After 38 years as the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Dr. Anthony Fauci announced on Monday that he will be stepping down from his role in December. Appointed to the position in 1984 by then-president Ronald Reagan, Fauci has personally overseen the federal government’s response to some of the 20th century’s deadliest infectious diseases — from tuberculosis and COVID to SARS and MERS.
But, as he told The Guardian in 2020, “my career and my identity has really been defined by HIV.” The prevention and treatment of HIV has been a prioritized area of research for the NIAID since 1986, and one that Dr. Fauci has devoted much of his public service to. The current state of AIDS research and response in America is thanks in no small part to his continued efforts in the field.
The NIAID is one of 27 specialized institutes and centers that make up the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which in turn reports to the Department of Health and Human Services. The NIH overall serves as the federal government’s premiere health research program. The NIAID operates within that bureaucratic framework, conducting and supporting “basic and applied research to better understand, treat, and ultimately prevent infectious, immunologic, and allergic diseases,” per its mission statement. That includes everything from working to mitigate effects of the annual influenza strain and alleviate asthma in urban youth to leading the development of an effective vaccine against COVID-19. The technology behind that vaccine is now being adapted for use against HIV and malaria as well.
Working at the forefront of immunoregulation research in the early 1980s, Fauci developed treatments for a class of otherwise-fatal inflammatory diseases including polyarteritis nodosa, granulomatosis with polyangiitis (formerly Wegener's granulomatosis) and lymphomatoid granulomatosis. The results of those studies helped lay the groundwork for today’s research by the NIAID’s Laboratory of Immunoregulation. That research includes cellular and molecular mechanisms of HIV immunopathogenesis and the treatment of immune-mediated diseases. Combining the institute’s nearly four decades of HIV/AIDS research with cutting edge genomic technology has brought us not one, but three potentially viable AIDS vaccines, all of which are currently in clinical trials.
“Finding an HIV vaccine has proven to be a daunting scientific challenge,” Dr. Fauci said in a March NIAID release. “With the success of safe and highly effective COVID-19 vaccines, we have an exciting opportunity to learn whether mRNA technology can achieve similar results against HIV infection.”
Fauci’s initial efforts during the AIDS epidemic did more harm than good. In 1983, he published The Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome: The Ever-Broadening Clinical Spectrum in which he warned of “the possibility that routine close contact, as within a family household, can spread the disease.” We know now that this is not at all how HIV works, but at the time — despite the study urging caution until more evidence was gathered — it set off a moral panic in the media. The study was subsequently picked up by right-wing organizations and used as a political cudgel blaming the LGBTQIA+ community for the disease.
Reagan himself didn’t publicly mention the crisis until 1985, three years after it was officially identified by the CDC (and, coincidentally, a month after he admitted his involvement in the Iran-Contra Scandal). Social stigma around the disease made funding for basic health research nearly impossible to acquire, and was exacerbated by Reagan’s repeated budget cuts to the NIH and CDC.
"The inadequate funding to date has seriously restricted our work and has presumably deepened the invasion of this disease into the American population," a CDC staffer wrote in an April, 1983 memo to then-Assistant Director, Dr. Walter Dowdle. "In addition, the time wasted pursuing money from Washington has cast an air of despair over AIDS workers throughout the country."
Even after his appointment as Chief Medical Officer — one who was determined to treat the AIDS crisis with its deserved gravity — Fauci faced pushback from the LGBTQIA+ community, who demanded greater action from the government in response to the crisis and sought to accelerate the glacial pace of drug trials at the time.
By 1990, the community’s patience had reached a breaking point, resulting in ACT UP’s (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) attempt to storm the NIH in protest. “One of the things that people in ACT UP said is that we are the people who are experiencing this novel disease, and we are the experts, not just the scientists and doctors,” Garance Ruta, executive director of GEN magazine and an ACT UP member at the protest, told The Washington Post in 2020.
“I was trying to get them into all the planning meetings for the clinical trials,” Fauci told WaPo, in response. “I felt very strongly that we needed to get them into the planning process because they weren’t always right, but they had very, very good input.”
Over the last 30 years, the NIH has helped lead development of numerous antiretroviral therapies. Azidothymidine (AZT), the first drug discovered to inhibit HIV’s replication without damaging cells, was initially developed by the NIH as an anti-cancer drug in the 1960s. Its use as an antiretroviral, approved by the FDA in 1987, helped to establish the AIDS Clinical Trials Group (ACTG), which further accelerated research into nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors (NRTIs, the class of drug to which AZT belongs). NIAID-funded studies in the 1990s helped establish combination therapies, which combine multiple medications for a synergistic effect, and explored a newly-identified class of drug, non-nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors or NNRTIs.
NIAID
Today, nearly three dozen antiretroviral drugs are available, many of them combined into fixed-dose tablets. In the 1990s, people living with AIDS would be expected to take up to 20 individual pills at set schedules throughout the day. The average lifespan for someone infected with the disease was roughly a year. Today, assuming you’re lucky enough to live in the developed world, AIDS has become a chronic condition to be controlled with a single daily pill. For the 20 million people living with AIDS but without access to modern treatment, it remains a death sentence.
The state of medical research technology has also evolved, even if the nation’s prevailing notions of fairness and equality haven't improved much in the intervening years since Reagan held power. Advances in laboratory standardization and automation have rapidly reduced development cycles and the occurrence of outlier results. The monotonous tasks that were once performed by lab assistants are now handled by robotic arms equipped with pipette arrays.
Disease prevention and diagnosis efforts have been augmented in recent years with artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms. They’ve also found use in helping to stem the spread of HIV and improve access to both retrovirals and PReP with applications including, “ML with smartphone-collected and social media data to promote real-time HIV risk reduction, virtual reality tools to facilitate HIV serostatus disclosure, and chatbots for HIV education,” argue Drs. Julia Marcus and Whitney Sewell, of Harvard and UMass Amherst, respectively.
And just as Dr Fauci is, quite specifically, not retiring — “I want to use what I have learned as NIAID Director to continue to advance science and public health and to inspire and mentor the next generation of scientific leaders as they help prepare the world to face future infectious disease threats,” he noted in Monday’s announcement — the work of the NIAID is far from complete. Even as we slowly conquer existing scourges like COVID and HIV, re-emerging threats like Monkeypox (not to mention ancient killers like Polio) will continue to appear on our quickly warming planet.
BYD is one of more than 450 registered EV firms in China, all of which are competing for a slice of the world’s largest automotive market with future designs for the US and Europe as well. American ingenuity may have initially ushered in the EV era, but it’s been China’s relentless commoditization of the technology that has put the nation’s automakers at the forefront of the global electric vehicle race.
“Developing new energy vehicles is essential for China’s transformation from a big automobile country to a powerful automobile country,” Chinese President Xi Jinping said in 2014. “We should increase research and development, seriously analyze the market, adjust existing policy and develop new products to meet the needs of different customers. This can make a strong contribution to economic growth.” In China, so-called New Energy Vehicles (NEVs) are basically any plug-in electric (either hybrid or battery) which qualifies for financial subsidies from the government — specifically battery electrics, plug-in hybrids, and fuel cell EVs.
These efforts can also help China meet its Paris Accord carbon neutrality targets of a 20 percent reduction by 2035 and a 100 percent reduction by 2060 – lofty goals given it’s currently the world’s biggest emitter of carbon dioxide. These policies aim to reduce pollution in Chinese cities, reduce the nation’s reliance on imported oil, and “position China for global leadership in a strategic industry,” per a 2019 study by Columbia University.
The country’s central government has invested heavily over the past decade to spur growth in the NEV industry, leveraging a mix of policy, tax incentives and consumer subsidies. As of 2020, EVs must account for 12 percent of production for any company that manufactures or imports more than 30,000 vehicles in China (up from a 10 percent requirement the previous year). The government has also deeply subsidized consumers’ EV purchases with more than $14.8 billion since 2009, providing up to $3,600 for battery electric vehicles (BEVs) with more than 400 km range, though those rebates were first halved, then eliminated by 2021.
The government has also provided funding and standardization mandates for building out China’s charging infrastructure with a goal of 120,000 EV charging stations and 4.8 million EV charging stalls available by 2020. Local and municipal governments further incentivized EVs with discounts on licensing fees and preferential parking spots for NEVs.
“Emerging China EV companies are making a concerted effort to target the premium end of the local market and eventually abroad,” Deutsche Bank equity analyst Edison Yu told Forbes in July. “We are already witnessing intense domestic competition in the mass market from Leap Motor, Hozon Neta, WM Motor, BYD and numerous sub-brands from incumbent OEMs (GAC/Aion, BAIC/Arcfox, SAIC/R-brand). Newer entrants have shown willingness to absorb deep losses to quickly gain volume share.”
The Chinese EV market is currently dominated by five firms: Tesla comes in third surrounded by domestic automotive manufacturers BYD (27.9 percent market share), SGMW (10.1 percent), Chery (4.9 percent), and GAC (4.2 percent). Geely, which owns stakes in Volvo, Polestar and Lotus, didn’t crack the top five but its various brands did manage a record 2.2 million worldwide vehicle sales in 2021. XPeng and NIO are additional noteworthy brands, totaling 98,155 and 91,429 sales in 2021, respectively.
At the Boao Forum in 2018, President Jinping announced a raft of sweeping economic reforms designed to further open the nation’s markets, including an announcement to phase out existing limits on foreign ownership of automakers. The Policy for the Automotive Industry of 1994 contained a key provision that banned foreign business entities from owning more than 50 percent of a joint venture with a Chinese firm as well as from participating on more than two such ventures for any single vehicle type sold in the country — the so-called 50%+2 rule. Jinping’s reforms will see the 2-venture limit lifted in 2022 and the restriction on ownership share eliminated at the end of 2023.
Xinhua News Agency via Getty Images
This regulatory relaxation could have immense impact on the Chinese EV market, potentially increasing competition for domestic OEMs from an influx of international automakers hawking additional NEV brands and models. The rule change could also see foreign firms renegotiate their ownership stakes, potentially even fully buying out their Chinese partners, though as Sino Auto points out, that isn’t likely to happen in the immediate future as the existing joint ventures have an average remaining contract length of 19 years. Overall, the policy shift should give international firms a more even footing with local Chinese automakers.
That’s not to say that local firms won’t still enjoy a number of advantages. For one, switching costs associated with transitioning from internal combustion to electric drivetrains are largely non-existent because for many Chinese consumers, an EV will be their first vehicle. The local automakers also have a better handle on what their customers want, offering tech-laden, customizable EVs at a variety of trim levels (starting at literally $4,300) to tech-savvy, price sensitive, middle-class consumers.
SOPA Images via Getty Images
International auto companies will need to tread carefully around any number of hot button topics, freedom and privacy concerns, should they choose to do business in China. GM and BMW, for example, recently became embroiled in a dispute over accusations of forced labor usage in lithium mining in the Xinjiang region. Beijing denied the allegations, characterizing the report as “nothing but ill-intentioned smears against China,” per Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian in April. The US has since sanctioned individuals and companies involved in the Xinjiang operation. Lithium mined from the region is used in Tesla battery systems, among others.
Looking ahead, you’ll need to tilt your head back a bit as the Chinese EV market is expected to grow more than 30 percent by 2027. The government’s stringent emissions regulations and growing population are both expected to contribute to the expected demand growth. What’s more, “over the forecast period (2022-2027), the country may also witness growth in the adoption of electric buses,” a recent study from Mordor Intelligence notes. “More than 30 Chinese cities have made plans to achieve 100 percent electrified public transit in the near future.” That’s not even including the nation’s battery production capacity, which currently stands at roughly 59 percent of the global market. It too is expected to balloon 7.5 percent by 2027.
Aly Song / reuters
Given the robust domestic Chinese market, it may not be long before we see BYD or XPeng brands on American roads, much as they are on the streets of Europe. “I’d imagine it’s only a matter of time before we see more Chinese vehicles being sold in North America,” Morningstar analyst Seth Goldstein told Capital in February.
“Given that EVs are a new powertrain, this is an opportunity for Chinese automakers to establish brands in new geographies where, for years, with the internal-combustion engine, Chinese automakers tended to only sell vehicles in China,” he continued.
The question now is whether China can maintain its pole positioning. Just as Tesla was eventually overtaken by BYD despite enjoying a sizeable and lengthy initial lead, Chinese automakers find themselves in much the same position: on top of the heap, but for how long once the likes of GM and Ford come sniffing around with their deep pockets and expansive R&D budgets?
If you were hoping to while the holiday season wearing a virtual reality headset from Sony, you are sadly out of luck. Nearly six years after its predecessor debuted in 2016, Sony took to Instagram on Monday to announce that its next iteration of the console-based VR system won't arrive until "early 2023."
According to a PlayStation blog last month, the new setup would run 4000 x 2040 resolution (that's 2000 x 2040 per eye) at 90/120hz while a "see-through mode" safety feature will keep wayward players from wandering too far a virtual field, similar to what Meta offers on the Quest Guardian. There's no word yet on pricing.
The trend of our gadgets and infrastructure constantly, often invasively, monitoring their users shows little sign of slowing — not when there's so much money to be made. Of course it hasn't been all bad for humanity, what with AI's help in advancing medical, communications and logistics tech in recent years. In his new book, Machines Behaving Badly: The Morality of AI, Scientia Professor of Artificial Intelligence at the University of New South Wales, Dr. Toby Walsh, explores the duality of potential that artificial intelligence/machine learning systems offer and, in the excerpt below, how to claw back a bit of your privacy from an industry built for omniscience.
The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that the total entropy of a system – the amount of disorder – only ever increases. In other words, the amount of order only ever decreases. Privacy is similar to entropy. Privacy is only ever decreasing. Privacy is not something you can take back. I cannot take back from you the knowledge that I sing Abba songs badly in the shower. Just as you can’t take back from me the fact that I found out about how you vote.
There are different forms of privacy. There’s our digital online privacy, all the information about our lives in cyberspace. You might think our digital privacy is already lost. We have given too much of it to companies like Facebook and Google. Then there’s our analogue offline privacy, all the information about our lives in the physical world. Is there hope that we’ll keep hold of our analogue privacy?
The problem is that we are connecting ourselves, our homes and our workplaces to lots of internet-enabled devices: smartwatches, smart light bulbs, toasters, fridges, weighing scales, running machines, doorbells and front door locks. And all these devices are interconnected, carefully recording everything we do. Our location. Our heartbeat. Our blood pressure. Our weight. The smile or frown on our face. Our food intake. Our visits to the toilet. Our workouts.
These devices will monitor us 24/7, and companies like Google and Amazon will collate all this information. Why do you think Google bought both Nest and Fitbit recently? And why do you think Amazon acquired two smart home companies, Ring and Blink Home, and built their own smartwatch? They’re in an arms race to know us better.
The benefits to the companies our obvious. The more they know about us, the more they can target us with adverts and products. There’s one of Amazon’s famous ‘flywheels’ in this. Many of the products they will sell us will collect more data on us. And that data will help target us to make more purchases.
The benefits to us are also obvious. All this health data can help make us live healthier. And our longer lives will be easier, as lights switch on when we enter a room, and thermostats move automatically to our preferred temperature. The better these companies know us, the better their recommendations will be. They’ll recommend only movies we want to watch, songs we want to listen to and products we want to buy.
But there are also many potential pitfalls. What if your health insurance premiums increase every time you miss a gym class? Or your fridge orders too much comfort food? Or your employer sacks you because your smartwatch reveals you took too many toilet breaks?
With our digital selves, we can pretend to be someone that we are not. We can lie about our preferences. We can connect anonymously with VPNs and fake email accounts. But it is much harder to lie about your analogue self. We have little control over how fast our heart beats or how widely the pupils of our eyes dilate.
We’ve already seen political parties manipulate how we vote based on our digital footprint. What more could they do if they really understood how we respond physically to their messages? Imagine a political party that could access everyone’s heartbeat and blood pressure. Even George Orwell didn’t go that far.
Worse still, we are giving this analogue data to private companies that are not very good at sharing their profits with us. When you send your saliva off to 23AndMe for genetic testing, you are giving them access to the core of who you are, your DNA. If 23AndMe happens to use your DNA to develop a cure for a rare genetic disease that you possess, you will probably have to pay for that cure. The 23AndMe terms and conditions make this very clear:
You understand that by providing any sample, having your Genetic Information processed, accessing your Genetic Information, or providing Self-Reported Information, you acquire no rights in any research or commercial products that may be developed by 23andMe or its collaborating partners. You specifically understand that you will not receive compensation for any research or commercial products that include or result from your Genetic Information or Self-Reported Information.
A Private Future
How, then, might we put safeguards in place to preserve our privacy in an AI-enabled world? I have a couple of simple fixes. Some regulatory and could be implemented today. Others are technological and are something for the future, when we have AI that is smarter and more capable of defending our privacy.
The technology companies all have long terms of service and privacy policies. If you have lots of spare time, you can read them. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University calculated that the average internet user would have to spend 76 work days each year just to read all the things that they have agreed to online. But what then? If you don’t like what you read, what choices do you have?
All you can do today, it seems, is log off and not use their service. You can’t demand greater privacy than the technology companies are willing to provide. If you don’t like Gmail reading your emails, you can’t use Gmail. Worse than that, you’d better not email anyone with a Gmail account, as Google will read any emails that go through the Gmail system.
So here’s a simple alternative. All digital services must provide four changeable levels of privacy.
Level 1: They keep no information about you beyond your username, email and password.
Level 2: They keep information on you to provide you with a better service, but they do not share this information with anyone.
Level 3: They keep information on you that they may share with sister companies.
Level 4: They consider the information that they collect on you as public.
And you can change the level of privacy with one click from the settings page. And any changes are retrospective, so if you select Level 1 privacy, the company must delete all information they currently have on you, beyond your username, email and password. In addition, there’s a requirement that all data beyond Level 1 privacy is deleted after three years unless you opt in explicitly for it to be kept. Think of this as a digital right to be forgotten.
I grew up in the 1970s and 1980s. My many youthful transgressions have, thankfully, been lost in the mists of time. They will not haunt me when I apply for a new job or run for political office. I fear, however, for young people today, whose every post on social media is archived and waiting to be printed off by some prospective employer or political opponent. This is one reason why we need a digital right to be forgotten.
More friction may help. Ironically, the internet was invented to remove frictions – in particular, to make it easier to share data and communicate more quickly and effortlessly. I’m starting to think, however, that this lack of friction is the cause of many problems. Our physical highways have speed and other restrictions. Perhaps the internet highway needs a few more limitations too?
One such problem is described in a famous cartoon: ‘On the internet, no one knows you’re a dog.’ If we introduced instead a friction by insisting on identity checks, then certain issues around anonymity and trust might go away. Similarly, resharing restrictions on social media might help prevent the distribution of fake news. And profanity filters might help prevent posting content that inflames.
On the other side, other parts of the internet might benefit from fewer frictions. Why is it that Facebook can get away with behaving badly with our data? One of the problems here is there’s no real alternative. If you’ve had enough of Facebook’s bad behaviour and log off – as I did some years back – then it is you who will suffer most. You can’t take all your data, your social network, your posts, your photos to some rival social media service. There is no real competition. Facebook is a walled garden, holding onto your data and setting the rules. We need to open that data up and thereby permit true competition.
For far too long the tech industry has been given too many freedoms. Monopolies are starting to form. Bad behaviours are becoming the norm. Many internet businesses are poorly aligned with the public good.
Any new digital regulation is probably best implemented at the level of nation-states or close-knit trading blocks. In the current climate of nationalism, bodies such as the United Nations and the World Trade Organization are unlikely to reach useful consensus. The common values shared by members of such large transnational bodies are too weak to offer much protection to the consumer.
The European Union has led the way in regulating the tech sector. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and the upcoming Digital Service Act (DSA) and Digital Market Act (DMA) are good examples of Europe’s leadership in this space. A few nation-states have also started to pick up their game. The United Kingdom introduced a Google tax in 2015 to try to make tech companies pay a fair share of tax. And shortly after the terrible shootings in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019, the Australian government introduced legislation to fine companies up to 10 per cent of their annual revenue if they fail to take down abhorrent violent material quickly enough. Unsurprisingly, fining tech companies a significant fraction of their global annual revenue appears to get their attention.
It is easy to dismiss laws in Australia as somewhat irrelevant to multinational companies like Google. If they’re too irritating, they can just pull out of the Australian market. Google’s accountants will hardly notice the blip in their worldwide revenue. But national laws often set precedents that get applied elsewhere. Australia followed up with its own Google tax just six months after the United Kingdom. California introduced its own version of the GDPR, the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), just a month after the regulation came into effect in Europe. Such knock-on effects are probably the real reason that Google has argued so vocally against Australia’s new Media Bargaining Code. They greatly fear the precedent it will set.
That leaves me with a technological fix. At some point in the future, all our devices will contain AI agents helping to connect us that can also protect our privacy. AI will move from the centre to the edge, away from the cloud and onto our devices. These AI agents will monitor the data entering and leaving our devices. They will do their best to ensure that data about us that we don’t want shared isn’t.
We are perhaps at the technological low point today. To do anything interesting, we need to send data up into the cloud, to tap into the vast computational resources that can be found there. Siri, for instance, doesn’t run on your iPhone but on Apple’s vast servers. And once your data leaves your possession, you might as well consider it public. But we can look forward to a future where AI is small enough and smart enough to run on your device itself, and your data never has to be sent anywhere.
This is the sort of AI-enabled future where technology and regulation will not simply help preserve our privacy, but even enhance it. Technical fixes can only take us so far. It is abundantly clear that we also need more regulation. For far too long the tech industry has been given too many freedoms. Monopolies are starting to form. Bad behaviours are becoming the norm. Many internet businesses are poorly aligned with the public good.
Digital regulation is probably best implemented at the level of nation-states or close-knit trading blocks. In the current climate of nationalism, bodies such as the United Nations and the World Trade Organization are unlikely to reach useful consensus. The common values shared by members of such large transnational bodies are too weak to offer much protection to the consumer.
The European Union has led the way in regulating the tech sector. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and the upcoming Digital Service Act (DSA) and Digital Market Act (DMA) are good examples of Europe’s leadership in this space. A few nation-states have also started to pick up their game. The United Kingdom introduced a Google tax in 2015 to try to make tech companies pay a fair share of tax. And shortly after the terrible shootings in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019, the Australian government introduced legislation to fine companies up to 10 per cent of their annual revenue if they fail to take down abhorrent violent material quickly enough. Unsurprisingly, fining tech companies a significant fraction of their global annual revenue appears to get their attention.
It is easy to dismiss laws in Australia as somewhat irrelevant to multinational companies like Google. If they’re too irritating, they can just pull out of the Australian market. Google’s accountants will hardly notice the blip in their worldwide revenue. But national laws often set precedents that get applied elsewhere. Australia followed up with its own Google tax just six months after the United Kingdom. California introduced its own version of the GDPR, the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), just a month after the regulation came into effect in Europe. Such knock-on effects are probably the real reason that Google has argued so vocally against Australia’s new Media Bargaining Code. They greatly fear the precedent it will set.
It was good times for the Ford Mach-E GT atop the e-muscle car heap. Those halcyon days of performance dominance will soon be coming to an end when Hyundai unleashes its EV6 GT performance crossover on North America. With 576 horses under the hood and a 0-60 of 3.4 seconds, not even a Huracan Evo can beat it off the line.
Hyundai Motor Group
The new EV6 GT is not to be confused with the existing EV6 GT-Line, though it’s easy to do. From the outside they’re largely similar — save for the neon accents and 21-inch rims — but like story morals, puff pastries and spider egg sacs, it’s what’s on the inside that really matters. Where the GT-Line AWD offered a not-insignificant 320 HP (446 lb ft torque) from its 165kW front and 74kW rear electric motors, the GT AWD goes two steps further, slamming a 160kW motor onto the front axle and a massive 270 kW motor on the rear to output 576 HP and 546 lb ft of torque.
It does a 0-60 in 3.4 seconds with a top speed of 161 MPH — that’s a tenth of a second faster than the Mach-E GT Performance edition with 96 more horsepower to use. That said, the Mustang does offer more torque (600 lb ft to the EV6’s 546) and a much longer driving range, 270 miles on a full Mach-E charge vs just 206 miles for the EV6 GT.
Hyundai Motor Group
Like the rest of the EV6 lineup, the GT will benefit from Hyundai Group’s 800V electrical architecture enabling rapid charging to the tune of 70 percent battery capacity in 18 minutes at 350 kW. Exclusive to the GT, however, are three new drive modes: GT Drive, My Drive and (squeeeee) Drift Mode.
GT Drive “optimizes the performance of the EV6 GT’s motors, braking, steering, suspension, e-LSD, and Electronic Stability Control (ESC) systems into their most dynamic settings,” per a Friday release. “Drivers can also create custom-tailored settings to suit individual driving preferences using My Drive Mode.” The real fun begins with Drift Mode, which pushes a majority of the power to the rear wheels for a fully electrified hooning experience.
Hyundai Motor Group
There’s no word on pricing yet but it’s pretty safe to assume that it’ll be north of the GT-Line AWD’s $56,400 MSRP (maybe even more than the $62,000 Mach-E GT). We'll find out when the EV6 goes on sale in Q4 2022.
Monterey Car Week has been a hotbed of EV debuts this year with unveilings from Dodge, Acura, DeLorean and a host of other automakers. On Thursday, Lincoln revealed the Model L100, its futuristic foray into electrified mobility, which draws inspiration from the company’s very first luxury sedan, the 1922 Model L.
Lincoln Motors
Like its pre-Depression predecessor, the Model L100 exhibits a shocking degree of opulence. “Next generation battery cell and pack technologies,” read the Thursday release, will deliver “game changing energy density,” while the steering wheel will be replaced with a “jewel-inspired chess piece controller that captures light and depth by redefining the vehicle controls inside the cabin.” That fancy yoke won’t be much use for actual steering thanks to the vehicle’s theoretical autonomous driving capabilities taking care of the navigating.
Lincoln Motor Comapny
“Concept vehicles allow us to reimagine and illustrate how new experiences can come to life with the help of advanced technologies and allow our designers more creative freedom than ever before,” Anthony Lo, Ford’s chief design officer, in a statement. “With the Model L100, we were able to push the boundaries in ways that evolve our Quiet Flight brand DNA and change the way we think about Lincoln designs of tomorrow."
Lincoln Motor Comapny
Other fantastical design details include animal-free interiors with front row seats that can flip to face the rear passengers (good thing the car’s driving itself), a digital floor and canopy that can project realistic animated scenes onto the floor and ceiling, a full-length hinged glass roof and reverse-hinged doors that open up like a lily.
Lincoln Motors
There's no word yet on when the production vehicle spawned from this concept will arrive. Unfortunately many of the ideas presented here will inevitably be cut, going the way of Mercedes’ awesome, Avatar-inspired trunk hatch wigglers.
The "brown noise" is a legendary tone purportedly capable of causing people to lose control of their bowels when subjected to its gut-punching harmonic resonance. South Park did a whole thing on it. Turns out that the 5400 RPM hard drives from a number of old Windows-era laptops possess a brown note of their own: Janet Jackson's 1989 mega-hit 'Rhythm Nation.'
According to Microsoft Software Engineer, Raymond Chen, who recounted the tale in a Microsoft Developers Blogpost earlier this week, "a major computer manufacturer discovered" that playing the music video (above) would not only crash the hard drive of the laptop it was running on but also any other similar model within earshot.
The Mitre Corporation was not amused by this newfound vulnerability, issuing it an entry in the CVE database. After a thorough investigation, the device manufacturer confirmed that the song contained one of the natural resonant frequencies of the hard drives playing the song essentially rattled the devices apart. Rather than recall untold numbers of decades-old drives, the manufacturer instead opted to develop a workaround by "adding a custom filter in the audio pipeline that detected and removed the offending frequencies during audio playback," according to Chen.
The same can be said for Pacific Gas and Electric, Northern California’s local power monopoly/serial arsonist. The company has faced multiple civil and criminal charges in recent years after causing some of the largest and most damaging wildfires in California history — like 2018’s Camp Fire, which killed 68 people, or 2021’s Dixie Fire which caused $1.5 billion in property damage. In fact, an investigation by the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection found that the company’s equipment started at least 17 of the state’s 21 fires in 2017, MSNBC reports.
A significant portion of the state is probably going to be alight for the next few months. Regardless of whether you live in a coastal city, on the urban-wildland interface or out in the middle of rural anywhere, those fires are going to have an immediate impact on your life. It could be the enduring hassle of weeks-long rolling power outages, it could be the health consequences from air pollution, it could be slaloming through walls of flame in a desperate bid to escape an engulfing firestorm — either way, you’re probably going to have a bad time. So here’s some gear and techniques to help with this summer’s fire season. Good luck.
It’s just like camping, but involuntary!
Your individual needs will depend on the emergency, your location and your access to resources. What you’ll need to successfully ride out an extended power outage in the comfort of your own home will be different than if you have to fit your life into an automobile trunk or hiking backpack. Below, we’ll discuss five categories of products that no go-bag should be without.
Packing and preparation can seem daunting and overwhelming but resources are available from the federal government to help. FEMA’s Ready.gov website offers information and advice in 11 languages for any number of emergency situations both in digital and physical formats. The FEMA app for Android and iOS offers the same information directly from your mobile device, as well as real-time emergency broadcasts and directions to nearby Disaster Recovery Centers. In the sections below, we’ll talk about the gear you’ll need to ride out the emergency until you can get to one of those centers, set out across seven broad categories.
Lighting
In wilderness survival situations, there’s an order of importance in doing things: find shelter, then water, start a fire and finally procure food. This is very good advice that could save your life, but when the emergency alert system goes off at night and you stumble out of bed to find that the power’s already out, you aren’t going to be thinking about water bottles, you’re going to want a flashlight, so let’s start there.
When my family was camping out in the driveway for a week after the Big One in ‘89, we were stuck with old-school Mag-Lites — incandescent bulbs, ran on six D-batteries, heavy enough you could beat a rhinoceros to death with it — you know the ones. Thankfully, technology has advanced in the convening years and today’s LED and Li-ion driven torches are much more luminous and lightweight.
You have a choice between flashlights and headlamps. Headlamps are great if you need your hands free and want light wherever you’re looking, hand torches offer more flexibility in their use and won’t blind whoever you’re looking at.
Fenix, Biolite, Petzl, Thrunite, and Black Diamond all make solid flashlights and headlamps. The $70 Petzl Actik Core headlamp, for example, will run on either AAA or Li-ion batteries, weighs less than 3 ounces and outputs 450 lumens. The $20 Black Diamond Astro 300 Headlamp, on the other hand, outputs 300 lumens but you’ll have to purchase the rechargeable battery separately. Just don’t go overboard with the lumen rating, 500 lumens is bright enough to see nearly 100 feet in complete darkness — you’re trying to illuminate what’s in front of you, not blind aircraft pilots.
Personally, I prefer to not strap LEDs to my face (nothing against headlamps but if I’m going to die in a natural disaster I’m not going do it looking like a huge dork), so I keep Thrunite’s TC15 V2 and Archer 2A V3 in my go-bag. The Archer runs on a pair of AAs while the TC15 is rechargable, giving me the redundancy my survivalist paranoia craves. They’re both waterproof, shock and drop resistant, and way easier to fit in a pocket than a Mag-Lite. You might also check out the waterproof, $66 Coast Polysteel 600R, which outputs 530 lumens, runs a claimed 35 hours on either a Li-ion pack or 4 AAs, and even includes a USB port for charging other electronics.
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If you’re at risk of long-term displacement, you’ll want to invest in a lantern. Black Diamond makes a slick LED lantern, the $25, 200-lumen Moji, that’s bright enough to illuminate a tabletop, tent or car interior. The $70 Moji Charging Station Lantern combines a 250-lumen LED lantern with a portable power block. It can run on AC (with an optional adapter), a rechargeable lithium ion battery or standard AAs while charging your other devices. The Goal Zero Lighthouse 600 is another good choice, offering 600 lumens of illumination and up to 180 hours of runtime. It can be recharged via USB, hand crank or an optional solar array. And if you would prefer something a bit more analog, it’s never a bad call to have a stash of long-burning emergency candles tucked away somewhere.
Also check out the Coleman Recharge 800. It outputs up to 800 lumens for as long as 45 hours straight thanks to a 4800 mAh lithium battery. I like it because it’s shaped like the old propane Coleman lanterns we used on family camping trips and that I still keep on hand for when the grid goes down for good. It’s half the price as the more modern design, propane is still easy to score and, again, redundancy is your friend. For an even more inexpensive option, take a look at the Texsport Single Mantle, currently $27 on Amazon. Or if you have access to a bulk propane tank (like what’s connected to your grill), Texport’s propane tree can fuel three gas-powered devices simultaneously — think lantern light, camp stove and tent heater — all from one supply, without having to swap connectors between them.
Shelter
If your domicile is still standing and you’ve just lost power for an indeterminate amount of time, congrats! That is what we call “an inconvenience” — keep living your life, enjoy drinking from your operational indoor plumbing and skip on down to the sections about energy storage and cooking because you’re good here.
Now, just because it’s California in the summertime doesn’t mean there won’t be a chill in the air by the time FEMA comes around. Keep a stock of warm and water resistant clothing in your go-bag, as well as a blanket or poncho that can work as both an insulation layer and ground cover. If you don’t mind the crinkle factor, SOL makes a variety of mylar emergency blankets for either personal or group use. Wool blankets (which don’t lose their insulation capacity when wet like cotton does) are another option. You can find them cheap on Amazon or at your local army surplus shop.
If you do find yourself displaced and in need of short-term accommodation, then it’s time to pitch yourself a little tent. The Litefighter 1X is an excellent three-season personal shelter that works as both a standalone tent with 18.2 sq ft of floor space, or as bug netting when affixed to a cot. It’s plenty spacious for a solo hiker plus their pack, and has lots of room for wet outer gear under the rain fly. An optional windbreaker attachment can provide enough added insulation to use the 1X during cold winter months as well. The Mountainsmith Morrison EVO is a cozy 17.25 square feet and $199 on Amazon, and LiteFighter also makes a larger 2-person tent with 34.5 square feet of floor space. At $400 and $450 respectively, the 1- and 2-person 1X series tents are a bit pricier than average. You can just as easily pick up a REI Co-op Half Dome SL 2+ with 33.75 square feet for $329 or for the same price as the solo-occupancy 1X, you can get a 4-person REI Wonderland.
EV owners whose vehicles have V2L capabilities — that’s “vehicle-to-load” and it’s offered in the Ford F-150 Lightning, Hyundai Ioniq 5 and Kia EV6 — may not even immediately notice an outage thanks to their cars’ ability to power their households for up to a few days at a time. Who needs a rooftop tent when your car is a rolling backup generator?
Water
Your next priority will be securing a supply of potable water for drinking, cooking and hygiene. The CDC recommends “one gallon of water per person per day for drinking and sanitation” and maintaining at least a 2-week supply. Bottled water is “the safest and most reliable” source in an emergency, per the agency, but that can become a pricey and space-consuming option if an outage drags on for an extended period.
You can store tap water in FDA-approved food-grade storage containers — after it’s been treated and sanitized with a mild bleach solution, of course — or you can fill your bathtub ahead of time and store around 100 gallons of water there using a plastic cover liner. Rainwater collection barrels can capture large amounts of water (or at least be used as pre-filled receptacles like a bathtub) but you will need to filter the water before consuming it. Gravity-fed cisterns like the Alexapure Pro Stainless Steel Water Filtration System, and the nearly identical Big Berkey, can hold up to 8.5 liters of fluid while filtering out a wide range of potential contaminants and supplying potable water to as many as 16 people. Regardless of how well these devices claim to clean the water, it’s always a good call to keep a small supply of iodine tablets on hand as backup.
If you’ve got access to a water source with a steady supply of unfiltered but otherwise clean water, take a look at the Portawell, a high-capacity water pump/filtration system that can produce up to 60 gallons of water every hour, using just 35 watts of power. Its 2-stage filtering process removes “100 percent of cysts including giardia, cryptosporidium, and 99.99 percent of pathogenic bacteria (including cholera, typhoid, coliform, chlorine, metals, and volatile organic chemicals),” down to half a micron in size, according to the product’s page. The optional 50W 12V solar panel comes bundled with a charge controller for an extra $170, a 12V battery to put that energy can be either lead-acid (car) battery or a Li-Ion brick and can be purchased at a local automotive or electronics store. All together, you’ll have a high-throughput water distribution device that can hydrate myself and a significant portion of your neighborhood indefinitely — or at least until the filters fail — and do so up to two and a half times faster than hand-pumped filters like the Katadyn Vario, the gravity-fed Platypus GravityWorks, the squeezable Katadyn BeFree or TIME’s “2005 Invention of the Year” winner, the LifeStraw Personal Water Filter can.
Fire, heating and cooking
The stress of displacement is going to take both a mental and physical toll, but you’ve already got light, a place to lay your head and a slake for your thirst. Next you’re going to want to square away your three squares a day.
If just your power is out, keep using your fridge as normal, assuming you have a generator (which we’ll get to below). Otherwise, standard power outage rules apply here: eat in order of perishability — refrigerator, then freezer, then canned — opening the doors as little as possible.
Having a smaller secondary cooler on hand for often-used items like milk, condiments and produce can help preserve the fridge’s contents for longer by reducing the number of door openings. Hydroflask’s $129 20L Day Escape pack cooler is easily portable and can keep items cold for up to 36 hours, while the $76 Coleman Xtreme Portable Cooler can keep ice in form for up to 5 days. If you need something more substantial, the $275 RCIT 65 QT hard cooler is a Wirecutter award winner and the $375 YETI Tundra 65 is sturdy enough to accommodate dry ice, which can keep food cold for up to three times longer.
For important items that will immediately spoil above a specific temperature, like insulin, consider investing in a powered refrigerator like the Dometic CFX3 35 or the 65W Whynter FM-45G. They’re nearly as expensive as regular kitchen fridges and you’ll need to have a beefier generator/solar array to accommodate their additional draw but they do offer added peace of mind knowing that your life saving medication will be viable when you need it.
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Eating cold beans out of a can loses its whimsey after the third or fourth spoonful and unless you plan on eating takeaway for the duration, you’re going to need something to cook with — whether that’s with your existing grill, over an open fire, a propane cooktop or electric hotplate. The RoadPro Portable Stove, for example, can heat food up to 300 degrees (like a Bizzaro-world CFX3) and runs through a vehicle’s 12V outlet. The Cuisinart CB-30P1 hot plate is equally at home in dorm rooms, RVs, and campsites but with a 1300-watt draw, you’ll need to use it sparingly.
The Solo Stove Ranger outdoor fire pit, conversely, will run for as long as you have fuel to feed it. The double-walled design maximizes combustion while minimizing smoke production, and can be converted into a woodfire grill with an optional cast iron griddle. At 16 pounds and 16 inches in diameter, it’s easily portable. It’s also $250, which seems expensive for what can be replicated with bare ground and a ring of stones. The INNO STAGE 15-inch portable fire pit is more affordable at $80 and can also run on wood pellets in addition to logs. Or if you want something more streamlined and durable, the Wolf and Grizzly Campfire Trio offers 120 square inches of cookspace and can hold up to 30 pounds — ideal for cast iron skillets and dutch ovens.
The Biolite line of firepits and camp stoves are unique in that they can convert thermal energy into electrical charge thanks to their incorporated heat converters. The Campstove 2 generates 3W of power which is stored in a 2600 mAh while still being able to boil a liter of water in under four and a half minutes. The larger FirePit+ offers a 12,800 mAh battery and can burn both logs and charcoal. If you want to stick with propane as your primary fuel source, check out the 7,000 BTU Coleman Gas Camping Stove which pulls double duty as both a wok and a grill. Of course, having a cook station is no good if you don’t know how to use it. Download a recipe app like BBC Good Food (iOS, Android), Epicurious (iOS, Android) or SideChef Recipes (iOS).
Whether the smoke is coming from your cooking fire or the wildfire, you’re going to want to keep a supply of filtration masks at the ready for when the air quality dips into dangerous particulate levels. Standard Covid rules apply: cloth works in a pinch but n-95 is the superior choice if you can get your hands on them.
First aid and hygiene
Roughing it means just that. With many of the conveniences of modern life inaccessible as long as the lights are out, you’re going to be doing a lot more manual labor which means a litany of bumps, bruises, aches and pains along the way. And while you likely won’t have to concern yourself with performing surgery in the field — the power’s out, you aren’t marooned on a desert isle, just drive to the damn ER — a well-stocked first aid kit is essential to any bug out bag.
In the case of the My Medic 20L Survival Kit, the first aid kit is the bug out bag. This all-in-one healthcare suite offers more than 110 products spread across the National Park Service 10 essential first aid categories, but is both bulky and expensive. If you’ve already got your hands full, maybe consider a less wide-ranging kit. Something like the AMK Mountain Series Hiker Medical Kit, which can accomodate the normal injuries a pair of hikers might see over two days, or the Red Cross’ Family First Aid kit that contains more than 115 items. And if you have pets, you can bet there’s a Medpack for them too. You might consider keeping duplicates of important medical documents — immunization records, allergy information and such — tucked into the kit with the originals locked safely away somewhere secure.
In the event that you do need to be admitted to the hospital, or are interacting with FEMA or other government agencies, you’ll need to have your ID and other critical documents close by — and very preferably not on fire. The Thomas & Bond fireproof safe protects up to two pounds of documents from both fire and water damage thanks to its silicone-coated fiberglass construction. Maintaining a safe deposit box in the next town over is another, more extreme option.
Much like cold beans from a can, the musky scent of an unwashed human — especially mixed with sweat, wood smoke and despair — can get real old, real quick. But when the power goes out, your water heater might stop working as well, which means you could be in for a whole bunch of cold showers. Solar camping showers like those from Advanced Elements or Coghlan's can help bridge the gap.
Assuming you live somewhere that gets bright sunlight throughout the day (ie, not San Francisco), these devices can heat up to 5 gallons of water to a yelp-inducing 110 degrees F in about 3 hours. They’re less great at retaining that heat so you’re going to need to (ahem) “get ‘em while they’re hot.” Nothing says that just because they’re heated outdoors they have to be used there as well — simply hang the heated bundle from your shower curtain. Be careful though, as 5 gallons of water is quite heavy, weighing 41.6 pounds. It could snap the curtain rod and leave you recreating that Flashdance scene with a bag of scalding hot water — and again, you’re probably going to have a bad time.
But hey, maybe showering outdoors turns out to be your jam. First off, good on you finding that bright side in the midst of a climate emergency. Second off, it just so happens that Amazon sells a 5.5-gallon heated outdoor shower system that runs off a solar panel and a garden hose, not for nothing.
Your body isn’t the only thing that’s going to get soiled and stinky while roughing it. If you don’t have access to a laundry or coin-op, the Wonder Wash can at least keep your socks, undies and other small items fresh — and up to bath towel-sized items, if you do them one at a time. Tie off a length of braided cotton rope between two uprights and you’ve got yourself a functional clothesline.
To reiterate, this is a power outage, not The Revenant. You are not a bear, so please do not dump in the woods without at least bringing a trowel — maybe a pop-up poop tent and travel bidet for good measure.
Electronics
With the power out and no word from PG&E on when it might be coming back on, you’ll simply have to make some of your own. But before you go jury rigging your Peloton to a daisy-chain of lead-acid batteries and trying to stationary ride your way to electrical self-sufficiency, step outside. The sun in your eyes and wind in your face can just as easily be harnessed to put electrons in a battery pack.
Thanks to steady advancements in materials and engineering technologies today’s solar panels and home wind turbines are smaller, more efficient, and more affordable than ever — as are the battery systems that hold the excess charge for use when the sun isn't shining and wind isn’t blowing. The 15W, 12V Survival Wind Turbine Generator from Pacific Sky Power is fully portable and only weighs 3 pounds. Larger turbines like the 400W Primus Air 40 and Pikasola wind turbines will produce more power but at the cost of mobility — they’ll need to be statically installed somewhere windy to be most effective and then wired into the property’s grid.
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The same holds true for renewable solar. But unless you need to keep your crypto mining operation running nonstop through the outage, plenty of battery backup systems can provide the power your family needs without having to affix permanent panels in your yard or on your roof. The $3,600 Jackery Solar Generator 2000 Pro, is essentially a ruggedized 2.1kWh power cell with six, 200W solar panels feeding it electricity.
“I feel like I could keep my refrigerator running in an emergency for quite a while,” Engadget Managing Editor Terrence O’Brien, who was sent a review unit for a separate post, said of the model. “I laid out four panels in my yard and charged it to 100 percent in a few hours and it’s been going for two months without a recharge.”
“It’s basically a giant battery,” he continued. “It’s quiet, so it’s not like running a regular generator.” The 2000 Pro is the biggest and baddest that Jackery makes and, “probably overkill for most people who aren’t using it for emergency purposes,” O’Brien noted.
Similarly, Geneverse and Bluetti Power both make solar generators parallel to Jackery’s offerings, and at roughly the same price point. But if you’re looking for something even more robust than that, Goal Zero offers a range of solar backup systems that can keep your house running up to 3 days without interruption. But be warned, anything beyond the starter kit is going to need installation by a professional electrician.
On the other hand if you’re under evacuation, a 23-pound power brick might not be the best traveling companion. In that case, scavenge the power you need off of nearby outlets using a USB adapter like the 20W Anker Nano, the 40W Anker PowerPort 4, or the RavPower Pioneer offering both USB-A and -C ports. And to save some of that power for later, the INIU Portable Charger holds 10,000 mAh for just over $20, as does the Anker Portable Charger. Be sure to keep a small pouch of common adapter types in your pack as well, just in case you need to share your supply.
Phone charges shouldn’t be the only thing you’re sharing during the event — accurate information will be a vital resource as well. At the very least, you’ll want a solar or hand-crank emergency radio like the Midland ER310 — it’s got a rechargeable 2600 mAh battery, solar panel, integrated flashlight, and an ultrasonic dog whistle for search and rescue canines. DaringSnail’s 4000 mAh emergency radio doesn't have nearly as many bells and whistles, but it also costs half as much as the 310. The Eton FRX3+ can be powered through a variety of means — USB, Li-Ion battery, solar, and hand crank — and will automatically broadcast NOAA weather alerts for your area.
In the first days of social media, to build a personal brand online you mostly just needed a basic working knowledge of html. In 2022, however, the influencer marketing industry's reach is estimated at around $16.4 billion. With so much money to be made, it's little wonder that an entire support ecosystem has sprung up to help get the next generation of PewDiePies camera-ready. In the excerpt below from her new book examining the culture and business of online influencing, Break the Internet, Olivia Yallop enrolls in a summer gaming influencer camp for teens.
Beginning the course bright and early on a Monday morning in August stirs memories from classrooms past, as the students — myself, plus a small group of animated pre-teen boys hailing from across the UK — go around and make our introductions: an interesting fact about ourselves, our favourite foods, two truths and a lie. A pandemic-proofed schedule means we are learning remotely, in my case prostrated on my parents’ sofa. Once logged on, we meet our course coach Nathan, an upbeat, relentlessly patient Scottish instructor with a homegrown YouTube channel of his own, on which he reviews electronic synthesisers and (he reveals privately to me) vlogs whisky-tasting.
Twenty minutes into our induction, I realise I am already out of my depth: I have accidentally landed in a class of aspiring YouTube gamers. Within the influencer landscape, gaming is a microcosm complete with its own language and lore, each new game franchise spawning an expansive universe of characters, weaponry, codes, and customs. Whilst the students are happily chatting multiplayer platform compatibility, I am stealthily googling acronyms.
Far from the bedroom-dwelling pastime of the shy and socially reclusive, as it has been previously painted, gaming is a sprawling community activity on social media platforms. Over 200 million YouTube users watch gaming videos on a daily basis; 50 billion hours were viewed in 2018 alone, and two of the five largest channels on YouTube belong to gamers. And that’s just YouTube — the largest dedicated gamer streaming platform is Twitch, a 3.8m-strong community, which has an average of 83,700 synchronous streams — with 1.44 million viewers — taking place at any time.
Just a fraction of these numbers are users actually playing games themselves. Gaming content usually consists of viewing other people play: pre-recorded commentary following skilful players as they navigate their way through various levels or livestreamed screenshares to which viewers can tune in to watch their heroes play in real time. According to Google’s own data, 48 per cent of YouTube gaming viewers say they spend more time watching gaming videos on YouTube than actually playing games themselves.
If, like me, you find yourself wondering why, you’re probably in the wrong demographic. My classmate Rahil, a die-hard fan of Destiny 2, broke it down: ‘What makes these content creators so good is that they are very confident in what they do in gaming, but they are also funny, they are entertaining to watch. That’s why they have so many followers.’
Watching other people play video games is a way to level up your skills, engage with the community’s most hyped gaming rivalries, and feel connected to something beyond your console. Being a successful gaming influencer is also a way to get filthy rich. Video game voyeurism is a lucrative market, making internet celebrities of its most popular players, a string of incomprehensible handles that read to me like an inebriated keyboard smash but invoke wild-eyed delight in the eyes of my classmates: Markiplier, elrubiusOMG, JuegaGerman, A4, TheWillyrex, EeOneGuy, KwebbelKop, Fernanfloo, AM3NIC.
PewDiePie — aka 30-year-old Felix Kjellberg, the only gamer noobs like me have ever heard of — has 106m followers and is estimated to earn around $8 million per month, including more than $6.8 million from selling merchandise and more than $1.1 million in advertising. Blue-haired streamer Ninja, aka Detroit-born 29-year- old Tyler Blevins, is the most-followed gamer on Twitch, and signed a $30 million contract with Microsoft to game exclusively on their now- defunct streaming service Mixer. UK YouTube gaming collective The Sidemen upload weekly vlogs to their shared channel in which they compete on FIFA, mess around, prank each other, order £1,000 takeaways, and play something called ‘IRL Tinder’, living out the fever dream of a million teenage boys across the internet. For many tweens, getting paid to play as a YouTube gamer is a hallowed goal, and each of my classmates is keen to make Minecraft a full-time occupation. I decide to keep quiet about my abortive attempt at a beauty tutorial.
Class kicks off with an inspirational slideshow titled ‘INFLUENCERS: FROM 0 TO MILLIONS’. My laptop screen displays a Wall of Fame of top YouTubers smiling smugly to camera: OG American vlogger Casey Neistat, Canadian comedian Lilly Singh, PewDiePie, beauty guru Michelle Phan, and actor, activist, and author Tyler Oakley, each underlined by a subscriber count that outnumbers the population of most European countries. ‘Everyone started off where you are today,’ says Nathan enthusiastically. ‘A laptop and a smartphone — that’s all they had. Everybody here started with zero subscribers.’ The class is rapt. I try to imagine my own face smiling onscreen between professional prankster Roman Atwood (15.3m subscribers) and viral violin performer Lindsey Stirling (12.5m subscribers). Somehow, I can’t.
Nathan hits play on early comedy vlogger nigahiga’s first ever upload — a 2007 viral video sketch entitled ‘How to Be Ninja’ that now has 54,295,178 views — and then a later video from 2017, ‘Life of a YouTuber’. ‘Look at that — 21.5M subscribers!’ Nathan taps on the follower count under the video. ‘It didn’t happen overnight. It took a year, 12 months of putting up content with 50 views. Don’t get disheartened. Take every sub, every view as a...’ he mimes celebrating like the winner of a round of Fortnite.
Thanks to its nostalgic pixelation and condensed frame ratio, watching ‘How to Be Ninja’ creates the impression that we’re sitting in a history class studying archival footage from a distant past: Late Noughties Net Culture (2007, colourised). In a poorly lit, grainy home video that feels like a prelapsarian time capsule, two teenage boys act out a hammy sketch in which they transform into martial arts experts, including off-tempo miming, questionable jump cuts, and a tantalising glimpse of old-school YouTube — running on Internet Explorer — that flies over the heads of my Gen Z classmates. The sketch feels like two friends messing around with a camera at the weekend; it’s almost as if they don’t know they’re being watched.
In the second video an older and now more-polished Higa — complete with designer purple highlights in his hair — breezily addresses his multi-million-strong fanbase in a nine-minute HD monologue that’s punctuated by kooky 3D animation and links to his supporting social media channels. ‘I am in one of the final stages of my YouTube career,’ he says, ‘and my YouTube life, so …’ The camera cuts to reveal his extensive video set-up, professional lights, and a team of three clutching scripts, clipboards, cameras, and a boom mic behind the scenes, all celebrating exuberantly: ‘That means we can get out of here right?’ asks one. ‘Yeah, it’s really cramped back here…’ says another, ‘I have to poop so bad.’
‘What’s the difference between these two videos?’ Nathan prompts us. ‘What changed?’ The answers roll in quickly, students reeling off a list of ameliorations with ease: better lighting, better equipment, a better thumbnail, slicker editing, a more professional approach, background music, higher audio quality, and a naturalistic presentation style that at least appears to be ad-libbed.
‘What makes a good video more generally?’ asks Nathan. ‘What are the key elements?’ When he eventually pulls up the next slide, it turns out Nathan wants us to discuss passion, fun, originality, and creativity: but the class has other ideas. ‘I heard YouTube doesn’t like videos lower than ten minutes,’ offered Alex. ‘There’s many things that they don’t like,’ Lucas corrects him. ‘The algorithm is very complicated, and it’s always changing. They used to support “let’s plays” [a popular gaming stream format] back in 2018, and then they changed it, and a lot of Minecraft channels died.’ Rahil pipes up: ‘They find as many ways as possible to scrutinise your video … if you do many small things wrong, you get less money, even though YouTube is paid the same money by the advertisers. So you should never swear in your videos.’ ‘No, demonetisation is different,’ corrects Fred.
There is something fascinating and incongruous about watching pre-teens reel off the details of various influencer revenue models with the enthusiasm of a seasoned social media professional. The fluency with which they exchange terms I’m more accustomed to encountering on conference calls and in marketing decks is a startling reminder of the generational gulf between us: though they may be students, they’re not exactly beginners on the internet.
As the conversation quickly descends into technocratic one- upmanship, Nathan attempts to steer our analysis back to entry level. ‘Once you reach 1,000 subscribers,’ he enthusiastically explains to the class, ‘that means you can monetise your channel and have ads on it.’ A heated debate about the intricacies of YouTube monetisation ensues. Nathan is corrected by one of his students, before another pipes up to undercut them both, and suddenly everyone’s talking all at once: ‘Most YouTubers make money from sponsorships, not advertising revenue, anyway,’ offers one student. There is a pause. ‘And merch,’ he adds, ‘the MrBeast hoodies are really cool.’
‘Okay then,’ says Nathan brightly, shifting the slide forward to reveal a list of attributes for creating successful content that begins, ‘Attitude, Energy, Passion, Smile’, ‘what about some of these…’
Looking at my notes, I realise Nathan’s original question, ‘What makes a good video?’, has become something else entirely: what does YouTube consider to be a good video, and thus reward accordingly? It’s a small elision, admittedly, but significant; good is whatever YouTube thinks is good, and interpretations outside this algorithmic value system aren’t entertained. His prompt about creative possibilities has been heard as a question about optimising the potential of a commodity (the influencer) in an online marketplace. ‘It’s all about value,’ he continues, unwittingly echoing my thoughts, ‘what value does your video bring to the YouTube community? How are you going to stand out from all the other people doing it?’
This cuts to the heart of criticism against influencer training courses like this one, and others which have sprung up in LA, Singapore, and Paris in recent years: that it’s ethically inappropriate to coach young people to commodify themselves, that it’s encouraging children to spend more time online, that it’s corrupting childhoods. Influencers and industry professionals rolled their eyes or responded with a mixture of horror and intrigue when I’d mentioned the Fire Tech programme in passing. ‘That’s disgusting,’ said one agent, ‘way too young.’ (Privately, I thought this was an inconsistent position, given she represented a mumfluencer with a family of four.) ‘I respect it,’ said a Brighton-based beauty guru, ‘but I would never personally make that choice for my kids.’ ‘Crazy times we live in,’ offered a NYC-based fashion influencer, before admitting, ‘for real, though, I kind of wish I had had that when I was younger.’
I live in a creaky old house that’s in constant need of repair. The electric drill that came with the place, ah, looks like it was used to build the place. It has a power cord that’s just barely holding together through a combination of duct tape and anxiety. Two electrical shocks, a blown fuse and several delightful new curse words into my first home improvement project, I was convinced to get with the 21st century and purchase a cordless drill. Way too many YouTube tool-review rabbit holes, three trips to my local Ace Hardware and one exhaustive excel spreadsheet after that, I’d found the drill I would buy.
First off, the price was right. The DCD771C2 comes bundled with a pair of 1.3Ah 20V batteries, charging base and storage case for $160 MSRP, though since April when I first started looking, I have yet to not see it on sale for under $100. I bought mine during Home Depot’s Memorial Day sale along with a 16-piece screwdriver bit set for $120 out the door. You can also find them at Lowes, Ace stores and on Amazon.
Second, it offered the features I needed with a 20V power level I could handle. Sure I could have opted for the heavy-duty DCD991P2 — probably even eventually convinced myself I had need for a commercial-duty DCH614X2. But in reality, I’m mostly installing banisters, building trellises and doing light handiwork, not installing siding or anchoring things into concrete, so a 60V rotary hammer would be overkill.
My DCC771C2 weighs a little under four pounds, with most of the mass at the bottom of the unit where the battery sits. It outputs 300W (530 in-lbs torque), the two-speed transmission switches between 0 - 450 and 1,500 RPM while the 16-stop clutch lets me fine tune the amount of torque the drill exerts. With it, I can just as easily screw a fire alarm bracket into drywall as I can bore holes through a pressure-treated 4x4.
Third, I really like DeWalt’s 20/60 FlexVolt battery system and it’s a big part of why I went with that brand. DeWalt makes a variety of power tools that largely work off 20V for light duty stuff like string trimmers, drills, circular saws and routers, and 60V for medium-duty gear like chainsaws, lawnmowers, grinders and impact drivers. If I own a 20V drill and buy a 60V lawn mower, I’d normally be stuck buying separate 20V and 60V batteries, separate 20V and 60V chargers — basically doubling up because the two systems have incompatible power units. With FlexVolt, all of the batteries are 60V max but their output can be stepped down to accommodate a 20V system. This way, I just need one set of batteries and a single charger. And even if I stick with just 20V tools, the FlexVolt batteries can reportedly deliver longer runtimes in 20V than the regular 20V Max batteries can.
Of course, a pair of DeWalt’s non-FlexVolt 1.3Ah “20V Max” batteries came with my drill, and I can go buy larger capacity batteries (up to 12Ah) if I need them — but they won’t work on a 60V tool, just as a 60V battery won’t work in my 20V drill. All of which means I’ll have to eventually spring for a FlexVolt charger once I expand my power tool menagerie.
