Remember all the dumb things you did when you were 23 and thought you knew everything? No, the year wasn’t all bad. Then again, when you were 23, you had your moments, too…

We’ve made our list and checked it twice, so without further ado, the people and peccadillos of the year that’s coming to an end, but the real question is, in many cases, when – and where – does it stop?

1. Sam Bankman-Fried. He held our attention for quite a spell, as tales of his exploits were revealed: defrauding investors left and right and spending money like it grew on trees. Which it did for him: shake the tree and there were even more funds in the FTX coffers. The one-time crypto king believed that his true strength was in his hair and that those carefully unkempt locks made all the difference in his meteoric rise. Maybe they did for a spell, but speaking of locks, fraud is fraud and the former wunderkind is heading to prison for an even longer spell.
2. The new cryminal class. SBF tops long list of crypto hot shots facing legal reckoning. “His case was far from the first — or last — time that crypto founders and executives found themselves in legal hot water related to their digital-asset activities,” the Toronto Sun pointed out. There was also Terraform Labs co-founder Do Kwon; Alex Mashinsky, the former chief executive of Celsius Network; Su Zhu, co-founder of the bankrupt Three Arrows Capital hedge fund and Thomas Smith, Kyle Nagy, and Braden Karony — the people behind the crypto token SafeMoon, who were accused by federal prosecutors of using millions in investors’ funds to buy luxury homes and McClaren sports cars. When you can live that large is so short an amount of time, chances are there’s a small cell in your future.

Biometrics collection is certainly growing.

3. There’s Sam Altman’s Worldcoin Orb, a retinal scanner that captures your info for verified identification. Said Forbes, “Late last year, Worldcoin discovered an exploit that operators used to fool the device into creating multiple signups for the same person.” Said one wag in the comments, “IDK about the rest of you, but I for one am eager to trust my retinal information to the guy who scraped all the world’s text, without permission, to program his for-profit LLM. Surely nothing could go wrong?” No sooner said than done, as Forbes noted: Worldcoin no longer says that they’re a crypto company. So, then, what exactly is up? Here’s a clue:
4. Gates Foundation Pushes National Digital ID Tech .Talk about invasion of privacy, welcome to the next level of surveillance, and how long has humanity successfully functioned without the controligarchs knowing everything about us, down to our DNA. It’s the foundation for the social credit score by any other name.
5. Amazon’s biometric palm reader. If you’re not comfortable with the retinal scan, Amazon to launch pay-by-palm technology at all Whole Foods stores by year-end.
6. Speaking of ‘23 and DNA, 23andMe was hacked, with nearly seven of their 14 million customers having their data compromised/sold on the open market, including health-related information, based on their genetic profile. How could entrusting the most sensitive and personal information to a tech company ever possibly be a problem? Especially with social credit scores on the minds of Big Tech.

The year anti-trust took on something of a new meaning:

7. The Google antitrust lawsuit. “Google’s legal defeat at the hands of Fortnite maker Epic Games Inc. threatens to roil an app store duopoly with Apple Inc. that generates close to $200 billion a year and dictates how billions of consumers use mobile devices,” said Yahoo!Finance, and it’s long overdue. 30% commissions and what other options do games makers et al have? But we’ve long known that neither company can be trusted.
8. Which brings us to the rise and fall and rise and… Mark Zuckerberg’s/Meta’s Threads launched this year and garnered a whopping 1M users in just an hour, and 70M by Day 2. Current stats: 141M users, with a mere 10.3M daily active users, who spend an average of 3 minutes daily on the app. How does the Twitter/XCorp killer stack up against its competitor? X Corp: 200M daily active users who spend an average 31 minutes per day on the app. Jack Dorsey’s Bluesky just hit 2M users who spend an average of 53 seconds on the site. OK, it’s still invite-only, but not always a good idea to repeat yourself, especially since, knowing what we know now about the Twitter Files under Dorsey’s stewardship of the company, we got it the first time, Jack.
9. More anti-trust: There’s Mark and the Metaverse. Meta has spent $36 billion building the metaverse but still has little to show for it. Given Zuck’s long history of emotional manipulation and worse, is it any wonder?
10. Speaking of which, “Meta was sued by more than three dozen states on Tuesday for knowingly using features on Instagram and Facebook to hook children to its platforms, even as the company said its social media sites were safe for young people,” The New York Times reported in October. Trust nothing Zuck says.
11. Corollary: Meta Ray Bans. Speaking of which, how many here have Meta Ray Ban Spy, er, Sunglasses (now integrated with livestream and AI technology) on your Christmas must-have list for your favorite voyeur?

The final dozen coming next week. It’s the holiday season, after all, and we didn’t want to leave you with an overwhelming editorial in a somewhat overwhelming year, as we all go onward and forever forward.