The Rip Current

Jacob Ward

We're in the invisible grip of technology, politics, and our own weirdness. We gotta get better at seeing it. Hosted by veteran journalist Jacob Ward (correspondent for Al Jazeera, PBS, NBC News, and CNN), The Rip Current is your guide to spotting the hidden forces at work in our lives and getting across them safely. Each week we speak to experts in the stuff you didn't know was having an impact on your life, from venture capital to racism to the tried-and-true tactics of bullies, and teach you how to see The Rip Current before it sweeps you out to sea. Read more at TheRipCurrent.com!

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Wednesday · 21 min
Inside the Meta Settlement: $16.7 Billion, No Fault, and a Clause That Saves Meta $5 Billion.
Meta Platforms settled with 51 state and territorial attorneys general at 6am PT this morning — about an hour after I’d published a vast think piece about what I thought the next six weeks could hold, dang it. It ended the trial taking place in front of Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers in Oakland one day after Instagram head Adam Mosseri began to testify and days before Mark Zuckerberg was scheduled to take the stand. The agreement — you can read it here — requires new tools and design features from Meta, and is worth a maximum of $16,680,647,753.21. But it splits the money into $11.66 billion guaranteed over 10 years, and makes $5.02 billion contingent on some very unusual conditions. Under the agreement’s provision about “Industry-Wide Adoption,” Meta owes the final 30 percent only when Snap, TikTok, and YouTube all come under “substantively equivalent obligations” in a given state, and only when each competitor with annual profits above $10 billion owes that state at least what that state’s own contingency is worth. Section VI.D.3 says any state that fails to get there within ten years permanently forfeits its share, and Meta keeps the money. A separate provision entitles Meta to matching terms if a state later settles with one of those competitors on more favorable terms than Meta received. Will it be worth it to Meta to save the $5 billion? Or will they want to pay that money to ensure their competitors have to play by the same rules? I follow society-changing technology and the landmark cases shaping it, every day, for paid subscribers. Thank you for supporting what i do. I talk through the product changes — the two-hour default cap, the midnight-to-6 a.m. block, the school-hours notification blackout, age assurance and its false-positive targets — and the four notable things excluded from the agreement entirely: direct messaging, long-form video, AI chatbots, and WhatsApp. I also look at the risks we’ve seen from past settlements like the 1998 tobacco Master Settlement Agreement, which had no contingency at all — and what happened five years later when 33 state attorneys general filed a brief asking a court to reduce Philip Morris’s appeal bond. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theripcurrent.com/subscribe
August 22 · 12 min
Meta Trial Day 2: If Zuckerberg Wanted it Done, It Would Be Done
Day two of the multistate trial against Meta in federal court in Oakland, where 29 state attorneys general are asking Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers to reach inside the company and change how Instagram and Facebook work. Arturo Bejar — former head of engineering for Facebook’s protection group, later head of well-being at Instagram — is the states’ first witness, and their strongest. He testified on direct and under cross-examination by Meta’s defense. Bejar told the court that priorities at Meta flow from one person: “If Mark Zuckerberg wakes up and decides something is a priority, then mountains move.” He described a “don’t ask, don’t tell” attitude toward the millions of children under 13 on platforms where they aren’t permitted, product managers who acknowledged knowing and had no plans to act, and Instagram posts where kids stated their own ages outright. He called Meta the most sophisticated company in the world at detecting fake accounts — machine learning made that routine long before anyone called it AI — and said that if the same capability had been aimed at underage accounts, the problem could have been solved in three to six months. After reading a public letter from Zuckerberg claiming the company was succeeding at protecting kids, Bejar told the court that he concluded: “You cannot trust Mark Zuckerberg with kids.” The Rip Current with Jacob Ward is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. On cross, Meta’s lawyers pressed him to call his survey data “subjective.” He refused. Asking a teenager whether they were sexually harassed in the past seven days measures an experience, not an opinion — and the whole defense strategy depends on making that harm sound too squishy to count. I cover the invisible forces shaping our lives, and I’ve been in the courthouse since day one. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theripcurrent.com/subscribe
August 19 · 12 min
The Meta Trial: How Zuck Will Fight Back
Reader note: I’m making these installments free for everyone, as I consider this trial to be a matter of crucial public interest. Still, support the work! Become a paid subscriber to get tech coverage no one else sees, and to keep me on the beat. Meta’s opening statement in Oakland was delivered by Paul Schmidt, a Covington & Burling partner who co-chairs the firm’s product liability and mass torts practice. His track record includes trial wins for McKesson in the opioids litigation, Eli Lilly in the Cymbalta cases, and Hoffmann-La Roche in the Accutane trials. Covington’s own website quotes a book by Washington Post reporters calling one of his cross-examinations “a master class in how to destroy a witness.” I was in the courthouse for both sides. California Deputy Attorney General Megan O’Neill gave the states a four-word shorthand — hook, hold, harvest, hide — and walked the eight-member advisory jury through the gap between what Meta said publicly and what its internal documents show. Schmidt’s answer was a phrase he returned to again and again: wait for all the evidence. His core argument is that science has not established a causal link between rising teen mental health problems and rising social media use. That argument is not wrong on the facts. Science deals in consensus, not certainty, and as the former editor-in-chief of Popular Science I can tell you no serious researcher will ever say a thing is 100% settled. Manufacturing doubt inside that gap is exactly the strategy that worked for Big Tobacco and for the oil industry on climate. The filters fight shows how the same facts get framed twice. O’Neill described Meta banning appearance-altering filters, asking outside experts whether to make the ban permanent, hearing yes from the experts and yes from its own staff — and then Zuckerberg putting them back after seeing the growth numbers. Schmidt described a ten-month review Meta was under no obligation to conduct, ending in a split decision that kept surgery-adjacent filters off and let the giraffe ears back on, all built by third parties in the first place. Anderson Cooper asked me tonight whether this is social media’s cigarette moment. What I wish I’d said: the value of a trial like this is that it turns a decade of vague dread about these products into specific, testable, legislatable language. Arturo Bejar, Instagram’s former head of wellbeing turned whistleblower, took the stand Tuesday for direct examination. I’m waiting for the cross this morning before I bring it to you, so you get both halves. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theripcurrent.com/subscribe
August 19 · 12 min
The Meta Trial: The States Say “We Have the Evidence”
Reader note: I’m making these installments free for everyone, as I consider this trial to be a matter of crucial public interest. Still, support the work! Become a paid subscriber to get tech coverage no one else sees, and to keep me on the beat. I’m outside the federal courthouse in Oakland, where Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers is hearing what may be the biggest legal threat Meta has ever faced — not just because of the dollar amount, but because a federal judge could order the company to fundamentally change how its products work. Twenty-nine states have joined a federal case arguing Meta violated COPPA, the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act — a claim that, if it wins, applies nationwide, not state by state. A smaller group of four states — California, Colorado, Kentucky, and New Jersey — are trying their own state-law claims first, as a test case the other 25 states are waiting to follow. Here’s the twist most coverage (including mine) missed: the $1.4 trillion damages figure everyone’s been repeating — including, briefly, me on CNN last week — didn’t come from the states. It came from Meta. The states’ actual ask is just under $200 billion, still enormous, but a fraction of Meta’s own number. Meta’s lawyers put the trillion-dollar figure out there, and it looks like the goal was to make the whole case sound absurd. I’m not sure it worked the way they hoped. If a company’s product is doing the kind of harm the states are alleging, an existential number might be exactly the point. Beyond the numbers game, California’s Deputy AG walked the jury through Meta’s own internal documents this morning — internal goals to increase teen time spent, internal surveys showing harm rates dramatically higher than what Meta reported publicly, and an internal message from the head of global safety saying the company doesn’t do much to keep teens off the platform. This trial is expected to run four to six weeks, and I’ll be covering it from inside the courtroom the whole way. One detail worth sitting with: on the very same day this trial opened, OpenAI announced a teen version of ChatGPT with new safety guardrails. The entire tech industry is watching this courthouse and adjusting in real time. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theripcurrent.com/subscribe
August 17 · 2 min
Inside Meta's Biggest Case Yet
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.theripcurrent.com Meta goes to trial in Oakland tomorrow, and this one works differently from the two it already lost. Twenty-nine state attorneys general are trying claims that Facebook and Instagram collected personal data from children under 13 without parental consent, violating COPPA, the federal children’s privacy law passed in 1998. Four of those states — Californ…
August 14 · 2 min
Zuckerberg's Biggest Trial Yet
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.theripcurrent.com A.I. Disclosure: I use LLM technology to help with research, fact-checking, document summaries, editing, and rewrites. I’m trying to use it responsibly, but I’m learning as I go. You can read my full ethics disclosure here.
August 13 · 15 min
Why AI Must Confess Now
In 1937, a Texas school exploded because natural gas has no smell — nobody could detect the leak until it killed nearly 300 people, most of them children. Within weeks, Texas passed the first law forcing gas companies to add an odor. That fix, mercaptan, is still the reason your kitchen reeks of rotten eggs during a leak today. It didn’t change the product. It just made an invisible danger detectable — and only because regulators forced the industry’s hand. That’s the history behind this week’s AI news. On August 2nd, the EU AI Act’s transparency rules took effect, requiring any company serving EU users to make AI-generated content detectable — or face a fine of €15 million or 3% of worldwide revenue, whichever is larger. Google and OpenAI committed to compliance back in May. This week Anthropic followed, saying it will embed statistical watermarks in AI-generated text and use C2PA provenance standards for images. None of them have shipped a public tool that lets you or me actually check the mark yet — the additive is in the gas, but we can’t smell it. The bigger question is whether it’s already too late. One widely cited study found nearly half of new articles online are now AI-generated — though a follow-up from the same firm found human-written work still dominates what Google actually surfaces in search. I dig into what that split might mean, and why the social embarrassment of getting “outed” by a watermark might do more to change our behavior than the regulation itself. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theripcurrent.com/subscribe
August 7 · 9 min
Here Come AI Romance Scams
In 2022 I interviewed a young Nigerian man outside Lagos who’d spent years working as a romance scammer, grinding one target at a time until he finally convinced a lonely widow to send him more than $200,000. The lesson of that story was never about technology. For criminals like him, the biggest cost was time. On July 31, OpenAI disclosed a scam operation run out of Poipet, Cambodia — a border town linked to forced labor and trafficking — where a cluster of ChatGPT accounts wrote the romance pitches, translated the messages, and handled the administration: shift tracking, handoff notes between managers, the immigration status of the workers being pressed into the job. OpenAI says it found out because WhatsApp tipped them off, not through its own detection. Bandwidth was the one thing holding scam crime back, and AI removes it. Meanwhile the transborder legal system built to prosecute fraud gets slower and harder to coordinate every year. This is what that gap looks like, and why the people supposed to stop it are already behind. Know anyone who’s been the victim of a romance scam? This post is free, feel free to share it with them. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theripcurrent.com/subscribe
August 6 · 4 min
"You Did It Before You Considered Whether You Should"
I do a lot of hits these days as a contributor to CNN, but I don’t post most of them — you’re getting the raw thinking here as a subscriber. But every so often the conversation produces some nice, new moments, and this interview with Elex Michaelson last night felt like one of those. Thanks, as always, for your support, and here’s more context on what we were discussing: This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theripcurrent.com/subscribe
August 1 · 1 min
Let Us Make A.I. Nudes If We Want, Say Elon Musk's xAI Lawyers
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.theripcurrent.com Minnesota’s HF 1606 takes effect this weekend. It is the first law in the country to target the companies that build “nudification” tools rather than the users who operate them, with civil penalties of $500,000 each time a user generates a prohibited image. On Monday, Elon Musk’s xAI — now owned by SpaceX — sued Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison …
July 16 · 1 min
Here's Where Prediction Markets Go Wrong
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.theripcurrent.com Gabriel Perez has run Donald Trump’s teleprompter since 2016. According to CFTC investigators, he spent months betting on Kalshi’s “Mentions” market on which words and phrases Trump would use in his own speeches, and made more than $100,000 doing it. He’s now in settlement talks with regulators, on unpaid leave from the White House (where the president’…
July 15 · 13 min
Revisiting "The Loop"
I’ve been on a very lovely summer break, thanks to you. Your patience allowed me time with my family camping, roaming New York City in apocalyptic heat, and squiring a kid to a national tournament. I appreciate you sticking with me. Let’s get back to it.Four years ago (damn it, I think this means I have to write a new book) I finished The Loop: How AI is Creating a World without Choices and How to Fight Back. In it I posed the highly speculative thesis that commercial AI would fundamentally alter our ability to make good decisions, and not in a good way, because our brains are built to offload choices whenever and however we can, and because as my decades of time reporting on the tech industry has taught me, its incentives always drive it to amplifying our worst impulses. As a commenter on TikTok said to me the other day, “The only thing worse than being wrong is being early.” Amen, sister. The Loop was my effort to draw a line between the best and worst parts of being human, so we could sort out which ones we want to allow tech companies to amplify. This summary is free. Keep up with the rest of that fight by subscribing. I’ve been on a jag of speaking gigs — perhaps you’d like to book me yourself? — in which the book’s thesis is finding ever-more-receptive audiences, from boardrooms to professional organizations. Everyone seems to be feeling the malaise of using this stuff, and want to sort out the best way to resist it. So here I’ve broken down the basics of what I argued. Short version: Your brain runs on shortcuts — what Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky called System 1, the fast-thinking brain that drives your car, picks your lunch, and carries you through the day on autopilot. (System 2, your slow-thinking brain, is for the rare moments of caution, creativity, and mindfulness when you fully engage your decision-making abilities.) That autopilot kept our ancestors alive. It makes moving through our day a light load, cognitively speaking. But it's also at the root of prejudice, bad choices with money, and political and financial manipulation. It's also the exact vulnerability that a system built to make your choices for you is perfectly suited to exploit, because your brain is wired to hand off effort wherever it can.So I make the case for cognitive friction — for what one federal judge described to me as "weak perfection": the idea that a harder, slower process is what keeps a mind strong. Entering a guilty plea is a pain, yes, but that's a good thing, because that choice is permanent, and will change your life — and a system that makes the decision frictionless takes away your chance to put your best thinking into it. That’s the challenge we face in all walks of our cognitive lives from here on out. Let’s get ready to protect what’s important. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theripcurrent.com/subscribe
June 24 · 25 min
The Fight to Protect You Against AI (with Rep Sara Jacobs)
Rep. Sara Jacobs (D-CA) just introduced the Sectoral AI Governance Act, a bill that would let federal agencies enforce existing laws — on housing, hiring, disability rights, benefits — when an algorithm is the one making the decision. It creates no new crimes. It’s what she calls a “minimum viable product.” I sat down with her to push on the hard parts: why the bill leans on agency power at the exact moment the Trump administration is stripping it and suing states over their AI laws; what it means that a $140 million super PAC backed by Andreessen Horowitz, OpenAI’s president, and a Palantir co-founder is spending to beat candidates who back regulation; and why she keeps comparing AI to the early days of commercial aviation. We get into the evidentiary trap that makes algorithmic discrimination so hard to prove, her four-level map for governing AI, her fear of an AI “Fukushima,” and her blunt fallback if Congress does nothing: the states. Paid subscribers get early access to this and all my analysis. For written reports, including all the source documents, consider becoming one. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theripcurrent.com/subscribe
June 10 · 30 sec
The Lightphone Takes Your Choices Away...to Give You More Freedom (with Joe Hollier)
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.theripcurrent.com Joe Hollier was 24 when he started building a phone designed to do almost nothing. Calls. Texts. Alarm. Music, maybe. Directions if you needed them. That was the list. The Light Phone launched on Kickstarter in 2015 to a polarizing reaction: why would you pay for a phone that does less on purpose? Eleven years later, Hollier doesn’t have to answer that q…
May 28 · 44 min
Comparing Notes with Jacob Ward
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theripcurrent.com/subscribe
May 26 · 11 min
The Pope Slams Silicon Valley
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.theripcurrent.com Yesterday the Vatican published Magnifica Humanitas — Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical and the Catholic Church’s official moral teaching on AI. I woke up at 5am to read it, and it’s remarkable. It names algorithmic systems making decisions about credit, jobs, and welfare benefits. It names data extraction from poor countries as a new form of colonialism. …
May 19 · 5 min
Musk Lost in Court. But Who Won, Exactly?
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.theripcurrent.com A jury in Oakland took ninety minutes Monday morning to dismiss Elon Musk’s lawsuit against Sam Altman and OpenAI. The verdict didn’t touch the substantive questions — whether Altman lied to co-founders, whether the nonprofit-to-profit conversion was a betrayal, whether the company “stole a charity,” as Musk alleged. The jury found Musk filed too late. …
May 16 · 19 min
The CEOs Who Flew to China and Got Nothing
Trump brought a dozen of America's most powerful CEOs to Beijing this week — Jensen Huang, Tim Cook, Elon Musk, and others — to meet with Xi Jinping. The optics were big. The results were not. And the whole experience was presumably a nightmare for Trump's emotional-support CEOs.Here's why: these companies aren't trying to expand into China. They're trying to hold onto what they already have — and in most cases, they're losing it anyway. Tim Cook has built Apple's entire supply chain around China. Nvidia has gone from 95% AI chip market share in China to nearly zero. Musk is trying to sell Teslas in a country that views Starlink as a military threat.The world that made Silicon Valley possible — the open-market, borderless-money era that began when China joined the WTO in 2001 — is over. And no amount of diplomatic face time with Xi Jinping, or plane rides with Trump, is going to bring it back. Paid subscribers get early access to this and all my analysis, as well as written reports, including all the source documents. The Rip Current with Jacob Ward is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theripcurrent.com/subscribe
May 13 · 6 min
Sam Altman Under Oath
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.theripcurrent.com I watched Sam Altman testified yesterday in the Musk v. OpenAI trial in Oakland — his first and possibly only day on the stand. Within two minutes of cross-examination, Musk’s attorney Stephen Molo was asking him point-blank whether he tells lies to advance his business interests. Altman’s answers were careful to the point of being revealing: “I believe…
May 12 · 14 min
Sam Altman's Own Hero Calls Him a Liar. Now He Faces a Jury.
Read what Altman’s colleagues and cofounders say about his pattern of dishonesty in this morning’s piece, free for everyone. Ilya Sutskever — the AI researcher who helped build OpenAI and is widely credited with turning the transformer model into ChatGPT — took the stand on Monday and confirmed under oath that he spent a year assembling a 52-page dossier on Sam Altman’s conduct, concluding that Altman “exhibits a consistent pattern of lying, undermining his execs, and pitting his execs against one another.” That testimony follows sworn statements from former CTO Mira Murati, former board member Helen Toner, and former board member Tasha McCauley — all describing the same pattern. Altman is expected to take the stand today with all of that hanging over him. But here’s the thing: none of that may actually matter for the outcome of this case. I break down what the jury is actually being asked to decide, why Musk’s legal hill is steeper than it looks, and what Sutskever’s extraordinary testimony reveals about the people building the most consequential technology in the world. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theripcurrent.com/subscribe

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