Good Monday Morning! It’s March 8th, which kicks off the second of approximately 47 weeks this month. It’s also International Women’s 💁🏽♀️ Day—check out this list of 12 actions you can take to advance gender equality.
And without further ado, here’s the SWIRL:
📱Tech: WTF is an NFT?
📈Business: Pirates of the Streamers
🏛Politics: Trump Issues “Cease & Desist” to GOP
If this is your first SWIRL, keep reading this part. If not, carry on to the content. Welcome, new Swirlers! Here’s a brief reader guide for you: the three teasers above will unfurl below to briefly cover a buzzy development in their respective areas. You’ll read a little about each one. At the end, we pull on a common thread among all three and explore what it might mean for us. If you missed last week’s SWIRL, tuck in here.
📱 Tech: WTF is an NFT?
I’m betting you know that first acronym. So, WTF 🤷🏻♂️ is the second one?
The internet has been buzzing for the last couple weeks about NFTs aka ‘Non-fungible Tokens.’ Let’s start with a few fundamentals.
What is an NFT? The simplest answer: computer code. It’s a unique string of 1s and 0s. The more nuanced answer is that NFTs are digital tokens that represent something else. Still unclear? Fair. Keep reading.
How do NFTs work? It helps to think of NFTs as certificates of authenticity 📜 for things that exist. Our culture ascribes value to rare things, so we like to prove rare things are genuine. An NFT is created with the same secure blockchain technology that enables cryptocurrencies. As such, NFTs “work” by establishing a unique digital code—that can be verified ✔️ and safeguarded 🔒—for a specific transaction to ensure it is genuine. The ownership of that specific code may then be transferred from one person to another, forming a transaction.
What kind of transactions? In theory, any transaction involving a digital item (art, song, newsletter, software, etc.) could be packaged and traded 🤝 as an NFT. So far, the most popular NFT use cases have centered around artists, creators, and musicians.
🎶 On Wednesday, rock band Kings of Leon announced they’ll release an album as an NFT
🙀 A cat meme was recently sold, and make sure you’re sitting down, for ~$590K
🐦 Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey is selling his first-ever tweet from 2006 as an NFT. As of Saturday evening, the current bid for that tweet was—make sure you’re literally strapped into a seat—$2.5M.1
Alright, congratulations. You’re an NFT expert now.
Okay, maybe not. To be fair, no one really is yet. NPR and The Verge offer more detailed explainers if you want to continue nerding 🤓 out on NFTs. In any case, hopefully I’ve helped shift some of you out of the WTF camp and into the ‘at least I can now spell’ NFT camp.
📈 Business: Pirates of the Streamers
Movie and TV providers will lose an estimated $52B in revenue to content piracy 🏴☠️ in 2022, according to a report Bloomberg released on Wednesday.
Notoriously loose intellectual property (IP) laws in China and Russia, which did little to blockade content piracy, have been the focus of international 🌏 ire for years. But both countries have made recent attempts to shore up IP laws and dock content theft. However, streaming pirates have recently found warmer waters in Southeast Asia.
Thousands of illegal websites streaming the latest hit shows and movies—content cribbed from legitimate services—cater to viewers from Vietnam to the Philippines, while other operators sell cheap hardware that allows access to pirated content.
- K Oanh Ha & Claire Jiao, for Bloomberg
How big is the problem? In 2019, about two-thirds of respondents in Southwest Asia admitted 😬 to accessing pirated streaming content, according to a survey from the Asia Video Industry Association (AVIA). By the end of 2021, it is estimated that only 6.5% of those households will actually pay for streaming services 📲 like Netflix and Disney+.2
There have been some victories in the streaming skirmishes. Indonesian efforts, guided by streaming companies, to contain piracy have reportedly reduced 📉traffic flow to illicit websites by 73% during a period between Aug 2019 and Jan 2021. But when the government sinks one illegal site, another sets sail ⛵️. “It’s a whack-a-mole game,” says Chand Parwez Servia, head of the Indonesian Film Board.
The heart of the problem, though, is the attitude of viewers, many of whom see nothing wrong in downloading movies. “A lot of users believe that since they’re paying for internet access, whatever is on the internet should be free,” says Maria Yolanda Crisanto, chief sustainability officer at Globe Telecom. “Changing that mindset has been slow.”
🏛 Politics: Trump Issues “Cease & Desist” to GOP
In the latest tussle between former President Trump and the Republican establishment, Trump told the three largest fundraising organizations for the GOP to…
Late last week, the former president’s lawyers sent a cease and desist letter 🛑 to Republican organizations, demanding that Trump’s name or likeness no longer be used in fundraising emails 📧 or merchandise without his explicit approval.
Trump remains an influential figure among his party’s base. His popularity helped him and Republicans rake in hundreds of millions of dollars 💵 since losing the White House in November. On Friday, Politico reported that Trump was angry to learn that Republican fundraising committees were using his name to raise money that could end up in the campaign coffers of GOPers who voted to impeach him a second time.
The three organizations Trump has blocked 🙅🏼♂️ from using his name without permission are the Republican National Committee, the National Republican Congressional Committee, and the National Republican Senate Committee. Combined, these groups represent the majority of official Republican party 🐘 fundraising efforts.
So, how do our three stories swirl together? They each share the common thread of creators posturing for control.
🖼NFTs enables artists to control the sales of their art, avoiding industry middlemen and selling directly to buyers
🎞Streaming services are leaning heavily on governments to clamp down on pirated IP, so the companies can reel in control of video content and distribution
🐘Trump is wresting back control of his name & brand from the GOP, so that he alone can determine how it’s deployed (and for whom)
People and organizations usually want as much control 🎛 over their destinies as possible. Legendary business leader Jack Welch lived by this rule: “control your destiny or someone else will.” Whether we’re after profits, publicity, or principals…it doesn’t really matter. The pursuit remains the same: we hope to be in the driver’s seat. This week’s SWIRL gives us three different opportunities to consider how newsmakers (and maybe ourselves🤔) are trying to regain some control of their (or our) domain.
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I also cannot believe that someone is going to pay 2.5 million actual US dollars to essentially hold the claim that they ‘own’ Jack Dorsey’s first tweet on Twitter. But I also can’t believe some people don’t like chocolate, so maybe my tolerance for beliefs isn’t a great litmus test. By the way, the guy who is willing to buy this tweet is very long on cryptocurrencies. So, given that NFTs are essentially cryptocurrency adjacent, this sort of makes more sense. It’s also still very wow.
Estimates from Media Partners Asia, a consulting firm.