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Let's Know Things

Let's Know Things

De: Colin Wright
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 A calm, non-shouty, non-polemical, weekly news analysis podcast for folks of all stripes and leanings who want to know more about what's happening in the world around them. Hosted by analytic journalist Colin Wright since 2016.

letsknowthings.substack.comColin Wright Política e Governo
Episódios
  • TikTok Deal

    TikTok Deal
    Jan 27 2026
    This week we talk about social networks, propaganda, and Oracle.We also discuss foreign adversaries, ByteDance, and X.Recommended Book: Rewiring Democracy by Bruce Schneier and Nathan E. SandersTranscriptIn 2021, TikTok, a short-form video platform that’s ostensibly also a social network, though which leans heavily toward consuming content over socializing, was ranked the most popular website by internet services company Cloudflare, beating out all the other big tech players, including search engine juggernaut, Google.It was a neck and neck sort of thing, with Google taking the lead some days that year, but 2021 was definitely TikTok’s time to shine, as it was already popular with young people and was starting to become popular with the general public, of all ages and across a huge swathe of the planet. It even beat Facebook as the most popular social media website that year, despite, again, being mostly about consuming content rather than interacting—that was actually a prime motivator for Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, to redirect its own apps in a similar direction, shifting its focus from communication and interaction between users toward the creation of binge-able content, and feeding users more of that content in a feed optimized for time-losing levels of consumption.2021 was also the first full year that TikTok was coming under scrutiny from the US government. In the preceding year, 2020, then first-term president Donald Trump said he was considering banning the app because it was becoming so popular, with young people in particular, and because it was owned by a Chinese company, ByteDance it represented a potential national security threat.So the idea was that because Chinese companies are forced, by their very nature, to do what the Chinese government tells them—that’s just how things work over there—and to do so on the down-low if that’s what the governments demands, and to lie about having to do what the government tells them to do, if the government tells them to thus lie, it doesn’t matter that ByteDance’s leadership swore up and down to the world that the company will never use its popularity, and the data it soaks up from all its users as a result of that popularity, to help the Chinese government, the Chinese military, or Chinese intelligence services.It of course will have to do that, and if it doesn’t, its leaders could be black-bagged and disappeared in the night—because again, that’s just how things work over there. So the Trump administration decided to make TikTok a sort of bogeyman, representing Chinese companies in general, and to some degree the presence of China in the US and throughout the Western world, and said, nope, we’re not gonna let this thing continue to operate over here.It’s worth remembering, too, that by 2021 the world was enmeshed in the COVID-19 pandemic, which originated in China, and which Trump and his administration were ardently attempting to tie to the Chinese government—calling Covid the Chinese Flu, and even worse things, as part of that effort.So this move against TikTok and its parent company, while based on genuine concerns about the ownership of the company and how and where the data being collected by said company is handled, it should also be seen as a political maneuver, allowing Trump, during the 2020 election run-up, to look like he was taking a big stand against a big foreign threat, China.What I’d like to talk about today is a deal that was proposed way back then by the Trump administration, as a potential way out for TikTok and ByteDance, allowing it to continue operating in the US despite threats to shut it down, now that said deal, or a version of it, seems to have finally come to fruition—and what we know about the shape of the resulting new, US-based version of TikTok.—On January 18, 2025, TikTok stopped worked in the US. It voluntarily suspended all services in the country in the lead-up to the implementation of the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, which was passed by the US congress and signed into law by then-president Joe Biden in April of 2024. This law gave social networking services controlled by ‘foreign adversaries’ 270 days, with the possibility of a 90-day extension, to divest themselves so that they’re no longer considered foreign adversary-owned.This law was almost exclusively aimed at TikTok, and the idea was that TikTok, in the US, would no longer be able to legally function following that deadline if it was still owned by China, which for the purposes of this law has been labeled a foreign adversary.ByteDance could keep TikTok in the US going if it sold a majority, controlling stake of its US-based assets to non-adversary owners, but otherwise it would have to shut down.Interestingly, though Trump was the original source of concerns about TikTok and its Chinese ownership during his first administration, when he stepped back into ...
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    14 minutos
  • Venezuelan Protests

    Venezuelan Protests
    Jan 20 2026
    This week we talk about war, inflation, and currency devaluation.We also discuss tyrants, police violence, and social media threats.Recommended Book: Post-Growth Living by Kate SoperTranscriptBack in mid-June of 2025, a shooting war erupted between Iran and Israel, with Israeli military forces launching attacks against multiple Iranian military sites, alongside sites associated with its nuclear program and against individual Iranian military leaders.Iran responded to these strikes, which left a lot of infrastructural damage and several military leaders assassinated, with large waves of missiles and drones against both Israeli and allied military targets, and soon after, later the same month, both sides agreed on a ceasefire and that was that.Following that blip of a war, though, Iran’s economy suffered greatly. It already wasn’t doing well, in part due to the crippling sanctions enforced by the US government for years, but also because of persistent mismanagement by Iran’s ruling regime, and the resultant deterioration of local infrastructure, both physical and bureaucratic.Millions of people fled Iranian urban centers during the war with Israel, and while most of them returned when the ceasefire was brokered, the pace of life and other fundaments of these cities never got back up to where they were, before, as there have been fairly consistent blackouts that have kept people from being able to function as normal, and these outages have also kept businesses from getting back on their feet. That, in turn, has resulted in closures and firings and an overall reduction in economic activity.The general hamhandedness of the government has amplified these issues, and the countless other issues of trying to exist within a country that is being so persistently targeted—both in the sense of those crushing sanctions from the US, but also in the sense of being periodically struck by Israel—has dramatically increased uncertainty throughout Iran these past several years.Even before that brief war, Iran was already on the backfoot, having suffered the loss of their local proxies, including the Assad regime in Syria, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, and Hamas in the Gaza Strip—all of which have been either severely weakened by Israel in recent years, or functionally wiped out—and that in turn has more directly exposed them to meddling and attacks from their key opposition, which includes the US, Israel, and Saudi Arabia.That new vulnerability has put the Iranian government on high-alert, and the compounding effects of all that infrastructural damage, mismanagement, and the need to reallocate more resources to defense has left the country suffering very high levels of inflation, a severely devalued currency, regular blackouts, mass unemployment, a water shortage, and long-time repression from a government that is in many ways more paranoid and flailing than in any time in recent memory.What I’d like to talk about today is a recent wave of protests across Iran and why the US government is apparently considering taking action to support protestors against the Iranian government.—Iran has long suffered all sorts of issues, including regular efforts by ethnic secessionists to pull it apart into pieces they periodically occupy and want to govern, themselves, and concerns from citizens that the government spends a whole lot of their time and the nation’s resources enriching themselves, oppressing the citizenry, funding what seems to be a pointless nuclear program, and prioritizing their offensive efforts against Israel and their other regional enemies, often by arming and funding those aforementioned, now somewhat defunct proxy militias and militaries.On top of all that, as of October 2025, inflation in Iran had surged to 48.6% and the Iranian currency, the rial, dropped in value to 1.45 million per dollar. The government tried to artificially boost the value of the rial to 1.38 million per dollar in early January of 2026, but it dropped further, to 1.5 million per dollar a few days later, hitting a record low. This combined with that wild inflation rate, made the basic fundamentals of life, food, electricity, and so on, unaffordable, even for those who still had jobs, which was an ever-shrinking portion of the population.For context, the drop of the rial to a value of 1.38 million per dollar, the boosted value, represented a loss of about 40% of the rial’s value since June of 2025, just before that war with Israel, which is a staggering loss, as that means folk’s life savings lost that much in about half a year.When currency values and inflation hit that level of volatility, doing business becomes difficult. It often makes more sense to close up shop than to try to keep the doors open, because you don’t know if the price you charge for your product or service will make you a profit or not: there’s a chance you’ll sell things at a loss, because the value of the money you receive and ...
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    16 minutos
  • Operation Absolute Resolve

    Operation Absolute Resolve
    Jan 13 2026
    This week we talk about Venezuela, Maduro, and international law.We also discuss sour crude, extrajudicial killings, and Greenland.Recommended Book: The Keep by F. Paul WilsonTranscriptBack in mid-November of 2025, I did an episode on extrajudicial killings, focusing on the targeting of speedboats, mostly from Venezuela headed toward the United States, by the US military. These boats were allegedly carrying drugs meant for the US market, and the US government justified these strikes by saying, basically, we have a right to protect ourselves, protect our citizens from the harm caused by these illegal substances, and if we have to keep taking out these boats and killing these people to do that, we will.There’s been a lot of back-and-forthing about the legitimacy of this approach, both in the sense that not all of these boats have been shown to be carrying drugs, some just seemed to be fishing boats in the wrong place at the wrong time, and in the sense that launching strikes without the go-ahead of Congress in the US is a legally dubious business. There was also the matter of some alleged follow-up strikes, which seemed to be intended to kill people who survived the initial taking-out of the boats, which is a big international human rights no no, to the point of potentially being a war crime.All of this happened within the context of a war of words between US President Trump’s second administration and the increasingly authoritarian regime of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, who followed the previous president Hugo Chávez as his hand-picked successor, and has more or less completed the authoritarian process of dissolving, coopting, or diminishing all aspects of the Venezuelan government that might ever check his power, which allowed him, in 2024, to bar the very popular, now Nobel Peace Prize winning candidate María Corina Machado from running, and her sub-in candidate, like previous Maduro opponent Juan Guaido, seems to have won the election by a fair bit, and in an internationally provable way, but Maduro’s government faked results that made it look like he won, and his single-party rule has since continued unabated.Or rather, it continued unabated until the early morning of January 3, 2026, around 2am, when US Operation Absolute Resolve kicked into action, leading to the—depending on who you ask—justified captured or illegal kidnapping—of Maduro and his wife from a stronghold in his country.And that’s what I’d like to talk about today: the operation itself, but also the consequences and potential meaning of it within the context of other important things happening in the world right now.—Maduro is immensely popular with about a fifth of the Venezuelan population, but essentially everyone else is strongly opposes him and his iron-fisted rule.It’s estimated that between 2017 and 2025, just shy of 8 million people, which is more than 20% of Venezuela’s 2017 population, has fled the country in order to escape a tyrannical government and its failed policies, which have collapsed the economy, made getting working and feeding oneself and one’s family difficult, and made crime, conflict, and the state-sanctioned oppression of anyone who doesn’t kowtow to the ruling party a commonplace thing.Trump speculated about the possibility of invading Venezuela even in his first administration, and part of the overt rationale was that it’s run by a failed government that most of the locals hate, so it would be an easy win. That justification shifted to orient around immigration and drugs by his second administration, and then more recently, Trump has said publicly that the real issue here is that Venezuela stole a bunch of US company-owned oil assets when it nationalized the industry back in the day, and those assets should be recaptured, given back to the US.Operation Absolute Resolve took months to plan and only about two and a half hours to complete. By most objective measures it was a spectacular military and intelligence success, especially considering all the moving parts and thus, all the things that could have gone wrong.The operation apparently involved at least 150 aircraft of various sorts, a spy within Maduro’s government, and months of surveillance, which helped them establish Maduro’s habits and routines, and that allowed them to map out where he would be, when, and what to expect going in to get him. All of these patterns changed in September of 2025 when US warships started massing in Caribbean, as Maduro started to get a little paranoid—justifiably, as it turns out—and he started moving between eight different locations, seldom sleeping in the same place more than one night in a row.He was eventually grabbed from a military base in Caracas, Venezuela’s capitol, and to make that happen the US military assets in the area had to take out local aviation and air defenses so that US Delta Force troops could be carried in by helicopter. Several air bases and ...
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    14 minutos
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