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On September 30, OpenAI launched its new Sora social network, powered by its Sora 2 video generation model. To call Soras launch successful is a gross understatement. Despite invite only access and restrictions outside North America, Sora exploded to over one million users in only five days. Thats faster than ChatGPTs user base grew after its own record-setting launch. Sora is a vertical video app, aping the interface and user experience (short clips, vertical swiping to select a new video, Likes and Shares) of every other app in its category. Except with Sora, theres a key differenceevery video on the app is explicitly and joyfully fake. I resorted to begging colleagues, lurking on obscure Discord channels, and constantly refreshing my own Sora app in order to get an invite. Finally, I got in and was able to try Sora firsthand. Im convinced that its the perfect social network. It could take down TikTok. Heres why. Suspending disbelief When you first sign into Sora, the app pops up a window warning you that You are about to enter a creative world of AI-generated content. Some videos may depict people you recognize, but the actions and events shown are not real. The warning reminds me of the famous sign at the entrance to Disneyland. That sign reads Here you leave today and enter the world of yesterday, tomorrow and fantasy. Disneylands sign is an invitation to suspend disbeliefto enter a world in which everything is kind of real, but is also explicitly curated and fabricated to delight you; a purified, enhanced reflection of reality. Sora feels similar. After accepting the warning, youre offered a blank box where you can type a description of any video you want to see. When you enter text in the box, the Sora app uses the Sora 2 video generator (OpenAI has never been much for clear naming conventions) to make whatever youve asked for, complete with synchronized audio and even music. Crucially, you can also begin to scroll through the AI creations of other users. Delightful deepfakes I didnt expect that an app filled with bespoke deepfakes would be fun to use. Turns out, it is. Wildly so. Many of Soras users creations are bizarre, engaging, and uproariously funny. In one popular video, a chicken hangs from a drone, flying over a drab British neighborhood while rapping about his predicament in a strong Cockney accent. In another, Jesus and his disciples ride a roller coaster. He speaks in bible verses while the disciples scream in the background at every turn and drop. Some of the best videos feature celebrities. In one, the ubiquitous 1980s painter Bob Ross stands in a Target store, furiously scribbling a mountain scene on a wall. Angry employees approach him, saying professionally but assertively Sir, you cannot draw on our wall, to which Ross responds, I know, Im trying to stop while scribbling even faster. Then stop! the employee commands. Just more shadow, I promise, Ross says as the employee grows more frustrated, yelling No sir, give me the marker. It needs a cloud . . . Ross says plaintively as security arrives to escort him out of the building. In another clip, Queen Elizabeth speaks at a press conference. Apparently having received a critical question, she says You know what? Im sick of you guys! before cackling and flying straight up into the sky with a woosh. An alarmed newscaster yells Shes going up! Your majesty, come back! as the crowd screams and the Queen ascends into the clouds. No one asked for reality Sora is far more fun to use than I expected. I hate vertical video apps, and have defiantly avoided spending any of my precious time on this planet scrolling through TikTok. Yet, I find myself returning to Sora again and again. Why? For one thing, the apps incredibly realistic video generation capabilities let users create anything they want. That unlocks a huge amount of pent up creativityas well as a hefty dose of Monty Pythonesque silliness. But the appeal goes deeper than that. Social media used to be funa melange of quirky local news stories, cat videos, updates on the lives of people you vaguely remember from high school, and photos of your friends breakfasts. Today, though, social networks are filled with highly-polished, aspirational content posted by brands, influencers, and the mini Kardashians in your own social circles. Fire up Instagram or its ilk and youre likely to see a stunning shot of a perfectly-styled, impossibly beautiful person sipping Negronis in Majorca, or a pic of your friend living it up at a fancy restaurant you cant afford. Youre unlikely to see footage of that same friend attempting (and failing) to troubleshoot her air fryer, or spending 45 minutes on hold with her insurance company. Everything is carefully selected and curated. Increasingly, youre also likely to see plenty of truly fake AI content masquerading as the real thing. More than 40% of Facebook content is now created by AI. Using social media has thus become a dispiriting slog through machine-generated slop and aspirational images, where youre constantly forced to question whats real and whats fakeor at least highly polished and edited. Its exhausting. No wonder that even teenagersthe most voracious users of social appsare fed up. Pew reports that 48% of teens now believe that social media is bad or their mental health. Sora sidesteps all this drudgery by ignoring authenticity altogether. Everything is fake! Theres no need to question what youre seeingyou can just enjoy the storytelling, the visuals, the delightful insanity and spectacle of it all. Its a weirdly liberating experience. Rather than feeling like wading in a cesspool of AI drek, using Sora feels like watching a very clever movie. Movies are fake, after all. Yet people spend billions of hours enjoying them. And here, if you like something you see, you can leap in and make your own version of it with a simple prompt and the press of a button. Turns out, people never wanted reality. Sora captures all the spectacle, drama, and storytelling that keeps people engaged with TikTok and Reels, but without any of the shame, exclusion, and need to constantly keep your digital guard up. Plus, you can tell any story you want on Sora, physics be damned! Its a seductive combinationfun, silliness, joy, and freedom from the limits of reality. No wonder people are already joining the network by the millions. TikTok and the other peddlers of depressing, soulless, obsessively curated semi-realities should be very, very afraid.
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E-Commerce
How do modernist transportation planners recommend handling congestion? By recommending new vehicle lanes. What happens when you build new vehicle lanes to handle traffic congestion? The vehicle lanes fill up with more traffic congestion. As they themselves have said for decades, you cannot build your way out of congestion. But every week you can do a quick internet search to see a bunch of new attempts. Induced demand Ive been hearing planners and engineers say we cant build our way out of congestion since the 1990s, when I began my career. The wonky term that describes why adding more lanes doesnt eliminate congestion is induced demand. Transportation professionals have understood the induced demand phenomenon for decades. Consider the hypothetical (or is it?) Route 60. Route 60 has two lanes in each direction with turn lanes at each signalized intersection. Most of the real estate fronting the corridor is retail or office, but thousands of single-family homes, townhomes, and apartments are just behind the other land uses. As you might expect, people choose to frequent the shops closest to home. {"blockType":"creator-network-promo","data":{"mediaUrl":"","headline":"Urbanism Speakeasy","description":"Join Andy Boenau as he explores ideas that the infrastructure status quo would rather keep quiet. To learn more, visit urbanismspeakeasy.com.","substackDomain":"https:\/\/www.urbanismspeakeasy.com\/","colorTheme":"blue","redirectUrl":""}} The department of transportation adds one more lane in each direction. After construction, people choose to visit more retail centers further from home because theres suddenly more space on the corridor. It gets to the point where enough people have made the same choices that car traffic on the corridor is back to its preconstruction levels. In response, the department of transportation builds one more lane in each direction. Now with four lanes in each direction, the corridor is wider than the nearby interstate. And once again, people who were avoiding the traffic jams on Route 60 now choose to get back on the road and drive further. Enough people make the same choice to drive further from home and the car traffic is back to preconstruction levels. The might-be-fictional Route 60 is the same never-ending story of induced demand in communities across the country. Road expansions only temporarily reduce traffic congestion, but professionals only temporarily remember expansions dont work. A better way Its no secret that public agencies are strapped for cash, and its no secret that public agencies continue to spend depleted accounts on road expansion projects. Meanwhile, the average citizen continues to point out problems with existing infrastructure: potholes, withering landscaping, crumbling sidewalks, and poor street lighting. Taxpayers financial contributions deserve good stewardship. Public agencies shouldnt be building something that cant be maintained, let alone expanding something thats destined to attract even more traffic and thus maintenance. Induced demand isnt inherently bad or goodits just a description of an economics principle of scarcity and choice. Theres a way for departments of transportation to take advantage of induced demand by creating bicycle networks that will fill up with new bike traffic. Robust bicycle infrastructure gives people the freedom to make short trips without having to rely on a motor vehicle. And of course, bicycle infrastructure yields an extraordinary return on investment when compared to car-oriented infrastructure. Culture plays a tremendous role in the planning and construction of transportation systems. When Danish streets were convenient for high-speed vehicular traffic and long commutes, thats exactly how people behaved. Following a fundamental shift in design philosophy, bicycling was made convenient and Danes naturally opted for the easier travel mode. Copenhagen wasnt always Copenhagen. They deliberately redesigned streets to make riding a bike an easy option, and just like that, the bike lanes filled up with people making obvious transportation choices. Americas rural villages, sprawling suburbs, and big cities have so much potential. Well meet that potential as future generations lead the culture shift by using the induced demand principle for the greater good. {"blockType":"creator-network-promo","data":{"mediaUrl":"","headline":"Urbanism Speakeasy","description":"Join Andy Boenau as he explores ideas that the infrastructure status quo would rather keep quiet. To learn more, visit urbanismspeakeasy.com.","substackDomain":"https:\/\/www.urbanismspeakeasy.com\/","colorTheme":"blue","redirectUrl":""}}
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E-Commerce
China likes to condemn the United States for extending its arm too far outside of its borders to make demands on non-American companies. But when it sought to hit back at the U.S. interests this month, Beijing did exactly the same.In expanding export rules on rare earths, Beijing for the first time announced it will require foreign firms to obtain approval from the Chinese government to export magnets containing even tiny amounts of China-originated rare earth materials or produced with Chinese technology.That means a South Korean smartphone maker must ask for Beijing’s permission to sell the devices to Australia if the phones contain China-originated rare earth materials, said Jamieson Greer, the U.S. trade representative. “This rule gives China control over basically the entire global economy in the technology supply chain,” he said.For anyone familiar with U.S. trade practice, China is simply borrowing a decades-long U.S. policy: the foreign direct product rule. It extends the reach of U.S. law to foreign-made products, and it has been used regularly to restrict China’s access to certain U.S. technologies made outside of the United States, even when they are in the hands of foreign companies.It is the latest example of Beijing turning to U.S. precedents for tools it needs to stare down Washington in what appears to be an extended trade war between the world’s two largest economies.“China is learning from the best,” said Neil Thomas, a fellow on Chinese politics at Asia Society Policy Institute’s Center for China Analysis. “Beijing is copying Washington’s playbook because it saw firsthand how effectively U.S. export controls could constrain its own economic development and political choices.”He added: “Game recognizes game.” The idea goes back to at least 2018 It was in 2018, when President Donald Trump launched a trade war with China, that Beijing felt the urgency to adopt a set of laws and policies that it could readily deploy when new trade conflicts arise. And it looked to Washington for ideas.Its Unreliable Entity List, established in 2020 by the Chinese Ministry of Commerce, resembles the U.S. Commerce Department’s “entity list” that restricts certain foreign companies from doing businesses with the U.S.In 2021, Beijing adopted the anti-foreign sanction law, allowing agencies such as the Chinese Foreign Ministry to deny visas and freeze the assets of unwelcome individuals and businesses similar to what the U.S. State Department and the U.S. Department of Treasury can do.Calling it a toolkit against foreign sanctions, intervention and long-arm jurisdiction, the state-run news agency China News in a 2021 news report cited an ancient Chinese teaching, saying Beijing would be “hitting back with the enemy’s methods.”The law “has combed through relevant foreign legislation and taken into consideration the international law and the basic principles of international relations,” said the Chinese scholar Li Qingming as quoted in the news report. He also said it could deter the other side from escalating.Other formal measures Beijing has adopted in the past several years include expanded export controls and foreign investment review tools.Jeremy Daum, a senior research scholar in law and senior fellow at Yale Law School’s Paul Tsai China Center, said Beijing often draws from foreign models in developing its laws in non-trade, non foreign-related areas. As China seeks capabilities to retaliate in kind in trade and sanctions, the tools are often “very parallel” to those of the U.S., he said.Both governments also have adopted a “holistic view of national security,” which expands the concept to justify restrictions on each other, Daum said. Things accelerated this year When Trump launched his trade war with China shortly after he returned to the White House earlier this year, Beijing readily deployed its new tools in addition to raising tariffs to match those imposed by the U.S. president.In February, in response to Trump’s first 10% tariff on China over allegations that Beijing failed to curb the flow of chemicals used to make fentanyl, the Chinese Commerce Ministry put PVH Group, which owns Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger and the biotechnology company Illumina, on the unreliable entity list.That barred them from engaging in China-related import or export activities and from making new investments in the country. Beijing also announced export controls on tungsten, tellurium, bismuth, molybdenum and indium, which are elements critical to the production of modern high-tech products.In March, when Trump imposed the second 10%, fentanyl-related tariff, Beijing placed 10 more U.S. firms on its unreliable entity list and added 15 U.S. companies to its export control list, including aerospace and defense companies like General Dynamics Land Systems and General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, among others, asserting that they “endanger China’s national security and interests.”Then came the so-called “Liberation Day” tariffs in April, when Beijing not only matched Trump’s sky-high tariff of 125% but also blacklisted more U.S. companies and announced export controls on more rare earth minerals. That led to a pause in the shipment of magnets needed in manufacturing a wide range of products such as smartphones, electric vehicles, jet planes and missiles.While the new tools have allowed China to stare down the United States, Daum said they are not without risks.“The dangers in such a facially balanced and fair approach are, one, what one side sees as reciprocity the other might interpret as escalation,” he said. And second, “in a race to the bottom, nobody wins.” Didi Tang, Associated Press
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E-Commerce
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