🔮 TikTok; misinfo bots; innovation; Mongolia, movies & organ donation++ #271

I’m Azeem Azhar. I convene Exponential View to help us understand how our societies and political economy will change under the force of rapidly accelerating technologies—and, of course, Covid-19.

The near future

🕺 Turner Novak’s unpicking of privately-held TikTok: “TikTok has become the best way to create and consume short videos on mobile. It rode the wave of AirPods and audio memes to over 1 billion DAU’s (Daily Active Users), and is likely worth ~$200 billion. […] The hyper-personalized algorithm recommends content based on thousands of objects and tags analyzed in each individual video, along with an individual user’s view history, re-watches, likes, comments, shares, and even post-view activity.” (TikTok has created some amazing cultural outputs you’ll all have seen across Facebook and Twitter. I avoid the app itself—I don’t need the time suck.)

😬 Nature makes the case for patent pools to accelerate the development and equitable deployment of any future Sars-Cov-2 vaccine. “Such…