The Los Angeles Police Department obtained video footage from a Waymo driverless car as part of its investigation into a hit-and-run in which a separate, human-driven car hit a pedestrian. 

The LAPD published the footage, which has a note on it that reads “Waymo Confidential Commercial Information,” on its YouTube page to ask the public for help identifying the driver of the vehicle. The short clip shows what video footage that law enforcement requests from Waymo looks like.

The situation shows that police in Los Angeles are now looking at Waymo robotaxis as potential sources of surveillance footage to investigate crimes that the vehicles’ cameras and sensors may have witnessed. In 2023, Bloomberg reported that police in both San Francisco and Maricopa County, Arizona, had issued search warrants for Waymo footage. Police have also requested footage from Teslas, extremely pervasive Ring cameras, and Cruise autonomous vehicles.

Waymo is rapidly expanding in Los Angeles; anecdotally, I see many Waymos driving around town every day, and the company just announced that the autonomous vehicles have expanded the geographic region in which they would operate in the city and that it would soon begin testing them on Los Angeles freeways. The proliferation of Waymo cars also means the proliferation of roving surveillance cameras. LAPD has shown an interest in obtaining footage from autonomous vehicles that operate in the city; last year we reported on a case in which the LAPD obtained footage from an autonomous food delivery robot to investigate a crime. 

A Waymo spokesperson told 404 Media that it does not proactively give footage to police. 

“Waymo does not provide information or data to law enforcement without a valid legal request, usually in the form of a warrant, subpoena, or court order. These requests are often the result of eyewitnesses or other video footage that identifies a Waymo vehicle at the scene,” the spokesperson said. “We carefully review each request to make sure it satisfies applicable laws and is legally valid. We also analyze the requested data or information, to ensure it is tailored to the specific subject of the warrant. We will narrow the data provided if a request is overbroad, and in some cases, object to producing any information at all.”

Waymo’s website explains that it conducts training sessions for law enforcement and emergency responders, which is designed to teach them about Waymo and explains what they should do in case they are responding to a car crash or other emergency involving a Waymo. The page says it had “conducted in-person training for 18,000+ first responders at 75+ agencies.” 

The Los Angeles Police Department did not respond to a request for comment.

As part of the company's months-long obsession with catching employees leaking internal developments to the press, staff at Wordpress parent company Automattic recently noticed individually-unique watermarks on internal sites, according to employees who spoke to 404 Media.

Automattic added the watermarks to an internal employee communications platform called P2. P2 is a WordPress product other workplaces can also use. There are hundreds of P2 sites across teams at Automattic alone; many are team-specific, but some are company-wide for announcements. The watermarks in Automattic's P2 instance are nearly invisible, rendered as a pattern overlaid on the site’s white page backgrounds. Zooming in or manually changing the background color reveals the pattern. If, for example, a journalist published a screenshot leaked to them that was taken from P2, Automattic could theoretically identify the employee who shared it. 

In October, as part of a series of buyout offers meant to test employee’s loyalty to his leadership, Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg issued a threat for anyone speaking to the press, saying they should “exit gracefully, or be fired tomorrow with no severance.” Earlier this month, the company laid off nearly 300 people.

Many companies provide this kind of forensic watermarking for internal communications. In 2023, one watermarking startup raised $10 million. Apple and Tesla reportedly have watermarking practices for emails and other internal comms, and some game developers add watermarks to game files to catch pre-release leaks.

It’s not clear when the watermarks started appearing on P2, and Automattic has not responded to a request for comment. But Mullenweg has been warring with web hosting platform WP Engine—and as the story has developed, seemingly with his own staff—since last year.

Mullenweg started publicly accusing WP Engine of misusing the WordPress brand and not contributing enough to the open-source community in September. WP Engine sent Mullenweg a cease and desist demanding he “stop making and retract false, harmful and disparaging statements against WP Engine,” and he sent one back then banned WP Engine from using WordPress’ resources. Contributors to the open-source Wordpress project said they’d been kicked out of community Slack workspaces for criticizing or questioning Mullenweg’s actions. Meanwhile, Mullenweg added a required loyalty-pledge checkbox to the Wordpress.org login page demanding contributors denounce WP Engine; a judge told him he had to remove the box as part of the ongoing trial, and he replaced it with a checkbox that said “pineapple is delicious on pizza.”  

Automattic employees I spoke to at the time of the October buyout offers told me that this ultimatum meant two kinds of employees: Mullenweg’s strongest supporters, and people who couldn’t afford to risk leaving their jobs. "Overall, the environment is now full of people who unequivocally support Matt's actions, and people who couldn't leave because of financial reasons (and those are mostly silent),” one employee told me.

“159 people took the offer, 8.4% of the company, the other 91.6% gave up $126M of potential severance to stay!” Mullenweg wrote in a blog post following the offer. A few weeks later, he offered another buyout window. He wrote in internal Slack messages seen by 404 Media: “New alignment offer: I guess some people were sad they missed the last window. Some have been leaking to the press and ex-employees. That's water under the bridge” So many people took him up on the combined offers that the company was “very short staffed,” he said.  

Just six months later, in early April, Automattic laid off 16% of its staff—reportedly almost 300 people. Multiple people with knowledge of the severance packages offered to laid-off Automatticians told me that some employees, regardless of time spent at the company, received just nine weeks of pay. 

One Automattic employee told me they don’t think anyone is shocked by the watermarking, considering Mullenweg’s ongoing campaign to find leakers, but that it’s still adding to the uncertain, demoralized environment at the company. “Can't help but feel even more paranoid now,” they said.

Last week Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) paid contracting giant Palantir tens of millions of dollars to make modifications to a powerful ICE database and search tool to allow “complete target analysis of known populations” and to update the tool’s targeting and enforcement priorities, according to procurement records reviewed by 404 Media.

The records show that Palantir is actively working on, and making updates to, the technical infrastructure underpinning the Trump administration’s mass deportation efforts. The news comes after ICE agents arrested a green card holding student at his interview to become a U.S. citizen; plainclothes officers picked up a student on the street for deportation despite the State Department finding no evidence she was linked to antisemitism or Hamas as claimed; and the American and El Salvadorian presidents deflecting when asked who was going to return a man who was mistakenly deported to a foreign mega prison. Trump has also called for deporting U.S. citizens to El Salvador.

At the same time, Palantir is running adverts at U.S. colleges which say “a moment of reckoning has arrived for the West. Our culture has fallen into shallow consumerism while abandoning national purpose. Too few in Silicon Valley have asked what ought to be built—and why. We did.”

“As a whole, extending Palantir's services with intentionally vague corporate-speak phrasing coupled with ICE's recent public escalation of violating people's rights via harassment, deportation without a basis, and terrorizing immigrants paints a clear picture: Palantir's engagement with ICE is facilitating and enabling abuses and violation of rights—rights like due process which, I want to note, extend to all in the US, regardless of citizenship status,” Calli Schroeder, senior counsel and global privacy counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), told 404 Media in an email after reviewing screenshots of the records.

This week we start with a couple of Jason and Joseph's stories about the tool ICE uses to lookup an incredible amount of information about people. After the break, Joseph explains how he tested an AI service that calls your parents in case you can't be bothered. In the subscribers-only section, our new regular contributor Matthew Gault tells us all about the hack of 4chan and how we got here.

Listen to the weekly podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube. Become a paid subscriber for access to this episode's bonus content and to power our journalism. If you become a paid subscriber, check your inbox for an email from our podcast host Transistor for a link to the subscribers-only version! You can also add that subscribers feed to your podcast app of choice and never miss an episode that way. The email should also contain the subscribers-only unlisted YouTube link for the extended video version too. It will also be in the show notes in your podcast player.

• Inside a Powerful Database ICE Uses to Identify and Deport People
• ICE Just Paid Palantir Tens of Millions for ‘Complete Target Analysis of Known Populations’
• I Tested The AI That Calls Your Elderly Parents If You Can't Be Bothered
• 4chan Is Down Following What Looks to Be a Major Hack Spurred By Meme War

When I walked into the Shrine of the Renunciation in Assisi, I thought about going to my friends’ houses in high school to play Xbox, and how bizarre it would be if one of those teenagers became a saint. What if the kid from down the cul-de-sac died, and they put his face on keychains, fridge magnets, and rosaries, and people stood in line to see his dead body through glass?   

I was there to see Carlo Acutis, the first Millennial Saint, who was born in 1991 and died at 15 years old of leukemia in 2006. By all accounts, he was a fairly normal—if not unusually pious—teenager. He reportedly knew Javascript and C++, tinkered with 3D rendering in Maya, and played Halo, Super Mario and Pokémon games. His mom said he bought a Playstation when he was eight. Notably, Halo was Xbox-exclusive, making this an inconsistency in the narrative of Acutis’ life (but whose mom didn’t call every gaming console “the Sony” or some other wildly incorrect catchall). He’s been called the “gamer saint,” but only gamed about an hour a week, wary of getting too hooked on gaming. He used his programming skills to make websites for volunteer projects and documenting historical miracles. 

He was a kid, and now his body is coated in wax and dressed in a red track jacket, jeans, and Nikes and lies in a church in a tiny Italian hill town where people arrive on tour buses to kiss their fingers and touch the glass next to his head of thick black hair. 

Standing in a short line to get a look at Acutis, people snapped sneaky photos on their phones in front of a “NO PHOTOS” sign. A group of old women sat against the wall in front of the tomb, gazing at his waxy face and soaking up as much Blessedness as possible. Most milled past with a short pause near his reposed head to clutch a rosary or do a half-kneel. I stopped long enough to gawk then moved to the pews and copied a messy sign of the cross from other worshippers as a midday service began. 

I went into my own off-books pilgrimage knowing almost nothing about Catholic sainthood. I was in nearby Perugia, Italy for the International Journalism Festival and decided to take the train out on a day trip to Assisi, to see the “Patron Saint of the Internet” in person. But having spent a lot of time in youth groups in a variety of Protestant flavors, I do know an attempt to make the church Cool when I see one. 

Among religious groups, Catholics are experiencing one of the largest recent declines in church attendance in the U.S., from 45 percent to 33 percent in the last two decades. Meanwhile, the share of Amercans without any religious affiliation is up by a lot: nine percent in 2000-2003 versus 21 percent in 2021-2023. This, of course, is a big problem for the Catholic church: The median age of Catholic adults in the U.S. is 49 years old, according to Pew Research Center, four years older than in 2007. Only 17 percent are under 30 years old. Members = money in most religions, and young members mean the money keeps flowing through generations. 

Add to this the Catholic Church’s ongoing image crisis, with hundreds of clergy credibly accused of child sex abuse; meanwhile, the Washington State Catholic Conference is opposing new legislation that would require clergy in the state to report sexual abuse if it’s disclosed to them in confessionals, with Republican legislators calling it “an attack” on Catholisim. 

In comes the Millennial Saint, a relatable example of piety and discernment for modern youths. Before him, the most recently-canonized saints lived and died in the 1800s. Acutis is different: He had a phone! He made websites about miracles! He wore sneakers! He’s “God’s influencer.” Supplicants see him as somehow both approachably normal and extraordinarily devout. He was reportedly “uninterested in the trappings common for a wealthy child in Milan,” asking his parents to donate the money they would have spent on more designer sneakers to the poor and skipping ski trips to teach catechism instead. Having been a pious little Christian teen myself, I can definitely relate.    

The campaign for Acutis the Influencer seems to be working, based on the sheer SEO power of the news of Acutis’s sainthood and the number of people asking questions, writing blog posts, and making the pilgrimage to see his tomb. Tens of thousands of people are expected to attend Acutis’ canonization service in Rome later this month—thousands of which, it’s safe to assume, will be there on Catholic high school field trips. For those who can’t make the trip, there are screenings of the Eternal Word Television Network’s film Roadmap to Reality, a documentary about teenagers visiting Acutis’ tomb but also serves as a warning about the ills of technology.

“In a world losing itself to screens, teenage mystic Carlo Acutis saw beyond the social media-addicted society we live in and offered an answer… if we’re willing to listen,” the filmmakers wrote on the documentary’s website. “Carlo emphasized that the Eucharist, with its real presence and physical communion, serves as a critical anchoring reality. This idea starkly contrasts the often isolating and superficial interactions fostered by digital technology.”

Coincidentally, technology is bedeviling Acutis’ early days as a saint. On eBay, people are selling what they claim to be his “relics,” tiny pieces of a saint’s body. One anonymous seller was selling “supposedly authenticated locks of Acutis’ hair that were fetching upward of 2,000 euros ($2,200 US), according to the Diocese of Assisi, before being taken down,” the AP reported. “It’s not just despicable, but it’s also a sin,” one reverend who has a tiny fragment of Acutis’ hair in a chapel by his office told the AP. “Every kind of commerce over faith is a sin.”

There is a lot of non-relic commerce happening at the Shrine of the Renunciation, however. It’s free to enter the church, but there is a gift shop around the corner at the exit.  

There’s also a lot of online debate about the status of the Gamer Saint’s body. Redditors from r/funeraldirectors to r/Catholicism have been asking about his appearance in the big glass coffin. 

“I don’t know man. I’ve pulled off some good embalmings in my career but nothing ever looked as good as this. I can’t explain it,” one funeral director wrote. After I saw him IRL, I was similarly confused. I’ve seen embalmed people, but this wasn’t an embalming. He looks like a mannequin. His folded hands are flat and plasticky. His face is super-smooth and all one color. This is because when he was exhumed in 2019, 13 years after his death, his body showed the “normal process of decay,” the bishop who oversaw the exhumation said, so they covered it in a layer of wax.

From what I understand of sainthood and the bureaucratic process of canonization, it’s pretty hard to become one, and that process often involves getting dug up and moved around. Would-be saints are sometimes exhumed after the local Bishop and the Vatican approve the investigation into their saint-worthiness, because checking out the state of decay is part of it (as is making relics, like the hair on eBay). A body found “incorrupt” means it’s resisted normal decay (allegedly; these exhumations are not exactly open to the public, so we’re relying on the testimony of clergy who were there) while “integral” means the whole body remains but—as I understand it—did not exactly look tomb-display read. Acutis’ body was “reassembled with art and love,” the bishop said.

The legacy of the Patron Saint of the Internet isn’t immune to fake news, either. A priest in Brazil claimed Acutis’ body was incorrupt in a Facebook post, but later deleted it and backtracked.

Having paid my respects, botched a sign of the cross, and bought a magnet for the fridge, I left the Shrine of the Renunciation feeling like I’d just witnessed something stranger than miracles or incorrupt death. A tradition started more than a thousand years ago is brushing roughly up against the 21st century, complete with a livestream where you can submit your intentions at a link in the description. Saint Acutis arrives at a time when young people are being aggressively sold a “trad” lifestyle and leaders with right-wing, Christian agendas are calling the shots from the highest offices. For the Catholic church, the timing might be perfect.

If he hadn’t died young, Acutis would be around my age today, and would probably be a front-end software engineer or a priest who was really good at running the parish Instagram account, or any number of more boring things than venerated saint. And if the church didn’t need an influencer, I wouldn’t be standing in the afternoon sun on the stone streets of Assisi, wondering what we’ll say about the next generation of saints—some of the only people in history whose legacies are preserved across centuries for the encouragement and recruitment of future generations, to a church desperate to have them.

The notorious imageboard 4chan is down following what appears to be a major hack of its backend. The hackers claim to have exposed code for the site, the emails of moderators, and a list of mod communications. This happened, it seems, as part of a five year long, inter-image board beef between users of 4chan and Soyjak, another image board that splintered off of 4chan.

It’s still unclear what the fallout of the hack will be, but the notorious image board remains down and a huge amount of data appears to have been leaked.

Users struggled to load 4chan on the evening of April 14, 2025, according to posts on other imageboards and forums. A few hours before that, the banned board /qa/ reappeared on the site and someone using the hiroyuki account, named after 4chan’s owner Hiroyuki Nishimura, posted “FUCKING LMAO” and “U GOT HACKED XD. 

Customs and Border Protection (CBP) is using various artificial intelligence tools, including ones that can quickly identify people of interest by pulling data from social media, according to documents published by the agency last week and marketing material from the contractors.

The documents follow others that 404 Media has previously obtained and published through the Freedom of Information Act and are more up to date. 

“Fivecast ONYX supports the collection of publicly available, internet-based content in near real-time, quickly organizing the content to facilitate analysis and the surfacing of risks and threats against the homeland to enhance CBP tactical targeting, analysis and vetting capabilities while at the same time supporting CBP’s strategic counter-network analysis,” one of the documents says, referring to the Australian intelligence company Fivecast. CBP also published documents about Dataminr, another social media monitoring company.

CBP published the latest documents to its website which lists AI programs or tools related to the agency on April 7. Previous documents published in the last year include ones discussing an underwater inspection system, anomaly detection algorithms, and its use of autonomous surveillance towers. 

The release of these documents happened the same week that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced it will “Begin Screening Aliens’ Social Media Activity for Antisemitism.” U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), a different branch of DHS, is conducting the “antisemitism” social media searches, according to the announcement. CBP told 404 Media in an email that “Neither tool is used for vetting or travel application processing,” referring to Dataminr and Onyx, but did not elaborate beyond that. 

The release of information about these tools comes in a climate of high-profile detainment of students who have criticized Israel’s indiscriminate bombing campaign in Gaza. Hundreds of students have had their visas revoked, many for protesting against Israel, and people who have criticized Israel have been detained on the street or at official appointments with DHS. 

A video on Fivecast’s website says Onyx “combines advanced data collection and AI-enabled analytics to rapidly identify people of interest.” Some of those AI capabilities include object and concept recognition from images and videos; natural language processing that looks for “risky” keywords and phrases; a tool that looks for similar phrases across investigations; and user-trainable logo detector, according to the video. 

As 404 Media previously reported, Onyx also includes sentiment and emotion detection over time.

Although published recently, the Fivecast documents date from May 2023. One of them, a statement of work, says “CBP is proactively collecting, harnessing and applying the power of data, intelligence, and advanced analytics.” This statement of work is similar to some 404 Media obtained from CBP through FOIA requests discussing the agency’s bulk pilot of Fivecast in March 2021 and another from 2022. Journalist Todd Feathers also obtained what appears to be the May 2023 statement of work.

The recently added documents to the AI section of CBP’s website also includes Dataminr, a social media monitoring company that also claims to use AI, although the company has been around for years. “In recent years, Dataminr has integrated Generative AI for real-time event description and launched ReGenAI (Regenerative AI), a breakthrough form of Generative AI that automatically regenerates in real time as events unfold. Dataminr’s AI platform is powered by more than 50 proprietary LLMs and multi-modal foundation models, trained on Dataminr’s 12+ year proprietary event archive,” its website reads.

That statement of work from September 2023 says “OSINT Team analysts, working alongside CBP’s tactical targeting/analytical units, intelligence support cells, and enforcement units, use a commercially available tools and analytical tradecraft methodologies to exploit asymmetric data sources to inform targeting, vetting, and network development and analysis workflows.”

The document adds “DataMinr enables advanced search, collection, and analysis of publicly available information through a single user interface, facilitating the collection of information regarding people, places, and things across social media platforms, as well as general information held on the surface, deep, and dark web to inform situational awareness and to support CBP law enforcement and national security operations.”

I previously obtained a document which said CBP used another AI-powered monitoring tool called Babel X to screen travelers, including U.S. citizens. 

Neither Fivecast nor Dataminr responded to a request for comment.

None of the frontier AI research labs have presented any evidence that they are on the brink of achieving artificial general intelligence, no matter how they define that goal, but Google is already planning for a “Post-AGI” world by hiring a scientist for its DeepMind AI lab to research the “profound impact” that technology will have on society. 

“Spearhead research projects exploring the influence of AGI on domains such as economics, law, health/wellbeing, AGI to ASI [artificial superintelligence], machine consciousness, and education,” Google says in the first item on a list of key responsibilities for the job. Artificial superintelligence refers to a hypothetical form of AI that is smarter than the smartest human in all domains. This is self explanatory, but just to be clear, when Google refers to “machine consciousness” it’s referring to the science fiction idea of a sentient machine. 

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, Elon Musk, and other major and minor players in the AI industry are all working on AGI and have previously talked about the likelihood of humanity achieving AGI, when that might happen, and what the consequences might be, but the Google job listing shows that companies are now taking concrete steps for what comes after, or are at least are continuing to signal that they believe it can be achieved. 

Part of the problem is that AGI is a loosely defined term and goal. According to The Information, a 2023 document from OpenAI and Microsoft defined AGI as an AI system that can generate up to $100 billion in profit, which seems entirely removed from any scientific benchmark. Earlier this year, Altman wrote that OpenAI is confident it knows how to build AGI “as we have traditionally understood it” and that the company believes that in 2025 we’ll see the first AI agents “join the workforce.” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella later downplayed this type of AGI definition, saying “Us self-claiming some AGI milestone, that’s just nonsensical benchmark hacking to me.” 

As other critics have previously pointed out, AGI and the massive impact it could theoretically have on society is also a useful marketing strategy for AI companies, allowing them to hype up their value based on something that may or may not happen in the future, while distracting from the actual problems and harm their AI system are actively causing as they exist.

Google’s job listing appears to prepare the company for the most ambitious, science fiction-y interpretation of AGI. Other key responsibilities for the job include “research projects exploring the influence of AGI on domains such as economics, law, health/wellbeing, AGI to ASI, machine consciousness, and education,” conducting “in-depth studies to analyze AGI's societal impacts across key domains,” and building “infrastructure and evaluation frameworks for a systematic evaluation of AI's societal effects.”

The job listing comes shortly after Deepmind published a report in early April about “taking a responsible path to AGI.” The report, which states that “AI that’s at least as capable as humans at most cognitive tasks, could be here within the coming years,” details how Google is “taking a systematic and comprehensive approach to AGI safety, exploring four main risk areas: misuse, misalignment, accidents, and structural risks, with a deeper focus on misuse and misalignment.”

Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment. 

A version of this piece originally ran on DexDigi, Dexter Thomas’s newsletter, and a video version ran on his YouTube. Please consider subscribing to both.

The Hollywood sign was on fire; or at least, it was online. Those images and videos were fake and AI-generated. Maybe you already knew this. But people made money off of them, anyway.

At the beginning of January, the Instagram account FutureRiderUS was posting AI videos of a motorcycle riding through futuristic landscapes – hence the name. Those videos usually would get anywhere from 20k to 30k views. But then, the fires started. 

The next day, FutureRiderUS posted its own flaming Hollywood sign video. That one got a million views.

Next, they posted another AI video, this one focusing on firefighters rescuing baby animals.

23 million views on that one. 78,000 comments, 2.5 million likes.

How much money did they make? It's hard to say exactly, but we can estimate.

Instagram pays people through programs where creators earn money based on how many views their Reels receive. The more viral a video, the longer users stay on the app, which allows Instagram to show more ads. Instagram then passes on some of the profit to the creator. How much? Meta doesn’t publish those numbers, and it varies depending on the audience that is looking at them. But I asked a few influencers, and the recent rate seems to be around $100~$120 per million views. Jason’s reporting shows that Facebook was paid out a few hundred dollars for single viral AI generated images, and Meta has paid out more than $2 billion through programs like Ads on Reels.

Just look at FutureRiderUS’s most popular posts from a roughly 24 hour stretch starting Jan 10:1m + 24m + 6m + 6m + 45m + 4m + 8m ≈ 94 million views.

That’s 94 million views, from typing in some prompts. Conservatively, this is likely worth thousands of dollars. Not a bad day’s work.

After that initial hit, FutureRiderUS started experimenting with different combinations of LA fire-themed AI slop, refining as they go. At first, their focus was on the firefighters holding baby animals. When the views on these started slowing down, the account shifted to videos showing animals running from fire; no firefighters needed. One features a swan bleeding out onto a freeway, with no visible fire at all.

It’s obvious what is going on here: FutureRiderUS realized that animals are a reliable attention-getter, but they’re experimenting to see which combination is the most profitable. They’re A/B testing the AI slop to see what sticks.

When I say ‘slop,’ by the way, I partially mean that in a literal sense. In the most popular video, a man is inexplicably exuding smoke from under his jacket as he cradles an owl. Another firefighter, instead of saving a raccoon, instead appears to nudge it back into the flames. It’s sloppy.

Still, a lot of people seem to be genuinely unaware that these images are fake. Some people can tell, and have commented angrily or jokingly about it. (A third group: people who are initially fooled, but when another commenter tells them it’s fake, they get annoyed, saying that they appreciate seeing images of heroic firefighters or vulnerable animals, even if those specific ones are not real.)

FutureRiderUS has addressed this, sort of.

In the comments section of their most viral post (45 million views) featuring a firefighter carrying two baby bears to safety, they posted a response to angry commenters. Three days after the initial post, they commented, admitting that the post is AI-generated. They said, in part: (emphasis mine):

“In this video, I aimed to shed light on the reality of what is happening. These problems are very real—animals are dying, homes are being destroyed, and firefighters are risking their lives to save others. They don’t have the time to produce visually stunning and powerful footage to raise awareness about these issues. That’s why I took the initiative to create something that could help people see and truly think about these tragedies. […]

Through art, even when created by AI, we can evoke emotions, raise awareness, and inspire change.”

The logic of their argument seems to be this (my paraphrase):If I don't post these provocative images, nobody will care about the brave firefighters or the people who lost their homes.

This sort of defensive, it-doesn’t-matter-if-it’s-fake stance is something that we are starting to notice more, as it’s used to justify the posting (and monetization) of everything from Palestinians to flood victims. But we shouldn’t lose track of the context: the main purpose of this account is to make money. It says so right on the page.

On January 18th, as the fires were still burning, FutureRiderUS posted a Reel advertising their $19.99 course on how to create viral content online by posting AI videos: “Earn $5000 a Month with Viral Videos - Zero Experience Needed - Start Today and Watch Your Life Change.”

To be clear, the man in the video above isn’t FutureRiderUS - the voice and video are AI-generated.

The post also goes on to brag about how FutureRiderUS got 285 million views in one month. The post (as well as another earlier one) points viewers to the link in their bio, which takes you to the course that promises to teach you to replicate FutureRiderUS’ success. The landing page contains screenshots of the viral fire videos as proof of their virality.

From their ad copy:“This proves that anything is possible when you know how to create content that grabs attention.”

Again — this is about creating ‘content that grabs attention’.

Not ‘raising awareness.’ And for the account owner to suggest that they are motivated by something other than money seems disingenuous. There are no donation links, no mention of local organizations. Instead, the only call to action is to click the link to buy their viral video course.

I usually wouldn’t do this, but for journalism’s sake, I bought the course. The course contains two files. The first is a ten-page, wide-spaced PDF that is clearly ChatGPT-generated. If you’re curious, here’s a summary of the main points:

1. Look online for what is already trending at the moment
2. type that into Sora.ai to generate a similar video
3. add music, then post the video online
4. repeat multiple times a day

Nothing you couldn’t find online for free or perhaps guess yourself.Really the only unique parts of the guide are two rules it suggests: first, that you should clearly label the post as AI-generated. FutureRiderUS doesn’t seem to follow this rule, but more on that in a moment.

And then, it tells you to not spend too much time on any one video. “Just 30 minutes are enough to move from concept to final upload,” it advises. And to drive home this point, there’s the second file: an .mp4 that is just a screen recording of an iPhone going from prompt to upload in seven minutes.

You’re probably curious about who is behind the account. I was, too. So I asked them some questions via Instagram DM.

Here’s a summary of what they told me: They’re Russian, and they only started doing this in December. OpenAI’s Sora had been released that month, and they got an account and started posting AI videos. Success came pretty immediately. They proudly told me about their high follower count across multiple social media platforms, and how well their guide was selling. As they put it, ‘the results speak for themselves.’

When I started asking about their LA fire videos, they started to get annoyed. I pointed out that most commenters clearly didn’t understand it was AI. The ones who did seemed angry. FutureRiderUS said that they didn’t see the problem, because they had added an ‘AI’ label to their videos.

Here’s the thing: FutureRiderUS is right.

On all of the fake fire videos FutureRiderUS has uploaded, there is an ‘AI Info’ label. Not on the video itself, but in the Instagram interface. The trouble is that the label doesn’t show up when you’re watching the video normally. You can only see it if you tap the ‘See More’ tag, and even then, space is prioritized for the song title, so sometimes the tag is pushed off of the screen.²

I’ve actually already shown an example in this article. Scroll back up and look at the screenshots of the fake burning Hollywood sign that went viral. That tiny ‘A…’ in the bottom right. Did you notice it?

(I made a video that explains this interface part a bit more visually. Jump to 12:00).

Below is the best-case scenario. The left image is what the 43-million view post looks like from the main grid; the center is what it looks like when you’re scrolling — this is where people spend most of their time. The right is what it looks like if you take the trouble to open the text description.

It says ‘AI Info’ in small text on the bottom right. Not ‘AI Warning’, not ‘AI Caution’. Just ‘AI Info.’

Why would you click this?

Meta has a page that makes a big deal about this tag. They primarily show what it looks like in the grid view. The issue is that it’s even more imperceptible there. Have a look at that ‘Los Angeles, California’ tag in the leftmost image above. Up in the top left, under the username. When you first look at the post in the grid, that’s what you see — the location tag. And then, the music title scrolls into view for a few moments. Only after that, the text ‘AI Info” appears. By that time, you’re watching the video, not looking at tiny text scrolls in the upper corner of your screen.

You have to either wait for 5.5 seconds (I timed it) for the ‘AI info’ to appear, or you have to search at the bottom of the screen.³

In our conversation, FutureRiderUS said that it isn’t the poster’s fault if people didn’t notice the interface AI tag: it was Instagram’s responsibility to make the tags bigger or more noticeable.

FutureRiderUS insisted that they are following the rules as written. As I spoke to them, I realized that they were probably correct. But just to make sure, I sent an email to Meta’s press department, asking if simply adding the ‘AI Info’ tag is enough.

I never got a response, but Meta has indicated to 404 Media and to the general public more broadly that it has no problem with this type of content and that it expects to see more AI-generated content on its platforms moving forward.

This all said, there are easy ways to make it clear that your post is not real. Some creators will do this by putting an #AI tag prominently at the beginning of the post, and then writing their caption below.

FutureRiderUS, in their own guide they sell to customers, suggests going further and actually writing it in the post itself. I sent them a quote from their own guide:

"Important: State that this content (or parts of it) is AI-generated (e.g., 'Created with AI' or 'AI-Generated Content')."

(The bolded ‘Important’ is in the original.)

This really seemed to annoy FutureRiderUS, and they accused me of harassment:

"Why should anyone pressure me or force me to do something beyond the established rules? I am following the platform’s guidelines, and anything beyond that crosses a line. This kind of behavior can be considered harassment, as it unfairly targets and imposes additional expectations on me that are not required by the platform."

If it’s not already obvious, everything FutureRiderUS wrote to me, as well as their captions and comments, is being copied and pasted from ChatGPT.

To be clear, I am not really interested in criticizing any one individual here. In the absence of stronger rules on Instagram, this just comes down to a question of ethics. I am free to believe that what FutureRiderUS is doing is not ethical; they are free to disagree, or at least pretend to.

But neither of our opinions matter, because of two facts: fake AI slop is profitable, and there are countless users doing the same thing. There’s absolutely nothing to stop them.

That is: the Instagram platform doesn’t just enable this behavior, it rewards it. So do other platforms. On Instagram and TikTok, FutureRiderUS’s top hits are from fake LA fires; on YouTube, it’s three-hour long Christmas music compilations with slop visuals of families shopping. None are clearly labeled. Disaster porn is just another kind of #content.

It doesn’t really matter what that content is: as long as it is ‘content that grabs attention,’ both sides can make money.

For the slop creator and the platform, this is a clear win-win, at least in the short term. The only loser here is the audience, who is unable to recognize slop when they see it.

There’s this thing that AI proponents like to say every time something new comes out: this is the worst it'll ever be. So far, they've been right, and they may well continue to be right. It’s hard to predict what happens next with AI, but I have one prediction I feel fairly comfortable making: unaided, most of us will always struggle to reliably recognize AI when we see it.

But it’s hard to blame us when two sides are conspiring against us: Instagram’s interface makes it almost impossible to tell, and creators are incentivized to lie by omission.

A few days after their viral successes, the viewcounts on FutureRiderUS’ fire content started to dwindle. The fires themselves were still burning in Los Angeles, but FutureRiderUS shifted focus. On January 14, as talks of a Gaza ceasefire started to circulate, the account anticipated interest in the trend, and made a post — as their viral video guide suggests.

This post is an AI slop collage of a Palestinian flag atop a spire, a woman crying as bodies and rubble lay in the street, children, bloody arms, doctors walking sideways. The caption is a vaguely worded, inoffensive block of text that says, in part, ‘This is not about taking sides, it’s about humanity.’

This move is completely obvious to anyone who follows FutureRiderUS’ viral video guide or honestly, any of the tons of books, articles, LinkedIn posts or videos by content creators who teach you how to make content and grow your account.

Again, it’s all about content. Content that grabs attention. Of course somebody was going to use those tools and strategies for something like this. As long as the platforms allow it and keep making money off of it there's no reason for it to stop.

FutureRiderUS had decided that the algorithmic juice had been squeezed out of Los Angeles. Moving on to Palestine content is just a business decision.

The Palestine post got a few comments, which are of the usual sort: heart emojis, crying emojis, someone musing about a world war. One of the commenters seems completely uninterested in Palestine, ‘humanity,’ or a ceasefire. Instead, they ask the real question:

if i join your courses, what i’ll get from the courses?

But after nearly a day, the Palestine video hadn’t even broken 10k views. It was a flop.

A few hours later, FutureRiderUS posted a video of a bear eating honey.

An AI startup promises to call your elderly parents for you if you don’t have time, or simply don’t want to, and we tested out the service.

Called inTouch, the service uses an AI generated voice so your parent receives a phone call in which they can talk to the AI about, for example, how their day is going, their hobbies, and how they’re feeling. An AI-generated summary of the conversation is then sent to the child or whoever setup the account, and includes a visual indicator of their state of mind, such as “bad mood” or “neutral mood.”

Obviously, the idea of having an AI call your lonely relative because you can’t or don’t feel like it is dystopian, insulting, and especially non-human, even more so than other AI-based creations. The creator, though, says it can provide a way to keep in touch with relatives and make sure they’re safe.

Welcome back to the Abstract! 

Whatever else you think of this past week, it sure served up some ridiculously good science. I’m talking about a real boffin buffet, with all the fixings. There were studies about trees spying on illegal mines. Or, an eerie rhino graveyard buried in ash 12 million years ago. Or, the first baby born from a remote and fully automated sperm injection. And those were all ones I had to regretfully leave in drafts, on account of the sheer scientific bounty.

For starters, there was a whole study this week predicated on what mariners have been writing in ship logs over the past 400 years. I’d have to turn myself into the authorities if I didn’t highlight it, for it would indeed be a crime. 

Next, the universe is acting up again and refuses to conform to our meticulously curated models. I would tell the universe to go to its room, but it is the room. Then, crows continue to prove that “bird brain” is a compliment, actually. Last, take a few seconds for Uranus. No, I mean, literally. 

Do You Take Milk in Your Sea?

Hudson, Justin and Miller, Steve. “From Sailors to Satellites: A Curated Database of Bioluminescent Milky Seas Spanning 1600-Present.” Earth and Space Science.

It has happened again: A study has turned to historical documents to make scientific conclusions. As I’ve mentioned previously, this is one of the absolute best flavors of research because we all get treated to a bunch of old-timey accounts of weird phenomena—in this case, the entrancing spectacle of “milky seas.”

Milky seas are produced by bioluminescent bacteria that can transform the nighttime ocean into a glowing white veneer. For centuries, seafarers have marvelled at the eerie beauty of these surreal displays, which sometimes last for months and can cover areas of 100,000 square kilometers (about the size of Iceland).

“Milky seas are a rare, historically fabled form of marine bioluminescence” that is characterized by their steady, non-flashing, eponymous white glow,” said Justin Hudson and Steven Miller of Colorado State University. “Eyewitnesses have compared the experience of sailing through a milky sea to a snowy plain at night, the “Twilight Zone,” and even the biblical apocalypse.”

“Despite centuries of scientific research into milky seas very little is known about the physical and biogeochemical processes which govern their formation, longevity, and size,” the team continued. “Scientific inquiry into milky seas has historically been held back due to the paucity of data, and the remote, ephemeral nature of the phenomenon.”

You know what that means—time to hit the stacks! Hudson and Miller compiled a trove of eyewitness accounts, spanning the past 400 years, which they used to statistically examine “the relationship between milky seas globally and large-scale coupled atmosphere ocean phenomena…for the first time.”

The science here is interesting on its own merits, as the team refined predictions about where and when milky seas are most likely to occur, and linked them to broader oceanic and climatic forces. The radiant displays, powered by the marine bacteria Vibrio harveyi, are influenced by the Indian Ocean Dipole and the El Niño Southern Oscillation, and are commonly observed around the Arabian Sea and off the coast of Southeast Asia, according to the study.

“Given their spatial scale and biological nature, milky seas may represent a critically understudied large-scale movement of carbon and nutrients through the earth system, particularly so with bacteria playing a key role in the global carbon cycle both on land,” concluded the team. 

But as with most studies in this category, the supplemental information is the star of the show. It’s such a treat to read through all these accounts of past mariners who found themselves on the decks of their vessels at night, looking out at a surreal seascape of milk, or snow, or silver.

“At a quarter before eight o’clock at night, a phenomenon appeared of the following nature, and to all on board of an unheard-of kind, which gave rise to transitory feelings of apprehension as to the vessel’s contiguity to danger,” wrote an observer in the log of the H. C. sloop Clive in August 1832. (Clive is an excellent boat name, by the way).

“Without any indication of a change in the elements, the ship was surrounder instanter (sic) by water as white as milk or snow,” continued the seafarer. “No line of horizon was visible; the dead white colour of the water close to the ship as it increased in distance from her very gradually brightened until, where I supposed the horizon to be, it assumed a silvery aspect, which increasing as it ascended became brilliant and dazzling towards the zenith, obscuring the stars and clouds which had before this visitation been distinctly visible.”

A similar tale unfolds over the course of dozens of collected entries. Some mariners threw fireballs into the ocean to literally test the waters, and many crews reported that tiny “animalcules” were seen under microscopes in buckets drawn up from the milky seas.

But the common theme across the centuries is an almost mystical quality to these encounters, which shines through (so to speak) in the ship logs.

“When looking into the sea at the height of the phenomenon, it was almost impossible to focus the eye and a slight feeling of vertigo was experienced,” noted an officer of the SS Ixion in a 1967 entry about a sighting in the Indian Ocean. “This eeriness could well have convinced the superstitious mariners of long ago that the ship would fall off the edge of the world during the night if navigated far from the shore.”

“It was like we were in the "Twilight Zone" and peering at a negative of the real world,” reported the crew of the USS O’Brien of a 1980 sighting near the Yemeni island of Socotra. “The seas were glowing with phosphorescence as far as you could see all around us…The phosphorescence was uniform and a bit lighter green or ‘whiter’ than the normal screw-generated green phosphorescence (kind of like the glow-in-the-dark plastic stars you can buy your kids). There were no breaks in the phosphorescence even with the waves.”

I recommend reading through some of the excerpts, which are filled with expressions of wonder, premonition, and good old-fashioned scientific curiosity. You gotta hand it to Earth. She knows how to put on a show.

Do These Lopsided Satellites Make Andromeda’s Butt Look Big?

Kanehisa, Kosuke Jamie et al. “Andromeda’s asymmetric satellite system as a challenge to cold dark matter cosmology.” Nature Astronomy.

The universe does not conform to our expectations. This is a common lament among cosmologists.

Over the past half-century, for instance, scientists across diverse fields have developed a framework called the standard model of cosmology, also known as the Lambda cold dark matter (ΛCDM) model, that accounts for a lot of the weird stuff we see in space. But if you search “challenges to the standard model,” you will get roughly a bajillion hits, as observations of the real universe frequently clash with the predictions of the standard model.

One of the most interesting conflicts is the behavior of dwarf galaxies that orbit larger ones, such as Andromeda, which is the nearest major galaxy to the Milky Way. The standard model, meanwhile, predicts that these satellite galaxies should be more or less isotropic in their distribution around their host, meaning that they should occupy a swarm of random orbits around a larger galaxy.

But in a new study, scientists found that Andromeda’s orbiters are weirdly clustered on one side. “All but one of Andromeda’s 37 satellite galaxies are contained within 107 degrees of our Galaxy,” said researchers led by Kosuke Jamie Kanehisa of the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam. 

In other words, most of the orbiting galaxies are asymmetrically located on the side of Andromeda that faces the Milky Way. In standard cosmological simulations, this configuration is extremely rare, showing up in just 0.3 percent of cases. What gives? 

The researchers speculate that the Milky Way might be exerting a tidal influence on Andromeda, thereby pulling its orbiters in our direction. But if this were true, you’d expect the satellites of the Milky Way to align in a similar asymmetry, given that Andromeda is about as massive as our own galaxy, yet there’s no evidence that this is the case.

“At present, no known formation mechanism can explain the collective asymmetry of the Andromeda system,” the team concluded.  

You could ask the universe, but it’s just not very forthcoming about this kind of thing. Indeed, this is not the first time the movements of satellite galaxies have defied the standard model; I covered this eerie discrepancy a few years ago for Motherboard.

The discovery that Andromeda appears to be “an extreme outlier in the prevailing cosmological paradigm” is yet another sign that something is either wrong with a) the model, b) our observations, c) all of the above, or d) some other wild card that has yet to be identified. Place your bets.

 An (Intellectual) Feast for Crows 

Schmidbauer, Philipp et al. “Crows recognize geometric regularity.” Science Advances.

It’s well-known that crows (and other corvids) are among the most intelligent animals on Earth. You can kind of intuit this fact just from looking a crow in the eye—they have that “clever girl” vibe to them—but studies have helpfully provided empirical evidence they are capable of tool use, abstract thinking, and epic grudges, among many other proficiencies.  

It got one team of scientists thinking: can crows do geometry?

“Animals’ sensitivity to geometric regularity has been found to be notably limited; nonhuman primates do not recognize geometric regularity in tests involving the perception of visual shapes, whereas humans do,” said researchers led by Philipp Schmidbauer of the University of Tübingen. “This result led to the interpretation that the recognition of geometric regularity could constitute a uniquely human ability.”

As a rule, don’t call anything uniquely human until you’ve tried it on crows. To that end, the team presented two carrion crows (Corvus corone), aged 10 and 11 years old, with a touch-screen showing different assortments of shapes. For instance, a simple starter test displayed six non-quadrilateral shapes, such as five stars and one crescent moon. A tougher test mixed in quadrilaterals—such squares, trapezoids, rhombuses—with one irregular four-sided shape. 

Crows were tasked with detecting the “intruder” shape, which they successfully did about half the time, a rate that is well over what would be expected by chance. 

“Our results, showing that crows spontaneously recognize geometric regularity in visual shapes, contrast with those from a study involving monkeys that failed to discriminate quadrilateral stimuli based on geometric regularity” a finding that challenges “the idea that intuitive shape geometry is uniquely human,” the team concluded.

To paraphrase a legendary animated newsman: I, for one, welcome our crow overlords. 

Uranus Gets its Chakras Aligned

Lamy, L et al. “A new rotation period and longitude system for Uranus.” Nature Astronomy. 

Last but not least, a day on Uranus just got 28 seconds longer. This is not because the planet has suddenly decided to slow down in mid-life, though it would be forgiven for the indulgence. Instead, the extra time is due to an update of its rotation period, which was measured by Voyager 2 in 1986. 

Data collected during that flyby determined that the Uranian day is about 17 hours, 14 minutes, and 24 seconds, give or take about a half-minute. On paper, this small margin of error for a giant planet located about two billion miles from Earth is not too shabby. But the slight imprecision has actually been bugging astronomers who study the planet for a while, prompting a lot of new rotational estimates over the years.

Now, scientists have refined the Uranian day to a whopping six decimal points by tracking the planet’s radiant auroras for more than a decade with the Hubble Space Telescope. 

“Here we use the long-term tracking of Uranus’ magnetic poles between 2011 and 2022 from Hubble Space Telescope images of its ultraviolet aurorae to achieve an updated, independent, extremely precise rotation period of 17.247864 ± 0.000010 h, only consistent with the Voyager 2 estimate,” said researchers led by Laurent Lamy of the Observatoire de Paris. 

This update brings the Uranian day to 17 hours, 14 minutes, and 52 seconds, about 28 seconds longer than Voyager 2’s rotational estimate. The improved accuracy “will allow the reanalysis of the whole set of Uranus observations” and the novel approach “stands as a new method to determine the rotation rate of any object hosting a magnetosphere and a rotationally modulated aurorae, in our Solar System and beyond.”

We’re all in a Proustian search for lost time. Who could have guessed we’d end up finding it on Uranus?  

Thanks for reading! See you next week. 

This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss the economy and the state of 404 Media, the need for robot umpires, and bringing on a new regular contributor to the site.

EMANUEL: Something that I couldn’t help but think about a lot this week was how easily one of the worst parts of working at a big company like VICE was the regular layoffs. It’s been on my mind because a cruel aspect of the job was that whenever there was some kind of cataclysmic event in the economy—COVID, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, etc—we had the unique pleasure of having to closely follow and cover news that could and often would ultimately result in members of our teams getting laid off. 

We worked hard and did our jobs as best we could but we could also feel the axe about to fall, usually in the form of an email from upper management about “economic headwinds” or something like that, followed by a brutal day of slowly finding out who still had a job. Donald Trump’s tariffs and their manic fluctuating between total global trade war to more limited but still devastating focus on China, stocks taking a nosedive, companies announcing they’re going to stop doing some business in the US, and CEOs putting everything on hold until we’re out of this zone of “economic uncertainty,” put out strong “headwinds” vibes this week.

For the last week, several news outlets have published shocking headlines about a game called No Mercy on Steam that features incest and “rape.”

In the UK, Peter Kyle, a member of Parliament and the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology described the game as “deeply worrying” and demanded Valve, which operates the PC’s leading digital game store Steam, take it down. The Sydney Morning Herald called it a “Rape game available online for Australian Children.” Two organizations, Women in Games and Collective Shout, called on Valve to remove the game.

I downloaded and played No Mercy today for about 20 minutes. It’s crude, badly made, very boring, and about as pornographic as a seventh grader who is really good at drawing boobs. You click through endless lines of inane dialogue and eventually get to a point where two characters who look like stiff action figures of the same age are miming sex in a way that is barely recognizable as human. This is what many of the sex games on Steam look like, and the only reason you’ve heard about this one is that one of the characters is labeled “son” and the other is labeled as “mom.”

I understand how conceptually, in the way it is written out and pitched on Steam, No Mercy can sound highly offensive. That’s the point. But playing it makes clear that it’s not interesting or well made enough to follow on its own shocking pitch. It’s just shovelware, low quality games published in huge quantities in hopes of making a few bucks.

No Mercy is a visual novel, meaning it’s a kind of choose-your-own-adventure presented mostly with still or barely animated images made with crude 3D models that players click through to advance the story and occasionally make choices about how that story unfolds. With adult games, those choices usually result in some kind of sexual encounter that is also rendered with those crude 3D models. It’s a common type of game on Steam, and No Mercy differentiates itself by focusing on taboos. 

“In this game, you’ll either become every woman’s worst nightmare… or rather: the best dick they'll ever have. Your goal is simple: leave no pussy non-fucked, since that's the only thing they all want. Never take 'no' for an answer,” the games Steam page reads. “Fuck your mom, fuck your auntie, and even fuck your friend’s mom. Why not?”

It’s a shocking way to pitch a game if porn tube site algorithms aren’t already serving you similar pornography, and doubly so if you haven’t kept up with Valve’s policy surrounding adult content on Steam, which is extremely permissive when compared to other platforms.

Valve’s current position is that pretty much anything goes when it comes to adult content. Users can easily choose not to have any of those games surfaced to them, and if they do, Steam does a good job of filtering that content out. If they choose to see that stuff, which I do, it’s all over the place, including the front page, game recommendations, and lists of new releases and best sellers, where at least one of these games is always featured. 

Looking at my Steam account right now under the list of “popular upcoming” games, I see Office Affairs : Executive Decisions, an adult only visual novel with a an office romance angle, Saviour of the Wasteland, an adult only visual novel with post-apocalyptic/Fallout-y premise, and Lust’s Cupid, an adult only “pleasure simulator” with an anime aesthetic. 

As PC Gamer helpfully keeps track, there were over 19,000 games released on Steam in 2024. A lot of those games are not good, and the list includes plenty of copycats, cheap asset flips, and shovelware. There are exceptions among Steam’s sex games, but the ratio there is even worse. There are a few formulas that developers in this space follow. There are games that basically use existing, well-known game mechanics like bullet hell and breakout-likes that reward players with some form of nudity, often furry or anime themed, and there are visual novels that usually follow porn genres and conventions, and are often rendered with cheap 3D graphics. Often, and especially in the latter category, these games have some kind of shocking, edgelord premise in an attempt to get players’ attention. For example, back in 2022 Sam and I played a Steam game called Sex with Hitler, which was a very bad top-down shooter/visual novel where, after a lot of very boring filler, you occasionally see a few images of having sex with Adolf Hitler. Most of these games barely rise above the level of the type of games advertised on porn sites that dare players “not to cum.” 

No Mercy is just a more extreme example of what Valve has been allowing on Steam for years. I understand why people are upset that it’s on the platform, but at least Valve makes it easy to filter out those games if you don’t want to see them, something much bigger platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter are terrible at, as we report on constantly. This is not to say that Valve is doing a great job of moderating its platform. I’ve been reporting on its problem with hate groups since 2017, which it still deals with today, and which there is no simple filter for as there is for adult content. Steam has also previously hosted games with an explicit connection to pick-up artists, the manosphere, and misogynist world views that are straight up marketed as instructions on how to talk to women in the real world, as opposed to the ridiculous fantasies included in No Mercy. 

We’ve also reported on the adult industry for years, and there’s an infinite variety in genres and fetishes. Sexuality can be strange, funny, and weirdly specific, and because it is generally a suppressed aspect of the human condition, it’s often offensive to people. 

Step-sister/step-brother porn is such a popular trope in pornography it’s become a punchline. There are more than 97,000 videos under Pornhub’s “Rough Sex” category. There are many things people get off to that other people find objectionable, but a good rule is that if the adult content is entirely consensual and is not hurting anyone, people should be able to engage with it if they wish.

Every platform decides the terms it’s going to allow, and then the people who make and play games, write ebooks, or make porn find whatever the edge is. Pornhub does not let users search for “rape,” and not all of the “rough sex” videos on Pornhub are rape fantasies, but some of them are. From what I’ve seen, No Mercy is like many other games that are on Steam but has successfully won the outrage lottery, allowing it to stand out from thousands of other games that are doing much the same thing. 

Earlier this week I wrote an article called “A US-Made iPhone Is Pure Fantasy." The long and short of it is that Trump’s dream of moving all high tech manufacturing to the US is extremely difficult because global supply chains are so intricate, manufacturing expertise exists primarily in China, Vietnam, Cambodia, and other countries, and the components that go into a phone are often made in other countries as well.

But there is currently one smartphone that qualifies for a “Made in the USA” title from the FTC. It’s the Liberty Phone, which is made by a company called Purism. The phone is a version of Purism’s Librem 5. The Made-in-China Librem 5 costs $800, and the Liberty phone costs $2,000. It has 4 GB of memory, and reviewers say that its specs are pretty outdated. Not every single component in the Liberty Phone is made in the USA, but the company has been trying very hard to make it as American-made as possible. The fact that it exists at all is kind of a miracle, and the way that Purism is approaching manufacturing is really interesting, so I called Purism’s founder, Todd Weaver, to talk about smartphone supply chains, making tech products in the United States, and tariffs. Here’s our discussion, which has been edited for length and clarity. The full, hour-long discussion is available here as a bonus episode of the 404 Media podcast:

 404 Media: What you're doing is super interesting and I know you've been doing it for a while. I know that there's been tons of discussion over the last few weeks about bringing manufacturing back to the United States, the difficulty of doing that with different supply chains and components and things like that. And I know to the best of your ability, you've brought the Liberty Phone to the U.S. Can you tell me a little bit about what the Liberty Phone is and how long you've been doing it for? 

Todd Weaver: So the first thing is I started the company, Purism, in 2014. The original business plan is actually what we were able to execute on over the course of the last 10 years, and looking at doing a fair number of things different than is currently done.

One of those is US manufacturing for a lot of reasons, secure supply chain, where we get to manage all the components, full transparency, I can also release my schematics. And then that gets us to where we're really targeting that security market as well, because the security market needs to have control and also verify the claims of any technology stack being used. When I started the company, we also did laptops. And then I knew I wanted to get to the point of phones. But I also knew that I had to increment my way there by building laptops first, showcasing that I'm able to do all of that on the hardware, software services side, and then get to the point of the phone. When we did the phone, it was the Librem 5 phone.

After we were successful on the Librem 5 crowdfunding campaign, we took our own electronics engineers (EEs), and then we worked with Chinese design and manufacturing through 2018, 2019, and 2020, because that's where every phone is made.

We had to leverage the knowledge base that was offshored into that country to do so. And so at that point, we were able to take our designs and educate our staff on the entire process and produce the Librem 5. And then we were able to take all those designs and spin up our own SMT, it's called Surface Mount Technology, where we can actually produce the entire electronics of the device at our facility, therefore bringing it back to US soil. And so we have a few different SKUs of our product offering that are manufactured in our facility. 

We have a varying degree of the country of origin for components or the total product. So on one end of that spectrum, you have our server, which is an Intel reference design manufactured out of China, and then we're importing it. And then you go through the whole scale all the way down to Liberty Phone and our Librem Key that are 100% produced at our facility in Carlsbad, California.

On those two products we take the printed circuit board, which is just a blank board that has no components and run that through our surface mount technology by our line operators. And so we go from resistors and capacitors and integrated circuits, put them all on the board, take it off the board, do quality control, any firmware loading. Then we assemble the entire phone and then do a software load for the customer and then ship it direct. That whole process is top to bottom done at our facility.

There’s a difference between a phone that is fully made and manufactured in the United States and one that is assembled in the United States. Do you believe that you're manufacturing the phone from start to finish in the United States?

There's no question about it. The difference is actually defined by the FTC. So the Federal Trade Commission has language that describes the difference between assembled and manufactured. Assembly is where you are putting parts together. And they actually even have a sub definition of that called screwdriver assembly. So if you only take a screwdriver to it, and that's the only tool you're using, meaning snapping parts and using a screwdriver, then you cannot claim it was ‘made in the USA’ or you can't even claim ‘assembled in the USA.’ When you're looking at the Liberty phone, we are taking the bare board and we are doing the entire manufacturing process of all of the electronics, meaning resistors, capacitors, integrated circuits are being put onto that board.

It's going from raw materials to finished goods at our facility. And then we assemble the entire printed circuit board into the actual chassis of the phone. And then we also load our own operating system and then ship it to the customer. So, not only are we doing full electronics manufacturing at our facility on US soil, but we're also doing the entire operating system and authorship and releasing of that. 

You're not buying components from overseas and then screwing them together here? You're making the components here as well?

Components are the things that you're actually purchasing like a resistor and a capacitor and integrated circuit. Those we are buying from a Western distributor and each chip set that you use has a country of origin. In our case, we also use chip sets that are like ST Micro [a Swiss company with American factories], Texas instruments. These are manufactured on US soil.

So we also go down as deep as we possibly can to purchase from US or Westernized distribution or manufacturers of those components and chips. So obviously resistors, capacitors are manufactured on US oil. We purchase those and install them. When you're talking about the PCB, which is the blank board and the PCBA, which is the printed circuit board assembly. You're taking those raw components and you're putting them onto a board, meaning soldering them onto a board, and then you have a finished electronic circuit board. When you're talking about other companies, what they're importing is typically finished goods, finished electronics. Meaning the chassis, the battery, the whole entire electronics inside. And in rare cases, they might import just the motherboard, meaning the printed circuit board or PCBA assembly. We're very unique in the sense that we actually go from parts in stock all the way to the manufacturing process, all the way to finished goods at our facility. It is a vertically integrated manufacturing process. And that is, as you can recognize, extremely rare.

The last part of this is the raw materials, the minerals that are being mined and turned into the different parts that you're sourcing from suppliers. Do you try to work with suppliers who are making parts using materials mined in the US? Or is that too hard to follow that deep into the supply chain?

Yes, we do, but there's levels of complexity, as you can imagine, where the desire is there, but sometimes the parts aren't, or sometimes the negotiation with the suppliers turn into much more challenging or time consuming for the scale that we happen to be at. And then there's another bit of that, which also is leverage. If you're talking millions of units, as a manufacturer you have a lot more leverage than if you have a hundred thousand or tens of thousands. And so there is a degree of how hard can you push into the supply chain for contractual sourcing of raw materials, meaning mined materials. What we tend to do when we're doing Liberty phone is use Western distribution which has to comply with an awful lot more regulation on where it can source components from. 

"If you scoured the United States, you would be able to probably actually still count the number of skilled electronics engineers. If you go to Shenzhen, there's floor after floor after floor after floor of skilled EE's"

Our philosophy from the very early days, especially as it relates to US manufacturing, is we go as deep as we possibly can to releasing our schematics, to sourcing our components, to having our HBOM, it's called a hardware bill of materials, a country of origin available, to the transparency of all of our source code that we author being published as well so you can verify that all of our claims are accurate.

How long did it take you to implement this vision for manufacturing everything in the United States? 

2017 was when we actually began to say ‘We want to manufacture a phone and we would like to do it on US soil.’ We then actually manufactured our Librem Key as a very small security token at the same facility, same US soil manufacturing process. But it was a much easier product to produce, but that also showed, hey, we're able to do it on a simpler product. 

Then in 2019, we were able to get what's called PVT samples. That's where you sort of get the initial versions of hardware being produced. So that two years is really about design changes that we needed, developing every bit out. But also in parallel to that, we were educating our electronic engineers to say, every time we're sourcing a Chinese resistor [a circuit board component], let's make sure we're getting the same resistance on a US resistor.

We always were sort of maintaining two different bills of materials of Chinese componentry and Western componentry because they're different. Then we produced five different iterations of the Librem 5 phone through Chinese contract manufacturing. And we iterated through those five changes over the course of about 18 months. At that point, we finally had a production ready product. And then we were able to take everything that we did and bring it to US soil. 

[The Librem 5 USA was released in 2020, after three years of development.]

Imagine this literally starting from scratch, you're looking at probably a three year cycle from, from ‘Let's take an existing made-in-China product and then just produce the same thing in the US.’ 

Were there specific components or specific parts of the phone that were harder to source in the United States or harder to manufacture in the United States because we don't make that type of component in the US or there's not a US supplier that sells it?

Yes. There's US-manufactured, and then there’s ‘Westernized’ sourcing, so something from Germany or Europe or Canada. There's a bunch of these where you can’t get a US-component but you can get a ‘Western’ component. And then there’s things you can’t get [from a Western manufacturer].

One specific item is a type of crystal that needs to be put into phones, which is basically for keeping track of time and a few other measurement metrics. That crystal is something that only comes from China, and maybe I think you can get it from South Korea, which is where we either are sourcing or trying to source that last component from.

Even where we care to do 100 percent of it, there's still always something that you can try and dig one level deeper and you realize, that's a mineral or a mineral resource of something that's coming from somewhere that would be outside of the U.S. So then you need to import it and you wonder, ‘Is that ever going to be produced in the US or is there some company who would like to begin doing so?’ It's obviously a very complex question when you're dealing with, you know, in our case, 200 unique parts and the entire sourcing of all of them.

You can imagine the majority of companies who are just selling electronics from manufacturers somewhere else, they don't care. There's no transparency, no visibility, and the company itself doesn't even know the designs or what goes into it.

Your table of component origins on the Liberty Phone site shows where things come from. Most of it is USA, but then you have the M2 Modem module that says its origin declaration is China. Is there a specific reason that’s not USA? 

The M2 module, we actually have options for US made and then we also have European, Germany. That module, specifically for cellular, it depends on the bands that you're looking to install it at or in some cases cost, right? So we have that as an actual module that you can snap in. The one that we ship for when we sell the [Chinese-made] Librem 5 is a Chinese modem. But we have a US-made one and a few other westernized countries for that modem module. We have the options of different bands, different country of origin, and to be able to put that in after the fact or during final assembly.

But I would just imagine that the Chinese one is a lot cheaper.

Yeah, absolutely. It's cheaper, it also has pretty wide bands. 

The phone that you were able to manufacture in the United States is not as fast as the latest iPhone. Can the newest best chips and components be manufactured in the US, and what would it take to do it here?

The short answer is yes, I do, because you didn't ask me the timing. It's going to be multiples of years and a major investment and undertaking. And it has to show that there's a ROI and that there’s stability, like ‘This is the future that we’re going to live in, so let’s actually invest in doing all those things.’

When you're talking chipsets, the actual CPUs inside of Apple and Samsung and Google phones, those are a complete computer where it's hardware, the CPU, memory, and baseband modem, the cellular modem all combined onto one. And typically that's from Qualcomm or MediaTek. And those particular chipsets are produced outside of China. So really what you're referring to is the actual design of a finished good saying, take the semiconductor and put it into a phone and then add all the other components, the 200 and some other unique components into the finished good. And that is done in China specifically for Apple and a bunch of other major manufacturers.

It's obviously far more complex, but to try and just level set a little bit about that, where you're at now is you say ‘Let's take what we have in China and try to replicate that in the U.S.’ Well, the challenge is that all high tech jobs were put into China. You have a brain transfer where the ODMs, the original design manufacturers, are in China. If you scoured the United States, you would be able to probably actually still count the number of skilled electronics engineers. If you go to Shenzhen, there's floor after floor after floor after floor of skilled EE's. 

These are people who design the actual board that goes into devices. That training takes time and effort and energy to get to the point where you can design new devices. 

Then you have the next step, which is the actual assembly process. When you're looking at costing, machine versus machine, it's the same price to produce a product in US or China. Because the machine is doing the effort. 

But then you have a person who physically grabs the board and does the assembly, which is a much more costly endeavor in the US than it is in China. China can solve problems by throwing people at it. The US and Western countries can solve problems by throwing engineering at it. If you were to go to Dongguan, China, and you see a manufacturing line, they're going to have rows and rows and rows of people who are taking a tablet or a phone that passes by them, and they just do [quality assurance on] pinch to zoom. They have gloves and they touch the screen, drag it open and drag it back and then it moves on the line. If one doesn't do pinch to zoom properly, they send it back. And that is a job for an entire row of people. 

But what we did at Purism is we solved it with engineering. How we do that is we actually plug in the phone and we flash the entire device and we run through what we call auto Quality Assurance. And that is where we actually hack the firmware to receive or fake to receive a touch screen event into the firmware itself on the screen. And then we actually replicate a pinch to zoom, take a picture and then back again and take another picture. And as long as those pictures match, we have a functioning touch interface, where we didn't have to have people doing that task. 

You can look at our concrete numbers. We sell a Chinese made Librem 5 phone for $799. We sell the Liberty phone for $2,000. When you're looking at just those numbers alone, that looks like a giant leap in cost. But there's a couple of factors that are not publicly known when you're looking at just those prices. When you're looking at COGS, cost of goods sold, our Librem 5 phone is equivalent in cost to about an iPhone. It's about $500 and some odd dollars, $550. So we can see that the Librem 5 phone doesn't have a very high margin when we sell it. The Liberty phone, same COGS componentry wise, but to produce it on US soil, we're adding not quite a hundred dollars. So it's about $650 to produce that entire phone. But what we're doing by selling it for greater originally, we're looking at a lot of differentiators for us. It wasn't just made in the USA. It's the fact that it's a secure supply chain, that you know, staff that's completely auditing every component, which means we're selling to a government security market with all those additional layers that we've added on top.

Do you feel like you are in a better spot tariffs-wise than a company that is doing all of their manufacturing in China because you've done all of this?

Absolutely, without question. If there’s a vertically integrated company where they have engineers, they have designers, they have the knowledge to be able to do it, then those companies will be able to adapt and bring it forth. If they choose to do US manufacturing, they have at least the ability to.

Whereas a company that is marketing and finance, and that's really the bulk of what they're doing, and they don't have any engineering, and they've offloaded all of those tasks. If they have no R&D budget, and they have no operating expenses for any type of engineering or manufacturing, then they're gonna be in a very difficult position because you can also imagine there's kind of a run on the bank, right? Everybody is going to be looking for a company who can build their product at the same time. They have no knowledge of how to do it because that entire process has been brought into China. In China, you’re basically talking to a project manager, who's finding all of the right parties that does all the other tasks, and then they bring in all the engineers and everything else that's needed operationally and what you're receiving at the end of the day is something you can drop ship to a customer without ever actually even opening the box. It’s going to be very challenging to find someone in the US who's going to fill that same void at the same time that everybody else is looking to see if they can fill that void.

You are doing this manufacturing in Carlsbad, California. Did you find it difficult to find workers who were able to work on a high tech factory line?

We did not have difficulty in finding line operators, or what we call ‘skilled labor’ where you're able to solder something or do assembly with tweezers. That type of skilled labor exists, but it’s also in [geographical] pockets. If you're to say ‘Why in the world are you in Carlsbad, California?’ It's because there’s skilled labor there. There's companies here that currently work for government contract manufacturers, so that's where the labor is, that's why it was easy for us to spin up a line there and hire skilled labor from some of the other companies who have trained up those same staff. 

Electronics engineers is a rarer position. And that's what I was describing earlier when you scour the nation you'd come up with, you could count the number of skilled electronics engineers on US soil and there's probably a million in Shenzhen alone. 

One thing that I worry about or think might be a problem is if you have tons of companies trying to do this all at once, very quickly, what is that going to be like? Are there enough skilled people to do that here?

The answer has to be no. There's enough skilled labor to handle the necessary manufacturing that we're currently doing and you know if you increment it slowly then you can probably get there. If you're talking full EEs, that's multi years of education to get to the point of actually being able to do proper designs that actually work. 

"If the tariff from China is 100%, and you know it is going to be 100 % for the next 10 years, you will make a different business decision than if it is, ‘Might be 100%, not sure what's going to be in three months, what's it going to be in a year from now, and what's it going to be in three years from now.’ That uncertainty does not create stable markets. It does not create very accurate business decisions."

There's another bit that you sort of hinted at there that I think is important, and I’m going to address it. The reliability of knowing that a tariff is in place and how long it's going to be in place allows a business to make informed decisions. If it was something where you knew that importing from China is going to be a hundred percent tariff for the next 10 years concretely, every business owner would be making decisions based off of that assumption, and the reliability of that assumption is important. 

If it's something where ‘Hey, this is what's going to be 100%, but in two months it might not be, and who knows what's going to happen in three years or four years?’ It makes it very hard for a business owner or the board of directors to say ‘It's worth spinning all this up.’ 

Did you look at bringing manufacturing to the US as a political project for you? Were you interested in the politics of doing this in the United States or was it a matter of differentiating yourselves?

There's like probably about 10 items on the list of reasons why we chose to do manufacturing in the US. And obviously one of those is from a civil liberties perspective. So manufacturing high tech componentry in a hostile nation to the United States is not good geopolitical politics, right? Purism as a company, we also care tremendously about civil liberties and the privacy side of things which is to say we manufacture a phone that doesn't spy on you. That's why we manufacture it and also do all the source code. We can't have some nefarious chip put into the supply chain from a hostile country. 

So the short answer is not in the short-term political game, but more of the geopolitical game and also understanding security and privacy and sort of how all those things weave together 

I think no matter where you are on the political spectrum, you can look at the last two weeks of tariffs, more tariffs, maybe not tariffs, maybe a delay in tariffs, increased Chinese tariffs and agree that this is chaotic. And you mentioned the stability of sort of knowing what the rules are going to be. Does this all stress you out?

I do not stress about the SKUs that we are fully making in the US, right? We don't have to worry about it for our US side, because the majority of it will not be affected. But for others [that we make overseas], you can’t project out, right? What is it gonna be in three months? Should we buy components now? What is it gonna be a year from now? Maybe we should stock up on a bunch of other things?

Should we buy it today? Then maybe somebody on your procurement team says, ‘Well, maybe we should wait a week, right?’ Because if it's going to change, is it going to change for the better or worse? And you can imagine those little micro example carries forward to everything else that a business has to decide

If the tariff from China is 100%, and you know it is going to be 100 % for the next 10 years, you will make a different business decision than if it is, ‘Might be 100%, not sure what's going to be in three months, what's it going to be in a year from now, and what's it going to be in three years from now.’ That uncertainty does not create stable markets. It does not create very accurate business decisions. 

AkiraBot is a program that fills website comments sections and customer service chat bots with AI-generated spam messages. Its goal is simple: it wants you to sign up for an SEO scheme that costs about $30 a month. For that low price it swears it can enchant Google’s algorithms to get you on the frontpage. But it’s a scam.

A new report from researchers at cybersecurity firm SentinelOne documented how scammers deployed AkiraBot, the tool’s use of OpenAI generated messages, and how it avoided multiple CAPTCHA systems and network detection techniques. According to the report, the bot targeted 420,000 unique domains and successfully spammed 80,000.

Whoever runs AkirBot operates their SEO company under a bunch of different names, but they all tend to use the words “Akira” or “ServiceWrap.” SentinelOne says the tool finds websites crafted by third party software like Wix or Squarespace and spams comments sections and automated chatbots with a promise to get the site on the frontpage of various search engines. If you have a small business that exists on the web or have run a WordPress-based website in the last 15 years, you’ve likely seen messages like those AkiraBot crafts. 

Bias in artificial intelligence systems, or the fact that large language models, facial recognition, and AI image generators can only remix and regurgitate the information in data those technologies are trained on, is a well established fact that researchers and academics have been warning about since their inception. 

In a blog post about the release of Llama 4, Meta’s open weights AI model, the company clearly states that bias is a problem it’s trying to address, but unlike mountains of research which established AI systems are more likely to discriminate against minorities based on race, gender, and nationality, Meta is specifically concerned with Llama 4 having a left-leaning political bias. 

“It’s well-known that all leading LLMs have had issues with bias—specifically, they historically have leaned left when it comes to debated political and social topics,” Meta said in its blog. “This is due to the types of training data available on the internet.”

A powerful Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) database, parts of which have been seen by 404 Media, allows the federal government to search for and filter people by hundreds of different, highly specific categories. Surveillance experts say the database is a tool that could possibly be helping ICE identify, detain, and deport people who are suspected of relatively minor infractions or who fit certain characteristics, but said the fact that we don’t necessarily know the exact mechanisms by which people are being identified and detained is a major problem. 

The database, called “Investigative Case Management” (ICM), “serves as the core law enforcement case management tool for ICE Homeland Security Investigations (HSI),” according to a 2021 privacy impact assessment for the tool. 

404 Media saw a recent version of the database, which allows filtering according to hundreds of different categories, which include things like resident status and entry status (“refugee,” “border crossing card,” “nonimmigrant alien refused admission,” “temporary protective status alien,” “nonimmigrant alien transiting without visa,” “undocumented alien,”); “unique physical characteristics (e.g. scars, marks, tattoos)”; “criminal affiliation”; location data; license plate reader data; country of origin; hair and eye color; race; social security number; birthplace; place of employment; driver’s license status; bankruptcy filings, and hundreds more. A source familiar with the database told 404 Media that it is made up of “tables upon tables” of data and that it can build reports that show, for example, people who are on a specific type of visa who came into the country at a specific port of entry, who came from a specific country, and who have a specific hair color (or any number of hundreds of data points). 

ICM was created by Palantir, the powerful and controversial surveillance and data management company. In 2022, Palantir signed a $95.9 million, five-year contract to work on ICM.  

ICE agents can set up a “Person Lookout Query” that sends email notifications if a person suddenly triggers the parameters of a search query. 404 Media has seen parts of the infrastructure of this database, which shows the characteristics that can be searched for, as well as several example reports that can be generated by it. 

A 2016 privacy impact assessment filed by DHS about the database says that ICM connects to other DHS and federal databases, including SEVIS, which are records about all people who are admitted to the United States on a student visa; another search tool called FALCON; “real-time maps” associated with ICE’s location tracking tools; “limited location data from license plate reader cameras operated by ICE,” as well as information from “other federal agencies.” The Intercept previously reported those agencies include the DEA, the FBI, the ATF, and the CIA.

We start this week with Joseph's story revealing how the FBI secretly ran a massive money laundering ring to catch drug traffickers and hackers. After the break, we run through a bunch of tariff stories and how it's going to impact everything from the Nintendo Switch to the iPhone. In the subscribers-only section, Jason explains why he found the new book on Facebook particularly illuminating.

Listen to the weekly podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube. Become a paid subscriber for access to this episode's bonus content and to power our journalism. If you become a paid subscriber, check your inbox for an email from our podcast host Transistor for a link to the subscribers-only version! You can also add that subscribers feed to your podcast app of choice and never miss an episode that way. The email should also contain the subscribers-only unlisted YouTube link for the extended video version too. It will also be in the show notes in your podcast player.

• ‘Elon Musk’ Was a Prolific Money Launderer for Hackers and Drug Traffickers. It Was Secretly the FBI
• Big Tech Backed Trump for Acceleration. They Got a Decel President Instead
• 'Sea of Idiocy:' Economists Say Trump Tariffs Will Raise Price of Switch 2 and Everything Else
• A 'US-Made iPhone' Is Pure Fantasy
• Framework Stops Selling Some of Its Laptops in the U.S. Due to Tariffs
• 'Careless People' Is the Book About Facebook I've Wanted for a Decade

This weekend, U.S. secretary of commerce Howard Lutnick went on CBS’s Face the Nation and pitched a fantasy world where iPhones are manufactured in the United States:  “The army of millions and millions of people screwing in little, little screws to make iPhones, that kind of thing is going to come to America, it’s going to be automated, and the tradecraft of America is going to fix them, is going to work on them, there’s going to be mechanics, HVAC specialists, electricians,” Lutnick said. “The tradecraft of America, the high school educated Americans, the core to our workforce is going to have the greatest resurgence of jobs in the history of America to work on these high tech factories which are all coming to America.” 

The idea of a Made-in-the-USA iPhone has been an obsession for politicians for years, a kind of shorthand goalpost that would signal “American manufacturing is back” that is nonetheless nowhere close to being a reality and would require a nearly impossible-to-fathom restructuring of the global supply chains that make the iPhone possible in the first place. Over the years, economists and manufacturing experts have attempted to calculate how much an American-made iPhone would cost. In recent days a Quora answer from 2018 that suggests an American iPhone would cost $30,000 has gone repeatedly viral. A Reuters story that claims a tariffed iPhone would cost $2,300 has also gone viral.

These articles are good exercises but they are also total fantasy. There is no universe in which Apple snaps its fingers and begins making the iPhone in the United States overnight. It could theoretically begin assembling them here, but even that is a years-long process made infinitely harder by the fact that, in Trump’s ideal world, every company would be reshoring American manufacturing at the same time, leading to supply chain issues, factory building issues, and exacerbating the already lacking American talent pool for high-tech manufacturing. In the long term, we could and probably will see more tech manufacturing get reshored to the United States for strategic and national security reasons, but in the interim with massive tariffs, there will likely be unfathomable pain that is likely to last years, not weeks or months. 

The truth is that, assembled in the U.S. or not, the iPhone is a truly international device that is full of components manufactured all over the world and materials mined from dozens of different countries. Apple has what is among the most complex supply chains that has ever been designed in human history, and it is not going to be able to completely change that supply chain anytime soon.

We can see how the iPhone is made today by looking at numerous reports that Apple puts out every year, which outlines its current supply chain and workforce requirements. So let’s start there. The home page of Apple’s supply chain website states “Designed by Apple in California. Made by people everywhere.”