Article note: Of _course_ they did.
The brainrot apps automatically propagating propaganda and acting as Trojan horses to mass-exfiltrate user data are absolutely a threat to society, but they're all the same threat, and we live in an emerging oligarchy so they're competing to capture the government.
_So many_ problems would be solved if government institutions had made a real effort to reign in surveillance capitalism instead of supporting it.
Article note: A twofer scam, fleecing some rubes on the side while laundering Rubles.
Image: Laura Normand / The Verge
Donald Trump has launched a new meme coin, according to posts from his X and Truth Social accounts last night. The posts, which have come just days before Trump’s inauguration, were initially met with suspicion by many that his accounts had been hacked.
Skeptics highlighted by Decrypt last night pointed to several red flags, such as that the millions of dollars seeding the project came from Binance and Gate, which only serve overseas customers. The coin’s website credits the project to the same group behind Trump’s NFTs, as noted by Cointelegraph, whichreports that sources close to Trump’s family confirmed the announcements’ legitimacy.
Both posts remain up as of this morning.
Screenshot: X
Trump’s official X account announced a new meme coin on Friday.
The idea that Trump would debut a meme coin is no big surprise, given his multiple NFT collections and his introduction of a crypto platform last year. He has made cryptocurrency a big part of his new agenda and has assembled a crypto and AI-focused tech policy team led by “crypto czar” David Sacks. Trump also plans to issue an executive order naming crypto a “national imperative or priority” after he’s inaugurated next week, Bloomberg reported ahead of the weekend.
I invented nothing new. I simply assembled the discoveries of other men behind whom were centuries of work. Had I worked fifty or ten or even five years before, I would have failed. So it is with every new thing. Progress happens when all the factors that make for it are ready and then it is inevitable. To teach that a comparatively few men are responsible for the greatest forward steps of mankind is the worst sort of nonsense.