fortune--2020-10-06--Trump kills hope of more stimulus checks as approval rating on the economy falls

“I have instructed my representatives to stop negotiating until after the election,” Donald Trump wrote on Twitter Tuesday afternoon. He went on to write that, “after I win, we will pass a major Stimulus Bill that focuses on hardworking Americans and Small Business.”
The stock market immediately sank on the news, with the Dow down 374 points or 1.33% at 3:20 p.m. ET.
The declaration comes a day after Trump was released from Walter Reed hospital and returned the White House. As CNN put it: “A strongly medicated President Donald Trump bolted from his VIP hospital bubble Monday, staging a bizarre White House comeback that included an irresponsible mask removal and a reckless pronouncement there is nothing to fear from COVID-19, which has already killed 210,000 Americans.”
On Saturday, Trump had tweeted: “OUR GREAT USA WANTS & NEEDS STIMULUS. WORK TOGETHER AND GET IT DONE. Thank you!” Indeed, on the economic front, a second round of $1,200 stimulus checks had been widely embraced by both parties as a way to help Americans that are still reeling from the economic effects of the pandemic. House speaker Nancy Pelosi and treasury secretary Steve Mnuchin have been negotiating for the past two weeks to try and hammer out a second stimulus deal after talks fell apart earlier this summer. The overall size of the package has been the main sticking point: Democrats were pushing for a package worth at least $2.2 trillion, but the White House hasn’t wanted to go above $1.6 trillion. The parties had gotten a bit closer since August when Democratic leaders wanted $3.4 trillion and Republicans were determined not to go above $1 trillion.
Interestingly, Trump’s decision to cease talks and kill the possibility of more stimulus checks before the election comes the same day as a CNN poll finds voters are now evenly split at 48% on Trump’s handling of the economy. That’s a marked change from early March when 54% of those polled approved of his handling of the economy vs. 42% who did not.
Earlier Tuesday Fed chief Jerome Powell weighed in, saying that he too was worried about the fragile state of the economy. “The expansion is still far from complete,” Powell said in a speech to the National Association for Business Economics. “Too little support would lead to a weak recovery, creating unnecessary hardship for households and businesses. Over time, household insolvencies and business bankruptcies would rise, harming the productive capacity of the economy, and holding back wage growth.”
Though Trump has long touted a strong economy as his signature issue, Goldman Sachs’ chief economist wrote on Monday wrote that a blue wave would actually be plus for the economy. “All else equal, such a blue wave would likely prompt us to upgrade our forecasts. The reason is that it would sharply raise the probability of a fiscal stimulus package of at least $2 trillion shortly after the presidential inauguration on January 20, followed by longer-term spending increases on infrastructure, climate, health care and education that would at least match the likely longer-term tax increases on corporations and upper-income earners,” Jan Hatzius wrote.
Reaction to Trump’s declaration on Twitter was mixed. “You actually have the presidency now, I’m not sure if you realize that? So you can pass that now and help the people that are suffering in this country you claim to love so much. Not really sure why u keep saying “when I’m elected, when I’m elected,” wrote one commenter.
Another simply added: “Don’t sweat it, bro. We got a new guy coming in to take over soon.”


fortune--2020-10-06--Will 2020’s racial reckoning lead to progress on marketing’s long-standing representation problems?

Here ’ s when your second stimulus check could arrive if Congress passes more economic aid

When the client request for a private school advertisement hit her desk, Le’Shae Robinson thought, Here comes another Caucasian-only order. The directive came from the client’s salesperson, and Robinson’s job was to help the digital advertising team execute––even if that client wanted to only attract white children with their campaign.
The advertising industry has struggled with diversity for a long time. When Americans called for change after more instances of police brutality this summer, the industry was one of many announcing its commitment to improve. For people like Robinson who must deal with racism both in their daily lives and in corporate spaces, these announcements fueled hope tempered with long-standing doubt.
A steady customer for the advertising company, the school was a hard opponent to face down. When “white-only” orders came in, the team acknowledged that it was wrong, but as the only Black person at the table, Robinson didn’t feel as if she had much power to move things past a conversation.
“I could have taken [off the “white-only” directive], but if I were to change it and the customer got different results, it would have very obviously been me that did it. Nobody else would really care,” Robinson says.
Too much noise, she reasoned, and she would be out of there. When Robinson started a new job with a larger advertising agency, it ended up happening anyway. Robinson pitched the idea of hiring more people of color to leadership. Friends in other departments asked her questions about Black audiences and how to speak to them all the time; why not hire Black people with the cultural competency and knowledge for those teams as well? In December, Robinson prepared a presentation for executives intent on highlighting the financial benefits of both hiring Black employees and investing in multicultural research.
“How can we tap into the $2.2 trillion buying powers of minorities?” a presentation slide asked.
The following month, Robinson was let go, with the company citing budget cuts. This summer that same company announced a new hiring policy: For new positions, at least half of all potential candidates must be a person of color. “We have not done enough,” the company statement read. It also released data about hiring demographics that revealed no Black employees, on any team.
The company was one of 30 that decided to reveal their diversity numbers following a call for transparency from 600 Black professionals across the industry. Those signees became a formal nonprofit––600 & Rising––led by marketers Bennett D. Bennett and Nathan Young with the goal of advocating for the advancement of Black talent in the industry.
Reality check
Already Jorge Martínez, the vice president of multicultural research firm C+R Research, has seen that commitment ebb and flow. While the firm’s clients immediately requested more research and training around multicultural marketing in May following the series of protests, Martínez has seen that interest drop. Kenosha fueled another spike.
“When these type of situations happen, I would say there’s almost like a second wave––similar to COVID––where it’s picking up again. And we’ve seen both more requests from the research perspective, but also in education,” he says.
Although the interest is rewarding, Martínez says it’s also happening during a very inconvenient year when it comes to marketing and research funds. Companies with slashed budgets are having to make tradeoffs, deciding to invest more on one ethnic group over the other to avoid hurting their budgets even more.
Typically C+R Research might see a couple of projects a year strictly focused on the Black community, but Ashleigh Williams says 2020 is different. When Williams came into this business as a Black researcher, it took her years to connect with other Black researchers in her field. With the rise of Black Lives Matter protests, a group of Black market researchers have begun meeting, and the camaraderie there, Williams says, gives her hope.
“We’ve been asking ourselves, how do we bring in a generation of researchers, but also how can the older generation mentor the younger?” she says, adding that for her role in marketing, there are few people of color to begin with.
For companies that are still not convinced, the Alliance for Inclusive and Multicultural Marketing (AIMM) is working to create an industry standard that they can’t ignore. According to the U.S. Census, 42% of the population identify with one or more of these underrepresented groups: Black, Hispanic, disabled, or LGBTQ+. And yet, an AIMM Benchmark Study found that only 16% of marketers research how to communicate with these audiences effectively. A lack of data is a big excuse used to not invest in more, says Lisette Arsuaga, cofounder of AIMM, a branch of the Association of National Advertisers.
“The bottom line is that those who are dragging their feet are going to miss out,” says Arsuaga. “They might not engage us at this point. What’s going to engage them is the growth in their competitors that’s going to make others take notice and do things differently.”
AIMM launched the #SeeALL campaign to hold agencies accountable while providing them with the education they need. The alliance’s new metric, the Cultural Insights Impact Measure, will prove how effective and useful multicultural research can be for brands, cofounder Gilbert Dávila says.
“We’ve seen the brands that have embraced this more than doubling, even tripling their consumer growth, and it’s not just about growth,” he says, adding that AIMM has been testing advertisements since last year. “It’s about talking to everyone in a way that connects with those consumers and making sure that you’re letting them know that their business is important to you.”
Problems in the middle
Keni Thacker has spent almost a decade creating initiatives to recruit and develop diverse talent for companies like Wunderman Thompson and now his own: 100 Roses From Concrete, a networking platform for men of color in the industry. He says the gestures and statements companies made this summer follow a long history of being reactive, instead of proactive.
“They know those numbers were bad. That’s why they never released them,” Thacker says. “So now you’re going to release them and say that you’re working on it. But you knew that this was the same problem that you had five, 10, 20 years ago.”
When it became apparent that students would lose their internships as companies struggled with COVID, Thacker started the G.R.O.W.T.H. (Giving Real Opportunity With Talent & Heart) Initiative, a virtual agency program that would make sure students of color wouldn’t be forgotten. While Thacker and diversity internship programs like the MAIP (Multicultural Advertising Intern Program) and the T. Howard Foundation are putting diverse talent on agencies’ radars, the programs can’t do much once students are past those doors. And if there’s one thing the industry really fails at, Thacker says, it’s developing Black and brown talent.
“Often they’ll get into these big organizations, and after two years they’ll realize, ‘I’m still in the same job’ or ‘There’s not even a remote chance that I’m going to get any type of training or promotion,’” Thacker explains.
As a result, young professionals of color play leapfrog, jumping from one company to another before they finally land somewhere supportive. President of multicultural agency Bold Culture by Streamlined Media, Darren Martin was an International Radio & Television Society fellow in 2014. Out of his 23-strong cohort, he says, maybe five remain in the industry.
“They’re still interviewing 10 times before they get a role. They’re still hearing that they’re ‘not a culture fit’ when they get into the office, so people just leave the industry,” Martin says.
Instead of supporting these employees in the middle of their career, Thacker explains, some companies have gotten away with playing what he calls the logo game: They send representatives to conferences or sponsor conventions where they know Black people will be to show support, but in reality do very little hiring, he says. And then there is the general lack of understanding, he notes, that leads to kerfuffles like the Pepsi ad where Kendall Jenner stopped a riot by handing a can to officers. If more people of color had roles across every aspect of the industry, agencies would have had someone in the room, he says, to tell them when they’re making a mistake.
“We have always learned white culture, but they rarely ever care to learn about ours. And we’ve been here forever,” he says. “Like, we all know what Penn is. We all know what Notre Dame is, but white people are still learning what an HBCU is today, still having to be taught the basics to build empathy for our journeys and experiences.”
Research
Martin started Bold Culture with photographer and graphic designer Ahmad Barber to provide the content knowledge––and research about multicultural communities––that marketers lacked.
“When we think about the increasingly diverse generations that are coming after us, agencies have to shift their perspective of what it means to be advertising to general market versus multicultural market,” Martin says.
Here’s how things fall apart: If an agency is largely white and straight, Martin says, then their strategies might overlook the nuances between Black millennials and white millennials. The general market audience is thought to be largely white by default in their minds.
And then we go on to the creative team. For example, women make up almost half of the industry, but less than 15% of creative director roles. The number is even lower when you factor in race. As a result, Martin says, the creative team doesn’t reflect their multicultural audience, and if the client doesn’t stop them, it goes downhill from there.
“Some are afraid to speak to multicultural audiences, isn’t that crazy? They’ll say, ‘I don’t know how to connect with this community, and when we’ve tried, something’s always gone wrong, and therefore, we’re just not going to focus on it,’” Martin says.
Through Bold Culture, Martin not only empowers agencies with research, he also prepares them to be a welcoming environment for people of color. With inclusive management development programs and attrition prevention programs, the company is slowly undoing the harm of equally ineffective one-off solutions.
Own it
Solving the industry’s multitude of race problems is going to take a level of transparency that the sector has never achieved before, brand strategist Gary J. Nix says. Part of the business model is to always be right. If a brand does something wrong, Nix says, it’s more likely to release a statement and run away as quickly as possible than to acknowledge the harm.
Still, when companies haven’t been doing the right thing for a long time, announcing big changes doesn’t inspire much trust––but accountability does.
“People will always ‘people,’” Nix says. “They’re inconsistent, hypocritical—that’s just humanity. What these companies need to understand is that they’re worried about being called out by the wrong people.”
Sometimes companies avoid more inclusive campaign decisions because they’re afraid to get it wrong; they’re also afraid of how their white audience will respond, Nix explains. But if companies think from a financial standpoint, Nix says, they’re ignoring a huge market. And if your audience is upset with you for speaking to all Americans, Nix has a question: Is that really the money you want?
Dove has a long history of getting it right. From its long-standing support of the CROWN Act to eradicate race-based hair discrimination to its project #ShowUs––a partnership with women and nonbinary people and photographers to create a collection of inclusive stock images––Dove is a leader in representative advertising. The Unilever brand, however, has also made some mistakes, like its 2017 ad that depicted a Black woman transforming into a white woman after using its products to show that they were for all skin types; however, critics said the campaign reinforced stereotypes that white skin is clean and black skin is dirty.
Esi Eggleston Bracey, executive VP and COO of Unilever North America, says that while it’s traditionally been ill-advised for brands to talk about past mistakes, it’s time for companies to be transparent.
“We have to look at images for decades that we’ve been responsible for as an industry that have perpetuated narrow beauty stereotypes or ways of thinking that don’t serve America,” she says. “We have to be willing to say, ‘We’ve made mistakes. Our actions are inconsistent with our intentions.’”
Brands and companies all fall short, she explains, because there’s institutional, unconscious bias that prevents advertisers from understanding important cultural nuances. While they are not going to be able to avoid mistakes, Bracey says, they need to be willing to learn how to get it right.
“We have to commit to do better. The expectation today is to learn, be vulnerable, and act,” she says. “Dove has had to own those mistakes, accept responsibility, and commit to do better.”
The good news? The people to help companies finally get it right have always been there, says Shaswau Howell, the founder of the Federation of African American Advertisers & Marketers (FAAAM). In her 20 years in the industry, Howell has seen Black talent rise and fall, passed over again and again for opportunities where they would have made a difference. She started FAAAM to connect companies with qualified Black professionals across the industry and to support Black advertising professionals on their journey.
“I’ve seen a level of promotion for Black people who have been qualified forever but are now finally receiving opportunities––I so celebrate that,” Howell says. “It’s so exciting to see that they are finally getting their just due.”
With the attention comes an opportunity that people of color have never seen before, she says. There’s mistrust there. There’s hurt. But there’s also a new opportunity: to advocate for the people of color who will come after her and others fighting to make things better now.
“That’s the crossroads of the Black experience––the triumph and the challenge of it all,” Howell says. “It’s hard some days—actually it’s extremely difficult—but we have to keep encouraging each other and showing up the best that we can because this is our generation’s moment.”


fortune--2020-10-06--From prayers to war: Trump campaign seeks to reinvent its COVID-19 narrative

In a Fox News interview on Monday, Erin Perrine, the Trump campaign’s communications director, said that President Donald Trump had an advantage in his reelection campaign against Joe Biden because he was diagnosed with COVID-19. “He has experience now fighting the coronavirus as an individual,” Perrine said. “Those firsthand experiences—Joe Biden, he doesn’t have those.”
The decision to highlight Trump’s battle with the virus, even after the President eschewed the use of masks and repeatedly played down the serious nature and easy communicability of the disease, is a new direction for the campaign, which could play out its final weeks without the President making public appearances.
The strategy has empirical backing: British Prime Minister Boris Johnson saw an uptick in popularity when he contracted the virus in late March. After his hospitalization in early April, he saw his personal popularity rise from 54% to 60%. By the time he left the hospital, support peaked to 66%, but by June, as he regained his health, it had fallen once more to 43%.
Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro also experienced a surge in favorability after his COVID-19 diagnosis. Much like Trump, Bolsonaro downplayed the virus, calling it the “little flu,” and when he was first diagnosed, he saw a drop in favorability ratings. However, by documenting his struggles with the disease on social media, he gained his constituents’ sympathy and grew his favorability rating from 20% to 40% within two months.
That appears to be the path the Trump campaign is taking, according to new data from Hawkfish, a political data agency founded by Michael Bloomberg. The Trump campaign purchased the front page of YouTube on Monday, one of the most expensive and valuable advertising properties online. The deal reportedly cost seven figures.
The ad was a video of President Trump addressing the nation from the Diplomatic Reception Room at the White House just before his departure to Walter Reed Hospital. “I think I’m doing very well,” the President says. “But we’re going to make sure things work out.” The video then asked viewers to text “BLESS” to the campaign’s shortcode, a helpful tool that collects phone number data to later solicit donations and voter information.
The Trump campaign has spent $125,000 since Sunday on Facebook to promote videos of the President speaking straight to camera from Walter Reed Hospital. The videos are often matched with messages about Trump “winning the war” against coronavirus.
These posts appear to be working for the campaign, generating some of his most viewed organic messages on both Twitter and Facebook. The President’s top two posts of 2020 have come since his diagnosis and have generated 8.4 million interactions combined.
The war-like language, which Trump has long been a fan of, was also repeated regularly on Fox News over the weekend. Commentator Jesse Watters compared the President leaving the hospital to a “general who gets wounded by the invisible enemy and goes and gets patched up and goes right back out to the front lines.” Fox News chief White House correspondent John Roberts said the decision to leave the hospital early “speaks to the tenacity and the forcefulness of this President.”
It’s unclear whether any of this will turn into actual donations. The Trump administration has been quiet about whether there has been an uptick since his diagnosis—typically a sign that there hasn’t been. But either way, it appears that the campaign has no problem generating visibility even with a candidate under strict orders to quarantine.


fortune--2020-10-06--Apple is expected to reveal its new iPhones at an Oct. 13 event

Apple Inc. announced that its biggest product launch event of the year will be held Oct. 13.
The Cupertino, California-based technology giant on Tuesday released the date of the event with the tagline “Hi, Speed.”
The company plans to reveal four redesigned iPhones with 5G wireless capability, upgraded cameras, faster processors and a wider range of screen sizes, Bloomberg News has reported.
The online event will mark Apple’s second product launch this year, following the company’s September announcement of a new iPad Air, refreshed entry-level iPad and updated Apple Watches.
The introduction of the new iPhones is occurring about a month later than usual after the company faced final testing and production delays due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
Despite a rapid expansion into services and new devices, the iPhone remains Apple’s most important product. The smartphone generates about half of Apple’s revenue, and is the central driver of sales for AirPods and Apple Watches. The iPhone is also the device used most often to subscribe to services and download apps, which in many cases gives Apple a cut of revenue.
The 5G wireless support on the new iPhones will put Apple’s toe-to-toe with the latest offerings from Samsung Electronics Co., Google and others.
The new lineup will also mark Apple’s biggest screen size variation in years, adding a 5.4-inch model and a 6.7-inch version, Bloomberg News has reported.
The new phones will have the most dramatic redesign since the iPhone X in 2017, adding squared off sides to replace the current rounded edges. The four models will be split into two entry-level versions and two Pro variations, with the higher-end phones using stainless steel and the less-expensive devices using aluminum.
Apple plans to add a Lidar scanner, a depth-sensing camera that improves augmented reality apps, to the more-expensive models. The company is also expected to remove the charging wall adapter from the new iPhone boxes, a move Apple has said would help the environment. The shift would also potentially save the company tens of millions of dollars a year.
Even with the announcement next week, some of the new models aren’t expected to be widely available for a number of weeks due to supply constraints.
Beyond the new iPhones, the company is working on over-ear headphones and physical device tracking tags to be introduced as early as this year. Apple also is planning to announce Macs with the company’s own custom processors as early as November.


fortune--2020-10-06--Black Friday traffic could fall as much as 25% amid earlier deals, COVID anxiety

Black Friday, which has long been retail’s biggest day, has been losing ground for years, as more shoppers turn to online gift buying.
And this year, the erstwhile holiday shopping kickoff sales event, with its long-ago scenes of crowds mobbing stores at midnight on Thanksgiving, will fade even further thanks to the pandemic.
One factor at play: With many retailers still smarting from sales drops earlier this year, the holiday season deals are already beginning to ramp up. Next week, as retailers like Target, Kohl’s and Home Depot try to compete with Amazon.com’s Prime Day, they will offer holiday discounts far earlier than last year, when things really got underway at the tail end of October. Companies are also hoping that getting more merchandise out the door earlier will help with COVID-induced inventory glut and the logistical challenges of responding to a massive surge in orders during the final days of the season.
Also hurting Black Friday this year? Retailers say they will push more of their doorbusters online to avoid big crowds at a time when they are trying to maintain social distancing in stores. All this adds up to a Black Friday that will likely see traffic to U.S. stores fall between 22% and 25% and make other shopping days more important, according to a forecast by data firm ShopperTrak released Tuesday.
“U.S. consumers continue to be more purposeful in their shopping journeys, so retailers need to make sure they capitalize on every in-store visit,” said Bjoern Petersen, president at Sensormatic Solutions, which owns ShopperTrak.
Interestingly, this year’s forecasted Black Friday drop comes despite most major chains—includingWalmart, Best Buy,Target, and Macy’s—closing stores on Thanksgiving for the first time in years, something that theoretically could have shifted more sales to Black Friday.
ShopperTrak is predicting that retailers’ efforts to even out the season over a longer period will succeed: It forecasts that the 10 busiest days in 2020 will generate 34.2% of all holiday store traffic, down from 46.5% in 2019.
Retailers’ caution is understandable given the uncertain trajectory of the economy, the potential for new lockdowns, and questions around ongoing assistance to the tens of millions of unemployed Americans. Deloitte recently projected holiday season spending would rise 1% to 1.5% this year, an anemic pace compared with recent years.
“Store capacity constraints and reduced hours will limit store traffic and productivity, making an earlier, more spread-out holiday shopping season preferable,” Bank of America wrote in a research note on Tuesday.


fortune--2020-10-06--Americans could face ‘unnecessary hardship’ without more stimulus, says Fed chief

Strong financial support from the government and the Federal Reserve have spurred a solid recovery from the pandemic recession, but the rebound may falter without further aid, Fed Chair Jerome Powell warned Tuesday.
Powell said that government support — including expanded unemployment insurance payments, direct payments to most U.S. households and financial support for small businesses — has so far prevented a recessionary “downward spiral” in which job losses would reduce spending, forcing businesses to cut even more jobs.
But the U.S. economy still faces threats, and without further support those downward trends could still emerge, the chairman said.
“The expansion is still far from complete,” Powell said in a speech to the National Association for Business Economics, a group of corporate and academic economists. “Too little support would lead to a weak recovery, creating unnecessary hardship for households and businesses. Over time, household insolvencies and business bankruptcies would rise, harming the productive capacity of the economy, and holding back wage growth.”
Powell noted that the economic recovery has slowed in recent months compared with its rapid improvement in May and June. Incomes fell in August. And job growth weakened in September, slowing to just 661,000, less than half the gains of 1.5 million in August and 1.8 million in September.
“A prolonged slowing in the pace of improvement over time could trigger typical recessionary dynamics, as weakness feeds on weakness,” he said.
In recent months, in speeches and in testimony to Congress Powell has repeatedly urged lawmakers to enact an additional economic aid package. Though negotiations between House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin are ongoing, prospects for a deal remain dim.
The $2 trillion financial rescue package that Congress approved in March, as well as previous aid measures, were “truly extraordinary,” Powell said, enabling U.S. households to pay bills and maintain their spending even as unemployment soared to 14.7% in April.
Spending on autos and other long-lasting goods is actually higher now that before the pandemic, the Fed chair noted.
“Still, since it appears that many will undergo extended periods of unemployment, there is likely to be a need for further support,” Powell said.
The chairman also discussed the Fed’s new framework for its interest rate policy but provided no new details about how it will work in practice. Last month, the Fed said it was now seeking to let inflation run above 2% “for some time” before considering higher short-term interest rates. That is a substantial shift from its previous approach, which potentially involved rate hikes once unemployment fell too low or inflation hit 2%.


fortune--2020-10-06--Early members of ‘Wall of Moms’ reflect on where they went wrong as protests in Portland continue

While people of color have organized and protested after instances of police brutality for years, 2020 saw a new trend: More and more white people were flooding the streets with them. There are lessons to be learned from cities like Portland, Ore., and now Kenosha, Wis., about how white people show up at demonstrations.
When the Wall of Moms group formed in July, attention turned from the vigil for 18-year-old Shai’India Harris––who was allegedly fatally shot by her boyfriend––to what Portland mayoral candidate Teressa Raiford says is more palatable: the majority-white Wall of Moms. As protests sparked across the U.S. in response to the killing of George Floyd, Beverly “Bev” Barnum organized moms from the Portland-area Working Moms Facebook group to protect protesters––and Harris’s vigil––from federal agents using tear gas and rubber bullets.
Barnum instructed the group to dress “like moms” because “Who would want to shoot a mom?” she told the New York Times.
Masked up with bicycle helmets, the vision of women of all ages marching went viral. “Moms are here!” they chanted in sunflower-yellow shirts. “Feds stay clear!” In another video, the moms sang a common protest chant to the tune of an old lullaby, crooning, “Hands up, please don’t shoot me,” while facing down police in riot gear. It was memorable. It was jarring. It forced viewers to see their own mothers in the women being shoved and attacked night after night.
Raiford and other Black mothers had just one problem: Black mothers have been leading the fight for Black lives from the beginning, and their motherhood has never protected them from violence. But because it’s white women, Raiford says, they’re receiving sympathy and awe that Black mothers have never been afforded.
“That same week, we filed a lawsuit against Donald Trump, but all people could talk about was the Wall of Moms,” Raiford explains, adding that the lawsuit was a joint effort between Don’t Shoot Portland and Wall of Moms. “Fifteen people were murdered in one city that the world is looking at in one month, and it’s invisible because white moms matter more.”
While the Wall of Moms gained media fame months ago, the protests haven’t stopped. The group, through twists and turns and growing pains, has continued to protest federal occupation in Portland and the treatment of their Black neighbors. Since its creation, Wall of Moms groups have popped up in over 20 cities, and more are forming as the success of the original Portland group continues to inspire more women of all races to take action. In the process, activists across the U.S. have had the unique opportunity to educate people who are protesting for the first time on how to be better allies.
Response to the Wall of Moms
As soon as anti-racism educator Catrice Jackson saw the Wall of Moms, she says she knew what the fallout would be. Videos of the protests went viral, in part, because white viewers were able to identify with the moms.
“They see their humanity,” says Jackson, who leads workshops across the U.S. strictly for white women. “When a white woman screams, when she speaks, historically, society responds to white women in distress.”
White women, Jackson says, have a tendency to put their experiences first––hence the chant “Moms are here” when Black mothers were there long before.
Jennie Breslow Vinson, who is white, previously managed social media for the original Wall of Moms group in Portland. By the time they headed downtown to join protesters around the Multnomah County Justice Center––home to the Portland Police Bureau’s Central Precinct and a maximum security jail––the response to George Floyd’s killing had already begun. People, she says, had been out every night for almost two months before the Wall of Moms arrived.
“And all of a sudden, every major news organization in the world was down there because a bunch of white ladies had joined the fight. I think that there’s righteous anger over that,” Vinson says. “When in reality, nothing changed, right? I can see why that would be upsetting.”
In her workshops and books like Antagonists, Advocates and Allies, Jackson encourages white women to reflect on what role they play in the fight for equality. While white women are responsible for doing their part to combat racism––instead of passively benefiting from a society that prefers lighter skin––Jackson says that the way they choose to engage in activism can be performative and self-serving.
“We were focused on white women saving or protecting the protesters who are out there, and that defeats the whole purpose of protesting––so that the voices of Black people are heard,” she explains.
Formation
Because of her name, Barnum says, people assume that she’s white. In reality, she’s a first-generation Mexican-American who, although she had never organized before, sincerely wants to do her part. The Wall of Moms, she says, was her first ever experience protesting––and her first time in the spotlight. At 4 a.m. after protesting night after night with Wall of Moms, she would sit in her car and cry. Then she would go home, shower, and take her son to school, trying to cope with the pressure of it all.
“I just want to keep doing whatever needs to be done to make inequality go away, racial injustice go away, police brutality go away,” Barnum says. “I don’t care how it happens.”
Her son is on the autism spectrum, and she saw similar traits in 23-year-old Elijah McClain, who was killed by police in Colorado in August 2019. When she stood in her kitchen for her first media interview about the Wall of Moms this summer, Barnum says she had just donated to McClain’s mother’s GoFundMe a few days before. But, she says, she didn’t say his name, and it’s a moment she regrets.
“I didn’t say I’m here because of Breonna Taylor. I didn’t say I’m here because of George Floyd. And I realized now that if I said that, this would be a very different conversation,” Barnum says.
She was moved to act after watching a video of federal officers putting protesters into an unmarked van just eight miles from where she lives.
“I’m a runner––I could run there. I could experience it––see it, the abhorrent abuse of power,” she says. “And I asked myself: What can I do?”
To help bring her vision of organizing moms to fight for justice, Barnum reached out to the president of Don’t Shoot Portland, a nonprofit founded by Black Lives Matter activist Teressa Raiford, for guidance. While Raiford says she agreed to work with Barnum with the understanding that Wall of Moms would be there to support Black protesters in the fight for racial justice, it became apparent that Barnum’s vision for the organization was a little different.
A Black leadership team was brought in for the majority-white Wall of Moms to both lead protests on the ground and let those experiencing police brutality decide how it should be addressed.
Barnum says the two weeks she was involved with the Wall of Moms were rife with conflict and harried communication as she and Raiford discussed next steps for the group, which had grown bigger than they ever expected. Communication mishaps, normal on any day but made more frequent owing to sleepless nights of protesting, happened over and over, exacerbated by the growing realization that their goals were different.
Intentions
Mutual aid is what Raiford knows best. Whether it’s funding a funeral or simply making sure a family can put food on the table, mutual aid networks are give-and-take relationships in which communities support one another. With the support of hundreds of volunteers and other grassroots organizations, Don’t Shoot Portland’s ongoing, statewide efforts to distribute resources have included free clothing, legal aid, mental health services, and now wildfire relief for Indigenous communities in Oregon and Washington. When Raiford agreed to help the Wall of Moms as a part of their leadership, that’s the kind of work she intended the group to do, she says. Within a week, not only did the moms show up for Shai’India Harris and her family, Raiford says, they joined Black Lives Matter protesters, enduring pepper spray and flash bombs to be with the community.
But as fast as plans were being made, Raiford recalls, they were falling apart. Raiford says she did not agree with the new direction the group was taking––expanding an organization originally meant to support Black people to include other causes––and the conflict of goals played out on Twitter.
My resignation from WOM. pic.twitter.com/f7upxBDduy — Emma Pattee (@emmalincolnblog) August 1, 2020
Barnum started to see the Wall of Moms as a national movement against all injustices, a decision that Raiford says wouldn’t be a problem if the organization wasn’t built on a commitment to support Black lives and protesters against police brutality in the streets. When Barnum decided to steer the organization––now a licensed nonprofit––in a new direction when the conflict is nowhere near over, activists on the ground felt she was abandoning the fight after a taste of fame. While Raiford was giving the advice necessary to run the Wall of Moms as a mutual aid organization, the direction didn’t match Barnum’s own goals to have Black Lives Matter as just one cause that the Wall of Moms supported.
In the months that followed, Barnum says she has received death threats and had her reputation tarnished. Critics have accused her of speaking up about federal agents in Portland only because it was in her backyard and not because Black people have been living with police brutality for decades. There’s a question that Barnum always gets asked: Is there actually room for allyship?
“My answer is, I don’t know,” she says. “Because I thought that I was doing what I was told to do.”
Why is this important? THIS IS ANOTHER EXAMPLE OF SOMETHING BUILT ON THE PREMISE OF HELPING BLACK PEOPLE, legitimized by Black people, TAKEN FROM BLACK PEOPLE. #WallOfGloms — WOM OFFICIAL (@WallOfMoms) July 29, 2020
Everything, Vinson says, was just moving too quickly.
“Part of the heartbreak for me in all of this has been the lack of trust that is there between women of color and white women. I think it’s on us as white women to figure out how to be not only allies but better friends to Black women,” Vinson says.
When organizing with the Wall of Moms, Vinson said a lot of very mom-like behavior happened, both in the streets as well as on social media.
“Moms were trying to do what moms do: take charge and tell people the right way to do things, and that wasn’t what we were there for,” Vinson says. “I think lots of mistakes were made on both sides, but that shouldn’t stop us from continuing, right? The fight is too important.”
Wall of Moms groups in other cities experienced similar issues. The Seattle Wall of Moms group started with around 4,000 people, Jackson says, and almost 500 left when she was brought in to refocus their efforts on Black Lives Matter. Within the Twin Cities Wall of Moms Facebook group, Jackson assumed control of the group from the white admin. At first, the top guideline listed on the page said that the group would disband after the election.
“Like, really, Black Lives Matter doesn’t matter after the election? I essentially messaged the admin and said, ‘We’re not going to allow white women to hijack the Black Lives Matter movement and use it for their own intentions,’” she says.
Doing the work
Barnum was just one of many women inspired to act because of the federal presence near their homes. But that’s the same reason Black protesters are wary of their presence: The issue wasn’t real, Jackson explains, until it was in their backyard.
“They will want to talk about the Trump administration and how their constitutional rights are being hijacked,” Jackson explains. “When we try to redirect them—because this is not an anti-fascism group, this is an anti-racism group—then they say things like, ‘You’re not listening to me’ or ‘This is important to all moms.’”
Kimberly Milliard calls herself a rule follower, and before she marched across Minneapolis’s Hennepin Avenue Bridge for Freddie Gray in her very first protest in 2015, the rules were still very much on her mind.
“I remember asking, ‘Well, is there a permit for this?’ And it’s a good example of focusing on the wrong things. These things don’t matter in the long run. I was centering my safety over the work we were trying to do,” Milliard, who is white, explains.
Amelia Hansa became a protest marshal in Minneapolis this year with a team of mostly white women responsible for doing things like blocking off streets for the path of the protest. They are there first to protect protesters and de-escalate violent situations, whether that be with counterprotesters or the police themselves.
“One of the big things that I took away was just how much space we can take up in conversations,” says Hansa, referring to how white people, in their process of learning about racism, tend to rely on people of color to teach them instead of educating themselves. “I started to see how much labor I was putting on them to explain.”
Without that education and a desire to listen, Milliard says, the presence of white people at protests can actually be a distraction.
“I think one of the most impactful things as a white woman is, when anyone disagrees with us we’re just always ready to talk back and explain ourselves,” says Milliard, who acts as a marshal at protests. “We want to talk about our intent and not address the harm we may have caused.”
With the rise of book clubs featuring Black authors on race, there are ample spaces to practice. If white people are willing to be reflective instead of defensive, Jackson says, these conversations can be productive. That’s how a conversation can shift from figuring out how to support Black people to centering their feelings of hopelessness about violence against people of color.
“This is not about protecting protesters from the federal agents coming in. We need to be aware of the dangers and law enforcement that are in our cities every day, because our Black neighbors deal with this every day,” Hansa says. “And that’s something that I always have to remind myself as a white person.”
For Nekima Levy Armstrong, civil rights lawyer and longtime activist, her consideration of increased interest from non-Black women comes with reservations. Are they here to stay, she wonders, or is their support only temporary?
It can be done, and it can be done right––if they’re willing to be consistent.
“That’s why there has to be accountability for what happens privately as far as their anti-racism efforts, how they treat Black people personally and professionally, and how they are using their privilege beyond being visible at a demonstration,” Armstrong says. “How are they putting some skin in the game beyond being visible at a protest?”
If white people are serious about fighting racism in this country, Jackson says, they need to first confront racism in their own lives. That’s the task where many, she says, get stuck.
“There’s that cognitive dissonance there that they’ve always thought they were good,” Jackson explains. “And here comes Black women like me, who say, ‘Well, no, not necessarily because you do X, Y, and Z.’”
Some women go silent. Some get angry. But what they need to do if they want to truly change, she says, is confront it head-on.
“I call it going down in the dungeon of your soul to gather all the ways that you’ve been racist,” she says. “Your thoughts, behaviors, beliefs, putting them in a box, bringing them upstairs, putting them on the table, spreading them out and picking each one of them up, examining it, and then figuring out how you’re going to stop doing or thinking or behaving in this way.”


fortune--2020-10-06--How Tammy Duckworth’s experience with breastfeeding and IVF guides her policy

Hours before President Trump revealed his positive COVID-19 test, Congress sent a bill to his desk: the Friendly Airports for Mothers Improvement Act.
The legislation, championed by Sen. Tammy Duckworth, requires that nearly all U.S. airports include lactation rooms for nursing—and traveling—mothers. Duckworth first introduced a bill on this topic in 2015; it was signed into law two years ago, but applied only to medium and large airports. The new act would extend the same regulations to small airports, providing coverage for all mothers traveling domestically.
It’s a relatively under-the-radar bill, arriving not only amid unprecedented turmoil at the White House but at a time when air travel, its target, has all but ground to a halt.
“I was not going to stop working on this just because we have a global pandemic,” Duckworth said in an interview. “If we want economically to recover, people are going to start traveling again—and we have to include women as part of the economy.”
Duckworth was inspired to pursue the issue in part by her own experience as a new, working mother, traversing airports without access to an appropriate place in which to breastfeed or express breast milk.
Navigating access to public spaces—for herself and for her constituents—wasn’t new to Duckworth, who uses a wheelchair and was the first disabled woman elected to Congress. “You don’t think about these things until you’re faced with them—I didn’t think much about accessibility in airports until I was wounded,” she said. “I was not as aware of the issue of trying to breastfeed [until I encountered it].”
Duckworth also reflected on her own experience in making another political decision this week. The lawmaker, who conceived her daughters via in vitro fertilization, wrote a letter to her Senate colleagues arguing that Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, Amy Coney Barrett, would threaten Americans’ access to IVF were she to be confirmed as a Justice. The letter cites a 2006 newspaper ad signed by Coney Barrett and placed by a far-right anti-abortion group that opposes the procedure, which helps would-be parents conceive.
Writes Duckworth: “I urge you to fully consider the message a vote in favor of a Supreme Court nominee who appears to believe that my daughters shouldn’t even exist sends not only to me as a mother and as your colleague, but to parents-to-be around this country struggling with infertility.”


fortune--2020-10-06--Which A.I. planet do you live on?

Which A.I. planet do you live on?

This is the web version of Eye on A.I., Fortune’s weekly newsletter covering artificial intelligence and business. To get it delivered weekly to your in-box, sign up here.
For the past three years, two London-based investors have compiled an extremely comprehensive summary of the current “State of A.I.” It’s the work of Ian Hogarth, who founded the concert discovery site Songkick and is now a prominent angel investor, and Nathan Benaich, a venture capitalist whose firm Air Street Capital focuses on startups built around applications of artificial intelligence.
This year’s report runs to 177 detailed Powerpoint slides. It’s a great way to take the pulse of the whole field.
The report touches on so many areas that I won’t be able to do it justice. But I will highlight a few things that struck me.
One trend emerging from the report that I touched on in this newsletter back in December: a growing dichotomy between the priorities of A.I. researchers and those of A.I. practitioners who work in other kinds of businesses, such as healthcare and finance.
The research community wants to push the boundaries of what A.I. can do. Benaich calls this group the “big-model world.” And for good reason. Many of the A.I. systems that are currently at the bleeding edge are truly gargantuan. Training a model that has hundreds of billions of parameters—as OpenAI’s GPT-3 language model does—takes mind-boggling amounts of computing power and costs millions of dollars.
Benaich and Hogarth question whether that is sustainable. “We are rapidly approaching outrageous computational, economic and environmental costs to gain incrementally smaller improvements in model performance,” the two write. They note that many machine learning researchers feel that progress in the field has stagnated and that fundamentally different approaches may be needed to bring us much closer to artificial general intelligence—systems that can perform many different kinds of tasks at human or super-human levels.
With the exception of the world’s tech giants, most companies can’t afford to live in “big-model world.” If more sophisticated A.I. actually depends on building larger and larger models, then “only a small number of actors will be able to compete,” Hogarth tells me. And while the likes of Google, Microsoft and IBM hope to sell their big models, pre-trained and pre-built, to customers of their cloud computing services, many businesses are reluctant to adopt giant pre-trained A.I. software because they don’t have enough insight into how it’s trained and how it’ll perform. Companies fear that by adopting it they may be inadvertently stepping into an ethical, reputational or regulatory morass.
Most businesses live on a different A.I. planet. Benaich calls this “the task-specific A.I. world.” These folks are looking to build A.I. systems that perform one highly specialized task exceptionally well. In building this task-specific software, even startups can compete. Benaich, for instance, points to a young London company called PolyAI that he’s invested in. It has built a chat bot-like conversational A.I. system that outperforms many of the larger language models, such as Google’s BERT, but is a fraction of the size of most cutting-edge NLP systems. (PolyAI’s system took in 59 million parameters compared to BERT, which even in its lightweight version uses 110 million parameters.) This allows PolyAI’s software to be trained on just a dozen GPUs—the graphics processing chips that have become the workhorses of A.I. computing—in a single day.
Benaich and Hogarth also have a nice slide deep in the report showing that 25% of the fastest-growing Github projects in the second half of 2020 were for “machine-learning operations” (MLOps), or the engineering nitty-gritty that lets companies deploy, run and maintain A.I. software over the long haul. MLOps is now trending as a Google search term for the first time. This, Benaich and Hogarth write, “signals an industry shift from technology R&D (how to build models) to operations (how to run models).”
Here are some other key takeaways from “The State of A.I.”:
A.I. in healthcare and medicine is booming. Research on applying A.I. methods to various biology topics has grown 50% each year since 2017. The application of computer vision to medical imagery is having a massive impact in everything from ophthalmology to mammography. Advanced A.I. techniques are also making major inroads into drug discovery and drug research.
Privacy-preserving machine learning is going to be huge. Interest in “federated learning,” which is one of the most promising techniques for allowing different parties to learn from the same data without compromising privacy, has exploded: More than 1,000 research papers on the topic were published in just the first six months of 2020, compared to just 180 in all of 2018. A major consortium of German hospitals along with Imperial College in London are testing one such system for sharing pediatric chest X-ray data.
Demand for A.I. talent continues to far outstrip supply, despite a drop-off in job postings due to the Covid-19 pandemic. There are currently three times more job listings for A.I.-related expertise than there are people looking at such job postings, and the rate of job postings has accelerated 12 times faster than job views in recent years. This is true despite the fact that universities are now churning out many more graduates with machine-learning skills. Stanford University, for example, is now training twice as many students in NLP per year as it was between 2012 and 2014.
The U.S. remains the best place in the world for A.I. talent—but a lot of that talent is foreign-born. American institutions and companies dominate the research output at top A.I. conferences. But the majority of top A.I. researchers working in the U.S. are not American—27% come from China, 11% from India and 11% from Europe. Less than a third—31%—are U.S.-born. The U.S. is also still doing a good job of holding onto foreign-born talent that comes to U.S. universities—85% of all international PhD students and 88% of Chinese PhD students, stay in the U.S. to work after graduation. But all of this is threatened by the Trump Administration’s restrictive visa policies.
Regulators are finally starting to scrutinize the use of A.I. The focus right now is on facial recognition technology, with a growing number of laws coming into effect in U.S. states and around the world limiting its use. Regulatory pressure is starting to build on algorithmic decision-making in many other contexts too, including banking and insurance.
The U.S. military is increasingly experimenting with cutting-edge A.I. techniques and incorporating A.I. into its arsenal. This has created a huge opportunity not only for established defense contractors, but also for a host of venture capital-backed startups that are selling the Pentagon everything from autonomous drones to intelligence analysis software to systems that can automatically detect and disrupt electronic communications.
Benaich and Hogarth always make a few predictions for the coming year. Last year, they got four of six predictions right. Here are three of their eight for next year:
Nvidia will not be able to complete its acquisition of U.K. chip design company Arm.
Someone will build a 10 trillion parameter A.I. language model.
One of the companies using A.I. for drug discovery will either be acquired or have an IPO in a deal that values it at over $1 billion.
We’ll check in next year to see if they’re right. Meanwhile, here’s the rest of this week’s A.I. news.
Jeremy Kahn
@jeremyakahn
jeremy.kahn@fortune.com
A.I. IN THE NEWS
Amazon's warehouse robots may be increasing employee injury risks. That is one of the conclusions of an investigation into rising injury rates at Amazon's warehouses conducted by the website Reveal, which is run by the Center for Investigative Reporting. The report points to data that backs up "the accounts of Amazon warehouse workers and former safety professionals who say the company has used the robots to ratchet up production quotas to the point that humans can’t keep up without hurting themselves. For each of the past four years, injury rates have been significantly higher at Amazon’s robotic warehouses than at its traditional sites." Amazon insists its robots make warehouse jobs "better and safer" for human workers.
A.I.-powered exam proctoring software doesn't work well for students of color. Black and Latinx students have complained that software used by ExamSoft to proctor the New York State bar exam includes a critical facial-detection feature that doesn't work well for non-white students. This has been a persistent problem with facial-recognition software, much of which has not been trained on enough images of non-white people. It was one of just a host of problems with "automated proctoring" software from a variety of vendors chronicled in a revealing New York Times story last week. As a whole, the software seems to perform poorly in a lot of real-world conditions, and it has features that students found distracting or that increased their test anxiety.
Toyota is working on an A.I.-enabled household cleaning robot. Cleaning robots have been making big inroads in commercial settings during the pandemic. Now comes news from Wired that Toyota is researching a multi-armed robot that could be suspended from a home's ceiling and be used to clean surfaces, including countertops and cupboard doors, as well to put away cutlery and dishes. "Toyota does not have a timeline for commercializing its prototypes, but it is looking to be an early entrant in a potentially big market," according to the story.
IBM joins a government project to improve schizophrenia diagnoses. Big Blue is joining a $99 million five-year effort funded by the U.S. National Institute of Health and involving researchers from Harvard Medical School, Mt. Sinai School of Medicine, Stanford University and the Northern California Institute for Research and Education that is designed to find biomarkers for schizophrenia that could lead to earlier diagnosis of the mental illness. The company will lend its expertise to A.I.-enabled analysis of brain imagery and to natural language processing that might be able to detect changes in how those who are developing schizophrenia speak or in the kinds of symptoms they describe, according to a blog from IBM.
EYE ON A.I. TALENT
New York-based digital publisher G/O Media, whose titles include The Onion, Gizmodo, Jezebel, Lifehacker and The Root, has named Michael Dugan as its chief technology officer, the company said. Most recently Dugan was CTO at Hearst Magazines.
U.K.-based semiconductor design company Imagination Technologies Ltd., which supplies computer chip designs to Apple among other customers, has named Simon Beresford-Wylie as its new chief executive officer, eeNews Europe reported. Beresford-Wylie was previously CEO at Arqiva, a UK provider of communications, broadcast and media services.
Insitro, a San Francisco startup using A.I. in drug discovery, has named Roger Perlmutter, the head of R&D at pharmaceutical company Merck, to a seat on its board of directors, according to a report in health website Stat News.
The Patrick J. McGovern Foundation has named Vilas Dhar as its president, according to a report in trade publication Ai Authority. The Foundation, created with a $1.2 billion endowment left by the late Patrick McGovern, the founder of the publisher of Computerworld, Macworld and PCWorld magazines, is dedicated to ways to use A.I. and data science to improve society. Dhar previously founded two social impact organizations and served as the Gleitsman Fellow on Social Change at Harvard University.
Deep Genomics, an A.I.-focused therapeutics company based in Toronto, has appointed Dr. Ferdinand Massari as its chief medical officer, the company said. Massari will be based in Boston and oversee clinical development of the company's products. Massari is a veteran of several major pharmaceuticals firms, having held senior roles at Pfizer, Pharmacia and Merck. Most recently, he co-founded Kintai Therapeutics.
EYE ON A.I. RESEARCH
This past week brought two potentially significant breakthroughs in Transformers, one of the most, well, transformative neural network architectures of the past five years.
A.I. researchers have been buzzing about a paper posted to the research repository Openreview.net. Entitled "An image is worth 16 x 16 words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale," the paper is currently under review for the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) in May, so its authors are currently anonymous. But many are saying it is likely to revolutionize the field. In essence, the paper says that convolutions are unnecessary. Those are the mathematical filtering technique whose use in deep learning for computer vision applications was pioneered by Yann LeCun in the 1980s and which has underpinned almost all state-of-the-art computer vision results for the past eight years. The paper says that simply using a Transformer can produce results that beat the two state-of-the-art convolutional neural networks (CNNs), both of which are less than a year old. Oriol Vinyals, a well-known researcher at DeepMind who was part of the team that used Transformers in its breakthrough work on Starcraft, tweeted an exchange he had with Ilya Sutskever, the OpenAI chief scientist, who as a graduate student was among the team that originally used a CNN to crack the ImageNet computer vision benchmark back in 2012. Sutskever asked Vinyals for his take on the new paper. Vinyals replied, "my take is: farewell convolutions : )" Transformer-based architectures tend to take up large amounts of computing power to train and can be unwieldy to deploy. But researchers from DeepMind , its sister company, Google , University of Cambridge , and the Alan Turing Institute have now proposed a new kind of Transformer that is much less computing-intensive to train, according to a story in publication Synced . (The research paper itself can be accessed on the free research repository arxiv.org here .) Called a Performer, it is based on a mechanism called FAVOR+ (short for Fast Attention Via positive Orthogonal Random features.) "Leveraging detailed mathematical theorems, the paper demonstrates that rather than relying solely on computational resources to boost performance, it is also possible to develop improved and efficient Transformer architectures that have significantly lower energy consumption," the Synced writer said. The researchers tested their new Performer architecture on a number of difficult benchmarks, including one that involved predicting protein-folding sequences, and found it performed better than two existing state-of-the-art Transformer models. On a test on the ImageNet64 computer vision benchmark, a Performer with just six layers matched the accuracy of an existing Transformer model with 12 layers and was twice as fast. Progress like this may mitigate the research-business divide I explored in the opening of the newsletter. If massive models can be slimmed down to achieve the same performance at a fraction of the computing load and time, they could be adopted much more widely in industry.
FORTUNE ON A.I.
What you need to know about Nvidia and VMware’s big new A.I. deal—by Jonathan Vanian
Obama: Social media is isolating and dividing Americans—by Danielle Abril
How A.I. is playing a bigger role in music streaming than you ever imagined—by Jonathan Vanian
A.I. gets down in the dirt as precision agriculture takes off—by Aaron Pressman
These deepfake videos of Putin and Kim have gone viral—by Jeremy Kahn
BRAIN FOOD
Deepfakes enter the 2020 Election in big way—but it's not what you might fear. The U.S. anti-corruption and good governance group RepresentUS created an ad campaign that featured deepfake videos of Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un expounding on how U.S. democracy is collapsing without them even having to resort to disinformation tactics such as, um, deepfakes. I covered the story for Fortune here.
Meanwhile, Florida Democratic Congressional candidate Phil Ehr's campaign created a deepfake video of his opponent, incumbent Congressman Matt Gaetz, in which the fake Gaetz says "Fox News sucks," "QAnon isn't real," and that's he's endorsing Joe Biden for President. Ehr says he created the ad to highlight Gaetz's failure to take Russian election meddling and disinformation seriously. You can see the ad campaign here.
Plus, the nonprofit group Change the Ref created a deepfake video in which Joaquin Oliver, who was killed in the Parkland school shooting in 2018, is seemingly brought back to life by his grieving parents in order to encourage other young people to vote.
A number of A.I. ethics and security experts are dismayed at the trend: Alex Stamos, the former Facebook security chief who is now a professor at Stanford, tweeted in response to the Ehr ad that "Democrats should not normalize manipulated media in political campaigns."
It may be too late for that. A growing number of advertising agencies are offering deepfakes to clients as part of their arsenal of marketing techniques. Hollywood is looking to the technology to potentially replace traditional computer-generated images (CGI), which are much more labor-intensive, time-consuming and expensive to produce. Some have even speculated that deepfakes may one day allow entire films to be created without the need for any human actors at all. Today, though, deepfakes are not so perfect that they are completely believable. In fact, in both the "Dictators" ad campaign and the Joaquin Oliver video, more traditional CGI effects were used to touch up the deepfake-generated video frames and make them more believable.
The problem with the growing use of deepfakes may not be that they will make political disinformation more believable. It may be the opposite—that they will make everything else, including legitimate video footage, unbelievable. For most of human history, the phrase "seeing is believing" has more or less held true. The advent of software like Photoshop began to undermine that, at least for still images. Deepfakes threaten to knock out its final foundations. We may plunge ever more into a world of fragmented realities—where each person sees what they want to see and believes what they want to believe, including conspiracy theories or whatever propaganda happens to mesh with their worldview.
I was struck by a line in a New York Times story from over the weekend. The story, written by Emily Flitter, was really a profile of a town—Portsmouth, Ohio—that voted for Trump in 2016. But embedded within the piece are a number of mini-profiles of the townsfolk. And one centers two friends who have drifted apart, in large part because one of them, Eli Eaton, has a "view of the world [that] is defined by a web of conspiracy theories. He said believes that the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks were somehow faked and that the police officer who knelt on George Floyd’s neck is not the same man who was charged with Mr. Floyd’s murder ('look at the ear structure in particular,' he advised)."
Look at the ear structure? That kind of armchair video forensic analysis is only going to become more and more common in an era of ubiquitous deepfakes. The technology will likely add a dash of plausibility to countless conspiracy theories—and when it comes to conspiracy theories, a dash is all that's needed.


fortune--2020-10-06--Movie piracy is on the rise as studios bypass theatrical releases

Along with stalling film production, shutting theaters and throwing release schedules into chaos, the coronavirus pandemic has brought still another woe to Hollywood: a rise in movie piracy.
Studios have tried to salvage some of their big-budget films this year by selling them through streaming services for $20 to $30. But that business model has made it easier for pirates to illegally copy and share new releases, with an estimated loss of millions of potential customers for the production companies.
Unlicensed downloads of Walt Disney Co.’s most-recent picture, “Mulan,” have outpaced those of other movies since its Sept. 4 U.S. debut on the Disney+ streaming service, according to TorrentFreak, a website that tracks pirating activity on public servers. Compared with “The Lion King,” which came out last year in theaters, “Mulan” saw about twice as many downloads in the days and weeks after its release.
When a traditional movie is released in theaters, thieves struggle to obtain high-quality recordings of it, often resorting to bootlegging with a hidden camcorder. With digital releases, pirates use technologies not available to most consumers to make perfect copies quickly.
The high cost of legitimate first-run streaming movies may also be dissuading some people. A licensed version of “Mulan” costs $30, on top of a $7-a-month subscription to Disney+. “Trolls World Tour,” from Comcast Corp.’s Universal Pictures, started streaming in April for $20.
Disney and Universal didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Limelight Networks Inc., which provides digital distribution of entertainment content and applies antipiracy measures, has seen piracy “going up dramatically” in recent months, Chief Executive Officer Robert Lento said.
“We spend more time talking to our customers about it now than ever before,” Lento said.
Adding Watermarks
The most common technique to limit piracy is by adding watermarks that help trace which customer originally received the movie. When content is found on a pirating website, the watermarks can be used to ban the original purchaser. But that method doesn’t always work, and it hasn’t stopped the yearslong surge in piracy.
Government efforts have also been unsuccessful at preventing viewers from accessing pirated content. Pascal Metral, vice president of legal affairs at Nagra Kudelski, another digital-distribution company, said studios are most concerned with shutting down the big players who move films for profit. Attempts to go after casual users could alienate more customers than it’s worth, Metral said.
What Bloomberg Intelligence Says
“The seemingly muted performance of Disney’s ‘Mulan’ in the premium digital-film-distribution window raises questions about the viability of skipping a theatrical release in favor of streaming, further vexing the decision-making for studios delaying blockbusters like ‘Black Widow’ and ‘No Time to Die.’ ‘Mulan’ appears to have fallen short of the 10 million digital buys needed to break even on a $300 million production and marketing budget, based on our scenario analysis.”
–Geetha Ranganathan, media analyst
While movies on peer-to-peer networks are free, those files often contain malware. Consequently, an entire industry has been propped up that offers reliable high-quality streaming of copyrighted works for a low monthly fee or advertisements. Streaming videos resolves most of the security risks.
Under scrutiny in Congress is one loophole of copyright law that lets streaming pirates off with only a misdemeanor offense, said Frank Cullen Jr., vice president of intellectual-property policy at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Global Innovation Policy Center. Other types of pirating where the content is republished as a file is punishable as a felony.
Closing the loophole has been discussed since at least 2011, although congressional talks are still ongoing, Cullen said.
‘Up-to-Date Penalties’
Karyn A. Temple, then-director of the U.S. Copyright Office, last year wrote to the chairman and ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee to urge the adoption of “up-to-date criminal penalties that are appropriate to the offenses and the digital world in which we operate.” Temple is now general counsel of the Motion Picture Association.
Last month, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement launched an ad campaign in conjunction with several industry trade groups. The focus is on risks to digital security and fraud when accessing pirated content. At a press conference, ICE officials highlighted the economic risks, noting that piracy costs the economy more than $29 billion each year.
“Clearly the rise of digital streaming presents new challenges when it comes to copyright protection for both the content creative industry and of course law enforcement,” said Derek Benner, executive associate director for Homeland Security Investigations.
Not all pirates go unchecked. In August, the Justice Department charged three men for their involvement in a disc-based piracy ring that distributed nearly every movie released by major production studios. The losses are estimated at tens of millions of dollars.


fortune--2020-10-06--An electric vehicle startup with a troubled past seeks a SPAC

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Electric-vehicle startups have been tying up with Special Purpose Acquisition companies. Faraday Future, a prominent startup in the space that fell from grace after blowing through billions, now says it too plans to go public via merger with a blank check company.
In an interview with Reuters, Faraday Future’s CEO Carsten Brietfeld says the company is working on a deal that will be announced “hopefully quite soon.”
Founded in 2014, the electric vehicle startup was hyped as a rival to Tesla with lofty promises of investing $1 billion in Nevada to build a car factory as well as a Batmobile-esque car. But it turned out Faraday’s future was more far away than anticipated. In 2017, the company abandoned plans for the factory as top executives left the company, and its debut car, the FF 91, remains elusive. In late 2019, Faraday Future founder Jia Yueting resigned as CEO and later filed for bankruptcy in the hopes of clearing himself of some $3.6 billion in debt that he had accrued while building up Faraday and other enterprises that had once valued him as the 17th richest man in China.
Even though Jia is no longer leading the company, his stake still remained a lingering issue, with Breitfeld telling Reuters that it has been an obstacle in onboarding new investors. Jia, he added, no longer owns stock in Faraday.
New owners or not, with the pandemic looming, Faraday Future has yet to come through with its first and flagship product: In October of last year, my colleague Eamon Barrett reported that the company planned to release the FF 91 SUV model by September. Now, the company is slated to deliver its flagship product nine months after securing funding through a SPAC.
Who knows how that timeline will turn out.
Lucinda Shen
Twitter: @shenlucinda
Email: lucinda.shen@fortune.com
VENTURE DEALS
- Ÿnsect, a Paris-based insect farming startup, raised $224 million in funding. Investors include Upfront Ventures and Robert Downey Jr.’s FootPrint Coalition.
- Unqork, a New York-based no-code platform, raised $207 million in Series C funding, raising the company’s valuation to $2 billion. BlackRock led the round and was joined by investors including Eldridge, Fin Venture Capital, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Schonfeld Strategic Advisors and Sunley House Capital Management. Existing investors including CapitalG,, Goldman Sachs, Broadridge Financial Solutions, Aquiline Technology Growth and World Innovation Lab also participated.
- Tipalti, a San Mateo, Calif.-based account payables automation solution, raised $150 million at a valuation of more than $2 billion. Durable Capital Partners led the round and was joined by investors including Greenoaks Capital and 01 Advisors.
- Dialpad, a San Francisco-based cloud business phone and contact center provider, raised $100 million in Series E funding. OMERS Growth Equity led the round and was joined by investors including Andreessen Horowitz, GV, ICONIQ Capital, Felicis Ventures, Section 32 and Work-Bench.
- GrubMarket, a California-based produce delivery company, raised $60 million in Series D funding. Investors include BlackRock, Reimagined Ventures, Trinity Capital Investment, Celtic House Venture Partners, Marubeni Ventures, Sixty Degree Capital, and Mojo Partners. Read more.
- Skilljar, a Seattle-based customer on-boarding platform, raised $33 million in Series B funding. Insight Partners led the funding round and was joined by investors including Mayfield, Trilogy Equity Partners, and Shasta Ventures.
- Airkit, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based customer engagement platform, raised $28 million in funding. Investors include Accel, Emergence Capital, and Salesforce Ventures.
- AccessFintech, a New York-based fintech focused on data and workflow collaboration, raised $20 million in Series B funding. Dawn Capital led the round.
- Cornelis Networks, a spinout of Intel’s Omni-Path Architecture Business, raised $20 million in Series A funding. Downing Ventures led the round and was joined by investors including Intel Capital and Chestnut Street Ventures.
- Uni, an India-based credit card fintech, raised $18.5 million in seed funding. Lightspeed and Accel led the round. Read more.
- Abridge, a Pittsburgh, Penn.-based platform for medical care and follow through on doctors’ advice, raised $15 million across seed and Series A funding. Investors include Union Square Ventures and UPMC.
- Mandolin, an Indianapolis, In.-based provider for artists, venues, and fans, raised $5 million in seed funding. Investors include High Alpha Capital and Marc Benioff.
- HUVRdata, an Austin-based maker of products that help industrial companies integrate data from inspections, raised $5 million in funding. Cottonwood Venture Partners led the round. Read more.
- Strike Graph, a Seattle-based compliance automation startup, raised $3.9 million in seed funding. Madrona Venture Group led the round and was joined by investors including Amplify.LA, Revolution’s Rise of the Rest Seed Fund and Green D Ventures.
- Walnut, a San Francisco-based platform for sales representatives to manage sales demos, raised $2.5 million in seed funding. NFX led the round and was joined by investors including Avishay Abrahami, CEO at Wix.
- Doppler, a San Francisco-based security platform for developers, raised $2.3 million in seed funding. Sequoia Capital led the round and was joined by investors including Kleiner Perkins, Abstract Ventures and Soma Capital.
- Empowerly, a San Francisco-based startup for college admissions, raised $1.6 million from investors including TransLink Capital, Scrum Ventures, Azure Capital Partners, and Spero Ventures.
PRIVATE EQUITY
- Icon Health & Fitness, a Logan, Ut.-based maker of connected fitness equipment and software, raised $200 million. L Catterton led the round and was joined by investors including Pamplona Capital Management.
- Blackstone acquired ZO Skin Health, a California-based skincare brand. Financial terms weren't disclosed.
- Integrity Growth Partners invested in MBS Highway, a Holmdel, N.J.-based provider of mortgage technology solutions. Financial terms weren't disclosed.
- Featheringill Capital acquired a majority stake in InvestEdge, a Philadelphia-based provider of compliance software to financial institutions. Financial terms weren't disclosed.
- Novacap acquired an interest in AGA Financial Group, a Quebec-based employee benefits advisory firm. Financial terms weren't disclosed.
- Premier Steel Doors, a portfolio company of OpenGate Capital, acquired MegaMet Industries, a Birmingham, Ala.-based company that designs and fabricates specialty and custom hollow metal door systems for government, medical, and commercial end-markets. Financial terms weren't disclosed.
- Quorum Software, a portfolio company of Thoma Bravo, acquired Landdox, a Dallas-based cloud-based land management company. Financial terms weren't disclosed.
- Smile Brands, backed by Gryphon Investors, invested in Reflections Dental, a Seattle-based general dentistry practice. Financial terms weren't disclosed.
OTHERS
- Bristol Myers Squibb (NYSE: BMY) agreed to acquire MyoKardia, (Nasdaq: MYOK), which focuses on cardiovascular diseases, for $13.1 billion.
- Avalara (NYSE: AVLR) acquired Transaction Tax Resources, a provider of tax advice and software, for about $377 million in cash.
- ECI Software Solutions acquired BOLT Software, a cloud-based construction business management solution. Financial terms weren't disclosed.
EXITS
- Investindustrial VII acquired the European and international bakery ingredients business of CSM Bakery Solutions, backed by Rhône Capital. Financial terms weren't disclosed.
- STERIS (NYSE: STE) agreed to acquire Key Surgical, a provider of consumable products to hospitals and surgical facilities, from Water Street Healthcare Partners for $850 million.
IPOs
- AppLovin, the U.S. mobile app and gaming company, is preparing for an IPO that could come in 2021. KKR backs the firm. Read more.
- Sequoia Solucoes Logisticas, a Brazilian logistics firm, raised 1 billion reais ($179.39 million) in an IPO. Warburg Pincus backs the firm. Read more.
- Root, a Columbus, Oh.-based auto insurance tech company, filed to raise $100 million. It posted revenue of $290 million in 2019 and a loss of $283 million. Drive Capital, Ribbit Capital, and Tiger Global back the firm. Read more.
- Telos, an Ashburn, Va.-based provider of security software, filed to raise $242 million. Read more.
- MediaAlpha, a Los Angeles-based provider of customer acquisition services for insurance companies, filed to raise $100 million. White Mountain Investments backs the firm. Read more.
SPACS
- Clover Health Investments, an operator of Medicare Advantage plans, plans to go public via merger with Social Capital Hedosophia Holdings Corp. III, a SPAC. The deal values the firm at about $3.7 billion.
- Gores Holdings VI, a blank check company created by The Gores Group, filed to raise $300 million. Read more.
F+FS
- Plexus Capital closed Plexus Fund V with $502 million in commitments.
- Sweetwater Capital Partners received $350 million in commitments for its second fund.
- ACME Capital raised $246 million for its 10th fund.
- Alta Growth Capital received $150 million in commitments for Alta Growth Capital, Mexico Fund III.
- Catalio Capital Management raised $100 million for its second fund.
- Salesforce (NYSE: CRM) announced a $100 million second impact fund.
PEOPLE
- CAVU Venture Partners named Alexandre Cohen as a partner.


fortune--2020-10-06--5 years in, damages from the VW emissions cheating scandal are still rolling in

Five years in, the Volkswagen emissions-cheating scandal is looking like one of the costliest business scandals ever. Another former top Volkswagen executive went on trial recently, just over five years after the scandal broke—and it’s still nowhere near over.
For anyone who doubts the destructive power of poor leadership and a diseased corporate culture, the VW saga is a sobering lesson. Leadership and culture aren’t “soft” factors. In this case, they represent lives ruined and hard-won billions of dollars lost.
If you’ve forgotten the details, Volkswagen admitted in September 2015 that it had installed “defeat devices” in millions of its diesel-powered cars. Software detected when cars were being tested for compliance with emissions rules; the software then adjusted the engines so that they passed. But in normal use, the engines emitted far more pollution, including up to 40 times more nitrogen oxide, which contributes to asthma, bronchitis, and emphysema.
It had all been going on for years. Many employees and executives—to this day no one knows how many—knew exactly what they were doing and why. Here’s a summary of the damage so far:
Damage to the business: Days after the scandal broke, VW booked a $7.3 billion charge to earnings in anticipation of fines, litigation costs, and other payouts. That was optimistic. To date the company has booked $35 billion of charges to earnings, offering little reason to suppose that’s the final number.
Damage to shareholders: It’s impossible to calculate precisely, but in the scandal’s first two months the company lost 46% of its value, or $42.5 billion. Today Germany’s DAX index is about where it was in September 2015, and the S&P 500 is up 68%, but VW stock is still 35% below its pre-scandal price.
Damage to dealers: VW paid its U.S. dealers $1.2 billion to compensate them for losses, but their total losses have not been calculated, and losses to thousands of dealerships worldwide are unknown.
Damage to reputation: The value of the VW brand plunged after the scandal. The brand has recovered some of its lost ground in BrandFinance’s annual ranking, but not all of it. Pre-scandal it was the world’s 18th most valuable brand; five years later it’s 25th.
Damage to employees: VW announced in 2016 it would eliminate 30,000 jobs worldwide as it overhauled operations in the wake of the scandal.
Damage to brand Germany: This is incalculable, but VW is Germany’s largest company, and engineering is Germany’s pride, the heart of the country’s business brand. VW couldn’t get its diesel engine emissions to be acceptably low, so it installed software to conceal its failed engineering. Humiliating.
Much additional damage remains to be determined. For example, not until this past May did a German court rule that Volkswagen owners in Germany are entitled to damages from the scandal.
How much longer can the effects of the scandal linger? Last month, five years to the day after CEO Martin Winterkorn resigned abruptly, German prosecutors announced scandal-related charges against eight more VW employees. The trial that just commenced, of VW executive Rupert Stadler, is scheduled to last until 2022. The trial of Winterkorn, on charges of fraud and market manipulation, hasn’t even been scheduled yet.


fortune--2020-10-06--Can superior design pick up the slack at Slack?

This is the web version of Business By Design, a weekly newsletter exploring design’s transformative influence on industry and enterprise. Sign up to get it delivered free to your inbox.
The origin story for Slack, the San Francisco-based enterprise communications platform, involves one of Silicon Valley’s wilder pivots.
In 2013, Stewart Butterfield, already famed for confecting Flickr from the ashes of a failed video game venture and selling it to Yahoo for $20 million, announced the launch of a workplace messaging app built for a second gaming startup (which also failed). By the summer of 2018, Slack—as the spun-off app was dubbed—counted more than 8 million users, had raised $1.7 billion, and commanded a $7 billion valuation. By the time Slack debuted on the New York Stock Exchange in June of last year, its market value had more than doubled to $15.7 billion. On its first day of trading Slack’s market cap more than doubled again to close at over $38 billion.
Early this year, as the coronavirus swept across the U.S. and Europe, the value of Butterfield’s ersatz messaging app looked poised to ascend even higher into the stratosphere. Slack offers a product that seemed a sure bet for the “work-from-home” era: an innovative digital platform, beloved by tech startups, that enables employees to communicate with each other quickly and intuitively without having to occupy the same space or resort to e-mail.
In June, Slack rolled out Slack Connect a bundle of additional functions and features designed to make it easier for large companies to collaborate externally with partners, vendors, and clients.
(Full disclosure: here at Fortune, we practically live on Slack; I’m a huge fan.)
And yet, as the pandemic drags on, Slack shares remain stubbornly earthbound. Consider Wall Street’s response in September when the company reported that revenues in the second quarter ending July 31 jumped 49% to $216 million. Losses were negligible. But billings were $218 million, shy of the $232 million projected by analysts. Slack’s stock price tanked 19% in a single day.
Slack shares have since rallied and now trade around $29, up from $23 at the beginning of the year. Not bad, but it’s a far cry from the performance of Zoom, the video conferencing app, whose shares began the year at $68 and now trade above $480. Slack’s market capitalization of $16 billion compared to $138 billion for Zoom.
I have argued often in this space that Wall Street routinely underestimates the value of great design. But Slack, unlike Zoom, has struggled to grow its user base during the pandemic. The company claims more than 12 million total daily average users—but hasn’t updated that estimate since last year.
A more pressing challenge for Slack is that many of its 130,000 paying customers are small and medium-sized businesses that have been hit hard by the pandemic and quicker to cut back on software fees to contain costs.
And it doesn’t help that Microsoft, Google, and Zoom are adding Slack-like features to their products. Slack’s biggest headache is Microsoft, which introduced its own enterprise communications and collaboration app, Teams, in November 2016.
The Wall Street Journal reports that Microsoft made a bid to acquire Slack in 2015. Butterfield declined. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella now hails Teams as critical to his company’s future.
Like Slack, Microsoft offers a free version of its platform with limited features and a more robust subscription-based version that can be purchased separately from other Microsoft products. But the Seattle-based software giant has worked hard to integrate Teams into its broader product suite and includes the platform free of charge for companies that pay for Office 365, which includes Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.
Butterfield has accused Microsoft of trying to “kill off” Slack because it perceives the smaller company as an existential threat. (Microsoft scoffs at that and says it welcomes competition.)
Slack has filed a complaint against Microsoft in the European Union alleging illegal and anti-competitive practices that breach EU competition law. In a statement, Jonathan Prince, vice president of communications and policy at Slack, alleged Microsoft is trying to stymie Slack because it “offers an open, flexible approach…that competes with the rest of Microsoft’s stack and gives customers the freedom to build solutions that meet their needs. We want to be the 2% of your software budget that makes the other 98% more valuable; they want 100% of your budget every time.”
Online reviews (like this one on blogging site, kinsta.com) of the two platforms tend to rate Slack the superior product for design, flexibility, and compatibility with outside applications. But there’s no denying that Teams is a solid alternative—or that Microsoft’s approach seems to be gaining traction, especially with big companies, government agencies, and schools.
In July of 2019 Microsoft issued a statement claiming Teams’ daily average users exceeded 13 million, topping the 10 million users then claimed by Slack. In April 2020, Microsoft said Teams’ user base had swelled to 75 million—prompting analysts at Goldman Sachs to declare victory for Teams.
My view, for what it’s worth, is that the battle is far from over. And in any case, it’s not clear to me that this is a zero-sum contest. Slack says the “majority” of its $1 million and above customers also use Microsoft’s Office 365. That’s certainly true at Fortune, where we use Slack, Outlook, and Zoom throughout the day.
Slack will be introducing a host of new features at its Frontiers 2020 conference which will be held virtually October 7-8. (You can register to participate here.) Ahead of that event, I caught up earlier this week (via Zoom) with Slack’s chief product officer Tamar Yehoshua and design vice president Ethan Eismann.
I couldn’t persuade them to spill the beans on Slack’s new product launch, but they offered a spirited defense of Slack’s open design philosophy and a detailed explanation of how the company collaborates with customers to continuously improve the platform. You’ll find highlights of that conversation in the video at the top of the web version of this week’s newsletter.
More design news below!
Clay Chandler
– clay.chandler@fortune.com
NEWS BY DESIGN
Kenzo Takada
Japanese fashion designer Kenzo Takada died from COVID-19 complications at age 81. Takada emigrated to Paris in 1965, where he began his career, growing his self-titled brand into an international icon. The Kenzo brand—originally known for its colorful, Japanese-inspired designs, and now most famous for its vibrant tiger logo—was acquired by LVMH in 1993. Takada retired from the label nine years later.
Snøhetta
Norwegian (but, international) architecture firm Snøhetta won the Cooper Hewitt National Design Award for Architecture. The accolade is awarded by New York’s Smithsonian Design Museum and recognizes not only the aesthetic splendor of Snøhetta's work but also its focus on the environment and sustainability. The award is the latest distinction to befall the architectural firm. Last month, Snøhetta won the bid to design the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library in North Dakota’s badlands.
Butterfly wings
California-based Cypris Materials has created a new paint inspired by the wings of a butterfly that uses reflection to create the illusion of color. Unlike conventional paints, which rely on dyes to provide color, Cypris Materials’s clear lacquer contains “nanostructures” that reflect certain wavelengths of light, making the paint appear colorful. But it’s not just color—the paint can be constructed to reflect UV or heat, too.
Monumental change
The Mellon Foundation—the largest foundation in support of humanities and arts in the U.S.—has pledged $250 million over the next five years to reimagine America's relationship with monuments. The so-called Monuments Project will pay to relocate some monuments, build new ones and reinvent others.
Pay me
Venmo is launching a credit card designed for mobile apps. The card comes with a personalized QR code printed on its surface, which can be scanned with handheld point-of-sale devices. It can also be used at regular credit card terminals, expanding Venmo’s reach beyond mobile payments.
Fee waver
The e-commerce giant is trialling a new payment system at two of its physical Go stores that allow customers to pay by hovering their palm above a scanner. The initiative is called Amazon One and it uses a biometric sensor to detect the identifying pattern of blood vessels within the user's palm. Amazon argues it is more “private” than facial recognition tech. But privacy advocates say biometric payments are unnecessary anyway.
EVENTS BY DESIGN
October
Dubai had, perhaps, the misfortune of hosting the World Expo this year. Originally scheduled to open in October and run until April next year, the Dubai Expo 2020 has been delayed until October next year instead. World Expos come but once every five years, so perhaps waiting one more year is okay.
Italy’s materia independent design festival will return to showcasing young Italian designers October 2, taking the exhibition online via Instagram and Facebook.
Dutch Design Week is cancelling the real-world elements of this year's event in Eindhoven as coronavirus case numbers rise in the city. The online portions of the event will continue, October 17-25.
Swiss furniture designer Vitra is hosting its inaugural Vitra Summit October 22-23, bringing together architects, curators and designers to discuss the future of spaces. The event will be online.
November
Dubai’s inaugural architecture festival, d3 Architecture Festival, will run November 11-13 on the sidelines of Dubai Design Week. The event will focus on sustainability—an existential issue for the desert city.
Canada’s annual graphic design fest, DesignThinkers, is running online this year, November 10-21—the first time in the event’s 20-year history that it hasn’t been held in person.
QUOTED BY DESIGN
“Designers need to take a good hard look at themselves and stop making pointless stuff that looks nice and fuels relentless consumption.”
A new eco-focused creative collective, Urge, is hoping to reimagine how designers interact with the issue of climate change. The group is “not a think tank,” members Alexie Sommer and Ella Doran assert, because it aims to create practical solutions—rather than just conduct research and file reports. Urge wants all designers to be more actively engaged in the climate crisis, calling on them to “re-think the brief and make people and planet the clients.”
This week’s edition of BxD was curated by Eamon Barrett. Email him tips and ideas at eamon.barrett@fortune.com