Digital Scams

On the changing risk and threat environment.

A. The Financial Times has an excellent podcast on digital scams. As the economy gets worse; salaries freeze or decline; inflation rises; and the cost of living gets worse, more people will be driven by a convenience / opportunity motivation to harness technology and to engage in digital scams. Many are very sophisticated - and go well beyond cryptocurrencies, tokenisation, ransomware, and romance scams.

B. The New Yorker’s John Cassidy signals the United States elite media stance that the second Trump administration’s revival of a Monroe doctrine of having a sphere of influence and pursuing oil geopolitics with Venezuela (and other countries like Mexico) will be costly. However, Trump and his team are likely using this as a catalyst event to arbitrage the energy, oil and commodities markets via near-term mispricings. They will also have done a cost-benefit analysis on the likely long-term gains and the cumulative advantages. This is also where liberal and progressive uses of futures studies and strategic foresight may have normative insights - and will suffer in terms of their execution against more authoritarian and strategic actors.

C. Today’s MIT OCW free course is All The President’s Generals: Civil Military Relations in the US and Beyond created by Dr Sara Plana (teaching details). Dr Plana’s Google Scholar profile.

D. PBS American Masters has a forthcoming profile of Holocaust / Shoah survivor and Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel, author of Night (New York: Bantam Books, 1960).

E. Turn Out The Noise (2023) - an Errol Morris film on the financial investment firm Dimensional Fund Advisors.