Mind and Iron: How Ron DeSantis is trying to stifle a planet-saving innovation
Also, the AI celebrity-doppelganger era is upon us. And an Airbnb trend that merits no stars.
Hi and welcome back to another riproaring edition of Mind and Iron. I'm Steve Zeitchik, veteran of The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times and chief attendant of this tech-news roller rink.
Every Thursday we tell you what's happening in the world of AI, science and the future. With an obsessive focus on the human — not the corporate or the cult of personality. Please consider pledging a few dollars to our cause.
This week: we've told you in the past about the many benefits of lab-grown or clean meat, which is real animal products but without all the animal farming, slaughtering and environment-damaging. So why is Ron DeSantis banning it? More important, can he be stopped from throttling this innovation? We talk to the Florida legislator who will try until the cows come home.
Also, we've hit the celebrity-double phase of the AI moment, and it's weirder and scarier than you think. Just because someone seems to be at an event, doesn’t mean they’re at the event. As we saw this week at one of the splashiest events this country has to offer — the Met Gala.
Finally, Airbnb has decided to push a new kind of offering. It's what awaits — but should we want it to be?
First, the future-world quote of the week. It comes from Katy Perry at said Met Gala and has an oddly zeitgeist-y message.
“lol mom, the AI got you, too.”
—Katy Perry, after said maternal unit was convinced she knew how her daughter was spending the night
Let's get to the messy business of building the future.
IronSupplement
Everything you do — and don’t — need to know in future-world this week
Ron DeSantis’ ‘don’t say fake’ initiative; Baby, you’re an AI-work; when we only book rooms if they were in a movie
1. OVER FIVE TOTALLY QUIET, BRIDGE-BUILDING YEARS IN OFFICE, FLORIDA GOVERNOR RON DESANTIS HAS TARGETED LGBTQ education, gas stoves, trans bathrooms, Walt Disney theme parks and other trollish bugaboos as part of his war on woke.
But his latest is eyebrow-raising even for him. He’s going after…cultivated meat.
Yes, you read that right.
Cultivated (or clean) meat, which as this space has noted could be one of the true earth-saving innovations of our time, is the process by which animal cells are fed sugars, proteins and fat in the lab and eventually turned into meat. Same taste and texture — none of the gargantuan toll.
Clean meat could make a dent in the ten billion cows, chickens, pigs and turkeys that are now in the U.S. farm system at any given time (double what it was as recently as the late 1980s). All of that is bad for the environment (given both methane emissions and what it takes to raise and feed the animals); bad for our health (given the sheer impossibility of monitoring the state of all of them); and likely even bad for our soul (given the kind of conditions you need to impose to keep ten billion animals around).
There are some 150 clean meat startups in the U.S., which has emerged as the space’s leader. Including two — the Bay Area’s Upside and Good Meat — that already won FDA approval last year and have begun to serve cultivated chicken in select restaurants. Some are even using other tech besides the cell cultivation.
All of this is setting up perfectly. Unlike solar power or semiconductors — areas where the U.S. lagged — this time we’re right at the vanguard of a future-oriented tech that benefits everyone and, oh yes, will also create a whole new sector of jobs and address climate change besides. As Americans, we know how to cook and we know how to eat. If a better meat is going to be created, it stands to reason we’re going to be the ones to do it.
Enter DeSantis, who last week signed into law a bill from the Republican-led legislature banning all production and sale of cultivated meat in Florida.
Enter DeSantis’ logic:
“Florida is fighting back against the global elite’s plan to force the world to eat meat grown in a petri dish or bugs to achieve their authoritarian goals,” DeSantis said. “We will save our beef.”
All the Substacks in the world wouldn’t be enough to dissect the howlers in that paragraph. (There’s actually a force-them-to-eat-bugs conspiracy theory he’s dog-whistling; you don’t want to know). Suffice it to say that an added meat product in a grocery freezer seems neither authoritarian nor like a global-elite plan. In fact if it’s authoritarianism we’re talking about, maybe we’d start not with a few lab tinkerers in Northern California but the country’s third-largest state banning an entire safe industry for no good reason.
DeSantis wasn’t the only one just saying absolutely bonkers things for what is a pretty straight-up protectionist law/anti-woke troll.
The president of the US Cattlemen’s Association, Justin Tupper, said cultivated meat could “weigh on the backs of our good reputation of the safest, best protein on the planet,” referring to the country’s cattle supply. (To which one can only quote Katy Petty: Lol.”)
One of the backers of the bill, the GOP legislator Dean Black, said cultivated meat could present a national security threat because a missile could hit the labs and endanger America’s food supply. (Couldn’t that also happen at, like, Frito-Lay?) He also said “In Florida, we don’t want our citizens used as guinea pigs.” But wouldn’t the people who buy cultivated meat be choosing to eat it, not marched down Aisle 4 and force-fed it in front of their families? The global-elite-is-trying-to-poison-us-with-insects theory is almost starting to sound sane.
Of course none of this is about actual principles or protecting anything but the bank accounts of the ranchers, who clearly see the product as something consumers might want or they wouldn’t need to be doing this in the first place. (Florida, btw, is the country’s ninth-largest producer of beef.)
The Florida Agriculture Commissioner Wilton Simpson, who has been a key engine of the ban, pretty much said the quiet part out loud when he noted in a statement that cultivated meat was a “disgraceful attempt” to attack “the integrity of American agriculture.” Or maybe di$graceful.
What a shock — shock — to learn, then, that Black himself is a cattle rancher. And Simpson is not a disinterested party — he owns an egg farm worth $11 million. All of this isn’t about principles — it’s about protectionism. For the officials.
Or even personal provocation. As some have pointed out , new Florida resident and prominent anti-woke bogey man Jeff Bezos recently invested $60 million in cultivated meat.
I called Lori Berman, a Democratic state senator from Florida, who has fought against the ban, to see what she thought about it.
“I keep laughing that this somehow represents the idea of freedom like the Republicans keep saying,” Berman told me. “I can’t see any way to defend it on those grounds when you’re banning a whole industry.” She sees the ban as pretty much what it is: another DeSantis culture-war broadside and pure protectionism for the ranchers.
One thing that troubles Berman is all the talk about petri dishes and guinea pigs. “I guess Florida officials who did no research know better than the U.S. government and the FDA that did years of research,” she said.
But what really galls her is how it contradicts the governor’s own rhetoric.
“This was supposed to be the state where companies can come because it’s so welcoming to them. Jobs jobs jobs — that’s what DeSantis promised. And now he’s just shutting down a whole industry.” She noted that one of the clean-meat entrepreneurs who testified during deliberations of the bill said they had actually considered moving from California to Florida because of the state’s lower level of regulation. (They won’t be doing that now.)
The Florida ban could give momentum to other states who want to do the same thing — Alabama, Arizona and Tennessee are all considering comparable measures.
What’s at stake here is not just the environment and our food supply but our national competitiveness and even security. China has already made cultivated meat a key part of its five-year agricultural plan. The innovation is coming, many experts feel; wouldn’t it be better if the U.S. was leading it?
“I mean ,you’re talking about a resource that unlike microchips and unlike solar power we actually can be at the forefront of,” said Paul Shapiro, one of the world’s leading experts on clean meat and author of a definitive book on the subject, when I called to ask him about it. “We have 150 companies here already. We should be incentivizing them, not punishing them.”
He added, “It’s even a matter of national security. Do you want other countries to have the crude oil? Or do you want to have it yourself?” Shapiro also astutely (and funnily) compared the ban to government at the dawn of streaming trying to pass legislation to protect Blockbuster. (We’ll have a longer conversation with him in a future issue.)
The craziest part of the law is that even if you are a rancher this is no threat to you now. Scaling cultivated meat to the point that it will be cheap enough for average consumers won’t happen until sometime in the 2030’s at the earliest.
Which is why I think this law won’t really matter. By the time cultivated meat is a real option, enough states (and even the federal government) will see the value in it that the industry should be just fine.
There may be setbacks — look at what auto-industry resistance did to electric vehicles for years. But eventually that will change. The product will get too good, the cost sufficiently low and the problems with the environment and traditional cattle-farming too many for it not to. You may even see Florida come around.
“I can imagine a point where some of the Republicans who passed this ban will reverse course,” Berman said. “They won’t admit they’re wrong — they’ll just claim that they finally investigated themselves and can now pronounce it safe.
“Or maybe they’ll just travel to a restaurant in a different state and say ‘hey, this stuff is pretty good.’”
2. BLAME IT ON MY FREQUENT EXPOSURE TO MOVIES ABOUT BODY DOUBLES, but few activities bring me as much joy as dreaming up fun doppelganger film plots. You know the type — "The Prestige," "The Parent Trap," “Dead Ringers,” "The One I Love,” with all the characters that confuse everyone about who's the original and who's the spinoff.
Even the wildest flight of fancy, though, couldn't conceive of what happened Monday night at the Met Gala. That's when, as you may have seen, Katy Perry appeared on the red carpet in a flowing floral gown. There was ooing and aahing: she looked great at the midtown Manhattan gala as she honored “The Garden of Time" dress code, the train bleeding into the mossy carpet beneath. Even her mom liked the getup, writing to her daughter, “What a gorgeous gown, you look like the Rose Parade, you are your own float.”
The photo materialized on our screens, dazzling us amid all the other images that streamed past us online. The pic even showed up in Perry’s own feed.
But as we soon found out, the image wasn’t Katy Perry. Or, it wasn’t the flesh-and-blood Katie Perry. As numerous commenters noted, some pithily.
This had been generated by an online mischief-maker. They dropped it into the digital ocean and — boom — watched it spread to distant shores.
A little while later someone posted a photo of a Rihanna dress. There were birds, and branches and, again, flowers. And yet again, there was computer code. This was AI too. (Rihanna had dyed her hair pink for the occasion and didn't even end up making it; People Magazine revealed she had the flu.) Someone then tried the same with Dua Lipa and another Perry image. But by then, we were hip to the game. Mostly.
With 12 million views and 313,000 likes, the initial Perry image was more than some little prank. Or at least, it has the potential to be. Photos like these could dupe large chunks of society. This photo did dupe large chunks of society.
Nor do you need to have some massive platform to do it — the user who posted the initial Perry image has 795 followers. And in fact as a fake it didn’t rate very high -- the carpet wasn't even the right color. Yet all this still fooled hundreds of thousands of people, including Perry’s own mom. (Hence her response, “lol mom the AI got you, too, BEWARE.” )
It’s worth taking a minute to think about why. First off, of course, we don't really spend much time scrutinizing any one of these images; there’s another coming right behind it. Second, for all the cultural chatter about AI, we're simply not conditioned to look for it yet.
But maybe most important is a psychological factor. The famous Invisible Gorilla Test by a pair of Harvard researchers 25 years ago (that basketball-passing video) established what has come to be known as "selective attention" — the idea that the human brain has the capacity to block out extraordinarily obvious pieces of information if it’s not expecting them.
In this case, it actually would have made sense for Perry to be at the Met Gala, as she has a new album out this year and also has attended nine times before. In this case, scanning social media for all these images of celebrities on the red carpet year in and year out prevented us from thinking a given personality on social media might not be there this year. So goes the power of suggestion – or at least the power of Midjourney.
I suppose soon enough we’ll start programming our brains to expect fakes, but then, we’ll also start wrongly assuming some real appearances are fake, so I’m not sure we’ll come out ahead on this score. (We’ll also get better at looking for telltale photographic signs of an AI fake, like a person’s hands, but then, the tech will get better al eliminating those signs too.)
What’s maybe most concerning — and most indicative of where we’re headed — is what it actually took here to undo our false beliefs. Namely — a lot of on-the-scene humans. As Tech Crunch put it. "No fashion magazine has reported on Katy Perry’s look tonight — it doesn’t look like she’s actually attending this year."
So there it is. The only way to undo the distortive power of tech is with hundreds of journalists — hundreds of real-life humans — there implicitly contradicting the point. Which can happen when you have one of the most covered events on the planet. Of course if we’re relying on humans seeing something in the flesh to neutralize tech fibs elsewhere, we’re in trouble. Tech with its power to be everywhere will win that battle 99.9 percent of the time. And honestly, there are probably still people out there who looked at the Perry news only glancingly and will assume she was there. Pictures of last night, ended up online, we’re screwed.
Also, there has been research showing that even when we know rationally an image was fake, our brains still recall it as real months later.
Needless to say, the disinformation power here is strong. What will it happen when an AI elected official is dropped into a rally for a cause they don’t support? Or an alleged criminal shown to be far from the scene of the crime? An innocent shown at the scene of a crime? Or even on a personal, Larry David-ish level, when a colleague we didn’t see at that work bash starts appearing in the photos from same? In ways profound and trivial, our society is built on the bedrock of photographic evidence, and this bedrock is slowly going, going, gone.
But we’ve read that riot act to you before. I wanted to wind down by just focusing on the more narrow use case from the Met Gala. Put simply, what does it mean that celebrities could appear to have been somewhere they’re not? In some cases they’ll actively not want to be, and the publicity team will be working overtime to say they didn’t attend X event because they were out doing Y. (As someone who’s survived their share of red-carpet scrums, I can tell you this is a harder point to clear up than you’d think.)
In other cases the celebrity’s interest might be ambiguous, as it was here. Perry on Monday posted a video of her rehearsing in what appeared to be a studio…but she also posted the AI Met Gala image too, suggesting at some level she at least wanted to have fun with the idea that she was there.
And then there will be a third set of cases, at the far other end of the spectrum, where a celebrity actively wants to make it seem like they made an appearance. For a cause they support. Or because they didn’t want to seem lazy. Or for any other reason public figures want to appear to have rubbed shoulders they never grazed.
Combine this with avatars and the idea that some of these events will eventually be taking place with a strong virtuality component to begin with, and one can imagine celebrities leaning in to the idea of a digital representation for an event they never left their compound for.
It’s not even hard to envision a world in which a celebrity’s team proudly proclaims an AI appearance, which I actually think could be kind of fun and add another layer to how a public figure throws their weight behind an idea. “Ms. Perry was unfortunately not able to attend the fundraiser tonight, but she believes the cause is important and sent her AI double instead.” We’ll roll our eyes. And yet still take note of the celebrity’s AI presence and perhaps even remember them months later as attending. Because the most powerful tool in these digital representations isn’t really technological at all: it’s our desire to believe.
3. HERE AT THE MIND AND IRON CORRAL WE DON’T JUST LOOK AT the latest developments in cutting edge tech and science. We look at regular ol' trends that technology has made possible. And this week we have a doozy.
It concerns…vacation accommodations. They’ve become something different than what most of us knew growing up — or, even five years ago. That is, a place you go that is comfortable, convenient and luxurious (if you have the money) or serviceable (if you don’t).
No, what we have slowly been doing is swapping out those seemingly basic criteria with a whole new set of parameters: sleeping in a place that is transcendent, life-changing and eye-catching to as many people as possible.
This month we hit a new high (low?) in that quest.
Airbnb chief executive Brian Chesky recently brought a whole bunch of reporters out to the New Mexico desert to show off the “Up” house listing — a lodging designed to look like the signature abode from the 2009 Pixar movie and that actually flies for a little bit (by crane).
It's all part of a new Airbnb initiative called "Icons,” in which the company will partner with brands and studios to sell lodging that connects to some cultural memory or another. They’re picking up on something that’s already worked out well for them as one-offs with Barbie’s Malibu Dream House and Carrie Bradshaw’s apartment. Now they’re formalizing it as a division of their business.
This year, Chesky says, the number of Icon stays will go from a handful to 4,000.
Now, on one level this is just simple boardroom strategy, one more way for a firm to make some money and appease a Wall Street worried about its revenues. With some harmless fun for consumers. You want to spend a month’s salary cosplaying Carl Fredericksen under a bunch of balloons? Go for it.
But it also seems to be hinting at a trend that has been happening and is now accelerating: the idea of making every aspect of American life, or at least vacation, into a once-in-a-life-time experience (until next year).
Or maybe more accurately, the ability to tell everyone how you've had a once-in-a-lifetime experience.
Just a few years ago we might have called this the Instagrammification of everything— the phenomenon, still going strong, in which anyone glancing at a computer screen will be inundated with someone else's better-looking breakfast.
But Icons strikes me as something else, the feeling not that your own private or cool or even glamor-adjacent moment has to be documented to the world, but the idea that something that happened to you has never happened to anyone before and might never again.
So maybe the better word for it is the Iconification of our culture. It's the convergence of two distinct phenomena: a memified pop culture with the idea that simply having a basically cool experience is no longer enough.
The charitable way to view this is as touching on humanity's innate quest for the unique. The less charitable way to view it as some posturing silliness.
I don't want to yell too loudly to get off my ("Fields of Dreams") lawn (bookable for overnight stays since 2018); I've driven dozens of miles to be photographed with the Stanley Cup and wasn't...not interested in seeking out the gravesite of the man who inspired Jack Dawson in "Titanic."
But it seems to me we're moving the trend from just a winky brush with fan objects into a whole new level of existential demonstrativeness — a state-of-being that renders any tourism or even life moment that doesn't come with singular cachet pretty much worthless.
What's ironic about this is that tech, which created the problem by providing these tools, is now coming along to offer the solution. If Instagram and Airbnb made it so that you can give everyone FOMO by blasting out images of that sweet villa, it's now coming along, like a drug dealer aware the high isn't coming like it used to, to sell you something more because that sweet villa is not enough. This FOMO game is like inflation in 2021: no matter what you pay, you're going to need to spend more.
And that's the real problem here. Iconification culture is a definitionally unsatisfiable beast — a kind of social Zeno’s paradox.
At first it was just about a premium cool experience. But over time everyone began having those experiences, and then where were we? Strikingly scenic views were great in the 2010's; they impressed us then. Now in the 2020’s we need “Up” and “Barbie” houses. And then what? If the only way to have a meaningful travel experience is to do something literally no one else is doing — while companies like Airbnb need to sell as many of these experiences as possible — that means we’ll never do something no one else is doing, and never reach the trend’s logical end. We’ll just frantically chase it, increasingly becoming the embodiment of that scene in "Life of Brian," where a thronging mob is told "you are all individuals," and they all answer back as one "we are all individuals." (You can’t stay in a Monty Python location — yet.)
And then frantically seek out the next big thing, this time no doubt nudged along by the increasingly persuasive realities of holograms and AI.
For years social scientists have observed a trend known as the Nownership phenomenon, in which Millennials prefer to spend money on experiences over things, with a famous Harris poll a few years ago backing it up. In many ways this is a great development, an immaterialism that privileges the kinds of social connections and memories that empirically tend to make us a lot happier than a new car.
But Iconification feels a little like this trend run amok. Replacing a lust for objects with cool times feels good; defining those cool times as something that can only take place in a Malibu Barbie House, less so.
So sleep under the roof Noah built for Allie in “The Notebook,” lather up your hair where Norman killed Marion in “Psycho,” throw back a tumbler of tomato juice where the Cullens settled down for family dinner in “Twilight.” Hey, it sounds fun (for five minutes). We just shouldn’t be too surprised if the satisfying effect this has is less on our psyche than on Brian Chesky’s bank account.
The Mind and Iron Totally Scientific Apocalypse Score
Every week we bring you the TSAS — the TOTALLY SCIENTIFIC APOCALYPSE SCORE (tm). It’s a barometer of the biggest future-world news of the week, from a sink-to-our-doom -5 or -6 to a life-is-great +5 or +6 the other way. Last year ended with a score of -21.5 — gulp. Can 2024 do better? So far it’s been pretty good. This week it’s…less so.
FLORIDA BANS A FOOD INNOVATION THAT CAN SAVE US: -3
CELEBRITY AI PHOTOS ARE HERE: Could be fun, in some cases. +1.5
AIRBNB TRIES TO SELL US MEANING: -2