To the new subscribers this week, welcome! You can find previous issues here. As always, feedback, criticism, ideas, articles, etc. are always welcome. Just reply to this email. If you have trouble, accessing some of these articles, let me know.
If you’re looking for something new to watch, a show that I worked on a few years ago is finally coming out next Thursday on Netflix.
Happy reading :)
-TK
⛏👑🇿🇦 Pretty crazy piece about illegal gold mining in South Africa, where “illegal mining accounts for around a tenth of South Africa’s annual gold production”. (New Yorker | Kimon de Greef | Feb 2023)
As Welkom’s mining industry collapsed, in the nineteen-nineties, a dystopian criminal economy emerged in its place, with thousands of men entering the abandoned tunnels and using rudimentary tools to dig for the leftover ore. With few overhead costs or safety standards, these outlaw miners, in some cases, could strike it rich. Many others remained in poverty, or died underground. The miners became known as zama-zamas, a Zulu term that loosely translates to “take a chance”…
Owing to the difficulty of entering the mines, zama-zamas often stayed underground for months, their existence illuminated by headlamps. Down below, temperatures can exceed a hundred degrees, with suffocating humidity. Rockfalls are common, and rescuers have encountered bodies crushed by boulders the size of cars. “I think they all go through hell,” a doctor in Welkom, who has treated dozens of zama-zamas, told me. The men he saw had turned gray for lack of sunlight, their bodies were emaciated, and most of them had tuberculosis from inhaling dust in the unventilated tunnels.
Worth reading for the incredible descriptions of these miners living underground for years trying to make their fortune (or just passage back up) and the economy that’s sprung up around them. The piece goes on to cover the criminal syndicates which organized to control and exploit the illegal mining activity, in particular one founded by a former zama-zama, David Khombi who became a sort of local Esocbar of the mines, feeding the underground economy with supplies but also paying for basic utilities and services in the cities. An estimated “seventy per cent of the local police force had been in the kingpin’s pocket” and at that point is that bribery or payroll?
What I find interesting thing about this, in addition to the sheer human extremity and ingenuity, is the story of the state and how law, order, and power are negotiated in its absence. It reminds me of the gangs in El Salvador, one day they’re running things and the next, the state reasserts itself and Bukele puts them all in a mega-jail. For more on South Africa’s serious crime and corruption problems, read the story about the head of the state power company being poisoned after trying to clean up the corruption and theft.
🧠📱🏥 Good piece on social media and the teen mental health crisis, following up on last week’s issue, fD[80]. (FT | Jamie Smyth, Hannah Murphy | Mar 2023)
Re: a lawsuit filed against Meta in federal court:
They allege that Meta, the parent company that owns Facebook and Instagram, and its rivals TikTok, Snapchat and YouTube have borrowed heavily from the behavioural and neurobiological techniques used by the tobacco and gambling industries to get children addicted to their products.
These features, which vary platform to platform, include algorithmically generated, endless feeds to keep users scrolling; intermittent variable rewards that manipulate the dopamine delivery mechanism in the brain to intensify use; metrics and graphics to exploit social comparison; incessant notifications that encourage repetitive account checking; inadequate age verification protocols; and deficient tools for parents that create the illusion of control.
As I mentioned last issue, I’m eager to see more and more internal material from inside these companies covering how much they’ve studied and known of their products potential harms.
“No one wakes up thinking they want to maximise the number of times they open Instagram that day,” one Meta employee wrote in 2021, according to the filing. “But that’s exactly what our product teams are trying to do.”
An internal study by Meta conducted around June 2020 found that 500,000 Instagram accounts each day involved “inappropriate interactions with children”. Yet child safety was still not considered a priority, the documents say, prompting one employee to remark that if “we do something here, cool. But if we can do nothing at all, that’s fine too.”
🏦💰 In the wake of the government stepping in to insure all deposits at Silicon Valley Bank, Ruchir Sharma writes about the “rise of a maximalist culture of bailouts and state support… destabilizing the global financial system” and how the government has gone from “lender of last resort” to being ready at the first sign of distress to supply easy money. (FT | Ruchir Sharma | Mar 2023)
More than low interest rates, the easy money era was shaped by an increasingly automatic state reflex to rescue — to rescue the economy from disappointing growth even during recoveries, to rescue not only banks and other companies but also households, industries, financial markets and foreign governments in times of crisis…
The hazards are not just moral or speculative, as many insist — they are practical and present. The rescues have led to a massive misallocation of capital and a surge in the number of zombie firms, which contribute mightily to weakening business dynamism and productivity. In the US, total factor productivity growth fell to just 0.5 per cent after 2008, down from about 2 per cent between 1870 and the early 1970s.
Michael Pettis’ thoughts on the article:
🤡🔪🎬 Horror movies over-performing at a box office that otherwise has been hit hard by the pandemic and secular decline in moviegoing. (WSJ | Robbie Whelan | Mar 2023)
With the film exhibition business in a multiyear slump that was accelerated by the pandemic’s cinema closures, producers want to make movies that audiences have more of an incentive to watch in theaters. Horror is one of a few genres that industry veterans say are custom-made to be watched on the big screen with a thumping sound system. Audiences prefer to be spooked in big groups, with adrenaline pumping, screams echoing, popcorn flying and couples clutching each other for safety.
🇬🇭🔫🛵 Interesting story about Al Qaeda trying to take advantage of local ethnic conflicts in Ghana to recruit new fighters. A great opening line in this article, which covers a 65-year long ethnic conflict between the Mamprusi and Kusasi. (WSJ | Michael M. Phillips | Mar 2023)
The clash between Bawku’s main ethnic groups is a hyper-local conflict with potentially global implications. Both Ghanaian and U.S. officials fear that al Qaeda militants, who have attacked villages in Burkina Faso just a few miles away, could take advantage of the tensions to establish a beachhead in Ghana, a regional powerhouse and American ally known for its relative stability and prosperity…
One of their favorite tactics is to inflame local conflicts and grievances to recruit young men. That strategy has helped turn Africa, from Mali in the west to Somalia in the east to Mozambique in the south, into the main battlefield in the decadeslong contest pitting Islamist extremists against the West and its local allies.
Not that I had many priors about Burkina Faso, but I had no idea it was such a compromised state:
The U.S. estimates al Qaeda’s local affiliate, Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal Muslimin, or JNIM, controls 40% of Burkina Faso’s territory.