9 items tagged “molly-white”
2024
As an independent writer and publisher, I am the legal team. I am the fact-checking department. I am the editorial staff. I am the one responsible for triple-checking every single statement I make in the type of original reporting that I know carries a serious risk of baseless but ruinously expensive litigation regularly used to silence journalists, critics, and whistleblowers. I am the one deciding if that risk is worth taking, or if I should just shut up and write about something less risky.
Follow the Crypto (via) Very smart new site from Molly White tracking the huge increase in activity from Cryptocurrency-focused PACs this year. These PACs have already raised $203 million and spent $38 million influencing US elections in 2024.
Right now Molly's rankings show that the "Fairshake" cryptocurrency PAC is second only to the Trump-supporting "Make America Great Again Inc" in money raised by Super PACs this year - though it's 9th in the list that includes other types of PAC.
Molly's data comes from the FEC, and the code behind the site is all open source.
There's lots more about the project in the latest edition of Molly's newsletter:
Did you know that the cryptocurrency industry has spent more on 2024 elections in the United States than the oil industry? More than the pharmaceutical industry?
In fact, the cryptocurrency industry has spent more on 2024 elections than the entire energy sector and the entire health sector. Those industries, both worth hundreds of billions or trillions of dollars, are being outspent by an industry that, even by generous estimates, is worth less than $20 billion.
Fighting bots is fighting humans [...] remind you that "only allow humans to access" is just not an achievable goal. Any attempt at limiting bot access will inevitably allow some bots through and prevent some humans from accessing the site, and it's about deciding where you want to set the cutoff. I fear that media outlets and other websites, in attempting to "protect" their material from AI scrapers, will go too far in the anti-human direction.
But increasingly, I’m worried that attempts to crack down on the cryptocurrency industry — scummy though it may be — may result in overall weakening of financial privacy, and may hurt vulnerable people the most. As they say, “hard cases make bad law”.
We can have a different web (via) Molly White’s beautifully optimistic manifesto for creating a better web. Read the whole thing, or even better, find some headphones and a dog and go for a walk listening to the audio version.
But the reality is that you can't build a hundred-billion-dollar industry around a technology that's kind of useful, mostly in mundane ways, and that boasts perhaps small increases in productivity if and only if the people who use it fully understand its limitations.
Become a Wikipedian in 30 minutes (via) A characteristically informative and thoughtful guide to getting started with Wikipedia editing by Molly White—video accompanied by a full transcript.
I found the explanation of Reliable Sources particularly helpful, including why Wikipedia prefers secondary to primary sources.
“The way we determine reliability is typically based on the reputation for editorial oversight, and for factchecking and corrections. For example, if you have a reference book that is published by a reputable publisher that has an editorial board and that has edited the book for accuracy, if you know of a newspaper that has, again, an editorial team that is reviewing articles and issuing corrections if there are any errors, those are probably reliable sources.”
2023
In 2022, web3 went just great. Molly White’s essential roundup of 2022 in cryptocurrency. “$4.27 billion was stolen in various hacks and scams this year alone”.
2022
DAOs are, I think, one of the best illustrations of the problem with a lot of these Web3 projects: They are trying to find technological solutions that will somehow codify very complex social structures. A lot of them also seem to operate under the assumption that everyone is acting in good faith, and that project members’ interests will generally align—a baffling assumption given the amount of bad actors in the crypto space.