The Acceleration Era: 2020
2020
September 2020. Surveillance. Sophie Zhang Posts Nearly 8,000-Word Memo on Facebook Election Manipulation. On her last day at Facebook, data scientist Sophie Zhang distributes an internal memo documenting that the company knowingly allowed heads of government and political parties to use fake accounts and coordinated inauthentic behavior to manipulate elections in at least 25 countries, including Honduras, Azerbaijan, India, and Brazil. Facebook took nine months to act on one campaign she flagged. BuzzFeed News obtains and publishes excerpts. Zhang had declined a $64,000 severance package that would have required signing a nondisparagement agreement. BuzzFeed News
September 30, 2020. Surveillance. Palantir Begins Trading on NYSE Under Ticker PLTR. Palantir goes public through a direct listing, opening at $10 per share and closing at $9.50, valuing the company at approximately $16 billion. The company, co-founded by Peter Thiel in 2003 with CIA seed funding, which has built data infrastructure for ICE, the DOD, and intelligence agencies for nearly two decades, is becoming a publicly traded investment. The company that will become the primary software infrastructure for DOGE’s cross-agency data consolidation is now accountable for quarterly earnings calls. CNBC
2020. China. e-CNY Pilots Begin in Four Cities. The People’s Bank of China launches digital yuan pilot programs in Shenzhen, Suzhou, Chengdu, and Xiongan. The first controlled consumer deployments of programmable, state-issued digital currency, testing retail transactions, government payments, and merchant-acceptance infrastructure. The experiment that China will scale to 3.48 billion transactions by 2025.
2020. Money. Mobile Payment Usage Spikes. The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the shift away from cash and physical payment infrastructure across the United States and globally. Contactless payment adoption advances by an estimated three to five years in a single year. The behavioral shift that makes stablecoin-linked card infrastructure viable at consumer scale is compressed into twelve months.