The Acceleration Era: 2021
2021
October 3-5, 2021. Surveillance. Frances Haugen Exposes Facebook’s Knowledge of Harm. Former Facebook data scientist Frances Haugen reveals her identity on 60 Minutes on October 3 and testifies before the Senate on October 5. She has secretly copied tens of thousands of pages of internal Facebook research documenting that the company knew its platforms harm children, stoke division, and undermine democracy, and chose not to act. The whistleblower event that establishes the evidentiary basis for platform accountability regulation. NPR
June 29, 2021. Identity. CLEAR Goes Public on NYSE Under Ticker YOU. CLEAR Secure, the biometric identity verification company that uses iris and fingerprint scanning to automate identity verification at airports, stadiums, and healthcare facilities, raises $409 million in its IPO, pricing above the range at $31 per share. The first major biometric identity company to reach public-market scale, establishing the infrastructure template for physical-world identity verification that World ID and India’s Aadhaar system are building toward. Renaissance Capital
2021. AI. Anthropic Founded. Dario Amodei, Daniela Amodei, and five other former OpenAI researchers founded Anthropic, citing concerns about OpenAI’s AI safety direction. The company that will develop Constitutional AI and the Claude model family begins as a safety-focused research lab spun out of the organization whose scale it will eventually challenge. Britannica
2021. Surveillance. Palantir Rolls Out Apollo. Palantir launches Apollo, its continuous deployment platform that manages software delivery across classified and unclassified environments. The infrastructure layer that allows Palantir’s software to operate across government agencies simultaneously, enabling the cross-agency data access architecture that DOGE will use in 2025.
2021. China. mBridge Collaboration Begins Between BIS Innovation Hub, PBOC, HKMA, Bank of Thailand, and CBUAE. The Bank for International Settlements Innovation Hub and four central banks begin the collaborative work that becomes Project mBridge. The first institutional effort to build a cross-border CBDC settlement system bypassing the correspondent banking architecture that SWIFT depends on. BIS
2021. China. e-CNY Distributed as Lottery Prizes in Beijing Pilot. The People’s Bank of China distributes digital yuan as lottery prizes to Beijing residents, the first mass consumer distribution event for China’s programmable digital currency. The government routes money through a state-issued programmable instrument at scale for the first time, establishing the distribution model it will use to drive adoption. Aware Trade