This was supposed to be the Geo-politics of Tik-Tok episode, but we never really got to the geopolitics part. Instead we talked a lot the merits of deleting one's social media accounts and whether, in our super-connected age, it's even tenable to do that.

Amazon met with start-up founders, then ripped off their product ideas

Top Top-4 Tech companies have more economic clout than many countries 

Garmin down hard after ransomware attack

We could call this one "The education episode", as we spent a lot of time talking about that. How teachers occupy an exalted position in the social strata from which they exert the kind of moral gravitas around which movements, rebellions or general strikes can form.

Cloudflare outage takes out huge chunk of internet (but not easyDNS)

Twitter hacked, blue checks iced, secret moderation tools exposed

New Hong Kong law makes it illegal to dissent for anybody anywhere in the world

We surmise that the often posited societal restructuring or "phase shift", characterized by a transition from linear to non-linear is not something coming at us from an uncertain future: the phase shift has already occurred.

Police use Twitter’s Dataminr to surveil BlackLivesMatter protestors, Ex security advisor: China’s hacking of Nortel was the beginning of the end, LinkedIn sued for iOS clipboard spying, and much much more....

Our homework assignment from last week was to distill “what is AxisOfEasy?” into something relatable and concise. We came away from this episode with: Exploring alternatives and seeing beyond the frame …in a world gone full cyberpunk. But if we had to distill today’s episode down it would be the rise, and possible downfall Neo-Feudalism. […]

In this issue:

Underworld in panic as cops penetrate secret criminal chat app

New EvilQuest ransomware targets Mac OSX users

BMW to make built-in car features into paid subscriptions

The recurring themes we kept coming back on over the show were:

Have we entered a climate where a French Revolution style megapolitical shift is looming?

The pesky phenomenon of the ole coup-within-a-coup, a.k.a the "Power Play" as per the 1978 Peter O'Toole political thriller of that name.

The difference between "objective reality" that everybody thinks exists and "authoritative reality", which for all intents and purposes, is what actually matters.

In this edition:

New US Bill aims to end warrant-proof encryption, PayPal preparing to enter Bitcoin marketplace, Hackers use Google analytics to steal credit cards