Sidechannel Presents... A Conversation With Data & Society's Cristina López G.

5:52PM Jun 16, 2021

Speakers:

Keywords:

bitcoin

people

el salvador

country

content

crypto

twitter

terms

social media

president

government

incredibly

narrative

democracy

running

means

salvadoran

pandemic

governance

power

It's working. Hey, how you doing? Good now? Christina, thank you for joining me tonight. So we're gonna let people trickle in. But this should be really fun. This is like the first, like crypto adjacent talk we've had a year, which is honestly kind of surprising because it's existed for about a month.

And I kind of hate but that's the one where I get pulled in, because it just happens to intersect with, you know, my obsession with the way that the president of my home country kind of governs and how you can really draw a lot of parallels to a lot of different people who've seen that this is a really good viable strategy of power, just ruling for means. Yeah.

Okay. So, before we like, so just set this up. Because I think this is really funny. You DM me the other day. And you're like, do you want to talk about content governance? And I had never heard that phrase before I googled it. And I had no, I've never seen it used anywhere. And yet, I immediately knew what you're talking about. And I was like, Oh, my god, yes, I do want to talk about content governance. But so I put it in my newsletter, and I had a reader who I will not put on blast. But he emailed me. And he said, this is one of the coolest concepts I've ever heard of, and intuitively makes sense. But you have to get a better name for it.

It is a terrible name, because it is literally what just, I was able to put into words into a DM, and I'm still trying to figure out what things it covers so that we can figure out like a better name for it. But it really started, not necessarily with power. It started out I started thinking about this more in line, after what we saw in January 6, after they stormed the Capitol, we were starting to think about this phenomenon of just seeing things in real life that have mostly been incentivized, by wanting to create content, right. And that's, you know, as old as most social media networks, you've had this incentive, like the need to create content has often had, you know, but people thought it on people that instead of creating actual happenings, what happens when this need for content is, is what dictates public policy. And to an extent if Trump I think had been a little more savvy in terms of the different audiences on every single social media platform, and if he had done what he so intentionally did with the news media, in terms of setting up the agenda, if he had done that, through policy, we would be in a much worse place, I think. But in El Salvador, what we have is a person who not only knows natively and intuitively how every social media network works, he's been able to use all of them to his advantage from the inception of his political career. And at this point, is the only way that you can explain in a very rough TLDR how El Salvador ended up being the first country to make Bitcoin, you know, basically legal tender, and at this point, you have every the most reputed economist self saboteur, like really racking their brains trying to figure out like, why this makes sense for a country in which, you know, 70% of the population doesn't really have access to E banking, or even just the main financial structures that you need for something like Bitcoin to make sense. So outside of a gigantic meme, this is not really public policy, like thought of, you know, in efforts of putting this tool at the fingertips of the population not really is. And it tracks really, with something that this President has been doing for a long time, which is, you know, creating policy with the effort of having a wave of content that really drowns out anything else. And so it's interesting not just to see hashtag the content that comes out. It's also interesting to figure out and map out in this what I've been doing for a while, um, what are the things that this hashtag content is meant to obscure? What are the things that are kind of what are the agenda items that got kicked out of the conversation? Because right now, like, everywhere, the only thing that you can talk about is, you know, the, the policy that was enacted with the effort of creating social media content for the President.

Right. Okay. So that was actually a fantastic way to intro this entire thing. So thank you very much. And before we go any further, I want to talk about you first, I want to sort of introduce you to everybody so Can Can you tell me a little bit about what your work has been like with the data society and sort of what you've Focus on normally.

Absolutely, I need to kind of ID data and society, it asks, the organization that I work for. It's a research institute that mostly devotes its attention to seeing the ways in which social media or in technologies intersect with social systems to either make them better make them worse, or in for the most part, what we are seeing are those inter interactions and seeing how they really affect different populations. My actual project that I've been focusing on, has nothing to do with this. So I haven't been able to really explore content governance, as much as I would like to and drawing samples from different countries in the world, I've been more immersed for the last two years on this information around the 2020 census, okay, um, both, you know, where it came from, what social media platforms were used for it, and I was working with a coalition of civil rights organizations that were funded to, you know, try to set up a network response to this information about the census to what we think is a network problem. So it was a really interesting experiment. And we're still like writing the findings of what the past two years taught us in terms of this, but outside of that I am originally from Southern Salvador. And I have always been obsessed with the ways that different political parties gain access to power. And it's been a very interesting last few years, because a person that had originally no ties to politics and no ties to the usual traditional paths towards power became not only the precedent but also a precedent with the most with the highest approval rate that we've ever had. It's it's close to 90%. That's crazy. surd.

And, and just as just to sort of like orient ourselves in this, he's, I read, I read a little bit about him in sort of my own trying to cover like the Bitcoin story, but like, he's a right wing populist, is that like fair to say that that's sort of like where he would fit on the Overton window there, the political spectrum.

That is where content, hashtag content has taken him, he originally arose to power through the left wing party, the only left wing party and no salvadora that came out of the Civil War, after the Civil War, the armed guerrillas that had been facing off against the army, basically, government powers. After our peace accords, they became an actual political party. And they I want to say they had power for 10 years, because they had to separate precedents. issue is that because our democracy is is pretty new, if we are counting from the peace, of course, after the Civil War, we haven't had enough time for this political parties to mature into, you know, the the strong structures that you need, in terms of vetting candidates are really actually like building an ideology. So what really started happening is that they also became really easy vehicles for any opportunist that was trying to figure out how to gain access to power. And this was the case of naive bucola. When he was in his early, early 30s. As soon as he could aspire for a for a candidacy for for mayor, he did just that he originally was the son of the owner of the ad agency that did the ads for this for the left wing political party. And of

course, of course, he's, of course the millennial president that made Bitcoin legal tender is an ad agency guy.

And before being an ad agency guy, he was the owner of one of the main ritzy clubs for like rich kids. And that was his deal. After high school, he owned the club and you could kind of see him there all the time. He had a really scary bouncer that kind of decided based on a lot of really shitty profiling, who was welcoming the club and who wasn't and that, okay, that dynamic is important because a lot of what he's done really well through the dynamics of hashtag content governance, has been singled out, who he believes is the enemy of the narrative. And he's done a phenomenal job at casting as enemies in the different narratives. Either the Traditional political parties, or journalists, the media, and because no one else has been able to compete in the same with the same effectiveness in terms of creating content, that's the thing, you have to be able to counter this, you have to create really compelling content and what people really can't like his political opponents really don't race to that level. It is really journalists who are countering the narrative with, you know, either investigative reports, or just really asking thorough the the questions that everyone should be asking and trying to insert some accountability, that allows him to paint them as the opposition to paint all journalism as an enemy of this incredibly popular project, like national project. And so I see what that has has brought is pretty much unchecked power. But how he got here was through an agent through his ad agency, he saw that there, you know, was this small town that didn't really have a candidate for the mayorship. And he suggested to his clients, then the left wing political party, that he could be that candidate that he could run and it was a very tiny town, he, um, he was able to mount a super effective campaign, mostly because he spent his own money on it, okay, is incredibly wealthy. And the what was interesting is that he didn't use the traditional colors of the party he was running with, he used his own colors, it was this guy that has

now a real piano or O'Rourke kind of vibe, right? He's like making his own logos and stuff.

fully, fully making his own logos, the the little town that he was running for its name was new evercool, Scotland. And so it started with an end. And you saw the end everywhere His name is. So the end became kind of a brand that you were seeing all over all over the Capitol and, and his little town wasn't even that close to the capital city. So you could see that, behind this little town project, there was a bigger branding project that was taking place. And he use the incredible popularity and really just like its brand positioning, to run for the biggest mayorship in the country, which is the capital city. And after that, he realized that he didn't really need the political party he had run with. And that's when his ideology becomes just a huge question mark, it really, he doesn't really tethered himself to a huge ideological project, he's been able to pick and choose right in ways that make him really palatable for different voting blocks. So weirdly, he's become the worst bro in your timeline, in the sense that he's pushing Bitcoin and this sort of savage capitalism approach of free market economics, coupled with a lot of rhetoric about inequality, despite the fact that he's pushing for things that would just exacerbate inequality in horrible ways.

I mean, is it wrong to say that he kind of sounds like Andrew Yang?

He is better Andrew, Andrew Yang, because he actually does his own content and and doesn't have that many people that think he's absolutely awful in their timelines, his incredible popularity can also be explained by how strategic he is, in his use of social media. No, Salvador, err, are we have a population of under 7 million people, but we have more cell phones than people. And that sort, the fact that everyone has access to a phone also means that social media networks have really interesting incentives when it comes to a country like Salvador, because what you tried to do is to make sure that everyone on their phones already has access to the internet exclusively through your platform. And so a lot of services like WhatsApp or Twitter or Facebook, exists on people's phones, even if they don't have an actual data plan. And the way that they experience the internet is exclusively through social media networks like WhatsApp, like Facebook, like Twitter. So what you have already is a captive audience. And then that audience and I was I was reading some of this last week in terms of where the country is, and what kind of social media networks attract which populations and and if you really think about it, it's it's really just like, 50% of the population that is actually active on social media networks. And now that 50% and even, not even a million users, um, no Salvador's Twitter, it doesn't reach them it even a million users, it's a lot lot less than that it's 70% men, the Twitter user base, oh, wow and 30% women. So that explains why someone like they Bill Keller would have incredible popularity on Twitter. And then the way that he's figured it out is that his content on Twitter is pretty much amplified by every newspaper and every journalist that exists. And then his content on Facebook has always been direct a direct conversation with people through either a great use, in my opinion of Facebook Lives. And so he he produces very specific and intentional content for each platform. While on Instagram, you have what amounts as a glamorous life of a reality TV star, okay. And, and that ties in narrative really well, because in that narrative, you also have his wife and his baby, little daughter that was born while he was already precedent. And so this allows him to extend the narrative outside of just the governance aspects to also this glamorization of the First Family something that was incredibly unusual for El Salvador and mostly unusual in every country is when you go to a government to any any public institution, and it's pretty normal to see a picture of the president. I think it's wild the fascist but it's fun in a lot of democracies around the world. Yeah, you know, salad Are you not only have his picture, you have his picture and his wife's picture, which kind of indicates he's planning to take this as further as the constitution allows him. And if he's not able, in his first five year period to push the constitutional amendments that would allow him to stay for longer narrative on his Instagram would allow him with the kind of popularity to push the candidacy from his wife, for example. Interesting,

okay, so, because we're gonna be talking about like, kind of like the type of content he's putting out and how it's working. I wanted to ask you a little bit about like, what salvadorian social media is like, in terms of what goes viral? What people like, and I, myself, I've done a little reporting in places like Mexico, in Brazil that have like very specific kinds of things that like, go viral there, right? So like, what is the landscape of El salvadorian? like Twitter look like it because I know like in Mexico, it's dominated by like completely inauthentic hashtags and weird bots, and like marketing campaigns is El Salvador similar, or is it sort of a different beast,

it's incredibly similar. And in a way, after name, Coachella, it's become even harder to map out the different networks and the different, you know, the different like big accounts of beams and the way that they all intersect, that has been a lot harder now, because you used to have a level of polarization that was easy to understand, that largely tracked, you know, in translation with the two main political parties that came out of the Civil War. And so one was, you know, fairly left wing and the other one was center right now, what you have when they will call it is a third party that was born out of some of the people that were kicked out of the right wing party and his his own baggage of content, I would say his own line of of their own means, and that has complete discombobulated, what I would say is the typical way that means working autometer. It's also similar to Mexico, and to some degree, Venezuela, of course, in like, much smaller scales, because it's just a different ballgame. And what you what you did see, at least when he was running for president was the, I would say, the proliferation of troll networks and troll centers that have been clearly paid to produce content in one way or in certain directions or to amplify certain narratives. And it was very interesting because I started seeing a lot seeing this a lot more with I used to write a column for the one of the daily newspapers and it's in print, and sometimes I forgot to put it out in my social media. And I would just, you know, kind of ignore it and I would see a lot of activity from my column on social media even though it was just print And very specifically, like tracking with, you know, the day that I published, it was like a matter of a matter of hours, whenever I had published anything related to name, okay, let that, you know, you could see in line of people just going after me that had never happened before mostly because again, this is not a column that has a lot of play on on social media or online. It's mostly a friend column. So there was an effort to bring this narrative on social media, and so something that that just didn't look organic, and clearly wasn't part of an organic conversation. The issue is that at this point, there have been too many accusations of, you know, fake coordination, that having a mountain that don't really amount to a lot and you have a lot of the other parties thinking that this is the way that you set up a narrative. So at this point that the social media landscape in O'Fallon, or in terms of, you know, a discussion of politics is is garbage

So, while you're talking about this, I want to drop this screenshot in the react to stage room just so people can kind of get a feel for his Instagram because like if you told me that this guy was just like Logan Paul's manager, I would absolutely believe you. And like the photos of him with his backwards white baseball hat are like absolutely surreal. Like like this is millennial president. Oh wait somebody is using the the fuck boy emoji and anything because like, that is the vibe, right? Like it's it's such a it's, it's so unabashedly millennial that it's making me uncomfortable to look at it

in a way that is also contrived, and that he's been able to sell this image, and now it will be really hard for it to rebrand himself differently. And I think I think this is, you know, the backwards hat was one of his first like, brand or brand signifiers, and at this point has become a symbol for for himself for his followers. Similar to what the magga hat did for the US like that kind of triggering reaction to folks like it, something as neutral as a backwards hat is no longer neutral, and solider.

Oh, interesting. So it's become like a symbol of his his presidency or his regime or whatever.

It's become a symbol for him so so you can really track like where someone like stands in terms of sympathies. It's also interesting to me that the way that he's been able to become as popular as he's become, is not only because this content strategy is, is incredibly solid, it's also because of the eye. Some people call this data voids. But I would say that it also applies to the ideological voids left by the political parties that were the main parties before they have every precedent that got elected from those parties is now either being processed for corruption, or in jail or escaping being processed for corruption in another country. So it was already super easy to hate his opponents like all of his opponents so

can I ask you like a question for Americans who might be you know, making sense of this because I I've had this issue like covering Brazil specifically, which is that how, how legitimate are these like accusations of corruption for his, like, the people he's running against? Are these is like, is this a thing where it's like soft coup stuff? Or is this like a truly corrupt like political landscape

These are the people that came before him and those are absolutely real and true. These people like completely bagged millions and millions of dollars from from our, our taxes, basically, and they all should be rotting in prison, I have no sympathy for them all. But this is the kind of landscape that allows allowed him without any political, um, let's say like, support behind him to basically obliterate the the previous parties, and just now we have more than two parties, but he's, and political alliances have been fragmented in such a way that now he holds up two thirds of the assembly, the National Assembly, which is why the law that passed Bitcoin wasn't even debated in in Congress, it was pretty much something that happened overnight. And without a lot of previous warning, it came again, this was an idea that became policy because they needed content content needed to happen and But now he has the political support that allows him to do that kind of thing.

So I was I, as I've started to cover cryptocurrency this year, which readers of garbage a window happened because I discovered that my retired father had invested quite a bit in cryptocurrency and I decided I should keep an eye on that. So that has become like a thing that I read about now. And I have a column for crypto, and I think it was like a Saturday night. And I was like sitting down for dinner. And all of a sudden, I see the president of El Salvador laser eyes, and I'm like, Oh, no, this, this is not gonna be good, whatever this is. And so I want to I want to do a just sort of outline really quickly before we jump into it. So it isn't. Bitcoin is now legal tender, which means it can be accepted as money in El Salvador, but it is tied to the price of USD, which essentially means that bitcoins value in El Salvador is based on whatever bitcoins value is based according to the dollar. So it's not exactly like, there's just Bitcoin now, it sort of reacts to the US market. And it seems like it has been sort of a mess. So I guess, like, one of the questions that I see popping up in this insincere questions room is, you know, what has the local reaction been to Bitcoin? Like, you know, are people just running to the Bitcoin ATMs? Or like, how does this work on the ground there?

I would say it's been mixed, mostly because there are there is a group of people that even if they might not sympathize with the president, they perhaps had already had some investment in Bitcoin, thinking that, you know, what the, the economics of this country don't seem, you know, don't look very promising, because he's, we are in that for infinity now, after this government. So there, there has been a lot of volatility in the Salvadoran market in terms of people, you know, wondering if they should get their pension money out, just because of the uncertainty that this President brought the uncertainty that comes from not really knowing whether he's going to be sent there. Right. Our right or far, far right. And just that sort of dismantling of what used to be already a welfare system of assistance that isn't that doesn't reach the people who need it the most, it has been, you know, continues to be dismantling dismantled by this government. And so there's a lot of uncertainty. And there is, I assume, a percentage of people who see this as good news as mostly a tool that is now available to them in the economy. These are the people that are all, again, already had investments in Bitcoin, they are the people who are probably going to benefit from this. And then just panic, because, in general, not a lot of people understand what this means. Air, you can just see it in how many journalists are trying to do explainers and just getting over 1000s and 1000s of the ends that are basically similar questions. Yeah. Like, are we going to get now or pensions in Bitcoin? And what does that mean? And so for now, what is happening because the law that passed and have a lot of details, and now it is really up to the the banking system and solider to figure out what this means for logistics. And one of the things that it means is that the government has set up an agreement with strike, which would basically mean that every single vendor or every person who accepts money is obligated to accept Bitcoin, but they can also convert it immediately to dollars through strikes. So this is definitely great for strike in terms of who's going to benefit from this

and strike just for clarification is a is a payment processing system for crypto. And one little anecdote I had read was that, I guess a few el Salvadorans when they were doing interviews, were surprised that strike was charging the money to transfer and it's I guess, it's up to three American dollars sometimes to transfer anything. And that was a shocker for people.

Another thing is that strike was already operating in El Salvador, but in a very different capacity. It was a still a processor. It would you know process payments, and convert them to dollars from Bitcoin. But what it had been set up as in El Salvador was as a way to send remittances our economy is I want to say, three years ago it was 17% of the GDP was dependent on remittances which is what people who have immigrated from El Salvador Your continued kind of tied to El Salvador by sending money to their families. And that really sustains a large part of our economy. So strike was attempting to enter the market and El Salvador by offering a way of sending remittances through Bitcoin and changing that Bitcoin into dollars for Salvadorans. So, no one really expected this company that was just trying to enter the Salvadoran market to suddenly become so substantial for public policy reasons. The other thing is, you know, that's going to be a big question mark, is, how do you in a country where again, 70% of the population don't really have access to the financial institutions that would make this feasible, you're going to have a network of ATMs that are going to make this, you know, likely operational around the country. And and there are some rumors that I haven't been able to verify myself. So I wouldn't necessarily write it in print until I can verify it. But there are rumors that the owners of the network of ATMs that you know, will be installed around the country is the brother of neighbor Kelly, because and his his brothers are incredibly influential on in terms of policy, when you had a Twitter space, in which the President came in and in English explained to other Bitcoin heads what this meant for the country and kind of like how historical it was that it was going to pass. His the other person that spoke on behalf of the country was his brother, who is very, very excited about Bitcoin. And it's that annoying guy on your timeline. So so there is a little aspect of nepotism that comes into play with this.

Just to give people like a good sense of like how unstable it would be to take Bitcoin as legal tender. Just today, it rose $5,000. But last month, it dropped like, I think it dropped close to 20 to $20,000, something like that something something. It's extremely volatile. So I can't imagine it would be very good for a country to use as its money, I don't think, do you? Do you feel like bogalay is in a better spot politically because of the crypto moved? I do think that content governance works.

So it does work because this is what we're not talking about anymore because of Bitcoin. He had an incredibly controversial approach in terms of handling the pandemic. El Salvador's numbers were in comparison to other countries in the region. And in general autometer did really well, for the pandemic, there was our health system, you know, held, I visited very recently, like, while still the pandemic was was going on, and I was coming from DC where we were incredibly paranoid. And you, you could see that math wearing had been incredibly political here in El Salvador, none of that happened mask wearing was wasn't political. So most people wore masks, and also at the beginning of the pandemic, the very stringent measures were implemented with the military, he has a lot of allies and is using the military for it for the sake of implementing policies. And that is something incredibly triggering and talador for a country that, you know, came out of a civil war. And a lot of people were are still, you know, still remember that they lived through it. A lot of people came of age during the Civil War. So that was incredibly triggering for a lot of people and the pandemic. And his measures were constantly being fought over in the Constitutional Court. So his first move after the midterm elections gave him the two thirds of the assembly was to fire all of the Supreme Court justices. Okay,

now, what about this sort of a soft coup or like a self coup? Right? So he's sort of like getting rid of anyone that could come against him right now.

That and the ad. He put he put an ad that is aligned with his political party, and the same was the case with with the supreme court justices. And that clearly attracted a lot of attention, especially in an international conversations, and that is something that his administration can't really afford to lose. The confidence of diplomats and the confidence of multilateral organizations that make, you know a lot of the financial instruments that will allow El Salvador to implement any policy come from the international cooperation and us USAID in many cases. And his soft coup attracted a worst attention and and for, for obvious reasons, there were a lot of concerns that many of the moves that he's done in terms of imperiling human rights in the country and how harshly his persecuted the press are just not going to have any recourse for people because of I completely aligned court. And the way that this manifested itself also in hashtag content was because the night before this soft coup happened, and it happened, you know, in the assembly through boats, his the equivalent to the mitch mcconnell here, the leader of the majority tweeted out a game of thrones meme. So cute cringe. That only said in all caps druk Harris, so everyone's like, What is she talking about? And then immediately, they destitute all over the court. And they destitute. And they, and that was the line of that that was how everyone was, like, how everyone realized something was happening.

I had literally democracy in a country like the least you can do is have enough respect for people to not use game of throne means to announce it like, please, just just do the normal thing. Don't do the cringy weird thing.

Also, that was that was the bad guy. Like, are you? Are you serious? like watching Game of Thrones wrong?

Yeah, to explain to my parents what riccar is meant and and why I'm associated. As, as user poche says, In the reactive stage, the least you could do is use the senator Palpatine meme. I should I should do a call out right now. If anyone wants to come up on stage and ask a question. You can use the the virtual raise hand thing. And we'll try to bring a few on if anyone's got anything to say. But yeah, tell us more about so after the the denarius meme is used, what happens then?

What happens is that he takes over, he pretty much takes over the three branches of government, and that game with a lot of reactions from just international press. And that was pretty much everything that for a couple of weeks, everyone could talk about when it came to El Salvador. And very quickly that conversation changed when Bitcoin happened in this tracks with the style of obfuscating through hashtag content. And another great example is from last year, that was during his first year in the presidency, they had a horrible water crisis in which all the water that was coming out of faucets was murky and brownish, and areas of the city and a lot of people were taking to social media to complain and put, you know, tag basically all of the different government dependencies, because he has put all of the government on Twitter. And it very quickly became the narrative how there was this water crisis and the government needed to respond and wasn't doing enough. And this was on a Friday, there is an incredible journalistic investigation that uncovered, you know, by talking to some people who are no longer in the government and some people with a lot of knowledge of, of how this decision came to be made, that there was an actual panic between, you know, in in the administration that they were losing the the PR war, which is the only word that matters for them, right, and how on Twitter, what was trending was the dirty water. So this was a Friday and on the Sunday, he entered Congress at the time he didn't have the majority in Congress. He entered Congress with the military and said that he was coming here to convene Congress extraordinarily because it was urgent that they approved a a loan that the country supposedly needed to implement his super draconian security strategy against criminality and the reality is that it'll politics criminality has always been pretty bad. So this, this was urgent, but at the same time, it didn't necessitate only Congress on a Sunday. Obviously, Congress wasn't going to come. So he entered Congress to show how no one was working for the people. But he entered with the military and the pictures are of that obviously, went around the world. And that was the first time he became, you know, referred to as a pseudo dictator, because it was very clearly an intention of showing that he made the calls and that it didn't matter what the assembly was doing. But more than that, it was content. It was the pictures, it was a picture of him sitting in, you know, the the pret the president of Congress seat and surrounded by the military, and all of them with their guns drawn out for something as bureaucratic, as you know, I am calling for an extraordinary Congress session, that didn't come to happen. So after that, nobody talked about the water. nobody talked about the crisis, nobody talked about the government response, because clearly everyone was too busy with the demise of democracy. So he has a way of staging this gigantic, like content opportunities and photo ops that serve his agenda really well, and just provide fodder for social media and pretty much delineate what the battle lines are going to be allows him to pick villains because every narrative needs a villain, of course, and usually, the villains tend to be the journalists trying to do the I think autometer journalism has grown a lot because of this challenge. And I become a lot better than they were, but they are functioning with a government that is not only openly hostile it, it puts targets in their backs, and it's made social media for these folks. Impossible.

It's It's interesting how, like, the natural endpoint of for the gram is just fascism like that, you know, if you create this reality with social media, and you use that to govern a country, like you're just describing fascism, it's it's, and it continues to happen, because it's not just El Salvador. I mean, it happened in this it happened in America, it happened in it's happened with leaders all over the world. And so I want to sort of as we wrap this up, and sort of take it on home, like, where do you see this going? Like, do you see buco as part of like a larger trend in Latin America where like, we're gonna get more of these guys? Or is this like a wave where we're gonna look at it in a couple years and be like, Well, that was really strange. But luckily, we're all good now. Like, like, where are we sort of in this in this cycle?

I don't think you will be the first one. I think he is a special case, because he's incredibly good at it. And the narratives are small enough that you can track them in that way. But I think that outside of just Latin America, you also have this in the US when you see people like congressman Madison cawthorne, who very openly said that in his in his case, he was organizing his office as comms first and policy second, right. So the incentive exists, the reason why this is going to be more prominent in El Salvador, or in you know, you name it any country south of probably the US is because Twitter, Facebook, social media, giants in general, don't care about these countries. These are expendable democracies. These are amazing businesses, because you have the president of the country. Who is we used to, you know, we say that Trump was pretty good at twitter. But Trump wasn't good at the affordances of the social media platform. And what it allows you to do bukanlah is good at that. And so you have the president of the country using space, that Twitter space is a relatively new product, what marvelous marketing, that is for Twitter, and you have the president reliably, depending on social media to advance his policy strategies, because they are incredibly tied, if not motivated by by content. And so it it's already an amazing business. And there is there, I'm sure you remember, there was a whistleblower within Facebook that called out how little Facebook basically cared about this, this democracies, even though they have evidence of not only, you know, coordination, that was inorganic coordination and artificial trending topic, manipulation and amplification campaigns. But in El Salvador, there is no one looking there is no one within Facebook necessarily looking to see if this affects democracy or not. how it affects democracy or not, is exclusively the way that people Experiment the internet because it's tied to any phone that you get access to whether you have a data plan or not. So this is why you're going to see it a lot more in democracies that are young, that don't yet have institutionality to be able to hold these amazing communicators accountable are countries where the main narrative or the or the happening in the country, the current events are exclusively reported and consumed through social media. It, it just makes it incredibly easy for someone that is savvy and understands politics as communication, and that has a background in you know, in an ad agency, right? It's, it's too easy to exploit. So this is I think this is the first of many, and I think it's a playbook for populist to come.

I also to sort of tie it all together here. The crypto element to me is is very scary. And we were talking about El Salvador and Bitcoin in my own discord a couple days ago, I was like, This feels like the beginning of a really scary sci fi movie because crypto as we've seen is extremely volatile. It connects with social media data quite well, like Elan Musk, and the Dogecoin pump and all the rest of it. So what you can really do if you're someone like Buccola, is you can take raw social media power connected to the levers of government, and then with Bitcoin, you can connect the levers of the market to it. And so what you've created is like this perpetual cult of personality machine that runs on blockchain, and it's just really scary because, you know, in your, in your perfect mind, it's like, okay, like you could pump Bitcoin to make bogalay look like more powerful, but even scary, you could dump Bitcoin to make money you can you can you can really manipulate people. And obviously, like, I don't think El Salvador can like move the entire Bitcoin market. But with crypto and and, you know, a very small example would be the company strike who, you know, was already in the country and all of a sudden is now managing all these payments, like, it just gets very complicated and very scary, very quickly. So,

I'm sure also the

incentives that are included in the law, like the idea that he is giving automatic citizenship to any foreign investor that invests, I think it's something ridiculous like three Bitcoin is the minimum you need, and you can get to Salvadoran citizenship. So that would protect you against extradition, extradition, if you were trying to be sketchy, and, you know, invest in this economy for the sake of money laundering,

I will say I did see a guy, I saw a guy pop up like my crypto Twitter feed, he was going viral like with like crypto traders, because he had posted like, a real estate photo. And he's like, just bought my beach house mansion in El Salvador. And then someone like reverse, like, someone looked it up. And we're like, dude, you bought property in Costa Rica. And all these, you had no idea. But it just, you know, the the hype cycle is just so out of control. Let me just take one quick run through a reactive stage. Just make sure I didn't miss anything here. So well, talk to us about, like projects you have coming up next. And where can people follow you? Where can people read your stuff, because I'm sure you've got a bunch of new fans tonight. So like what's coming down the pipe for you.

I use my Twitter very, very sporadically. And mostly, it's happened because of what it means to use Twitter for a Salvadoran and, you know, you have to assess the cost of getting hounded by just awful trolls. So I'm not as present on Twitter as I used to be. But that is definitely like the easiest way of reaching me. And in terms of products coming down the pipeline at data in society, we are working on distilling all the lessons of, you know, protecting the 2020 census from this information with a coalition of civil rights organizations that, but this really new approach to trying to make sense of what we think is a network problem. So you can only respond to it as a network, and trying to put those in a sort of how to guide that can be helpful for different scales of different information for any problems. That's what's coming up.

That sounds amazing. Thank you for coming on this. This was super fun. This was really, really fascinating. And it's a topic where like, I was I, you know, I started off by talking about this, but I was so excited because it was a word that I had never seen before content governance yet knew exactly what you meant. And I was like, I've been thinking about this so much. This is great. And I want to highlight a comment from Hugh bolt Hefner, who writes cream, capitalism ruins everything around me. So if you'd like that's a good place to leave this. But yeah, thank you very much. And you know, I hope I hope some some people here will will follow you on Twitter. Follow what you're doing and it's great stuff. Thank you again thank you so much for having me. Awesome. All right guys good night Have a good one and and yeah, don't don't buy bitcoin or buy bitcoin or I don't know. Don't take my advice, not financial advice. All right. Good night