Y2K revival

The late 90s/early 2000s have been back in vogue for a while now, but until this week, one particular turn-of-the-millennium cultural phenomenon hadn't yet returned: mass panic over mass IT outages.

Only this time, it actually happened. Some bad code in a software update from digital security company CrowdStrike crashed Windows systems across the globe. (If you want the technical details, Wired has you covered.)

In Australia, the outage affected supermarkets, banks, airlines, TV networks, petrol stations, and small businesses, as outlined by the ABC.

Even The Last Place on Earth was impacted:

In The Conversation, Griffith University Cybersecurity Lecturer David Tuffley said the outage demonstrated "the interconnected and often fragile nature of modern IT infrastructure" and showed how "a single point of failure can have far-reaching consequences."

On Sky News's Outsiders, Rowan Dean and his panel started out with a similar, sensible, warning — before quickly moving on to how CrowdStrike's Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives were somehow to blame for the chaos. Panelist James Morrow then hinted at conspiracy theories, pointing out that CrowdStrike had been hired by the US Democratic National Committee in 2016 to investigate a hacking. "It's just funny where this company's name keeps showing up, and we'll just leave it at that," he said.

According to Dean, the outage proved cash is king, and plenty share the sentiment. A Facebook group called Cash Is King Australia has 162 thousand members. A group admin told The Last Place on Earth that 2,000 of those had joined in the 24 hours following the outage. A similar group, Cash is King (Perth/WA), has about 3,600 members. Many salient points are raised in these groups: it's annoying when businesses don't take cash, cops can't track physical transactions the same way they can track cards, banks make fortunes off digital transaction fees, and it's always a good idea to have some hard currency in reserve. But these forums can also veer into cooker territory. In the Perth group, one user said the outage was "a trial run for later total control". Another said it "fits right in with the upcoming bird flu simulations". Concerns about the prospect of a cashless society seem to square neatly with the worldview of those on the right's populist, paranoid fringes, but it's worth remembering – cash really is on the decline, and moving away from it hits the most vulnerable the hardest.

Will the climate lose worse than Biden in US election?

The climate movement doesn't know what's coming for it.

The New York Times reported this week that a reelected Donald Trump looks set to easily dismantle environmental and climate protections. A recent Supreme Court decision has given Trump a "free hand" to slash regulations, according to former EPA boss Christine Todd Whitman. There's speculation Trump will gut the public service and install loyalists, meaning he'll have more success at rolling back environmental protections than he did the first time around. On the campaign trail, he's been promising to "unleash domestic energy production like never before" –  and he doesn't mean renewables.

Meanwhile, The Guardian reports US climate groups like Climate Defiance and The Sunrise Movement are pushing Joe Biden to stand back and let another candidate with a better chance of winning take on Trump.

Last month, POLITICO reported Trump would once again withdraw the US from the Paris Agreement. He might go even further, the article suggested, by removing the US from the coordinating body for intergovernmental climate cooperation, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC).

When Donald Trump wins in November, the age of international climate agreements may be over. If America pulls out of the UNFCC, the body will lose a major funder, and other nations will follow suit. Politicians and big companies will feel less pressure to pretend they're doing anything to reduce emissions. The climate movement will find itself on a totally different battleground. It could be time to learn some new maneuvers.

J.D Vance might be weirder than Trump

Staying in the US: After God chose Donald Trump for President by sparing him from that bullet, Donald Trump chose Senator J.D Vance for Vice President at the Republican National Convention.

J.D Vance is notable for several reasons: he's the first millenial on a major party ticket, he's the first major party nominee with facial hair in more than seven decades, he's been attacked by white supremacists for having a wife with Indian heritage, and he once wrote an opinion piece in The Atlantic describing Trump as "cultural heroin".

He's also associated with some pretty far-out politics. If you want to understand where J.D Vance is coming from, read James Pogue's great 2022 piece for Vanity Fair about the National Conservatism Conference and the rise of the hip, anti-liberal, transgressive 'New Right'. Vance features heavily, as does his friend and intellectual influence Curtis Yarvin, a neo-reactionary, "monarchist" blogger who openly disdains democracy. In Vance's suggestion, made on a right-wing podcast and quoted by Pogue, that Trump should "fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, [and] replace them with our people," there's an echo of Yarvin's acronym 'RAGE': 'Retire Every Government Employee'.

Vance, a venture capitalist with ties to Silicon Valley, is also a supporter of open-source artificial intelligence, and has warned that "crazy people" are trying to imbue AI with leftist bias. As Casey Newton writes at Platformer, AI enthusiasts and 'effective accelerationists' (also knows as 'e/accs') are excited by Vance's candidacy, and believe he might help in their mission to solve all the world's problems through unhindered AI development.

Is Twiggy's green dream out of steam?

Andrew Forrest's Fortescue announced this week it would put on hold its goal to produce 15 million tonnes of green hydrogen annually by 2030. The company is also slashing 700 jobs.

Seemingly unaware it's never reassuring to speak of yourself in the third person, Forrest told morning radio, "Twiggy is not walking back from hydrogen."

In today's Sunday Times, Ben Harvey gives a pithy and amusing account of Fortescue's hydrogen journey, (worth reading in full):

Twiggy knew the odds were against him but no more than when he tried to break Rio and BHP’s duopoly in the Pilbara 20 years ago — and that turned out pretty well.

The difference, of course, was that iron ore actually existed when Fortescue pegged its claims, whereas commercial green hydrogen needed to be invented.

And even if he could invent it (he was messing around with a magical membrane at some stage) he needed to work out how to ship it safely because people stopped using hydrogen in transport shortly after the Hindenburg took off.

As we've written elsewhere, it was never a good idea to invest climate hopes in a green billionaire like Twiggy.

For those wondering...

Your correspondent easily made his flight and ended up in the Pilbara. He arrived in time to witness a pro-Palestine march through the main drag of Karratha on Saturday morning:

That's all for today! You'll hear more from us during the week ahead, if the internet still turns on.