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Tech is having a reckoning. Tech investors? Not so much.

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Tech is having a reckoning. Tech investors? Not so much.


They have also been indirect beneficiaries of the insurrection at the Capitol, with spikes in users as a result of the mainstream services’ deplatforming President Trump, his surrogates, and accounts promoting the QAnon conspiracy.

In a few cases, public pressure has forced action. DLive, a cryptocurrency-based video streaming site, which was acquired by BitTorrent’s Tron Foundation in October 2020, suspended or permanently banned accounts, channels, and individual broadcasts after the Southern Poverty Law Center identified those that livestreamed the attack from inside the Capitol building.

Neither Tron Foundation, which owns DLive, nor Medici Ventures, the Overstock subsidiary that invested in Minds, responded to requests for comment. 

EvoNexus, a Southern California-based tech incubator that helped fund the self-described “non-biased” social network CloutHub, forwarded our request for comment to CloutHub’s PR team, who denied that its platform was used in the planning of the insurrection. They said that a group started on the platform and promoted by founder Jeff Brain was merely for organizing ride sharing to the Trump rally on January 6. The group, it said, “was for peaceful activities only and asked that members report anyone talking about violence.”  

But there’s a fine line between speech and action, says Margaret O’Mara, a historian at the University of Washington who studies the intersection between technology and politics. When, as a platform “you decide you’re not going to take sides, and you’re going to be an unfettered platform for free speech,” and then people “saying horrible things” is “resulting in action,” then platforms need to reckon with the fact that “we are a catalyst of this, we are becoming an organizing platform for this.” 

“Maybe you wouldn’t get dealflow”

For the most part, says O’Donnell, investors are worried that expressing an opinion about those companies might limit their ability to make deals, and therefore make money.

Even venture capital firms “have to depend on pools of money elsewhere in the ecosystem,” he says. “The worry was that maybe you wouldn’t get dealflow,” or that you’d be labeled as “difficult to work with or, you know, picking off somebody who might do the next round of your company.” 

Despite this, however, O’Donnell says he does not believe that investors should completely avoid “alt tech.” Tech investors like disruption, he explains, and they see in alt tech the potential to “break up the monoliths.” 

“Could that same technology be used for coordinating among people in doing bad stuff? Yeah, it’s possible, just in the same way that people use phones to commit crimes,” he says, adding that this issue can be resolved by having the right rules and procedures in place. 

“There’s some alternative tech whose DNA is about decentralization, and there’s some alt-tech whose DNA is about a political perspective,” he says. He does not consider Gab, for example, to be a decentralized platform, but rather “a central hosting hub for people who otherwise violate the terms of service of other platforms.”

“It’s going to be pissing in the wind… because that guy over there is going to be in.”

Charlie O’Donnell

“The internet is decentralized, right? But we have means for creating databases of bad actors, when it comes to spam, when it comes to denial of service attacks,” he says, suggesting the same could be true of bad actors on alt tech platforms. 

But overlooking the more dangerous sides of these communications platforms, and how their design often facilitates dangerous behavior is a mistake, says O’Mara. “It’s a kind of escapism that runs through the response that powerful people in tech … have, which is just, if we have alternative technologies, if we just have a decentralized internet, if we just have Bitcoin” … then everything will be better.

She calls this position “idealistic” but “very unrealistic,” and a reflection of “a deeply rooted piece of Silicon Valley culture. It goes all the way back to, ‘We don’t like the world as it is, so we’re gonna build this alternative platform on which to revise social relationships.’” 

The problem, O’Mara adds, is that these solutions are “very technology driven” and “chiefly promulgated by pretty privileged people that … have a hard time … [imagining] a lot of the social politics. So there’s not a real reckoning with structural inequality or other systems that need to be changed.”

How to have “a transformational effect”

Some believe that tech investors could shift what kind of companies get built, if they chose to. 

“If venture capitalists committed to not investing in predatory business models that incite violence, that would have a transformational effect,” says McNamee.

At an individual level, they could ask better questions even before investing, says O’Donnell, including avoiding companies without content policies, or requesting that companies create them before a VC signs on.

Once invested, O’Donnell adds that investors can also sell their shares, including at a loss, if they truly wanted to take a stand. But he recognizes the tall order that this would represent—after all, it’s highly likely that a high-growth startup will simply find a different source of money to step in to the space that a principled investor just vacated. “It’s going to be pissing in the wind,” he says, “Because that guy over there is going to be in.”

In other words, a real reckoning among VCs would require a reorientation of how Silicon Valley thinks, and right now it is still focused on “one, and only one, metric that matters, and that’s financial return,” says Freada Kapor Klein.

If funders changed their investment strategies—to put in moral clauses against companies that profit from extremism, for example, as O’Donnell suggested—the impact that this would have on what startup founders chase would be enormous, says O’Mara. “People follow the money,” she says, but “it’s not just money, it’s mentorship, it’s how you build a company, it’s this whole set of principles about what success looks like.” 

“It would have been great if VCs who pride themselves on risk-taking and innovation and disruption … led the way,” concludes Kapor Klein. “But this tsunami is coming. And they will have to change.”

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The hunter-gatherer groups at the heart of a microbiome gold rush

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The hunter-gatherer groups at the heart of a microbiome gold rush


The first step to finding out is to catalogue what microbes we might have lost. To get as close to ancient microbiomes as possible, microbiologists have begun studying multiple Indigenous groups. Two have received the most attention: the Yanomami of the Amazon rainforest and the Hadza, in northern Tanzania. 

Researchers have made some startling discoveries already. A study by Sonnenburg and his colleagues, published in July, found that the gut microbiomes of the Hadza appear to include bugs that aren’t seen elsewhere—around 20% of the microbe genomes identified had not been recorded in a global catalogue of over 200,000 such genomes. The researchers found 8.4 million protein families in the guts of the 167 Hadza people they studied. Over half of them had not previously been identified in the human gut.

Plenty of other studies published in the last decade or so have helped build a picture of how the diets and lifestyles of hunter-gatherer societies influence the microbiome, and scientists have speculated on what this means for those living in more industrialized societies. But these revelations have come at a price.

A changing way of life

The Hadza people hunt wild animals and forage for fruit and honey. “We still live the ancient way of life, with arrows and old knives,” says Mangola, who works with the Olanakwe Community Fund to support education and economic projects for the Hadza. Hunters seek out food in the bush, which might include baboons, vervet monkeys, guinea fowl, kudu, porcupines, or dik-dik. Gatherers collect fruits, vegetables, and honey.

Mangola, who has met with multiple scientists over the years and participated in many research projects, has witnessed firsthand the impact of such research on his community. Much of it has been positive. But not all researchers act thoughtfully and ethically, he says, and some have exploited or harmed the community.

One enduring problem, says Mangola, is that scientists have tended to come and study the Hadza without properly explaining their research or their results. They arrive from Europe or the US, accompanied by guides, and collect feces, blood, hair, and other biological samples. Often, the people giving up these samples don’t know what they will be used for, says Mangola. Scientists get their results and publish them without returning to share them. “You tell the world [what you’ve discovered]—why can’t you come back to Tanzania to tell the Hadza?” asks Mangola. “It would bring meaning and excitement to the community,” he says.

Some scientists have talked about the Hadza as if they were living fossils, says Alyssa Crittenden, a nutritional anthropologist and biologist at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas, who has been studying and working with the Hadza for the last two decades.

The Hadza have been described as being “locked in time,” she adds, but characterizations like that don’t reflect reality. She has made many trips to Tanzania and seen for herself how life has changed. Tourists flock to the region. Roads have been built. Charities have helped the Hadza secure land rights. Mangola went abroad for his education: he has a law degree and a master’s from the Indigenous Peoples Law and Policy program at the University of Arizona.

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The Download: a microbiome gold rush, and Eric Schmidt’s election misinformation plan

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The Download: a microbiome gold rush, and Eric Schmidt’s election misinformation plan


Over the last couple of decades, scientists have come to realize just how important the microbes that crawl all over us are to our health. But some believe our microbiomes are in crisis—casualties of an increasingly sanitized way of life. Disturbances in the collections of microbes we host have been associated with a whole host of diseases, ranging from arthritis to Alzheimer’s.

Some might not be completely gone, though. Scientists believe many might still be hiding inside the intestines of people who don’t live in the polluted, processed environment that most of the rest of us share. They’ve been studying the feces of people like the Yanomami, an Indigenous group in the Amazon, who appear to still have some of the microbes that other people have lost. 

But there is a major catch: we don’t know whether those in hunter-gatherer societies really do have “healthier” microbiomes—and if they do, whether the benefits could be shared with others. At the same time, members of the communities being studied are concerned about the risk of what’s called biopiracy—taking natural resources from poorer countries for the benefit of wealthier ones. Read the full story.

—Jessica Hamzelou

Eric Schmidt has a 6-point plan for fighting election misinformation

—by Eric Schmidt, formerly the CEO of Google, and current cofounder of philanthropic initiative Schmidt Futures

The coming year will be one of seismic political shifts. Over 4 billion people will head to the polls in countries including the United States, Taiwan, India, and Indonesia, making 2024 the biggest election year in history.

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Navigating a shifting customer-engagement landscape with generative AI

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Navigating a shifting customer-engagement landscape with generative AI


A strategic imperative

Generative AI’s ability to harness customer data in a highly sophisticated manner means enterprises are accelerating plans to invest in and leverage the technology’s capabilities. In a study titled “The Future of Enterprise Data & AI,” Corinium Intelligence and WNS Triange surveyed 100 global C-suite leaders and decision-makers specializing in AI, analytics, and data. Seventy-six percent of the respondents said that their organizations are already using or planning to use generative AI.

According to McKinsey, while generative AI will affect most business functions, “four of them will likely account for 75% of the total annual value it can deliver.” Among these are marketing and sales and customer operations. Yet, despite the technology’s benefits, many leaders are unsure about the right approach to take and mindful of the risks associated with large investments.

Mapping out a generative AI pathway

One of the first challenges organizations need to overcome is senior leadership alignment. “You need the necessary strategy; you need the ability to have the necessary buy-in of people,” says Ayer. “You need to make sure that you’ve got the right use case and business case for each one of them.” In other words, a clearly defined roadmap and precise business objectives are as crucial as understanding whether a process is amenable to the use of generative AI.

The implementation of a generative AI strategy can take time. According to Ayer, business leaders should maintain a realistic perspective on the duration required for formulating a strategy, conduct necessary training across various teams and functions, and identify the areas of value addition. And for any generative AI deployment to work seamlessly, the right data ecosystems must be in place.

Ayer cites WNS Triange’s collaboration with an insurer to create a claims process by leveraging generative AI. Thanks to the new technology, the insurer can immediately assess the severity of a vehicle’s damage from an accident and make a claims recommendation based on the unstructured data provided by the client. “Because this can be immediately assessed by a surveyor and they can reach a recommendation quickly, this instantly improves the insurer’s ability to satisfy their policyholders and reduce the claims processing time,” Ayer explains.

All that, however, would not be possible without data on past claims history, repair costs, transaction data, and other necessary data sets to extract clear value from generative AI analysis. “Be very clear about data sufficiency. Don’t jump into a program where eventually you realize you don’t have the necessary data,” Ayer says.

The benefits of third-party experience

Enterprises are increasingly aware that they must embrace generative AI, but knowing where to begin is another thing. “You start off wanting to make sure you don’t repeat mistakes other people have made,” says Ayer. An external provider can help organizations avoid those mistakes and leverage best practices and frameworks for testing and defining explainability and benchmarks for return on investment (ROI).

Using pre-built solutions by external partners can expedite time to market and increase a generative AI program’s value. These solutions can harness pre-built industry-specific generative AI platforms to accelerate deployment. “Generative AI programs can be extremely complicated,” Ayer points out. “There are a lot of infrastructure requirements, touch points with customers, and internal regulations. Organizations will also have to consider using pre-built solutions to accelerate speed to value. Third-party service providers bring the expertise of having an integrated approach to all these elements.”

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