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TL;DR: The rise in popularity & investment in liquid meal replacements such as Soylent are reflective of an ever-increasing screwed up work culture. Not too long ago, I was riding the bus back home, doing what I usually do when I’m on the bus — read or try to catch up on the endless amount of articles that I’ve saved to Pocket. I stumbled upon an article in The Times of India called . Flipboard ‘No time to eat, Silicon Valley drinks its meals’ The author begins the article by telling the story of Aaron, a developer in Silicon Valley that works in an education start-up. Aaron is a hard worker, and to make sure that every minute is optimized for work and coding, Aaron doesn’t eat breakfast, nor does he eat lunch. He just works, non-stop. Instead of eating, relies on liquid nutrition for the majority of the day, consuming a concoction of Macedemia oil and “Schmoylent”, a liquid meal replacement that supposedly has all the vitamins and minerals you need. As mentioned in the article, Aaron sips on a cold glass of Schmoylent from 6:30am to 3:30pm as to “completely remove food from the equation until 7pm”. Aaron Now, reading this on a crowded bus in Tel-Aviv, after just having trained Muay Thai for 2 hours, I didn’t really flinch — but it certainly seemed odd. Until this past Monday (8/3), where Soylent 2.0, another liquid meal replacement heralded by Bay Area techies, on Product Hunt for the day. trended as the top hunt I found this troubling for a couple of reasons: 1. Our work culture is becoming more and more f#$%ed up Honestly, I’m not sure exactly what is causing the scales to tip — whether it’s the ever increasing demands of companies (tight deadlines, impossible sprints, late nights — we’ve all been there), or the growing competition in Silicon Valley/the tech scene as a whole and the growing need to be always be “better”. However, the amount of praise that Soylent 2.0 received on Product Hunt was wild, and only further exemplified the fact that we are becoming more and more immersed in our work. If you think about a scale where on one side you have ‘life’ (things outside of your work), and on the other end you have ‘work’, then the scale is being constantly tipping more and more in favor of ‘work’. When Soylent was trending on Product Hunt, Hunters, Makers, and everybody in between were praising Soylent for being a huge time saver — so they could focus on their work, for longer. Just like Aaron. Lunches out with your co-workers? Socializing? Hell no. Ain’t nobody got time for that! Just keep working on sipping on that goopy mess. Yes, I’ve read “Getting Things Done”. I’m also the one that’s always with headphones at work. Effeciency in the workplace is something that we should constantly seek to improve — but at what cost? I absolutely cherish going out to lunch with my colleagues. I think it’s absolutely vital to team bonding. And heck, getting a breath of fresh air really does bode well for creativity. I would never give that up, certainly not for an additional 45 minutes of work. However, seems like adoption for products like Soylent has been widespread by the tech crowd and they’ve certainly done a good job on zeroing in on their target customers. One quick glance at Soylent’s might affirm this from a marketing standpoint. There’s a call to action to subscribe for a 12 bottle shipment of the new-and-improved Soylent 2.0 even before it really explains what the product is, aside from being “simple, healthy, affordable food”(there’s a brief nutritional breakdown below the fold). To me, that seems like it’s set up to cater to somebody who already knows what they want to buy, and not a newcomer looking for more information. Messaging-wise, if you scroll down a bit you’ll notice that Soylent’s tagline on their video is “Use less, do more”. Well, when your work day is structured like Aaron’s, for example, where all distractions including food have been removed for the sake of productivity, then yeah — you should find something that allows you to “use less” and “do more”. website actually 2. Why not make the world a better place? actually Let’s suppose for a second that Soylent and Schmoylent really do live up to nutritional claims they make (Being a nutrition junkie, I don’t believe that anybody who is mildly athletic/physically active should be relying on any type of liquid nutrition, but that’s another debate). I want to see these types of products be marketed towards solving pressing world issues like 3rd world hunger, and not marketed towards the Silicon Valley techie who makes upwards of $100K/year but ‘doesn’t have time to eat’ because he either works at a company where social gathering/work-life balance is totally jacked, or he’s too lazy to get up 30 minutes earlier and eat a wholesome breakfast of whole foods. I mean, sure, go where the money flows. That makes sense. But, if this stuff is all that it’s hyped up to be, then why not do some good with it? Surely countries like Africa or Nepal would do really well with this all-encompassing, ‘just-add-water’, powder that’s cheap and supposedly has all the nutritional properties that your body needs. Can you imagine the amount of good that something like that will do? And hell, poor Aaron might actually learn to make a healthy omelette in the morning. So put that glass of white goop down and actually go out and eat your lunch with your coworkers. Unplug for a bit, breathe some fresh air, and get to know your colleagues. Or, stop being so goddamn lazy and wake up 20 minutes earlier, cut up some veggies, toss them in a pan with some eggs, and voila — you’ve got yourself a healthy breakfast that wasn’t engineered in a lab (and actually tastes good!). Seriously, if you’re a hustler, developer, analyst, whoever, and you haven’t yet realized that an investment in your nutrition is just as important as an investment in your business, then you’re selling yourself short. Period. actually This is, of course, my personal opinion. I have the utmost respect for any individual, entrepreneur, or company that seeks innovation and that is forward looking.

On Soylent and the troubling work culture in Silicon Valley

Before they gobbled up headlines everywhere, large language models ingested truly staggering amounts of data to train their models. That training data didn’t emerge from the ether: Some of it came from other people’s creativity and work. So it’s unsurprising that copyright concerns are front and center in the early days of this technological boom— . we’ve been here before Hello! I’m Nabiha Syed, the CEO of The Markup, and I spent the last decade as a media lawyer obsessed with emerging technology. I frequently joke that artificial intelligence is Soylent Green—it’s made of people, specifically the nuggets of data we’ve been leaving all over the internet—and we should probably pay more attention to what that means for our future. (Look, I didn’t say it was a joke.) The point is, especially now that lawyers have entered the mix, we’re going to have to find the right model to understand the technological upheaval we find ourselves in. good So I turned to Katherine Forrest, former federal judge for the Southern District of New York and partner at Paul, Weiss, to help us break down how we should be thinking about copyright—a doctrine designed, as she points out, to encourage innovation!​—and generative AI. Keep reading for a mention of one of my favorite Supreme Court cases, ; the human ingenuity of prompts; and why this moment is “as if Alexander Graham Bell invented the iPhone.” Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music (This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.) Syed: Some copyright owners, like artists and Getty Images, argue that the training data for large language models included copyrighted materials, and they are bringing litigation accordingly. What do you make of their arguments? I would like to move away from the expression “ ” because sometimes that causes people to get their heads stuck into a language-only kind of model space. These kinds of models are really what are called , where the same model can be used to do a multiplicity of things. Forrest: large language model foundation models Foundation models are trained on tremendous amounts of content that are not just language-based but also photographic-based, video-based, audio-based…. Understanding the kind of breadth that these foundation models can have is so important when you’re talking about what kinds of training data gets captured. It’s everything, songs or art or what have you. So it is, in my view, logical and reasonable for the content owners to question the wholesale and large-scale copying of their data to train these models. We know that copyrighted works for OpenAI are copyrighted in toto, because OpenAI has put that in a statement to the Patent and Trademark Office, which it then defended on fair use grounds. Earlier in my career, before I went on the bench, I did a lot of work in the internet music space, including the LimeWire case on behalf of the RIAA, the MP3.com case, and . That was a case about old recording artists who had relinquished the rights to their recordings to a record company prior to the internet. Chambers v. Time Warner And the question in that case was whether or not the internet—because it was a non-anticipated technology at the time that recording contract was signed—was one of the places where the record companies had actually acquired the rights. And the answer was yes. What happened then was there was a lot of copying by MP3.com and LimeWire where the view was, well, internet music is not really copyrighted music because it’s not in a, quote, “tangible medium of expression,” that somehow the digital transformation had resulted in this kind of ephemeral music where it was just 0s and 1s and wasn’t the kind of sound recording that had been obtained by anybody as a copyrighted work. For me, it’s copyright infringement—there can be a lot of technical words around it, but it’s copyright infringement. There is an entire song that was being copied. And when you played it, it sounded like the song. So we prevailed. And as you now know, music over the internet is considered to be copyrightable. That’s the major way of distributing music these days, through licensed uses, whether it be Spotify or iTunes or Pandora. The world evolved to accept that this material was in fact copyrightable and protectable. With the current environment with generative AI, there’s a new and different question about copyrighted works, which is—whether it be music or a written work or a photographic work or something else—does making a copy of the copyrighted work infringe on the author’s copyright? (And we’ll come back to who an author is in a moment.) There’s no doubt that the entirety of the work is being copied, because that’s the point of the ability to train a foundation model; you need the of the work in order to determine the probabilistic relationship of one part of the work to the other. entirety In other words, if you chopped it up so all you had were a few words here and a few words there, it wouldn’t give you the information that you need, which is, how is this constructed. So we know 100 percent is copied. Then you get into the fair use question, which is complicated because no single factor of is determinative. The fourth factor, which is, Will this impinge on the commercial opportunity for the work?—that factor is, I think, one which is answered by saying, “Absolutely.” Because it is a replacement of that work forever. the four fair use factors So the ultimate difference between this situation and say, Google Books, is that the point of Google Books was to allow you to search for the book, and it gave you a portion of the copy for you to access. The point was discovering the underlying work. For generative AI, the value is not necessarily the discovery of the underlying creative work but rather a replacement of the work with something else. It is 100 percent copy leading to 100 percent replacement. And it’s absolutely commercial. This will all be fought out in the courts. Syed: That will capture the live debate over whether these innovations can help you discover more, versus erase and replace what came before. That matters for the Google Books-type analysis. I would ask you: Has anybody who suggests this technology is additive said, “Please lead me to where I can buy this work”? And the answer is no. Forrest: The architecture of the past had a pathway back to the underlying work. That replacing and erasing is critical because part of what this does is obscure, intentionally so, and part of the beauty of the tool is its ability to come up with nuanced and innovative answers. But it’s erasing the language now. There’s a real difference in terms of copyright between the input moment and the output moment. The input moment is the training that you and I have been talking about, and that’s where the copying is occurring. That’s where the training of the tool happens; that’s going to become the replacement of the human forever. The output is something different. For Getty Images, for instance, the output actually still had the little image of the Getty logo. Hence, there are several different trademark claims that they’ve got embedded in that suit. So the input moment and the output moment, I believe, need to be analyzed separately. Both face different copyright issues. Syed: Let’s focus on the “output” for a minute. Computer-generated art has been , and the U.S. Copyright Office has been convening and commenting on AI and art issues for some time. It provided around for decades recent guidance that it is open to granting ownership to AI-generated work on a “case-by-case” basis. Can you walk us through what’s happening here? I think that this is an area that is in flux. We know that there has been guidance by the Copyright Office that they do not find that AI alone is an author, that an author is human. What’s happening now is there’s a recognition that there are human beings involved in the process throughout. Forrest: We know that these tools don’t just spontaneously, with no prompt at all, start creating things randomly. They are query machines, if you will. And how do you, as the Copyright Office, make distinctions between when you’ve got enough human involvement to check that box? If I give a prompt, “Give me a woman in a field drinking tea with a lion,” is that enough human input? Am I participating in that art? That human inspiration is given value to some extent by the Copyright Office now. And so the question isn’t one of a spectrum; it’s on a case-by-case basis in terms of the amount of human involvement. One of the points of copyright in the Constitution is to incentivize human creativity. It’s a recognition that there are certain protections given to the people to support innovations that will have a broader public benefit. So when you move into the world of copyrighted artificial-intelligence-generated content, you’re moving into a different place in terms of the role of the U.S. Constitution. Now, that might not be the logical place to go if human ingenuity is still involved in the prompts. If human ingenuity is still involved in, “You’ve made me a picture of the moon. I now want the moon to be a half moon,” and the AI generates that, that is kind of synergistic involvement, the kind of artistic creation that’s still within the founders’—certainly not what they anticipated, but—within the four corners of what could be placed there. The Copyright Office is trying to balance our constitutional principles with the realities of where technology is moving us. Syed: On that note, an AI-generated song called “Heart on my Sleeve” emerged over the weekend, and it sounds like it’s by Drake and The Weeknd … but it’s not. Neither of them made this song, but that didn’t stop it from becoming wildly popular with more than nine million listens on TikTok before it was removed. There’s some early suspicion that this was part of a marketing campaign from a tech company unrelated to either artist. Can you break down the legal issues at the input and output stages of this development? There are a lot of different pieces there. First of all, you’d want to understand how much of the music was through the kind of music tools that have existed outside of generative AI. For at least two decades, there has been music that’s been created with a variety of electronic tools. Forrest: That has not been AI; it’s been people thinking about how to construct and put together new and different sounds. That is not new. Then there’s the piece of how it sounds like a particular artist. I don’t want to comment on how this particular song [“Heart on my Sleeve”] was made. But often that can be done by feeding into the tool a training set consisting of a large amount of a particular artist’s songs. Was that tool trained on exact copies of the artists’ music that were intact at the moment that they were being analyzed—in other words, not transformed at the moment of analysis, but transformed later into this other work? That raises the question: Is it transformative? Is it the kind of thing which falls under ? That’s a 1994 Supreme Court case that looked at fair use and what should be considered as sufficiently transformative. Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music There’s a separate copyright and fair use analysis on the output side, if it sounds like other artists. There’s the possibility of unfair competition claims. These are the kinds of issues that will be litigated: whether or not a song that sounds like an artist, and is being passed off like it is that artist, is interfering with the commercial opportunities for that artist. Syed: What if the artists use it themselves as sort of a creativity prosthetic right there in the studio? There’s a base set of training that comes in the tool, and that base set of training is not limited to that artist. It’s going to have maybe some John Lennon, maybe some Madonna, maybe some Taylor Swift, probably all of the above, plus a whole lot more. Forrest: So when the artist is playing with it in the studio, there’s a risk analysis that they have to undertake, because some of the interesting new sounds may be from the works of other artists. But on the input side, there’s the possibility, depending upon how these cases come out, that if the training of the tool is eventually found to be an infringement, right, and the artist has an output that’s a hit, that output could have a problem, potentially even an injunction against being utilized, if it was found that it was based upon an input that was copyrighted without fair use. These are all absolutely unsettled questions right now in the law. So I certainly understand the desire to play with what is extraordinarily interesting technology, and we are at a transformative moment. In my view, this is one of the most transformative moments in our lifetime, and in all industries. If you’re in live theater, working in a hair salon, or, you know, a carpenter, there are certain things that are not impacted. But my job and your job are all impacted by this in ways that we have not even begun to understand. And so as the dust settles, we will be able to figure out how to use these tools in a way that is safe, that actually appreciates, compensates, validates, attributes the right kind of artist input into the tools. But these are all things that have to be worked out. Syed: Stepping back, it really feels like the iPhone moment. It’s not just the iPhone. It is as if Alexander Graham Bell invented the iPhone. Forrest: If you think about it, the human brain has something like 70 billion neuronal connections. ChatGPT-2 had 1.75 billion. Chat GPT-3 had 175 billion. So it had over 100 billion more neuronal connections than the human brain. And ChatGPT-4 has extraordinary additional computing power layered on top of that. These are incredibly innovative pieces of technology. To those of us who are involved in determining the right legal frameworks, the right legal boxes to put things in, the right kinds of potential licensing schemes and all of that, this is a today issue. This certainly gives me much to chew over. Will I stop using ChatGPT to write bespoke bedtime stories for my toddler? Too soon to say. (Although I been thinking about my timing, given last week’s insights on .) have the water footprint of AI But at a high level, over here at The Markup we’ve been engaging with all kinds of innovators, critics, and thinkers around artificial intelligence—including events like Sisi Wei’s and my upcoming chat at . Stay tuned for much more to come! panel at ISOJ last week Stanford on April 26 Thanks for reading! Always, Nabiha Syed Chief Executive Officer The Markup By Nabiha Syed Also published here Photo by on Umberto Unsplash

AI's Next Stop: A Copyright Showdown

Let’s start with a simple experiment. I’ll tell you the equation that can get us to Net Zero. For free. I’m the savior of human civilization, and it’s extraordinarily simple. Stop Existing There. I can now retire on this monumental achievement and display of scientific, political, and economic prowess. Of course, I’m joking, but then again, I am not. The very simple act of reading this passage so far has contributed to the problems we face, but you can’t ‘offset’ this by simply planting a tree sapling or buying a “carbon credit” from a website that didn’t exist last month to fund a green project that either doesn’t exist or cannot prove any positive environmental impact. The system is rigged after all. Now, before you go off half-cocked and claim I am a denialist, be assured that I am nothing of the sort. ; you’ll understand the thought process behind all of this c̶y̶n̶i̶c̶i̶s̶m̶ realism. Go read Part 1 Let’s start with the latest COP itself. We’re to believe that suddenly and without provocation, over 200 leaders of the world decided to unilaterally phase out fossil fuels by 2050? We’re to believe that 200+ people sitting around a 10-course dinner who flew over on private jets managed to agree to phase out fossil fuel when they know full well they’d go to war with each other if one insulted their god or grandmother at the drop of a hat? And then there’s the argument that we shouldn’t call it “phase out” because that’s quite scary to some people, so we should find another softer term, like “phase down” instead, because that way, we can get away with not meeting a target because we’re just rounding down another accounting error on the balance sheet not removing it entirely. Remember — by 2050, not one of them will still be around to take accountability for the false promises they’ve made, so words come as easy as the money sitting in a Cayman Islands account to them. It’s also worth noting some of the phrasings of this historic climate kumbaya. You have to remember that the President of COP himself has openly admitted that he does not believe in the science. Now, context is useful here because he too was also discussing why phase-out is not a scientific goal — — we can just bring our oil and so we have Get-Out Clause #1 projections and consumption down but we don’t need to turn off the tap completely. The president of Cop28, Sultan Al Jaber, has claimed there is “no science” indicating that a phase-out of fossil fuels is needed to restrict global heating to 1.5C, the Guardian and the Centre for Climate Reporting revealed earlier this month. Al Jaber also said a phase-out of fossil fuels would not allow sustainable development “unless you want to take the world back into caves.” It’s funny because he’s actually speaking the truth here. Civilization and the world of capitalism aren’t prepared for the changes needed in how society functions. It’s not just fossil fuels and the evil internal combustion engine that has to go; we’ve got to find replacements for pretty much everything else that the byproducts and derivatives of oil are used in — from the 99% of plastic that’s saturating the oceans and in our bloodstream, the tens of “bags for life” you’ve collected this year from the supermarket that are sitting in your kitchen, the plastic that covers the interior of the cheap EV you bought from China because EVs will save the planet, and the plastic parts in every item around your house….the list is endless. But it’s always only about cars. Because cars are easier to paint as ‘bad’ for the environment. You can’t stage a Just Stop Oil protest outside a shop selling toasters after all. Let’s not forget that the road you drove along today in your Audi TDI, potholes and all, especially in the UK, was made from crude oil. Or the crap you coated the top of the roof of your fucking shed with so your precious garden tools wouldn’t get wet and rust. — “in keeping with the science” — and so, the scientists once more will be vilified by the press and public and averting blame from the politicians because it was them who got the science wrong innit. And if we can’t trust the science to get it right, then why should we bother in the first place? And then we have Get-Out Clause #2 And the thing is, we can’t trust the science because there’s no supercomputer in the world that can accurately model what is going to happen. And it will happen. It’s happening now. We are in the middle of a climate shift of our own making but no amount of phasing out or phasing down is going to make a blind bit of difference because the whole concept around Net Zero is a fundamental lie. It defies even the most basic laws of physics. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction — ergo, for everything you do, you are impacting the world around you; no matter how small, and it all adds up. Even if you were the most altruistic and giving person on Earth, the very act of making a decision costs in an unending chain of events you have no control over. What’s worse is that all these initiatives take fuck all account of the livelihoods of everyone on the planet in their various emotional, personal, and financial states; something no climate scientist or supercomputer really understands or would be expected to. They’re only interested in modeling and simulating climatological impacts and effects over the next century. They don’t care about the millions of families with absolutely no choice but to make the same decisions every day because they live in poverty and cannot afford to make the right choices. They live day by day, quite literally in some cases, but they’re being asked to change because they must think about the next 50 years instead. And think about the 50 million other people around them. The idea of Net Zero is as offensive as Carbon Offsetting, that Excel spreadsheet exercise claiming that the billion tonnes of CO2 you output last year in the UK can be written down by planting trees in Jamaica. That’s not how the fucking planet works. The people we are supposed to believe know what is happening overestimate the impact and underestimate the apathy to take action in the first place. I’m not saying don’t bother; I’m saying be realistic because there are planetary-scale forces at work that we still don’t understand. If we can’t predict the weather, you’re telling me we can predict climate change that consists of thousands of unpredictable patterns, plus events like volcanic eruptions and pandemics, a potential atomic explosion or another reactor meltdown in the next 30 years, and so on and so on? Now, go back and read Part 1 again. Go on. Our hubris is our downfall. Do you honestly believe that (1) small changes will amount to anything when every single action in a single second of every single day by every single human being that has a knock-on effect and climate impact can reach this imaginary and civilization-saving threshold called Net Zero, and/or (2) there will be some magical technological breakthrough like skyscraper-sized carbon scrubbers or artificial intelligence to usher in a last-minute Hail Mary and save the climate and human race from extinction, and/or (3) we harness the power of the sun and give away free energy for everyone. Do you hear yourself when you read these words back and how foolish it all sounds? For a start, any technological solution will have its own impact on the climate; the resources have to come from somewhere after all. The idea of having massive carbon scrubbers that suck meager amounts of CO2 from the atmosphere to turn into another type of fuel that contributes back to climate change, only to have been made from materials and effort that negates the value of its existence in the first place is something that is constantly overlooked. And let’s tackle (2) here because there’s an awful lot of bullshit being peddled that AI will solve this and create abundance for all. No. No, it won’t. An AI does not solve the problems of capitalism or an ever-growing species that continues to consume resources faster than the planet can replenish. Not only consume but continue to demand the superfluous and frivolous because we want to be distracted from the truths. These supercharged chatbots won’t solve global inequality, increase food production, or find miraculous ways to generate free energy because if they could, and we all had access to it, then why would we bother with the society we’ve built? That’s a step change too far, and those 200-odd folks living it up at COP are not going to want that for you. In Star Trek, society thrives in a post-capitalist, post-scarcity world driven by a magical MacGuffin called The Replicator. In The Orville, it’s the same thing. Human civilization peaks when we finally figure out how to make shit from nothing. But it’s not going to happen; there are no brightly colored food cubes for you or a hot Earl Grey on command. It’s more likely you’ll be fed Soylent Green at the local food bank and wonder why you’ve not seen your neighbor for over a week…but according to some of the biggest names in venture capital and pop-culture futurists, AI will make this a reality. We will have money for all, medicare for all, want for nothing, and the robots will seize the means of production and do everything for us. We will become a renaissance society, a protopian or utopian future driven by art and humanity and creativity and striving to better ourselves. But we won’t. Because that’s not how humans operate. The ability to have whatever we want will fuel the desire to possess whatever we want and quell the desire to strive for anything. Without a struggle or a challenge, we’ll grow ever more hungry for whatever someone else managed to create from nothing and seek to own it too. A never-ending cycle of needs and wants in a capitalist society is replaced by an unending cycle of wanting more in a post-scarcity society. The idea that ‘life owes me a living’ will become an exponentially louder cry for help that becomes ‘living owes me a life.’ And the capitalists will welcome you back with open arms. Now, add to this the current impacts of climate change, which are happening around us as we speak, and add those already infinite wants and needs, and things are going to get as heated as the planet is when swathes of people start trying to migrate to better corners of the world that won’t be hit as hard. Because climate change doesn’t care about your fucking society, or religion, or political leanings. It will continue to do what it’s doing now regardless — which is changing because we will continue to do what we’re doing now regardless — which is impacting it. I’d go as far as saying that post-scarce societies are the last thing we need right now. The first step is a post-status society, one where we’re not driven to level up material consumption because Janice has a better SUV and OLED TV than you do, or the man in the advert told you that having a 5.0 V8 to drive to and from the school 400 yards away from your whopping 6-bed house for a family of 3 was the ultimate expression of manhood. When Steve Jobs uttered ‘just one more thing’ at the end of every Apple keynote, or when Columbo said the same as he questioned the suspect he knew committed the murder, they may as well have been talking about our inbred push to achieve status. Status will be the undoing of UBI, that other silver bullet-tipped panacea to solve all of our societal woes on top of artificial intelligence. There isn’t a money printer going brrrrr big enough to take on that challenge, and then, when the middle managers find out that the bottom of society has a foot on the ladder they worked so hard to climb, they’ll be pissed off. And when that UBI doesn’t stretch to support the middle management lifestyle they've built by stepping on the lower runged, they’ll be even more pissed off. That poor money printer will be working so hard it’ll eventually contribute more CO2 than the fucking human race it’s meant to support. And let’s not get onto the possibilities of a Personal Carbon Tax; this is not a joke. It’ll happen. It’ll be included in your medical bills, your food shopping, and higher rates applied if you still drive an ICE….it won’t be just a monthly tax on your salary; it’ll be across everything you do. You’ll probably have some kind of digital tracker applied to payments so the Government can get a sense of how obedient or reckless you are with our precious atmosphere. The rich will enjoy their continued existence, but the poor will not. Sound familiar? There is no utopian vision coming. No Star Trek MacGuffin to save the day and the human race. It doesn’t matter if COP succeeds in this latest version of an ever-changing mission statement — one that will be rewritten next year when a new bunch of leaders sit at the table anyway — or if the next one does or the next. There is no, “Oh but if we all make small changes, it will help us get to Net Zero” because there is no such thing; you cannot switch off the impact and attitudes of 8 billion people living on this planet without switching off the people. And so we’re back to the start and our little thought experiment. You can either stop existing, or you can start living with the knowledge that we are a civilization living on the brink of an environmental collapse, and there are forces in motion that we will not prevent from cycling to its next inevitable conclusion. The best we can do is prepare for it. Also published here

Climate Change: There Is Nothing You Can Do About It - Part 2

Plan of War when the Destruction of the Enemy is the Object

On War by Carl Von Clausewitz, is part of the HackerNoon Books Series. You can jump to any chapter in this book here . Attack on the Enemy’s Army in its Cantonments Book VII: Chapter XIX. Attack on the Enemy’s Army in its Cantonments We have not treated of this subject in the defence, because a line of cantonments is not to be regarded as a defensive means, but as a mere existence of the army in a state which implies little readiness for battle. In respect to this readiness for battle, we therefore did not go beyond what we required to say in connection with this condition of an army in the 13th chapter of the 5th book. But here, in considering the attack, we have to think of an enemy’s army in cantonments in all respects as a special object; for, in the first place, such an attack is of a very peculiar kind in itself; and, in the next place, it may be considered as a strategic means of particular efficacy. Here we have before us, therefore, not the question of an onslaught on a single cantonment or a small corps dispersed amongst a few villages, as the arrangements for that are entirely of a tactical nature, but of the attack of a large army, distributed in cantonments more or less extensive; an attack in which the object is not the mere surprise of a single cantonment, but to prevent the assembly of the army. The attack on an enemy’s army in cantonments is therefore the surprise of an army not assembled. If this surprise succeeds fully, then the enemy’s army is prevented from reaching its appointed place of assembly, and, therefore, compelled to choose another more to the rear; as this change of the point of assembly to the rear in a state of such emergency can seldom be effected in less than a day’s march, but generally will require several days, the loss of ground which this occasions is by no means an insignificant loss; and this is the first advantage gained by the assailant. But now, this surprise which is in connection with the general relations, may certainly at the same time, in its commencement, be an onslaught on some of the enemy’s single cantonments, not certainly upon all, or upon a great many, because that would suppose a scattering of the attacking army to an extent which could never be advisable. Therefore, only the most advanced quarters, only those which lie in the direction of the attacking columns, can be surprised, and even this will seldom happen to many of them, as large forces cannot easily approach unobserved. However, this element of the attack is by no means to be disregarded; and we reckon the advantages which may be thus obtained, as the second advantage of the surprise. A third advantage consists in the minor combats forced upon the enemy in which his losses will be considerable. A great body of troops does not assemble itself at once by single battalions at the spot appointed for the general concentration of the army, but usually forms itself by brigades, divisions, or corps, in the first place, and these masses cannot then hasten at full speed to the rendezvous; in case of meeting with an enemy’s column in their course, they are obliged to engage in a combat; now, they may certainly come off victorious in the same, particularly if the enemy’s attacking column is not of sufficient strength, but in conquering, they lose time, and, in most cases, as may be easily conceived, a corps, under such circumstances, and in the general tendency to gain a point which lies to the rear, will not make any beneficial use of its victory. On the other hand, they may be beaten, and that is the most probable issue in itself, because they have not time to organise a good resistance. We may, therefore, very well suppose that in an attack well planned and executed, the assailant through these partial combats will gather up a considerable number of trophies, which become a principal point in the general result. Lastly, the fourth advantage, and the keystone of the whole, is a certain momentary disorganisation and discouragement on the side of the enemy, which, when the force is at last assembled, seldom allows of its being immediately brought into action, and generally obliges the party attacked to abandon still more ground to his assailant, and to make a change generally in his plan of operations. Such are the proper results of a successful surprise of the enemy in cantonments, that is, of one in which the enemy is prevented from assembling his army without loss at the point fixed in his plan. But by the nature of the case, success has many degrees; and, therefore, the results may be very great in one case, and hardly worth mentioning in another. But even when, through the complete success of the enterprise, these results are considerable, they will seldom bear comparison with the gain of a great battle, partly because, in the first place, the trophies are seldom as great, and in the next, the moral impression never strikes so deep. This general result must always be kept in view, that we may not promise ourselves more from an enterprise of this kind than it can give. Many hold it to be the non plus ultra of offensive activity; but it is not so by any means, as we may see from this analysis, as well as from military history. One of the most brilliant surprises in history, is that made by the Duke of Lorraine in 1643, on the cantonments of the French, under General Ranzan, at Duttlingen. The corps was 16,000 men, and they lost the General commanding, and 7,000 men; it was a complete defeat. The want of outposts was the cause of the disaster. The surprise of Turenne at Mergentheim (Mariendal, as the French call it,) in 1644, is in like manner to be regarded as equal to a defeat in its effects, for he lost 3,000 men out of 8,000, which was principally owing to his having been led into making an untimely stand after he got his men assembled. Such results we cannot, therefore, often reckon upon; it was rather the result of an ill-judged action than of the surprise, properly speaking, for Turenne might easily have avoided the action, and have rallied his troops upon those in more distant quarters. A third noted surprise is that which Turenne made on the Allies under the great Elector, the Imperial General Bournonville and the Duke of Lorraine, in Alsace, in the year 1674. The trophies were very small, the loss of the Allies did not exceed 2,000 or 3,000 men, which could not decide the fate of a force of 50,000; but the Allies considered that they could not venture to make any further resistance in Alsace, and retired across the Rhine again. This strategic result was all that Turenne wanted, but we must not look for the causes of it entirely in the surprise. Turenne surprised the plans of his opponents more than the troops themselves; the want of unanimity amongst the allied generals and the proximity of the Rhine did the rest. This event altogether deserves a closer examination, as it is generally viewed in a wrong light. In 1741, Neipperg surprised Frederick the Great in his quarters; the whole of the result was that the king was obliged to fight the battle of Mollwitz before he had collected all his forces, and with a change of front. In 1745, Frederick the Great surprised the Duke of Lorraine in his cantonments in Lusatia; the chief success was through the real surprise of one of the most important quarters, that of Hennersdorf, by which the Austrians suffered a loss of 2,000 men; the general result was that the Duke of Lorraine retreated to Bohemia by Upper Lusatia, but that did not at all prevent his returning into Saxony by the left bank of the Elbe, so that without the battle of Kesselsdorf, there would have been no important result. 1758. The Duke Ferdinand surprised the French quarters; the immediate result was that the French lost some thousands of men, and were obliged to take up a position behind the Aller. The moral effect may have been of more importance, and may have had some influence on the subsequent evacuation of Westphalia. If from these different examples we seek for a conclusion as to the efficacy of this kind of attack, then only the two first can be put in comparison with a battle gained. But the corps were only small, and the want of outposts in the system of war in those days was a circumstance greatly in favour of these enterprises. Although the four other cases must be reckoned completely successful enterprises, it is plain that not one of them is to be compared with a battle gained as respects its result. The general result could not have taken place in any of them except with an adversary weak in will and character, and therefore it did not take place at all in the case of 1741. In 1806 the Prussian army contemplated surprising the French in this manner in Franconia. The case promised well for a satisfactory result. Buonaparte was not present, the French corps were in widely extended cantonments; under these circumstances, the Prussian army, acting with great resolution and activity, might very well reckon on driving the French back across the Rhine, with more or less loss. But this was also all; if they reckoned upon more, for instance, on following up their advantages beyond the Rhine, or on gaining such a moral ascendancy, that the French would not again venture to appear on the right bank of the river in the same campaign, such an expectation had no sufficient grounds whatever. In the beginning of August, 1812, the Russians from Smolensk meditated falling upon the cantonments of the French when Napoleon halted his army in the neighbourhood of Witepsk. But they wanted courage to carry out the enterprise; and it was fortunate for them they did; for as the French commander with his centre was not only more than twice the strength of their centre, but also in himself the most resolute commander that ever lived, as further, the loss of a few miles of ground would have decided nothing, and there was no natural obstacle in any feature of the country near enough up to which they might pursue their success, and by that means, in some measure make it certain, and lastly, as the war of the year 1812 was not in any way a campaign of that kind, which draws itself in a languid way to a conclusion, but the serious plan of an assailant who had made up his mind to conquer his opponent completely,—therefore the trifling results to be expected from a surprise of the enemy in his quarters, appear nothing else than utterly disproportionate to the solution of the problem, they could not justify a hope of making good by their means the great inequality of forces and other relations. But this scheme serves to show how a confused idea of the effect of this means may lead to an entirely false application of the same. What has been hitherto said, places the subject in the light of a strategic means. But it lies in its nature that its execution also is not purely tactical, but in part belongs again to strategy so far, particularly that such an attack is generally made on a front of considerable width, and the army which carries it out can, and generally will, come to blows before it is concentrated, so that the whole is an agglomeration of partial combats. We must now add a few words on the most natural organisation of such an attack. The first condition is:— (1.) To attack the front of the enemy’s quarters in a certain width of front, for that is the only means by which we can really surprise several cantonments, cut off others, and create generally that disorganisation in the enemy’s army which is intended.—The number of, and the intervals between, the columns must depend on circumstances. (2.) The direction of the different columns must converge upon a point where it is intended they should unite; for the enemy ends more or less with a concentration of his force, and therefore we must do the same. This point of concentration should, if possible, be the enemy’s point of assembly, or lie on his line of retreat, it will naturally be best where that line crosses an important obstacle in the country. (3.) The separate columns when they come in contact with the enemy’s forces must attack them with great determination, with dash and boldness, as they have general relations in their favour, and daring is always there in its right place. From this it follows that the commanders of the separate columns must be allowed freedom of action and full power in this respect. (4.) The tactical plan of attack against those of the enemy’s corps that are the first to place themselves in position, must always be directed to turn a flank, for the greatest result is always to be expected by separating the corps, and cutting them off. (5.) Each of the columns must be composed of portions of the three arms, and must not be stinted in cavalry, it may even sometimes be well to divide amongst them the whole of the reserve cavalry; for it would be a great mistake to suppose that this body of cavalry could play any great part in a mass in an enterprise of this sort. The first village, the smallest bridge, the most insignificant thicket would bring it to a halt. (6.) Although it lies in the nature of a surprise that the assailant should not send his advanced guard very far in front, that principle only applies to the first approach to the enemy’s quarters. When the fight has commenced in the enemy’s quarters, and therefore all that was to be expected from actual surprise has been gained, then the columns of the advanced guard of all arms should push on as far as possible, for they may greatly increase the confusion on the side of the enemy by more rapid movement. It is only by this means that it becomes possible to carry off here and there the mass of baggage, artillery, non-effectives, and camp-followers, which have to be dragged after a cantonment suddenly broken up, and these advanced guards must also be the chief instruments in turning and cutting off the enemy. (7.) Finally, the retreat in case of ill-success must be thought of, and a rallying point be fixed upon beforehand. About HackerNoon Book Series: We bring you the most important technical, scientific, and insightful public domain books. This book is part of the public domain. Carl von Clausewitz (2006). On War. Urbana, Illinois: Project Gutenberg. Retrieved https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/1946/pg1946-images.html This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org , located at https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html .

Attack on the Enemy’s Army in its Cantonments

Retreat into the Interior of the Country

On War by Carl Von Clausewitz, is part of the HackerNoon Books Series. You can jump to any chapter in this book here . Base of Operations Book V: Chapter XV. Base of Operations If an army sets out on any expedition, whether it be to attack the enemy and his theatre of war, or to take post on its own frontier, it continues in a state of necessary dependence on the sources from which it draws its subsistence and reinforcements, and must maintain its communication with them, as they are the conditions of its existence and preservation. This dependence increases in intensity and extent in proportion to the size of the army. But now it is neither always possible nor requisite that the army should continue in direct communication with the whole of its own country; it is sufficient if it does so with that portion immediately in its rear, and which is consequently covered by its position. In this portion of the country then, as far as necessary, special depôts of provisions are formed, and arrangements are made for regularly forwarding reinforcements and supplies. This strip of territory is therefore the foundation of the army and of all its undertakings, and the two must be regarded as forming in connection only one whole. If the supplies for their greater security are lodged in fortified places, the idea of a base becomes more distinct; but the idea does not originate in any arrangement of that kind, and in a number of cases no such arrangement is made. But a portion of the enemy’s territory may also become a base for our army, or, at least, form part of it; for when an army penetrates into an enemy’s land, a number of its wants are supplied from that part of the country which is taken possession of; but it is then a necessary condition that we are completely masters of this portion of territory, that is, certain of our orders being obeyed within its limits. This certainty, however, seldom extends beyond the reach of our ability to keep the inhabitants in awe by small garrisons, and detachments moving about from place to place, and that is not very far in general. The consequence is, that in the enemy’s country, the part of territory from which we can draw supplies is seldom of sufficient extent to furnish all the supplies we require, and we must therefore still depend on our own land for much, and this brings us back again to the importance of that part of our territory immediately in rear of our army as an indispensable portion of our base. The wants of an army may be divided into two classes, first those which every cultivated country can furnish; and next those which can only be obtained from those localities where they are produced. The first are chiefly provisions, the second the means of keeping an army complete in every way. The first can therefore be obtained in the enemy’s country; the second, as a rule, can only be furnished by our own country, for example men, arms, and almost all munitions of war. Although there are exceptions to this classification in certain cases, still they are few and trifling, and the distinction we have drawn is of standing importance, and proves again that the communication with our own country is indispensable. Depôts of provisions and forage are generally formed in open towns, both in the enemy’s and in our own country, because there are not as many fortresses as would be required for these bulky stores continually being consumed, and wanted sometimes here, sometimes there, and also because their loss is much easier to replace; on the other hand, stores to keep the army complete, such as arms, munition of war, and articles of equipment are never lodged in open places in the vicinity of the theatre of war if it can be avoided, but are rather brought from a distance, and in the enemy’s country never stored anywhere but in fortresses. From this point, again, it may be inferred that the base is of more importance in relation to supplies intended to refit an army than in relation to provisions for food. Now, the more means of each kind are collected together in great magazines before being brought into use, the more, therefore, all separate streams unite in great reservoirs, so much the more may these be regarded as taking the place of the whole country, and so much the more will the conception of a base fix itself upon these great depôts of supply; but this must never go so far that any such place becomes looked upon as constituting a base in itself alone. If these sources of supply and refitment are abundant, that is, if the tracts of territory are wide and rich, if the stores are collected in great depôts to be more speedily brought into use, if these depôts are covered in a military sense in one way or another, if they are in close proximity to the army and accessible by good roads, if they extend along a considerable width in the rear of the army or surround it in part as well—then follows a greater vitality for the army, as well as a greater freedom in its movements. Attempts have been made to sum up all the advantages which an army derives from being so situated in one single conception, that is, the extent of the base of operations. By the relation which this base bears to the object of the undertakings, by the angle which its extremities make with this object (supposed as a point), it has been attempted to express the whole sum of the advantages and disadvantages which accrue to an army from the position and nature of its sources of supply and equipment; but it is plain this elegant piece of geometrical refinement is merely a play of fancy, as it is founded on a series of substitutions which must all be made at the expense of truth. As we have seen, the base of an army is a triple formation in connection with the situation in which an army is placed: the resources of the country adjacent to the position of the army, the depôts of stores which have been made at particular points, and the province from which these stores are derived or collected. These three things are separated in space, and cannot be collected into one whole, and least of all can we substitute for them a line which is to represent the width of the base, a line which is generally imagined in a manner perfectly arbitrary, either from one fortress to another or from one capital of a province to another, or along a political boundary of a country. Neither can we determine precisely the mutual relation of these three steps in the formation of a base, for in reality they blend themselves with each other always more or less. In one case the surrounding country affords largely the means of refitting an army with things which otherwise could only be obtained from a long distance; in another case we are obliged to get even food from a long distance. Sometimes the nearest fortresses are great arsenals, ports, or commercial cities, which contain all the military resources of a whole state, sometimes they are nothing but old, feeble ramparts, hardly sufficient for their own defence. The consequence is that all deductions from the length of the base of operations and its angles, and the whole theory of war founded on these data, as far as its geometrical phase, have never met with any attention in real war, and in theory they have only caused wrong tendencies. But as the basis of this chain of reasoning is a truth, and only the conclusions drawn are false, this same view will easily and frequently thrust itself forward again. We think, therefore, that we cannot go beyond acknowledging generally the influence of a base on military enterprises, that at the same time there are no means of framing out of this maxim any serviceable rules by a few abstract ideas; but that in each separate case the whole of the things which we have specified must be kept in view together. When once arrangements are made within a certain radius to provide the means of subsisting an army and keeping it complete in every respect, and with a view to operations in a certain direction, then, even in our own country, this district only is to be regarded as the base of the army; and as any alteration of a base requires time and labour, therefore an army cannot change its base every day, even in its own country, and this again limits it always more or less in the direction of its operations. If, then, in operating against an enemy’s country we take the whole line of our own frontier, where it forms a boundary between the two countries as our base, we may do so in a general sense, in so far that we might make those preparations which constitute a base anywhere on that frontier; but it will not be a base at any moment if preparations have not been already made everywhere. When the Russian army retreated before the French in 1812, at the beginning of the campaign the whole of Russia might have been considered as its base, the more so because the vast extent of the country offered the army abundance of space in any direction it might select. This is no illusory notion, as it was actually realised at a subsequent time, when other Russian armies from different quarters entered the field; but still at every period throughout the campaign the base of the Russian army was not so extensive; it was principally confined to the road on which the whole train of transport to and from their army was organised. This limitation prevented the Russian army, for instance, from making the further retreat which became necessary after the three days’ fighting at Smolensk in any direction but that of Moscow, and so hindered their turning suddenly in the direction of Kaluga, as was proposed in order to draw the enemy away from Moscow. Such a change of direction could only have been possible by having been prepared for long beforehand. We have said that the dependence on the base increases in intensity and extent with the size of the army, which is easy to understand. An army is like a tree. From the ground out of which it grows it draws its nourishment; if it is small it can easily be transplanted, but this becomes more difficult as it increases in size. A small body of troops has also its channels, from which it draws the sustenance of life, but it strikes root easily where it happens to be; not so a large army. When, therefore, we talk of the influence of the base on the operations of an army, the dimensions of the army must always serve as the scale by which to measure the magnitude of that influence. Further it is consistent with the nature of things that for the immediate wants of the present hour the subsistence is the main point, but for the general efficiency of the army through a long period of time the refitment and recruitment are the more important, because the latter can only be done from particular sources while the former may be obtained in many ways; this again defines still more distinctly the influence of the base on the operations of the army. However great that influence may be, we must never forget that it belongs to those things which can only show a decisive effect after some considerable time, and that therefore the question always remains what may happen in that time. The value of a base of operations will seldom determine the choice of an undertaking in the first instance. Mere difficulties which may present themselves in this respect must be put side by side and compared with other means actually at our command; obstacles of this nature often vanish before the force of decisive victories. About HackerNoon Book Series: We bring you the most important technical, scientific, and insightful public domain books. This book is part of the public domain. Carl von Clausewitz (2006). On War. Urbana, Illinois: Project Gutenberg. Retrieved https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/1946/pg1946-images.html This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org , located at https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html .

Base of Operations

On War by Carl Von Clausewitz, is part of the HackerNoon Books Series. You can jump to any chapter in this book here . Marches (continued) Book V: Chapter XII. Marches (continued) We have now to consider the destructive influence which marches have upon an army. It is so great that it may be regarded as an active principle of destruction, just as much as the combat. One single moderate march does not wear down the instrument, but a succession of even moderate marches is certain to tell upon it, and a succession of severe ones will, of course, do so much sooner. At the actual scene of war, want of food and shelter, bad broken-up roads, and the necessity of being in a perpetual state of readiness for battle, are causes of an excessive strain upon our means, by which men, cattle, carriages of every description as well as clothing are ruined. It is commonly said that a long rest does not suit the physical health of an army; that at such a time there is more sickness than during moderate activity. No doubt sickness will and does occur if soldiers are packed too close in confined quarters; but the same thing would occur if these were quarters taken up on the march, and the want of air and exercise can never be the cause of such sicknesses, as it is so easy to give the soldier both by means of his exercises. Only think for a moment, when the organism of a human being is in a disordered and fainting state, what a difference it must make to him whether he falls sick in a house or is seized in the middle of a high road, up to his knees in mud, under torrents of rain, and loaded with a knapsack on his back; even if he is in a camp he can soon be sent to the next village, and will not be entirely without medical assistance, whilst on a march he must be for hours without any assistance, and then be made to drag himself along for miles as a straggler. How many trifling illnesses by that means become serious, how many serious ones become mortal. Let us consider how an ordinary march in the dust, and under the burning rays of a summer sun may produce the most excessive heat, in which state, suffering from intolerable thirst, the soldier then rushes to the fresh spring of water, to bring back for himself sickness and death. It is not our object by these reflections to recommend less activity in war; the instrument is there for use, and if the use wears away the instrument that is only in the natural order of things; we only wish to see every thing put in its right place, and to oppose that theoretical bombast according to which the most astonishing surprises the most rapid movements, the most incessant activity cost nothing, and are painted as rich mines which the indolence of the general leaves unworked. It is very much the same with these mines as with those from which gold and silver are obtained; nothing is seen but the produce, and no one asks about the value of the work which has brought this produce to light. On long marches outside a theatre of war, the conditions under which the march is made are no doubt usually easier, and the daily losses smaller, but on that account men with the slightest sickness are generally lost to the army for some time, as it is difficult for convalescents to overtake an army constantly advancing. Amongst the cavalry the number of lame horses and horses with sore backs rises in an increasing ratio, and amongst the carriages many break down or require repair. It never fails, therefore, that at the end of a march of 100 miles or more, an army arrives much weakened, particularly as regards its cavalry and train. If such marches are necessary on the theatre of war, that is under the eyes of the enemy, then that disadvantage is added to the other, and from the two combined the losses with large masses of troops, and under conditions otherwise unfavourable may amount to something incredible. Only a couple of examples in order to illustrate our ideas. When Buonaparte crossed the Niemen on 24th June, 1812, the enormous centre of his army with which he subsequently marched against Moscow numbered 301,000 men. At Smolensk, on the 15th August, he detached 13,500, leaving, it is to be supposed, 287,500. The actual state of his army however at that date was only 182,000; he had therefore lost 105,000.(*) Bearing in mind that up to that time only two engagements to speak of had taken place, one between Davoust and Bragathion, the other between Murat and Tolstoy-Osterman, we may put down the losses of the French army in action at 10,000 men at most, and therefore the losses in sick and stragglers within fifty-two days on a march of about seventy miles direct to his front, amounted to 95,000, that is a third part of the whole army. (*) All these figures are taken from Chambray. Vergl. Bd. vii. 2te Auflage, § 80, ff. Three weeks later, at the time of the battle of Borodino, the loss amounted to 144,000 (including the casualties in the battle), and eight days after that again, at Moscow, the number was 198,000. The losses of this army in general were at the commencement of the campaign at the rate of 1/150daily, subsequently they rose to 1/120, and in the last period they increased to 1/19 of the original strength. The movement of Napoleon from the passage of the Niemen up to Moscow certainly may be called a persistent one; still, we must not forget that it lasted eighty-two days, in which time he only accomplished 120 miles, and that the French army upon two occasions made regular halts, once at Wilna for about fourteen days, and the other time at Witebsk for about eleven days, during which periods many stragglers had time to rejoin. This fourteen weeks’ advance was not made at the worst season of the year, nor over the worst of roads, for it was summer, and the roads along which they marched were mostly sand. It was the immense mass of troops collected on one road, the want of sufficient subsistence, and an enemy who was on the retreat, but by no means in flight, which were the adverse conditions. Of the retreat of the French army from Moscow to the Niemen, we shall say nothing, but this we may mention, that the Russian army following them left Kaluga 120,000 strong, and reached Wilna with 30,000. Every one knows how few men were lost in actual combats during that period. One more example from Blücher’s campaign of 1813 in Silesia and Saxony, a campaign very remarkable not for any long march but for the amount of marching to and fro. York’s corps of Blücher’s army began this campaign 16th August about 40,000 strong, and was reduced to 12,000 at the battle of Leipsic, 19th October. The principal combats which this corps fought at Goldberg, Lowenberg, on the Katsbach, at Wartenburg, and Mockern (Leipsic) cost it, on the authority of the best writers, 12,000 men. According to that their losses from other causes in eight weeks amounted to 16,000, or two-fifths of the whole. We must, therefore, make up our minds to great wear and tear of our own forces, if we are to carry on a war rich in movements, we must arrange the rest of our plan accordingly, and above all things the reinforcements which are to follow. About HackerNoon Book Series: We bring you the most important technical, scientific, and insightful public domain books. This book is part of the public domain. Carl von Clausewitz (2006). On War. Urbana, Illinois: Project Gutenberg. Retrieved https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/1946/pg1946-images.html This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org , located at https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html .

Marches (continued)

PYOTR STEPANOVITCH IS BUSY

The First And Rightful Lover

A DISCOURSE

The Discovery of Muscovy by Richard Hakluyt is part of the HackerNoon Books Series. You can jump to any chapter in this book here . The Copy of the Duke of Muscovy and Emperor or Russia his Letters, sent to King Edward VI., by the hands of Richard Chanceler. The Copy of the Duke of Muscovy and Emperor or Russia his Letters, sent to King Edward VI., by the hands of Richard Chanceler. “The almighty power of God, and the incomprehensible Holy Trinity, rightful Christian belief, etc.  We, great Duke Ivan Vasilivich, by the grace of God Emperor of all Russia, and great Duke of Vladermerskij, Moskowskij, Novogrodskij, Cazanskii, Pskanskii, Smolenskii, Tuerskij, Hugorskij, Permskii, Veatskii, Bolgarskii, with divers other lands, Emperor also and great Duke of Novogoroda, and in the low countries of Chernigouskii, Rezanskii, Volotskii, Refskii, Belskii, Rostouskii, Yaroslavskii; Belocherskii, Oodorskii, Obdorskii, Codinskii, and many other countries, lord over all the north coast, greeting. “Before all right great and worthy of honour Edward, King of England, &c., according to our most hearty and good zeal, with good intent and friendly desire, and according to our holy Christian Faith and great governance, and being in the light of great understanding, our answer by this our honourable writing unto your kingly governance, at the request of your faithful servant Richard Chanceler, with his company, as they shall let you wisely know, is thus.  In the strength of the twentieth year of our governance, be it known, that at our sea coasts arrived a ship, with one Richard and his company, and said, that he was desirous to come into our dominions, and according to his request hath seen our Majesty and our eyes; and hath declared unto us your Majesty’s desire as that we should grant unto your subjects, to go and come, and in our dominions, and among our subjects to frequent free marts, with all sorts of merchandises, and upon the same to have wares for their return.  And they have also delivered us your letters which declare the same request.  And hereupon we have given order, that wheresoever your faithful servant Hugh Willoughbie land or touch in our dominions, to be well entertained, who as yet is not arrived, as your servant Richard can declare. “And we, with Christian belief and faithfulness, and according to your honourable request and my honourable commandment will not leave it undone, and are furthermore willing that you send unto us your ships and vessels, when, and as often as they may have passage, with good assurance on our part to see them harmless.  And if you send one of your Majesty’s council to treat with us, whereby your country merchants may with all kinds of wares, and where they will, make their market in our dominions, they shall have their free mart with all free liberties through my whole dominions with all kinds of wares, to come and go at their pleasure, without any let, damage, or impediment, according to this our letter, our word, and our seal, which we have commanded to be under-sealed.  Written in our dominion in our town and in our palace in the Castle of Moscow, in the year seven thousand and sixty, the second month of February.” This letter was written in the Muscovian tongue, in letters much like to the Greek letters, very fair written on paper with a broad seal hanging at the same, sealed in paper upon wax.  This seal was much like the broad seal of England, having on the one side the image of a man on horseback in complete harness fighting with a dragon. Under this letter was another paper written in the Dutch tongue, which was the interpretation of the other written in the Muscovian letters.  These letters were sent the next year after the date of King Edward’s letters, 1554. About HackerNoon Book Series: We bring you the most important technical, scientific, and insightful public domain books. This book is part of the public domain. Richard Hakluyt (2003). The Discovery of Muscovy. Urbana, Illinois: Project Gutenberg. Retrieved October 2022 https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/4076/pg4076-images.html This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org , located at https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html .

The Copy of the Duke of Muscovy and Emperor or Russia his Letters, sent to King Edward VI.

The Jungle: Chapter II

Founders at Work: 150+ YCombinator Founders’ Stories

There have been many times in my career of building web apps and frontend experiences that I have needed to embed a widget in a DOM that I did not build or have access to. For example, embedding e-commerce widgets in a CMS or building chrome extensions to augment a given website.  One of the biggest frustrations I've had is the . style collision In my development environment, all the widgets look great, but the second I add the widget to a customer’s page… everything is broken! Why does this happen? The difficulty with embedding widgets in a DOM that you don't own is every DOM is going to reference different default fonts and colors.  It’s normal for a css stylesheet to look like this: body {
   font-family: my-awesome-font;
   font-size: 16px;
   color: #eee;
   line-height: 16px;
   box-sizing: border-box;
} When I embed my widget into the body of this customer’s page, it will inherit the above styles.  While sometimes this is okay, many times, it will break the beautiful widget I designed because I designed the widget with different font sizes or padding. Classic solutions Historically, we have had 2 solutions to this problem: Use an iFrame. Be crazy explicit with your styles. While both solutions can work, they both have rather frustrating aspects you will have to deal with. Below I'll go over a few examples of what I’ve done in the past and then cover what this blog post is all about – the fancy, new, futuristic way to make composite user interfaces or the Shadow DOM. <insert sinister laugh here> Working with iFrames With an iFrame, I have no control over the element’s size, so the consumer of my widget will have to accurately carve out space in their DOM for my iFrame.  If my widget is dynamic in size, this will cause all sorts of problems with scrolling and positioning. The second issue we find with iFrames is the communication between the iFrame and the parent.  While I can now use , I will need to build out an event system for both the parent and the iFrame context.  This can be frustrating if the client already has a built-in SDK.  It’s basically building a mini SDK for the SDK for iFrame communication. CustomEvents Finally, and maybe the most simplistic issue, is my consumer can’t tweak ANY of the styles in my iFrame.  This can lead to inconsistent user interfaces and is just a bad experience all around. While iFrames will work, they are outdated, difficult to communicate with, and if your widget is dynamic in size or you need any kind of customization, . good luck CSS specificity The more common approach I have taken is to just be super specific with my CSS.  So namespace everything!  This can be tedious and will most likely need to be tweaked for each new client integrating your components. The QA process for pushing out an update to the widget is going to be difficult too.  There are so many ways clients can use CSS and have it break your integration. Ok, so if I don’t want to use an iFrame or be anal about my CSS, what can I do? Enter the Shadow DOM! Wow, that sounds spooky… What is the Shadow DOM, you ask? It’s an API for DOM encapsulation, and we all know how important encapsulation is. Shadow DOM allows hidden DOM trees to be attached to elements in the regular DOM tree — this Shadow DOM tree starts with a shadow root underneath which can be attached to any elements you want in the same way as the normal DOM.> - Using Shadow DOM The most basic approach to creating a shadow is to attach it to any DOM element: const shadow = element.attachShadow({mode: 'open' || ‘closed’}); The mode or allows you to specify whether or not the page’s JavaScript can interact with the Shadow DOM.  Open means it can interact, and closed means it cannot. open closed After I’ve created my shadow element, I can append to it just like any normal DOM node. const shadow = element.attachShadow({mode: 'open' || ‘closed’}); 
const styleNode = document.createElement(“style”);
style.textContent = `
	background: blue;
	font-size: 18px;
`;

shadow.appendChild(styleNode);

const contentNode = document.createElement(“div”);
contentNode.textContent = `Hello World`;
shadow.appendChild(contentNode); The above code will create a shadow node, append a node style to the Shadow DOM, and append a div saying Hello World. The style will now be isolated, only affecting the shadow tree and not contaminating the parent. Success! However, the above example is very verbose and simple and shows us just the bare metal implementation of the Shadow DOM.  It’s only scratching the surface of what the Shadow DOM can do.  It’s not all that complicated, and it’s pretty well supported right now. Shadow DOM with React I’d like to take a quick moment to highlight a really useful package that I’ve used in the past and really gave me the feeling of “WOW, I might actually be able to use this in production.”. makes working with the shadow DOM with React easy as pie!  The example I used above with will look like this: React Shadow react-shadow import root from 'react-shadow';
 
export default () =>  (
    <root.div>
        <div>Hello World</div>
        <style type="text/css">
            background: blue;
            font-size: 18px;
        </style>
    </root.div>
); Now, if that isn’t magic, I don’t know what else is. So, take a step with me into the future. Let’s not be afraid of our Shadow DOM, and let’s make beautiful composite user experiences together!

Using the Shadow DOM to Isolate Styles on a DOM That Is Not Yours

‘Patrick Coraban died as he lived, taking a step back’ It’s said not all heroes wear capes, and some also don’t wear parachutes. We remember today the life of Patrick Coraban, 34, a product manager who went all the way back to school to earn an MBA to become a product manager. He was taken from us far too soon, much like how his engineers closed tickets and gave status updates far too soon just to get him off their butts for a few minutes. Dear Patrick set a strategy and vision for not falling off a cliff, but was unable to actually not fall off the cliff himself. Perhaps the requirements of not falling off the cliff were loosely-defined. Regardless, it was a poor user experience. He is survived by a Kanban board. Patrick’s remains have been shipped and he will be released for general availability in a Celebration of Journey Map Completion at the Sinclair Memorial Home in Burlingame at 11 am on Saturday, June 30th.  In lieu of flowers, his family requests the total addressable market of stakeholders deliver minimum viable donations to the American Cliff and Ravine Awareness Association. Solopreneur funds additional day of runway with $14.78 found in couch Ah, the solopreneur lifestyle. What a treat it is to be captain of thy ship, master of thy domain, the only name on the LLC thou paid $950 to set up through LegalZoom because thou could not figure out how to navigate the state government website. Yes, maybe this is the week thou launch thy website or go to that networking event full of prospects, or then again maybe it isn’t? Thou is thy boss now! After all, thou hath two months left in thy four months of severance and wait - what is that? Could it be? Why, that is fourteen whole dollars and seventy-three American cents lying right there betwixt the couch cushionry - wait, actually there’s another nickel there, so it’s $14.78. Thy Gods smile down upon thee! O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay! Why $14.78 is enough for a tall boy and a three-rack of Pringles - nourishment to get thee through a long week of using Fiverr to negotiate revisions of thy third attempt at a logo. Thou may have enough sustenance yet to cancel all the extra crap GoDaddy threw in whenst thou signed up for web hosting for that personal branded website thou hath claimed thy is making! Praise thy heavens - a blessing from above no doubt caused by the lamb sacrificed for the takeout curry vindaloo that rests upon thy coffee table for the past fortnight! Though the flies may be collecting, so too is thine confidence! NEWS IN PHOTOS Every company now out of closet Everyone in Zoom conference a narcissist only looking at self Job outsourced to India outsourced to Cleveland ‘I’ll decide when data is Big Data, and it’s Big Data when you have to scroll down,’ claims Director of Operations CARL TO ACTION To My Valued Board of Crustees, Following a recent Groupon-funded teeth cleaning at my local “tooth miner,” which is what the layman may call a “dentist,” I was found to possess an overly tense jaw. That only logical culprit was stress. Perhaps it was the six pounds of Soylent-soaked espresso beans I eat every morning. Maybe it was my fixation on the impending pizza bot takeover. Or perchance it was merely the act of visiting the dentist that caused my jaw to be wound tighter than the rubber band ball I stole off my intern’s desk. That’s when I remembered that by simply referring 5 people to TechLoaf using my unique referral URL I would win a TechLoaf StressLoaf™. Now you may be wondering whether I’m endorsing the TechLoaf StressLoaf™ as a replacement for your dental insurance. I am. #deleteyourdentist #jawgoals #mandiblecrushmonday From Crust Til Dawn, Carl “Baby Teeth” Cantana CEO/Editor-in-Teeth/Head Authenticator of Shark Tooth Necklaces WANT MORE TECHLOAF? The disruptors are about to get disrupted. Start receiving the weekly email. ( ) preview

Product manager dead after ‘taking a step back’ off cliff

(This article is part of an ongoing series on technical and soft skills from Nathan Thomas, a full stack software engineer studying and working at Lambda School based in Silicon Valley. Click here for part 5 in the series, an article about “The Pursuit of Persistence and Grit.”) Getting Started with React Native It’s time for another to-do app tutorial! Just kidding. I can guarantee that this walkthrough will be worth your time, much like double-stuff Oreos or a happy golden retriever puppy. We’ll be building out a simple weather app in using , a free weather API. React Native is a library for building iOS, Android, and most recently . React Native MetaWeather Windows, tablets, and Xbox applications Here’s an example of the we’ll be making. I’ve even thrown in a higher order component and some light styling for some extra seasoning so you can see that React Native isn’t so crazy after all. finished product As always, I like to define my reader expectations up front; you need to be familiar with React, as I won’t be explaining concepts fundamental to it. In fact, your ability to quickly learn React Native from this article on us being able to compare what we’re doing to how we would normally use React. Additionally, you need to be familiar with Flexbox and the basics of CSS. Lastly, it would also be great if you’re used to working with APIs, but it’s not a requirement; I’ll hold your hand through that part and give you the code for everything. depends With that out of the way, let’s go ahead and get started. I think you’re really going to have fun with this one. “We take better care of our smartphones than we do of ourselves — the phones are always recharged!” — Arianna Huffington Let’s Make It Rain There are just a couple things we need to do before we code anything. I’ll list them all out here: Go to the and sign up for a free account. Once you do, scroll down to the footer, look for a column labelled “Beginners,” and click on the “Try Expo Snack” link. Snack is a free, online code-editing sandbox for React Native, and it’s what we’ll be using today. Expo website I need you to go grab a cup of your favorite hot beverage. If we’re going to do this, we’re going to do it right. We’re going to get comfortable. When you’re done with both of those things, create a new, blank project in Snack. Your new boilerplate app should look something like this: Snack makes up amazing names when you create a new application. Mine’s called “intelligent donut,” but yours might be something like “amused pistachio” or “frisky blueberries.” Go ahead and rename it if you want (although I’d personally keep either of those last two names), and then hit the big “Save” button in the top right corner. I’m going to call mine “React Native App Demo” for the sake of clarity during this walkthrough. Go ahead and delete everything in App.js and paste in the following code: <a href="https://medium.com/media/383fc891b3a4b19a0ddf0a0353e4b367/href">https://medium.com/media/383fc891b3a4b19a0ddf0a0353e4b367/href</a> This is instantly going to throw an error because we haven’t created a HomeView component yet, but don’t panic from the red screen of death Snack is going to throw us. Let’s take a moment to discuss what’s going on with our code, and then we’ll go fix it. Notice how I’ve only imported the react dependency so far. If this doesn’t prove to you that you can easily learn how to use React Native coming from a web background, I don’t know what will. We are running full-blown React on a mobile device, and we’ll supplement it in just a minute with the react-native dependency for anything else that needs to be tweaked to make it work. With that little pep talk out of the way, go ahead and remove all the files in the existing components directory, add a container directory inside that one, and make a new HomeView.js file to go inside it. Paste in the following code (and then we’ll discuss it): <a href="https://medium.com/media/1d18eadc3ba355b0b180404d04d588f4/href">https://medium.com/media/1d18eadc3ba355b0b180404d04d588f4/href</a> Did you read through all of that? Good. You deserve a medal, high five, or at least a cookie 🍪 from someone. Go ahead and take a quick mental break to swig some of that hot beverage you’re holding. Okay, let’s discuss what’s happening. First off, we have the import line for react-native. It looks like this: <a href="https://medium.com/media/161f9f3a557ec3213da1f0fe35a354b8/href">https://medium.com/media/161f9f3a557ec3213da1f0fe35a354b8/href</a> These named exports from the react-native dependency allow us to build out our mobile application on top of normal React. But don’t be intimidated by them; they directly correlate to pretty much everything you already know about the web environment: Text is used the same way as the p, h1, h2, and all of those other sorts of text-containing tags. The View tag is used in much the same way as you would a div, section, header, footer, or other sorts of organizational tags in HTML. ScrollView is very much like View, but it’s 🎉 since it allows us to extend our container past the boundaries of the screen so that the user can swipe through content. We’ll see how this works in a bit. extra fancy Finally, the StyleSheet import enables us to build out a complete stylesheet object inside of our application using CSS styles. Taking that knowledge, let’s work our way down the page and analyze the code. To start, here’s the class in our HomeView.js component file: <a href="https://medium.com/media/f26f6b9a5ebdce319562ced25357ec44/href">https://medium.com/media/f26f6b9a5ebdce319562ced25357ec44/href</a> As you can see, we have our class structured with a ScrollView as the overall container. This allows us to have a scrollable, fluid structure to the page that the user can drag through with their finger. Inside of that, we have our View and Text tags which contains some text content. Finally, the last thing to note here is that we’re using Text tag inside of the first one; this functions (in this scenario) very much like if you had a span tag inside of a p tag in your JSX in normal React. It allows you to single out parts of the text for specific styling. another We have our StyleSheet below our class. As a reminder, this is what it looks like: <a href="https://medium.com/media/873103a28a604bb895c4318c04908e14/href">https://medium.com/media/873103a28a604bb895c4318c04908e14/href</a> When we call StyleSheet's .create() method, we can pass in an object that contains multiple key-value pairs of styling objects. React Native connects these to our component and makes them accessible for reference there. In the code snippet, the scrollContainer style is assigned the value of an object with many individual CSS styling properties inside of it. These are all camel-cased (i.e. marginBottom and justifyContent), and any text value is wrapped in quotation marks (i.e. "center", "spaceBetween", etc.). Additionally, notice that all measurements lack the values (i.e rem, px, etc.) that you know and love (and maybe hate) from a web environment. This is because all measurements in React Native default to plain integers without a unit type ending. These represent pixel-density-independent proportions on the screen. This is also a great moment to talk about how layout work in React Native. I’ve previously said that CSS is the technique you use to style everything, but you’ll also be pleased to know that Flexbox is the module we use for all layouts. There are two significant differences with it that you need to know about right now, though: The CSS styling property of flexDirection in the Flexbox module defaults to column instead of row in React Native. The new flex property, shown in scrollContainer up above, sizes the element according to the number assigned to it. There is no way I can explain it in this small space better than the , so I highly recommend you give it a quick read. official documentation As we previously said, the object passed into StyleSheet.create() applies to the component when it mounts. We then utilize the styles on it by writing style={styles.styleNameGoesHere} on the component in the code; here’s the HomeView.js class again so you can see what I’m talking about: <a href="https://medium.com/media/f26f6b9a5ebdce319562ced25357ec44/href">https://medium.com/media/f26f6b9a5ebdce319562ced25357ec44/href</a> Pretty cool, right? Now that we have a basic grasp on some of the React Native imports as well as how the default stylesheets work, let’s go ahead and rig up a higher order component, some presentational components, and make an axios call to our MetaWeather API. “When we started work on the iPhone, the motivation there was we all pretty much couldn’t stand our phones, and we wanted a better phone.” — Jony Ive When It Rains, It Pours At this point, your app should have the following image on screen and file setup as shown below: We’re going to go ahead and build out the rest of this app. I’m going to show you entire snippets of code to paste in, and we’ll talk about anything unique before we move on to the next one. Sound good? First, create a LoginView.js component inside your container directory and paste in the following code: <a href="https://medium.com/media/7cd1e1cb6f5daf04fb87de0829557548/href">https://medium.com/media/7cd1e1cb6f5daf04fb87de0829557548/href</a> This only new thing I want to point out here is that we can import and use the prop-types dependency just like in normal React. We won’t be doing that in the rest of the application, but it’s important that you at least see it once. Now we have to go flesh out the rest of the app so that this component's buttonFunction will get passed in on props. That code above is also going to throw a big red error due to the button import, so create a presentational directory inside the components one and make a Button.js file there. Paste in the following code: <a href="https://medium.com/media/632b5603c500581f430744af6b649f60/href">https://medium.com/media/632b5603c500581f430744af6b649f60/href</a> In this code, I want you to notice what we’re importing from react-native— TouchableHighlight is what allows React Native to respond properly to touches when wrapped around other tags. We have to supply it with an underlayColor prop and a hex color code (the last two numbers of the #0E30F050 above are the opacity percentage). If we don’t supply this, the color will turn super funky when we press the button (read about why ). here Additionally, notice that we no longer have onClick events. Instead, we’re using onPress which seems super obvious if we stop to think about it. We are using smartphones, after all! Our next step is to make one more file in your container directory. We’ll name it authenticate.js. This is a higher order component for an simple pseudo-login process. Paste this code in: extremely <a href="https://medium.com/media/0dd833be919505acd6c178aab8111f85/href">https://medium.com/media/0dd833be919505acd6c178aab8111f85/href</a> The point of using a higher order component and some light currying is to show you that we’re flexing the exact same muscles as in normal React. React Native isn’t that bad, and things are really starting to come together now! Obviously, we need to complete the circle with our components, and you can probably see where this is going if you’re used to currying and higher order components in React; let’s go back to App.js and update it to look like this: <a href="https://medium.com/media/334b4fee5c66ab82c9349430857d8f0f/href">https://medium.com/media/334b4fee5c66ab82c9349430857d8f0f/href</a> Right on! At this point, our file structure and application should look like this: If you click that beautiful blue button, you will “login” to your application. It’s time to make our call to the MetaWeather API and display our data to the screen! Image by on Alfred Twj Unsplash Excuse Me While I Kiss the Sky First, go ahead and click on the package.json file. Delete all the code in there, and paste the following dependency list in: <a href="https://medium.com/media/34ce9193aabaf9db14665d017692d597/href">https://medium.com/media/34ce9193aabaf9db14665d017692d597/href</a> Isn’t it nice to know that we have ye olde package.json with us and along for the ride? Next, go to HomeView.js and update the code to look like this: <a href="https://medium.com/media/4a4229ffafc937b1cd19a72d8d1d9100/href">https://medium.com/media/4a4229ffafc937b1cd19a72d8d1d9100/href</a> We just imported the axios dependency along with the Button.js component, added a class constructor function, implemented a componentDidMount() lifecycle method, but some new text and a button in our component code, and added a weatherText style in our StyleSheet code. The axios call happening in our lifecycle method is currently coded to San Francisco, but you can tweak it using the information in the MetaWeather API documentation . here Whew. 😰 That was a lot of work, but we’re all done! Poke your way around the application, and you’ll find that you can log in, drag the ScrollView page from HomeView.js around, render the current weather to the screen, and logout using the button on the home screen. Additional Resources for Your Journey — These are really well-written, and you can basically search your way through building an app (with some light sprinkling of Stack Overflow thrown in). React Native official documentation — This is the premier way of building out a React Native application. They made the Snack software we used in this article. I used Apple’s raw Xcode on my last project since Expo doesn’t support React Hooks, and trust me, you should use Expo. There are some nice CLI tools to work locally on your computer so you don’t have to use Snack in the future. Expo — There are many choices out there for navigation in React Native, but this one is great since it uses the exact same syntax as React Router (except that it doesn’t have a NavLink). React Router Native — You can use this amazing styling library in React Native by installing the dependency styled-components and then importing styled-components/native anywhere in your app. Styled Components — A great resource for generating cool drop shadows for your apps. I used this to generate the shadow on the welcome card in this article’s demo app. React Native Shadow Generator Thanks for reading. Nathan ( , , , , and ) GitHub LinkedIn Twitter Instagram Portfolio Site

Building Your First React Native App

Crowdfunding platforms have their share of censorship controversies. In December, a flurry of account deactivations called attention to the fragility of trying to earn a living on the platforms. Patreon’s predicament The content funding site, Patreon, first booted British user Carl Benjamin, who used anti-feminist, anti-Islamic, and homophobic language in his political commentary. According to journalist Nellie Bowles, the site referenced its terms of service, which forbade denigrating language against others. In spite of good intentions, the ban sparked accusations of censorship and political bias. Seeming to embrace its role policing language on its platform, Patreon removed the account of later that week. New York Times Milo Yiannopoulos Patreon tweeted that the account violated hate-speech rules, and Business Insider reported that Yiannopoulos’ was also barred for affiliation with Proud Boys, which Patreon terms a hate group. Yiannopoulos is best known for right-wing politics and views that also espouse anti-feminism and anti-Islam. Multiple other content producers suffered similar fates during recent takedowns. Platforms, where content-makers make a living, have weathered increasing scrutiny that they have outsised control over content-makers’ views. Not only do they actively censor politically unpopular speech, as was the case in , but they hold the purse-strings to those users’ careers, controlling access to accounts, followers, funds, and data. this independent journalist’s coverage of Mediterranean NGO migrant rescue ships Funds are particularly linked to content censorship, with payment processor rules dictating who and what can be said on the platforms and who can access funds. about which kind of content is monetisable on their platform, stating that, “We’ve been ramping up the proactive review of content on due to requirements from our payment processors.” In this case, adult content was the target. One Patreon employee confirms that payment processors make decisions Patreon Patreon alternatives? Alternatives are in the works. Jordan Peterson, a psychology professor at the University of Toronto who works against political correctness and has a large following on YouTube, . The site would use a subscription model, as Patreon does, but there has been no announcement yet about the ways in which a new platform would work with payment processing companies to allow access to funds for all users. says he will create a crowdfunding platform that does not censor Ultimately, all of the crowdfunding and content creation platforms maintain control of the content posted by users and the ability to deactivate accounts and livelihoods at any time. For a truly censorship-free content universe, a new approach is needed. Ensuring Open Speech for All on Crowdfunding Platforms Centralised platforms have expressed that they do not remove accounts easily and without cause. Patreon CEO Jack Conte posted a YouTube video in which he says, “The authority to take away a person’s income is a sobering responsibility. It is not something to be done on a whim.” The sentiment is noble, but the December takedowns reinforce that platforms do have and use that responsibility. They control content on their platforms. While takedowns may not happen on a whim, they do seem to happen in conjunction with pressure from payment processors, political pressures, and the internal views of a team of employees with their own policies and objectives. A company attempting to create alternatives would have to remove themselves from control of account content, but also from partnerships with other organisations attempting to limit their affiliation with controversial content producers. Decentralisation At , we believe that decentralisation is the only way to solve the problem of controversial maker censorship. Where the devolution of control is handed to the communities in order to moderate the content they consume. Lightstreams With centralised authorities, the responsibility to patrol platform speech is overwhelming. What platform creators say impacts the reputation and the responsibilities, both legally and ethically, of the platform itself, bringing insurmountable pressure to the decisions of who to welcome. Platforms are giving voice to makers on their platforms, and as such, they cannot extricate themselves from responsibility and authority over those voices. A decentralised platform is censorship-free. A New Revenue Model is Needed Centralised content platforms cannot operate independently of payment processors. In order to actualise a content platform where all are welcome and can thrive, an independent system for payment strategy is required. Because decentralised solutions can include their own currencies, they can bring a new revenue model to the system which resists censorship. Further, the new revenue model of localised currencies allows revenue to flow to content-makers based on their relationship directly with their users, fans and followers. Instead of a central platform holding the keys to a content maker’s reputation, the relationship is unmediated, as is the sponsorship. Decentralisation keeps capital between maker and consumer without the platform controlling access and payments. Since Bitcoin’s original 2008 white paper, the idea of decentralisation of revenue model has proven that mathematics, and not a central authority, can create a revenue model based on trust that works for producers as well as consumers. Meeting the Needs of Diverse Community Groups Because decentralised systems can be more responsive to the needs of users, they encourage more participation and allow a broader range of voices to be heard than centralised platforms. As platforms like Patreon lose the far right, the adult industry, and other groups, the political dialogue they bring to a complex society is also lost. Those with the privilege to speak have less and less to say as arguments vanish from the platform. In order to have a debate that reflects the richness of a culture, the entire culture must be incentivised to participate. This is possible in a decentralised environment but not in an environment with censorship. Readers, too, lose out with centralisation. They can only read and consume content that is approved by the gatekeepers. If they are not interested in that narrow band of voices, they too, leave the community. Lightstreams, Fanbase, and the Future of Open Content , an application initially developed for the music industry by the Lightstreams team, demonstrates what the advantages of uncensored content development could look like. Fanbase The app allows musicians and bands to connect directly with fans and offer exclusive content, just as artists on platforms like Patreon currently do through a subscription model. It offers benefits for artists who they control their own content dissemination and access to their own fans. Unlike centralised streaming services, artists on Fanbase can directly engage with fans and incentivise their listeners to buy or complete actions in exchange for artist-branded coins. Decentralisation using Lightstreams Fanbase built on the showcases the protocol’s ability to let music makers share data with fans without middlemen and with no centralised control or censorship by the network. When an artist is in control of their community and content, the platform cannot limit what kind of content an artist or fans choose to share with one another. Lightstreams Network This censorship-free environment means that content creators are empowered to use and stay on the network knowing they will not be suddenly disenfranchised from the business they have built around their content. The network has been engineered to be 100% decentralised as a direct response to the problems currently plaguing the content industry. If an artist or their community do not like the limitations of Fanbase they can freely move to another version developed by another team and can still continue and forever have access to their funds, content and historic activity. A New Revenue Model For Artists The economy is engineered with problems in the music industry in mind, where content consumption is exploding but revenue for the artists creating it is shrinking. The coin system of Fanbase gives artists a new and unique revenue stream based on their current and future popularity. Unlike other coin systems that have a single currency with a fixed supply, each will have its own currency where the number of their coins in circulation and the purchase price is a function of the artist’s popularity. For example, if the community was supporting Marshmello then the currency could be an MSH coin with a large supply because of his popularity. With this system of artist-based coins, Fanbase is engineered so that artists can generate revenue through capital investment in coins, subscription fees, and exchange fees when holders of their coins convert their funds to other currencies. artist-based community How to Make Bonding Curves for Continuous Token Models The price of an artist coin is controlled by a CoinFactory service that creates coins in response to demand and at the same time increases the purchase price as the number in circulation increases. You can read more details about CoinFactory in this Lightstreams article. Artist popularity and the number of coins in circulation are correlated as coins are created when fans acquire them in order to subscribe to become members of the artist’s community or are acquired and held by backers who believe the artist will attain more future subscribers. Initially, the price of coins set by CoinFactory will by low, offering substantial future rewards for early backers. A Censorship-Free Voice for Diverse Communities The entire ecosystem works to support the people that create amazing content and where new economies are built around that content. Fanbase allows many diverse groups to freely share thoughts and opinions which are moderated by the artist and the fans themselves. Fanbase is built on a system of smart contracts that contain autonomous rules that govern how the system will behave and execute independently of the Fanbase’s creators. Rules are digitally signed by the artist or delegated community members and immediately distributed on the network as a public and immutable record for full transparency. This system of independently operating smart contracts means that diverse groups of fans can flourish by their own complex, individual and constantly changing terms without being held back or controlled by the application itself The Future of Fanbase Fanbase’s long-term goals are to create a system that is scalable and can spread globally, giving users the best experience and the closest relationship with artists they love. Content is to be easily published on Fanbase, which will function as an artist-based community, run Reddit-style. In October 2018, Fanbase’s technical proof of concept was released along with the test network and pre-provisioned nodes for testing purposes. Fanbase will go live post the mainnet launch of Lighstreams timed for Q1 2019. Stay tuned and please to be notified about the upcoming . subscribe to our newsletter Lightstreams token sale If you liked what you read, PLEASE “Clap” below so others will see it too (up to 50 claps allowed!) Michael SmolenskiCEO Twitter Instagram Thanks to the vision of , , , , , , , , and the many others that have inspired my thoughts. Simon de la Rouviere Dimitri De Jonghe Patrick Kershaw Mike Goldin thibauld David Truong Slava Balasanov Paul Kohlhaas

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