Boston University’s National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratory (NEIDL) has been conducting research on infectious diseases for over a decade, and studying COVID specifically pretty much since the pandemic began. But on Oct. 14, when the lab released a preprint detailing results of their work reengineering the Omicron spike protein, their research suddenly became a lightning rod for panic and speculation. 

News outlets were quick to sound the alarm. “This is playing with fire—it could spark a lab-generated pandemic,” one Daily Mail headline warned. “Boston University researchers claim to have developed new, more lethal COVID strain in lab,” Fox News announced. The articles really highlighted two things: Scientists were making their own versions of the virus, and that  it killed 80 percent of the mice in the study.

The fear is understandable. The pandemic has killed millions of people worldwide and left others permanently debilitated. The idea that scientists could have created a more deadly version of the virus is scary and feeds into theories about a possible artificial origin for COVID-19—something that is being investigated but for which nobody has found concrete evidence. It’s also not entirely true. 

The study is a preprint, meaning it hasn’t been peer-reviewed or accepted by a scientific journal. But that doesn’t mean there weren’t any guidelines or approvals before it was submitted. According to a lab press release responding to fearmongering over the study, the study was approved by the Institutional Biosafety Committee, and the Boston Public Health Commission, and was conducted in the lab’s biosafety-level 3 facilities. Although the work was not cleared by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), as a STAT article explains, this was not necessary because the team wasn’t using funding from the agency. 

In terms of the actual methods of the research, contrary to what outlets reported, the virus was not engineered to be more dangerous. Rather, it was trying to compare different strains of the SARS-CoV-2 virus to give us a better idea of how we could eventually combat it. This is the purpose of most work that occurs in these facilities.

“This research is not gain-of-function research, meaning it did not amplify the Washington state SARS-CoV-2 virus strain or make it more dangerous,” NEIDL Director Ronald B. Corley said in a press release. “In fact, this research made the virus replicate less dangerous.”

In the BU study, researchers were actually just comparing how the Omicron variant compared to the original Wuhan strain. They created a hybrid version of the virus that contained genetic information for both the Omicron and the ancestral strain. They started in a tissue culture and eventually moved on to an animal model, but never humans. Working with mice, they found that the recombinant version killed 80 percent of the lab mice, which—and this is key—made it more deadly than the Omicron strain but still weaker than the original strain. 

“The animal model that was used was a particular type of mouse that is highly susceptible, and 80 to 100 percent of the infected mice succumb to disease from the original strain, the so-called Washington strain,” Corley said. “Whereas Omicron causes a very mild disease in these animals.”

Mohsan Saaed, one of the lead researchers on the study, also emphasized that this research is similar to that of other organizations, including the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

“Consistent with studies published by others, this work shows that it is not the spike protein that drives Omicron pathogenicity, but instead other viral proteins,” Saeed said in a press release. “Determination of those proteins will lead to better diagnostics and disease management strategies.”

It makes sense why people were quick to freak out over this given that some believe the SARS-CoV-2 originated in a lab in Wuhan, China. This COVID lab-leak theory often feeds into many misunderstandings about the nature of scientific research. So-called gain-of-function research—wherein scientists make viruses more capable and deadly—is controversial. In fact, from 2014-2017, there was a moratorium on research that was attempting to create novel pathogens. However, the NIH lifted this moratorium in December 2017, deeming gain-of-function research important in “helping us identify, understand, and develop strategies and effective countermeasures against rapidly evolving pathogens that pose a threat to public health.” 

But, as previously mentioned, the Boston University study was not gain-of-function research. As virologist Florian Kramer points out in a Twitter thread, this research is normal. 

“Of note, other labs have legally made such viruses and used them for serology assays [tests for immune responses] without any problem,” he wrote, citing a study published in Nature earlier this year. He also points out that the FDA did similar experiments, published in September. 

Altogether, the headlines were completely sensationalized and misrepresented the purpose of the study. This incident highlights how work on dangerous viruses can get spun into a conspiracy theory that doesn't resemble reality. 

Early Saturday morning, a Florida man and his teenage son were arrested after allegedly shooting at and nearly killing a woman sitting in her car after receiving a Ring doorbell camera alert.

After a neighbor stopped by Gino (73) and Rocky (15) Colonacosta's front door to drop off prescription medication accidentally delivered to the wrong address, the Ring surveillance camera began bombarding their phones with alerts. 

The pair grabbed .45-caliber handguns, went outside looking for a burglar, and found a woman sitting in her car on her phone. Gino pointed the gun at her and ordered her out of her car, but she escaped in her car believing she was being carjacked. The pair allegedly shot at her seven times according to police; in a press conference on Monday, Poly County Sheriff Grady Judd claimed one round passed through an empty child seat in the vehicle.

“They go out searching for a burglar that wasn’t there and shot up an innocent lady’s car while she was in it,” Judd said. “That’s crazy!”

Thankfully, no one was killed, but if she had been shot it wouldn’t have been the first time a Ring surveillance camera played a role in someone’s death. In October 2021, a man in England learned four people were breaking into his home through his Ring surveillance camera alerts, then went home and stabbed one of the burglars to death. The man was later found guilty of manslaughter and jailed for 19 years. 

Still, some may claim that the Ring surveillance camera had nothing to do with this incident. When I shared this story on Twitter, a small but vocal contingent insisted Ring surveillance cameras are not implicated because the humans, not the tech, shot the handguns. Some replied that  this was a mental health issue, although no details were released to suggest this. Given the popularity of Ring cameras, it’s not unreasonable to assume a lot of people view Ring surveillance cameras this way.

So let’s try to be clear about this. We understand what’s going on when people make similar arguments about guns; when someone says that guns don’t shoot people, people shoot people, we understand the rhetoric intent there is meant to pre-empt any discussion of gun control. Similarly, a Ring camera doesn't force someone to go and shoot at an innocent person, but both Ring cameras and handguns exist to amplify some tendencies and enable different actions, which in this case resulted in violence. Arguing that a piece of surveillance technology is okay so long as you or other people like you use it for good reasons is not only muddle-headed, but preempts any discussion around corporate surveillance and its outcomes. Technologies are not neutral tools: they’re intentionally designed, often to be used even at great cost to the user by obscuring the harms or packaging them up with “good reasons” that seem undeniable.

We should think critically about whether even the “good reasons” are actually, you know, good.

As a report from Data & Society recently found, a Ring owner may be bombarded with alerts that allow them to track packages, surveil overworked delivery workers, and even punish them by way of public humiliation. Amazon has "managed to transform what was once a labor cost (i.e., supervising work and asset protection) into a revenue stream” by selling surveillance tech (e.g. Ring) and subscription services (e.g. Prime) that lets you perform that labor, the report states. 

More relevant to the Florida case is Ring's well-documented pattern of cultivating paranoia to sell cameras.  Amazon’s Ring is powered by the Neighbors app—a virtual neighborhood watch that encourages people to racially profile, spy on, and snitch on their “suspicious” neighbors—which shares Ring surveillance footage with police departments. 

Cultivating that paranoia is a key thread of the company’s revenue stream here, but it goes even further. This doesn’t simply translate into a vague sense of hostility in your neighborhood, but the gamification of harassment, policing, and criminalization of Black and brown people. At the same time, Amazon is continuing to build an even wider surveillance dragnet that will sweep up private and public spaces—Alexa, Astro, Echo, Sidewalk, the list of new Amazon surveillance tech grows every quarter. 

In July of last year, 48 civil rights and advocacy groups sent a letter to the Federal Trade Commission asking it to ban corporate surveillance of public spaces, specifically because Amazon uses it as part of a strategy to shore up its economic empire. Pervasive surveillance was key to its monopolies, but at great costs to our politics, social relations, and economy. Is the cost worth minor conveniences?

“Rulemaking is needed to stop widespread systematic surveillance, discrimination, lax security, tracking of individuals, and the sharing of data,” the letter reads. “While Amazon’s smart home ecosystem, facial surveillance technology, and e-learning devices provide a good case study, these rules must extend beyond this one technology corporation to include any entity collecting, using, selling, and/or sharing personal data.”

The coalition calls for these forms of corporate surveillance to be banned outright and similar forms to be closely regulated, limited, and banned whenever possible. The argument is that using the population at large to cultivate harmful social and political patterns while testing new products or services that might be lucrative should be illegal, especially when surveillance comes into the picture.

But you don't have to wait around for the government to act here. You can always throw your surveillance camera away, or talk to your friends and loved ones and neighbors about getting rid of theirs. There’s no reason why any of us should be foot soldiers in Amazon’s campaign to spin corporate surveillance into the highest form of consumer convenience.

On Tuesday, the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project (AEMP)—a data visualization project focused on documenting urban displacement and resistance—unveiled a new tool: the Evictorbook, a database of corporate landlords in San Francisco and Oakland that identifies evictors, their shell companies, additional rental properties, and eviction patterns.

“As they did after the 2008 housing crash, investors and corporate landlords have taken advantage of the COVID-19 pandemic to buy up housing across the country,” the team behind Evictorbook writes on its website. “This disproportionately harms communities of color and limits opportunities for homeownership. Evictorbook is a tool communities can use to combat the systemic racial and economic inequities within our housing system and ensure that housing is for people, not corporate profit.”

While tracking corporate landlords is a matter of public interest, it's relatively hard to do because of the byzantine corporate maze of limited liability companies and limited partnerships they build. This can not only obscure who your actual landlord is if you're being harassed or your rights and protections are being violated, but it also confers a plethora of self-dealing financial benefits to landlords.

Consider just one method highlighted by Evictorbook: "These corporate landlords can create five shell companies and sell [a property] through each of them, lowering the sale price each time. In this way, a home valued at a million dollars may be eventually valued at four hundred thousand dollars, and be taxed at lowest property value. Of course, when they sell, they'll pass it right back through and raise the price."

You can search Evictorbook by address, property owner, neighborhood, or through a corporate network bound by common shell companies or rental properties or owners. Take, for example, one corporate network mapped out by Evictorbook with a major San Francisco landlord at the center. The owner has at least 25 business entities under their name, which are connected to 10 properties, which are connected to about 6 property owners. All of this is connected to one business address.

It’s exciting to see the development of tech that empowers tenants given just how much landlords have at their disposal. Landlords enjoy access to bureaus and databases that allow them to discriminate against applicants, have managed to get COVID relief aid yet still squeeze tenants with rent hikes, and surveil anyone that happens to cross the boundary of the private fiefs that landlords, well, lord over. 

In a recent paper by Anti-Eviction Mapping Project co-founders Erin McElroy and Manon Vergerio, the pair paint a horrifying picture of how New York City landlords have used low-income, public, and affordable tenant housing as a laboratory for biometric and facial recognition technology. Thanks to an unholy alliance of “landlord tech investors, venture capital, conferences, and products deployed locally and globally,” there’s been a largely successful effort to automate evictions and gentrification by targeting non-white households with surveillance tech developed in low-income housing, then provided as an amenity in other housing.

One important thread of this paper is the question of why so much time and money goes into technology constructed mainly to surveil and discipline certain populations. 

After 2008, policymakers nationwide, but particularly in New York City, were busy trying to attract tech investors and startups as part of a new legitimation narrative. In doing so, however, they created a new financial asset out of tenants and their housing, as well as a new set of incentives to intensify the exploitation of renters. 

“Over the years, the proptech industry has strategically taken advantage of crises like the subprime crisis and 9/11 to push housing financialization and surveillance systems,” McElroy told Motherboard. “Corporate landlords have rolled up more and more of the housing market, while implementing more surveillance and screening technologies alongside property management systems to ensure they don’t experience the sort of losses their tenants are experiencing. They’re pursuing profits while tenants continue to suffer, exploiting invasively collected data to increase those profits, and also seeking aid from the state even as covid relief for tenants goes straight to the landlord.”

As Desiree Fields argues in a 2019 journal article, "such advances have given rise to what I term the 'automated landlord', whereby the management of tenants and properties is increasingly not only mediated, but governed, by smartphones, digital platforms, and apps, and the data and analytics these devices and infrastructures gather and enable." 

Surveillance technologies aimed at tenants and their properties could now generate data for not just landlords, but real estate developers and investors interested in increasing returns by cutting costs or hiking rents, and also flipping and consolidating properties and portfolios. Members of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project have referred to this and other related developments as “speculation technologies.”

“It also includes new modes of housing financialization, membership-based housing platforms, short term and intermediary length rental infrastructure, tech-owned housing, and more—all of which diminishes tenant rights and protections,” McElroy, Wonyoung So, and Nicole Weber write in one article for Shelter Force, a community and housing publication. “Speculation tech serves to automate housing financialization, mechanizing processes of housing being made an asset rather than a space of shelter and community.”

So, landlords were able to manage properties at scale, but in the process of pursuing more expansive and granular digital technologies for extract rents also helped accelerate the financialization of tenets and their housing—and incentivize even greater surveillance, data consolidation, and rent extraction for post-2008 investors looking for outsized returns.

The law hasn't been much help here either. Eviction moratoriums passed during the COVID-19 pandemic were notoriously weak and regularly ignored by landlords greedy (or confident) enough to harass and terrorize tenants. That hasn’t stopped people from taking matters into their own hands, though. Tenants have been able to organize in the meantime form tenant unions, collectively buy and run buildings themselves, fight real estate developer predations by targeting large investors bankrolling them, and mount community defenses against illegal evictions. 

“Landlords and property managers know so much about tenants, but we’re still struggling to even know the names of these owners. This is a way to help level the playing field,” McElroy told Motherboard.

Evictorbook, as well as other tools aimed at pulling back the veil on corporate entities that dominate something as essential as housing, are invaluable for activists hoping to fight back against this class of investors and speculators. This is even more urgent as they’ve seemingly subordinated the entire political apparatus to accommodate their desire to turn housing into a lucrative asset, instead of a human right.

A new study suggests that a person who strongly identifies as a "gamer” is more likely to be prone to “extreme behaviors” like racism, sexism, and defending their community at any cost. 

While toxicity and radicalization have long been known as issues afflicting some parts of the video game community, the mechanisms of how this occurs aren't fully understood. The new research suggests that a key part of understanding is knowing how strongly the “gamer” identity pervades a person’s life. 

"When the gamer identity is very core to who you are as a person, that seems to reflect what we call toxic gamer culture, tends to reflect more exclusion than inclusion—so things like racism and sexism and misogyny,” Rachel Kowert, the research director at Take This, a nonprofit that provides mental health information to the gaming industry and one of the paper's authors, told VICE News. “All these things that we know exist in gaming spaces seem to be internalized by those who very closely identify as being part of that community." 

It should be noted that this is only referring to a small, toxic portion of the gaming community, which numbers in the billions, as many positive communities and elements exist within gaming culture. That said, some extremists, especially those in the far-right, use gaming communities as a recruitment ground. Research has found that places like Steam and Discord are popular areas for white supremacists. It’s a problem that the industry hasn’t necessarily wanted to grapple with, but that’s slowly changing, and some game companies are now calling out misogyny. 

Even the term “gamer” has been disputed within the community, with the term frequently being used for toxic gatekeeping. For some, a “gamer” is someone who plays on PCs; for others, it’s only people who play competitive multiplayer games, or if you play on easy mode, you're not a gamer, and so on and so forth. The term can be exclusive for many and has been a hot-button issue in the community as of late.

For the three studies the researchers conducted for the paper, they allowed the respondents to define themselves as gamers and didn’t offer an operational definition. The research was conducted by Kowert; Bill Swann, a psychology professor at the University of Texas at Austin; and Alexi Martel, a psychology Ph.D. student, for the academic journal Frontiers in Communication. Each of the three studies surveyed hundreds of people who played video games and analyzed the gamers’ beliefs. Kowert said that to understand the research, you need to understand the concept known as “identity fusion.” They define this as when an identity is almost the defining trait of a personality, something that pervades all aspects of a person’s life. 

"We have individual identities and social identities. So I am Rachel, I am a female, and I'm a gamer. I love The Witcher. These are my social identities and are separate,” said Kowert. “Identity fusion is when the social identity, the individual identity, fuses together and you can't tear them apart…. The way in which fusion is shown to develop makes them more susceptible to more extreme behaviors."  

Kowert used the example of someone who was in the military for years and that identity leaks into all aspects of their life, until there’s not much difference between “Doug the soldier” and “Doug the father.” Those who have gone through this identity fusion are susceptible to “extreme pro-group behavior.” 

There is a subset of gamers who turn to video games for the community they may lack elsewhere in their life, and they form strong bonds within the subculture. In the paper, the authors dub this a “double-edged sword” as finding a community could be a positive thing for the gamer but it could also introduce them to toxicity and hateful speech. In the worst-case scenario, this may lead some to “be lured into embracing extremist beliefs that lead them down the path to radicalization.”

Some in the industry are attempting to address the issue of toxic behavior and extremism in gaming communities. Games have also been used as effective counter-violent extremism tools as well, particularly through the use of bespoke ”serious”  games in educational settings. Decount, a well-known game in this genre, walks players through the radicalization journey of ISIS and far-right extremists. 

Like every large community, gamers aren’t a monolith, so the study's authors decided to look at the difference between two popular gaming communities—Call of Duty and Minecraft. The paper found that anti-social behavior like racism and misogyny correlated stronger with fans of the Call of Duty series. 

“So this can vary across communities depending on what kind of people that you are spending a lot of your time with,” said Kowert. “I don't think it's necessarily about content but about the community in which you're being immersed.” 

The authors are quick to caution people from reading too heavily into this and more research is necessary. The effects of gaming have long been a hot topic issue, and often sensationalized by cable news and politicians looking to scare parents. Kowert told VICE News she always worries that her research will be taken out of context and used to attack the community. Kowert is clear she’s “not saying that all games are bad or all gamers are extremists.” 

“I think that games are wonderful places that have more positive things to offer than negative things across the board,” she said. “I think it's important that we have the conversation that games are being leveraged in this way, because we're not having that conversation, and therefore we can't mitigate it if we don't have the conversation."