.io, Eugenics and anti-SEO travel guides
Why is it so dark?????
Racial Science and the Tech Bros
This month Hope not Hate published their latest investigation into the reprisal of eugenics (i.e racial science) thanks to the deep pockets of Silicon Valley.
Their investigation shows that The Pioneer Fund, a Nazi-affiliated eugenics organisation thought to be essentially defunct, has rebranded as the Human Diversity Foundation (HDF). Their members use research papers, popular YouTubers and podcasts to share their ideology about the supposed genetic superiority of certain ethnic groups.
While undercover, the Hope Not Hate team discovered that HDF received more than $1m from Andrew Conry, a tech entrepreneur. The investigation also mentions a connection with Peter Theil. Although he did not invest in HDF, he did know and found a way into a meeting with the team.
Unfortunately, the link between eugenics and the tech industry is not new. I first learnt about the resurgence of Eugenics in Angela Sani’s brilliant book Superior - which talks about how racial science developed by the Nazis simply rebranded in modern America.
Then, with Elon Musk's unfortunate rise in profile, his views on pronatalism came to light, too. In Parix Marx’s interview with Julia Black, they discuss her research into the rise of the ultra elite and believe that it is their duty to procreate as they have “superior” genes. Combined with a Silicon Valley that has been inspired by by eugenicists, a rise of interest in selective reproductivity tech, and the growing voice of right wing influencers, tech conglomerates are a vital piece of why we are seeing a rise in these extreme ideas coming back!
A lesser known domain
It's fascinating how little we know about the internet. It has changed society forever, yet so few of us understand how it works. For example, did you know that there is Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) that creates and assigns top-level domains (e.g. ".co.uk, "fra") to countries? This piece of infrastructure rarely impacts us…but it might now. On 3rd October, the British government announced that it was giving up sovereignty over a remote small cluster of islands in the Indian Ocean, known as the Chagos Islands, to Mauritius.
Why is this important? Because the Chagos Islands had been assigned one of the tech and gaming industry's top level domains ".io". So when a country 'disappears', what happens to the domain? No one is really sure, but Gareth Edwards does a bit of a deep dive into a moment in history when this has happened before.
An antidote to SEO travel guides
I love the way people build community in corners of the internet. In 2019, we saw how students were using Google Docs to talk to each other in class. And now, we are seeing how a Google Doc is the ideal travel guide. I have done this, too. When travelling abroad, I love a personal recommendation and prefer screenshots from someone's notes app rather than trawling through travel guides, which a bot or PR company might write.
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Arda + Savena
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