Sarah Jeong

Seeing faceless, anonymous nation-state hackers go on Reddit to do promo for the Navy is giving me some feelings. Feelings like: confusion, concern, amusement, vague embarrassment over my amusement, and more confusion.

Unrelated: It’s been almost 10 years since Chelsea Manning, a military intelligence analyst, was convicted and sentenced to prison for leaking classified material to the press.

Extraordinary investigative work from Cambodian news outlet VOD, interviewing Indonesian migrant workers who were allegedly brought to Cambodia and set to work as pretend beautiful women who would like you to invest in their cryptocurrency platform.

The workers say they lived and worked in the same building, and that their personal phones were taken away; one said he was beaten and tased for a mistake. The workers were rescued after one of their siblings saw a “TikTok describing forced labor and detention” that made him suspicious of his sister’s working conditions — he eventually sought out an NGO that intervened.

The obvious example is Peter Thiel naming his surveillance company Palantir (after an unspeakably evil scrying artifact that irreversibly corrupts its users?) but once you notice one profile of an alt-right or extremist figure mentioning how much they love Lord of the Rings, you start seeing it everywhere — including the footnotes of specious lawsuits attempting to undermine the 2020 election.

Anyways, you should read this, about an ascendant hard-right politician in Italy, whose politics are intertwined with high fantasy fandom in a way that will be unsettling to nerds of good conscience. And if you want to read more about Italy’s neo-fascist Camp Hobbit youth rallies in the 1970s, Atlas Obscura has you covered.