- Remember three years ago when Vice media said they were pausing work in Saudi Arabia due to the state-ordered assassination of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi? Well, now writing for the Guardian, Jim Waterson reports that Vice secretly organized a $20M music festival for the autocratic government that has never faced any real consequences for the murder:
When social media influencers turned up at the Azimuth music festival in the middle of the Saudi Arabian desert they were promised a festival of musical and gastronomic excess, all subsidised by an arm of the Saudi government.
What attendees did not know was that the pricey music festival was secretly organised by youth media company Vice, as part of the media company’s ongoing push to make money in the Middle Eastern state despite the country’s poor human rights record.
Just three years after Vice publicly announced that it was pausing all work in Saudi Arabia due to the fallout from the state-ordered murder of dissident Jamal Khashoggi, insiders at Vice told the Guardian the company was once again aggressively pursuing business opportunities in Saudi Arabia.
“Vice employees have for years raised concerns over the company’s involvement with Saudi Arabia – and we’ve been fobbed off with empty statements and pathetic excuses,” said one Vice employee.
- A few New York City locations that Hollywood uses again and again by Business Insider:
- Writing in his Substack newsletter, Max Read on how so many celebrities are connected to crypto through the Creative Artists Agency (CAA), which is in turn an investor in the NFT marketplace OpenSea. Ugh (I left the links in because it’s a lot):
If you pay attention to both the Hollywood trades and the crypto press, and smoke enough weed, you can begin to pick out the contours of an expanding, interconnected, celebrity-based web3 financial-cultural complex: Did you know, for example, that Jimmy Fallon is represented by CAA, which is an investor in the NFT marketplace OpenSea, and which recently signed a deal to represent the NFT collector 0xb1, who owns NFTs from Bored Ape Yacht Club and World of Women? Did you know that another CAA client, Ashton Kutcher1, is also an investor in OpenSea, through his company Sound Ventures? Or that Kutcher will be starring in a Netflix romcom called Your Place or Mine with Reese Witherspoon, the most prominent owner of World of Women NFTs, who also happens to be married to a CAA agent? Or that the people behind World of Womenand Bored Ape Yacht Club are both represented by Kutcher’s partner in Sound Ventures, the music manager Guy Oseary? Did you know that Oseary’s other major venture these days is pearpop, a platform for connecting Tiktok influencers to celebrities for collaborations — a platform used by none other than Paris Hilton?
- Over 300,000 are lining up to become digital residents of the Pacific island nation of Palau. Atossa Araxia Abrahamian interviews the president, Surangel Whipps Jr., and the first digital resident, Tim Draper:
During the interview, I asked [President Whipps] to describe to me someone who could benefit from being a digital Palauan, and he explained that residents of states like Hawaii can’t buy and sell cryptocurrencies from Hawaii with their Hawaiian ID (note: they could, but my understanding is that it’s a pain in the ass because of the way the exchanges are restricted.) With a digital ID, the idea is they’d be able to participate in these markets more freely and essentially transcend their location and nationality … with an assist from Palau. And yes, there will be background checks similar to the ones banks use to make sure they aren’t doing business with money-launderers (who all still seem to have bank accounts, but OK.)
For individuals, this is a nice service to have; for Palau, it’s the first move in a bigger bid to become a place with the kinds of regulations that draw crypto-currency companies to register there, thereby making the country money through fees, licenses, taxes and whatnot.
- Amanda Moore infiltrated MAGA world for months and before her cover was blown, she found out some disturbing things. Ali Breland of Mother Jones has the story:
Moore’s descent into the far-right was gradual and initially unintentional. When she heard about a post-election MAGA rally planned for November 2020 at DC’s Freedom Plaza, near the Capitol, she immediately decided to attend. “I’ve always made time for something like that. I grew up here so I think that morphs your brain in a weird way,” she explained to me in November 2021, at a DC bar. She had just headed over straight after a spin class—just like she had ahead of going to the rally one year before.
While she spoke quickly and intensely, she was warm and inviting, despite it being our first face-to-face meeting. I imagined how that—along with her ruthless persistence, savvy, and status as a white woman in a space that explicitly values but was short on them—helped ingratiate her with the far right.
Moore, who is 33, didn’t initially build a cover story. But she realized that if she didn’t wear a mask, held her tongue, and acted friendly, demonstrators simply assumed she was on their side, and would warm up to her and speak freely with little prompting. After the November 2020 rally and several other events, Moore realized that she was noticing things—observations that kept her from being as surprised as many people were by the January 6 storming of the Capitol.
“December was incredibly disturbing,” she explained, describing a tone of menace at the next major MAGA rally in DC that followed Biden’s victory. “It was tense all day and people were telling me about how the Proud Boys had protected and saved them at the last rally, and how the police can’t do anything”—anything meaning, she says, commit violence against counterprotesters. “I remember, this guy walking by me and saying ‘When it gets dark…’”
- Oscar Schwartz considers the Ted Talk and what the hell it actually is for The Drift, though I think his suggestion that Ted Talks never changed anything isn’t true, as many people have been “discovered” or at least become very popular after their prominent talks, including Ashraf Ghani in 2005, who would go onto become the president of Afghanistan until last year’s withdrawal by US forces:
In ancient Athens, public speaking was understood primarily as a means of persuasion; learning to convince others was the duty of a democratic citizen. For Confucius, refined speech was the embodiment of refined ethics. In nineteenth-century America, popular lectures delivered in lyceums up and down the East Coast were seen as a form of moral uplift, raising the nation’s cultural standards and satisfying the middle class’s rapacious appetite for useful knowledge. The primary function of TED, by contrast, is to predict the future.
The inaugural TED conference, held in Monterey, California in 1984, was organized by Richard Saul Wurman, an architect, and Harry Marks, a TV broadcast designer, who shared a conviction that the separate fields of technology (T), entertainment (E), and design (D) were converging, and that their convergence was going to change the world. Lofty futurism was nothing new for the Silicon Valley cohort that attended the first TED conference. Since the dawn of digital computing, the engineers and mathematicians building the new machines had spoken of how their inventions would instigate revolutions, upend institutions, disrupt industries, and transform what it means to be human. John von Neumann, sometimes considered the father of modern computing, is said to have confessed to his wife, “What we are creating now is a monster whose influence is going to change history, provided there is any history left.” The world was about to enter a new historical epoch. The change would be exponential and irrevocable across every sphere of human activity. Wurman and Marks packaged this futurist imaginary and sold it as a live event.
- Billionaire Leon Cooperman talks to Eli Saslow of the Washington Post about how much money is enough. I can’t say Cooperman doesn’t sound oblivious here (the super rich always love to play victim, woe is me, it’s not enough to be rich, they have to be adored):
The past year had been the best time in history to be one of America’s 745 billionaires, whose cumulative wealth has grown by an estimated 70 percent since the beginning of the pandemic even as tens of millions of low-wage workers have lost their jobs or their homes. Together, those 745 billionaires are now worth more than the bottom 60 percent of American households combined, and each day Cooperman could see that gap widening on his balance sheet — up an average of $4,788 per minute in the stock market, $1.9 million per day and $700 million total in 2021. As a record amount of wealth continued to shift toward a tiny fraction of people at the pinnacle of the economy, Cooperman could sense something else shifting, too.
“Billionaires shouldn’t even exist in America,” read one note he’d received after he went on TV to recommend stock picks.
“One day, we’re coming after all of you with pitchforks,” read another message.
“Wake up, moron. YOU and your insatiable greed are at the root of our biggest societal problems.”
He responded to most of the personal emails, kept record of the occasional death threats and wrote letters to politicians such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) whenever they criticized billionaires in their speeches, because he couldn’t understand: What exactly had he done wrong? What rule had he broken? He’d been born to poor immigrant parents on the losing end of a capitalist economy. He’d attended public schools, taken on debt to become the first in his family to attend college, worked 80-hour weeks, made smart decisions, benefited from some good luck, amassed a fortune for himself and for his clients and paid hundreds of millions in taxes to the government. He had a wife of 57 years, two successful children, and three grandchildren who were helping him decide how to give most of his money away to a long list of charities. “My life is the story of the American Dream,” he’d said while accepting an award at one charity gala, and he’d always imagined himself as the rags-to-riches hero, only to now find himself cast as the greedy villain in a story of economic inequality run amok.
- Ever wonder why weather is changing so much during this period of climate change? This might be one of the clearest explanations:
Required Reading is published every Thursday afternoon, and it is comprised of a short list of art-related links to long-form articles, videos, blog posts, or photo essays worth a second look.
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