Matt Pearce

@mattdpearce.com

55817 Followers 1316 Following

May the forces of evil become confused on the way to your house. Opinions are my own (but they are correct) https://mattdpearce.substack.com

galaxy brain meme with a brain getting increasingly explodey across four categories, starting with deontology, virtue ethics, utilitarianism, ending with a tweet from Liam Bright: “Adding a single principle to utilitarianism (‘ok, but no galaxy brain stuff, alright?’) and thereby perfecting moral philosophy.”
But the sheer pace of growth in Al means that, once we produce the first artificial moral patients, we will soon after have enor nous quantities of them. After a few years, so many morally significant Al systems could exist that their collective interests would outweigh those of all humans on Earth combined.,
Leo Strauss’ “Natural Right and History” and Francis Fukuyama’s memoir “In the Realm of the Last Man” on a table next to each other
M. Dambreuse's grave was close to the graves of Manuel and Benjamin Constant. The soil in this place slopes with an abrupt decline. One has under his feet there the tops of green trees, further down the chimneys of steam-pumps, then the entire great city. Frederick found an opportunity of admiring the scene while the various addresses were being delivered. The first was in the name of the Chamber of Deputies, the second in the name of the General Council of the Aube, the third in the name of the coal-mining company of Saone-et-Loire, the fourth in the name of the Agricultural Society of the Yonne, and there was another in the name of a Philanthropic Society. Finally, just as everyone was going away, a stranger began reading a sixth address, in the name of the Amiens Society of Antiquaries. And thereupon they all took advantage of the occasion to denounce Socialism, of which M. Dambreuse had died a victim. It was the effect produced on his mind by the exhibitions of anarchic violence, together with his devotion to order, that had shortened his days. They praised his intellectual powers, his integrity, his generosity, and even his silence as a representative of the people, "for, if he was not an orator, he possessed instead those solid qualities a thousand times more useful," etc., with all the requisite phrases-"Premature end; eternal regrets; the better land; farewell, or rather no, au revoir!" The clay, mingled with stones, fell on the coffin, and he would never again be a subject for discussion in society.
A copy of Leo Strauss’ “Natural Right and History” on a table next to a disposable coffee cup.
Martin Van Buren represented just this sort of new breed of American, at ease in the chaos of the early Republic and confident of the future. He thrived in a democratic political world that was very different from that of the founding fathers. He believed in political parties and in running for office. He was the first modern professional politician to win the presidency. As the ambitious son of a tavernkeeper, he prided himself on having risen to office "without the aid of powerful family connexions. Before his elevation to the highest office in the land, Van Buren had no fame, no fortune and no reputation for great achievement. He had won no battles, had written no great treatises, had made no memorable speeches. He had no public charisma and was barely known throughout the United States. But what this "little magician" did do was build the best and most organized political party the country had ever seen. The new parties of professional politicians like Van Buren were designed for the modern democratic society. They brought together large numbers of ordinary people in order to counter the family influence and personal connections of Federalist gentry and older aristocratic Republicans such as De Witt Clinton of New York. Parties, like other voluntary associations of these years, combined otherwise isolated individuals into meaningful communities. People have joined the New York Republican party, declared its leaders in 1820, not for personal benefit or profit, "but have spontaneously and voluntarily identified their political fortunes with ours, and thereby entitled themselves to full community with us.'' Parties, in fact, became a modern means by which something akin to the self-subsuming virtue of classical politics could be practiced. "Individual partialities and local attachments," declared the leaders of the New York Democratic-Republican party in 1823, "are secondary and quite unimportant compared...with the INTERESTS AND PERMANENCY OF THE REPUBLICAN PARTY”
Hungary's state media went dark after its new leadership said it was ending years of propaganda that had propped up former leader Viktor Orban until his downfall in watershed elections earlier this year. The main channel and website of Hungary's state broadcaster cut to a blank screen on Tuesday, showing a written apology to viewers for the years when it had been a mouthpiece for the previous government. "Public media must not lie," read the text, white on a black screen, that went live after the new management team delegated by Prime Minister Peter Magyar's government took over. "We apologize for having nonetheless done so for many years!"
Almost all of my ancestors immigrated the U.S. in the 19th century seeking a better life, mostly found it, and many fought for it. Most of the military-aged men in my family enlisted with the Union during the Civil War, though a few chose the confederacy (and saw their wars end in ignominy). One of my Unionist ancestors who was too old to fight, George Gewinner, who immigrated from Bavaria in 1848, became a bandmaster in Lincoln's armies instead and claimed to have played at Robert E. Lee's surrender at Appomattox. Old George wasn't a natural-born killer but a natural-born music teacher, and his immigrant contribution to American freedom was to teach the slavers what defeat sounded like. May he rest in honored glory.
But a world without publishers and journalists has problems even beyond information production. News providers don't just produce knowledge but also community, serving as collectors of what Alexis de Tocqueville called the "wandering spirits" of democracy. * Al, by comparison, is practically inherently anti-community technology. $ Much how freedom and equality are the binding agents for liberal democracy, so too do knowledge and community work together to create the learning society.
As reality sets in, and the most egregious propaganda of recent years gets exposed by increments to have been so much bullshit, it's clear that artificial intelligence as of 2026 is just a normal technology. Al causes disruptions much like any other innovation. Its impacts, while real, are not fantastic or mysterious. The jobpocalypse - mass human unemployment caused by Al - is obviously not coming soon, nor is robot superintelligence. Like all other machines fashioned by human genius, Al is not conscious. The familiar drives of human nature and capitalism have not been fundamentally changed by Al's arrival. People, companies and societies will use Al for logical and illogical purposes; these uses will have benefits and harms. This is because Al is a normal technology.
A Bloomberg line chart showing the last seven years of oil production in Russia, with a green line for 2026 plummeting significantly below normal production levels for 2020-2026.
The connection of Greenwater Services - also known as Green Water Solutions - to Mr. Cafaro is being reported first by The New York Times.
[Submitted on 29 May 2026 (v1), last revised 11 Jun 2026 (this version, v3)]| If LLMs Have Human-Like Attributes, Then So Does Age of Empires Il Adrian de Wynter View PDF Much research has been carried out on large language models (LLMs) and LLM-powered agentic workflows. However, many works within the field state emergence of, ascribe to, or assume, generalised anthropomorphic attributes to them (e.g., morality or understanding of natural language). Our goal is not to argue in favour or against the existence of these attributes, but to point out that these conclusions could be incorrect. For this we build and train a simple neural network on the videogame Age of Empires II, and note that any entity in a sufficiently-powerful substrate, such as LEGO or the Greater Boston Area, could also present such attributes. Hence, the purported anthropomorphic attributes of LLMs are empirically non-unique: although some properties (e.g., responses to prompts) could remain invariant, others, such as the interpretation of their perceived behaviour, might change with the substrate. Thus, any empirically-grounded discussion on these attributes requires explicit measurement criteria; otherwise the interpretation is left to the representation. We then show that assuming that these attributes exist or not in a system, independent of the substrate and in a generalised way, leads to either circular or uninformative conclusions. This is regardless of the experimenter's viewpoint on the subject, or whether the outcome shows existence or non-existence. Finally we propose a 'null' assumption, where one assumes LLM non-uniqueness instead of assuming anthropomorphic attributes to set up an experiment, along with examples of it. We also discuss potential objections to our work, briefly survey the field, and prove that Age of Empires Il is functionally- and Turing-complete.
ELIZA could hold basic "conversations," including playing the role of a psychotherapist with real human users. An example of ELIZA's responses to one woman are shown in capital letters: Men are all alike. IN WHAT WAY They're always bugging us about something or other. CAN YOU THINK OF A SPECIFIC EXAMPLE Well, my boyfriend made me come here. YOUR BOYFRIEND MADE YOU COME HERE He says I'm depressed much of the time. I AM SORRY TO HEAR YOU ARE DEPRESSED Excerpt from Joseph Weizenbaum's 1976 book "Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation."
Neil Postman's biggest criticisms weren't of technology itself, exactly, though he was an adept of Marshall McLuhan's influential formulation that "the medium is the message" - meaning that the form of communication dictates what is capable of being said. Postman was harsher on the instrumentalist view of technology that puts humans second. This instrumentalist view happens to be the organizing principle of a culture that has just made Elon Musk our first trillionaire while he used his social media network to help coment the race hate in Northern Ireland. 1 When someone like Musk is both medium and message, there's no point expecting a rotting pipe to do anything but spew its bilge all over everything.
Consider this passage from Postman's "Technopoly": “In a technocracy, tools play a central role in the thought-world of the culture. Everything must give way, in some degree, to their development. The social and symbolic worlds become increasingly subject to the requirements of that development. Tools are not integrated into the culture; they attack the culture. They bid to become the culture. As a consequence, tradition, social mores, myth, politics, ritual, and religion have to fight for their lives.” Technology, attacking and taking over the culture? Bending society to its own imperative for advancement? In my United States of America? Postman (most famous for writing "Amusing Ourselves to Death") thought the U.S. was the world's first "Technopoly," a society marked by "the submission of all forms of cultural life to the sovereignty of technique and technology," where information itself has become a form of pollution.
A copy of Thomas Pychon’s “Gravity’s Rainbow” opened on a table to pages 282-283, and you can see more terrible song lyrics Pynchon insists inserting as often as possible
Of course, it's the fate of every true craftsperson to love a job that can't love them back. Money and prestige are nice if you can get them. But in the balance of life, talent is something you give away.
There's nothing new happening just because the capital input is called "artificial intelligence" instead of "a stapler" or "a hammer. The process of substituting capital for labor is constant, ever-present, sometimes boring, frequently career-shattering, and, when done a certain way, insanely profitable. It's how productivity increases and the economy gets bigger; old industries are destroyed and new ones created; goods sometimes made cheaper and tasks a little easier; and how so many more mansions are built and inequalities multiplied on behalf of whoever's holding the equity. It's because of this inexorable process that executives are practically mathematically obligated to be excited about Al. After all, if they don't implement the technology, someone else will - won't they? And aren't the first movers likelier to win, to knock out their clumsier competitors? What if you're one of the clumsier competitors, is the status quo even an option? Under the laws of competition, what looks like innovation is more like an obligation. This is why the disruptive impacts we blame on Al are more accurately attributable to capital, humanity's first and most powerful autonomous technology.
Back to top Results as of 6/7/2026 4:50:39 PM Cities LOS ANGELES CITY PRIMARY NOMINATING ELECTION Mayor KAREN RUTH BASS NITHYA RAMAN SPENCER PRATT 34.68% 27.12% 26.69% 250,871 196,198 193,085 A FAI
Not all innovations reduce costs. Al increasingly pushes non-users to engage each other through a prism of doubt, almost evoking Eve Sedgwick's famous description of the "paranoid reading" style from queer theory: "In a world where no one need be delusional to find evidence of systemic oppression, to theorize out of anything but a paranoid critical stance has come to seem naive, pious or complaisant." Z Assailed by this unwelcome technology, readers and writers have responded by witch-hunting Al infiltrators using detection software that I would not place my own faith in. ? An open culture, an ethical culture, requires a presumption of innocence even when in the presence of guilt. But I can't deny Al makes this presumption more challenging.
It's an earnest embrace of Al's surreality that is in some ways more challenging to cope with than the lying, because at least a liar knows they're doing something wrong. Around L.A., I've been seeing cartoonishly Al-illustrated billboards for the reality TV star Spencer Pratt's mayoral campaign, who lost his Pacific Palisades home in the 2025 wildfires and has apparently been spamming social media with Al videos as well. Pratt, currently one of the top candidates, is running to take over an L.A. that exists in his head but not in mine, and this passage from Vanity Fair is like a capsule study for the post-media era to explain how we can live in the same city without our realities ever intercepting: “He showed me his average daily screen time on his iPhone: 16 hours and 49 minutes. (None of that time is spent listening to podcasts or reading news publications. "I don't listen to anything or read anything," he says. "I haven't watched a single thing on my TV since it burned down.")”
Vanity Fair https://www.vanityfair.com Spencer Pratt Interview: The 'Hills' Star Talks to Vanity Fair About His Mayoral ... 18 hours ago - Spencer Pratt, Self-Described "Full Villain" of The ... He showed me his average daily screen time on his iPhone: 16 hours and 49 minutes.
Armed with Moss's labor-law expert-ise, Miller in 1967 planned to focus upon clearly establishing in contract form big-league players' rights and obligations — the fundamentals of workplace rules, minimum wages, scheduling and safety issues, and grievance procedures that constituted the core of modern-day labor contracts. Much of what he sought at first seemed tedious and unnecessary to fans and to the baseball press alike, but, as a labor veteran, Miller understood how crucial they were to the pursuit of greater future goals. Cautioning his own membership against impatience with the push for what seemed at first glance a mundane agenda, he counseled them to "swing for the singles," assuring that "the home runs
Book: “Marvin Miller: Baseball Revolutionary” by Robert F. Burk
On reading this, I was, as always, utterly thrilled by Wedgwood's writing. But as I was telling my Dad last night, I also took a moment to reflect on my own studies, and my own mission as a writer, and as an African-American. First, it's really startling to read about the utter barbarism which Europe sank to during the War, and then contrast it with popular images of Africa as "the dark continent." I hope this doesn't sound cold, but immediately it occured to me that all the sins the proto-white racists put on Africa--cannibalism, slavery, wanton rape--were very much known to them. The very Germans who fled from Palantinate to a country that derided Africans as savages, were, themselves, the children of such savages.
an old yellowed cover of Dame CV Wedgwood’s book “The Thirty Years War,” over a royal crest of double-headed eagles holding regalia
It could be argued, and has been, that this regulatory array is the best possible outcome for consumers, for free expression and for the frictionless distribution of content. It would not, and couldn't, be argued that this regulatory array is the best outcome for inducing an industry that produces original journalism to produce more of it instead of less. Diminishing returns being what they are, the math will say many journalists need to leave the field to do something, anything else, if only for their own welfare. The overall availability and quality of original news falls; consumers wander away from a deteriorating product; society is impoverished by dwindling sources and transmission of accurate information; technological innovations keep multiplying the ease of producing and distributing inaccurate information for the survivors to compete against. This is journalism's development trap.
In another field and another lifetime, the legendarily heterodox Albert Hirschman coined a term, fracasomania, for obsessions with failure that become self-fulfilling prophecies. "The paradigm-based gloomy vision can be positively harmful, wrote Hirschman, who died in 2012. "When it [fracasomanía] prevails, hopeful developments either will be not perceived at all or will be considered exceptional and purely temporary. In these circumstances, they will not be taken advantage of as elements on which to build." Hirschman wanted to build, and he was especially interested in what regular people build, without permits, when no one is looking.
From “Gravity’s Rainbow”: It was one of those great iron afternoons in London: the yellow sun being teased apart by a thousand chimneys breathing, fawning upward without shame. This smoke is more than the day's breath, more than dark strength-it is an imperial presence that lives and moves. People were crossing the streets and squares, going everywhere. Busses were grinding off, hundreds of them, down the long concrete viaducts smeared with years' pitiless use and no pleasure, into haze-gray, grease-black, red lead and pale aluminum, between scrap heaps that towered high as blocks of flats, down side-shoving curves into roads clogged with Army convoys, other tall busses and canvas lorries, bicycles and cars, everyone here with different destinations and beginnings, all flowing, hitching now and then, over it all the enormous gas ruin of the sun among the smokestacks, the barrage balloons, power lines and chimneys brown as aging indoor wood, brown growing deeper, approaching black through an instant—perhaps the true turn of the sunset—that is wine to you, wine and comfort.
(VF Vanity Fair https://www.vanityfair.com Spencer Pratt Interview: The 'Hills' Star Talks to Vanity Fair About His Mayoral ... 18 hours ago - Spencer Pratt, Self-Described "Full Villain" of The ... He showed me his average daily screen time on his iPhone: 16 hours and 49 minutes.
"The urban blight has become so bad," said Andy Heyward, chief executive of the animation company Kartoon Studios. Pratt "could be a turning point, a tipping point character," he said. Heyward co-hosted a fundraiser with his wife last week where Pratt was smudged with sage before standing in front of a giant amethyst geode to address about 125 people.
Days after Israeli strikes killed Iran's supreme leader and other top officials in the opening salvos of the war, President Trump mused publicly that it would be best if "someone from within" Iran took over the country. It turns out that the United States and Israel went into the conflict with a particular and very surprising someone in mind: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the former Iranian president known for his hard-line, anti-Israel and anti-American views. But the audacious plan, developed by the Israelis and which Mr. Ahmadinejad had been consulted about, quickly went awry, according to the U.S. officials who were briefed on it. Mr. Ahmadinejad was injured on the war's first day by an Israeli strike at his home in Tehran that had been designed to free him from house arrest, the American officials and an associate of Mr. Ahmadinejad said. He survived the strike, they said, but after the near miss he became disillusioned with the regime change plan.
J.M. Coetzee, in a majestic passage from his novel "Foe"" suggests luck is other people, and they tend to arrive in our lives when we let our guards down: In a world of chance, is there a better and a worse? We yield to a stranger's embrace or give ourselves to the waves; for the blink of an eyelid our vigilance relaxes; we are asleep; and when we awake, we have lost the direction of our lives. What are these blinks of an eyelid, against which the only defence is an eternal and inhuman wakefulness? Might they not be the cracks and chinks through which another voice, other voices, speak in our lives? By what right do we close our ears to them?
When Germany started the Second World War, Hirschman joined the French army to fight against his homeland, then fled to Vichy-controlled Marseilles after the French almost immediately surrendered. Here is where the Hirschman story becomes legend. He meets a young American journalist at the Marseilles train station named Varian Fry who had come to France to smuggle out as many thinkers and artists as possible. Hirschman would become his fixer, and the result of this chance collaboration, known as the Emergency Rescue Committee, changed the intellectual and cultural history of the world. From Jeremy Adelman's book "Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman":
This painting shows a man seated with one knee bent, his body turned to the right and his face turned slightly back toward us. He has brown skin, high cheekbones, a short, curly black beard, and short black hair. His facial expression is neutral, and he is gazing off into the distance, his brown eyes turned slightly upwards. The man is wearing a cream-colored shirt with short sleeves, red and white striped shorts that end above his knees, and a yellow sash around his waist. His hands are clasped together on his bent knee, the other leg hanging downwards. The background is a solid light blue color with visible brushstrokes, and the man appears to sit on a red object in the bottom left corner, with a piece of blue fabric hanging off of it or in front of it.
Carr describes his own media diet as a mixture of social media clips, podcasts and "talking on the phone" with work associates. His favourite podcasts include the conservative show Ruthless, the business-and-tech programme All-In and various history programmes about explorers. He can be oddly evasive on even the most benign subjects. Asked what TV shows he watches, he drifts into something closer to a meditation on productivity. "People ask like, what's your favourite colour? What's your favourite this? Who is your best friend?" he says. "I come to the office, Ilock in ... The portion of your brain for favourite colours, I've used that for other things." PULLOUT INSERT TEXT: “It's probably been 50, 60 years or longer since the FCC has used [these tools]. If you didn't take us seriously, now you should”
When I go out and chat with people, I have no idea what kind of media they're consuming, if any at all. Some people just ask Al: OpenAI reported in February that ChatGPT is getting about a million prompts a week for local news. Others randomly encounter news when TikTok passes a news creator at them. They have to describe the videos to me. I deleted the app and have lately been preferring to take my news via print as if I were a million years old and the past 15 years of media innovation I lived and worked through and helped foment never happened. Ironically, by weaning myself off a longtime digital news addiction (apart from a couple mostly national apps), I'm probably far closer to the modal consumer news experience than when I was a Los Angeles Times reporter, which is to say: News is not something a lot of people are actively. seeking out. "News finds you nowadays," a survey respondent told the Pew Research Center.
The US cigarette industry negotiated with Congress and government agencies to settle liability claims against it. Under the settlement, cigarette companies make billions of dollars in annual payments to the government based on their historic market shares. Suppose a manufacturer estimates its marginal cost at $2.00 per pack, its own price elasticity at -1.5, and sets its price at $6.00. The company's settlement obligations are expected to raise its average total cost per pack by about $.50. What effect will this have on its optimal price?
THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN NA1O, Please Help. Trump Has No Strategy for Iran. 6 MIN READ
The mass media era is fully and completely dead, and people have recently stopped using terms like "mainstream media." Now there's a bewildering eddy of bigger media and littler media and no Habermasian "public sphere" whatsoever. Bari Weiss' right-wing makeover of CBS News is apparently more interesting to read about than to watch: The network's dwindling audiences are probably switching to the nation's now-number-one streaming channel, YouTube.
You probably couldn't create a more anti-news internet if you tried (and some people seem to have tried). There are lots of things that have gone wrong for the news media in the 21st century, but the feature they have in common is the destruction of incentives to produce accurate information. Addressing these problems doesn't require one fix but many - not just for the news outlets and journalists on the supply side, but to help out the exhausted, burned out, confused consumers on the demand side, who are getting drowned in content sludge. Our digital economy has levied a gigantic cognitive tax on news consumers trying to find accurate information. The cost is just too much to bear.
The evil was less about the science of social psychology itself (the Milgram electric-shock / Stanford prison experiments didn't help!) than what the results suggested: that people are unthinking meat sacks who can be prodded, primed, anchored and nudged into doing what the experimenter wants. The findings were worse than believable, they were practical. Every successful social psych experiment was a instruction manual for how to reduce someone else's free will. Knowledge = power [derogatory]. Amid all this, reading Hannah Arendt's "Eichmann in Jerusalem" landed on my conscience with biblical weight. Consider the notion that evil could be banal; that you could create evil in the world through unthinkingness; that your unthinkingness creates conditions for holocaust; that for unthinkingness, Arendt thinks you should hang. You must think or else people could die. You must think, or a brilliant writer's stylish book about your lethal emptiness will live on the curricula forever.
The worst meatsackification of human free will has predictably happened online, the only laboratory environment where conditions can be completely controlled, tested, surveilled and reproduced at practically zero cost. Logging on anywhere these days is like punching in for another unpaid shift at the nudge factory. (No, your Al doesn't actually think you have great ideas, it's just saying that so you keep buying tokens from Sam Altman who really really really needs the revenue.) The social scientist, like the kind employed by Big Tech companies, knows that humans are controlled very quickly; it's disobedience that takes a bit longer. Resistance requires friction, an inconvenient force that will shape and enforce new norms. The users and workers of the internet need a union.
Fruitful long-shot wagers are more common in military markets Polymarket win rates on wagers of $2,500 or more on odds of 35% or less, by topic (%) “Military and defence” is above 50% while every other category has half those odds: Politician speech Election Political party Foreign affairs Domestic policy Legal Government appointments Central bank decisions Politician attendance Source: Anti-Corruption Data Collective • Excludes categories with fewer than 100 long-shot bets
REBUILD LOCAL NEWS Here's how Illinois news providers described the immediate or expected impact of the credits during its 2025 rollout: • A larger publisher said the credit "allowed us to... save jobs and roles that we did not have to make cuts for." • A small publisher spoke to its potential attracting other support: "I could use this as a jumping off point for fundraising for this particular position. It's almost like a match at that point." • One recipient said: "It will be our second largest revenue stream for the year... about 15% more. So that's a sizable impact on our ability to cover the community." • "Payroll is our biggest expense as a small newspaper," said a suburban non-profit publisher. "The credit is a lot of money to us. It will help pay our freelancers. We have a lot of requests for coverage that we are not able to respond to, but if we can expand our freelance team and get them out to more events, that will help our community."
In one of "Muskism"'s other most insightful passages, Slobodian and Tarnoff cite Musk as an exploiter of the sociologist' Paolo Gerbaudo's concept of "the digital party, one of the great modern paradoxes of politics and technology: In the 2000s and 2010s, a handful of new political parties emerged that promised to use digital tools to give voters a direct voice in the selection of candidates and policies. From Germany's Pirate Party to Italy's Five Star Movement, these newcomers offered a particular vision of how the participatory qualities of the internet could unleash a new kind of participatory politics. In Gerbaudo's account, however, the parties actually became autocracies, where a "superbase" followed a "hyperleader" who spoke on its behalf. Without the formalized structures of representative democracy, one figure took outsized power. In an echo of the internet's evolution, decentralization cashed out as monopoly.
Democracy decentralizes power; Muskism recentralizes it by liquidating the bureaucratic class, which had emerged to manage democracy's increasingly complex companies and societies. Executive strategies like zero-based budgeting - where every line item is proposed to be eliminated, thus forcing it to justify its survival - "rarely succeeds in cutting costs" as much as reconcentrating power in the budgeter's hands, Slobodian and Tarnoff note. "Efficiency became the alibi for centralization." And once you fully control a platform, you're better positioned to control and edit its inputs. The rest of us are democracy's inputs.
Where "Fordism" was once the term describing Henry Ford's mastery of mass production to create a society of mass consumers, Elon Musk's project narrows the beneficiaries but broadens the scope. Muskism is an admixture of Silicon Valley strategies - world-eating market monopolization, achieved through bureaucracy-slimming "Agile" project management - coded onto something like apartheid South Africa's fortress racism, which Musk was raised under. Just add robots and rockets to the old-timey white-nationalist rhetoric.
A photo of “MUSKISM A Guide for the Perplexed” by Quinn Slobodian & Ben Tarnoff
Podcast alert Decoder with Nilay Patel THE PEOPLE DO NOT YEARN FOR AUTOMATION
Either due to an insatiable thirst for knowledge, or a wounding ither due to an insatiable thirst for intellectual inferiority complex that gets me out of bed most mornings, I've been teaching myself microeconomics. I bought a $130 copy of William F. Samuelson and Stephen G. Marks' 10th edition "Managerial Economics" textbook, and most nights after work, I walk to the coffee shop, order a green tea, and start studying the Necronomicon. One of the first things I discovered during the textbook's checkpoint quizzes, which demanded I calculate some marginal revenue or marginal profit or their related tangents, is that I needed to relearn differential calculus before I could proceed to the mastery of microeconomics. OK, fine. I rolled up my sleeves. Then, while relearning some differential calculus, I learned I needed to reteach myself elementary algebra. While reteaching myself elementary algebra, I discovered I forgot how to do long division.
Bloomberg Top News Latest Markets Economics •allbirds 7 mins ago Allbirds Soars 373% After Sneaker Firm Rebrands as Al Stock
By the same mechanism that strongmen remove the checks on their power, they remove the guardrails against the political and economic crises that would be their own downfall. One of the basic tenets of Fukuyama Theory, as I would call it, is that autocracy makes you brittle, blind and ultimately vulnerable to democracy's return: The strongman creates a skill issue for himself. When people yell at you about their problems, electoral democracy's survival instinct is to fix the problems, not to stop the yelling.
2026 State Policy Playbook for Newsrooms April 9, 2026 TIME 3:30 p.m. ET LOCATION on Zoom ONA Matt Pearce REBUILD LOCAL NEWS LOCAL NEWS DAY Susan Patterson Plank REBUILD LOCAL NEWS REBUILD LOCAL NEWS RSVP: ONLINE-NE.WS/LOCAL-NEWS-DAY
WSJ homepage with mixed stock tickers as headline says Trump Warns Iran Whole Civilization Will Die' If Deadline Isn't Met
Here's a real-life, concrete example of the Al free-rider problem for news producers, demonstrated by Aengus Bridgman and Taylor Owen of the Centre for Media, Technology and Democracy in a new study: When asked about Canadian news events drawn from their training data, ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Grok provide no source attribution 82% of the time. When given web access and asked about specific recent articles, the same models covered enough of the original reporting to substitute for the source in 54 to 81% of cases. Models linked to Canadian news sites in 29 to 69% of responses, but named the originating outlet in the response text in only 1 to 16% of cases. When we named the outlet and asked the same models for citations, attribution rates reached 74-97%.
To analogize the Al information-collapse scenario: It's like if the modern information economy was a bee farm, where journalists are the honeybees. (We do sting people from time to time). Information is honey, and society loves honey! You don't even need to meet a bee to eat it. But making honey is so slow... Then a new Al-powered robot arrives that makes it a lot cheaper and faster to get the honey to consumers — by driving over the flowers, smashing open the beehive and killing all the bees in the process. There's no more honey to collect next time, and the robot is left to scrape up whatever is left in the debris. One day you get to the grocery store, and crud is the only thing on the shelves. Suddenly dinner is less appetizing but you don't know why. Oh, and society has gotten addicted to riding around on the bee-smashing machine.
From Thomas Piketty’s “Capital and Ideology” Borders and Property: An Electorate Divided Four Ways To review, over the past few decades the electoral left has turned into the Brahmin left, which is itself increasingly divided between a pro-market (center-left) faction and a more radical pro-redistribution faction (some would say that it is simply less right-wing). Meanwhile, the electoral right has split into a pro-market center-right and a nativist and nationalist right. In the end, it is clear that the whole system of "classist" cleavages, together with the left-right political structure of the period 1950-1980, has gradually broken down. Recom-position is currently under way. As we will soon discover by looking at coun tries other than France, this redefinition of the dimensions of political conflict can take different forms. It would be a mistake to see these developments in a deterministic light. The system of political cleavages can evolve in quite different ways depending on the strategies of the actors and the ability of contending social groups to mobilize support and ideas. The state of political-ideological conflict in France in the late 201os illustrates to perfection the indeterminacy and profound instability of the system. Briefly stated, the electorate has fractured into four approximately equal parts: an ideological bloc that can be characterized as egalitarian internationalist, another that can be described as inegalitarian internationalist, a third that can be called inegalitarian nativist, and finally, an egalitarian nativist bloc. This deco de in nart hecauce nolitical conditionate 〜。