The Peak Weekend Reader

Good morning. A few weeks ago, I had my Friday afternoon ruined by a phone call. It was with Jérémie Harris, the CEO and co-founder of an AI safety company called Gladstone AI, and the topic was AI doomsday scenarios (this was just days after outgoing Anthropic employee Jacob Coxon published a doozy of a tweet about AI having a 10% chance of wiping out humanity in the next 10 years). “It doesn't take much: a study of the U.S. electrical grid found a set of roughly 30 key nodes, and taking out around nine of them could effectively compromise it. That's since been partially remediated, but only partially. These scenarios are looking less like speculation,” Harris told me. 

I left the call dazed and spooked. I briefly considered just publishing the transcript in its raw format, but decided that passing my stomach-drop feeling on to our readers wasn’t the move. Then a journalist friend in Paris advised me to “follow the research” and told me that the story’s angle would reveal itself as I moved through the work of writing it.

I decided to zero in on preppers. If my social media timeline is anything to go by, the movement is coming out of obscurity — and drawing in newcomers — as headlines of cyber hacks and power outages in grocery stores dominate the news cycle. Even Anthropic’s own IPO prospectus outlines potentially catastrophic existential risks. For preppers, this is nothing new. “You still need food, water, medicine, and communications. Those things do not change whether it is a hurricane, a war, a volcano, or an [AI] attack,” Marlon Smith, one of my prepper sources, told me. 

If you, like me, have started eyeing the bulk packages of bottled water with a newfound interest, today’s story might be for you. It’s not all doom and gloom, I promise.

Liz

🦊 Mozilla released the most millennial advertisement ever. Tay Zonday. Bad Luck Brian. Overly Attached Girlfriend. If you are an internet user of a certain age, these names will bring back a flood of memories of surfing the web in the school computer lab. Mozilla has brought them all out for a new Firefox campaign. We hope it sparks a Numa Numa Guy revival.

🇦🇺 Australian court rules Vegemite isn’t a human right. A man serving a life sentence for murder in the state of Victoria tried to argue that a ban on prison access to the ‘it’s an acquired taste’ spread breached his right to “enjoy his culture as an Australian.” The court sided with the state, upholding that Vegemite can potentially interfere with drug sniffer dogs.  

🏟️ You’ll never guess which place is getting the next Sphere. It’s that famed tourist spot we all long to visit… Prince George's County, Maryland! The region bordering D.C. is getting its own mini 6,000-seat version of the Las Vegas Sphere, with the county council approving up to US$215 million in funds to build it (though its final price will be closer to $1.4 billion).

🧅 Students are fighting for the right to trade onion futures. Since 1958, the trading of onion futures has been banned in the U.S. in response to an incident where two traders cornered the market. Now, a group of prediction-market-loving students called For Our Futures is petitioning for a repeal of the ban. Kalshi uses the protest as an opportunity to hand out branded merch.

Last weekend, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva held on to office, defeating his far-right opponent Flávio Bolsonaro, the son of jailed former president Jair Bolsonaro, in a second-round runoff vote. The 81-year-old leftist firebrand made history by becoming the first presidential candidate to win a runoff despite finishing second in the first round of voting. So, what changed in the three weeks between the first and second rounds? An online tidal wave, that’s what. 

Saying social media has irrevocably changed politics and elections might be some easy hack commentary, but here’s the thing: it’s also true. And there might be no country where it’s more true than Brazil — a nation whose citizenry is heavily online and where several of the most popular sitting politicians are also de facto influencers. 

For years, the Brazilian right had dominated the online battlefield, with the senior Bolsonaro revolutionizing the political utility of social media when he won the presidency in 2018. However, it appears that the script may have officially flipped. While there were several contributing factors to Lula’s victory — including a change in messaging from his campaign and heightened suspicion about potential corruption tied to Bolsonaro — many analysts cite a WhatsApp channel called Lula’s Army as the key catalyst powering the surprise comeback. 

The channel was the brainchild of Congressman André Janones, a popular progressive politician who posts energized rant videos to his more than nine million Instagram followers.  He started the channel in April, enlisting 53,000 of his followers as the initial base, but it really started to take off after the first round of voting. It rapidly accumulated new members and even survived two shutdown attempts from a Bolsonaro-linked judge.

Lula’s Army was an apt name, because Janones acted like a five-star general. Through the channel, he and his administrators would send expletive-filled all-caps messages commanding members to do various tasks, like push specific hashtags on X, view and share videos, and spike internet searches for Bolsonaro-related corruption scandals. “At family gatherings and get-togethers with friends, it was not uncommon for people to interrupt conversations to complete their missions,” Brazil expert Anaïs Fléchet told Le Monde. 

It worked like gangbusters; the channel was a dynamite recruiting tool and narrative-changing force that was able to win over people who voted for a candidate besides Lula or Bolsonaro in the first round and those who didn’t vote at all. By the time the second round of voting began, the channel had accumulated more than 10 million people ready to help the campaign at a moment’s notice — this included Lula himself, who was gifted his first-ever smartphone so he could join. For comparison, a similar group for Bolsonaro called Flávio Troop had just 2.1 million followers. 

Where Brazil goes from here is uncertain: the country is still intensely politically divided; Bolsonaro (like his father before him) refused to acknowledge defeat and fled the country; and the nation’s currency fell off a cliff after Lula won as foreign and domestic investors fretted over the administration’s fiscal management. One thing is for certain, though: social media will continue to drive political change in the country. 

In fact, Brazil might be an image of the future for elections in other countries that haven’t utilized these tools in quite the same way. Maybe one day, a mobilizing WhatsApp group with millions of members will be as commonplace here as a lawn sign or a TV advertisement.

📡 What else is on our radar:

After a call with an AI safety expert left Liz Guber rattled, she went looking for the people who’ve been preparing for disaster long before weaponized bots entered the picture. Preppers — previously dismissed as paranoid loners — have seen interest in their methods surge since the pandemic, and AI doomsday headlines are bringing in a new wave of reluctant newcomers. But the true preppers aren’t panicking.