Many conversations about how generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) will impact the workplace seem to focus on one of two opposing views: AI will replace humans, or AI projects should be abandoned now because they aren’t delivering sufficient business value. In the legal world, research shows that companies are increasingly incorporating AI-powered tools, but at the same time feel employees are unprepared for the impacts.

The current reality is that, right now, GenAI and some professions (legal, for one) aren’t working together as well as they could be. Some users trust AI outputs too much, others not at all. It feels hard to strike the right balance. That may be due in part to legal professionals’ misinterpretation of how AI works, a hesitation perhaps catalyzed into full-blown fears recently by early high-profile failures in both the courtroom and the data science lab.

In navigating these uncertainties, we’re seeing the rise of a middle ground: an understanding that practitioners using AI and GenAI tools can gain demonstrable, quantifiable value from them when their output is managed like the work product of a smart intern. It’s an idea that’s easy for anyone to get their arms around. It’s also part of a three-step approach your company can use to get comfortable with GenAI not working quite like more conventional computer experiences.

3 Steps to gain trust––and value

Here are three steps any organization can take to build trust in GenAI solutions––the necessary foundation of any business value. To help ensure that using the tool will build trust, rather than erode it, organizations should:

1. Choose tools that embed GenAI improvements into existing workflows:
Users should not have to go to a separate website or exit the task they’re
doing to use the GenAI tool. Any prospective tool should arrive with precise
interaction points already integrated into existing workflows. Curated
integration, out of the box, can increase a GenAI tool’s reliability by:

• Avoiding open-ended, unreliable user interactions––think clicking a single button, rather than requiring users to master prompt engineering, or risk a chatbot going off the rails.
• Ensuring that all the relevant context can be included automatically, rather than relying on users to find and upload the necessary supporting documents each time.

2.   Reshape users’ mental model of the tech: GenAI solutions are different from algorithmic tools such as search because they don’t produce the same results every time. Instead, they’re flexible, powerful and sometimes inconsistent. It’s best to think of GenAI tools’ capabilities in human terms—like a smart intern. As with a smart intern, these tools can help users do their daily jobs better. And also just like an intern, they sometimes make mistakes.

Mindset shift is a critical point in successful GenAI adoption—use of the tool must be accompanied by a change in the tacit belief most users have that “the computer is always right” (or the converse, that if it’s wrong once, you can never rely on it again). Users will need to get comfortable with the indeterminate aspects of this still-new technology to better grasp its potential utility and limitations.

In practice, an intern mentality encourages users to think about working with GenAI as the evolution of trust in a relationship. When you first start using GenAI, just like on an intern’s first day on the job, you’re going to want to check every bit of work it produces. Over time, analogous to being a couple of months into the summer internship, you may find some tasks that the AI intern performs well enough to accept as a first pass, but still need to check and make your own. There may be other tasks the intern performs so reliably that you don’t even need to check its work. And there may be still other tasks that you don’t want to entrust to the intern at all.

This kind of approach can be implemented at a personal or organizational level, and can be emphasized when training new users on new GenAI tools. Importantly, it accounts for variances in different AI models’ capabilities and performance, the particular tasks at hand, and user risk tolerances.

3.  Be able to immediately verify results: A critical corollary to the point above, users should be able to immediately confirm the validity of any output a GenAI tool produces, in the platform. This capability should be a component of any GenAI tool your company may consider, so that users can check the AI’s work, and implement and evolve their trust profile with it over time. Correctness concerns can be addressed if the output contains citations, links, or other quick ways to point back to the facts that support the tool’s generated work product.

Professionals in many fields, including law, are finding it difficult to figure out exactly where and how GenAI can make tasks easier. If you consider the three steps above as a best practice in how to evaluate and adopt GenAI tools, I believe your organization will be much closer to achieving trustworthy results that deliver real business value. At the end of the day, users need to think of GenAI not as infallible, but as a powerful collaborative partner in which you build trust the more you understand and work with it––just like a smart intern.

AJ Shankar is CEO and founder of Everlaw.

These days, finding happiness at work can seem like a luxury most workers can’t afford. Facing a competitive job market and rising cost of living, many employees are burnt out from navigating what seems like an endless minefield of obstacles in the workplace, from restructuring and mass layoffs to return-to-office mandates and long hours.

In fact, overall happiness is down in the United States. And for the first time, America is no longer one of the top 20 happiest countries in the world, according to the Gallup World Poll’s World Happiness Report 2024.

But it turns out that the elusive happy employee does exist, at least according to Comparably, a leading workplace culture and corporate brand reputation platform.

Comparably released its annual list of the highest-rated companies with the happiest employees, part of its annual Best Places to Work series. The ranking is based on anonymous employee feedback to a variety of questions related to their overall happiness at work over a 12-month period (from August 2023 to August 2024), along with data from 20 million ratings of 70,000 companies in the U.S. and Canada on Comparably’s platform.

Winners are divided into two lists: the top 100 large companies (with more than 500 employees) and top 75 small-to-midsize companies (with 500 employees or fewer).

It may surprise you, or not, but none of the tech giants such as Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, or Microsoft have been on this list since 2020. However, Uber took top honors in the large company category. It’s come a long way since its early days, when it faced numerous workplace culture challenges.

ADP, Adobe, Boston Consulting Group, CarGurus, Elsevier, Experian, HubSpot, RingCentral, and TopGolf all maintained their top 25 rankings from the previous year. HR/payroll software company Paycom came in at #5, while notable newcomers to this year’s list include CRM leader Salesforce at #10 and geospatial mapping software Esri at #7.

Here are the top 10 large companies with the happiest employees:

1. Uber
2. Adobe
3. ADP
4. Elsevier
5. Paycom
6. Proofpoint
7. Esri
8. HubSpot
9. TopGolf
10. Salesforce

Chronosphere tops the list for small-to-midsize companies. It got high marks for creating “an environment where [employees] encourage and support each other to achieve impactful results.”

The complete list of winners, including company rank, location, and industry, is available here.

Parts of southeastern North Carolina were still underwater Tuesday after a storm that wasn’t quite organized enough to get a name dropped historic amounts of rain on an area that has suffered floods of a lifetime at least four other times in the past 25 years.

The flash flooding closed dozens of roads in Brunswick County, including U.S. Highway 17, which is the main coastal route. Floodwaters swamped the highway at several points for most of the day, trapping some drivers on high ground that became an island.

Emergency workers brought food and water to people as they waited for the waters to recede, Brunswick County emergency officials said. No deaths were reported, but dozens of roads in the county were damaged and many washed out.

Monday’s deluge centered on Carolina Beach south of Wilmington, where more than 18 inches (46 centimeters) of rain fell in 12 hours. That amount of rain in that period of time qualifies as a so-called 1,000-year flood expected only once in a that era, meteorologists at the National Weather Service office in Wilmington said.

Several blocks of the coastal town were flooded to the bottom of car doors for hours Monday as the system, known as Potential Tropical Cyclone No. 8, never organized enough to become the eighth-named tropical storm of the season, Helene.

It’s not the first historic flood in the region by any measure.

Hurricane Diana in 1984 brought more than 18 inches (46 centimeters) of rain to the area, and forecasters noted that it was the first time a tropical event had dropped a foot (30 centimeters) of rain to the area.

Since then, the area just southwest of Wilmington saw 20 inches (51 centimeters) of rain in Hurricane Floyd in 1999, which was once the benchmark for heavy rain.

An unnamed storm in the wake of Hurricane Matthew in 2010 dropped about 11 inches (28 centimeters) of rain on Brunswick County; and a 2015 deluge, as Hurricane Joaquin moved well offshore, dropped 20 inches (51 centimeters) of rain.

And in 2018, Hurricane Florence brought what is now the touchstone for historic flooding across the region with 30 inches (72 centimeters) of rain.

The blame for recurring floods of a lifetime can be placed on rising temperatures because of climate change, said Tim Armstrong, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Wilmington.

“The warmer the air, the more moisture it can hold,” Armstrong said Tuesday.

As the three massive floods from unnamed storms show, it doesn’t take a powerful hurricane, just the right combination of atmospheric factors to end up with big floods over small areas.

“The worst of Monday’s flood was centered over just parts of two counties,” Armstrong said.

The rain from the system had moved into southeast Virginia on Tuesday. Along North Carolina’s Outer Banks, the storm closed vulnerable coastal highway North Carolina 12 on Ocracoke Island and threatened several homes in Rodanthe, where erosion and rising sea levels have destroyed more than a half-dozen beachfront homes this decade.

The Atlantic hurricane season continues through the end of November.

In an updated hurricane outlook last month, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration was still predicting a highly active season thanks to near-record sea surface temperatures and the possibility of La Nina. Emergency management officials have urged people to stay prepared.

Elsewhere in the Atlantic, Gordon remained a tropical depression as it swirled through open ocean waters. Gordon could either dissolve in upcoming days or strengthen back into a tropical storm, forecasters said.

—Jeffrey Collins, Associated Press

We may yet live to see the day when it’s perfectly normal to see the world through eyewear that blurs the line between physical reality and digital imagery. But instead of coming into focus, the question of how we might get there has become murky. We do know that the metaverse bubble has definitely burst: Even Meta is downplaying the hype by pitching its Quest headsets as AI-powered mixed-reality devices, a less out-there concept. Meanwhile, spatial computing—Apple’s term for what it’s creating with its Vision Pro headset—might be Apple’s tiniest niche for a long time to come.

And then there’s the augmented reality experience offered by Snap’s Spectacles.

If you kind of forgot that Spectacles existed, or at least that they involve AR, that’s understandable. The high-tech eyewear made its biggest splash back in 2016 when the original version launched as a near-impulse item at $130 and was even sold from traveling vending machines. But Spectacles didn’t do AR until 2021, when Snap unveiled a fourth-generation version—simply called “the new Spectacles”—that was more experiment than product. Instead of being for sale, it was available only to a select pool of creators.

More than three years later, Snap is back with its fifth-generation Spectacles, which it’s unveiling at its Snap Partner Summit conference today. Still best known for its Snapchat ephemeral messaging app, the company has been through a lot lately, including multiple rounds of layoffs and a huge drop in its stock price. Last year, I wrote about its new initiative to power AR features for enterprise customers such as Men’s Wearhouse; months later, it shuttered that operation. Just being a public company principally involved in monetizing eyeballs through advertising is not getting any easier, though cofounder and CEO Evan Spiegel pointed out in a recent letter to employees that Snap has reversed two years of declining revenue growth.

So the fact that Snap continues to invest in Spectacles—rather than focusing entirely on buttressing Snapchat’s fortunes—is notable. Especially since Spectacles still isn’t back to its early days of being a true consumer product. For now, Snap is offering it via a subscription service targeting developers intrigued by the opportunity to write AR apps (or, in Snap parlance, lenses) for the platform. The price of entry is $99 a month, with a one-year commitment.

Spectacles may still be a bit, well, speculative, but Snap already has deep relationships with developers. Hundreds of thousands of them have used its Lens Studio to create millions of interactive AR effects inside Snapchat that have been viewed trillions of times—potentially providing a springboard for finding Spectacles’ killer apps.

The new glasses offer ”a really compelling developer experience, and so that’s where we’re starting,” says Snap cofounder and CTO Bobby Murphy. “But certainly, our goal is to collaborate with our developers and support them as we build towards a more consumer-oriented device.”

Unlike Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses—which have cameras, audio, and AI but no displays—the fifth-generation Spectacles are wholly incapable of passing as garden-variety eyeglasses. They’re strikingly angular and almost comically oversized, with an aesthetic that can only be described as Cybertruck-esque. There was only so much Snap could do to reduce the size of the technology involved, which includes twin liquid crystal on silicon projectors, waveguides to direct images into your field of view, and enough battery power for up to 45 minutes of use.

Still, this is definitely a pair of glasses, not a headset. At 223 grams, Spectacles is far lighter than the Meta Quest (515 grams) and Apple Vision Pro (at least 600 grams, not counting the external battery pack). You slip it on rather than having to strap yourself in. And there’s no need for this device to give you digital eyeballs to simulate eye contact—your real eyes remain visible at all times.

When I spent some time with the latest Spectacles recently, I never got the isolating—or even suffocating—feeling that head-worn hardware sometimes provokes. “We’ve been really committed to this vision around committing ourselves to a form factor that is easy to put on and take off, and compact and much more accessible,” says Murphy. “And one that allows us to enhance the experience that we have with the people in the world around us, rather than take us out of it.”

Judging from my experience, anyone who’s used a Meta Quest headset or the Apple Vision Pro probably won’t have their mind blown by what Snap has created. The field of view is 46 degrees, which means that the digital imagery it intermingles with reality is rendered within a rectangular area rather than enveloping you. I used Spectacles with snap-in lenses approximating my eyeglass prescription, but the graphics fell far short of the Vision Pro’s razor-sharp vividness.

But that 46-degree rectangle is almost three times larger than with the previous Spectacles, helping to better preserve the illusion that the stuff you’re seeing is real. And while interacting with Spectacles experiences doesn’t involve anything as dazzling as the Vision Pro’s highly precise eye tracking, its means of input—hand gestures, plus voice commands—worked well for me. Hold up your palm, and Spectacles renders a control panel on top of it that you can tap with your other hand—a pretty nifty trick.

Even before many developers get their hands on the latest Spectacles, Snap has salted its Lens Explorer app store with experiences that show off these AR glasses’ stuff. For example, the company worked with Niantic to bring its Tamagotchi-like game Peridot to Spectacles. There’s a Lego lens that lets you play with oversized virtual bricks (I assembled them atop a real chair). You can play golf using your phone as a virtual club, or paint with flowers and other plants, or learn about human anatomy by inspecting a life-sized body model with no skin. My AI, the ChatGPT-powered chatbot Snap added to Snapchat in 2023, is also available.

Spectacles’ most promising frontier—and the one that would link it most clearly to Snapchat—might be lenses with a social element. For instance, one called Imagine Together lets you issue spoken commands to summon cartoony generative AI imagery (I asked for a dog in a tuxedo) that floats around in shared space that other nearby people wearing Spectacles can also see. Of course, it might be a long time before you have friends who own Spectacles so you can share such experiences, but there’s also a spectator mode that lets someone at least passively see what you’re seeing on a phone.

I had fun trying out the latest Spectacles. But Snap still doesn’t have a public road map for turning its AR hardware investment into an actual mainstream product, making it hard to assess. For example, exactly what eventual price point is the company trying to hit? A product that might be tempting if it was available soon for $299 could feel like too little, too late if it arrived in 2026 at $899. As Steve Jobs was fond of saying, real artists ship.

Murphy says that shipping remains the goal—and that he believes smart glasses of some sort will be ubiquitous someday. ”If anything, as we continue to make progress, we’re becoming more and more excited and more optimistic about this form factor,” he told me. “This kind of computing device unlocks a totally different set of digital experiences than people have been able to experience before.” Now Snap just needs to unlock it for the masses—or at least a lot more people than it has so far.

Bryce Hall is a relic of the TikTok dance age. Now, he’s on stage with Donald Trump. 

He’s part of the late-2010s crowd of (mostly young) male influencers who have recently embraced the right. Logan Paul, once a vlogger known for his subversive content, recently had Trump on his podcast. FaZe Banks, a popular streamer of the era, said that Trump had “aura on absolute max.”

“The Trump campaign is trying to appeal to young people,” says Trevor Boffone, a lecturer at the University of Houston, “so they’re getting the most popular TikToker they can find who will go with them.” 

The conservative turn of “brofluencers”

Hall has 23 million TikTok followers, and Banks serves as CEO of the popular gaming group, FaZe Clan. Logan and brother Jake Paul maintain a combined 44.3 million followers on YouTube. Masculinity was often central to their content: They all posted shirtless frequently, and had influencer girlfriends who laughed at their jokes. Hall and both of the Paul brothers even now have side hustles as professional boxers.

Meanwhile, many Gen Z men are feeling emasculated. Two-thirds of Gen Z men agree that “no one really knows me well,” per the gender-focused nonprofit Equimundo, and think pieces abound about the masculinity crisis. This makes Gen Z a prime voting population for Trump—and they happen to be watching the TikTok brofluencers.

Jordan Foster, a research fellow at McMaster University who studies online masculinity, is skeptical of just how effective these endorsements will be in turning out voters.

“While Jake and Logan Paul—and others who craft content in this vein of masculine-meets-ridiculous sport—are well followed and certainly persuasive, their major audience demographic is one with which Donald Trump already polls well,” Foster writes in an email to Fast Company. “Namely, by young men and by white men, especially.”

Still, the endorsements have juiced these brofluencers’ engagement. Hall’s recent videos bashing Kamala Harris and touting Trump’s achievements are some of his highest scoring, with the clips regularly garnering over five million views. On Friday, Hall even joined Trump on stage to tell the cheering audience that “we need Trump back, really bad.” His oversize pink hoodie showed Hall’s TikTok roots; his red MAGA hat showed his political future.

Logan Paul has undergone a similar arc: Seven years ago, YouTube videos like “REPLACED MY BROTHER’S CLOSET WITH 1,000 PAIRS OF SOCKS!” regularly racked up more than 10 million views. Within the last year, though, he’s only had two YouTube videos reach more than three million views: One was a recap of his experience with MrBeast, a more popular account; the other was his interview with Trump. 

The politics of influencing

The internet is full of MAGA influencers; a whole conservative media ecosystem has popped up around Trump, part of which is on TikTok. The difference, then, is Hall and the Pauls’ pre-MAGA fame. They didn’t build their brand on political content—they veered right after they were already famous. 

That’s especially surprising considering the state of influencer politics. Most big-name YouTubers and TikTokers stay silent about their politics. Some, like Hall’s ex-girlfriend, Addison Rae, have endorsed Harris. 

“Typically, celebrities and social media personalities skew Democrat,” the University of Houston’s Boffone says. “Even among conservative content creators, there has been a hesitancy to attach themselves to Trump.”

Still, these brofluencers of the 2010s are starting to don their red MAGA hats. With that choice, they’re getting boatloads of views—and hate comments.

Meta said it’s banning the Russia state media organization from its social media platforms, alleging that the outlets used deceptive tactics to amplify Moscow’s propaganda. The announcement drew a rebuke from the Kremlin on Tuesday.

The company, which owns Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram, said late Monday that it will roll out the ban over the next few days in an escalation of its efforts to counter Russia’s covert influence operations.

“After careful consideration, we expanded our ongoing enforcement against Russian state media outlets: Rossiya Segodnya, RT, and other related entities are now banned from our apps globally for foreign interference activity,” Meta said in a prepared statement.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov lashed out, saying that “such selective actions against Russian media are unacceptable,” and that “Meta with these actions are discrediting themselves.

“We have an extremely negative attitude towards this. And this, of course, complicates the prospects for normalizing our relations with Meta,” Peskov told reporters during his daily conference call.

RT, formerly known as Russia Today, and Russia Segodnya, also denounced the move.

“It’s cute how there’s a competition in the West—who can try to spank RT the hardest, in order to make themselves look better,” RT said in a release.

Rossiya Segodnya, the parent company behind state news agency RIA Novosti and news brands like Sputnik, said Meta’s decision “was not unexpected for us.”

“Meta is a deeply politicized organization. We will continue our work in the countries where we are present, and this decision will not affect our work,” Segodnya said in a statement.

Meta’s actions comes days after the United States announced new sanctions on RT, accusing the Kremlin news outlet of being a key part of Russia’s war machine and its efforts to undermine its democratic adversaries.

U.S. officials alleged last week that RT was working hand-in-hand with the Russian military and running fundraising campaigns to pay for sniper rifles, body armor, and other equipment for soldiers fighting in Ukraine. They also said RT websites masqueraded as legitimate news sites but were used to spread disinformation and propaganda in Europe, Africa, South America, and elsewhere.

Earlier this month, the Biden administration seized Kremlin-run websites and charged two RT employees of covertly providing millions of dollars in funding to a Tennessee-based content creation company to publish English-language social media videos pushing pro-Kremlin messages.

Moscow has rejected the allegations.

Meta had already taken steps to limit Moscow’s online reach. Since 2020 it has been labeling posts and content from state media. Two years later, it stopped Russian state media from running ads and putting their content lower in people’s feeds, and the company, along with other social media sites like YouTube and TikTok, stopped European Union users from accessing RT and Sputnik channels after the outlets were sanctioned by Brussels. Also in 2022, Meta took down a sprawling Russia-based disinformation network spreading Kremlin talking points about the invasion of Ukraine.

Meta and Facebook “already blocked RT in Europe two years ago, now they’re censoring information flow to the rest of the world,” RT said in its statement.

Moscow has fought back, designating Meta as an extremist group in March 2022, shortly after sending troops into Ukraine and blocking Facebook and Instagram. Both platforms—as well as Elon Musk’s X, which is also blocked—were popular with Russians before the invasion and the subsequent crackdown on independent media and other forms of critical speech. The social media platforms are now only accessible through virtual private networks.

—Kelvin Chan, Associated Press business writer

Dasha Litvinova contributed to this report.

Americans spent a bit more at retailers last month, providing a small boost to the economy just as the Federal Reserve considers how much to cut its key interest rate.

Retail sales ticked up 0.1% from July to August, after jumping the most in a year and a half the previous month, the Commerce Department said Tuesday. Online retailers, sporting goods stores, and home and garden stores all reported higher sales.

The data indicates that consumers are still able and willing to spend more despite the cumulative impact of three years of excess inflation and the higher interest rates intended to combat those rising prices. Average paychecks, particularly for lower-income Americans, have also risen sharply since the pandemic, which has allowed many Americans to continue spending even as many necessities became more expensive. And price increases are slowing, with inflation falling to a three-year low last month of 2.5%.

The impact of inflation and consumers’ health has been an ongoing issue in the presidential campaign, with former president Donald Trump blaming the Biden-Harris administration for the post-pandemic jump in prices. Vice President Kamala Harris has, in turn, charged that Trump’s claim that he will slap 10% to 20% tariffs on all imports would amount to a “Trump tax” that will raise prices further.

A slowdown in hiring and a recent rise in the unemployment rate have fueled concerns the economy is sputtering, yet steady spending should boost growth. The Federal Reserve’s Atlanta branch estimates that the economy grew at a solid 2.5% annual rate in the third quarter.

“With consumption still very healthy, for now, recession fears appear overblown,” Olivia Cross, North America economist at Capital Economics, said.

The Fed could provide a further boost to consumers and the economy by lowering borrowing costs. It is likely to reduce its key rate at its meetings in November and December as well as on Wednesday. Such cuts should, over time, lower rates for mortgages, auto loans, and credit cards. Average mortgage rates have already fallen in anticipation of the Fed’s actions.

Consumers have been showing signs of stress, with credit-card debt rising and savings rates falling, trends that could weigh on spending in future months.

Kamie Meeks, a 22-year-old college student in New York City, said that inflation has made her better at finding lower-priced goods. She does her food shopping at the discounter Aldi. She shops mostly online at Walmart and at Chinese retailers like Shein and Temu.

It’s easier to “find deals” online, Meeks said.

In August, sales jumped 1.4% for online retailers and rose 0.7% at health and personal care outlets. Yet they were flat for restaurants and bars, a sign that consumers are holding back from some discretionary spending.

Gas stations reported a 1.2% drop in sales, which mostly reflected a decline in prices last month. Auto sales also ticked lower.

On Wednesday, Fed policymakers will decide whether to cut their key interest rate by a typical quarter-point or a larger-than-usual half-point, from its current level of about 5.3%, a 23-year high.

Wall Street is increasingly expecting a reduction of a half-point. With inflation headed back to the Fed’s 2% target, many economists also argue that the central bank does not need to keep rates that high. At the same time, some Fed policymakers who worry that inflation could remain stuck at its current level of 2.5% may not want to cut rates that fast. They could point to solid retail sales as evidence that there is no need to rush rate cuts.

One reason inflation has fallen from a four-decade high of 9.1% in June 2022 has been consumers’ reluctance to pay some of the higher prices they’ve encountered at grocery stores, restaurants, and clothing stores. Instead, shoppers have traded down to store brands, sought out deals, or spent more at discount retailers. Some packaged-food makers, fast-food restaurants, and retailers such as Target have responded by cutting prices or offering deals to entice shoppers.

Major retailers say that shoppers will likely remain cautious heading into the critical holiday season, so they’ll be pushing discounts.

“Overall, customers remained deal-focused and attracted to more-predictable sales moments with 4th of July, Black Friday in July, and the beginning of back-to-school sales events,” Best Buy’s CEO Corie Barry said recently.

—Christopher Rugaber and Anne D’Innocenzio, Associated Press business writers

Tobacco companies famously did it. Corporate giants still do it. Now, the Trump and Harris presidential campaigns have been accused of astroturfing—not rolling out synthetic grass on sports fields, but faking grassroots support.

Astroturfing is the deceptive tactic of creating the illusion of widespread public backing for a person or policy when, in reality, that support is lacking. This tactic plays upon the human tendency to be influenced by the majority, often leading people to ignore evidence and even their own beliefs, and instead jumping on the proverbial bandwagon.

“The difference between grassroots and AstroTurf”

The term was first coined in 1985 by Texas Senator Lloyd Bentsen and gets its name from the synthetic substitute designed to mimic grass. Discussing at the time the “mountain of cards and letters” he had received demanding his support for a bill favorable to the insurance industry, Bentsen famously said, “A fellow from Texas can tell the difference between grass roots and AstroTurf . . . this is generated mail.”

Astroturfing has since found fertile ground in the anonymity of the internet, where individuals and well-funded organizations—from political campaigns to activist groups—can operate undetected. In its modern form, astroturfing uses social media, forums, and comment sections to flood discussions with manufactured support or opposition, effectively drowning out the voices of real citizens.

Over the past 11 months, thousands of fake, automated Twitter accounts have been discovered to heap praise on Donald Trump and ridicule his critics, according to new research. As reported by the Guardian, sophisticated “persona management software” multiplies the efforts of each astroturfer, providing each with a name, email accounts, web pages, and social media to make them indistinguishable from authentic profiles. 

Astroturfing in the 2024 election

To make matters more complex, these campaigns don’t solely rely on automated “bots” or bot accounts. Often humans, rather than programmers or AI, are placed behind these screens, paid to wreak havoc all around the internet.

The New York Post recently reported that an OnlyFans creator was approached by Palette MGMT, an influencer marketing company, on behalf of Future Forward—a Democratic Party-aligned super PAC. “Hi Michael, I hope you’re doing well! I’m reaching out on behalf of one of Palette’s partners with an exciting paid offer to create and post anti-Trump content on TikTok,” read the missive shared with the Post. Turns out the OnlyFans creator was a Trump supporter.

While there are laws in the United States against astroturfing in commercial advertising, political advertising remains a grey area. So, as with everything on the internet, take what you read with a hefty serving of salt.

After getting a bump last week, shares of Trump Media and Technology Group (Nasdaq: DJT) are falling once again, nearing the lowest point since the parent company of Trump’s Truth Social platform went public via a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) merger in March.

Shares of DJT stock closed down more than 6% on Tuesday and are down 27% in the past month. That’s despite majority owner and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump saying last week that he has “absolutely no intention of selling” his shares, which comprise roughly 60% of the company’s total, when his lockup agreement expires later this week.

That proclamation gave the stock a short-term 25% boost, but it has been on a downward trajectory ever since. What’s driving the losses? It’s not the easiest question to answer.

Equity analysts don’t cover the stock. That’s not especially unusual for companies that go public via SPAC, as Trump Media did. And while the stock has a high-trade volume, it’s largely individual investors, rather than Wall Street firms buying and selling—meaning banks aren’t likely to make any money in covering the stock.

So while the experts aren’t willing to talk about the roller coaster that is DJT, the company’s stock symbol, there are still some solid reasons why some investors might be abandoning ship.

Will Donald Trump sell his Trump Media shares?

He says no, but he didn’t offer a lot of specifics. While Trump says he has no plans to sell his holdings, he could potentially sell a small number of shares and still maintain a strong majority in the company. 

We’ll know for sure on Thursday, when he is free to divest as much Trump Media stock as he would like, as long as the price doesn’t fall to $12 before then. Since Trump has a history of changing his mind without a lot of warning, some investors might be hedging their bets and selling some shares just in case.

Will other insiders sell their Trump Media shares?

That seems a lot more likely. Two investors—ARC Global Investments II and United Atlantic Ventures—have already declared plans to sell 18 million shares beginning September 19. Trump Media mounted a legal challenge to prevent that, but a judge denied the motion in late August.

Meanwhile, Andy Litinsky and Wes Moss, former contestants on The Apprentice who cofounded Truth Social, and Patrick Orlando, whose ARC Global sponsored the SPAC that merged with Trump Media, all own shares and have no roles at the company. They’ve all also tussled with Trump Media in legal filings.

Moss and Litinsky both have specifically accused the company of trying to prevent them from selling their shares, which represented an 8% stake at one point. And earlier this month, a judge ordered Trump Media to deliver a larger stake in the company to Orlando, saying TMTG had breached its contract with ARC.

Neither Moss, Litinsky, nor Orlando has specifically announced plans to sell when the lockup expires, but traders are keeping a close eye out for regulatory filings from all three.

What is the case for and against Trump selling his Trump Media shares?

Trump stands to make a lot of money if he sells his shares. Even with the recent plunge in value, his stake is worth more than $2 billion. In a presidential race that’s increasingly neck and neck, that’s a cash pool that might become appealing as November 5 draws near.

However, selling off a big chunk of DJT stock would likely startle investors and cause shares of Trump Media to plummet. And whether Trump wins or loses in November, Truth Social is likely to continue to get a lot of media attention.

If he wins, he will almost certainly continue using it as a platform to make announcements (as he did with Twitter in his first term), which could drive more users to Truth. If he loses the race, Truth will be his megaphone for opposition to the Harris administration—and, perhaps, the election results once again. That, too, would point more people to the platform. And the higher the number of subscribers, the better its chances of attracting advertisers and seeing its stock price increase.

What impact have the assassination attempts had on Trump Media stock?

Not a whole lot, ultimately. Shares spiked in support of Trump after he was reportedly wounded in Butler, Pennsylvania, in July, but have steadily fallen since. And after the incident this weekend, there was a brief rise at the start of trading, but the stock finished lower for the day.

Are the company’s financials affecting DJT’s stock price?

They don’t appear to be what’s driving the stock price. In June, the company reported revenue of just $836,900, a nearly 30% drop from the previous year and a net loss of more than $16 million (28% more than in the same period in 2023). Investors didn’t blink. (The company also ended the most recent quarter with $344 million in cash and cash equivalents, saying it had no debt.) Some have dubbed the company a “belief stock,” meaning it’s driven more by the personalities behind it than the fundamentals. 

Hundreds of pagers detonated simultaneously across Lebanon on Tuesday as part of what’s believed to be a coordinated attack against members of Hezbollah, killing at least nine people and wounding some 2,750 more.

Hezbollah has not said why the pagers exploded, but did say it held Israel “fully responsible for this criminal aggression.” Israel has not yet claimed responsibility for the attack, but had signaled, one day prior, that it was considering a heightened military campaign against Hezbollah, which has for months been firing rockets into Israel in support of Hamas.

UN spokesperson Stéphane Dujarric told reporters Tuesday that the developments in Lebanon were “extremely concerning,” adding that there’s now a higher risk of escalation in the Middle East. In particular, the surprising nature of the damage caused has raised concerns that a new front has opened up on warfare: a form of sabotage that transforms innocuous gadgets into deadly devices.

“Hezbollah made an error when they told their top echelon to stop using mobile phones because they feared they could be tracked,” says Alan Woodward, a cybersecurity professor at the University of Surrey. “They decided to switch to pagers, but they were known to only use a small number of vendors.”

It’s believed that the pagers attacked were produced by Taiwanese manufacturer Gold Apollo, based on images of destroyed devices in the immediate aftermath of the attack. There is no suggestion Gold Apollo knew about the alteration of its devices. (Gold Apollo did not immediately respond to Fast Company’s request for comment, made outside working hours in Taiwan.)

The batch of pagers used by Hezbollah representatives is believed to have contained a small explosive charge within the device that was triggered by a simple message sent to the pagers, according to a former British Army munitions expert who spoke to the BBC. And terror groups and governments alike have in the past detonated bombs through text message. “Intelligence and security organizations have a history of being innovative using relatively simple means,” says Woodward. For example, Hamas engineer Yahya Ayyash was killed in 1996 when he answered what turned out to be a duplicate of his personal cell phone, which contained a small bomb.

“Fundamentally, there’s nothing new [with Tuesday’s attack],” says an experienced UN weapons inspector, who spoke to Fast Company on the condition of anonymity. “It was done nearly 30 years ago.”

Military experts suggest the method of attack limits the number of people who might inadvertently be affected by being incorrectly targeted—because the pager is such an old, outmoded technology. “The clever bit here is who else would use a pager?” says Lynette Nusbacher, a military historian and a former senior lecturer in war studies at the U.K. Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst.

The attack will have a significant organizational impact within Hezbollah, says the UN weapons inspector. “There’ll be massive panic within Hezbollah, obviously,” they say. “It will have totally disrupted Hezbollah’s covert communication system.”

Nusbacher, for her part, worries that this week’s attack could mean heightened uncertainty among the general public around the safety of their digital devices. “Does this signal that there are internet-age vulnerabilities?” she asks. “Yes, it does.”

You don’t want to get on the wrong side of parenting TikTok. Just ask influencers Matt and Abby Howard.  

Controversy erupted after Abby in a since-expired Instagram Story said that she and her husband were leaving their children—Griffin, two, and August, one—in their room during a cruise to go to dinner elsewhere on the ship.

“We ended up taking them for five nights, and it became apparent that they weren’t enjoying it and therefore we weren’t either,” the Instagram Story read. “So THEN we switched our dinner time to AFTER their bedtime and FaceTimed the monitors while we ate.”

In another Instagram Story, Abby explained that regular baby monitors don’t work on the cruise ship “unless you’re only like 10 feet away,” hence the decision to FaceTime them instead. “And that worked out muchhhh better for everyone,” she added.

The video quickly did the rounds online and, of course, people had opinions. “The most shocking thing about the Matt and Abby cruise situation is that they posted in REAL TIME that their kids were alone,” one person wrote in a video posted to TikTok. “What if a follower was on that ship? A stalker? Literally anyone?? They are so lucky that nothing horrible happened.”

“FaceTime is not a safe or appropriate substitute for proper, in-person supervision of very young children, particularly in a potentially hazardous environment like a cruise ship,” parenting expert Chioma Fanawopo tells Fast Company. “Children this young require hands-on care, not only to meet their physical needs but also for emotional security. A screen cannot provide the comfort, attention, or quick response necessary if an emergency arises.”

The couple responded to the backlash a couple days later by clarifying that they were on the cruise with their extended family, saying: “People started to speculate, and believe, that we had left our children alone in their staterooms. And that is just completely untrue. We had someone with our children at all times on this boat. Period.”

Parenting is challenging enough on its own, but putting it on display for the internet to scrutinize takes a thick skin. TikTok’s backlash culture takes no prisoners, and parents are no exception. While criticism can stem from genuine concern, it often morphs into a free-for-all to tear others down, particularly by those with strong opinions they like to voice.

No one’s suggesting leaving kids unattended with just a baby monitor will win you parent of the year. But if you do, you should know better by now than to broadcast it on TikTok.

Kroger and Albertsons were expected to present their closing arguments Tuesday in a U.S. District Court hearing on their proposed merger, which the federal government hopes to block.

Over the course of the three-week hearing in Portland, Oregon, the two companies have insisted that merging would allow them to lower prices and more effectively compete with retail giants like Walmart and Amazon.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) argued that the deal would eliminate competition and lead to higher food prices for already struggling customers.

In 2022, Kroger and Albertsons proposed what would be the largest supermarket merger in U.S. history. But the FTC sued to prevent the $24.6 billion deal.

The FTC wants U.S. District Judge Adrienne Nelson to issue a preliminary injunction that would block the deal while its complaint goes before an in-house administrative law judge.

In testimony during the hearing, the CEOs of Albertsons and Kroger said the merged company would lower prices in a bid to retain customers. They also argued that the merger would boost growth, bolstering stores and union jobs.

FTC attorneys have noted that the two supermarket chains currently compete in 22 states, closely matching each other on price, quality, private label products, and services like store pickup. Shoppers benefit from that competition and would lose those benefits if the merger is allowed to proceed, they said.

The FTC and labor union leaders also argued that workers’ wages and benefits would decline if Kroger and Albertsons no longer compete with each other. They also expressed concern that potential store closures could create so-called food and pharmacy deserts for consumers.

Under the deal, Kroger and Albertsons would sell 579 stores in places where their locations overlap to C&S Wholesale Grocers, a New Hampshire-based supplier to independent supermarkets that also owns the Grand Union and Piggly Wiggly store brands.

The FTC says C&S is ill-prepared to take on those stores. Laura Hall, the FTC’s senior trial counsel, cited internal documents that indicated C&S executives were skeptical about the quality of the stores they would get and may want the option to sell or close them.

But C&S CEO Eric Winn testified that he thinks his company can be successful in the venture.

The attorneys general of Arizona, California, the District of Columbia, Illinois, Maryland, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, and Wyoming all joined the FTC’s lawsuit on the commission’s side. Washington State and Colorado filed separate cases in state courts seeking to block the merger. Washington’s case opened in Seattle on Monday.

Kroger, based in Cincinnati, Ohio, operates 2,800 stores in 35 states, including the brands Smith’s and Harris Teeter. Albertsons, based in Boise, Idaho, operates 2,273 stores in 34 states, including the brands Safeway, Jewel Osco, and Shaw’s. Together, the companies employ around 710,000 people.

If Judge Nelson agrees to issue the injunction, the FTC plans to hold the in-house hearings starting October 1. Kroger sued the FTC last month, however, alleging the agency’s internal proceedings are unconstitutional and saying it wants the merger’s merits decided in federal court. That lawsuit was filed in federal court in Ohio.

—Dee-Ann Durbin and Claire Rush, Associated Press

A bipartisan group of lawmakers introduced legislation Tuesday that would prohibit political campaigns and outside political groups from using artificial intelligence to misrepresent the views of their rivals by pretending to be them.

The introduction of the bill comes as Congress has failed to regulate the fast-evolving technology and experts warn that it threatens to overwhelm voters with misinformation. Those experts have expressed particular concern over the dangers posed by “deepfakes,” AI-generated videos and memes that can look lifelike and cause voters to question what is real and what is fake.

Lawmakers said the bill would give the Federal Election Commission (FEC) the power to regulate the use of artificial intelligence in elections in the same way it has regulated other political misrepresentation for decades. The FEC has started to consider such regulations.

“Right now, the FEC does not have the teeth, the regulatory authority, to protect the election,” said Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick, a Pennsylvania Republican who co-sponsored the legislation. Other sponsors include Rep. Adam Schiff, a California Democrat; Rep. Derek Kilmer, a Washington State Democrat; and Lori Chavez-DeRemer, an Oregon Republican.

Fitzpatrick and Schiff said the odds were against the bill passing this year. Nevertheless, they said they don’t expect the measure to face much opposition and could be attached to a must-pass measure in the waning days of the congressional session.

Schiff described the bill as a modest first step in addressing the threat posed by deepfakes and other false AI-generated content, arguing the legislation’s simplicity was an asset.

“This is really probably the lowest hanging fruit there is” in terms of addressing the misuse of AI in politics, Schiff said. “There’s so much more we’re going to need to do, though, to try to attack the avalanche of misinformation and disinformation.”

Congress has been paralyzed on countless issues in recent years, and regulating AI is no exception.

“This is another illustration of congressional dysfunction,” Schiff said.

Schiff and Fitzpatrick are not alone in believing artificial intelligence legislation is needed and can become law. Rep. Madeleine Dean, a Pennsylvania Democrat, and Rep. María Elvira Salazar, a Florida Republican, introduced legislation earlier this month that aims to curb the spread of unauthorized AI-generated deepfakes. A bipartisan group of senators proposed companion legislation in the Senate.

Opposition to such legislation has primarily focused on not stifling a burgeoning technology sector or making it easier for another country to become the hub for the AI industry.

Congress doesn’t “want to put a rock on top of innovation either and not allow it to flourish under the right circumstances,” Rep. French Hill, an Arkansas Republican, said in August at a reception hosted by the Center for AI Safety. “It’s a balancing act.”

The FEC in August took its first step toward regulating AI-generated deepfakes in political advertising when it took a procedural vote after being asked to regulate ads that use artificial intelligence to misrepresent political opponents as saying or doing something they didn’t.

The commission is expected to further discuss the matter on Thursday.

The commission’s efforts followed a request from Public Citizen, a progressive consumer rights organization, that the agency clarify whether a 1970s-era law that bans “fraudulent misrepresentation” in campaign communications also applies to AI-generated deepfakes. While the election commission has been criticized in recent years for being ineffective, it does have the ability to take action against campaigns or groups that violate these laws, often through fines.

Craig Holman, a government affairs lobbyist for Public Citizen who helped the lawmakers write the bill being introduced Tuesday, said he was concerned that fraudulent misrepresentation law only applies to candidates and not parties, outside groups, and super PACs.

The bill introduced Tuesday would expand FEC’s jurisdiction to explicitly account for the rapid rise of generative AI’s use in political communications.

Holman noted that some states have passed laws to regulate deepfakes but said federal legislation was necessary to give the Federal Election Commission the clear authority.

—Dan Merica, Associated Press

This story is part of an Associated Press series, “The AI Campaign,” exploring the influence of artificial intelligence in the 2024 election cycle.

The Associated Press receives financial assistance from the Omidyar Network to support coverage of artificial intelligence and its impact on society. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org

In an effort to make ride hailing safer and easier, Uber announced a new verification feature aimed at giving drivers more information about who is getting in their car.

Starting Wednesday, passengers will have their account information checked against third-party databases or have the option to upload an ID. Once verified, they will receive a blue “Verified” rider badge, similar to the ones that have long been common on social media platforms, visible to drivers right on the trip request.

Uber explains in detail how the process works in an FAQ section on its website.

Existing members of Clear can use the identity-verification service in order to get the badge.

Rude riders: consider yourself warned

The ride-hailing service is also targeting passenger behavior, sending warnings to rude customers. Drivers already have the ability to block and un-match with riders who give them one star.

In April, Uber rolled out a slate of new in-app safety features aimed at female riders, including audio recording, pin-verification, and RideCheck, which helps detect if a ride ends early, stops unexpectedly, or changes direction. Over the years, the ride-hailing company has faced criticism over how it has handled assault and other safety concerns.

The news comes just days after Uber made two major announcements that will start early next year: It would offer driverless ride-sharing in Austin and Atlanta, and riders will be able to rent a car on Uber’s app.

In 1982, the legendary Finnish designer Yrjö Kukkapuro designed the Experiment Chair. But instead of a single version of the chair, he created three, each with a differently shaped armrest and in a different color. With its quirky look and style, which the designer later described as “decorative functionalism,” the chair went on to symbolize the postmodernist defiance of the ‘80s. The chair has been out of production for 30 years, but now, a version of it can be yours for $1,899—thanks to Swedish furniture brand Hem.

The new Experiment Chair has the same squiggly armrests as the original and comes in the same red, apple green, and sky blue, plus the obligatory shade of black that was added by Hem. The brand made the chair slightly wider and taller than its 1980s counterpart (because people today are bigger) and slightly sturdier (because requirements are more stringent). But all of those differences, however minute, were agreed upon by Kukkapuro, who is 91 years old and living in Helsinki, and collaborated with Hem to bring his chair back to life.

The Experiment Chair marks a significant evolution in Hem’s business model, which from the very beginning, has favored designs by contemporary designers like Faye Toogood, Max Lamb, and Formafantasma. “From the beginning, the idea was to champion everything that we love, that I love about the design industry, the quality, the stories, the culture, but add a layer of a new generation,” says founder and CEO Petrus Palmér, himself a designer.

From the beginning, Palmér was interested in challenging the norm and being progressive, which to him meant looking forward. But the company is now approaching its 10-year anniversary. It has grown and matured, and Palmér now understands that it is impossible to be a progressive design company without also looking back.

In May this year, Hem reissued the Fars Glas—a wine glass with a delightfully chunky stem—by the Swedish glass artist Erik Höglund, and Palmér is thinking about reviving another Kukkapuro chair next. But he says the brand’s strategy isn’t yet set in stone. “It’s impossible not to regard the shoulders of the giants we stand on,” he says.

Kukkapuro is one of those giants. The postmodernist designer is known for his rebellious style and experimental approach to furniture design. His most famous chair, the Karuselli, was hailed the most comfortable chair in the world by The New York Times and is still in production with the Finnish manufacturer Artek. According to Kukkapuro’s biography, the designer was so prolific that most Finns have sat on one of his chairs at some point.

His Experiment Chair was of part of a bigger series of birch plywood and steel chairs, tables, and sofas with colorful armrests and legs. It is known as the Experiment collection. In an email to Fast Company, the designer says he designed this collection over the summer of 1982—“to please my own artistic mind”—then started making prototypes as soon as he returned to Helsinki from his summer cottage. “I thought it was hilarious when this collection became a success,” he says, noting that the chair went on to be sold to banks, offices, schools, and private homes.

Now, Kukkapuro says he is “a bit sentimental“ at the thought of his chair coming back to life after so many years. “Sometimes I think that it’s not a designer’s job to bring old models or works back to life,” he says. “But if new generations find my works again, it’s an honor for me! I have always felt that the Experiment series has potential to be a benchmark from the eighties.”

He may have been right. A vintage Experiment Chair with black leather upholstery and green armrests is currently going for $7,599 on the luxury design marketplace 1st Dibs. Palmér spent some time scouting marketplaces and auction houses to get a sense of how popular the chair was, but in the end, he says his gut and that of his team prevailed. “I hope people will take to it,” he says. “They sell for high prices at auction houses, but it is an acquired taste. If you know nothing about Kukkapuro, I’m not sure you’re going to buy it.”

Experiment chair 2.0

Hem’s Experiment Chair was made with modern manufacturing techniques. It comes in flat-pack form and allows users to mix and match colors and textiles, including trending styles like bouclé. It was also reinforced with meticulously located yet discrete steel plates designed to prolong its life. It looks the same, but is it, really? “We can probably have a night-long discussion with a vintage dealer about that . . . and end up losing,” says Palmér with a laugh. “But in my head, it’s still the same design.”

Whichever camp you fall in, the Experiment Chair remains a symbol of design rebellion, and it’s the reason Palmér was enamored with it in the first place. “It is a very progressive idea and that’s what caught our eye and made us realize that even though it’s 40 years old, it’s still highly relevant and highly progressive and still challenging,” he says. “People look at that chair and they have to have an opinion.”

Opinions, however, come in all sorts of flavors. If you hate something, you won’t buy it, but Palmér believes that taking risks is the only way we will avoid getting lost in an infinity room of look-alike chairs. “It’s part of being progressive and being bold and being a trailblazer. You have to accept some things will be widely successful whereas others won’t,” he says. “You need to have some guts, otherwise you end up putting out what everybody else is putting out.”

Welcome to Pressing Questions, Fast Company’s work-life advice column. Every week, deputy editor Kathleen Davis, host of The New Way We Work podcast, will answer the biggest and most pressing workplace questions.

Q: How do I ask for time off for my period?

A: The short answer, and perhaps the easiest solution, is to take a sick day (or days) if your period causes symptoms that make work difficult. Just telling your boss “I don’t feel well today and will be taking a sick day,” seems like the path of least resistance if you only sometimes experience difficult period symptoms.

If you suffer from period pain, endometriosis, uterine fibroids or intense hormonal shifts, you may be entitled to “reasonable accommodations” under the Americans with Disabilities Act, or ADA. Reasonable accommodations can take a lot of forms and in this case could include time off work or the opportunity to work remotely. 

But even if your symptoms aren’t debilitating, it can still be difficult to work while experiencing period symptoms and most Americans aren’t allotted enough sick time to take off several days each month. If you find yourself in that situation, the best thing you can do is talk to your manager. It may be an awkward conversation, but the only way we start to break the stigma is to talk about the issue more.

You don’t need to apologize or be embarrassed. You can say something simple like: “I have some period symptoms that make work difficult; on those days I’d like to work from home or have my camera off on Zoom or may be slower to respond to messages or may need to take some sick time.”

If you’d like to lobby for bigger company-wide change you can point to the growing movement for period leave that some companies have been adding as an employee benefit. But the idea of a company-wide period leave is fraught.

“Menstrual leave is a total double-edged sword,” says Nadya Okamoto, cofounder of August, a period care brand. “It’s needed, but on the other side, when you have blanket period leave, in addition to patriarchal stigma that thinks of periods as a weakness, the cons are that women are less likely to get promoted. There’s an assumption that they’re actually only working 75% of the month because they have this automatic period leave. And we’ve seen time and time again that it actually really stunts the accelerated success of women in the workplace.”

Many believe that a better solution is unlimited sick time and PTO, because while everyone doesn’t get a period, everyone does experience health, caregiving, or other personal issues that require time away from work, without fear or stigma.

More on period leave:

• What is period leave? The complicated push for a new employee benefit
• Could menstrual leave be the next work-life benefit?
• Too many women are working through their high menstrual pain instead of taking the time off they need
• Bleeding on the job: a menstruation investigation

The 2024 Fast Company Innovation Festival continued on Tuesday with dozens of sessions and receptions covering a wide range of topics. The event even served as an opportunity to share some news—City of Hope announced a historic $150 million gift from the Stephenson family to support pancreatic cancer research.

But for many festivalgoers, the second day of programming was largely an opportunity to learn and laugh, while connecting with fellow attendees.

Below are some highlights from Tuesday:

‘We’re all fucking winging it’

While Ryan Reynolds has become a household name with memorable roles in both movies and TV series, he also enjoys the opportunity to go off script and deviate from a “concrete, inflexible plan,” when possible.

Likewise, the actor has found that creativity is essential in the business empire he’s building, which spans TV and film production, marketing and advertising, sports, a mobile network, spirits, and more.

Reynolds shared how he recalled feeling “so invested” in a multilayered, humorous ad for Match.com that he was on his “hands and knees” to get it greenlit. (It ultimately was.) But he also cautioned festivalgoers that failure is inevitable. “We’re all fucking winging it,” he quipped.

So long as creativity is part of the mix, however, that can yield success. Reynolds shared the company’s “north star” for Wrexham A.F.C., the Welsh association football club that he co-owns: “Bringing people together in smart, fun, and unexpected ways—and that leads to a lot of interesting opportunities when you’re treading in joy.”

‘Change is actually possible’

During a protest a few years ago, David Hogg said he asked Dolores Huerta, the American labor leader and civil rights activist, the most important thing people can do to create change. “She said, ‘You have to make people believe that change is actually possible,’” Hogg recounted Tuesday during a panel discussion about Gen Z politics. 

Hogg, cofounder and president of Leaders We Deserve, rose to prominence after the 2018 shooting at Stoneman Douglas High School, where he was a student. He helped to launch March for Our Lives, a nonprofit that lobbies for gun control legislation. 

While young people may be dismayed by the amount of negativity or apparent lack of progress, Hogg reiterated how important it is to believe change is possible.

“The biggest obstacle to us ending gun violence in the United States of America is not whether or not it’s actually possible,” he said. “The biggest challenge is if we don’t believe it’s possible, it’s going to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

‘Leadership comes in all forms’

Speaking of politics, Vice President Kamala Harris has become the face of a broader reassessment of who can be a leader, according to Sara Nelson, president of the Association of Flight Attendants. During a wide-ranging discussion Tuesday, Nelson talked about the intersection of politics and workers’ rights, along with the value of seeking out different types of leaders.

“One of the reasons that we have thought that we don’t have all the leaders that we need in this time is because we have allowed our biases to put us in check about who can actually be a leader,” Nelson said. “We can see that we’re going to be stronger when we look for leaders that come in all kinds of different packages, with all kinds of different experiences and all kinds of different identities.” 

The women-over-50 conversation

Qurate Retail Group, the shopping entertainment company that owns QVC and HSN, among other brands, has “planted a flag” in the demographic of women over the age of 50, David Rawlinson II, the company’s president and CEO, shared on Tuesday.

Earlier this year, the company announced its first-ever Quintessential 50—a group of women aged 50-plus that includes Martha Stewart, Patti LaBelle, Christina Applegate, Queen Latifah, and more. 

Why go after this demographic? “We think about it as a life phase, and we think it’s a life phase that deserves to be celebrated,” Rawlinson said.

Expect to hear more from these women in the future, predicted actress Busy Philipps, host of “Busy This Week” on the QVC+ streaming network. She noted that women are aging differently now—and credited Naomi Watts and Gwyneth Paltrow, among others, for broaching different types of conversations about menopause and women’s health.

“That conversation is only going to increase in the next few years and I really applaud them wholly for taking that stance,” she said.

Tupperware Brands Corporation (NYSE: TUP), owner of the iconic food storage brand Tupperware, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. The filing comes after years of financial struggles despite a pandemic boost when many were under lockdown orders, leading to an increase in people cooking at home. Here’s what you need to know about Tupperware’s bankruptcy.

The reason for Tupperware’s bankruptcy

Many reasons typically lead a company to the point of bankruptcy. In a press release announcing the filing, Tupperware blamed a “challenging macroeconomic environment” for “severely” impacting its financial position. 

When companies blame the “macroeconomic environment,” they are pointing to broader factors that most companies suffer through, such as rising costs due to inflation, undesirable interest rates, and hesitancy from consumers to spend on discretionary items as a result.

But if you look at the bankruptcy petition that Tupperware filed with the the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware, the company gets more specific about the factors behind its financial woes.

Notably, Tupperware says the main sales channel that it has relied on for decades—getting independent consultants, which the company calls its “Sales Force,” to sell Tupperware’s goods directly to their friends, colleagues, and communities—doesn’t work as well in the 21st century as it did in the 20th. 

“The historical strengths of a widespread direct selling model began to turn into weaknesses,” the company wrote in its bankruptcy petition. “The Company’s focus on its direct sales model ultimately came at the cost of developing an omnichannel strategy, or even modern e-commerce infrastructure to support its Sales Force.”

A lack of a strong online presence

Tupperware said that nearly 90% of its sales came via its direct sales channels in 2023. That’s an astonishingly high figure, especially considering that e-commerce has been a thing since the 1990s.

Yet Tupperware did not readily start embracing e-commerce until the 2020s. It wasn’t until June 2022 that Tupperware opened up a storefront on Amazon.com. In October of the same year, the company began selling its wares on Target.com. 

To say Tupperware was late to the game in selling via two of the biggest online retailers in the United States is an understatement.

So what does Tupperware do from here?

If a judge approves the bankruptcy petition, Tupperware will implement its turnaround strategy. Tupperware says it plans to keep selling its goods throughout the bankruptcy proceedings via its Sales Force, online, and in retail stores.

But the company says it will also seek approval from the court “to facilitate a sale process for the business in order to protect its iconic brand and further advance Tupperware’s transformation into a digital-first, technology-led company.”

The company does say what it means by “digital-first, technology-led,” but presumably it entails, in part, a strategy to make online sales a bigger slice of its revenue pie.

Online competition is fierce

Tupperware faces and will presumably continue to face existing challenges in online marketplaces.

In its court filing, Tupperware revealed that even after it opened its Amazon storefront, when a customer searches for “Tupperware” on Amazon.com, the site “presently return[s] results for other brands, undercutting the Company’s strategic purpose for selling on Amazon.”

(Searches for “Tupperware” on Amazon.com currently bring up plenty of results for Tupperware products but also sponsored products for competitors like Rubbermaid.)

Tupperware says a key pillar of its turnaround plan “is to increase the Company’s focus on marketing and advertising to capture this existing demand and to generate further sales.”

Tupperware Brands Corporation was founded in 1938. The company’s stock trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker “TUP.” The stock’s all-time high was above $74 per share in April 2017.

As of the time of this writing, TUP stock sits at below 51 cents per share. Year-to-date Tupperware stock is down over 74%.

Character, as they say, is what you do when no one’s watching. What’s been hard to ignore during the current election, however, is that character also seems to be what you do when only certain people are watching. Or when you think only certain people are watching, anyway.

Ever since JD Vance became Donald Trump’s running mate back in July, the Ohio Senator has been haunted by previous online activity intended for select audiences. Between unflattering clips from old podcasts and some unsavory connections within the financial app Venmo, the first millennial to land on a presidential ticket is also the first VP pick whose web presence has come back to bite them like an edgy comedian hired on Saturday Night Live.

JD Vance’s rocky candidacy is proof that, no matter your political ideology, being terminally online has become risky for anyone entering the public eye in a high-profile gig. Not only has it gotten harder to hide the digital skeletons lurking in one’s closet, but the professional skeleton-finders are doing more thorough closet inspections than ever—especially in the realm of politics.

Sifting through your internet history

The state of being terminally online involves logging on for so long within one’s preferred echo chamber that it informs practically all your opinions and makes you comfortable sharing them widely and confidently. In a political environment where every awkward conversation has the potential to go viral, this can be a problem. It’s a fairly recent problem.

JD Vance and his fellow millennials were only in their early twenties when Facebook launched in 2004. Since then, they’ve accrued 20 years’ worth of FB posts, tweets, Livejournal entries, and YouTube vlogs; all while a culture of “this you?-style” receipts emerged, teaching onlookers how to take a magnifying glass to digital footprints.

The problem isn’t just limited to the folks whose names are actually on the ballots either. For instance, AI-powered screening company Ferretly has just launched a social media-vetting platform specifically for political staffers.

“I don’t believe in censorship, but I think what someone says publicly can have consequences,” says Ferretly founder Darrin Lipscomb. “And I think if they want to join a company and be part of the culture of that company, that company has every right to assess those public statements.”

Ferretly has been letting companies know what would-be employees have said online in public spaces since Lipscomb founded it in 2019. The service uses AI to scan social media and other publicly available data, going back 10 to 15 years, to root out potential risks and behaviors beyond the scope of traditional background checks—including inflammatory rhetoric, hate speech, bullying, drug use, and nudity.

With customers in 32 countries, the company’s eclectic client base includes both collegiate and professional sports teams, various police departments, and reality-TV stars and influencers. One need not look very far to come across problematic hires in these fields, which perhaps could have been flagged by a company like Ferretly.

The company didn’t set out to make a platform expressly for election-workforce screening, though.

“We weren’t even thinking about this market or vetting political appointees,” Lipscomb says.

“It started with some specific behaviors we were surfacing from social media around politics, government speech, and extremism, and we went from there.”

After independently noticing a rise in these behaviors among those screened in other fields, Ferretly says it was hired to vet some Member of Parliament candidates in the U.K., on both sides of the aisle. The company eventually launched the service as an Election Workforce platform and is now working with some PACs in the U.S.

The platform, which can be tailored to a client’s specific needs, goes beyond standard screening, with an emphasis on extreme rhetoric and visuals. Its image-based machine-learning classifiers can sift through thousands of social media posts and memes to pick up on offensive gestures like the middle finger, extremist symbols like Nazi insignia and terrorist flags, along with images of guns, sharp objects, and explosives. If a potential campaign manager has posed jauntily next to The Communist Manifesto in a publicly posted photo, or while wearing a QAnon T-shirt, the platform can likely find it, Lipscomb says.

Digging up old tweets

The fact that Ferretly’s screening platform is in demand is only the latest sign of how scrutinized social media has become for anyone seeking political jobs. Beyond social media, though, the platform can also, if a campaign calls for it, search through transcripts of publicly available podcasts in search of various keywords and phrases. (It can’t comb through video yet, but that’s a challenge Lipscomb hopes to tackle soon.) Just imagine what it might turn up for a terminally online political job candidate with fiery opinions about childless cat ladies, were that something a campaign wished to avoid having to address.

As social media vetting becomes more commonplace for high-profile job candidates, people aren’t likely to stop engaging in the kind of behavior the vetting is meant to capture as much as they might learn how to hide it better. Fledgling comedians haven’t stopped creating offensive material, after all; they’ve just learned to nuke as much of their social media presence as possible when they’re in the mix for getting cast on SNL. Some people are even hiring Ferretly to do screenings on themselves, says Lipscomb, in case any blemishes turn up that they might have forgotten about.

Perhaps the key to being terminally online is just knowing when and how to cover your tracks.  

“People can say whatever they want but they should also understand that there’s tools out there, including ours, that companies can use to assess what those statements are,” Lipscomb says. “If you’re not smart enough to realize that, then that’s probably something against you.”

In this custom episode from FastCo Works and Williams, Kathleen Koch sits down with Chad Zamarin, EVP of Corporate Strategic Development at Williams, to break down the rapid rise in energy demand with the rise of artificial intelligence — and what the U.S. needs to do to keep pace.

As individuals and industries alike unlock the power of AI to achieve their goals, the actual power needed to meet this demand is testing the limits of our infrastructure. With the speed of growth expected to triple over the next decade, Koch and Zamarin explore the energy innovations and investments required to advance these technologies in a sustainable way.

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