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Your Individuality Doesn’t Matter. ‘Industry’ Knows Why.

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This article contains spoilers through Season 3 of Industry.

Midway through the third season of HBO’s Industry, the audience gets a taste of what life is actually like for Rishi (played by Sagar Radia), a hotshot trader who works at Pierpoint & Co., the fictional multinational investment bank in London where the show is largely set. He owes a lot of money to a bald, big-bodied bookie. His accounts and cards are maxed out and in the red. He has a raging gambling addiction, which he funds by persuading his co-workers to place unsound horse-racing bets through him. On top of all that, Rishi consumes loads of cocaine—which, at one point, causes his raw nose to bleed onto his newborn baby, as he watches a young colleague pose nude on her OnlyFans.

The stand-alone Rishi episode was a perfect example of why audiences flocked to Industry in its third season, which just finished. In its first two seasons, Industry played like an erotic office drama—but this year, the show evolved into a financial thriller, with characters caught up in a high-stakes game where the ultra-wealthy wield unimaginable power and manipulate public systems (such as Parliament and the press) for their personal benefit. Watching this season, I was reminded of a psychological concept dating back to the 1950s called “locus of control.” If you believe that you command your own destiny—that your actions and behaviors heavily influence the course of your life—then you have an internal locus of control. An external locus of control means that you think your actions have a limited effect; the currents of the outside world will instead determine what happens to you, regardless of how you act.

What makes Industry such a rich viewing experience is how its locus of control bends toward the external. This season, the main characters—Harper (Myha’la Herrold), Yasmin (Marisa Abela), and Rob (Harry Lawtey), whom we first met as fresh-faced junior employees at Pierpoint—stood at a crossroads. Should Harper cozy up to Otto Mostyn (Roger Barclay), a billionaire who looks, acts, and sounds like a semi-reformed Nazi? Should Yasmin choose the potential to live a normal-ish life with Rob—or should she marry a well-connected entrepreneur for protection that Rob can’t give her? Should Rob, the working-class striver, leave Pierpoint behind and seek something meaningful to anchor his life?

Read: What makes Industry the most thrilling show on TV

On the surface, these decisions appear to be deeply personal, based on a distinct, internal logic. But in actuality, each character is bumping up against the limits placed on them by potent forces beyond their reach. Every time Harper, Yasmin, and Rob think they’ve taken control of some aspect of their life, powerful, behind-the-scenes figures pop up to remind them how little they understand. Episode by episode, the show wrestles with the financialization of everything, wherein the cold logic of the market extends into every facet of human activity. By the finale, the choices our main trio make feel inevitable, almost predetermined.

The economist and philosopher Adam Smith described free markets as having an “invisible hand” that guides our behavior, and believed that even selfish human beings could be made to act for the public good if business conditions were just right. Industry suggests otherwise: In the show, climate-friendly “green tech” turns out to be a fraud, and earnest-seeming champions of the cause ditch their morals and end up chasing profit when the market turns on them. Industry’s characters would like to think they’re capable of doing good in this ruthless world. But they can’t—not really.

Because of its visceral intensity, and its focus on drugs and sex and money, Industry has typically been compared to Succession and Euphoria. But Industry more closely resembles Game of Thrones and The Wire––shows where characters must navigate long-standing institutions without making a fatal misstep (which, in Industry’s case, usually means getting fired). In Industry, everything flows out of Pierpoint, which generates its own culture, politics, and action. The bank’s motto is “People are our capital,” which might as well translate to “Everything, even intimate human connection, is exploitable for personal gain and profit.” Its employees come in with their own unique attitude, but we see what happens when their aspirations collide with the callous systems that manage global capitalism.

Take Rishi. His job at Pierpoint closely mimics the chaos of his life outside work. He executes trades, overseeing his desk’s profits and losses—basically, he takes bets on which way the market will swing. During his stand-alone episode, we learn that Rishi is risking about half a billion pounds of the bank’s money on a trade that seems unlikely to pay off. Once Rishi’s boss, the menacing Eric Tao (Ken Leung), learns how gigantic Rishi’s position is, he demands that Rishi stop trading and calls security; Rishi’s behavior has been so irresponsible that he must be forced from the building.

Then, in classic Industry fashion, the market suddenly reverses. The conservative Tories running the government roll back some inscrutable aspect of their agenda. The line chart on the Bloomberg terminal inexplicably jumps vertical, and in a blink, Rishi’s big loss becomes an £18 million profit. Rishi’s appetite for risk fuses with his job as a trader betting on the market; the two become one, the trader and gambler become indistinguishable, and their fate is decided by total chance.

Read: How greed got good again

Once Rishi’s position turns profitable, his lovable and anxious co-worker, Anraj, says to him, “You’re not even a good trader––you’re just lucky!” Rishi responds triumphantly, “Tell me, what’s the difference?” The real question is which came first: Has Rishi’s addictive personality and the impunity with which he bets on horses bled into his work? Or have his years in finance scrambled his brain and turned him into a degenerate gambler, both at the office and outside it? Luck saves Rishi this particular time—but that kind of luck is not reliable. He quits Pierpoint and gets double-crossed by Harper. Then, the bookie he’s in debt to shoots and kills his wife, as revenge. It’s a miserable end to a miserable arc—and, in a true exception given how the show usually shakes out, Rishi faces the consequences of his actions. It’s up to him whether he finally looks inward, and digests the damage he’s wrought.

This season, as Industry’s fresh-faced junior traders come of age in Pierpoint’s cutthroat culture and decide where they go next, we’re able to see how external events limit the horizon of choices before them. Yasmin seeks protection among the billionaire class because that’s where she comes from, what she knows. Harper, working for her hedge fund, becomes more merciless than ever; she craves control and strength, and there’s only one path to becoming a major player. Both Harper and Yasmin make their choice, yet are still trapped in the game. Rob, alone, manages to make a clean break from the posh world of London that he’s long yearned to fit into. Realizing he’ll always be expendable, he moves on with his life by leaving for America. He takes back control—his decision actually has an effect on his life—but he does so by giving up his position as a cog in this immense system. It’s a level of humility that his co-workers may never reach.

Even though so much about the world of high finance feels remote and inhuman––rows of monitors, beeping Bloomberg terminals, plate glass, gray everything––Industry lets us put ourselves inside the lives of these characters. Peel back the financial jargon, the extreme wealth, the backroom deals and market manipulation, and what you see are young people and their hopes and wishes running headlong into a brick wall. It’s a thrill to watch what they decide to do after that point of collision and ask yourself not if you would do something different—but could you?

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October 4, 2024

Bluesky continues to soar, adding 2M more new users in a matter of days

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Social networking startup Bluesky continues to benefit from X’s shutdown in Brazil having now added over 2 million new users over the past four days, up from just half a million as of Friday. This rapid growth led some users to encounter the occasional error that would state there were “Not Enough Resources” to handle requests, as Bluesky engineers scrambled to keep the servers stable under the influx of new sign-ups.

As new users downloaded the app, Bluesky jumped to becoming the app to No. 1 in Brazil over the weekend, ahead of Meta’s X competitor, Instagram Threads. According to app intelligence firm Appfigures, Bluesky’s total downloads soared by 10,584% this weekend compared to last, and its downloads in Brazil were up by a whopping 1,018,952%. The growth seems to be having a halo effect, as downloads outside Brazil also rose by 584%, the firm noted. In part, this is due to Bluesky receiving downloads in 22 countries where it had barely seen any traction before.

In terms of absolute downloads, countries that saw the most installs outside Brazil included the U.S., Portugal, the U.K., Canada and Spain. Those with the most download growth, however, were Portugal, Chile, Argentina, Colombia and Romania. Most of the latter group jumped from single-digit growth to growth in the thousands.

Bluesky’s newcomers have actively engaged on the platform, too, driving up other key metrics.

As one Bluesky engineer remarked, the number of likes on the social network grew to 104.6 million over the past four-day period, up from just 13 million when compared with a similar period just a week ago. Follows also grew from 1.4 million to 100.8 million while reposts grew from 1.3 million to 11 million.

As of Monday, Bluesky said it had added 2.11 million users during the past four days, up from 26,000 users it had added in the week-ago period. In addition, the company noted it had seen “significantly more than a 100% [daily active users] increase.”

Bluesky’s appeal to those forced to leave X may have to do with how closely the user experience resembles that of the now Elon Musk-owned app, formerly known as Twitter. Once incubated within Twitter, Bluesky spun out as a separate company and raised its own funding, but still retains much of Twitter’s look and feel.

Like X, Bluesky offers features like likes, reposts, quote posts, lists, direct messages, search tools and user profiles, but it also improves on X’s capabilities in other ways. As a decentralized social network, users can set up their own instances (servers that run Bluesky and connect to others over the AT Protocol), customize their feeds, subscribe to third-party moderation services, and create and share “starter packs” that link to curated sets of recommended users to follow. In a coming update, Bluesky also plans to add support for video, the company says.

Another factor to consider here is how Bluesky’s approach to content and moderation differs from Threads.

Even when it was Twitter, X has long been known as a hotbed for breaking news and political debates, Threads has taken the opposite approach, saying it would not default to recommending political content on its platform. Instead, Threads wants to make itself palatable to brands and influencers, similar to Instagram, as it intends to eventually monetize via ads.

Given that X’s ban in Brazil is tied to politics — the country wanted control over what could be said on the platform — it’s likely that some Brazilians opting for Bluesky wanted to join a network that was not centralized and as easily controlled. On platforms like X, moderation decisions are left up to the site’s owners, but on decentralized networks, the users are in charge.

That flexibility combined with Bluesky’s ease of use could make the network a bigger draw than others.

For instance, though Mastodon offers its own decentralized network, the recent user growth driven by Brazil was on a much smaller scale. On Saturday, Mastodon founder and CEO Eugen Rochko said the service had seen 4,200 signups from Brazil, up from 152 signups on August 28, for instance. That could speak to the fact that Brazilians want more than decentralization: They also want a place that more closely resembles Twitter/X.

Meta has not yet commented on how large an increase it’s seen on Threads driven by Brazilians leaving X, but as a network that already has over 200 million monthly active users, even the addition of thousands or millions more would not be as noticeable a gain, compared with the much smaller Bluesky. Still, it’s also possible that Brazilians wanted to move to a place that was separate from friends, family and creators — one that defaulted to public postings and felt more like Twitter once did. Bluesky’s culture, which tends toward s***posting and memes, has the sort of chaotic energy of an early Twitter.

X is said to have had north of 20 million users in Brazil, which means there’s plenty of growth to be captured all around.

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September 3, 2024

Spacetime defects uncouple gravity from mass in dark matter alternative

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Something seems to be missing from the universe, and the favored model of physics calls it “dark matter” – but despite a century of searching, it remains a no-show. A new paper proposes an alternative hypothesis, showing how gravity could exist without mass and produce many of the same effects we ascribe to dark matter.

Einstein’s theory of general relativity is still our best model for describing gravity. As you might remember from high school physics class, gravity is the force that arises from masses resting on the fabric of spacetime. The more mass an object has, the deeper the “dip” in spacetime and the stronger the gravitational pull.

But starting in the 1930s, some strange astronomical observations began to raise questions. Galaxy clusters seemed to be moving much too fast to stay stable based on visible matter, suggesting that far more matter was present than we could see. That led to the hypothesis that huge amounts of invisible stuff – which was dubbed dark matter – pervaded the universe. The idea has held surprisingly strong in observations in the decades since, backed up by the motions of stars within galaxies and the bending and magnifying of light through gravitational lenses.

A good hypothesis is always testable, and so physicists concocted plenty of experiments designed to detect a range of plausible dark matter particles. But so far, all have come up empty, leading some scientists to propose alternatives like modified gravity or even a “dark fluid” permeating the cosmos.

A new paper, by Dr. Richard Lieu at the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH), suggests a new idea entirely. Topological defects in the cosmos, which could have been formed during a phase transition in the early universe, could exert a gravitational influence on nearby objects and passing light, but have zero mass themselves.

“Topological effects are very compact regions of space with a very high density of matter, usually in the form of linear structures known as cosmic strings, although 2D structures such as spherical shells are also possible,” said Lieu. “The shells in my paper consist of a thin inner layer of positive mass and a thin outer layer of negative mass; the total mass of both layers – which is all one could measure, mass-wise – is exactly zero, but when a star lies on this shell it experiences a large gravitational force pulling it towards the center of the shell.”

This could explain how stars can move faster than they “should” be able to according to their visible mass, and how galaxies and clusters hold themselves together. And if these shells form groups of concentric rings, they could also explain observations of gravitational lenses, which magnify distant light sources.

“Gravitational bending of light by a set of concentric singular shells comprising a galaxy or cluster is due to a ray of light being deflected slightly inwards – that is, towards the center of the large-scale structure, or the set of shells – as it passes through one shell,” said Lieu. “The sum total effect of passage through many shells is a finite and measurable total deflection which mimics the presence of a large amount of dark matter in much the same way as the velocity of stellar orbits.”

It might sound a bit too convenient to invent a new phenomenon out of nowhere, but it’s not without some merit. First, negative mass sounds like a sci-fi concept, but it has been modeled before, and some of its expected properties – such as an object flowing backwards when you push on it – have even been demonstrated in fluids and particles. Second, gigantic ring structures seen in space, which can’t currently be explained through dark matter, could be evidence of these topological defects.

It’s an intriguing idea, albeit one that still has a few holes to plug up. For one, the paper doesn’t attempt to explain how the defects form in the first place. There’s also the problem of how these shell structures could be confirmed or ruled out through observations. And finally, Lieu admits that it might not be enough to remove the need for dark matter entirely, but could just reduce its role.

Still, it’s the first model that suggests gravity could exist without mass, and future work could investigate how the structures might form and how they could guide galaxies and clusters to form.

The research was published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Source: UAH

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June 12, 2024

Our brain matter is stuck at a phase transition, says new study

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Based on fractal patterns in neurons, researchers believe our brains exist at or near a state called criticality where they’re extremely close to shifting from one state of matter to another. They also admit they don’t know what either state is.

You might think your brain is pretty solid, but new research says it’s composition might not be so straightforward. Scientists at Northwestern University have identified components of neurons that match up to materials undergoing a phase shift – a transition from one state of matter, like a liquid, to another, like a gas.

“The structure of the brain at the cellular level appears to be near a phase transition,” said Northwestern’s Helen Ansell, the first author of a paper about the finding. “An everyday example of this is when ice melts into water. It’s still water molecules, but they are undergoing a transition from solid to liquid. We certainly are not saying that the brain is near melting. In fact, we don’t have a way of knowing what two phases the brain could be transitioning between. Because if it were on either side of the critical point, it wouldn’t be a brain.”

To reach the conclusions put forward in the paper, which was just published in Scientific Reports, Ansell and colleague István Kovács, looked at publicly available 3D brain images of humans, mice and fruit flies. Looking at these images at the nanoscale, they discovered that brain tissue exhibits traits of universal scaling known as criticality, the point at which a material is either about to – or already undergoing – a change from one state of matter to another.

One of the main indicators of this that the researchers focused on is the fact that brain cells at the nanoscale display fractal patterns that are “self similar.” This means that a small part of the pattern resembles the entire pattern. The researchers also found broad size distributions among neurons and variety in different neuron segments.

“These are things we see in all critical systems in physics,” Kovács said. “It seems the brain is in a delicate balance between two phases.”

Surprisingly, the hallmarks of criticality were seen in both the rat and fruit fly brains, in addition to the human brain tissue. That could point to some kind of phase change quality of all brains, say the researchers.

“Initially, these structures look quite different – a whole fly brain is roughly the size of a small human neuron,” Ansell said. “But then we found emerging properties that are surprisingly similar.”

“Among the many characteristics that are very different across organisms, we relied on the suggestions of statistical physics to check which measures are potentially universal, such as critical exponents. Indeed, those are consistent across organisms,” Kovács said.

The researchers say their findings could help reshape statistical models of the brain and possibly inform the development of neural networks in computers. They also say they will continue their research and look at different organisms to see if the state of criticality more universally applies.

Source: Northwestern University

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June 11, 2024