My theory is that it has basically gone underground (private groups on Slack, Signal, Discord, etc and maybe some public-yet-opaque activity on Twitter) along with much of the rest of the internet.
Weird and wonderful tech is by definition something that threatens the status quo, and having a public presence could attract unwanted attention by hostile journalists or even law enforcement. This has been called the dark forest theory of the internet. Being unsearchable also raises the the barrier to entry and keeps newbies out - besides not having to deal with them, this also keeps more in the pot for you if you ever figure out a monetization path.
Unfortunately I never got on the cool Discords or whatever in time to know the details of or network myself into these communities. But I’m pretty sure there are people printing pharmaceuticals in their garage with bacteria right now. DIYbio is fascinating
(like the guy who made his own vaccine) but there’s no primer or news site about it - you’re going to have to dig hard and actually talk to people to get informed. I know for a fact there are people printing and inventing new firearms and things like electrical primers.
There are cool things (for a certain definition of cool - not necessarily positive) going on with cryptocurrencies - check out rekt.news for a sample of what’s going on. They are covering heists, but the details tell you a lot: did you know you can take out a loan of $100M right now with zero credit or identity checks? You just have to pay it back in the same transaction.
The DIYbio community at least is quite intentional about keeping a low profile. It's not hard to imagine how the mob could pick any random experiment to blow up about on a slow news day.
Weird and wonderful tech is by definition something that threatens the status quo, and having a public presence could attract unwanted attention by hostile journalists or even law enforcement. This has been called the dark forest theory of the internet. Being unsearchable also raises the the barrier to entry and keeps newbies out - besides not having to deal with them, this also keeps more in the pot for you if you ever figure out a monetization path.
Unfortunately I never got on the cool Discords or whatever in time to know the details of or network myself into these communities. But I’m pretty sure there are people printing pharmaceuticals in their garage with bacteria right now. DIYbio is fascinating (like the guy who made his own vaccine) but there’s no primer or news site about it - you’re going to have to dig hard and actually talk to people to get informed. I know for a fact there are people printing and inventing new firearms and things like electrical primers.
There are cool things (for a certain definition of cool - not necessarily positive) going on with cryptocurrencies - check out rekt.news for a sample of what’s going on. They are covering heists, but the details tell you a lot: did you know you can take out a loan of $100M right now with zero credit or identity checks? You just have to pay it back in the same transaction.