Loading summary
Transcript102 lines
- [00:00]
A
Foreign. Hello and welcome to the porn and propaganda episode of Slate Money, your guide to the business and finance news of the week. I'm Felix Salmon of Axios. I'm here with Emily Peck of Fundrise.
- [00:28]
B
Hello.
- [00:28]
A
And very special guest, Joe Bernstein of. I'm not entirely sure what your affiliation is. Joe, introduce yourself.
- [00:36]
C
Hi, I'm Joe Bernstein. My byline is Joseph, but please call me Joe. I, as of Tuesday, am a reporter, senior reporter at BuzzFeed News. I spent the last year as a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University.
- [00:49]
A
Welcome, Joe. You are back at BuzzFeed now, but during your sabbatical or whatever it was, you did manage to write a massive cover article for Harper's about anti disinformation, which is a fascinating subject. We are going to talk about. We are also going to talk about porn because obviously it's been in the news for the past couple weeks. There was this big sort of flip flop from Onlyfans. We're going to talk about what that was all about. We are also going to talk about rise in shoplifting thanks to the Internet and Jeff Bezos. We have a sleepless segment on Renaissance technologies and their tax settlement. We have a numbers round that is probably the most depressing numbers round we've ever had. No bowling balls, but it's all a good show, actually. And you get to hear Joe drop some serious knowledge about the Internet and whether it changes how we think it's all coming up on Slate Money. So, Joe, you disappeared off to Harvard and disappeared into a pile of books and came out with magnum opus on the COVID of Harper's Magazine about this is my favorite word that you used in the piece anti disinformation and the anti disinformation industry, which now I feel that Slate Money has been part of the anti disinformation industry ourselves. We are part of the problem. But tell us what this industry is.
- [02:19]
C
I would like to start by saying we've all in various ways, shapes and forms, been a part of the anti disinformation industry over the past 10 years. We've sort of been inundated with new and exciting and sometimes disturbing, infuriating, anti democratic forms of content and we're all sort of negotiating how to live with them. That's just a broad lesson across lots of Internet. Basically every Internet platform. Specifically since 2016, there's been a kind of a cluster of people in the media, in academia and at think tanks and sort of civil society groups, cash rich nonprofits that have really devoted themselves to combating a concept that they call disinformation. And what this group of people, of essentially knowledge workers assumes is that there is a stable category of thing called disinformation that can be fought against, and that that is like a. Like a neutral sort of like empirical good. And what I wanted to do with this story is think about the assumptions behind that. Think about how this work takes place in the broader technological context, the broader sociological context, the broader media context, and take a step back and think about how that has worked over the past sort of four to five years.
- [03:38]
A
So the first thing to think is that what was that Netflix documentary that got everyone up in arms? That was terrible.
- [03:44]
B
The Social Dilemma.
- [03:46]
A
The social Dilemma. That was it. There was the social Dilemma. And then there was also just anyone you've ever heard at a cocktail party or whatever, just like, complaining about Cambridge Analytica and how evil they were. And I think, as you say in your piece, it all really comes back to this idea that there was something illegitimate about the way in which Trump won the 2016 election, that Russia in particular was injecting disinformation or misinformation or whatever you want to call it into Facebook, that people therefore or thereby wound up believing things that weren't true, thanks to this brand new sophisticated way of getting people to believe things that aren't true. And the consequences of that was the election of Donald Trump. And people got terrified at the power of social networks and have now seen this, are now terrified of this power in a bunch of different contexts, right?
- [04:45]
C
And, like, right away, there's, like, good academic research that studies the effects of fake news that is not at all, you know, causal, that is not at all sort of unidirectional. Like, this stuff makes people vote for Donald Trump, but it sort of doesn't get. It just doesn't get a lot of media space. And I think there was just an enormous appetite to explain why Trump was elected, why Britain left the eu. And blaming this sort of, like, nebulous concept of bad information is in many ways easier than thinking through, like, the various, like, complicated reasons behind both of those things.
- [05:22]
A
And there's this peculiar irony here, which I really love on one level, which is that the natural people to fight back against this narrative are the tech companies and specifically Facebook. And Facebook is uniquely incapable of fighting back against this narrative because it makes all of its money by selling the narrative that it can influence people, and that if you buy ads on Facebook, then that is going to influence their behavior.
- [05:49]
C
Right? So one of the things that I sort of started thinking while I was working on this piece was about the framing of disinformation as a pollution issue. And so then I started thinking about sort of other big, sort of like classical, like, literal polluting industries, Big tobacco, you know, the energy industry, and how long and hard these industries fought to claim that their products weren't doing the things that advocates claim that they were doing. And then how comparatively fast Big tech essentially took on board the disinformation critique. And then I started thinking like, well, why is it not in their interest to fight the basic claim of the disinformation critique, which is that information on social platforms causes people to behave in these specific ways, which there's research that supports that. And I started thinking, well, actually, as you say, their entire business model is based on the idea that they are all persuasive, that they can standardize people to be persuaded. And once I realized that, it kind of unlocked a lot of things about this story for me.
- [06:52]
B
So the disinformation narrative then helps everyone on all sides of it, because it gives powerful elites, as we call them, sort of like a boogeyman excuse, and they don't have to examine their own behavior or policies. They can just say, well, it's Facebook's fault. Facebook can say, we're sorry, but at the same time, they can say to Charmin, we're going to help you sell a lot more toilet paper. Look how influential and powerful we are. And then real problems underlying everything don't really get addressed. That was very appealing about your piece. It was just like, oh, no.
- [07:26]
A
I mean, I guess one of the messages I took away from this piece is that maybe the problems that people are getting so exorcised about are not so real after all.
- [07:36]
C
I don't want to go that far, and I don't want to say that information on social platforms can't have profound negative effects. I just think we need to be humble about massive claims, massive sort of overarching claims about the nature of media effects, which is like an unsettled science.
- [07:52]
A
Do you think that Russia won the election for Donald Trump by meddling in Facebook?
- [07:59]
C
I don't know. What do you think? I mean, no, I don't. I don't. There's a 2017 Stanford and NYU study which concluded that if one fake news article, or about as persuasive as one TV campaign ad, the fake news in our. In our database, which is the database of Facebook users that the study was examining, would have changed vote shares by an amount on the order of hundredths of a percentage point that is much smaller than Trump's margin of victory in the pivotal states on which the outcome depended. So for them to have sort of for Russia to have elected Trump, you'd have to believe that this Internet advertising is like, massively more powerful and persuasive than TV advertising, which we don't even know is all that persuasive to begin with.
- [08:45]
A
Right. I mean, I think that's one of the things we've learned in the past few elections, is that money doesn't win elections, even though what it does do is buy lots of TV ads. And if TV ads aren't particularly impressive and don't really change people's minds anymore, it's hard to see how the Internet is suddenly way more powerful, being able to have that kind of effect.
- [09:10]
B
So that was one of the things that I was kind of wrestling with after reading your piece. It's like, on the one hand, you're saying Facebook isn't as powerful as everyone is arguing it is. Social media isn't as powerful as everyone argues it is. TV ads aren't as powerful. Marketing isn't as powerful. But like, it is, though, marketing, TV ads, all that stuff does shape a narrative and does lead people to believe certain things or see the world in certain ways. So how do you kind of.
- [09:37]
A
What's your evidence, Emily? What makes you believe that?
- [09:41]
B
I mean, I just listened to a great podcast episode on Slate about how bottled water is basically a creation of marketing. Like, no one needed bottled water. Marketers figured out how to bottle water literally and convince people that they needed to hydrate. And now it's a multi billion dollar industry. And now I am actually working in marketing and I can see, like, you can see measurable results. You know, like a CEO appears on TV and then, you know, traffic surges to a website, sales go up. It all does matter.
- [10:11]
A
Tim Wang is a friend of mine. He's also quoted in Joe's piece. He has a great quote in Joe's piece, basically saying, like, the reason why digital marketing in particular has so much strength of belief behind it is because it lends itself so naturally to impressive PowerPoint presentations, basically, which show you exactly the kind of causality that you're talking about. And you can say, well, look, we spent a bunch of money in this channel and then we made a bunch of money over there. Or I have this business where for every hundred dollars I spend on Facebook advertising, I make $130 in profits. And so it's just this great business and it all runs on Facebook and I think you're right. That does it work at some level of the funnel? Right. It works in terms of if you have someone who wants to buy, you know, who has a general idea that they want to buy something and you put in front of them a button saying, here you can buy it right now, you get 20% off, then that's going to be the thing that incentivizes them to actually buy it. Whether it works like higher up the funnel in terms of, you know, making people decide who to vote for or change their mind in terms of what they think about Ford cars, is much less well defined. And I think it does work to some degree, but I don't think it works much better than marketing. And advertising has always worked. I don't think digital is some kind of amazing marketing technology that has transformed the industry and its effectiveness.
- [11:55]
B
Yes, marketing does work, but digital marketing might not be any different or better.
- [12:00]
C
But also it's related to this kind of mid century idea that some combination of advertising and behavioral science has cracked the code to the human mind. And I don't think that's true. And I think attempts to sort of quantify that and to say exactly how it works, I just don't think they're accurate. And just to take your example, Emily, did people start buying bottled water because they saw ads for it or because they saw it in the store? I mean, those two things seem to me to be separate questions. Right.
- [12:28]
B
But seeing bottled water in the store is marketing. There are decisions that go into where the bottles of water get placed. Right. And how they're sold, et cetera, et cetera. Like it's all part of, it's all part of marketing and ad sales. Like there is brutal competition over where the products are placed.
- [12:45]
C
Yes, it's marketing, but it's not messaging. And what I'm talking about is messaging.
- [12:50]
B
Okay, well, I guess I think it's all part of the messaging. I think all that stuff is very meticulously planned and crafted and sold to people. And that, I guess I think people are pretty vulnerable to those messages, maybe not uniquely so on social media.
- [13:04]
C
That to me is more like debating whether or not Trump or Biden goes first on the ballot and less about. Right. When you're talking about like placement in the store or whatever, what I'm talking about are like the messages people are exposed to before, before they make a choice. And I think there's a lot of evidence basically showing that those effects are not as strong as you think. And a lot of Fortune 500 companies don't even run 12 because it's not clear that they work.
- [13:28]
A
So let me ask you two questions, Jed. The first one is just broadly, has the tech clash been over egged? Is there much less here than meets the eye? Yeah, let's start with that one. Have we all got too invested in this sort of tech clash narrative?
- [13:44]
C
I think that the tech clash is a completely understandable and in some ways necessary reaction to the way the industry was covered for years and years and years. I think a mature coverage of the tech industry is going to combine some acknowledgment that these companies are not uniquely evil, they're just self interested like all companies, and with a kind of skepticism that any reporter, any sort of knowledge producing person needs to bring to bear on the things that they analyze that they cover and report on.
- [14:18]
A
And then my second question is about COVID truth is and anti vaxxers and anti maskers. And what's your opinion of the degree to which social media may or may not be particularly to blame for the spread of those kind of beliefs?
- [14:34]
C
I think it absolutely plays a role and I think there has to be reporting on this stuff. My piece is not an argument that we need to, you know, it's not a libertarian argument, sign argument that you're sort of, you know, a speech uberalus or anything like that. It's just that there are other factors at play in vaccine skepticism. Vaccine skepticism existed before social platforms. It exists in lots of different communities in the States, in other countries. And to sort of delude ourselves into thinking if we have better content moderation, well, that's going to eliminate vaccine skepticism is I think, just sort of cruising for bruising.
- [15:09]
A
I totally agree with that one. I'm recording this from Berlin where I spent a bunch of time talking, talking to Germans. Well, in Germany, talking to a bunch of Germans with various degrees of various different types of attitudes about vaccines and masks. And the one thing you can say about Germany in general, at least the kind of people I've been hanging out with, is they spend very little time on what we would consider social media. They might use messaging apps like WhatsApp, but it's not sort of a fake newsy kind of place necessarily. But yeah, I think what we see now is people who we never used to see before. There were always anti vaxxers, there were always crazies, there were always conspiracy theories and they just didn't used to be nearly as visible as they are now. And now we see them all and we're like, this is terrifying. What is going on. And maybe that's good that we can see it. I just don't think that. I think you're right, that it's a bit of a stretch to actually blame Facebook or YouTube for that.
- [16:07]
C
I think it's an interaction you have people who say, who make the argument you basically just made, which is that social media technology is a mirror. It just shows us what already exists. And there's people who say technology is completely determinative of human behavior. I think the truth is somewhere in the middle that these things interact, that we're still figuring out how they interact, that we need to be paying close attention, but that also to give too much power to the tech companies in a negative way is in many ways to their benefit. And that's, I think, what I was trying to say in the piece.
- [16:38]
B
But certainly social media has this amplification effect. Like it's not just a mirror. If it is a mirror, it's being held up to the sun and reflecting in all our faces and making my eyes go all squinty. I mean, it's more than just, oh, people have always been kind of nuts, but now everyone gets to say how nuts they are in public and it's like contagious or something, right? There is something going on that's worth worrying about.
- [17:05]
C
That was one of the criticisms of my piece that I didn't talk enough about the sort of amplification effect. And I think that's valid. I think that's one of the interactions that I'm talking about between sort of a preexisting social context, between a preexisting belief system and the ability to share that and find like minded people. I think that's a consequence of connecting everyone. I think because Facebook and YouTube and Twitter to a lesser extent have become so huge and powerful and wealthy, it is incumbent on them to monitor this stuff and it's incumbent on reporters to monitor this stuff. And again, I'm not making the argument that it's not. I just think to say that everything starts sort of with those platforms and is a consequence of them, which is how I see this discussion moving or how I saw it moving is just a mistake.
- [17:55]
B
Yeah, that makes sense. Well, my one other question is sort of the lead of your piece. Is it possible that it's always been this way, that people have always had these nutso opinions and they've been able to express them in different mediums? But during this kind of like golden age of media, when it was like the three television networks and the nice men behind the desks telling us what to think was kind of an anomalous period of cohesion in the world and in the United States. And we think that's normal, but really that was not normal. And what we're seeing now is kind of the way it usually is.
- [18:28]
C
Yeah, I think that's highly plausible. I also think there was a world of media during that time period that people who watched abc, CBS and NBC were kind of free to ignore. There was a huge network in some ways prefiguring sort of modern conservative talk radio. There's this network of like rabidly anti communist radio preachers who had an audience of millions in the 50s and 60s. And the people who listened to them were sort of the people we would now think of as Trump voters. And you know, if you lived in New York or you know, Washington D.C. or Chicago, whatever, you sort of or didn't listen to these radio channels, you just wouldn't be exposed to them. You might see an article about at a certain point the Kennedy administration tries to sort of shut them down using the fec, sorry, the fcc, but you just wouldn't be exposed to these viewpoints. And of course that's an argument or a conversation about. You also wouldn't be exposed to the viewpoints of like millions of minority Americans who were treated as second class citizens. And so it's, you know, then we sort of get into a broader conversation about the sort of disinformation industry, what it wants to do in terms of which voices it wants to let into the conversation. And when you talk about, yes, there's all this bad stuff on the Internet now that we didn't see before, well, there's a lot of good stuff too. There's a lot of voices being represented that weren't represented before. And those conversations I think need to be had in parallel.
- [19:52]
A
Which is a perfect segue to the conversation I wanted to have with you about porn. There was this very vibrant community on the Internet on a wonderful website known as Tumblr where every amazing sexual predilection you can possibly think of managed to find a safe home to celebrate themselves. And it was a very sort of sex positive and explicit kind of place if you wanted it to be. And then one day it got sold and all of that porn just got eradicated more or less overnight. We have big mainstream payments companies like Stripe and American Express who just want nothing to do with anything, porn whatsoever, even though it's legal. It's like the American government isn't asking them to do this. We Just had a crazy flip flop from OnlyFans, which is a porn company basically, which came out and said, guys, you have to stop doing porn on our platform. And then everyone was up in arms and then they were like, it's all the bank's fault. And then they somehow managed to find a solution and they said, oh, well, never mind, go back to your porn after all. But the fact is that exactly what you're talking about in terms of content moderation and gatekeepers and all of that kind of stuff really does exist to a very stifling degree in the porn industry, to the point at which there are basically no American porn companies. And it's extremely difficult for American sex workers to have bank accounts for American porn companies to get off the ground. What's your view of all of that?
- [21:29]
C
It's interesting. I mean, that OnlyFans situation in particular is fascinating because it's almost like a negotiation between various sort of stakeholders and who's going to set the rules of 20th, 21st century American life. Like, on the one hand, you have banks who sort of can exercise their own sort of like moral imperatives. You have the platforms who sort of gain scale in certain ways and then often sort of try and distance themselves from the ways that they've gained scale. And you have the users themselves who in many ways were kind of liberated by OnlyFans. And you see this sort of push and pull between these three different, want to call them interest groups, but these three different interests. And the fact that OnlyFans has kind of gone back on it is fascinating because it really shows the power of this, like, loud group of people, an impassioned group of people on the Internet, to kind of say, well, we're going to take our business and we're going to go, we're going to take our bonko home.
- [22:24]
A
Well, I mean, that was what OnlyFans kind of wanted them to do, right? I mean, what was happening with OnlyFans is incredibly opaque because they're not really explaining what was happening. No one really understands what was happening. A lot of what they said didn't make a lot of sense. You know, was it the case that they wanted like a bunch of VC money and that VCs just weren't interested in funding a pawn company? That could be it. Was it the case that, like, their banks were forcing them to take this move and then the banks changed their mind? That's kind of what they're saying, but it seems less plausible. But Emily, you're shaking your head here.
- [22:57]
B
I mean, I think it is mysterious. Exactly what happened. And if we can say anything, we can say it seems to have been really badly handled by OnlyFans. What was the strategy here? It just seems like a total fail on their partners of leadership and branding. But I was just thinking. I've been thinking that what happened with OnlyFans sort of points to something that's happening maybe all over social media, which is that the people who were used to posting stuff for free or were being taken advantage of in their content was being used to the advantage of big companies like Twitter, Facebook, etc. Are gaining more power. The. The reason that a lot of sex workers liked OnlyFans was that the company let you keep 80% of your. Of the money that you made on the site, which is apparently like a really lot of a big percentage for sex workers who on other sites are getting much smaller cut. And like, we know Twitter is now about to launch some kind of program where people can get paid for their tweets. People are making money as creators everywhere. Like, it's just. There's something new happening with, with social media, which I don't know how it plays back into Joe's Harper's piece, but it's something to pay attention to.
- [24:07]
A
But. So this is the big question, right? Is Twitt, you know, Well, I don't know what they're calling it, but, like the subscription tweets thing that they've now launched, is that a competitor to OnlyFans? Are they going to be okay with that being porny? Because Twitter is basically the only major social network that allows porn these days. You know, it got booted off Tumblr. It's never been allowed on Instagram, it's never been allowed on Facebook. And Instagram don't even allow, like, basic nudity, let alone anything, you know, socially explicit. Whereas Twitter has always, you know, it hasn't really monetized the porn, but it's allowed the porn. Joe, do you have any, like, insight there into what's the difference between Twitter and Instagram that, like, one of them, like, refuses to show so much as a nibble and then the other one is. Yeah, go ahead, be explicit.
- [24:56]
C
Well, first of all, Instagram is like a purely visual platform, so it kind of makes sense that they've thought more explicitly, pardon the pun, about what they're going to allow, I mean, visually on the platform. Twitter is a media platform that starts as a micro blogging platform of however many characters it originally was.
- [25:13]
A
So you think this is like, path dependency, basically?
- [25:15]
C
Yeah, it could be. I Mean, visual media certainly plays a huge role on Twitter, but I don't know that their strategy for it has always been great. I don't think the user experience of video and photo on Twitter is all that good. Have you ever tried to search for a video clip on Twitter? It's almost impossible. I think Twitter historically is sort of like the worst designed and least user friendly of all of the big social networks. And so some of this may just be classic Twitter, kind of stumbling over its own feet, not really having thought about a problem it's created. But it's true that there's an enormous amount of porn on Twitter. There's just a huge amount of it. And most people don't know because they don't hide it. Exactly. Felix said. They don't really monetize it.
- [25:55]
A
They kind of do hide it. They kind of shadow ban it. If you look for it, it's there, but if you're not looking for it, you'll probably never see it.
- [26:02]
B
Yeah, I didn't know until I read it in Felix's newsletter. Which is a strange place to discover pornography, I guess.
- [26:08]
A
Unless you're my colleague Dan Primack, who wrote about OnlyFans early on, and then suddenly his entire tweet deck was full of like, sex workers DMing him and.
- [26:18]
C
Trying to talk about OnlyFans, Twitter and porn. Reminds me of that episode of the Simpsons where Marge goes away and like, Bart and Homer are trying to clean up before she comes home and they sweep all the trash under the rug. And like, when Marge comes home, there's so much trash under the rug that it's actually like swaying back and forth. But again, I mean, it goes to this idea that we don't actually have a lot of visibility about what's on the platforms, that there's all this hidden content on the platforms that, you know, it may be affecting people in ways we don't understand. And as always, you know, the platforms control the data. And so it's sort of hard to say, you know, ultimately, what's the other.
- [26:55]
B
Random thought I had about OnlyFans? Actually was reading Felix wrote about this for his newsletter. And you linked to a piece from, I think it was a software engineer who'd written a blog post about pornography and how it's so hard to write code for porn sites because the payments that. The way the payments are structured are so convoluted and weird because the mainstream companies won't let them just do regular stuff. You can't just pay with your MasterCard. It's like a Whole nightmare. I'm digressing, but the point I was thinking about was just that like porn has built the Internet. People say that a lot, but it's really true. And now I think, you know, like web video and such, the progress that was made there was in part driven by demand for better pornography. And now if we're moving to a more like creator, individual creator dependent, kind of like content system on the Internet, I feel like OnlyFans has showed that once again it was like demand for pornography that has driven this new sector and segment of the Internet.
- [27:58]
A
And that's sort of OnlyFans is false than like Patreon, you know, someone like.
- [28:04]
C
Yeah, well, but it's interesting. Shouldn't this, hypothetically, and you guys can speak, I'm sure, much more intelligently about this than me. I mean, this should benefit cryptocurrency.
- [28:13]
B
Yeah, it should, shouldn't it? Felix, you talk about that.
- [28:20]
A
Maybe, I mean, you know, like perhaps in the. Yes, I can. I can see in principle, like this idea that like OnlyFans could move just to a bitcoin based system. But yeah, it hasn't. You know, this is one of the weird things about crypto is that the obvious use cases tend not to be the actual use cases. And so, yeah, in principle I can see the idea that if the payments companies are all being very bad about allowing porn payments, then this is a great place for crypto to step in. And yet somehow it hasn't happened. One of the mechanisms that I do want to mention is that a lot of what we see here is driven by very aggressive anti porn campaigners, explicitly Christian nearly always, who like to believe that all porn is illegal. They have this whole sort of theory of jurisprudence saying that it's all covered under obscenity laws and it's all illegal. But since that has failed in courts over and over again, they've sort of fallen onto this fallback position where they're saying that it's illegal not for obscenity reasons, but because a bunch of the sex that you're seeing is either non consensual or has underage performers or has people who've been sex trafficked or something like this. And this is like this weird paradox because if the porn industry was allowed to operate in like a clean, well lighted place with well moderated companies who were making sure that everyone was consenting to everything, like that wouldn't be an issue. But because every time a porn site becomes successful, Exodus Cry, or someone gets Nick Kristoff to write a column and then the next thing you know, the whole industry is so shadowy and genuinely does have a bunch of shady players who do illegal things in it. No one can confine. Like OnlyFans is the closest thing that we have to a perfectly clean, well lighted, consensual place where people can have sex, you know, legally, on camera. And even that is controlled by some like very shadowy Ukrainian billion webcam billionaire. And you know, no one really knows where it's based or who owns it or who's on the board or anything like that. You know, like, it's just, I feel that so much of the problem here could be solved if you got one of these big platforms actually embracing it and saying like, we will do this right. But they're all far too shy to do.
- [30:49]
B
But the payments companies are a big, a big hold up to like even if OnlyFans totally, you know, went out and said we're going to do this right and everything. MasterCard, Amex, all those guys stripe, they don't want anything to do with this. I don't know if this is the real reason, but the blog post I was talking about, the guy was saying like a big problem is that someone will pay for pornography and then their spouse will get the. See the bill charge. Yeah. And dispute the charge and then the credit company will, will be like, fine. Okay. And that happens. A. And that's a real problem. I don't know if that's true.
- [31:23]
A
The chargeback thing, I think, I mean I spent a bunch of time disappearing down this chargebacks rabbit hole. The chargeback thing is real, but it's much, it's much less of a big deal than I think a lot of the payments companies would have you believe. Right. Or people think this. Like the fact is that the amount of chargebacks, you know, the amount of times that someone will dispute a charge and get the money back is a known ratio. Right. And I think all of the porn sites are perfectly happy to just accept that as a cost of doing business. It's not in and of itself a reason for the payments processors to just not want to deal with them. Right. On a steady state kind of thing, like it should be fine. But you know, chargebacks are certainly always going to be bigger with porn than they are with, I don't know, like grocery stores.
- [32:15]
C
I have a funny story about chargebacks, if we have time for a digression.
- [32:18]
A
Digress, always digress.
- [32:20]
C
All right, so I don't know, five years ago I reported a story. Do you remember one of those kind of dual engine little things that people would glide around on were a big viral product category very vividly. Okay, right. So everyone made their own hoverboard brand, and Soulja Boy the rapper had his own hoverboard make, which was just sort of imported en masse from Shenzhen somewhere. And I got a tip from someone working, I think, at Shopify that some wild percentage of Soulja Boy branded hoverboards were being charged back and that he was actually making no money because of it. And I got a leak, Basically an email to him saying, like, people are not actually paying for these hoverboards. And so I reached out to him, I said, soldier Boy, no one's actually buying your hoverboards, that you're not making any money on your hoverboards. He didn't respond. I sent him a text message, and he just said something like, who the fuck is this? We run this store. You can find it on buzzfeed. It's like, Soldier Boy is hoverboard company beset by fraudulent purchases. It gets better. So this is the night before my 30th birthday, and the story publishes. I do what you would imagine on the night of your 30th birthday. I wake up at 10am the next morning with the worst hangover of my life. I can barely function. I turn on my phone, which basically gets so hot I can't touch it. I open Twitter on my laptop, and I have so many notifi. Like, the most notifications I've seen in my entire life. Soulja Boy has tweeted out my phone number and said, this is Soulja. Call me.
- [33:55]
A
Whoa.
- [33:57]
C
Gawker writes it up. Soulja Boy has basically ruined my life for a week. Oh, no. I sometimes still get WhatsApp messages from, like, people who've made their own basement hip hop in, like, Brazil or Malaysia and want Soulja Boy to check it out. And this is all because of chargebacks and payment processors. So that's the digression. But it's a good story.
- [34:19]
A
So it's a good story, but what.
- [34:20]
B
Was wrong with the hoverboards?
- [34:24]
A
They just fell apart. He bought the wrong brand from Shenzhen.
- [34:27]
B
Oh, man.
- [34:28]
A
Amazingly, that is also a perfect segue to the question of, like, can we trust things that we buy on the Internet and specifically that we buy on Amazon? Because it turns out that a bunch of storefronts on Amazon are just selling stuff that was stolen from cvs.
- [34:49]
B
I told my family about this, and they were like, who cares? Like, okay, a bunch of stuff is stolen. It's the same Allergy medicine. It's not like the products, because Amazon has had trouble before, people selling products that were defective. This is a case where people are just fencing enormous amounts of legitimate product on Amazon and the only one harmed is like cvs. And to be fair, I do love cvs. I go there often and enjoy buying random things there that I don't need. But, yeah, what's the harm? I'm curious why Felix wanted to talk about this phenomenon.
- [35:27]
A
I think it's just fascinating. The new economics of fencing stolen goods. Right. I wrote about this when we had the looting surrounding the sort of second wave of Black Lives Matter marches. There was a bunch of city centers where there was a bunch of looting. And it used to be that people would loot stores and then either just keep what they had stolen or sell it for pennies on the dollar. But what you saw this time around in 2020 was a bunch of people looting, like high end clothing stores, you know, Gucci or Balenciaga or something like that. Because that shit is now worth like 90 cents, sometimes upwards of 100 cents. Sometimes you can sell it on the Internet for more than retail. And I wound up talking to a bunch of sites like, you know, the RealReal and Vestier collective and all of these places where you can sell genuine goods. And I'm like, are you doing anything to make sure that these goods aren't stolen? And they kept on coming back to me and saying, we are very, very careful to make sure they're not fake. Ah.
- [36:35]
B
They don't care if you buy.
- [36:37]
A
From those sites, you're not getting something fake. But like, they really have no way of telling whether or not it was stolen. And so suddenly the returns to stealing things like covetable fashion items or even items at CVS are way higher than they used to be. Once upon a time, what you would do with something if you stole from CVS is, you know, use it as deodorant or whatever. Now you can turn around and sell it for almost as much as retail. And in fact, the higher the price you're selling it for, the more legitimate it looks.
- [37:09]
C
Yeah.
- [37:09]
B
And these are sophisticated operations that the Journal reported on. This wasn't just like me with a bunch of Claritin in my closet. It's like people with like warehouse space in their homes and a separate elevator to carry the goods up and down flight to flight. So it's a whole new market. I guess.
- [37:27]
A
So is the Internet increasing? Shoplifting? This is the question.
- [37:31]
C
Oh, I don't know. I mean, something really interesting occurred to me about this story, which is that it was recently reported that Amazon is going to open more big box stores essentially. And so you may actually have a situation in which people are stealing from Jeff Bezos and then making Jeff Bezos money by selling the stolen goods on his third party market. Whoa.
- [37:53]
B
But you won't be able to steal from those Amazon stores because they have that whole thing where you can just take the stuff and walk out and they'll charge you.
- [37:59]
C
Oh, good point. Bezos thought of it.
- [38:03]
B
Evil genius, he is.
- [38:04]
A
Why he's worth so much money, man. He's two steps ahead of us.
- [38:07]
B
The Internet has enabled all this crime and the pandemic has really changed the face of crime. Right? I mean we've talked about the unemployment benefit scam.
- [38:15]
A
The unemployment benefit scam was huge. There was this weird uptick in violent crime during the pandemic which now seems to have come straight back down again. And I don't really understand what explains that at all. But yeah, I feel like we can sort of tease apart these two things. This is not a pandemic thing. This is just, you know, ease of selling on the Internet thing. And I do think that if Amazon only, you know, did a bit more work in terms of validating its third party sellers, there's really no other place they can go on the Internet to sell. Right. If you have a bunch of Claritin, it's relatively easy to sell it on Amazon. But if Amazon says wait, who the fuck are you? And no, go away, what's plan B? You know, who are you going to sell to that isn't Amazon? No one else has that reach.
- [39:04]
C
Yeah, I mean, interestingly, to bring it back to my story, selfishly, a lot of disinformation. These are stories about scams. I mean, and the Internet has enabled like this whole range of scams. This is not necessarily a new thing. A lot of disinformation or what like people will call this information are just are click scams. I mean there are ways of getting people to click on content to generate money. And like for example, my former colleague Craig Silverman has done a ton of really good work on this. The original sort of Macedonian teenagers making fake news story. You know, the Internet has created all these new sort of like weird shady quasi hidden economies. And this also goes to Felix, your whole thing about like a clean, you know, well lighted place for porn. I mean lots of people make their living in various legal and semi legal ways on the Internet. And that's what cuts across all of these, I think all these stories.
- [39:54]
B
That's a really good point.
- [39:55]
A
You see, we have thematic coherence to.
- [39:58]
B
This show, people meticulously planned and scripted, obviously.
- [40:02]
A
Although now I am going to mess it all up by opening it up to a numbers round, and these numbers are going to have nothing to do with anything. Emily, do you have a number?
- [40:10]
B
Yes, I have a number. It is six weeks. That is the Texas law that went into effect this past week. It bans abortion after six weeks, a point at which most women don't even know if they're pregnant or not yet. It's very early. So that's one part of the law that seems bad, effectively banning a procedure that's legal under Roe v. Wade. And then the other crazy part of this law is that it deputizes everyone in Texas to sue anyone who helps someone get an abortion. So you can't sue the woman who gets the abortion, but you can sue, like, her Uber driver, her doctor, the nurse, the guy who drove her. And if they win the suit, they get $10,000, which is crazy. That was like the runner up for my number. 10,000. And I am mentioning this on Slate Money because it's an. It's. Obviously, it's a political issue, but it's also an economic issue. Women who don't have access to abortions have worse economic outcomes. There's some good research from one specific study called the Turnaway Study, which compared women who were turned away for abortions and women who were able to get them. And they looked at financial data for the women, and the ones who weren't able to get the abortions were more likely to go bankrupt and struggle financially. So it's a big deal in a lot of ways.
- [41:32]
A
The thing that really strikes me about this story is the astonishing silence from big corporations.
- [41:40]
B
Oh, yeah, that too.
- [41:41]
A
VCs in Texas about this. You know, North Carolina passes a bathroom ban, and suddenly everyone's like, we're gonna boycott the entire state. Texas does something which is just way more draconian. And you know, all of these big Texas companies, you know, American Airlines or Dell Computer or whatever, or the big VCs down there in Austin, they're like, meh. And they're saying nothing. There's a handful of companies run by women, mostly like match.com dating companies who have been like, we're going to care about this. But there doesn't seem to be a corporate backlash against this. And that surprises me. I would have imagined that this was like, given the predilections of CEOs to take stances on this kind of thing. This would have been a very easy way for them to take the moral high ground. It doesn't seem to have happened. Maybe it's just going to take a little bit of time. But my colleague Dan Primack reckons this is just a gender thing, that most companies are run by men. And although most men are pro choice, they're not nearly as viscerally pro choice as most women are.
- [42:42]
B
Yeah, and I mean, the big tech companies have big outposts in Austin right now. Facebook, Apple, Tesla's coming to Austin. And yeah, they need to say something. There's a piece in Fortune this morning where Fortune reached out to a lot of companies and none of them commented except for Bumble and Match.
- [43:00]
A
My number is 235,000. I have to do this one. This is the number of jobs that were created in August, the number that came out on Friday morning. It is a massive decrease. We basically had a million jobs created in June, a million jobs created in July. There was a bunch of momentum in terms of getting all of those jobs back that we lost during the crisis, and that just fell off a cliff, basically. It's still positive, but it's way, way lower, not only than it was, but even than people expected. And I can explain this with one word, which is Delta Leisure and Hospitality added zero jobs. And you just can't expand an economy at a torrid pace when there's a massive third wave pandemic going on.
- [43:44]
B
It's awful.
- [43:45]
A
Joe, do you have a number?
- [43:47]
C
Yeah, my number is 50, which is about the number of people they found so far to have died as a result of flooding due to Hurricane Ida in the Northeast.
- [43:57]
A
Which is more than the number of people who died in Louisiana.
- [44:00]
C
Yeah, including people trapped in their basements in Queens. I mean, it's just shocking and it just shows how much this, you know, our global climate is changing and how much, you know, people who sort of thought that they were insulated from some of its effects are going to have to deal with it, you know, immediately.
- [44:17]
B
And once again, it's the most vulnerable people. The New York Times had the stories of the people in Queens who died in their basement apartments, probably illegal basement apartments, you know, that people, immigrants live in for very cheap, that are not officially apartments and aren't really safe. And those are the people in the most trouble.
- [44:38]
C
Yeah, that's right. And actually a guy I follow on Twitter made the point that there was a program basically to standardize and make some of these dwellings safe, to regulate them essentially, and fund funding for that went away during COVID And it's just. I mean, it's a tragedy, and it was a preventable tragedy. You know, we all bear some responsibility for it.
- [44:59]
A
On which sober note, I think that's it for us. This week. We are going to have a slate plus segment about Renaissance Technologies, the hedge fund, and the $7 billion that its officers have agreed to pay in back taxes that they had managed to avoid paying. If you are not a Slate plus listener, then thank you for making it this far. Thank you for listening to Slate Plus. Thank you not only to Jessamine Molly for producing this show, but also to the great Dan Stern of Radio Speitzkauf here in Berlin, who was incredibly sweet and lent me his microphone so that I could record this show because I stayed on for a week in Germany without a microphone and I needed to record. So thank you, Dan. You're a superstar. And you guys should all listen to Radio Sprach Kaufman, specifically their podcast series how to Fuck up an Airport, which is pretty much the best podcast series I've ever listened to. It's about the big Brandenburg Airport in Berlin, which I am going to be flying out of quite shortly. Pretty much as you're listening to this show and how incredibly un German its building and opening was. It's hilarious. It's awesome. Check that out on Radio Shmeekhauf. But mainly, let me thank Joe Bernstein for coming on. Joe, thank you for being on the show, and thank you for raising your peace in Harper's, and it's been a pleasure to have you such a great time.
- [46:22]
C
Thanks a lot, guys.
- [46:23]
A
All right, we'll be back next week with more Slate money.