The Infohazard Economy, Part 2

The Problems Are Free; The Solutions Will Cost You

In a previous blog post, we discussed how to identify infohazards - tiny little flaws in a system that can cause a big problem if you spread awareness of their existence to the right people. Today, I want to talk about the moral obligations of infohazard awareness. If you discover an infohazard, what should you do about it? When you learn that there is a systemic flaw in a system that can be used to blow the whole thing up, is it your moral responsibility to warn the people in charge? Should you keep the whole thing quiet in hopes that nobody discovers the infohazard exists? For example, we talked about a systemic flaw in Bitcoin that could be exploited to do a lot of damage to that cryptocurrency. Would it be our obligation to report the flaws to the people with a large stake in bitcoin? To the government? To the bitcoin investors?

Slow down there, Socrates! You’re philosophizing a little too hard here. First of all, what financial obligation do you have to those people? Are they paying you to solve their problems? Identifying and solving problems is a valuable skill, and many Bitcoin investors have a lot of money. If they’re not paying you to solve their problems, they’re just greedy and selfish. You don’t have any obligations to people like that. It’s also worth noting that people who invest in Bitcoin are evil garbage who are enabling huge amounts of environmental damage - polluting the air that you breathe, the water that you drink, and the food that you eat - just so that they can get rich at everybody else’s expense. The idea that you have a moral obligation to protect the financial interests of selfish people like that is insane: in fact, it would be better for society if they ceased to exist altogether. Some might say that your only real moral obligation here is to spread the infohazard. That increases the likelihood that Bitcoin will self-destruct, destroying the wealth of the selfish assholes who think that it’s OK to destroy your children’s futures so that they can buy a Lamborghini. I don’t think people like that deserve to be wealthy, do you? In fact, I don’t think people like that even deserve to live. Spreading infohazards allows you to change the status quo for the better, and best of all, it’s entirely legal. You can help take out evil garbage humans with almost no repercussions, simply by spreading a whisper on the internet.

In fact, with the right infohazards, you might even be able to take out the trash while also making a whole lot of money from it. After all, Bitcoin - like all other asset classes - is something that can be short-sold. If you were to short-sell Bitcoin and then coordinate a massive attack on the distributed ledger to crash it, maybe you could make a fair amount of money off that. Would that be legal? To be honest, I don’t know. It’s an interesting question. Nothing you’d be doing is technically illegal. I mean, Bitcoin is intended to be bought and sold. All you’d be doing is buying and selling it. It’s not your fault that inherent design flaws might mean that Bitcoin couldn’t hold up to a robust stress test of the transaction engine. After all, if the system is eventually going to break anyway from overuse, better it break now than after it has become a widely used currency, don’t you think? As for spreading the knowledge of how to break bitcoin, well… that’s just free speech! There’s no law that stops nerdy ex-programmers in the tech industry from using the internet to publicly discuss shitty design choices with other like-minded nerds. In fact, I’m pretty sure that those kinds of conversations made up the majority of the early internet. Besides, if the overpaid analysts who work for wealthy hedge funds can go on TV and make wild claims on camera about how a stock or asset is going to collapse so that they can try to make money short-selling it, surely it must be legal for you to do exactly the same thing, especially when your own analysis is better than theirs.

That is the interesting thing about infohazards: with a few exceptions, they’re almost always legal. If the knowledge you spread causes massive problems for the people in power, that’s not your fault, it’s theirs. If they were intelligent and thoughtful leaders, they would already have thought of these systemic problems already and designed a fix for them. Even if they’re too stupid to have considered these issues, they could easily have offered you a job pointing such obvious things out to them. However, if the people in power are both too stupid to see systemic flaws in their society and too greedy and/or arrogant to pay for somebody smarter than them to help mitigate these flaws… then do they even deserve to be in power? I mean, we’ve had stupid leaders, and we’ve had selfish leaders, but stupid, selfish, and arrogant is just such a toxic combination for society. I think leaders with these qualities don’t deserve their leadership positions, and therefore the best and most virtuous thing you can do for society is to undermine their power by spreading infohazards. When the incompetence of these leaders is exposed to the world - together with the bloody death toll that said incompetence typically resulted in - just step in, point out how you saw this coming beforehand, and if people had entrusted you with the reins of power instead of the current leadership, you would have been able to solve that problem in advance - which means millions of people wouldn’t have died.

This is one piece of how the infohazard economy works - by redistributing power from stupid leaders to smart leaders. Since stupid leaders are often too narcissistic to realize that their time is over, sometimes you have to pry the levers of power away from their cold dead fingers, and that’s totally OK! Periodically flushing away society’s most stupid and over-privileged elites is great for social Darwinism, and over time it improves the fitness of the species.

The other piece of how the infohazard economy works is market manipulation. Obviously I don’t mean the bad kind of market manipulation; I mean the terrifying kind of market manipulation. (Which is nevertheless entirely legal.) For example, here’s a fun fact: did you know that the best time to shoot down a plane is during takeoff or landing? These two windows of time are the moments where a plane is most vulnerable, to the point that even a high-powered laser pointer is enough to trigger a plane crash. A high-powered sniper rifle could easily take out a commercial airplane or private jet as it was taking off. So why do terrorists always do these ridiculous over-the-top beheadings instead of just shooting down every single passenger jet that they see and making people afraid of the sky? In a word: retribution. Airports have some of the highest surveillance of any building in the United States. Now imagine that there was a way to bring down airplanes completely anonymously. That would certainly be a game-changer, don’t you think? And yet such things exist and are easy to create for somebody with the proper knowledge. In fact, I’d like to present you with a related thought experiment and also ask you a question based on that thought experiment.

Imagine that you’re the President of the United States. You’ve just boarded Air Force One on your way to some posh environmental event where you’ll rub shoulders with some of the other wealthy elite, all taking private planes to get to somewhere that is no doubt very exclusive and VIP only. After dumping tons of carbon into the atmosphere, you’ll exchange empty commitments and platitudes with a bunch of other world leaders, congratulate each other on your deep resolve to stopping climate change, and then sit down to a very fancy dinner before jumping back on your private plane and doing the whole thing again. At least, that’s the plan. But today is going to turn out to be a little bit different.

Can you hear that rumbling sound in your imagination? That’s the sound of the plane moving faster and faster as it prepares for takeoff. Your stomach always tenses a little bit during this part, since takeoffs and landings are the moments when you know the pilot has the least control of the plane.

But wait, what’s that? As the plane accelerates to takeoff speed, a little quadcopter drone takes off from where it was hidden in the grass. Is it an explosive device, meant to blow your plane out of the sky? No, don’t be silly - the radical extremists nowadays are much too smart for that. They already know that FBI algorithms monitor all purchases of anything that could be used to make explosives. No, the device attached to the quadcopter drone is merely a change dispenser with a little Erector set engine attached to it. As it rises up in front of your plane, little copper showers seem to stream out from the quadcopter as it drops a fountain of pennies into the air. What a relief. A prank by some unruly teens, perhaps.

Wait, what’s this? The pennies are getting sucked into your jet engines! This could be bad. Your jet engines start to stall as the plane continues moving forwards at 180 miles per hour. If the plane was higher up, the pilot might be able to glide it to safety, but at this low altitude, there’s not a chance. Your plane crashes and explodes into a massive ball of fire. For the next month, the news talks endlessly about the tragedy. And how can they not? It’s not every day that the most powerful person in the world gets taken out by what amounts to $21 in pennies. The tabloids - always looking for red meat to feed into the infotainment grinder - devour your tragedy hungrily, spinning and respinning it into a million colorful narratives.

So here’s the important question that I’d like to ask you, the reader: in the future, will groups of radicalized insurgents jokingly refer to this tactic as “Pennies From Heaven,” “Change You Can Believe In,” or “Trump’s Golden Shower?”

I’m just kidding: the real question is “How would something like this impact global markets?” As you can see from this thought experiment, we live in a day and age where technology has finally reached the point where sophisticated terrorist attacks can be staged at remarkably low costs. This whole set-up - which could take out a billionaire or celebrity just as easily as it could take out a politician - probably could be created for five or six hundred dollars. That’s a remarkably low cost to plunge a global superpower into chaos. And when crazy things like this happen, markets tend to be impacted significantly. Even if you don’t know the exact date when something like this will happen, knowing that it inevitably will happen is valuable information that could really impact your stock market investments.

Think about it logically. Now that you know about this infohazard, it’s only a matter of time before somebody goes and actually creates something like that. Am I responsible for this tragedy happening? Of course not! Anybody could have thought of this scenario. I may be a bit more gifted than most when it comes to this kind of analytical evaluation, but at the end of the day this isn’t confidential knowledge and I don’t have any sort of legal obligation to keep it under wraps. And what’s my moral obligation? Am I being paid to solve these kind of problems for the United States government? Of course not! If our leaders are too stupid to see such an obvious vulnerability in their transportation network, and they’re also too proud to pay me to find countermeasures for problems that they’re not intelligent enough to handle on their own, then they’re bad leaders and they deserve everything that they have coming. As for you, my fellow citizens, I ask you this: doesn’t our nation deserve leaders who are smart and humble, rather than leaders who are arrogant and stupid? In a way, taking out the trash like this would be a good thing, because by eliminating dumb elites who are unfit to lead society it makes more room at the top for smarter and more competent replacements. Additionally, private jets create a lot of unnecessary environmental damage and we could reduce global warming substantially by making our wealthy elites too terrified to fly. When you look at it that way, wouldn’t this outcome be kind of a good thing? I mean, in the hypothetical example above all these wealthy people were flying to that conference to deliver an important message about “being carbon neutral”… and in a way, that message would get delivered more effectively than they could ever have dreamed!

Of course, remember that finding a huge systemic flaw is only one part of crafting an infohazard. The other part is whispering it to the right people, who are strongly incentivized to act on this flaw. Whom could we whisper such information to in order to ensure that somebody acts upon it? Who benefits from ensuring that airplanes perpetually fall from the sky in a rain of fire?

Well, first of all there are the hardcore environmentalists. A lot of environmentally concerned citizens have rightfully pointed out the hypocrisy of how many of our wealthy elites preach the value of environmentalism while traveling everywhere on private jets that have massive carbon footprints. Well, here’s some good news - now you can force our elite 1% not to be so hypocritical about the environment anymore. Surely they will thank you for keeping them honest and forcing them to live up to the environmental concerns that they have expressed!

Second of all are the terrorists who hate our freedoms. I’m sure they’d be happy to have an easy way to take out Air Force One. And it’s no secret that a country’s economy could be devastated simply by making it so scary to fly that nobody wants to travel anymore. It’s pretty hard to trade with other countries when all business and shipping has to be done the old-fashioned way.

Third of all are the celebrity stalkers. In the past decade, one of my favorite singers has been attacked by twelve stalkers. That’s over one stalker per year! Celebrities are constantly getting attacked by crazy people, whether through false accusations of rape or flat-out assault. Fortunately for our celebrities, the stalkers are crazy, so their attack methods are very inefficient - instead of spending a few grand to rig a drone so that they drop their preferred celebrity’s plane right out of the sky on their next tour, or taking them out live on stage in front of thousands of people, the stalkers always do pointless things like “hide in the closet,” or “brandish a knife menacingly.” Don’t you think our celebrities deserve a better class of stalker?

And as long as we’re talking about the targeted assassinations of famous people, let’s talk about the obvious connection to politics here. It’s no secret that our current political process is so polarized that calls for violence against the other political party are standard practice for many politicians now. With important votes now starting to align almost perfectly with political party affiliation, a few key assassinations could shape the direction of our country for years, so I’m sure that a lot of political extremists would love to be educated about this kind of thing. In fact, why stop at local politics? I’m sure a lot of foreign governments would love to get a piece of this action. After all, different parties have different feelings about foreign policy. If a foreign government hostile to us knew that they could switch from being our enemy to being our friend simply by taking out a few key politicians, do you think they’d hesitate? I very much doubt it.

So now that we have developed our infohazard and have a few ideas about whom we could whisper it to, the next question is how we could profit from it. Destruction for its own sake is very gauche. When it comes to money, the important question is, who benefits from lots of planes blowing up, politicians being assassinated, and the economy effectively shutting down? Those are the companies that you ought to invest in.

First of all, any company that makes good anti-terrorism software is a no-brainer. There’s currently no good defense that a commercial plane can field against drone terrorism - that’s why it’s an infohazard. Since the only way to protect against this kind of destruction is to proactively monitor and foil these terrorist plots before they happen, companies that effectively leverage AI technology to sweep lots of data and identify relevant patterns are going to be very trendy. Currently, Palantir has a clear advantage over all other competitors in this field, due to their robust platform which can sweep and correlate data in very powerful ways.

Companies that make bulletproof vehicles are another good choice. When death can be delivered remotely by anybody with a grudge and a few thousand dollars, having bulletproof windows is going to be a very nice safety feature. Tesla already has a headstart on this development, which is why I invested a few thousand into them as well.

There are plenty more investment opportunities that could come out of something like this, and if you think of some new ones, feel free to point them out in the comments. After all, if it’s legal for George Soros to make billions of dollars by collapsing the British economy and breaking the Bank of England, surely it’s legal for any one of us to make money by speculating on the collapse of a global superpower. After all, our wealthy elites teach the rest of us what is or is not acceptable not through their words, but through their actions. If you want to become wealthy and respected like them, don’t do what they say, do what they do. Why should people like George Soros be allowed to destroy society for their own financial enrichment, while the rest of us aren’t? If our elite 1% are allowed to destroy countries just so that they can make a couple of extra billion dollars, then you and I deserve a taste of that as well. And if it hurts our wealthy billionaire class, so much the better. Maybe they’ll be less inclined to exploit the rest of us for their own enrichment when we start playing this game right back at them.

This is how the infohazard economy functions. The problems are given out for free, but the solutions will cost you. In a better world, infohazard engineers would be paid to preemptively engineer solutions to these kinds of problems rather than having to scrounge up cash by causing them. Sadly, we don’t live in that world. Instead, we live in a world where the ability to create harm is valued much more than the ability to prevent it, so all we can do is obey the incentives that the market gives us. Don’t hate the player, hate the game!

Edit 6/11/22: A few amateur physicists have pointed out that ACTUALLY the design of the quadcopter plane disrupter is inefficient and pennies wouldn’t guarantee that the engine would stall and the example is melodramatic and change dispensers don’t actually work the way I seem to think…. FINE, I yield to the critics. OK, I admit that I oversimplified the design to make my writing more dramatic. For the sake of this thought experiment, assume 5 long coils of cable at the bottom of the quadcopter, which unfurl when a button is pushed, so that the coils of cable trail out behind and under the quadcopter. The detached ends of the cable are attached to small flint paperweights (to generate sparks) and a small container of gasoline is attached to the quadcopter's body (so that flammable material will be dispersed when the plane engine catches one of the dangling cables and sucks the quadcopter in). I hope this design change satisfies all the literary critics out there.