The Blind Spot’s “shadow morning editorial conference” is an experiment in running an open, discursive alternative to the traditional newsroom meeting, aimed not at deciding what to cover, but at identifying what is being structurally missed in mainstream news coverage. Below is the AI summary of the second of these experiments. The discussion was led by Izabella Kaminska, with contributions from Dario Garcia Giner (deputy editor of the Blind Spot), and Chris Cook (an independent researcher with an affiliation to UCL).
We are scrapping tomorrow’s experiment as it’s too close to Christmas, but we will revert with these formats in the new year. Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year from all of us at the Blind Spot in the meantime.
Purpose and editorial framing: Why the “Blind Spot” conference exists
The session opened with a clarification of purpose: this editorial conference is designed as a daily discipline to counteract echo chambers and groupthink by systematically asking three questions — what stories the mainstream press is missing, what angles are being overlooked in dominant narratives, and how disparate developments map together into a coherent picture. The format deliberately mimics a newsroom editorial meeting, but with the added goal of surfacing underexplored risks, incentives, and structural dynamics rather than chasing daily headlines. The conversation functioned both as a news scan and as a meta-discussion about how independent journalism might better fund and prioritize deeper investigative work.
Epstein, political honey pots, and the Hunter Biden interview
The discussion began with renewed attention to the Jeffrey Epstein case, prompted by newly circulating materials and imagery in Colombia involving Ghislaine Maxwell, which reinforced concerns about elite vulnerability to compromise via sexual and financial “honey pots.” While no new definitive evidence was asserted, the group emphasized the enduring blind spot: not merely who participated, but how intelligence-adjacent entrapment mechanisms continue to shape political risk.
This segued into a long-form interview given by Hunter Biden to podcaster Shawn Ryan, in which Biden again denied the authenticity of the laptop attributed to him. Participants noted that Biden now claims the laptop was either wholly fabricated or materially manipulated.
Contextual juxtaposition: While the laptop’s provenance remains contested, multiple U.S. media outlets and forensic analysts have previously authenticated at least portions of the data, even as questions persist about chain of custody and possible data injection. Biden’s claim that the entire device was fabricated goes further than the current evidentiary consensus supports.
The group treated the interview less as a fact-finding exercise and more as an illustration of how modern AI-enabled fabrication muddies evidentiary waters, making political figures increasingly susceptible to kompromat — real, altered, or wholly synthetic. A secondary theme was the ideological fragmentation of alternative media, with figures once aligned with right-wing populism now expressing disillusionment with their own role in amplifying misleading narratives.
Farming, inheritance tax, and the hidden politics of food security
Building on a prior discussion about property rights, the group turned to farming—specifically backlash against inheritance tax regimes affecting farmers in the UK and farmer protests against the Mercosur trade deal in Europe. Jeremy Clarkson was cited as a high-profile advocate highlighting how razor-thin margins, regulatory burdens, weather volatility, and bureaucracy have made farming economically precarious.
The debate contrasted two narratives: one framing farmers as asset-rich landowners resistant to fair taxation, and another emphasizing farming as a fragile, skill-intensive profession essential to national food security and generational knowledge transfer. The consensus leaned toward treating agriculture as a strategic sector rather than a conventional wealth store, with inheritance tax policy potentially accelerating land consolidation and undermining resilience.
Mercosur, eco-standards, and asymmetric regulation
This imbalance, participants argued, risks hollowing out European agriculture while rewarding regulatory arbitrage. French opposition to Mercosur was framed not as protectionism per se, but as resistance to structurally uneven competition disguised as free trade.
China’s property crisis and the question of selective bailouts
The conversation moved to Chinese real estate, situating the troubles of developers like China Evergrande Group within a broader post-bubble reckoning. Particular focus was given to uncertainty over which mid-tier developers would be rescued and which would be allowed to fail, highlighting the opacity of China’s crisis-management playbook. The conversation focused specifically on the travails of China Vanke, which S&P downgraded to being in “selective default” on Tuesday.
Rather than rehashing default mechanics already well-covered in the press, the group noted the missing angle: how selective bailouts function as an implicit industrial policy, reallocating capital and political favor while masking deeper structural slowdown.
Smuggled cash, crypto, and financial absurdity
A lighter but telling story involved Japanese nationals arrested in Hong Kong for having stolen suitcases containing about one billion yen in cash ($6.3 million), which they were in the process of being taken for processing to a foreign exchange shop in Hong Kong. The anecdote was linked to earlier incidents involving Japanese businessmen trying to smuggle fake U.S. “Kennedy bonds” over the Swiss border in 2009, underscoring how financial fraud often blends sophistication with almost comic incompetence.
The broader implication was not about crypto per se, but about persistent demand for portable, opaque value transfer mechanisms whenever capital controls, sanctions, or surveillance intensify.
BIS liquidity paper and the quiet reinvention of money plumbing
One of the most technical but consequential discussions centered on a recent working paper by the Bank for International Settlements, proposing auction-based intraday liquidity mechanisms. Participants highlighted that as excess reserves decline, intraday funding stress is re-emerging — an issue largely invisible outside central banking circles.
The paper’s acknowledgment that tokenized payments and stablecoins increase liquidity demands was seen as especially significant. The proposed solution — a continuous auction for intraday liquidity — was compared to crypto funding markets based on perpetual futures that already perform real-time price discovery.
While the discussion suggested the U.S. Federal Reserve only recently collateralized intraday credit, it’s worth emphasizing in reality, the Fed has long required, collateral for most daylight overdrafts, tightening rules incrementally over time. The novelty lies less in collateralization itself than in recognizing systemic intraday scarcity as a structural issue.
Energy, shadow fleets, and a de facto oil standard
A strategic discussion followed on shadow oil fleets, sanctions evasion, and the claim that the U.S. and China are implicitly cooperating to stabilize hydrocarbon prices. The argument proposed that China’s excess refining capacity and access to sanctioned crude allows it to cap global product prices, while U.S. shale effectively anchors the dollar to energy output.
Though speculative, the thesis framed sanctions not as purely punitive tools but as instruments reshaping global cost structures, with knock-on effects visible in commodities like gold.
Trump Media, fusion energy, and narrative arbitrage
The group examined the surprising merger between Trump Media & Technology Group and fusion firm TAE Technologies. Rather than treating this as a serious energy breakthrough, participants likened it to past “pivot” manias — blockchain, quantum, AI — where association with a hot narrative drives valuation irrespective of technical viability.
While TAE Technologies is a legitimate fusion research company, claims that a utility-scale fusion plant could be delivered “next year” are widely regarded by fusion experts as unrealistic, with commercial fusion generally expected on much longer timelines.
Yemen, Socotra, and quiet territorial reordering
A brief but notable segment highlighted Yemen’s lesser-covered southern dynamics, particularly the island of Socotra, which is de facto administered by the UAE despite formally belonging to Yemen. This was framed as a modern example of territorial control achieved through economic and security arrangements rather than formal annexation.
El Salvador, mega-prisons, and exportable authoritarianism
Discussion turned to El Salvador’s maximum-security prison system under President Nayib Bukele, sparked by editorial controversy at major U.S. networks. Two competing narratives were laid out: one portraying the system as mass human rights abuse potentially outsourced to other states (“human rights abuse as a service”), and another crediting it with dramatically reducing crime and restoring everyday security.
The group stressed that Western enthusiasm or condemnation often ignores Salvadoran public opinion, which polling suggests remains strongly supportive of Bukele — an uncomfortable complication for simplistic moral framing.
Ankle bracelets, digital prisons, and medieval futures
The conference closed with a discussion on electronic monitoring technologies, including ankle bracelets used in home detention. While framed commercially as cost-saving alternatives to incarceration, participants warned of dystopian potential: geofencing, coercive compliance, and the creation of a permanently monitored underclass.
The mention of Nicolas Sarkozy wearing an ankle monitor served as an ironic illustration that such tools are already normalized at elite levels — raising questions about how quickly they could scale downward.
“Letters of Marque” for journalism
Toward the latter part of the discussion, the conversation shifted from news analysis to the structural economics of journalism itself — specifically, how independent reporters might fund high-risk, high-value investigations that do not guarantee short-term returns. This emerged from frustration with the prevailing incentive structure of modern media, where freelancers and independent journalists are pushed toward fast, low-cost stories that can be monetized quickly, rather than slow, uncertain investigations that may ultimately yield nothing publishable.
The core problem identified was bridge financing. In traditional newsrooms, editors can allocate budget for exploratory reporting — travel, time, local research — accepting that some assignments will fail. Independent journalists lack this cushion. As a result, many important stories remain uninvestigated, not because they lack significance, but because they lack upfront funding with no guaranteed payoff.
To illustrate this, the group drew an analogy to early modern trade and exploration. In that era, risky voyages were financed through collective mechanisms — often backed by sovereign authority — that spread risk across investors. Some expeditions failed entirely; others returned with outsized gains. Crucially, the system accepted uncertainty as inherent to discovery.
From this emerged a provocative idea: a modern equivalent of “letters of marque” for journalism. Historically, letters of marque authorized private actors to undertake risky ventures in the public interest, sharing both risk and reward. Transposed into journalism, the concept would involve journalists publicly proposing investigative missions — clearly outlining what is known, what is uncertain, and why the story matters—and then inviting readers or patrons to fund the exploration itself, not a guaranteed outcome.
In this model, the audience would not be purchasing a finished story, but underwriting the right to attempt one. Success would yield original reporting; failure would still produce transparency about what was investigated and why it did not pan out. The emphasis shifts from content-as-product to investigation-as-process.
Participants noted that this already resembles how documentary filmmaking is financed, but argued that it could be extended more systematically to investigative journalism. The deeper implication was cultural as much as financial: it would require readers to accept uncertainty and partial failure as the price of meaningful discovery, rather than demanding constant output.
The idea was explicitly acknowledged as difficult to execute. Trust, governance, and editorial independence would all be challenges, particularly in an environment already saturated with crowdfunding fatigue and misinformation. Nonetheless, the discussion framed this approach as one of the few plausible ways to restore risk-taking to journalism without reverting to legacy newsroom economics or billionaire patronage.
In the context of the Blind Spot project, the proposal fit naturally with the broader mission: identifying not only underreported stories, but also under-resourced forms of reporting — and experimenting with structures that might allow independent journalism to once again pursue uncertainty, complexity, and long time horizons.
