Journalism – dr.Pep

If, as a financial journalist, you want to bring down a fraudulent fintech startup, you need to be very, very careful

Dan McCrum – Money Men

The Netflix documentary is better, because it has less extensive digressions into the author’s personal life.

Even though the art world is hermetic, myopic, elitist, and irrational there is still inherent value in art itself (whatever the definition of art is)

Bianca Bosker – Get the picture

The characters are carefully positioned as archetypes that are painfully accurate.

It requires a risky mix of naive optimism, grotesque bluff, and boneheaded persistence to get a scoop on a yakuza boss

Jake Adelstein – Tokyo vice

The story is, appears heavily romanticized, but provides a nice insider perspective on many quirks of Japanese culture.

The ruthless pursuit of profit optimization has killed the soul of the American supermarket

Benjamin Lorr – The secret life of groceries

Narrated with bravado, the book conjures the nostalgic image of a 1950s store and skillfully contrasts it with the current state of the industry.

Waking up

DeepDreamGenerator: “Journalist sitting at a desk at the newspaper office. The journalist grabs their own writings and trying to protect them, while fighting off a large crawler that wants to feed it to an AI.¨

Great to see journalists initiating change in their own organization.

Fri Aug 25: Guardian journalist Ariel B. reports that other news media have started blocking GPTbot. The subtly note in his article: “The Guardian’s robot.txt file does not disallow GPTBot.” (Version Sept 3, 2023)
Fri Sept 1: Guardian leadership has taken notice and blocks GPTbot – as reported here.

As I have noted earlier, data access is a major topic when it comes to achieving a healthy power balance in the information space here and here. Glad to see more and more companies take this seriously.

Personally, I currently see little incentives for companies, organization, or individuals to allow their data to be crawled by for profit.

Crowd-sourced analysis of publicly available data can be a powerful tool in exposing lies, as is proved by an impressive track record of impactful scoops.

Eliot Higgins – We are Bellingcat

The book raises the question what happens if online sleuth methods are applied for profit maximization rather than for truth seeking.

The issues and conflicts plaguing modern Spain are rooted in a troubled history that until shockingly recently was a dictatorship

Tobias Buck – After the fall

Great overview that brings together different perspectives in a shocking narrative without becoming judgemental.

Traders trying to make a killing in an ever more sophisticated market economy are driven to ever smarter deals and lower moral standards

Javier Blas and Jack Farchy – The world for sale

Well documented account of how instrumental commodity markets have been in global politics.

Almost any country can hack its way to power, posing a threat to political systems and essential infrastructure world-wide

Nicole Perlroth – This is ho they tell me the world ends

Although the writer clearly picks sides, she does not shy away from the role of the US in the cyber arms race.