snapchat, fund things like it: Yik Yak, Streetchat, ooVoo. Or, at a slightly deeper level, if two dropouts from Stanfords computer-science Ph.D. program created Google, fund more Stanford C.S.P. dropouts, because they blend superior capacity with monetizable dissatisfaction.Venture capitalists with a knack for the 1,000x know that true innovations dont follow a pattern. The future is always stranger than we expect: mobile phones and the Internet, not flying cars. Doug Leone, one of the leaders of Sequoia Capital, by consensus Silicon Valleys top firm, said, The biggest outcomes come when you break your previous mental model. The black-swan events of the past forty yearsthe PC, the router, the Internet, the iPhonenobody had theses around those. So whats useful to us is having Dumbo ears.* A great V.C. keeps his ears pricked for a disturbing story with the elements of a fairy tale. This tale begins in another age (which happens to be the future), and features a lowborn hero who knows a secret from his hardscrabble experience. The hero encounters royalty (the V.C.s) who test him, and he harnesses magic (technology) to prevail. The tale ends in heaping treasure chests for all, borne home on the unicorns back.At pitch meetings, Andreessen is relatively measured: he reserves his passion for the deal review afterward, when the firm decides whether to invest. Thats where he asks questions that oblige his partners to envision a new world. For the ride-sharing service Lyft: Dont think about how big the taxi market is. What if people no longer owned cars? For OfferUp: What if all this selling onlineeBay and Craigslistgoes to mobile? How big could it be? Ben Horowitz, who sits next to his co-founder at the head of the table, is an astute manager who quotes the rap lyrics of his friends Nas and Kanye West to inspire fearless thinkingbut he doesnt try to manage Andreessen. If you say to Marc, Dont bite somebodys fucking head off!, that would be wrong, Horowitz said. Because a lot of his value, when youre making giant decisions for huge amounts of money, is saying, Why arent you fucking considering this and this and this?In New York, we wouldnt call this quick.A16z was designed to be a full-throated argument about the future, a design predicated on its founders comfort with conflict. In 1996, when Horowitz was a Netscape product manager, he wrote a note to Andreessen, accusing him of prematurely revealing the companys new strategy to a reporter. Andreessen wrote back to say that it would be Horowitzs fault if the company failed: Next time do the fucking interview yourself. Fuck you. Ordinarily, relationship over. When he feels disrespected, Marc can cut you out of his life like a cancer, one of Andreessens close friends said. But Ben and Marc fight like cats and dogs, then forget about it. Two years later, when Netscape was floundering and forty per cent of its employees left, Horowitz announced that he was staying no matter what. Andreessen had never trusted anyone before, but he began to consider it. Their teamwork at a16z is complementary: Horowitz is the people-person C.E.O., and Andreessen is the farsighted theorist, the chairman. Yet Horowitz noted that Marc is much more sensitive than I am, actually. Hell get upset about my body languageGod damn it, Ben, you look like youre going to throw up when Im talking about this!Although Andreessen has been a board member of Facebook, Hewlett-Packard, and eBay, he doesnt take many board seats in a16zs portfolio companies, preferring to train his eyes on the horizon. Andreessen is tomorrows advance man, routinely laying out what will happen in the next ten, twenty, thirty years, as if he were glancing at his Google calendar. He views his acuity as a matter of careful observation and extrapolation, and often invokes William Gibsons observation The future is already hereits just not very evenly distributed. Jet packs have been around for half a century, but you still cant buy them at Target. To smooth out such lumps in distribution, Andreessen disseminates his views via every available podcast and panel discussion and CNN interview slot: hes a media soothsayer, Andreessen the Magnificent. He also tweets a hundred and ten times a day, inundating his three hundred and ten thousand followers with aphorisms and statistics and tweetstorm jeremiads. Andreessen says that he loves Twitter because reporters are obsessed with it. Its like a tube and I have loudspeakers installed in every reporting cubicle around the world. He believes that if you say it often enough and insistently enough it will comea glorious revenge. He told me, We have this theory of nerd nation, of forty or fifty million people all over the world who believe that other nerds have more in common with them than the people in their own country. So you get to choose what tribe or band or group youre a part of. The nation-states of Twitter will map the world.Mixpanel was emblematic of Silicon Valleys outsized worship of unicorns. At the companys deal review, Peter Levine, who sits on Doshis board, reported that the entrepreneur had e-mailed to say that hed love for his company to be valued at a billion dollarsan assessment that would set the price for the portion of it that a16z might now buy. However, Doshi would sell the firm ten per cent of his company for eighty million, suggesting a valuation of eight hundred million dollars. Andreessen said, The dogs are fucking jumping through the screen door to eat the dog food. And he hasnt done any marketing yet. And hes profitable!Horowitz exclaimed, How old is he, twenty-four? God damn it, lets give him all our money! A16z provided Doshi all his B-round fundingsixty-five million dollarsfor a further 7.5 per cent of the company, which was thus valued at eight hundred and sixty-five million dollars. Doshi was a little sorry that Mixpanel wasnt valued at a billion dollars, but he told me that he could wait: his business was growing so fast, and everyone was raising money so frequently in the current boom, that in six or twelve months well be a unicorn.Venture firms rarely do an entire follow-on round themselves, for fear of losing sight of a companys true market value; as Andreessen put it, You can be thinking your shit smells like ice cream. None of the half-dozen other firms that Doshi pitched last fall valued his company as highly as a16z did. But Andreessen applied a maxim from his friend and intellectual sparring partner Peter Thiel, who co-founded PayPal and was an early investor in LinkedIn and Yelp. When a reputable venture firm leads two consecutive rounds of investment in a company, Andreessen told me, Thiel believes that that is a screaming buy signal, and the bigger the markup on the last round the more undervalued the company is. Thiels point, which takes a moment to digest, is that, when a company grows extremely rapidly, even its bullish V.C.s, having recently set a relatively low value on the previous round, will be slightly stuck in the past. The faster the growth, the farther behind theyll be. Andreessen grinned, appreciating the paradox: the more they paid for Mixpanelaccording to Thiel, anywaythe better a deal theyd be getting.Most businesses dont work like this. At least, not yet.Silicon Valley, the fifteen-hundred- square-mile shelf an hour south of San Francisco, was called the Santa Clara Valley until the rise of the microprocessor, in the nineteen-seventies. It remains contested ground. Armies of startups attack every incumbent, with early employeesand sometimes even their lawyers and landlordstaking deferred compensation, in the hope that their options and warrants will pay off down the line. Yet workers loyalty is not to a company or even to an idea but to the iterative promise of the region. Uber is built on the efforts of thousands of people in the Valley, the investor Naval Ravikant said. On the back of the iPhone and Android and G.P.S. and battery technology and online credit-card payments, all stacked on themselves.V.C.s give the Valley its continuityand its ammunition. They are the arms merchants who can turn your crazy idea and your expendable youth into a team of coders with Thunderbolt monitors. Apple and Microsoft got started with venture money; so did Starbucks, the Home Depot, Whole Foods Market, and JetBlue. V.C.s made their key introductions and stole from every page of Sun Tzu to help them penetrate markets. And yet V.C.s maintain a zone of embarrassed privacy around their activities. They tell strangers theyre investors, or work in technology, because, in a Valley that valorizes the entrepreneur, they dont want to be seen as just the money. I say Im in the software industry, one of the Valleys best-known V.C.s told me. Im ashamed of the truth.At a hundred and eleven dollars a square foot, Sand Hill Road is Americas most expensive office-rental marketan oak-and-eucalyptus-lined prospect stippled with bland, two-story ski chalets constrained by an ethos of nonconspicuous consumption (except for the Teslas in the parking lot). Its a community of paranoid optimists. The top firms coperate and compete by turns, suspicious of any company whose previous round wasnt led by another top-five firm even as theyre jealous of that firm for leading it. They call this Schadenfreude-riddled relationship co-opitition. Firms trumpet their boldness, yet they often follow one another, lemming-like, pursuing the latest innovationpen-based computers, biotech, interactive television, superconductors, clean techoff a cliff.Venture capital became a profession here when an investor named Arthur Rock bankrolled Intel, in 1968. Intels co-founder Gordon Moore coined the phrase vulture capital, because V.C.s could pick you clean. Semiretired millionaires who routinely arrived late for pitch meetings, theyd take half your company and replace you with a C.E.O. of their choosingif you were lucky. But V.C.s can also anoint you. The imprimatur of a top firms investment is so powerful that entrepreneurs routinely accept a twenty-five per cent lower valuation to get it. Patrick Collison, a co-founder of the online-payment company Stripe, says that landing Sequoia, Peter Thiel, and a16z as seed investors was a signal that was not lost on the banks we wanted to work with. Laughing, he noted that the valuation in the next round of fundingfor a pre-launch company from very untested entrepreneurs who had very few customerswas a hundred million dollars. Stewart Butterfield, a co-founder of the office-messaging app Slack, told me, Its hard to overestimate how much the perception of the quality of the V.C. firm youre with mattersthe signal it sends to other V.C.s, to potential employees, to customers, to the tech press. Its like where you went to college.A venture firm musters its ammunitionsay, a fund of a hundred and fifty million dollarsby recruiting investors such as university endowments and pension funds to become limited partners, or L.P.s, in the fund. The firm invests the money for three or four years, then harvests the returns for the remainder of the funds ten-year term. In theory, V.C.s, like entrepreneurs, are motivated by delayed gratification. The standard fee is two and twenty: two per cent of the fund each year, and twenty per cent of the ultimate profits. (The top firms, including a16z, charge thirty per cent.) L.P.s expect returns equal to at least those theyd get in the stock market, plus an additional five per cent for the illiquidity of the investment. For top firms, the dream is 5x to 10x.At the moment, venture funding accounts for less than 0.3 per cent of the U.S.s G.D.P. Venture is often called a rounding error in the economy, Herbert Allen III, the head of the investment bank Allen & Company, said. But the bang for the buck is huge. And venture is a major source of the optimism that underlies the American myth. Venture speeds the cycle of American impatience: what exists is bad and what replaces it is gooduntil the new thing itself must be supplanted.Corporate culture, civic responsibility, becoming a pillar of societythese are not ventures concerns. Andy Weissman, a partner at New Yorks Union Square Ventures, noted that venture in the Valley is a perfect embodiment of the capitalist dynamic that the economist Joseph Schumpeter called creative destruction. Weissman said, Silicon Valley V.C.s are all techno-optimists. They have the arrogant belief that you can take a geography and remove all obstructions and have nothing but a free flow of capital and ideas, and that its good, its very good, to creatively destroy everything that has gone before. Some Silicon Valley V.C.s believe that these values would have greater sway if their community left America behind: Andreessens nerd nation with a charter and a geographic locale. Peter Thiel favors seasteading, establishing floating cities in the middle of the ocean. Balaji Srinivasan, until recently a general partner at a16z and now the chairman of one of its Bitcoin companies, has called for the ultimate exit. Arguing that the United States is as fossilized as Microsoft, and that the Valley has become stronger than Boston, New York, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C., combined, Srinivasan believes that its denizens should build an opt-in society, ultimately outside the U.S., run by technology.The game in Silicon Valley, while it remains part of California, is not ferocious intelligence or a contrarian investment thesis: everyone has that. Its not even wealth: anyone can become a billionaire just by rooming with Mark Zuckerberg. Its prescience. And then its removing every obstacle to the ferocious clarity of your vision: incumbents, regulations, folkways, people. Can you not just see the future but summon it?Marc Andreessen mentions Thomas Edison often, his family never. When he was growing up, outside the no-stoplight town of New Lisbon, Wisconsin, his father, Lowell, was a sales manager for a seed company called Pioneer Hi-Bred International, and his mother, Pat, worked in customer service at Lands Endbut I didnt get that information from him. A friend who knows Andreessen well told me, Weve never had a conversation about his parents or his brotherall he said was They didnt like me, and I didnt like them all that much, either.The few details Andreessen let slip to me suggested a climate of antiquity, superstition, frustration, and penury. The natural state of human beings is to be subsistence farmers, and that was my expectation, he said, adding that his world was Scandinavian, hard-core, very self-denying people who go through life never expecting to be happy. The family telephone was a party line, and the bathroom at his relatives farm was an outhouse. Everyone believed in dowsing and the weather reports in the Farmers Almanac. One winter, with money tight, his father decided to stop paying for gas heat, and we spent a great deal of time chopping fucking wood. The local movie theatre, one town over, was an unheated room that doubled as a fertilizer-storage depot; Andreessen wore a puffy Pioneer Hi-Bred coat to watch Star Wars while sitting on the makings of a huge bomb. He had to drive an hour to find a Waldenbooks, in La Crosse; it was all cookbooks and cat calendars. So he later saw Amazon as a heroic disseminator of knowledge and progress. Screw the independent bookstores, he told me. There werent any near where I grew up. There were only ones in college towns. The rest of us could go pound sand.Andreessens vision of the future, and of his escape route, came from television. He told me, KITT, the car in Knight Rider, was a computer that could analyze a poison-gas attack. The car was magicbut now you can actually do all those things. A new car isnt KITT, but it does have all the maps and all the music in the world, and it talks to you. Even the transporter beam in Star Trek basically makes sense if you understand quantum entanglement. People are composed of quantum elements, so there is a path!Something of the transporter beam clings to Andreessen, a sense that he just rematerialized from a city on the edge of forever. Hes not great at the basics of daily life: directions confound him, because roadways arent logical, and hes so absent-minded about sunglasses that he keeps a reload station with nine pairs on his hall table. Perhaps Edison haunts his conversation because Andreessen is a fellow-tinkerer, except that his gadgets are systems and platforms, and his workshop is his own mind. He regularly reprograms his appearance and deportmenthis user interfaceto suit his present role, and friends refer to chapters in his life as versions of an operating system: Marc 1.0, Marc 2.0, and so on. A charismatic introvert, Andreessen draws people in but doesnt really want them around. Though he has a crisp sense of humor, its rarely deployed at his own expense. He hates being complimented, looked at, or embraced, and has toyed with the idea of wearing a T-shirt that says No hugging, no touching. He doesnt grasp the protocols of social chitchat, and prefers getting a memo to which he can e-mail a response, typing at a hundred and forty words a minute. He didnt attend Netscapes twentieth-anniversary celebration, because it combined two things from which he recoils: parties and reminiscing.Yet hes also energetic and decisive, which makes him a valued counsellor. In 2006, Yahoo! offered to buy Facebook for a billion dollars, and Accel Partners, Facebooks lead investor, urged Mark Zuckerberg to accept. Andreessen said, Every single person involved in Facebook wanted Mark to take the Yahoo! offer. The psychological pressure they put on this twenty-two-year-old was intense. Mark and I really bonded in that period, because I told him, Dont sell, dont sell, dont sell! Zuckerberg told me, Marc has this really deep belief that when companies are executing well on their vision they can have a much bigger effect on the world than people think, not just as a business but as a steward of humanityif they have the time to execute. He didnt sell; Facebook is now worth two hundred and eighteen billion dollars.Andreessens range of reference extends from Ibn Khaldun to South Park, yet he approaches new topics as if starved, eating through mens fashion or whiskey-making or congressional politics until it has yielded every micronutrient. In a tweetstorm about the question of net neutrality, he observed that anyone who took a position should be versed in the history, technology, and economics of backbones, interconnection agreement, peering, CDNs, caching, colocation, current and future telco and cable business models including capex and opex models, rate caps, cost of capital, return on investment, as well as a dozen other equally abstruse matters. He coyly noted that no one, himself included, understood them allthen stated his position. Andreessens learning fuses the idiosyncrasy of the autodidact with the thoroughness of what programmers call depth-first search. I could never tolerate not knowing why, he said. You have to work your way back to figure out the politics, the motivations. I always stop when I get to evolutionary psychology, and why we have tribesoh, O.K., were primates cursed with emotions and the ability to do logical thinking. He keeps rediscovering that were australopithecines, and keeps hoping to transform us into Homo habilis: man the tool user, able man.To this end, he addresses any topic, such as Googles purchase of the thermostat maker Nest, by launching a dialectics1) Either Nest is the most amazing company ever, or 2) Larry Page acqui-hired Tony Fadell for $3.2 billion and got a thermostat business on the sidewhose synthesis is often that the thesis and the antithesis were simplistic (Or, maybe Google has a larger plan for automating the home) or irrelevant (Whatever, whatever, we dont own it, so who cares?). Often, he discourses at such lucid length that his cheeks redden and he must pause for breath. If you seize the interval to demonstrate a basic grasp of his argument, hell say Ex-zact-ly, with a pleased smile, and upload another tranche. What saves him from pompous know-it-all-dom, most of the time, is this eagerness to communicate.He turns to theory the way a drinker turns to the minibar. But Horowitz told me that every once in a while Andreessen will get all Wisconsin on you, sticking up for his people. When we looked at an Internet pawnshop, people here said, Its immoral, and Marc went bananas. He said, If youve got no fucking money, and you need to pawn your watch to pay for your kids to eatyou think thats morally fucking wrong because it offends your sensibilities, you rich motherfuckers? He knew that guy who was pawning his watch because hed missed the harvest, or whatever. Or we saw an Uber-for-private-jets thing, or some wine thing that came through, and he just got incensed: We didnt start the firm for rich people to buy hundred-dollar bottles of wine or to fly around on fucking private jets! He reminds me of Kanye, that level of emotional intensityhis childhood was so intensely bad he just wont go there.One afternoon, Alexis Ringwald, the C.E.O. of LearnUp, a job-training startup that has worked with Staples and Old Navy, stood in a16zs conference room, all poise and smile. I like to launch movements to tackle huge problems, she said, launching into her presentation.Start at the beginning, where you grew up, Ben Horowitz said. A16z had made a small seed investment in Ringwalds company, but most of the general partners, who were about to tell her whether she was ready for an A round, didnt know much about her. Horowitz also routinely forces a founder to abandon her script and regroup. Its a stress test intended to elicit biography, resilience, and the real story.How many times do I have to tell you to stay inside the bowl?Ringwald, who is thirty-one, blinked, then shifted smoothly to an engaging account of her early years, her work interviewing people on the unemployment line, and how shed eventually realized that the countrys biggest gulf is between those who have the basic skills to be employableshowing up on time, dressing neatlyand those who dont. So its a modern My Fair Lady sort of thing? Horowitz asked, ingenuously. Ringwald crisply noted that her process triples an applicants chance of getting a job, and that eighty-two per cent of LearnUps trainees outperform their fellow-workers. Horowitz and Andreessen nodded: she could handle the pressure. Afterward, Horowitz told me, My big conclusion was shes a legit Pied Piper, with charisma and will and fury.Pitch meetings are minefields. If a V.C. asks you, When you get to a hundred engineers, are you worried about the company culture or excited?, the correct answer is A hundred? I want a thousand! Reid Hoffman, a V.C. at Greylock Partners who co-founded LinkedIn, told me, I look to see if someone has a marine strategy, for taking the beach; an army strategy, for taking the country; and a police strategy, for governing the country afterward.A16z wants to learn if the founder has a secreta novel insight, drawn from personal experience, about how the world could be better arranged. If that new arrangement is 10x better, consumers might be won over. Balaji Srinivasan contributed the concept of the idea maze: you want the entrepreneur to have spent years thinking her idea intoand out ofevery conceivable dead end. Entrepreneurs want to raise money from us, Andreessen told me, so the natural thing when we say What if you did this? is to tell us what we want to hear. But we dont want to hear what we want to hear. Its a delight when they look at you with contemptYou idiotand then walk you through the idea maze and explain why your idea wont work. Such tests help a16z determine whether the founder is a mercenary who wants to sell the company within four years, which will cap a16zs return at 5x, or a missionary, determined to change the world. At the same time, Andreessen said, were not funding Mother Teresa. Were funding imperial, will-to-power people who want to crush their competition. Companies can only have a big impact on the world if they get big.Ringwald, back into her planned remarks, promised bigness: LearnUp will transform employment in America. We can unleash human potential and move the needle on the G.D.P. Andreessen said, Question: This is a known problem. Why do companies not just do this themselves, once they see that it works? Ringwald replied, Well keep on differentiating by moving fast and collecting more data on what companies need now.Then a general partner named Chris Dixon asked, Is it a marketplace or an enterprise company? Marketplace companies sell to consumers; enterprise companies sell to other businesses. Clearly perplexed by the distinction, Ringwald said that she was signing up workers as well as companies. Everyone became a shade more remote.Afterward, Andreessen told his colleagues, She didnt really answer Chriss question. If its marketplace, its defensible; if its enterprise, she can be undercut. If Ringwalds customers were the workers, who would keep using LearnUp as they moved from job to job, she could create a network effect. If her customers were actually the companies, they could start doing the training themselvesor another startup could. A16z views marketplace and enterprise companies very differently. The firm invests early with enterprise, but waits with consumer companies, because they tend to take offsuddenly, everyone wants to be on Instagramor fail fast. Its a risk-averse way to embrace risk. In 2013, a16z passed on the A round of Oculus VR (waiting to see if it could resolve the nausea issue that has plagued virtual-reality systems) and came in on the B, six months later. It got the same ten per cent of the company it could have had in the Abut it paid thirty million dollars instead of six million. The internal rationale for this expensive de-risking is We paid up for certainty.The partners began to discuss how LearnUp might be valued. Valuation, particularly in a companys early rounds, often derives less from spreadsheets than from market forceswhat are other firms offering?and the What ifs of mental modelling. Does the companys traction, leadership team, and total addressable market call to mind a Pinterest, or does it feel more like a ShoeDazzle? One partner suggested that LearnUp was a ten on thirtyten million dollars should buy a third of the company, which would then be valued at forty million. Its more like ten on fifteen or twenty, Horowitz said, cutting the companys value in half. Or six on twelve, Andreessen said, whittling it further. Soon after the meeting, Ringwald turned LearnUp into an enterprise company.Most venture firms operate as a guild; each partner works with his own companies, and a small shared staff helps with business development and recruiting. A16z introduced a new model: the venture company. Its general partners make about three hundred thousand dollars a year, far less than the industry standard of at least a million dollars, and the savings pays for sixty-five specialists in executive talent, tech talent, market development, corporate development, and marketing. A16z maintains a network of twenty thousand contacts and brings two thousand established companies a year to its executive briefing center to meet its startups (which has produced a pipeline of deals worth three billion dollars). Andreessen told me, We give our founders the networking superpower, hyper-accelerating someone into a fully functional C.E.O. in five years.The firms fourteen-person deal team also enables it to rapidly assess any new technology, making a16z a kind of Iron Man suit for Andreessen as he pursues his flights of fancy. Jim Breyer, who led Facebooks first venture round at Accel Partners, told me, I spend most of my time trying to connect the dots for what the future will look like in five to seven years, but I dont believe I scale as well as Marc and Ben and their team. Theyve moved into next-gen agricultural products and wearables and drone software, where a lot of us dont have expertise or networks.Andreessen and Horowitz launched the firm in 2009, when venture investment was frozen by the recession. Their strategy was shaped by their friend Andy Rachleff, a former V.C. He told them that hed run the numbers and that fifteen technology companies a year reach a hundred million dollars in annual revenueand they account for ninety-eight per cent of the market capitalization of companies that go public. So a16z had to get those fifteen companies to pitch them. Deal flow is everything, Andreessen told me. If youre in a second-tier firm, you never get a chance at that great company. A leading investment banker who has taken numerous software companies public told me, I put ninety per cent of my effort into seeking out deals from the top eight venture firms, ten per cent into the next twelve, and zero per cent into all the rest.The dirty secret of the trade is that the bottom three-quarters of venture firms didnt beat the Nasdaq for the past five years. In a stinging 2012 report, the L.P. Diane Mulcahy calculated, Since 1997, less cash has been returned to V.C. investors than they have invested. The truth is that most V.C.s subsist entirely on fees, which they compound by raising a new fund every three years. Returns are kept hidden by nondisclosure agreements, and so V.C.s routinely overstate them, both to encourage investment and to attract entrepreneurs. You cant find a venture fund anywhere thats not in the top quartile, one L.P. said sardonically. V.C.s also logo shop, buying into late rounds of hot companies at high prices so they can list them on their portfolio page.When a16z began, it didnt have even an ersatz track record to promote. So Andreessen and Horowitz consulted on tactics with their friend Michael Ovitz, who co-founded the Hollywood talent agency Creative Artists Agency, in 1974. Ovitz told me that hed advised them to distinguish themselves by treating the entrepreneur as a client: Take the long view of your platform, rather than a transactional one. Call everyone a partner, offer services the others dont, and help people who arent your clients. Disrupt to differentiate by becoming a dream-execution machine.Believing that founders make the best C.E.O.slook at Intel, Apple, Oracle, Google, FacebookAndreessen and Horowitz recruited only general partners whod been founders or run companies. Then they began constructing the illusion of authority, taking offices on Sand Hill Road and filling them with paintings by Robert Rauschenberg and Sol LeWittanother page from the book of Ovitz, who commissioned a Roy Lichtenstein painting for C.A.A.s lobby that was so large the firm had to leave it behind when it moved. They were studiously punctual (partners are fined ten dollars for each minute theyre late to a pitch), used glassware rather than plastic, and said no quickly and explained why (unless the reason was doubts about the entrepreneur) in a handwritten note. And, while most V.C.s were publicity averseSequoias slogan was The entrepreneurs behind the entrepreneursa16z banged the drum to draw startups. The tech publicist Margit Wennmachers built an eight-person marketing department and helped to orchestrate stories in Forbes and Fortune.They all lead back to this ball of yarn.Andreessen and Horowitz believed that it would take them years to get great deal flow. So instead of fighting for A-round financingsthe most competitive round, because its when you can buy the largest chunk of an up-and-coming companythey planned to make seed investments in eighty startups. They wouldnt take the customary board seats (otherwise, theyd each be sitting on forty boards), but theyd help all eighty companies and then lead the A round for the twelve best.The strategy had flaws. Entrepreneurs want V.C.s on their boards, and so do L.P.s: thats how you really learn a company. The firm would be sending a huge negative signal about companies it didnt reinvest inhardly an entrepreneur-friendly stance. Furthermore, by making so many investments, a16z would create significant opportunity costs. In its first year, it put two hundred and fifty thousand dollars into a company called Burbn, which soon pivoted and became Instagrambut a16z couldnt increase its share, because it had also taken a position in a short-lived photo app called PicPlz. Though the firm made 312x when Facebook bought Instagram, the huge multiple amounted to only seventy-eight million dollars. Elizabeth Obershaw, a managing director at Horsley Bridge, a prominent L.P. that invested in a16z after some debate, told me, Our list of cons was that we didnt think their original model would work at all. The pros were Marc and Benwe decided they were learners and adapters and would realize the model wasnt workable fast enough to fix itand an industry that was ripe for reinvention.They learned fast. After a16z raised a three-hundred-million-dollar fund and opened shop, in July, 2009, it did a lot of seed rounds, but it also spent fifty million dollars to buy three per cent of Skype. Two years later, Microsoft bought Skype, and the investment returned 4x. Andreessen believed that everyone had underestimated the size of the Internet market, so in 2010, after raising a much bigger second fund, the firm spent a hundred and thirty million dollars to acquire shares of Facebook and Twitter at unprecedented valuations. Other V.C.s sniped that a16z was trying to buy its way in: Skype was an established company, not a startup, and the Facebook and Twitter deals were mere logo shopping. But, as Ron Conway, Silicon Valleys leading angel investor, noted, In twenty-four months, Andreessen Horowitz was the talk of the town. The firm won a hundred-million-dollar A round for the coding company GitHub, which Conway called the most hotly contested deal in five years. Chris Wanstrath, GitHubs co-founder and C.E.O., said that a16zs services were a major attraction: Its like a buffetthey offered a bunch of great dishes, and we wanted to sample them all.After six years, Andreessen believes, a16z is meetingand winningenough new clients to place it comfortably in the top three V.C. firms. (This is not far off from the consensus in the Valley.) Its first fund has already returned 2x, and contains such powerhouses as Slack and the identity-management company Okta. The funds internal rate of return, a calculation of annualized profit, is fifty per cent, which places it very high among funds raised in 2009. (Sequoias rate for its corresponding fund is sixty-nine per cent.) The firms second fund includes Pinterest and Airbnb, and its third fund includes Zenefits, GitHub, and Mixpanel; both funds, on paper, are well into the black. A respected L.P. of the firm told me, Theyre one of our top performers. Yet Andreessen cautioned, We still have a lot to prove on returns. I wouldnt be comfortable saying were No. 1 until ten years have passed, maybe fifteen. Until then, its Schrdingers cat, and Ive got really good arguments on why the cats are both alive and dead.At Andreessens wedding, in 2006, Ben Horowitz said in his toast that the man hed long known was grouchy Marc, because hed gone through his whole life without anyone understanding him, being all by himself. No one had understood him in his farm town, no one had understood him in Silicon ValleyHell, I do not understand him. But now, at last, he was happy Marc, because hed found someone who totally gets him: the bride, a lecturer in philanthropy at Stanfords business school named Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen.In December, Andreessen invited me to their house in Atherton, five minutes from a16zs office, to watch television. He and Laura live in a modern, art-filled, nine-thousand-square-foot villa built in a style that she calls Northern California pastiche. The ceilings are scaled to Andreessens Brobdingnagian proportions, and everything is majestic, minimal, and new. The toilet in the powder room is so visionary, and the surrounding dimmer lights so flattering, that I had to study it for some time to figure out how it flushed.Arrillaga-Andreessen brought the couples dinners into the living room and placed them on matching Costco TV tables. The omelettes and Thai salads that their chef had prepared earlier had been freshly reheated (they have three microwaves, so their food will always be ready at the same time). Andreessen stroked her arm and beamed: Hello, gorgeous!Hello, my darling! she replied. Then she gave me a dramatic hug, as we hadnt seen each other since the previous day. Arrillaga-Andreessen is a tall, ethereal-seeming, yet effusive woman. When the couple met, in 2005, at a New Years Eve dinner thrown by the leading investor in eHarmony, they talked for six and a half hours. She told me that Andreessen satisfied most of the criteria on her checklist: he was a genius, he was a coder, he was funny, and he was bald. (I find it incredibly sexy to see the encasement of a cerebrum, she explained.) For his part, Andreessen felt that she was spectacular! My biggest concern was that she wanted to live a jet-set life. In one of the seventeen e-mails he sent her the next day, he asked, Whats your ideal evening? She responded, Stay home, do e-mail, make an omelette, watch TV, take a bath, go to bed. Before their second date, he delivered what she calls a twenty-five-minute monologue on why we should go steady, with a full intellectual decision tree in anticipation of my own decision tree. They were married nine months later. In her and her father, John, a billionaire Silicon Valley developer, Andreessen seems to have found a replacement family. Laura showed me a photograph of the two men side by side, both bald, self-made, and magisterial: Quite two peas in a pod.After some TV time together, the couple reads in bed, so that, she says, I can fall asleep holding my beloved. (She invariably refers to her husband as my beloved, rather than Marc.) I ask him questions about things I got curious about during the day, so every night Im going to sleep with a human Wikipedia that can go deeper and deeper and deeper, link upon link. In the past week, we talked about all the hardware components of a mobile phone, how binary code works, what might happen with drone regulation, and whether Putin is using Ukraine as a distraction from the financial crisis in Russia. Once shes dozed off, Andreessen returns to work in his home office, where, like a recharging cell phone, he gains energy through the night.He pushed a button to unroll the wall screen, then called up Apple TV. We were going to watch the final two episodes of the first season of the AMC drama Halt and Catch Fire, about a fictional company called Cardiff, which enters the personal-computer wars of the early eighties. The shows resonance for Andreessen was plain. In 1983, he said, I was twelve, and I didnt know anything about startups or venture capital, but I knew all the products. He used the school librarys Radio Shack TRS-80 to build a calculator for math homework. In 1992, as an undergraduate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, he neglected his jobwriting Unix code for $6.85 an hourto team with another programmer to create Mosaic, the first graphical browser for the Web. After graduating, he moved to Silicon Valley, where he and a volatile serial entrepreneur named Jim Clark launched Netscape, to make the Internet available not just to scientists but to everyone. John Doerr, the V.C. who funded their A round, said that the genius of their browser was that it was like putting photos on the menu at Howard Johnson. You didnt need to know the language; you could just point. The story underlying that story, Arrillaga-Andreessen told methe secretwas that Netscape was based on my beloveds own inability, as a child, to access knowledge in a small town.Netscape Navigator, released in 1994, quickly claimed more than ninety per cent of the browser market, and Andreessen predicted that the Web would make operating systems such as Microsofts Windows irrelevant. When the company went public, in 1995, its stock rocketed from twenty-eight dollars a share to seventy-five dollars, and Andreessen was soon on the cover of Time, barefoot on a throne. But Marc 1.0 was very much in beta. Having given up coding, his first love, to manage coders, he scarfed Pepperidge Farm Nantuckets and Honeycomb cereal straight from the box, skipped meetings, and blazed up without warning. Youd see him vibrating, and it would inspire a combination of excitement and terror, Jason Rosenthal, a manager whom Andreessen actually liked, recalled. A favorite Andreessen response to underlings confusion was There are no stupid questions, only stupid people. Jim Barksdale, the companys C.E.O., said, Id tell Marc after meetings, You dont have to tell a dumb sumbitch hes a dumb sumbitch. Andreessen told me, I needed Netscape to work, it had to workit was my one-way doorso I was absolutely intolerant of anything that got in the waymeaning, he clarified, people. He could never relax: I am very paranoid. And the down cycle hurt a lot more than the up cycle felt good.The down cycle began when Microsoft bundled its own browser with its operating system, making it the nations browser of convenience, if not of choice. Netscape shifted from marketplace to enterprise, and began selling browser and server software, but it was fortunate to get bought by AOL, in 1999, for ten billion dollars. Peter Currie, the companys C.F.O., said, We made a difference, we invented cookies and pioneered downloading software from the Internet, yet Netscape is an asterisk in business history. Maybe the best way to think about it is as a classic tech story: a company creates, invents, succeedsand gets bypassed.In the first Halt and Catch Fire episode, Cardiffs entrepreneurs go to Comdex, the big trade show, and discover that another company has stolen their idea and beaten them to market. In response, Gordon, the hardware engineer, removes the interactive operating system from their Cardiff machinea system designed by Cameron, a punk female software prodigyand slots in Microsofts dos, which makes the machine I.B.M.-compatible, viable, and dull. It was an excruciating capitulation, but Andreessen nodded evenly: This was Microsofts moment, and Gordon is rightthey need to live to fight another day. But... He pointed at the screen, where Apples Macintosh was making its dbut at the trade show. Hello, Im Macintosh, the machine said. Andreessen laughed and continued, They were doomed from the start, because Apple in Cupertinoin Silicon Valleyhad spent three years building that. Ive been totally determined to be on the other side of that dynamic by being here, because success in software follows a power-law distribution. Its not Coke and Pepsi and a bunch of others; its winner take all. Second prize is a set of steak knives, and third prize is youre fired.In the season finale, Cameron launches her own startup. As Andreessen watched her manage her coders, he said, softly, The best scenes with Cameron were when she was alone in the basement, coding. I said I felt that she was the least satisfactory character: underwritten, inconsistent, lacking in plausible motivation. He smiled and replied, Because shes the future.In Why Software Is Eating the World, a widely invoked 2011 op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, Andreessen put the most optimistic spin on Silicon Valleys tendencies. The article proclaimed that tech companies are consuming vast swaths of the economy, from books and movies to financial services to agriculture to national defensewhich Andreessen saw as the healthful scavenging of a carrion way of life. On Twitter, he pursued the theme: Posit a world in which all material needs are provided free, by robots and material synthesizers.... Imagine six, or 10, billion people doing nothing but arts and sciences, culture and exploring and learning. What a world that would be, particularly as technological progress is precisely what makes a strong, rigorous social safety net affordable.Andreessens telepathic methodextrapolating the future from current trendsmay be the best available, but it has had doubtful results. Of the eighteen firms that V.C.s valued at more than a billion dollars in the heady days of 1999-2000, eleven have gone out of business or have been liquidated in fire sales, including @Home, eToys, and Webvan. A16z bought into Zulily, an online marketer, at a valuation of a billion dollars; it soared to a market capitalization of five billion dollars, and has since slumped to $1.3 billion. Another billion-dollar a16z company, the bargain-shopping site Fab, recently sold for about thirty million dollars. On the other hand, the firm wrote off the gaming company Slack to zeroand then it became an office-messaging app thats now valued at $2.8 billion.The random, contingent way that the future comes to pass is a source of endless frustration in the Valley. Sam Altman, the president of the startup incubator Y Combinator, notes that his early investment in Stripe is now worth, on paper, more than 2,000x. So ninety-seven per cent of my returns from 2010 and 2011 are concentrated in one investment, which I could easily have missed, he said. I only let myself think about this sort of thing on vacation, because if I acknowledged that I was wasting more than ninety per cent of my timewhich is true, from an economic perspectiveI couldnt get through my days.The key to investing, Andreessen contends, is to be aggressive and to fight your instinct to pattern-match. Breakthrough ideas look crazy, nuts, he said, adding, Its hard to think this wayI see it in other peoples body language, and I can feel it in my own, where I sometimes feel like I dont even care if its going to work, I cant take more change. Andreessen believes that the major barrier to change is sociological: people can embrace only so many new ideas at once. O.K., Google, O.K., Twitterbut Airbnb? People staying in each others houses without there being a lot of axe murders?A16z passed on Airbnbs A round in 2009. Reid Hoffman, the Greylock V.C., who led that round, and who is a friend of Andreessens, said, Once something like Airbnb gets going, Marc can get a very good sense of it, of the economic systembut hes not necessarily as good at the psychology of why it would get going in the first place.Brian Chesky, Airbnbs co-founder and C.E.O., told me, In 2011, when we were starting to get some traction, Marc and Ben did a one-eighty and were very humble. Marc said he now saw it through the lens of eBay: buying stuff from strangers. A16z led Airbnbs B round. Soon afterward, the company was battered by headlines about renters who trashed a San Francisco home. It wasnt axe murders, but, Chesky said, It was a P.R. nightmare. We had just expanded from being ten people living in a three-bedroom apartment and we had no idea how to be a billion-dollar company. Marc came to our office at midnight and read the letter Id written to our community about the Airbnb Guarantee, and the two changes he made changed the company forever. Id said we guarantee five thousand dollars for property damage, and he added a zero, which seemed crazy. Andreessen also added the proviso that claimants would have to file a police report, which he correctly believed would discourage scam artists. And he told me to add my personal e-mail address. He gave us permission to be bold.In venture, its not batting average that matters; its slugging average. Boldness is all. When Google Glass appeared, a16z joined a collective to seek out investments, and Andreessen declared that, without the face shield, people are going to find they feel, basically, naked and lonely. Google withdrew the product in January. But, he would argue, so what? His thesis is that such a16z failures as Fab and Rockmelt and Digg and Kno are not merely a tolerable by-product of the risk algorithm but a vital indicator of it. Its fine to have a lousy record of predicting the future, most of the time, as long as when youre right youre really right. Between 2004 and 2013, a mere 0.4 per cent of all venture investments returned at least 50x. The real mistakes arent the errors of commission, the companies that crashall you can lose is your investmentbut those of omission. There were good reasons that a16z passed on buying twelve per cent of Uber in 2011, including a deadline of just hours to make a decision. But the firm missed a profit, on paper, of more than three billion dollars.The beauty of betting on risky technologies is that youre sometimes proved right, eventuallyperhaps well all feel naked without Google Glass 3.0. When reverses occur, Andreessen tends to believe that he wasnt wrong so much as overly prescient. Yet, while he professes intellectual comfort with being wrong, he never mentions Ning, a social-networking company that he co-founded in 2004, because, as he conceded when I asked about the elision, It didnt do great. And he can be touchy about criticism. At one Q. & A. I attended, when the interviewer read him a snarky quote from Sam Biddle, a writer who worked for the gossip site Valleywag, Andreessen made a doobie-smoking gesture and plunged an imaginary needle into his vein to suggest the quality of Biddles thinking. Being the public face of venture means that you can be challenged on multiple fronts: even as you philosophize about ushering in a new age of democracy, you also have to make money for your L.P.s. And, while the ideal startup advances both goals, most, in truth, advance neither. The V.C. Bryce Roberts told me, Its an ego game, where you want to believe youre changing the world. But how can you write a check to Fab and believe that giving people discounted tchotchkes is changing the world?You two are fired as security guards. Now gather up your things and escort each other from the building.In 1999, Andreessen and Horowitz started Loudcloud, an early cloud-computing service that booked thirty-seven million dollars in contracts in its first nine months. Andreessen, meanwhile, was becoming Marc 2.0. He shed thirty pounds, started wearing Ermenegildo Zegna suits, and traded in his red Mustang for a white Mercedes. Marc 1.0 was Jim Clark, Andreessen told me, referring to his impulsive co-founder. Marc 2.0 was trying to get as polished as possible, more socialized. And Marc 3.0 is a combo. The goal is not to be elegant but to be blunt enough that theres no confusion. I learned the skills from reading all of Caros L.B.J. books.The dot-com crash hit Loudcloud hard, and, in 2002, it pivoted to become a software company with a new name: Opsware. In 2007, after years of slogging, Andreessen and Horowitz sold the company for $1.6 billion. Andreessen says that the tech crash scarred him: The overwhelming message to our generation in the early nineties was Youre dirty, youre all about grungeyou guys are fucking losers! Then the tech boom hit, and it was We are going to do amazing things! And then the roof caved in, and the wisdom was that the Internet was a mirage. I one hundred per cent believed that, because the rejection was so personalboth what everybody thought of me and what I thought of myself. I was not depressed, but I was growly. In retrospect, he concluded, we were five or six years too early.Peter Thiel, who is four years older than Andreessen, observed that the late nineties, for Gen Xers in Silicon Valley, was an experience as powerful as the late sixties was for the younger boomers. The sixties was a transformative moment that got short-circuited by Nixon, and, for Marc, the ninetieswhen Netscape was iconic, and he was deeply living the belief that technology was going to inspire liberalization everywherewas short-circuited by the super-powerful bust and return of the old economy. But Marc is very tenacious.Andreessen said he learned that, while technology improves steadily, psychologically theres no middle groundthe plane is always headed straight up or straight down. Recognizing that he was a poor manager, and needing to buffer those emotional and financial swings, Andreessen saw that the obvious next move was a portfolio of investments. In 2003, he and Horowitz began angel investing, separately and then together; they put ten million dollars into fifty companies, including Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Then Andreessen began pushing to start a venture firm. I always thought the entire venture thing was incredibly cool, he told me. Going to Kleiner Perkinsthe firm that funded Netscapewith the high ceilings, the markers on the wall of all the great companies theyd I.P.O.d, Larry Ellison walking through, and, at 11 a.m., the biggest buffet youve ever seen, at a time when I was eating at Subway? It was the closest thing to a cathedral for nerds. Mark Zuckerberg told me, When Marc started Andreessen Horowitz, I asked him why he didnt start another company instead, and he said, It would be like going back to kindergarten.A16z was designed not merely to succeed but also to deliver payback: it would right the wrongs that Andreessen and Horowitz had suffered as entrepreneurs. Most of those, in their telling, came from Benchmark Capital, the firm that funded Loudcloud, and recently led the A rounds of Uber and Snapchata five-partner boutique with no back-office specialists to provide the services theyd craved. We were always the anti-Benchmark, Horowitz told me. Our design was to not do what they did. Horowitz is still mad that one Benchmark partner asked him, in front of his co-founders, When are you going to get a real C.E.O.? And that Benchmarks best-known V.C., the six-feet-eight Bill Gurley, another outspoken giant with a large Twitter following, advised Horowitz to cut Andreessen and his six-million-dollar investment out of the company. Andreessen said, I cant stand him. If youve seen Seinfeld, Bill Gurley is my NewmanJerrys bte noire.A16zs services model made a strong impression on Sand Hill Road. Andreessen caused us to up our game on the marketing side, Sequoias Doug Leone told me. Younger founders pay attention to media, and we dont want to be de-positioned. Sequoia hired an in-house publicist and two new marketing specialists to complement the four it had, and most top firms made similar moves, even if they privately believed that a16zs services were simply a marketing tool. Todd McKinnon, the C.E.O. of Okta, said, Every firm we talk to now is Hey, were doing all this recruiting, and well introduce you to big customers. Its become the table stakes.Benchmark, by contrast, took down its Web site. Its like watching Coke and Pepsi go head to head, one C.E.O. told me. Bill Gurley declined my requests for comment, but he has publicly bemoaned all the money that firms such as a16z are pumping into the system at a time when he and many other V.C.s worry that the tech sector is experiencing another bubble. So many investors from outside the Valley want in on the startup world that valuations have been soaring: last year, thirty-eight U.S. startups received billion-dollar valuations, twenty-three more than in 2013. Many V.C.s have told their companies to raise as much money as possible now, to have a buffer against a crash.Benchmarks funds top out at four hundred million dollars and are reserved for early-round investing: the original, artisanal venture model. A16z raised $1.5 billion each for its third and fourth funds, in 2012 and 2014, with much of the money earmarked for later, costlier growth rounds, whose returns tend to be capped at 5x. Andreessen argues that startups now wait longer and raise more capital before going public, and a16z wants to be in those conversations, too. He also says that larger funds will allow the firm to provide even more of the services that its entrepreneurs crave. But, in the Valley, increasing your fund size so dramatically is customarily seen as smoking your own exhaust, or, among those with a classical turn of mind, hubris. Venture doesnt scale, Diane Mulcahy, the L.P. and venture critic, said. Raising and investing more doesnt increase the number of billion-dollar companies, and offering services to entrepreneurs wont help the firm generate returns. Its like a Saks Fifth Avenue that gives everybody a free iPhone. Are they going to attract everybody and see everybody? Yes. Are they going to make money? Not for long.When I pressed Andreessen on a16zs fund size, he said that even if the basic assumptions havent changedeven if only fifteen companies a year reach a hundred million dollars in revenuethose companies generate more money now. And, he said, Id bet the number of companies that reach that revenue is going up. With a playful smile, he referred to Gurley: If theres no profit opportunity beyond the first four hundred million, Bills making the case that everyone who follows Benchmark in a later investment round is a moron. I wouldnt say that.One morning, as I sat down to breakfast with Andreessen, a rival V.C. sent me a long e-mail about a16zs holdings. The V.C. estimated that because Andreessens firm had taken so many growth positions, its average ownership stake was roughly 7.5 per cent (its eight per cent), which meant that to get 5x to 10x across its four funds you would need your aggregate portfolio to be worth $240-$480B! You would, in other words, need to invest in every Facebook and Uber that came along. When I started to check the math with Andreessen, he made a jerking-off motion and said Blah-blah-blah. We have all the modelswere elephant hunting, going after big game!In addition to assuaging various slights from V.C.s, Andreessen is attempting to assuage the wound of the 2000 crash, by maintaining that it was an isolated event. The argument in favor of concern is cyclical, he told mebusts follow booms. The counterargument is that stuff works now. In 2000, you had fifty million people on the Internet, and the number of smartphones was zero. Today, you have three billion Internet users and two billion smartphones. Its Pong versus Nintendo. Its Carlota Perezs argument that technology is adopted on an S curve: the installation phase, the crashbecause the technology isnt ready yetand then the deployment phase, when technology gets adopted by everyone and the real money gets made. So the 2000 tech crash prefigured not the next crash but a sustained boom. And Andreessens portfolio, like the entire Sand Hill Road enterprise, wasnt so much overpriced as underappreciated.We even tried a visit from a celebrity.Still, he recently tweeted that startups were spending too much. When the market turns, he wrote, nobody will want to buy your cash-incinerating startup. There will be no Plan B. vaporize. And, come to think of it, maybe it wasnt prudent to raise too much, either. In one pitch meeting where a portfolio company sought a billion-dollar growth round, Andreessen raised his arms overhead and made an explosive sound to warn of what can happen when your valuation vastly exceeds your revenues: Thanks for playinggame over! The company went on to secure its round, with only a token contribution from a16z. Andreessen later said that, as in an increasing number of deals, growth investors had paid one round ahead of progresspaid in other words, for the results they hoped to see in the following round. Though the companys lofty valuation buoyed a16zs portfolio, his body language suggested that buying at such valuations was maybe not smartbut, as long as theyre sophisticated investors, its not our job to moralize on whether theyre overpaying.Another way of framing the growth-funding question, Peter Thiel suggests, is that Andreessen may not be as suited to making early, counterintuitive investments as he isa point that Andreessen concedes: Peter is just smarter than I am, and in a lateral way. But, Thiel says, Andreessen is well positioned, because of his broad knowledge and flexible mind-set, to respond to incremental changes in an array of fields. And that, he argues, is what the times reward: While Twitter is a lesser innovation than flying cars, its a much more valuable business. We live in a financial age, not a technological age.In December, Apoorva Mehta, the founder of a grocery-delivery app called Instacart, came to a16z to ask it to fill out his C round. The firm had led Mehtas B round with an investment of twenty-seven million dollars, but he reminded the team anyway that Instacart is quite a magical experience. Then he invoked a few sharing-economy shibboleths, including we dont have any infrastructure, mobile-powered independent contractors, and machine-learning-based fulfillment engine. In two years, Mehta had set up in fifteen cities, signed up many of the independent grocery chains, including Whole Foods, and showed profitability in a number of stores. And it was a defensible network, because he installed refrigerated lockers in the stores. At the same time, because Mehta had recently changed his model, Instacart was losing money on each delivery, and that amount was growing as he rapidly expanded into new markets.Andreessen applied a disinfecting wipe and said, Let me ask you a question I know the answer to. In 1999, there was no more flaming debacle of a business than grocery delivery online. You were probably twelve at the time of Webvan?Thirteen, Mehta said.So why now?The main reason is you have access to labor through smartphones. Its the same reason Uber and Lyft exist now.Andreessen nodded with satisfaction: You can orchestrate the entire supply chain through your phone. Webvan was what he called a ghost storya cautionary tale that still frightened investors. But Instacart proved that even haunted houses could be rehabilitated.Another partner asked about competitors, including Uber, TaskRabbit, Amazon Fresh, and Fresh Direct. The other, older models cant do instant delivery, Mehta replied. And the newer ones dont have anywhere near our coverage and range of data in groceries. So if you want slower delivery and smaller selection, go with them. Andreessen smiled, savoring the contempt.At the deal review, Jeff Jordan, who sits on Instacarts board, praised Mehtas progress, while noting concerns about unit economicshow hed get to profitability on each delivery. Referring to the venture communitys enthusiasm for the round, Jordan went on, This is an I missed Uber, I dont want to miss the next one climate. Balancing everything, he recommended that the firm put in ten million dollars.Horowitz argued for a bigger investment. Mehtas moat against competitors is really fucking deephe already has Whole Foods, monster of monsters. Its the biggest market of all time, incredibly huge.After other partners argued that the valuation seemed high, Andreessen looked at Horowitz: Ben, I think youre making an even more provocative point than people understand. It sounds like youre saying this could be an Uber for real.I think so, Horowitz said. What makes unit economics really scary is if youre in a competitive market. Hes in a monopoly.Andreessen said, We could go to the well, and go in higher. He beckoned, coaxingly. Horowitz thought it over, then said, I dont want to override Jeff. Andreessen, too, seemed content to temper his enthusiasm and to share the round with other firms. (Mehta eventually raised two hundred and twenty million dollars on a valuation of two billion.) Hed like to make twenty times the investments the firm does, but every opportunity comes with an opportunity cost, and even $1.5 billion doesnt last forever.Andrew Golden, the chief investment officer for Princeton University, an L.P. in a16zs last three funds, told me that, when the firm started, my worry was that Marc is such a big personality he wouldnt necessarily listen to someone who told him he was wearing fewer clothes than he thought. But now my working hypothesis is that Marc is smart enough to know that hell do better if he doesnt try to win every argumentif he doesnt try to go undefeated.In March, Andreessen and his wife announced the birth of their son, whod been carried to term by a gestational surrogate. They named him John, for Lauras father. I feel fantastic! Andreessen told me. Hell come of age in a world where ten or a hundred times more people will be able to contribute in science and medicine and the arts, a more peaceful and prosperous world. He added, tongue in cheek, Im going to teach him how to take over that world!Andreessen often remarks that, in the blue-collar milieu he came from, no parent wants his or her child to stay blue-collar. His own circumstances have changed dramaticallyhe is now a paper billionaire, though he argues that his net worth depends on how you value a16zso I told him it seemed paradoxical that some of his other babies, such as Instacart and Lyft, make their profits off blue-collar drivers and pickers who must freelance without a safety net to make ends meet. Unsurprisingly, he strongly disagreed: Maybe theres an alternate way of living, a free-form life where you press the button and get work when you want to.One afternoon, as we sat at his baronial dining table, he made an agonized but sincere effort to discuss his blue-collar childhood without mentioning his nuclear family. I really identified with Charles Schulz in the David Michaelis biography of him, Schulz and Peanuts, he said. I was struck by the parallels between Andreessen and both Peanutsin which Charlie Brown has a massive bald head and the parents are kept offstageand its creator. Charles Schulz, who grew up in Minnesota, was socially awkward, hated being embraced, and loathed his mothers Norwegian relatives, a farming family. Andreessen went on, Ninety-six per cent of the people who grow up like he and I did, in the Midwest, just stay there, but the ones who leavethe cartoonist, too, moved to Californiabecome intensely interested in the future. In Schulzs last ten years, he really focussed on Rerun, Linuss younger brotherthe youngest and most optimistic character.I told Andreessen that this seemed like a tendentious reading of Rerun, a bland character whose two most famous lines are Ill drink to that and My brother is the only one in the family with a blanket, and I dont want to end up like him. Taken aback, he explained, Hes the youngest, hes the newest, he has the most life in front of him. Andreessen, as he saw himself, was both an immigrant to the land of opportunity, like the entrepreneurs he preferred to fund, and someone whose childhood was merely an installation phase. He told me, It wasnt that I felt misunderstood or badly treated; it was that I was so completely different. I wasnt seeking understanding. I wasnt indexing myself against the people around me.Andreessen reminded mein his formidable achievements and manner, his thickly armored sensitivities and yearningsof Rilkes remark Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love. When I told him so, he stared back in absolute horror.Last year, a programmer named Alex Payne wrote an open letter to Andreessen in which he observed, People are scared of so much wealth and control being in so few hands. Consequently, wherever you and other gatekeepers of capital direct your attentiontowards robots, 3D printers, biotech, whateveryoure going to detect a fearful response as people scramble to determine the impact of your decisions and whims, which only compound lingering structural unemployment and an accumulation of capital at the top of the economic pyramid.Good Evening, ladies and gentlemen! If I may have just a moment of your timemy name is Edward and Ill be sitting here reading the paper with my mouth shut. Thank you for you time, have a good evening and God bless!Payne addressed his thoughts to Andreessen because Andreessen represents the Valleyboth in its soaring vision and in its tendency to treat people as a fungible mass. But Andreessen waved away the criticisms as the ravings of a self-hating software engineer. When I persisted, he said, Ordinary people love the iPhone, Facebook, Google Search, Airbnb, and Lyft. Its only the intellectuals who worry. He raised counter-arguments, then dismissed them: technology would solve any environmental crisis hastened by an expanding economy, and as for the notion that, as he said, You American imperialist asshole, not everyone wants all that technologywell, bullshit! Go to a Chinese village and ask them. Technology gives us superpowers, makes us smarter, more powerful, happier. Would the world be a better place if there were fifty Silicon Valleys? he said. Obviously, yes. Over the past thirty years, the level of income throughout the developing world is rising, the number of people in poverty is shrinking, health outcomes are improving, birth rates are falling. And itll be even better in ten years. Pessimism always sounds more sophisticated than optimismits the Eden-collapse myth over and over againand then you look at G.D.P. per capita worldwide, and its up and to the right. If this is collapse, lets have more of it!Global unemployment is rising, toothis seems to be the first industrial revolution that wipes out more jobs than it creates. One 2013 paper argues that forty-seven per cent of all American jobs are destined to be automated. Andreessen argues that his firms entire portfolio is creating jobs, and that such companies as Udacity (which offers low-cost, online nanodegrees in programming) and Honor (which aims to provide better and better-paid in-home care for the elderly) bring us closer to a future in which everyone will either be doing more interesting work or be kicking back and painting sunsets. But when I brought up the raft of data suggesting that intra-country inequality is in fact increasing, even as it decreases when averaged across the globeAmericas wealth gap is the widest its been since the government began measuring itAndreessen rerouted the conversation, saying that such gaps were a skills problem, and that as robots ate the old, boring jobs humanity should simply retool. My response to Larry Summers, when he says that people are like horses, they have only their manual labor to offerhe threw up his hands. That is such a dark and dim and dystopian view of humanity I can hardly stand it!One challenge for Andreessen is whether venture itself has a skills problem. If software is truly eating the world, wouldnt venture capital be on the menu? The AngelList platform now allows investors to fund startups online. Its co-founder Naval Ravikant said that future companies will require more two-hundred-thousand-dollar checks and way fewer guys on Sand Hill Road. Jeff Fagnan, of Atlas Venture, which is the largest investor in AngelList, said, Software is already squeezing out other intermediariestravel agents, financial advisersand, at the end of the day, V.C.s are intermediaries. Were all just selling cash.Andreessen sometimes wonders if Ravikant is onto something. Hes asked Horowitz, What if were the most evolved dinosaur, and Naval is a bird? Already, more than half the tech companies that reached a billion-dollar valuation in the past decade were based outside Silicon Valley. And as Andreessen himself wrote in 2007, before he became a V.C., Odds are, nothing your V.C. does, no matter how helpful or well-intentioned, is going to tip the balance between success and failure.He still believes thatbut he also thinks that a16z can cut a companys time to success in half, and time is money. He also believes that venture will maintain its incumbency because computers cant yet introduce you to just the right engineer or chief information officer at eBay, and machines cant yet come to your office at midnight to future-proof your letter to perturbed customers. Indeed, venture is one of the most human businesses going. Only human beings could have created such a supercollider of contradictions: a font of innovation that pools around conformity; a freedom train that speeds toward monopoly; a promoter of transparency that shrouds its own dealings; a guild thats dedicated to flattening hierarchies, and that rewards its leaders with imperial power.Naturally, Andreessen had to weigh the counterargument, and consider whether he added any value at all. One Sunday afternoon, as he sat alone at the head of a16zs conference table, he said, Chris Dixon argues that were in the magical-products businessthat we fool ourselves into thinking were building companies, but it doesnt matter if we dont have the magical products. And magic could not be summoned, only prepared for. Over twenty years, he continued, our returns are going to come down to two or three or four investments, and the rest of thishis gesture took in the building full of art, the devotions of more than a hundred eager souls, even the faux-Moorish rooftops of his competitors down the roadis the cost of getting the chance at those investments. Theres a sense in which all of this is mathyou just dont know which Tuesday Mark Zuckerberg is going to walk in.Yet math was no help with mass psychology. Even if we could do perfect analysis, we just cant know the future, he said. What if Google Ventures had access to all Google searchescould you predict hit products? Or perfect access to all of peoples conversations or purchases? You still wouldnt know whats going to happen. How is psychohistory going? he went on, referring to Isaac Asimovs invention, in his Foundation novels, of a statistical field that could predict the behavior of civilizations. Not very fucking good at all! Which, by the way, is part of what makes this job really fun. Its a people business. If we could revise the industry completely, wed just dump all the business plans and focus on peoplethe twenty-three-year-old Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs.He acknowledged, though, that his optimism dims once human beingswith their illogic, hidden agendas, and sheer bugginessenter the equation. Were imperfect people pursuing perfect ideas, and theres tremendous frustration in the gap, he said. Writing code, one or two people, thats the Platonic ideal. But when you want to impact the world you need one hundred people, then one thousand, then ten thousandand people have all these people issues. He examined the problem in silence. A world of just computers wouldnt work, he concluded wistfully. But a world of just people could certainly be improved.*An earlier version of this article misstated the name of Sequoia Capital.Tad Friend has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1998. He is the author of Cheerful Money: Me, My Family, and the Last Days of Wasp Splendor.Read more More:Silicon ValleyTechnologyVenture CapitalistsNever miss a big New Yorker story again. 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such coverage as a separate policy. Oct. 25. Appelby, a Bermuda-based law firm that caters to the super rich, announces it suffered a data breach in 2016 and that it’s being contacted about it by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. Oct. 25. Rasmussen Reports survey of 1,000 American adults reveals 41 percent of them have been victims of payment card information theft. Oct. 25. F-Secure releases analysis of email addresses of more than 200 CEOs from top businesses in 10 countries finding 30 percent of the executives had their passwords leaked when a service they subscribe to suffered a data breach. Oct. 24. Specialty insurer Beazley reports rapid rise in data breaches of its clients caused by social engineering attacks. It says during first three months of 2017, social engineering data breaches increased nine percent, compared to one percent for the same period in 2016. Oct. 23. Hacker group that calls itself The Dark Overlord breaches systems at London Bridge Plastic Surgery in the UK and steals an undisclosed amount of data. Clinic is known for its celebrity clients, including some members of the Britain’s royal family. Oct. 23. Georgia Revenue commissioner Lynne Riley says state has blocked $108 million in fraudulent tax returns in 2017, compared to $19 million in 2015. Oct. 23. Coinhive, a cryptocurrency mining software provider, acknowledges a compromised password led to the hijacking of its mining scripts , which allowed thieves to redirect funds intended for Coinhive into a virtual wallet controlled by the attackers. Oct. 23. COL financial, a major online Philippines brokerage firm, warns clients it has discovered a possible data breach of its systems. It says client account balances, stock positions and account transactions were not affected by the incident, but recommends passwords be changed. Oct. 20. Federal court in Manhattan sentences Yuri Lebedev, a Florida software engineer, to 16 months in prison for role in data breach at JPMorgan Chase & Co. in 2014 that exposed information on more than 83 million accounts. Oct. 20. Kromtech reports Tarte Cosmetics has secured two databases containing information on nearly two million online customers after a misconfiguration error exposed the data to the public Internet for more than 10 years. Oct. 19. Verisk Analytics estimates losses to Merk & Co. due to “NotPetya” data breach in June could cost insurers $275 million. Oct. 19. Class action lawsuit filed against home respiratory care and medical equipment provider Lincare Holdings of Clearwater, Fla. by employees who allege they were harmed by data breach that exposed their tax information to online thieves. Oct. 17. IRS Commissioner John Koskinen says his agency doesn’t expect the Equifax data breach to have a major impact on 2018 tax filings since 100 million Americans had already had their personal identifying information stolen by digital thieves prior to the breach. Oct. 17. Reuters reports Microsoft’s database for tracking bugs in its software was breached by hackers in 2013 and the company never revealed the intrusion to its customers or the public. The defects were eventually corrected, but in the interim, the threat actors could have used the bug data to attack any computer using Microsoft software. Oct. 17. Troy Hunt, founder of the data breach information search site HaveI BeenPwned, announces he’s found a database containing unique personal information of more than 30 million South Africans. He says the data breach that exposed the information took place around March 2017, although some data dates back to the 1990s. Oct. 16. Pizza Hut informs some 60,000 customers who placed orders with the company’s mobile app or at its website that their payment card information has been stolen by a hacker. Oct. 16. Beazley, a specialist insurer, reports that during the first nine months of 2017, unintended disclosure accounted for 41 percent of data breach incidents reported to the company by health care organizations. That’s more than twice the second most frequent cause for data loss, hacking or malware (19 percent). Oct. 13. We Heart It, a teen-oriented website, reveals eight million accounts may have been affected by a data breach that took place in 2013. It advises users who have not changed their passwords since 2013 to do so now. Oct. 12. Equifax takes down one of its web pages after discovering it contained malicious code from a third-party vendor. The code on the company’s credit report assistance page uses an Adobe Flash document to infect a computer with malware. Oct. 12. IRS temporarily suspends $7.2 million contract it awarded Equifax to verify taxpayers’ identities and help combat fraud. Suspension comes about a month after a data breach at Equifax compromised confidential information of 145.5 million Americans. Oct. 12. Hyatt Hotels acknowledges it’s discovered  unauthorized access to customer payment card information at 41 properties worldwide, including 18 in China, between March 18, 2017 and July 2, 2017. In 2015, a similar incident affected 250 of the chain’s hotels in 50 countries. Oct. 11. Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson releases second annual data breach report for the state. It finds that three million state residents were affected by data breaches between July 2016 and July 2017. That’s six times more residents affected than in the previous 12-month period. Oct. 11. ZDNet reports Victory Phones, an automated phone research and data compilation firm in Grand Rapids, Mich. was hacked and several databases stolen. It says theft exposes data on hundreds of thousands of Americans who submitted donations to political campaigns.  Oct. 10. Kromtech Security reports an Amazon S3 repository belonging to  Patient Home Monitoring exposed to the public Internet blood test results of an estimated 150,000 people. PHM  offers a variety of monitoring services to manage respiratory diseases and sleep apnea, as well as  blood testing for patients on anticoagulants. Oct. 10. Motherboard reports a bug on a T-Mobile website has put at risk sensitive information about 76 million of the company’s customers.  Oct. 9. First class action lawsuit arising from a data breach begins in London’s High Court. The litigation was brought by 5,500 employees of UK supermarket giant Morrisons whose former auditor exposed personal information of nearly 100,000 employees online over a “personal grievance” with the company. Oct. 9. Domino’s Australia says it’s investigating  a potential data leak at a former supplier after some of its customers began receiving spam that contained information about where they bought their pizza. Oct. 6. US Office of the Inspector General reports Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., which is responsible for insuring the nation’s banks, suffered more than 50 data breaches in 2015 and 2016. The OIG also notes the average time the FDIC took to notify people affected by the hacks was 288 days. Oct. 6. Disqus, the Internet’s largest provider of hosted commenting systems, announces one of its databases from 2012, which included information dating back to 2007, was exposed in a data breach. It says 17.5 million users may be affected by the attack. Oct. 6. Forrester Research reveals intruders using stolen credentials accessed some confidential reports intended for clients but did not access any client data. Oct. 6. Cabrillo College in Aptos, Calif. notifies 40,000 students their personal information may have been exposed in a breach of the school’s computer systems. College says Social Security numbers of 12,000 students and personal information of 28,000 others may have been compromised. Oct. 4. Fast food chain Sonic reveals malware attack on some of its outlets may have exposed their customers payment card information to hackers. Oct. 4. Catholic United Financial, a financial services company servicing Catholic Church members in the upper US Midwest, informs 127,310 current and former members of a data breach. It says hacker accessed first and last names, mailing addresses, dates of birth, email addresses, insurance policy information and Social Security numbers of members. Oct. 3. Equifax CEO Richard Smith, appearing before a congressional committee examining a data breach at his company, blames a single IT person failing to patch an Apache flaw that led to the exposure of sensitive personal information of 145.5.million Americans. Oct. 3. Verizon Communications reveals all three billion Yahoo user accounts were affected by data breach in 2013. Verizon purchased Yahoo for $4.48 billion in June. Oct. 3. Federal investigators warn Atlanta public school system that confidential data on the system’s 6,000 employees may have been compromised in data breach. Oct. 2. Information security research firm Kromtech reports a misconfigured Elasticsearch database has exposed to the public Internet private information of more than 1,100 NFL players and agents. Oct. 2. Equifax reveals an additional 2.5 million Americans were affected by a data breach at the company in July. New tally brings the total number of people affected by the breach to 145.5 million. Oct. 1.Vermont Attorney General T.J. Donovan announces SAManage USA will pay $264,000 fine for exposing online Social Security numbers of 660 Vermont Health Connect users. Stay tuned for the Q2 2018 edition of the Data Breach Report. John P. Mello, Jr. a freelance writer specializing in business and technology subjects, including consumer electronics, business computing and cyber security. BreachDiary.com — sponsored by ThreatBook — provides a quarterly diary of noteworthy data breaches and cyber-attacks to CIOs, CSOs, CISOs, IT security teams, and the media. Massive data breaches dominate the news in third quarter of 2017 Massive data breaches at credit reporting agency Equifax and subscription television service HBO dominated data breach news during this year’s third quarter. Sensitive information for more than 140 million Americans was compromised by the Equifax data breach, which set off a cascade of resignations, lawsuits and investigations. CEO of the company, Richard Smith, resigned, as did Chief Information Officer David Webb and Chief Security Officer Susan Mauldin. Nearly a dozen lawsuits were filed in the federal and state courts, as well as in a Canadian court where consumers are seeking $450 billion in damages. Meanwhile, the Federal Trade Commission announced it is probing the breach. In addition, 40 states have banded together to investigate the incident. Equifax, too, is looking into the breach, as well as $1.8 million in stock sales made by senior executives just weeks before the event was made public. At HBO, hackers calling themselves Mr. Smith pilfered 1.5 terabytes of data from HBO and dribbled it on the Internet during August. They started with unaired episodes of Ballers and Room 104, as well as written material for an episode of Game of Thrones. They then moved on to dropping four unaired episodes of GoT and prior to that show’s season finale, released a detailed outline of that installment. Some arrests were made in connection with the data theft in India. Police there collared three employees and one former employee of Prime Focus Technology which stores and processes GoT for the Indian streaming website Hotstar. Past massive data breaches also made headlines during the period. An arrest was made in connection with the June 2015 data breach at the U.S. Office of Personnel management in which sensitive data for more than 21 million people was stolen. Yu Pingan, a Chinese national, was arrested in Los Angeles and later charged with having a hand in the malware that was used for the breach. Meanwhile, the OPM got off the hook for any legal ramifications from the incident when a federal district court judge in D.C. dismissed two lawsuits filed against the agency over the breach. An arrest was also made in connection to the huge data breach at Yahoo which affected more than a billion user accounts. Karim Baratov, 22, pleaded not guilty in a San Francisco federal court to charges he participated in the Yahoo hack. Yahoo wasn’t as lucky as the OPM in avoiding litigation, though. A federal district court in California ruled that a class action lawsuit could proceed against the company. According to the Identity Theft Resource Center, there were 791 data breaches during the first six months of the year, a 29 percent jump over the same period in 2016. Breaches continued to climb in the second half of the year. Many of those breaches involved household names. For example, Dow Jones & Company, Time Warner, Viacom, Verizon and World Wrestling Entertainment all put customer data at risk by misconfirguring cloud servers. Wells Fargo placed information about its wealthiest customers at risk when it accidently sent the data to opposing attorneys in a lawsuit involving the bank. Customer credit card information at Whole Foods and Sonic was compromised by point-of-sale attacks. Instagram’s security, too, was compromised due to a software bug. Meanwhile, Hard Rock Hotels & Casinos discovered payment card information over an eight month period was compromised by a breach ast a third-party reservation system. Some significant penalties and settlements were also announced during the period. SAManage USA paid a $264,000 fine for exposing the data of Vermont Health Connect users, and TalkTalk, a U.K. IT services provider, paid a £100,000 fine for a breach affecting 21,000 customers. Meanwhile, Ruby Corp. settled a lawsuit against Ashley Madison for $11.2 million, Nationwide Insurance paid $5.5 million to put to rest a case arising from a 2012 data breach that exposed the personal information of 1.27 million customers and healthcare insurer Anthem received preliminary approval of a $115 million settlement of litigation arising from 2015 breach that allowed intruders to access personal identifying information of 80 million people. Sep. 29. Equifax tells U.S. House of Representatives it is investigating sale of stock by senior executives weeks before a massive data breach at the company was made public. Executives made $1.8 million off the stock sale. Sensitive information on some 143 million Americans was compromised in the breach. Sep. 29. Crystal Bray and Samuel Cook file putative class action lawsuit against GameStop over six-month data breach that compromised payment cards of its customers. Plaintiffs allege the company’s cavalier approach to data security led to the breach. Sep. 29. Vermont Attorney General T. J. Donovan announces SAManage USA, which provides support services for Vermont Health Connect, will pay a  $264,000 fine for a data breach affecting 660 VHC users. Sep. 28. Whole Foods, a grocery chain recently acquired by Amazon, reveals a data breach compromised credit card information at taprooms and restaurants at some of its stores. It adds that Payment cards used at its grocery stores were not affected by the breach. Sep. 28. Chicago files lawsuit in state court against Equifax in connection with data breach at company. City alleges Equifax violated the city’s consumer fraud ordinance and state laws regarding information privacy, consumer fraud and deceptive practices. Sep. 27. San Francisco files lawsuit in California state court seeking tens of millions of dollars in civil penalties against Equifax in connection with data breach at company. Sep. 26. Krebs on Security reports data breach at Sonic Drive-In may have compromised some five million payment card accounts. Sonic is a fast-food chain with 3,600 locations in 45 states. Sep. 26. Richard Smith resigns as CEO of Equifax. During Smith’s tenure at the company, it experienced a data breach in which sensitive information on 143 million Americans was compromised. Sep. 22. Law firms Robbins Geller and Hagens Berman announce they’ve filed proposed class-action lawsuit on behalf of people in 43 states in federal district court in Atlanta against Equifax in connection with data breach at company, Sep. 21. Webroot reports an average of 1.4 million phishing sites are created every month. Phishing is a prime method for creating data breaches. Sep. 21. Kromtech discovers data repository of vehicle device and monitoring company SVR exposed on the Internet due to a configuration error in an Amazon Web Services S3 bucket. Data included information on SVR’s customers and re-seller network, as well as on tracking devices on vehicles. Sep. 19. U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. dismisses two lawsuits filed against the Office of Personnel Management over June 2015 data breach in which sensitive data on more than 21 million people was stolen. Sep. 19. Upguard, a cybersecurity firm, reports about a gigabyte of credentials and configuration files belonging to entertainment giant Viacom were exposed on the Internet via an unsecured server. Sep. 15. Equifax announces resignations of Chief Information Officer David Webb and Chief Security Officer Susan Mauldin. Resignations follow data breach that affected 143 million U.S. customers. Sep. 15. U.S. Rep. Jim Himes, D-Conn., files bill to protect consumers affected by data breach at a credit reporting agency. Measure allows consumers to ask for a security freeze on their information free of charge following a breach. Sep. 14. Scott Meyers, Judey Meyers and Karl Gordon Eikost file a proposed class-action lawsuit in a Chicago federal court against Equifax in connection with data breach at company. Sep. 12. Jennifer Mertlich and others file proposed class-action lawsuit in a Seattle federal  court against Equifax in connection with data breach at company. Sep. 14. Federal Trade Commission announces investigation of data breach at Equifax. Sep. 13. Reuters reports nearly 40 states have joined an investigation into data breach at Equifax. Sep. 12. Canadian consumers seek $450 billion in class-action lawsuit filed in Toronto against Equifax in connection with data breach at company. Sep. 11. Five citizens of Utah file proposed class-action lawsuit in Salt Lake City federal court against Equifax. Citizens are seeking $5 billion in damages. Sep. 9. Brian F. Spector of Florida and James McGonnigal of Maryland file proposed class-action lawsuit in an Atlanta federal court against Equifax.. Sep. 8. ZDNet reports Alexander Filinov and Konstantin Teplyakov, two members of the Humpty Dumpty hacker gang have been sentenced by a Moscow court to three years in a penal colony for compromising computers, smartphones and tablets of Russian citizens and stealing data from them. It adds that accounts of high ranking Kremlin officials were also hacked by the group, including the Twitter account of Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev. Sep. 7. Credit reporting agency Equifax reveals data breach of its systems placing at risk sensitive information of 143 million American consumers. Sep. 7. Roman Seleznev, 33, pleas guilty in federal courts in Nevada and Georgia to his role in a cyber theft ring that allegedly stole $50 million using credit card numbers stolen from online sources. Seleznev is the son of Valery Seleznev, a member of Russia’s lower house of parliament who has been critical of U.S. policies. Sep. 5. Times of London reports data breaches at British universities have doubled in the last two years to 1,152. It notes cyber gangs behind the attacks seek information that they can sell to nation-states. Sep. 4. Hacker News reports massive data breach at Taringa, known as the Reddit of Latin America. Breach compromised login details of 28 million users. HN says LeakBase, a breach notification service, has obtained a copy of the stolen data. Sep. 4. Upguard, a security research firm, reports third-party contractor for private military contractor TigerSwan accidentally exposed on the Internet resume files of 9,402 people. Data includes job histories of U.S. military veterans, mercenaries and Iraqi and Afghan nationals who worked in their countries with U.S. forces and government institutions. Sep. 1. Kromtech reports four million records containing personal information of Time Warner customers were stored without a password on an Amazon server. More than 600 GB of data was exposed, which included usernames, email addresses, MAC addresses, device serial numbers and financial transaction information. Sep. 1. Crown Records Management releases survey finding that in the U.K. pharmaceutical industry 23 percent of IT decision makers chose not to report a data breach to management or appropriate authorities; 23 percent know someone who hasn’t reported a breach; and 15 percent don’t know to whom to report a breach. Sep. 1. U.K. Information Commissioner’s Office fines Nottinghamshire County Council £70,000 for exposing to the public Internet personal data of elderly and disabled people in an online directory. Sep. 1. AXA insurance notifies 5,400 customers some of their personal data is at risk after a data breach at its online health portal. It says email addresses, birth dates and mobile numbers were exposed in the breach. Aug. 31. U.S. District court Judge Lucy Koh rules class action lawsuit may proceed against Yahoo over three data breaches from 2013 to 2015 which affected more than a billion user accounts. Aug. 30. CeX, a technology and video game retailer, says personal details of up to two million customers may have been compromised in a “sophisticated breach.” Aug. 30. Instagram, a Facebook company, announces hackers exploited a software bug in its software that allowed them to access the accounts of an unspecified number of “high profile” users. The company says email addresses and phone numbers may have been obtained by the data thieves but not the passwords for the accounts. Aug. 30. U.S. Food and Drug administration issues recall of 465,000 St. Jude pacemakers so their firmware can be patched to prevent unauthorized tampering with the devices. Aug. 30. Mid-Michigan Physicians Imaging Center notifies more than 106,000 patients that their personal health information is at risk due to a data breach at a third-party service provider, McLaren Medical Group. Aug. 30. Silver Cross Hospital in Lenox, Ill. reveals data breach at third-party service provider has exposed health information for up to 9,000 patients. Aug. 30. U.S. Appeals Court in St. Louis upholds most of lower court ruling dismissing lawsuit stemming from two 2014 data breaches at SuperValu, a supermarket wholesaler and retailer based in Minnesota. However, the court reinstated the case of one of the plaintiffs who demonstrated his credit card was misused because of the data breach. Aug. 29. Security researcher with the handle Benkow discovers server in the Netherlands containing information on 711 million email accounts for the Onliner spambot. Onliner is used to deliver banking malware and is responsible for more than 100,000 infections around the world, according to Benkow. Aug. 28. Legal Action Center files lawsuit against Aetna accusing the insurer of breaching the privacy rights of 12,000 customers in 23 states by allowing the words “filling prescriptions for HIV”  to be seen in window envelopes sent to the clients. Lawsuit seeks unspecified damages, a change in Aetna’s mailing practices and legal fees and costs. Aug. 28. Major League Lacrosse sends email to its players informing them a link on the player registration web page directed browsers to a spreadsheet containing social security numbers, email addresses, phone numbers and mailing addresses of everyone in the league’s player pool. Aug. 26. Hackers known as Mr. Smith, who claim to have stolen 1.5 terabytes of data from HBO, post on Reddit a detailed outline of the much anticipated season finale of the HBO series Game of Thrones. Aug. 25. U.S. District Court Judge Lucy Koh gives preliminary approval of $115 million settlement of litigation against healthcare insurer Anthem over massive data breach in 2015 when intruders accessed personal identifying information and other data on some 80 million people.  Aug. 25. Taiwan’s Financial Supervisory Commission says no data breach was involved in incidents of credit card fraud involving Apple Pay. Fraudulent purchases were made through the service after user bank accounts were compromised through social engineering attacks. Aug. 25. ERPScan reports vulnerabilities in point of sale systems developed by SAP and Oracle that allow an adversary to not only compromise credit card data but gain control of the POS server and perform tasks such as changing prices or remotely starting or stopping terminals. Aug. 24. Yu Pingan, a Chinese national, is accused by U.S. Justice Department of being linked to malware used in massive data theft at U.S. Office of Personnel Management. Pingan was arrested Aug. 21 at Los Angeles International Airport. Aug. 24. Legal Action Center and AIDS Law Project of Pennsylvania says health insurer Aetna exposed the HIV status of patients in several states in the clear window of the envelopes of mail communications sent to the patients. Aug. 24. Beaumont, Texas suspends online water bill payment system after it received complaints from taxpayers of unauthorized charges to their iTunes accounts. City says it is investigating potential data breach. Aug. 23. Karim Baratov, 22, pleads not guilty in San Francisco federal court to charges he participated in the massive hack of Yahoo. Aug. 21. OneLogin releases survey of 500 IT decision makers finding one in five enterprises say failure to deprovision employees from corporate applications contributed to a data breach in their organizations. Aug. 21. OurMine hacks Sony PlayStation social media accounts. It also posts to Twitter screenshots of the PlayStation Network’s databases, suggesting they have been compromised. Aug. 18. The Sun reports a person with alleged connections to the hacktivist group Anonymous has stolen data on 1.2 million patients of the U.K.’s national health system. Aug. 18. U.S. Department of Labor shuts down portal for employers to report employee injuries and illnesses after it was informed by Department of Homeland Security that data at the site may be compromised. Aug. 17. San Antonio Institute for Women’s Health warns patients their personal information is at risk after it discovered a keylogger residing on its systems from June 5 to July 6. Aug. 17. Security researcher Chris Vickery reports misconfigured Amazon Web Services server exposed to the public Internet information on 1.8 million Chicago voters. Aug. 17. Hacker group calling itself OurMine compromises HBO’s Twitter and Facebook accounts and advises company to tighten up its security. Aug. 17. Delaware Gov. John Carney signs into law bill requiring free credit monitoring services to citizens of state whose personal information is compromised in a data breach. Aug. 17. AP Moller Maersk reports $264 million loss due to disruptions in service caused by the NotPetya virus in June. Aug. 15. Indian Police arrest three employees and one former employee of Prime Focus Technology in connection with leaking an unaired episode of the HBO series Game of Thrones. Prime Focus stores and processes the series for the Indian streaming website Hotstar. Aug. 11. U.K.’s Information Commissioner’s Office fines IT services company TalkTalk £100,000 in connection with a third-party data breach that allowed unlawful access to the personal data of up to 21,000 customers. Aug. 9. Nationwide Mutual Insurance agrees to pay states $5.5 million to settle case stemming from 2012 data breach which exposed the personal information of 1.27 million consumers. Aug. 9. U.S. Department of Justice charges two Iranian nationals — Arash Amiri Abedian, 31, and Danial Jeloudar, 27 — of hacking into online merchants and stealing credit card and personal information of customers. Aug. 9. Kromtech reports misconfigured Amazon Web Services bucket leaves vulnerable personal identifying information of an estimated 48,000 customers of Indian credit services company Creditseva. Aug. 8. Colorado Judicial Department reveals inadvertant exposure of files containing more than  600,000 jurors in the state for almost a year. Agency states it doesn’t beleive data was downloaded in bulk, stolen or used illegally. Aug. 7. Hackers drop second wave of sensitive HBO data on the Internet. Drop includes four episodes of the current Game of Thrones season, the script of an unaired fifth episode and countless internal documents. Aug. 5. UCLA notifies more than 30,000 current and former students their personal data was on a server accessed by an unauthorized party. University adds  it does not believe any sensitive information was obtained by the intruder. Aug. 4. Protenus reports there were 233 healthcare data breaches during the first half of 2017 affecting 1.2 million patient records. Aug. 2. FBI arrests Marcus Hutchins, 23, for his role in creating and distributing the Kronos banking Trojan. Hutchins has been credited with stalling the spread of WannaCry malware which crippled the U.K.’s  national health care system in May. Aug. 1. Kaspersky Lab reports DDoS attacks were launched against resources in 84 countries during 2Q 2017, an increase of 14 nations from previous quarter, although almost half the attacks (47.42 percent) were directed at China. Aug. 1. Cyber insurance underwriter Beazley reports 32 percent of 1,330 client incidents during the first six months of 2017 were caused by hacking and malware attacks. Another 30 percent of the breaches were caused by employee or third-party provider error. Aug. 1. Mandiant, which is owned by FireEye, confirms the social media accounts and personal laptop of one of its employees were compromised and  business documents related to two Israeli customers stolen. Aug. 1. Federal appeals court rules customers of CareFirst can sue the health insurer over a 2014 data breach of its systems. Appeals court reversed decision of lower court which dismissed the lawsuit.   Jul. 31. Entertainment weekly reports hackers stole 1.5 terabytes of data from HBO. Some of data posted to the Internet includes upcoming episodes of Ballers and Room 104, as well as written material from the fourth episode of Game of Thrones. Jul. 30. France fines Hertz £40,000 after car rental company exposed personal identifying information of 35,357 customers to the public Internet due to a misconfigured server. Jul. 28. Anthem reports personal identifying information of more than 18,500 members is at risk after an employee emailed the data to a personal account. The healthcare provider notes the employee was engaged in activities related to identity theft.. Jul. 27. Virgin America notifies employees their personal information is at risk after an unauthorized party gained access to login information and passwords used to access the company’s computer network. It notes 3,120 employees and contractors had their login credentials compromised and 110 employees had personal identifying information stolen. Jul. 26. U.S. grand jury indicts Alexander Vinnik for laundering more than $4 billion in bitcoin, including funds from Mt. Gox, a failed bitcoin exchange. Jul. 26. UniCredit, Italy’s biggest bank, reports two data breaches at one of its third-party providers resulted in unauthorized access to personal loan accounts of 400,000 customers. Breaches occurred in September and October 2016 and June and July 2017. Jul. 26. HackRead reports China has arrested 11 hackers suspected of developing Fireball, a malware program which infected 250 million computers worldwide, 20 percent of them in large corporations. Jul. 26. Gait House hotel in Louisville, Ky. reveals its payment processing system was infected with malware putting at risk payment card transactions performed between Dec. 21, 2016 and April 11. Jul. 24. Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Lofven calls data breach at country’s Transport Agency “incredibly serious.” Inadequate safeguards at a government contractor exposed all information in the agency’s database to the contractor’s Eastern European subsidiaries. Data included details about bridges, roads, ports, the subway system in Stockholm and other infrastructure. It also may have included the identities of undercover agents working for the Swedish police and armed forces. Jul. 24. Thales releases 2017 data threat report which finds 43 percent of retailers have suffered an IT breach in the past year. Jul. 24. RedLock reports hundreds of organizations  have misconfigured their Google Groups service exposing personal identifying information of group members to the public Internet. Jul. 24. Federal court in St. Louis approves Ruby Corp. agreement to pay $11.2 million to settle class action lawsuit stemming from data breach at Ashley Madison adultery website. Jul. 22. Bloomberg reports Wells Fargo in under investigation by the federal Financial Industry Regulatory Authority for accidentally submitting to an attorney sensitive information for tens of thousands of accounts belonging to high-wealth individuals doing brokerage business with the bank. Jul. 21. New York Times reports 1.4 gigabytes of data affecting at least 50,000 Wells Fargo customers, including some of the banks wealthiest clients, was inadvertently sent to lawyers of a former employee suing the institution for defamation. Newspaper notes the disclosure is a data breach that potentially violates numerous state and federal consumer privacy laws. Jul. 21. Darkface, a security firm, reports hackers pilfered 10 GB of data from a North American casino by compromising a fish tank connected to the Internet. Jul. 21. Federal district court in Colorado dismisses proposed class action lawsuit by credit unions stemming from data breach at Noodles & Co. A data breach at Noodles in September 2016 placed at risk the payment cards of hundreds of thousands of customers who ate at the restaurant chain’s 322 locations in the nation.  Jul. 21. Atlantis Paradise Island resort in the Bahamas reports point-of-sale system for its food, beverage and retail locations was compromised by malware putting at risk all payment card transactions made from Nov. 1, 2016 to April 3, 2017. Jul. 21. Nuance, a speech recognition company, issues financial statement warning Wall Street analysts that its fiscal 2017 third quarter and possibly the fourth quarter would be negatively impacted by the NotPetya global ransomware attack. Jul. 20. Ricoh Australia warns banks, government agencies. universities and large businesses that a number of documents about its multifunction devices, some containing sensitive data, have been posted to the Internet and indexed by Google’s search engine. Jul. 19. Arlington Research releases survey of 500 IT workers commissioned by OneLogin finding that 32 percent of companies take more than a week to remove former workers from their systems. Survey also found that 20 percent of organizations have experienced a data breach caused by an ex-employee. Jul. 18. Identity Theft Resource Center and CyberScout reports 791 data breaches for the first six months of 2017, a 29 percent jump over 2016. Jul. 18. Women’s Health Care Group PA in Philadelphia reveals that one of its servers and a workstation were subjected to a ransomware attack affecting 300,000 people. Group was able to continue normal operations by restoring affected data from backups. Jul. 17. UpGuard reports sensitive and personal information of from two to four million Dow Jones & Company customers was exposed to more than a million users of Amazon Web Services through a cloud-based repository configured for semi-public access. Also exposed were the details of 1.6 million entries in a suite of databases used largely by financial institutions for compliance with money laundering regulations. Jul. 17. B&B Theatres, the seventh largest theater chain in the United States, says it’s investigating a breach of its credit card system. The announcement came after blogger Brian Krebs reported the company has been leaking customer credit card data from its systems for two years. Jul. 17. FBI issues warning to consumers to consider cybersecurity before introducing smart, interactive, Internet-connected toys into their homes or trusted environments. Such toys can collect personal information that puts the privacy of children at risk. Jul. 17. U.S. Virgin Islands police department announces it will stop collecting Social Security information from people filing incident reports. Decision made after police officer stole personal identifying information of four people as part of an alleged identity theft scam. Jul. 15. U.K. Information Commissioner’s Office fines Boomerang Video £60,000 for 2014 data breach that resulted in the theft of information on 26,331 customers. Jul. 14. Ruby Corp. agrees to pay $11.2 million to settle class action lawsuit stemming from data breach at Ashley Madison adultery website. Jul. 14. Kevin Kunlay Williams, 56, pleads guilty in federal court in St. Louis to mail fraud, aggravated identity theft, re-entry of a removed alien and making a false statement relating to citizenship. Williams admits in court that he filed more than 2,000 fraudulent tax returns seeking $12.2 million in refunds. Jul. 13. The international healthcare group Bupta reveals personal identifying information for 547,000 customers was compromised when an employee copied and removed the data from the company’s systems. It notes no financial or medical data was stolen. Jul. 12. UpGuard reports a third-party vendor has exposed on the Internet personal identifying information of as many 14 million Verizon customers by misconfiguring a cloud server.It adds that data from a French telco, Orange S.A., was also exposed on the server owned and operated by Nice systems, an Israeli company that’s known to work closely with phone cracking firms Hacking Team and Cellebrite. Jul. 12. Wilshire Law Firm files proposed class action lawsuit against Sabre Corp. over eight-month data breach that compromised payment card information of customers who made reservations at a number of hotels. Among the affected hotels were Trump Hotels, the Four Seasons, Hard Rock International, Montage Beverly Hills and Loews Hotels. Jul. 12. Indian law enforcement authorities arrest Imran Chippa, 35, a former engineering student from Rajasthan, for allegedly stealing and posting to the Internet personal data of more than 100 million  customers of Reliance Jio, an Indian telecom company. Jul. 12. University of Iowa Health Care warns 5,300 patients some of their health care information is at risk after it was posted for two years to an unsecure application developer’s website. It notes that the information did not include clinical information like diagnoses, social security numbers or financial information like credit card numbers.  Jul. 12. KnowBe4, a security training provider, releases quarterly analysis of top phishing subject lines. Top lines for the second quarter of 2017 included Security Alert, Revised Vacation & Sick Time Policy and UPS Label Delivery 1ZBE312TNY00015011. Jul. 10. Kaspersky Lab and B2B International reports that employees in 40 percent of businesses worldwide hide IT security incidents to avoid punishment. Jul. 7. Krebs on Security reports the seventh largest theater chain in the United States, B&B Theaters, is investigating a two-year breach of its credit card systems. The chain operates 414 screens in 50 locations in nine states. July 7. Avanti Markets, a self-service payment kiosk operator, notifies users of its machines that some 1900 of them were infected with malware designed to steal payment card and other information. Infection occurred from July 4 to August 4. According to the company, the kiosks are used by 1.6 million customers in 46 states. Jul. 6. Hard Rock Hotels & Casinos  announces that due to a security incident at a third-party reservation system, payment card information is at risk of customers who performed transactions at 11 of the chain’s locations from Aug. 10, 2016 to March 9, 2017. Jul. 6. The Register reports South Korean law enforcement authorities are investigating a data breach at digital money exchange Bithumb. It noted personal identifying information for 32,000 users — about three percent of the user base — was stolen. Bithumb handled $1.7 billion in bitcoin transactions in 2016. Jul. 6. Logicforce releases survey of more than 200 law firms finding two-thirds of them (66 percent) reported a data breach in 2016. It also notes that an average of 10,000 intrusions occur daily at law firms. Jul. 6. UC Davis Health in California notifies some 15,000 patients their personal information is at risk after an employee was duped by a phishing scam. Jul. 5. MacKeeper reports Kromtech discovered two open and publically accessible Amazon S3 buckets with personal identifying information of more than three million fans of World Wrestling Entertainment. Jul. 5. Federal court judge in Illinois dismisses putative class action lawsuit against digital toymaker VTech. Litigation stems from data breach in which data on 11 million adults and children was compromised.  Jul. 5. Airway Oxygen, a health care provider in Wyoming, Mich. reports ransomware attack affecting 500,000 people. It says there is no indication that any protected health information was accessed or acquired during the attack. Jul. 4. FBI alerts Wooster-Ashland Regional Council of Governments in Ohio of a data breach of its computer systems involving more than 200,000 records containing confidential information of the region’s residents. Jul. 3. Motherboard reports AA, a U.K. auto insurance company, exposed on the Internet sensitive information of more than 100,000 customers due to a misconfigured server and did not tell them about it. Jul. 3. The Guardian reports that Medicare patient details of any Australian is being sold on the Dark Net for $30 per individual. It noted the data seller says requests for information can be fulfilled by exploiting a vulnerability in the government’s systems. Stay tuned for the Q4 2017 edition of the Data Breach Report. John P. Mello, Jr. a freelance writer specializing in business and technology subjects, including consumer electronics, business computing and cyber security. BreachDiary.com — sponsored by ThreatBook — provides a quarterly diary of noteworthy data breaches and cyber-attacks to CIOs, CSOs, CISOs, IT security teams, and the media. Ransomware attacks dominate the data breach scene during second quarter of 2017 Global ransomware damage costs are predicted to exceed $5 billion in 2017, up from $325 million in 2015. That’s a staggering 15X increase in just 2 years, and the damages are expected to worsen. Ransomware attacks on healthcare organizations will quadruple by 2020. Two staggering attacks affected organizations around the world. In May, the WannaCry program infected thousands of computers in more than 100 countries. It was followed in June by the GoldenEye/NotPetya malware that disrupted computing activity in at least 65 nations. The scope of the Ransomware problem was detailed by Verizon in its annual data breach report released in April — which found ransomware involved in 71 percent of the 40,000 data breaches they analyzed. Also during the period one of the largest ransomware payoffs was made by Nayana, a web-hosting company in South Korea. It coughed up $1.1 million to digital extortionists after ransomware knocked out more than half of the company’s 300 servers and affected an estimated 3,400 websites it hosted. Large data breaches also continued during the quarter. One of the largest was in India where 130 million holders of the country’s national identification card were told in May their ID numbers had been exposed on the public Internet since Nov. 2016. Another 77 million users of the education website Edmodo had their account information stolen when hackers broke into that site. Meanwhile, 8tracks, an Internet radio service, told its users to change their passwords after reports appeared that a cache of credentials for 18 million users of the service were up for sale on the Dark Web. And Zomato, a restaurant search service, reset the stolen passwords of some 17 million users. Lawyers were also busy during the period. Health insurer Anthem put a $115 million deal on the table to settle a data breach class action lawsuit against it. Retailer Target paid $18.5 million to settle a data breach lawsuit filed against it by 47 states. In addition, data breach litigation was settled against Neiman Marcus for $1.6 million and Kmart for $5.2 million. Regulators were also busy. In June, it was reported that the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office collected 65 percent more in fines in 2016 compared to 2015, to £3,245,500 from £2 million. In the United States, the federal Department of Health and Human Services collected for data breach infractions $2.5 million from CardioNet, a mobile heart monitoring technology company based in Malvern, Pa. and $400,000 from The Metro Community Provider Network in Denver. Reports on the costs of data breaches were also released during the quarter. IBM Security found that the average cost of a data breach globally is $3.62 million, a 10 percent decrease from 2016. Meanwhile, CGI released an eye-opening analysis of 65 “severe” and “catastrophic” data breaches. It found that those kinds of breaches can cost a company 1.8 percent of its market value. For a typical FTSE 100 company, that would be a permanent loss of market capitalization of £120 million. Jun. 29. The UK’s Government Digital Service recommends users of its Data.Gov.UK website change their passwords after a database of usernames and email addresses were discovered on a system accessible to the public during a routine security review. Jun. 28. Goldeneye ransomware spreads from Ukraine disrupting business and government computing activity in at least 65 nations. Businesses affected by the virus include Russian oil company Rosneft, shipping firm A.P. Moller-Maersk and pharmaceutical giant Merck. Jun. 28. Nayana, a web-hosting company in South Korea, agrees to pay $1.1 million to unlock computers infected by hackers with ransomware. More than half of the company’s 300 servers were disabled by the attack that affected an estimated 3,400 websites. Jun. 27. 8tracks, an Internet radio service, recommends its users change their passwords after reports appear that a cache of credentials for 18 million users of the service are up for sale on the Dark Web. Jun. 27. Experian releases study that finds only nine percent of companies are prepared for the EU Global Data Protection Regulation and 59 percent of the 550 IT security and compliance professionals surveyed said their companies did not know how to comply with the GDPR. Jun. 27. Anthony Murgio, 33, sentenced to five and a half years in prison for operating an illegal bitcoin exchange suspected of laundering money for hackers and linked to data breach at JPMorgan Chase & Co. Jun. 23. FBI’s Internet Complaint Center reports U.S. losses due to Internet crime in 2016 totaled $1.3 billion. Jun. 23. Plaintiff’s legal team announces $115 million proposed settlement in class action lawsuit against health insurer Anthem stemming from data breach resulting in the theft of personal information of 7.8 million people. Jun. 23. The Register reports 32 terabytes of data stolen from Microsoft was posted to the Internet, including internal builds of Windows and chunks of its source code. Jun. 23. The Times of London reports that stolen email addresses and passwords of tens of thousands of government officialsin the UK are being sold or bartered on Russian-speaking hacking sites. Jun. 23. Airway Oxygen in Michigan notifies 500,000 people their personal health information is at risk due to unauthorized access to its infrastructure in April. Jun. 23. Southern Illinois Healthcare reports that personal information of more than 600 patients is at risk after Experian Health, a third-party vendor, accidentally sent their data to the wrong medical facilities between Feb. 13 data breach that affected some of the fast food firm’s franchises in 2015 and 2016. Feb. 21. Business Continuity Institute and British Standards Institute release survey of more than 700 organizations in 79 countries finding that nearly nine out of 10 businesses (88 percent) worldwide are worried about the threat of cyberattacks. Feb. 21. Louisiana Department of Insurance says personal information is at risk of an estimated 8,000 former members of the failed Louisiana Health Cooperative after a data breach at the co-op’s reinsurance broker. Feb. 20. Accenture releases survey finding more than one in four (26 percent) Americans have had their personal medical information stolen from a technology system and that half those victims suffered medical identity theft, which cost them, on average, $2,500 in out-of-pocket expenses. Feb. 20. Nursing home chain American Senior Communities in Indiana states W-2 tax information of more than 17,000 employees has been compromised in a phishing scam. Feb. 18. Family Services of Rochester (Minn.) says an investigation is underway of a data breach that has compromised the personal information of an unspecified number of clients. Feb. 17. Memorial Health Care systems, an operator of six hospitals in South Florida, agrees to pay U.S. Department of Health and Human Services $5.5 million to settle case involving the theft of patient information by two employees. Feb. 17. A survey of 250 IT pros by iSense Solutions for Bitdefender finds 34 percent of companies have suffered a data breach in the last year and of those companies breached, 74 percent don’t know how it happened. Feb.16. New York Department of Financial Services releases “first in nation” cybersecurity regulations for the financial services industry. Feb. 16. The Philippines’ Commission on Elections confirms a laptop containing personal information, including biometrics, of 55 million voters was stolen from the election office of Wao, Lanao del Sur. Feb. 16. British Columbia Premier Christy Clark announces an investigation is underway into a data breach of the province’s PharmaNet system that compromised medical information of some 7,500 people. Feb. 16. Memorial Health Care System in Florida pays $5.5 million to settle potential violations of federal privacy and security rules after reporting the personal health information of 115,143 people was impermissibly accessed by its employees and impermissibly disclosed to affiliated physician office staff. Feb. 15. Yahoo warns its users that forged cookies were used to log into some of their accounts in 2015 or 2016 without the use of passwords. Feb. 15. U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs says personal data of more than 20,000 members of two Montana American Indian tribes is at risk after an external hard drive was stolen from a law enforcement vehicle in Big Horn County. Feb. 15. Texas Department of Transportation confirms breach of an automated administration system which may have left some employee data altered and compromised. Feb. 15. Redspin releases annual data breach report revealing hacking attacks on healthcare providers increased 320 percent in 2016. Feb. 15. World Trademark Review reports that more than 100,000 websites have been hacked and defaced following the release WordPress 4.7.2 which contained a fix for a critical vulnerability. Feb. 15. Charter Oak Fire Insurance Company and Travelers Property Casualty Co. of America asks federal court in Florida to reject claim by 21st Century Oncology that data breach losses are covered by publication of confidential information clause in existing insurance policy. Feb.15. Horizon Healthcare Services of New Jersey agrees to pay state $1.1 million to settle case involving the theft of two laptops that allegedly compromised the personal information of 690,000 policyholders. Feb. 14. Verizon releases its 2017 data breach digest finding that the effects of breaches are spreading to even more parts of an enterprise and causing more problems outside of IT. Feb. 11. NBC News reports data breach at PIP, a printing chain with more than 400 outlets in 13 countries, has exposed thousands of sensitive documents from labor filings for NFL players to lawsuits against Hollywood studios. Feb. 10. Ercan Findikoglu is sentenced in a New York federal court to eight years in prison for conducting cyberattacks that netted him $55 million. Feb. 10. Bloomington Public Schools in Minnesota alerts several thousand employees their personal and financial information is at risk from a tax form phishing scam. Feb. 9. Arby’s alerts nearly 355,000 customers that their payment card information may have been compromised due to a malware infection of the point-of-sale system at some of its stores between October 25 and January 19. Feb. 9. Hacked-DB reports a hacker has leaked 1.3 million accounts stolen from staffing website eLance in 2009, as well as hundreds of thousands of Yahoo and Gmail accounts. Feb. 9. Mercer County School District in West Virginia is victimized by tax phishing scam that results in theft of personal and financial information of some 1,800 school employees. Feb. 8. Boeing reveals the personal information of some 36,000 employees is at risk after an employee sent a spreadsheet with the information to his spouse to resolve a formatting issue. Feb. 8. Brian Neff, who owns an online insurance company based in Texas, files putative class action lawsuit in a federal district court in California claiming fraudulent charges were made to his credit cards due to data breaches at Yahoo. Feb. 8. Russia’s Ministry of Internal Affairs announces it arrested in January nine suspected members of a cybercrime group known as Lurk alleged to have played a role in the theft of more than $17 million from the country’s banks. Feb. 7. GoCardless, a UK payment processing company, warns its customers that their personal data is at risk due to the theft of 19 laptops from its offices. Feb. 6. Federal Trade Commission announces Vizio, one of the world’s largest makers of “smart” televisions, agrees to pay $2.2 million to settle charges it installed software on its TVs to collect viewing data on 11 million consumer TVs without the knowledge or consent of their owners. Feb. 6. Marsh announces launch of Marsh CyberShield, a cyber risk and data breach insurance policy for mid- to large-sized organizations to cover up to $624 million in risk associated with cyber incidents and data breaches. Feb. 6. U.S. Appeals Court in West Virginia dismisses lawsuit arising from data breaches at the Bryan Dorn Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Columbia, S.C., saying plaintiffs “failed to show they were in any real and immediate danger of sustaining a direct injury as a result of some official conduct.” Feb. 6. Gdadebo Adebiyi pleads guilty to conspiracy to commit mail fraud for his role in a breach of the Bradley University data warehouse which resulted in the theft of $770,000. Feb. 3. Hacker dumps on the Internet a database of users of Freeedom Hosting II, as well as the administrative credentials for accessing the thousands of “Dark Web” websites it services. Feb. 3. Michigan Unemployment Insurance Agency says personal information of up to 1.87 million workers in the state is at risk after a software error in its computer system exposed their data to third-party payroll vendors and employers unauthorized to access it. Feb. 3. Toys R Us advises all loyalty customers to change their passwords because of data breaches at the vendor that runs its Rewards R Us program. Feb. 2. InterContinental Hotels Group confirms credit card data breach between August and December 2016 at restaurants and bars at 12 of its hotels. Feb. 1. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announces Children’s Medical Center of Dallas has agreed to pay $3.2 million civil money penalty for impermissible disclosure of unsecured electronic protected health information and non-compliance over many years with federal security standards. Feb. 1. Licking County, Ohio, announces more than 1,000 computers have been shut down by a ransomwaree attack. Jan. 31. Officials at Scotty’s Brewhouse in Indianapolis reveal W-2 forms of 4,000 employees were emailed to an unknown party posing as the CEO of the company. Jan. 31. Data breach notification site Have I Been Pwned reports that 1.8 million user credentials have been stolen from online forum of Polish game development studio CD Projekt RED. Jan. 31. Cisco releases security report that finds for more than a third of organizations that suffered a data breach in 2016, the cost of the breach exceeded 20 percent of revenues. Jan. 31. The Irish Sun reports that data breaches at two popular forums for PlayStation and Xbox have resulted in the exposure of 2.5 million accounts. Jan. 30. Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred strips the St. Louis Cardinals of its top two draft picks and orders the team to pay the Houston Astros $2 million for hacking into the Astros email system and scouting database. Jan.30. Belton (Texas) Independent School District officials discover W-2 forms of 1,700 current and former employees were emailed to an online scammer posing as the ISD’s superintendent. Jan. 29.Massachusetts releases online records showing sensitive information from nearly 3.4 million Bay State customer accounts have been inappropriately viewed, lost or stolen from businesses and state agencies since 2012. Jan. 29. The Romantik Seehotel Jägerwirt in Austria pays cyber extortionist $1,600 after ransomware attack disabled the hotel’s key lock, reservation and cash desk systems. Jan. 27. MacKeeper researchers say recordings of some 400,000 phone calls from at least one U.S.-based telemarketing firm has been exposed on the Internet due to a database misconfiguration error. Jan. 27. Singapore’s Personal Data Protection Commission fines PropNex Realty $10,000 after it accidentally exposed online the personal data of 1,765 people. Jan. 27. A data thief posing as the CEO of solar company Sunrun obtains W-2 forms of an unspecified number of employees in a phishing scam. Jan. 27. Lexington County School District 2 in Wisconsin reveals W-2 forms of employees who worked there between Jan. 1 and Dec. 31, 2016 were stolen in a phishing scam. Jan. 27. Superintendant Daniel Trevino announces personal information in the W-2 tax forms of some 950 employees of the Mercedes, Texas,school district is at risk after it was emailed to an unauthorized third-party in a phishing scam. Jan. 26. New York Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman announces Acer Service Corporation has agreed to pay $115,000 in penalties and to shore up its data security after a data breach at its website exposed more than 35,000 credit card numbers. Jan. 26. UGI Utilities in Pennsylvania announces personal information of about 1,900 employees was acquired by perpetrators of an email phishing scam. Jan. 26. Website of LeakedSource, a for-profit breach notification service, disappears from Net amid reports it was raided by law enforcement. Jan. 26. Pew Research Center releases survey finding that 51 percent of American adults are “not at all confident” or “not too confident” in social media sites keeping their information safe and 49 percent feel the same way about the federal government. Jan. 26. Beazley, a provider of data breach response insurance, reports ransomware attacks in 2016 quadrupled over the previous year will double again in 2017. Jan. 25. Risk Based Security reports that in 2016 there were 4,149 data breaches that exposed 4.2 billion records. Jan. 25. Rosen Law Firm announces filing of investors class action lawsuit against Yahoo stemming from data breaches that resulted in theft of information for one billion user accounts. Jan. 23. Wall Street Journal reports SEC is investigating whether two massive data breaches at Yahoo should have been reported sooner. Jan. 23. Reuters reports that bandits who stole data from 29,000 clients of XP Investments SA of Brazil demanded a $7.1 million ransom to keep the security breach secret. Jan. 20. Federal appellate court in Philadelphia finds class action lawsuit against Horizon Healthcare stemming from data breach may proceed even though only intangible injuries are claimed by the plaintiffs. Jan. 20. Ohio State Veterinary Medical Center in Dublin, Ohio, alerts 4,611 clients that their personal data is at risk due to data breach caused by malware infection. Jan. 20. Bowlmor AMF, the world’s largest bowling center operator, says it has had a possible data breach at 21 of its more than 300 domestic locations in 12 states. Jan. 20. CSO Online reports a misconfigured synchronization program at Canadian ISP KWIC Internet has exposed its customers’ personal information and more on the public Internet. Jan. 19. Identity Theft Resource Center and CyberScout report U.S. data breaches reached all time high in 2016 of 1,093, a 40 percent increase over the 780 in 2015. Jan. 19. Army announces its first bug bounty program received 400 bug reports, 118 of which were unique and actionable and earned their programmers $100,000 in rewards. Jan. 19. Ransomware attack on St. Louis Public Library disables 700 computers and prevents books and other materials from being checked out of the library. Jan. 18. Supercell, the developer of the mobile game Clash of Clans, warns users a vulnerability in its forum software has exposed their emails and encrypted passwords to hackers. According to the breach notification website LeakBase, some 1.1 million accounts are affected by the breach. Jan. 18. CoPilot Provider Support Services, a health care provider in Hyde Park, New York, announces personal information of some 220,000 people is at risk after one of its databases was accessed by an unauthorized third-party. Jan. 17. Australian Prime Minister Malcom Turnbull orders his top cyber security adviser to prepare a report on claims that more than 3,000 government officials had private data stolen in the 2013 Yahoo data breach. Jan. 17. An analysis of 16,000 Android applications by cybersecurity firm Fallible reveals 2,500 of them had some type of secret credential hard-coded into them by developers, including access tokens and API keys for services like Twitter, Dropbox, Flickr, Instagram, Slack and Amazon Web Services. Jan.17. Motherboard reports data traders are swapping details o more than one million user accounts belonging to Supercell. a maker of popular mobile games, such as Clash of Clans. Jan. 17. Sentara, a healthcare provider servicing Virginia and North Carolina says personal information of 5,454 patients is at risk due to data breach at third party vendor. Jan. 17. Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles warns 3,600 patients their personal data is at risk due to theft of an unencrypted laptop in October. Jan. 13. Protenus reports fewer patient records were stolen in health care data breaches in 2016 (27.3 million) than 2015 (113 million) but there were more data breaches in 2016 (450) compared to 2015 (253). Jan. 13. The Delaware Department 0f Insurance announces the personal information of 19,000 members of Highmark Blue Cross Blue Shield of Delaware is at risk following a data breach at two of the health care provider’s subcontractors. Jan. 13. Three Pennsylvania Superior Court judges uphold lower court ruling that health care provider UPMC, which suffered a data breach in which personal information of 62,000 employees was stolen, is not under any obligation to keep its employees data safe. Jan. 13. Federal appeals court in St. Louis affirms lower court ruling capping liability at $500,000 for data breach at Schmuck Markets in 2013. Jan. 13. Margarita Serrano files class action lawsuit in a federal district court in California alleging Automotive Recovery Services exposed her personal information to hackers after she donated a car to charity. Jan. 12. Motherboard reports it has received from a hacker 900 gigabytes of data stolen from Cellebrite — an Israeli mobile hacking company that’s done work for U.S. federal and state law enforcement agencies as well as Russia, the United Arab Emirates and Turkey — including customer information, databases, and a vast amount of technical data regarding its products. Jan. 12. Federal court in Tennessee approves $1.9 million settlement of class action lawsuit against Mapco Express for data breach in 2013. Jan.11. CSO Online reports that 68.5 percent of public-facing MongoDB databases or 32,820 installations have been infected by ransomware from multiple actors. Jan. 11. UK Information Commissioner’s Office fines Royal & Sun Alliance Insurance £150,000 for data breach resulting from theft of storage device containing information on nearly 60,000 customers. Jan. 11. Giulio Occhionero, 45, and Francesca Maria Occhionero, 49, are charged in a Roman court with hacking into the phones and computers of high-ranking government officials, business leaders and Freemasons in Italy. Jan. 10. Federal judge in Tennessee approves $1.9 million settlement in lawsuit against convenience store chain Mapco Express stemming from point of sale data breach in 2013. Jan. 9. Presence Health in Illinois agrees to pay $475,000 to settle case with U.S. Department of Health and Human Services over the untimely reporting of a breach of protected health information. Jan. 9. Owners of the Two Plus Two poker discussion forum confirms personal information about its members has been stolen and posted to the Internet for public access. Jan. 9. Sydney Morning Herald reports National Australia Bank mistakenly sent the bank account details of 60,000 customers to an email address controlled by Real Assets Limited, a domain name broker. Jan. 9. An investor files a lawsuit against the board of directors of Wendy’s claiming breach of fiduciary duties by mismanaging a data breach that resulted in the theft of customer data. Jan. 8. Online gambling site TwoPlusTwo tells some of its 400,000 customers to reset their passwords and take extra precautions trading or staking players because of data breach at the site. Jan. 7. Breach notification service LeakedSource announces it has obtained 1,503,707 customer records stolen in data breach in December from ESEA, one of the largest competitive video gaming communities on earth. Jan. 6. California Department of Insurance finds data breach that compromised 78.8 million consumer records at health insurer Anthem was performed on behalf of a foreign government. Jan. 6. Los Angeles Valley College pays $28,000 in bitcoin to hacker who locked out 1,800 staff and teachers from their computers with ransomware. Jan. 5. The Philipine National Privacy Commission recommends criminal charges be filed against Commission on Elections Chairman J. Andres D. Bautista for a data breach exposing online the personal data of 1.3 million overseas Filipino voters and the fingerprints of 15.8 million people. Jan. 5. Federal Trade Commission files complaint against D-Link for failing to take adequate measures to secure its routers and webcams which left them vulnerable to hackers and put consumer privacy at risk. Jan. 5. The University of Alberta in Canada warns more than 3,000 faculty, students and staff that their passwords are at risk due to malware infections on 300 computers at the institution. Jan. 4. Frederick County (Maryland) Board of Education refuses to send student information to state Education Department after suspected data breach at department exposed on the Inernet personal information of 1,000 students from the county. Jan. 4. Andrew Minty, Jamie Leong, and Michelle Craddock, plead guilty and are sentenced for conspiring to steal customer information from Enterprise Rent-A-Car in the UK and selling it for hundreds of thousands of pounds to accident claims companies who used it to make nuisance calls about personal injury claims. Jan. 3. U.S. Office of Management and Budget publishes new policies on how federal agencies should prepare for and address a breach of personally identifiable information. Jan. 3 The Massachusetts Office of Consumer Affairs and Business Regulation announces it is making reports of potential identity theft available to the public on its website and eliminating need to file a public records request to see them. Stay tuned for the Q2 2017 edition of the Data Breach Report. John P. Mello, Jr. a freelance writer specializing in business and technology subjects, including consumer electronics, business computing and cyber security. The Data Breach Report provides a quarterly diary of noteworthy data breaches and cyber-attacks to CIOs, CSOs, CISOs, IT security teams, and the media. Yahoo, Friend Finder, Dropbox suffer biggest attacks Information on millions of people was exposed during the final calendar quarter of 2016. Among the big hacks during the period were the theft of information on more than one billion Yahoo accounts, the compromise of the Friend Finder network, which put at risk 412 million accounts and the posting to the Internet by a hacker of 68 million Dropbox accounts from a 2012 data breach. Cyber bank robbers were also busy during the frame. They compromised 3.2 million payment cards in India and stole $31 million from the central bank of Russia. Dec. 29. FBI and U.S. Department of Homeland Security issue joint report detailing the tools and infrastructure used by Russian intelligence services to compromise and exploit networks and infrastructure associated with the recent U.S. election, as well as a range of U.S. government, political and private sector entities. Dec. 29. Nevada takes its marijuana portal offline after a data breach exposed confidential information on some 12,000 applications for cards used to obtain medical marijuana. Dec. 28. InterContinental Hotel Group, which operates more than 5,000 hotels worldwide, says it’s investigating reports of a possible data breach at a small number of its hotels located in the United States. Dec. 27. Three Chinese citizens charged by United States of engaging in conspiracies to commit insider trading, wire fraud and computer intrusion in an indictment filed in federal court in Manhattan. Dec. 24. The Daily Caller reports a Russian hacker breached The Russian Visa Center and exposed information on some 3,000 people seeking assistance in obtaining Russian visas. Dec. 14. Yahoo discloses data breach dating back to 2013 resulting in theft of information on more than one billion accounts. Dec. 2. Reuters reports hackers using a client’s credentials stole more than $31 million from the central bank of Russia. Dec. 1. MacKeeper Security Researcher Chris Vickery reports sensitive information of explosives handling company Allied-Horizontal is at risk after a Network-Attached Storage device was exposed to the public Internet. Dec. 1. International law enforcement authorities announce dismantling of Avalanche, a malware delivery and money mule recruiting platform that produced hundreds of millions of euros in revenues for its operators. Nov. 30. Camelot, the operator of the UK’s national lottery, announces some 26,500 player accounts are at risk after a data breach of its systems. Nov. 30. Europol reports sensitive data on terrorism investigations conducted from 2006 to 2008 is at risk after an employee brought the data home in violation of agency policy and stored it on a hard drive connected to the Internet without password protection. Nov. 29. Barrett Brown, a self-proclaimed spokesman for the hacktivist collaborative known as Anonymous, is released from federal prison five months before scheduled. Nov. 29 Idaho Fish & Game announces it is again selling licenses and posting hunter reports online. The service was knocked offline in August by a data breach. Nov. 29. Deutsche Telecom and German Office for Information Security announce system disruption over the weekend  affecting some 900,000 customers was part of a failed global attempt by hackers to hijack routers and use them to disrupt Internet traffic. Nov. 28. The Japan Times reports a cyberattack by a state actor in September may have compromised Japan’s internal military network. Nov. 28. U.S. Navy warns more than 130,000 sailors their personal information is at risk after a laptop by a contractor is compromised. Nov. 19. Russian telecom watchdog Roskomnadzor discovers data breaches at 55 websites which contain personal information of children who have written to “Father Frost,” the Russian Santa Claus. Nov. 18. Michigan State University announces it will notify some 400,000 current and former students and staff of data breach that has compromised their personal information. Nov. 16. GulfNews reports personal records of more than 34 million residents of the Indian state of Kerala was posted to Facebook by a hacker disenchanted with the security of the state’s computer systems. Nov. 16. Protenus reports month-to-month decline in health care data breaches to 35 in October from 37 in September, although the number of patient records increased to 776,533 from 246,876. Nov. 16. Workers at Indian security firm AI solutions discovered selling phone records of Australians from call centers of Optus, Telstra and Vodaphone. Nov. 15. Seventeen-year-old boy pleads guilty in UK to data breach last year at telecommunications provider TalkTalk which resulted in unauthorized access to personal data of nearly 160,000 people. Nov. 14. Adobe agrees to pay $1 million to 15 states to settle case stemming from 2013 data breach at the company which resulted in unauthorized access to some 552,000 people. Nov. 14. Data breach at Friend Finder Network places at risk personal information in more than 412 million accounts. Nov. 3. New Zealand Nurses Organization announces “tens of thousands” member’s contact details were emailed to someone posing as the chief executive of the organization. Nov. 2. Business Insider announces its website was compromised by OurMine, a group that hacks websites to expose security flaws. Nov. 2. U.S. District Judge Rosemary Collyer dismisses class action lawsuit stemming from 2015 data breach at the IRS in which  the personal and financial information of 330,000 taxpayers and their family members was compromised by hackers who infiltrated the now defunct “Get Transcript” service, which allowed taxpayers to access their tax filings online. Oct. 31. Hacker group calling itself Shadow Brokers releases data dump of alleged computer servers around the world compromised by The Equation Group, which is believed to be linked to the NSA. Oct. 31. U.S. Office of Personnel Management announces it is changing credit monitoring and identity protection service providers and that some of the 25 million people affected by a data breach at the agency will have to re-enroll to continue coverage. Oct. 31. Attorney General of Washington reports that from July 2015 to July 2016 39 data breaches in the state affected some 450,000 people. Oct. 20. Weebly, a San Francisco-based website creation company, starts notifying more than 43 million customers their personal information is at risk due to data breach that ocurred in February. Oct. 20. National Payments Corporation of India reports some 3.2 million payment cards have been compromised in massive ATM security breach. Oct. 19.  Federal Reserve, FDIC and OCC issue notice of proposed rulemaking seeking comments on a set of enforceable cybersecurity standards for banks with more than $50 billion in assets. Oct. 18. Redbus, an Indian online travel ticketing platform, confirms data breach that may have compromised more than four million accounts. Company advises all its users to reset their passwords. Oct. 19. Czech police announce they have arrested Russian citizen in Prague wanted by the FBI in connection to 2012 data theft of 117 million passwords at LinkedIn. Oct. 17. Katy Independent School District in Texas warns 78,000 students and staff members their personal data is at risk due to a data breach. Oct. 7. U.S. government formally accuses Russia of a campaign of cyber attacks against Democratic Party organizations ahead of the Nov. 8 presidential election. Oct. 6. Central Ohio Urology Group reports to U.S. Department of Health and Human Services that 300,000 patients were affected by data breach in August, the eighth largest breach in the nation this year. Oct. 6. Montana Department of Justice reports 110,000 citizens of the state were victims of data breaches in the last 12 months. Oct. 6. American 1 Credit Union in Jackson, Mich., announced it will decline all purchases made at Wendy’s by its payment card holders because it doesn’t believe the fast food chain has removed all the malware that infected its point-of-sale systems in more than 1,000 locations in 2-15. Oct. 5. The BBC reports Fancy Bears, the hackers who published online medical records stolen from the World Anti-Doping Agency, may have doctored some of the data in those records. Oct. 5. UK Information Commissioner’s Office orders TalkTalk to pay fine of£400,000 in connection to 2015 data breach that affected 150,000 customers. Oct. 5. The New York Times reports the FBI has arrested Harold T. Martin,  a former employee of NSA contractor Booz Allen Hamilton, and is investigating whether he stole and disclosed classified security code developed by the agency to compromise the networks of foreign governments. Oct. 4. Personal data of more than 1.5 million users of websites run by C&Z Tech Limited, which include HaveAFling.mobi, HaveAnAffair.mobi and HookUpDating.mobi, is at risk after a database for the sites was found exposed to the Internet without a password. Oct. 4. Thomas White, aka The Cthulhu, posts to his website as a free download information from more than 68 million Dropbox accounts stolen in a 2012 data breach of the service. Oct. 4. The Sunday Express reports that Amazon has alerted some its customers that their passwords have been reset after it discovered their Amazon email address and password corresponded to a login list posted online. Oct. 4. Reuters reports that last year Yahoo built a custom program to search all its customers’ incoming emails for information provided to it by U.S. intelligence officials. Yahoo later denied the claims in the report. Oct. 3. U.S. District Court Judge Andrea R. Wood dismisses class action lawsuit against Barnes & Noble related to a compromise of its point-of-sale systems in 2012. She found that plaintiffs failed to show they had suffered any actual damages because of the data breach. Oct. 3. U.S. Surgeon General warns 6,600 medical professionals in his “commissioned corps” that their personal information is at risk by a breach of the agency’s personnel system. Stay tuned for the Q1 2017 edition of the Data Breach Report. John P. Mello, Jr. a freelance writer specializing in business and technology subjects, including consumer electronics, business computing and cyber security. 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