What if Political Polarization Is Not the Disease but the Cure?

With President Trump in the White House, rising authoritarianism has prompted a battle royal within academia over polarization, pitting those who argue that it undermines democracy against those who see it as a tool to motivate defenders of democracy.

This debate in the rarefied atmosphere of elite academia is virtually certain to have real-world consequences three weeks from now, as Democrats are heavy favorites to take control of the House and have something like a 50-50 shot of turning the Senate. In power, they will have to decide how tough and how aggressive to be in pushing back against the Trump administration.

Lilliana Mason, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins University and the author of the groundbreaking 2018 book “Uncivil Agreement,” is a prime exemplar of this shift.

In the book, Mason described how in recent decades, on both the American right and left, voters’ multiple social identities — race, religion, ideology, cultural outlook and party affiliation — increasingly aligned. The result: Elections became matters of political life-or-death struggles as the parties turned into antagonistic social groups.

In an article published in The Journal of Democracy this month, “Polarization Is Not the Problem,” Mason wrote:

Partisan polarization is not the greatest threat to U.S. democracy, but a symptom of a deeper struggle over who belongs and deserves equal rights.

Rapid gains by racial minorities, women and L.G.B.T.Q. citizens have produced an ethnonationalist backlash whose adherents now wield disproportionate power through the Republican Party. This conflict has intensified partisan animosity and moral disengagement, but a “both sides” diagnosis obscures the asymmetry between a faction seeking to reverse social progress and those resisting it.

“Polarization,” Mason then contended, with an artful turn of phrase, 

is therefore less the disease than democracy’s immune response to an unpopular, antidemocratic movement.

Suppressing that response in the name of civility would only strengthen the movement and imperil pluralistic self-government. The United States can still become its most inclusive democracy, but only if leaders defend equal rights and voters hold accountable those who will not.

Mason is not alone in her assessment.

In a paper published in July, “It’s Not Polarization; It’s the Radicalization of the Political Right,” Petter Törnberg, associate professor of computational social science at the University of Amsterdam, argued:

Neutrality is not borne out by the empirical evidence. Across advanced democracies, crisis is resulting not from mutual divergence but from the one-sided transformation of the political right: the mainstreaming of authoritarian rhetoric, the normalization of conspiracy and hate as political strategies, and the systematic dismantling of institutional guardrails. 

Törnberg makes the case that claims of objectivity and neutrality are themselves problematic. “Conceptual choices are not politically neutral,” he wrote. “Casting authoritarian threats as mutual breaches of etiquette is not simply a misdiagnosis: It is an abdication of responsibility.”  [...]

The ivory tower debate over polarization is soon likely to become front-page news. Matt Grossmann, a political scientist at Michigan State, wrote by email: “Democrats are likely to regain power in Congress and states. If they confuse the current thermostatic liberal trends in public opinion as an opportunity for extreme governance, they are likely to face another backlash.”

These controversies over polarization are infused with high levels of a kind of moral charge — is this good or bad? — that Grossmann argues grow out of the “widespread concern among scholars about democratic backsliding in the United States. There is also perennial concern about the tendency to treat it as an outcome of polarization, or colloquially, to ‘both sides’ the discussion of that backsliding when Donald Trump is central instigator.”

To be more concrete, Grossmann continued, “We have just lived through the consequences of the Democratic reaction to the first Trump administration, which included moving leftward on immigration and racial injustice in response to Trump’s overreach. But the policy and rhetorical countertrends on these issues under Biden — however morally justified — contributed to Trump’s return.”

Marc Hetherington, a political scientist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has adopted an approach akin to — although certainly different from — Mason’s, arguing that well before Trump took command of the Republican Party, 

polarization resulted from the dominant disagreement between Democrats and Republicans shifting from the anodyne “how much should government do” to the visceral “how much racial, social and cultural change should the U.S. engage in.”

It results from disagreements about the rights revolutions — for African Americans, women, L.G.B.T.Q. folks — taking center stage in the conflict between parties. [...]

Thomas Zimmer, a historian at Georgetown, is an outspoken supporter of Mason’s thesis. “I am fully aligned with Lilliana Mason on this,” he said. “In fact, I have been offering a similar critique of what I would call the ‘polarization narrative’ for years.”

“Once polarization is adopted as an overarching diagnosis, as a governing historical and political paradigm,” Zimmer wrote by email, “it obscures not only what the key challenge to achieving a pluralistic democracy is — the anti-democratic radicalization of the right — but also transports a misleading idea of America’s recent past and how we got to where we are now.”

Much of academia’s polarization narrative creates a false picture of American society, Zimmer argued:

We tend to tell a story of the American polity in decline, almost always casting the “consensus” of the postwar era in a problematically favorable light, mythologizing it as a moment of unity and order.

And such a declinist tale often comes with a hefty dose of nostalgia for that long-lost ”consensus,” something the right has successfully weaponized. But political consensus, to the extent it ever existed, was usually confined to white male elites and based on a cross-partisan accord to leave a discriminatory social order intact and deny marginalized groups equal representation and civil rights.

Put differently, he continued, “it wasn’t a coincidence that polarization started when one party broke with the white elite consensus and supported — albeit reluctantly — the civil rights revolution of the 1960s. In many ways, polarization is the price U.S. society has had to pay for real progress toward multiracial pluralism.”

While Zimmer points the finger of blame at the rising strength of the radical right, Gregory Conti, a political scientist at Princeton, looks in the opposite direction.

In an Oct. 6 essay, “How ‘Woke 1’ Radicalized the GOP,” Conti and Aaron Sibarium, a staff writer at The Washington Free Beacon, an online conservative news site, wrote:

The radicalism of Trump II is better understood as a response to Peak Woke than as a continuation of a coherent ideology already in place during Trump’s rise. Despite his unorthodox and boundary-pushing rhetoric, in his first term Trump largely respected the cultural consensus of the Obama years, poking at its edges but leaving the most important assumptions intact.

It was wokeness, not Trump, that dissolved that consensus. If liberals had clamped down on their woke flank, many of their preferred policies would likely still be in place, and Trump’s second term (on the assumption that there was one) would have been more moderate in many respects.

Fortunately for my career as an analyst, the onslaught of these scholarly conflicts is unrelenting. [...]

So does your vaunted analyst have a take? I think they are all right.

The Republican Party is dominated by a president beneath contempt who reigns over a collection of spineless sycophants.

In the face of this opposition, the Democratic Party has repeatedly failed to stand tall, all too willing to succumb to left-wing orthodoxies that alienate the average voter.

by Thomas B. Edsall, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Aleksey Kondratyev for The New York Times

How a 'Hardwired Pause' on AI Development Might Work

If the world’s government and AI leaders ever agree to pause frontier AI training, is an international pact really feasible? How would it be implemented, coordinated and monitored?

In a first-of-its-kind academic study released today (Friday, Oct. 9), a multidisciplinary team of 26 researchers maps out a path toward an international, mutually verified pause of frontier AI training of at least 10 years. The team — which includes professors Barry Eichengreen and Stuart Russell from UC Berkeley and faculty from other top institutions, including Princeton, Stanford, Harvard and Oxford — combines expertise in computer science, economics, history, international relations, and Chinese and American politics with practical experience in diplomacy and government.

 

The researchers focus primarily on a plan that halts the production of AI training chips and replaces them over time with specialized “inference-only” chips, which serve fast, efficient inference on existing AI models but are not practically useful for training new models. Such a plan would permit the continued use of currently available AI products, while preventing new AI models from overwhelming states with social or economic disruption or threats to their national security. They also suggest verification measures that would allow world leaders to assure nervous rivals that they are upholding the pause agreement.

“We consider a scenario in which world leaders want to pause if they can be confident that others are pausing or that defections would be detected quickly enough,” writes co-organizer Wesley Holliday, a UC Berkeley philosophy professor, in the study. 

Frontier AI training refers to the development of ever more powerful AI models. In a hardwired pause of such training, societies could control how powerful these models are allowed to get. If they judge that certain models can offer economic and scientific benefits, a hardwired pause could give them a way to reap the benefits before they become powerful enough to pose catastrophic risks, thus avoiding the dangers of an uncontrolled AI race.

The rapid progress of frontier AI systems, combined with leading AI companies’ recent struggles to prevent their models from escaping containment and committing cybercrimes, has prompted widespread calls for a global pause until these systems can be built safely and controllably. For strategic reasons, however, a long-term pause could be difficult to arrange even if parties agree that it would be in their interests: without effective verification measures, rival companies or nations may fear that others will defect and thereby put them at a commercial or geopolitical disadvantage.

But the Working Group on AI Pause Feasibility’s detailed, 200-page report addresses such roadblocks with a framework for mutual verification.

Stopping, replacing, retiring AI training chips is key

Frontier AI training requires AI chips, which states can govern. The supply chain for AI chips is highly concentrated with several chokepoints, bolstering governments’ ability to enforce rules on their production.

“Bypassing existing supply chains is extraordinarily difficult,” writes study co-organizer Will Fithian, UC Berkeley associate professor of statistics. “An international prohibition on frontier AI training can take advantage of this fact about the hardware needed for AI training.”

The report proposes halting the production of AI training chips, which are needed to develop more powerful AI models. Over time, most or all of the pre-pause stock of such chips would be phased out. They would be replaced by inference-only AI chips, which are capable of fast, energy-efficient AI inference on approved models but are not practical for training new frontier AI models — even if stolen or seized — due to constraints hardwired into the chips.

During the chip replacement process, other verification measures would prevent residual training-capable AI chips from being used for frontier AI training.

Fithian and Holliday add that technologies needed for inference-only AI chips already are being developed for purely economic reasons, but that their economic attractiveness is currently limited by the rapid turnover of new models. If the training of new frontier models were prohibited, a hardwired pause would increase the economic advantages of these specialized chips and spur innovation in the development of other inference-only chips.

Other highlights of the report include:

• How a hardwired pause could be made politically palatable by offering ways to pursue AI-powered scientific and medical research, retain strategic insurance against being left behind in the AI race by defecting states, and pass on the economic benefits of cheaper inference to consumers.

• The new chips’ reduced resource demands, which would decrease their environmental impact and improve frictions in the U.S. between data center operators and local communities.

• How a hardwired pause safeguards against both covert evasion — when a state secretly trains new frontier models while ostensibly adhering to verification procedures — and overt breakout — when a state openly abrogates the pause in an attempt to build a much more powerful frontier model before other states could respond.

The researchers agree that a hardwired pause’s success depends on the cooperation of world leaders and their willingness to retire or transfer pre-pause stock to other jurisdictions or internationally governed data centers, such as scientific preserves. [...]

“Coordination is possible if the decision makers care enough about the future,” the authors write, “not just immediate payoffs, and if monitoring is adequate to support credible consequences for defections.”

by Sarah Fullerton, UC Berkeley News |  Read more:

Image: Yuki Iwamura/AP
[ed. Executive Summary here. Full Report here. Stop feeding the beast. Sounds reasonable until you consider a couple of constraints: like, tanking the economy (AI spending is the biggest single factor propping it up); and trillion dollar IPOs hanging in the balance (who's failure could also produce a cascade of financial failures).]

Sabra Field, September Corn
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Camille Lemoine

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Trump's Boomer-Palooza

It’s nearly 9 p.m. inside Dallas’s American Airlines Center, and Trump supporters are waving their cowboy hats in the air. They are slowly rocking from side to side as Lee Greenwood belts out “God Bless the USA” to the party faithful. The mood is triumphant, even euphoric, particularly once the president enters stage left. He is about to announce the dawn of a new golden age, but there’s a catch: “You know what happens if you don’t vote?” he asks. “You go to hell. You know that, okay? You go to hell, and I don’t want that to happen to you.”

This week’s GOP midterm convention — the first of its kind in more than 40 years — was supposed to be the big reset for a party hemorrhaging public support amid an unpopular war, rising fuel prices, and a broader cost-of-living crisis. Against this grim backdrop, the gathering, which became known as Trumpapalooza, was a chance for the party to regroup, fire up the base, and wrest back control of a narrative that could derail its electoral hopes in November.

It ended with the threat of eternal damnation (albeit a jokey one). [...]

Nearly everyone I spoke to at the convention acknowledged that a generational divide inside the party was emerging. Some dismissed it as a youthful rebellion, while others offered a bleaker diagnosis. They argued that Trump was the final string in the Republican bow, and once that snapped, there was no coming back. He was supposed to be the galvanizing force around which the entire movement was built. Now, he had become the very thing pulling it apart.

Conventions are rarely known for attracting the young and hip. And Trumpapalooza was no different. Inside this jumbo-sized arena, where every doorway and entrance was festooned with some kind of Trump poster, it looked more like a Caribbean cruise holiday than a political convention. The vast majority of the crowd were retirees, dressed head to toe in their finest MAGA regalia: sequin jackets with “DJT” emblazoned on the back, star-spangled cowboy boots, and T-shirts with Trump’s Georgia mugshot on the front. There was no alcohol, but spirits were so high I thought something had been slipped into their drinks. It was like Glastonbury for boomercons.

On both days, the stadium was slow to fill and never reached full capacity. It did, however, grow lively as familiar faces took to the stage. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas got one of the biggest cheers of the convention when he declared that “Sharia law has no place in America” — a point that was echoed, again and again, by other speakers. Most focused on the twin threat of Islamo-communism, punctuated by a recorded message from Trump intoning, “America must never be a communist country,” between each speech.

It was like a form of exposure therapy, repeated so many times that it felt more like a mantra than a message. Older attendees lapped it up, but the few young conservatives I spoke to were less impressed. “So far, all I’ve heard is communism, communism, communism, and that Iran must never have a nuclear weapon,” said one. “It’s like their brains have broken.” Another told me that he wasn’t even sure why he came. [...]

“Guys like James Fishback and Nick Fuentes are guys we have to consider,” Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief adviser, tells me. “Young people are telling older people that they don’t want to hear about legal immigration anymore because legal immigrants are stealing their jobs. They’re not hearing about mass deportations anymore, either. Young people are feeling the brunt of that. They don’t care about the Greater Israel project.”

This may be an extreme position, but it reflects the anti-establishment sentiment coursing through the young Right and Left. Both camps share a deep hostility toward the party establishment and a desire for a far more radical policy program. One side wants no borders. The other wants a sealed border. One wants to abolish ICE. The other wants to deport millions. One wants to abolish the Senate. The other wants a CEO-monarch. The only point on which the two sides converge is Israel.

I asked Sean Spicer, Trump’s former press secretary, if he is concerned by this dynamic. He agreed that young voters had become more populist in the last few years, but it did not pose a major problem for the GOP. “Young voters are very transactional, and they’re not as motivated as seniors,” he says. “If they’re not going to vote Republican, I’d rather they just don’t vote. That’s not great, but it’s not the worst scenario.” [...]

A little more than 40 years ago, V.S. Naipaul went to the Republican National Convention, also in Dallas. He bemoaned the quality of speeches, complaining that all contained “the same tone, the same personality (or absence of it), the same language: unallusive, cleansed, sterile; nerveless and dead; computer language, programmed sometimes to rise to passion, but getting no higher than copywriter’s glib,” he wrote. “As though, at the heart of this great, man-magnifying occasion, there was a hollow, a vacancy.”

Today, that vacancy feels deeper than ever. As one young attendee succinctly put it to me: “It’s over, but we’re not allowed to say it’s over.”

by James Billout, Unherd |  Read more:
Image: Getty
[ed. Having observed Trump for over 60 years, his MO is pretty consistent: he's either lying, projecting, scamming, or suing - frequently all at once. Not to mention the pathological need for self-promotion. How anyone who experienced his first term and said "yeah, we need more of that" is beyond comprehension. Tariffs, DOGE, Greenland, Canada, Venezuela, Iran, fishing boat murders, ICE murders and kidnappings, public and cultural facilities screw-ups, Epstein, Putin, Strait of Hormuz oil, rising inflation, election interference, Big Beautiful tax breaks for the wealthy, new Medicaid and Medicare restrictions, media exiles, crytocurrency scams, convicted felon pardons. And more (a free jet in every pot)? All facilitated by a Cabinet of boot-licking, incompetent sycophants. Do his supporters really want more of this, by a president who only cares about half the country? Guess so. What a poltical philosophy to live by (such as it is). See also: Our Increasingly Insecure President (NYT):]

***

At least the old political machines used to give you five bucks if you voted for the machine ticket; Trump is giving voters a $5,000 I.O.U., for this money he says he’s going to give them. And this, of course, from a guy who is famous for not paying his debts.

But the very fact that I am mentioning this is what Trump wants people to do, because he doesn’t want people to talk about the war or inflation, or lots of other things. And I think that this is going to be a real contest between whether it’s a normal midterm election, where Democrats can focus the election on Trump and his record. Which, as Charlie Cook says — the great political analyst, who’s very careful in what he says — a lot of Trump voters think they were victims of a bait-and-switch, given Trump’s priorities, when they voted for him in the presidential race.

And Trump goes: Here’s $5,000, and by the way, the Democrats are communists, and you can’t possibly elect them.

He’s almost daring voters to judge him on this record, frankly, of promises he has not kept. But he seems afraid, when he essentially has to offer — he’s reduced to offering people money: I’ll give you five grand apiece, American adults, if the Republicans win.

In essence, it’s sort of being reduced to the offer of a bribe. If we’ve learned something about Trump, though, it’s that whatever happens in November, he’s going to declare victory. If the Republicans do better than expected, he’ll say, probably correctly, that it was because of him. It’s because of his coattails, because he asked people to vote as if he is on the ballot himself. If the Republicans get spanked, it’ll be because, when he’s not on the ballot, people just aren’t excited — because it’s really all about him. He’s always been able to separate his brand from that of the party. Trump is very good at declaring victory even when he loses — sometimes especially when he loses.

Inside Larry Ellison's Wide Web of Power, Money and Politics

PROLOGUE: THE ISLAND

The first sign was the orange Corvette.

In the early days of July, the residents of Lanai started seeing a C8 Stingray the color of a traffic cone tearing along the island’s switchback roads. Then other signals came. The clerk working the cigarette counter at the Pine Isle Market said her nephew, a private chef, had flown in and had been shopping for a big group.

At the Four Seasons down in Manele, the island’s pharmacist Kert Shuster was leaving brunch at Nobu when he saw a security detail he recognized moving through the lobby. It’d been a while, but Shuster knew—he’d just missed Larry Ellison.

A few years had passed, it seemed, since the man who owns all but a sliver of the Hawaiian island nine miles west of Maui had last set foot there. Now Ellison and his extended family were staying in a new compound above Manele’s steep volcanic shoreline. The cluster of houses was built by Japanese carpenters whom Ellison had once brought in and boarded in private barracks up-island.

For Lanai’s 3,000 regular residents, actually seeing Ellison is rare. His presence is more typically sensed—like a change in air pressure.

“I noticed the salad bar was really good that day,” Shuster tells me. “That’s what it’s like when Larry’s back. People step up. Things just get better.”

For the past 40 years, the people of Lanai have lived at the pleasure of one billionaire or another. Before Ellison there was David Murdock, a real estate magnate who took control of the island in 1985, when it was still a pineapple plantation. Murdock was a visible ruler who’d make his rounds in the local stores, attend community meetings, and give employees he had fired 30 minutes’ notice before sending them off in a helicopter. But Lanai had been a ­money pit for him, and the 2008 crash was the final straw. In 2012, he sold it to Ellison for a reported $300 million.

If Murdock ran the island like the plantation owner he was, Ellison runs it like a distant god. He points, and an amenity appears.

His first move was refurbishing the community pool that Murdock had closed. He answered the housing shortage with the Hokuao development, where the homes are pastel-colored and stamped everywhere with the touch of their benefactor. Each has a Tesla solar roof, a Big Green Egg in the yard, two Japanese Toto toilets, and interiors painted a custom color called Ellison White. (It’s a Benjamin Moore white base with a shot of oxide yellow and a half shot of black, your choice for sheen may vary.) Shuster, who lives in Hokuao, once told Ellison how much he loved the place. “I feel like I moved into your house,” he had said.

“Good,” his host responded. “I wanted to make it like a place that even I could live in.”

Ellison owns Lanai’s only gas station, where a sign reminds customers they’re paying “the Lowest Prices in Hawaii.” And he upgraded the movie theater that today bills itself as being “the crown jewel of theater experiences in Hawai‘i.” In July it was showing Supergirl, which was produced by Warner Bros., the movie studio Ellison, along with his son, will soon control.

“Sigourney Weaver lives here part-time, and she says that this is the most beautiful theater in the world,” Gail Allen, a longtime Lanai resident, tells me. “It serves truffle-oil popcorn,” she adds.

The sense is that life is pretty good on the island since Ellison bought it. Or at least could be worse. “We could have become Molokai,” says Alberta de Jetley, another longtime resident who ran the island’s newspaper, Lanai Today, before selling it to Ellison.

At a picnic table outside Richard’s Market, the other grocery store on Lanai (this one Ellison owns), a handful of residents hold a coffee klatch de Jetley calls the Laugh Group. That morning, beneath overcast skies, the Laugh Group was discussing the island’s recently arrived proprietor.

One member, Mari Lynn Di Lullo, brought up a time she saw a Tesla straddling two stalls in a parking lot. “Jeez, look at the way they parked,” she’d uttered to members of a security detail loitering nearby. “If you didn’t know better, you would think he owned the place.”

Just then the owner of the car—and everything else—appeared, laughing.

“He’s not pretentious,” Di Lullo told her coffee group. “He’s low on the radar.”

The radar. Interesting choice of words about a man who has made a case for a mass AI-enabled surveillance system.

That afternoon a woman came through the grocery checkout line wearing a Sensei Farms sweatshirt. The company is one of Ellison’s island projects: a hydroponic greenhouse concept meant to be the Tesla of agriculture. Eight years in and ­several hundred million dollars later, Sensei Farms describes itself as “a thought ­leader in greenhouse-grown produce.” It has an endcap with boxed salad mixes at the island’s grocery stores.

I introduced myself to the woman and asked what she did for the farm. She smiled.

“They said there would be a journalist on the island today,” the employee told me before starting to walk away. “They warned us about you in our morning meeting.”

I hadn’t told anyone at Sensei Farms I was coming.

Ellison’s newest gift to Lanai is at the entrance to the Four Seasons. In a man-made lagoon surrounded by fake lava rock stands a monumental bronze he commissioned from British artist Damien Hirst. It shows a crew of Polynesian voyagers in an outrigger canoe flung skyward on a cresting wave that up close is revealed to be not water but a knot of sea monsters. A shark bursts through the swell, its mouth open wide enough to take the canoe whole. A mo‘o, the lizard spirit of Hawaiian water, coils below the hull. Amidships, a chief in a feathered cape clutches the ankle of another paddler who is facing away. A loose paddle, some cargo, and a few bronze flowers slide down a wave. And above all of it, from something beneath the surface, hang two giant octopus arms with suckers the size of dinner plates, muscular and curled and about to crash down on everyone.

It’s titled Overcoming Adversity.

PART I: THE CEPHALOPOD

Ellison has long been fixated on the octopus. Cephalopod Corp is what he named the corporate entity atop his private investments. He has another company called Octopus Holdings LP, which, with its general partner Tentacle Corp, put up the money behind Lanai. His venture capital firm that over the years has backed Netsuite, Theranos, and Sensei Farms is called Tako Ventures, tako being the Japanese word for octopus. In many of the villas he built on Lanai hang ukiyo-e prints, many with a tako.

For years it was Ellison’s quiet way to talk about himself.

“His joke is he is the octopus,” says a former executive who worked closely with Ellison. This person was one of several dozen sources I spoke to for this story, most under the condition of anonymity to be able to discuss sensitive matters.

“He loves being the éminence grise. He loves the notion that he’s so powerful, there’s nothing he can’t get into.”

The joke has become a fact in full view. At 82, the last of the founding moguls of Silicon Valley who’s still in the game has extended his grasp into a convergence of power that no other fortune could manage. Where Elon Musk built an empire that’s loud and cultish, Ellison—his mentor and close friend—has pieced together something patient, proximate, and structural. The kind whose shape is clear once you see how far it goes.

One arm of the octopus is wrapped around Oracle, the 49-year-old company he is dragging from dull database vendor into one of the essential data center providers of the AI boom. It is a damn-the-torpedoes move into infrastructure that’s risky even for an executive who nearly lost the company once before. He has saddled Oracle with $130 billion in debt, turned its free cash flow negative, and chained its fortunes to a single volatile partner, OpenAI.

A second arm has closed on American media. Larry’s son David has transformed the independent production company Skydance into the last great consolidator in Hollywood, largely with Dad’s money. Skydance has gobbled up Paramount and with it CBS News; now it has won Warner Bros. Discovery in a $110 billion deal. Ellison also has the American spin-off of TikTok, which an Oracle-led consortium pried loose from its Chinese owner.

A third appendage winds toward political power. As Silicon Valley staged its noisy migration to Trumpism, Ellison worked quietly to influence the president, establishing an effective if not always close relationship. Outside America, he bankrolls his friend Tony Blair’s nonprofit organization, which pushes governments to adopt new technologies like AI. And he has been a steadfast supporter of Benjamin Netanyahu, hosting the prime minister on Lanai while the Israeli leader faced corruption charges at home.

Ellison has had a reputation as a killer in Silicon Valley for decades. In 2011, Bryan Cantrill—who quit Oracle within a year of its taking over Sun Microsystems—told a roomful of engineers not to “anthropomorphize Larry Ellison.” Instead, said Cantrill, think of him as a lawnmower: It doesn’t hate you, it just mows, and if you put your hand in, it’ll chop it off. Cantrill told me recently he hasn’t changed his mind.

by Tom Dotan, Vanity Fair |  Read more:

Images: Yuko Shimizu; Damien Hurst

[ed. Vicious and evil.]

Mark Zuckerberg Is Trying Something On

When I meet Mark Zuckerberg, currently one of the poster boys for evil tech billionaires, a man whose products are used by about 46 percent of all living people in the world and whose company has a market cap of more than a trillion dollars, he is wearing sky-blue, cable-knit shorts that look an awful lot like bloomers.

That was just over a month ago, before what is turning out to be a style-centric period for Meta. It started this week at Connect, the company’s annual new products reveal, where Zuckerberg took to the stage wearing a T-shirt with the words “Building is my love language.”

He waxed enthusiastic about the future, including the many new styles of smart glasses, and the company’s personal A.I. assistant, Muse, which looks a lot like a customizable stuffed animal in a onesie. This was just after Vogue World kicked off Milan Fashion Week with Meta glasses as a sponsor, and around the same time W magazine produced an entire stand-alone advertorial zine devoted to a new glasses collaboration with the K-pop star Lisa.

Ahead of all of that, I had come to the compound in Lake Tahoe to try to understand the role style has come to play in the Zuckerberg saga, including the very public rebrand of 2024, when he went from robotic coder in a gray hoodie to fashion-conscious bro next door. That the latest version of Zuckerberg coincides with Meta’s push into wearables, as well as with Silicon Valley’s obsession with the idea of taste and how important a role it will play in the future, may explain why he was finally willing to talk about it.

“I want to make sure that we really immerse ourselves in what people care about,” Zuckerberg told me. It turned out he had started with himself, his own preferences, and where they took him.

Zuckerberg knows that what he does reflects on Meta. “I care about that,” he said. “I think the company is an instantiation of my values.” And, he said, he wants to “be intentional about how I program that.”

Meta is fighting on many fronts at once. Though it settled a case for $17.1 billion in August that positioned social media as the Big Tobacco of the 21st century, it is still embroiled in other lawsuits. Then there is the growing backlash against what critics call its “pervert glasses” (they have been used to secretly record video and audio), which have been banned from courts in England and New York, with organizations like the ACLU alleging that they could become a tool of the surveillance state.

And on Oct. 9, “The Social Reckoning” opens as a sequel to the “The Social Network” — the film responsible for cementing Zuckerberg’s reputation as a revenge-hungry nerd — starring Jeremy Strong as an older Zuckerberg, with a Caesar haircut to crown his march toward world domination.

Despite the push into fashion, it doesn’t add up to a great look.

But whatever Zuckerberg’s or his advisers’ agenda, the more he speaks about his life and newfound interest in outfits, the more insight he provides, sometimes inadvertently, into his otherwise highly guarded psyche. How he approaches clothes is how he approaches everything.

“A few years ago, he made this point,” said Andrew Bosworth, Meta’s chief of technology. “He said, ‘I’m willing to not be liked. I just want to be understood.’” [...]

“We have an off-site in Hawaii at Mark’s ranch,” Bosworth said. “I remember getting there, and I was like, ‘Oh my goodness!’” Then his team arrived. “We’re all listening to Mark,” Bosworth said, “and on the back channel we’re all like: ‘Is this his new style? Are we commenting? Are we not commenting? How do we feel about it?’”

How Bosworth feels is, this is the authentic Zuckerberg. “He knows he’s going to be judged no matter what,” he said. So why not?

In this version of the story, Zuckerberg has been freed from the fetters of his self-imposed gray T-shirt prison. A less charitable view, however, is that his fashion glow-up has been so fortuitously timed that most people assumed it was a marketing choice created by a stylist. Rumor had it Karla Welch, who works with Tracee Ellis Ross and Sarah Paulson, was involved. This turned out to be false, though Welch sometimes works with Chan. Zuckerberg said he mostly styles himself. The multiprint Loewe shorts he wore during the Sun Valley conference? Totally his idea.

Fashion-wise, he seems to be experiencing a sort of delayed adolescence. “This is stuff we did in college, or in high school,” said the designer Mike Amiri, who helped Zuckerberg design his first high-fashion T-shirt, in 2024, with “Aut Zuck Aut Nihil” embroidered across the front, Latin for “all Zuck or all nothing.”

“You’re figuring out: ‘Am I a baggy fit guy? Am I a vintage type? Who am I?’” Amiri said. It’s just that Zuckerberg is doing it in his 40s, with unlimited resources.

by Vanessa Friedman, NY Times | Read more:
Images: Godofredo A. Vásquez/Associated Press; Brendan Mcdermid/Reuters
[ed. Pathetic and clueless. See also: Why Does The Times Care About Mark Zuckerberg’s Style? (NYT).]

Avi Kiriaty, 'The Night Fishers'.
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Philip Braham (British, 1959), Bialoweiska: The Silence of Snow, 2005

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The Commenters

I’ve been a journalist for long enough to be familiar with most of the job’s occupational hazards. I’ve angered powerful people without a legal canopy to protect me. My cursor has hesitated over the Send buttons of emails containing invasive questions. I know what it’s like to be chewed out, to have your confidence flattened, to junk entire drafts and start over from scratch. And yet, for most of my career, I never did attract a personal troll.

In this line of work, having a troll is the opposite of having a fan. It’s someone out there—across the astral span of the internet—who has decided to keep tabs on what you publish with the singular intent of mocking everything you write. Since I never had one, I wondered if people like this had gone extinct alongside the rest of the web I used to know. After all, digital media, and its trademark pugnacious tone, is basically defunct. The linear rapport necessary for a blogger to become someone’s nemesis simply no longer applies; the written word is on life support. At least, that’s what I thought—until I discovered the Slate comments section. At last, I had finally found my haters.

Slate’s comments section is not prominently advertised on the homepage, and when I was hired as a staff writer in the spring of 2023, I didn’t know it existed. But, sure enough, all of the articles on the website are studded with a button shaped like a speech bubble. Click on it, and a discussion thread quietly materializes at the bottom of the screen, revealing one of the last few remaining active commenting communities hosted by a magazine. The section possesses a distinctly Web 1.0 architecture: There are no reaction GIFs or YouTube embeds, and posters tend to distinguish themselves with multisyllabic usernames. Trawling through the comments feels a little bit like exploring the sediment of cyberspace. As such, the core clientele—about 200 strong—is composed of people who have been visiting Slate for a very, very long time. They are some of our most dedicated readers. They’ve also despised pretty much everything I’ve ever written.

Comments sections are, by nature, snarky. The format was devised to be a digital version of the newspaper’s good old-fashioned Letters to the Editor page—itself a receptacle for readers to loudly hector the opinion columnists they found annoying. Once considered default features, many of those sections disappeared as digital media matured, mostly because editors determined them to be hotbeds of inanity and harassment. (Recently they’ve made something of a comeback—earlier this year, the Atlantic reintroduced a comments board after abolishing it in 2018.) But Slate’s comments section has survived, and it has retained its characteristically adversarial register to this day. The threads bloom with treatise-length complaints, exasperating grammatical pedantry, and the usual flame-war material. Anyone who has ever written professionally has contended with some version of this, but what surprised me about Slate’s community was just how closely read the taunts in the comments section tended to be—particularly when they were channeled in my direction. Sure, I’ve been hit with plenty of run-of-the-mill drive-bys—“I really hope my Slate Plus dollars aren’t paying this guy,” reads one comment to my 2024 story about men wearing chains—but other insults reveal a profound metatextual fluency in my entire oeuvre. It’s as if the commenters are reading my work voraciously with the specific intention of obliterating me.

In the autumn of 2023, as part of Slate’s long-running Human Guinea Pig column, I was tasked with donning a Mario costume and busking for change in Manhattan. I think the story turned out pretty well, but the incident has been cited, derisively, in the comments section of dozens of articles I’ve written since. “You’ve never forgiven him for putting on that Super Mario costume in Times Square,” read one, left by user Muffin the Mule, about a story published almost three years after the Mario adventure. When I checked the comments on a story I wrote in the spring about Tucker Carlson’s gonzo ballcaps, one read, “Do you think Winkie wears the hat with his gold chain?” In another, about plastic surgery, I wrote that I left the house dressed in a chambray shirt and salmon shorts. This fairly normal outfit offended one user so much that he has made sardonic references to it on multiple occasions in the comment box.

You get the idea. It is not just that I get roasted relentlessly—it is that the roasts are meticulously tailored, leading one to believe that making fun of Slate writers is, for the commenters, among the prime incentives for visiting the website. And I am far from the only person here to get that treatment. Slate contributors far and wide have endured their own bespoke wisecracks, and that has nurtured a, let’s say, complicated relationship with the magazine’s comment box among the staff. One colleague told me that her mother has occasionally taken up in the comments herself, slinging zingers back at the trolls on behalf of her daughter. (My mom has done this too—I imagine it’s among the main reasons she pays for a Slate Plus subscription.) Another co-worker told me that she ventures into the comments on extremely rare occasions, often as a self-loathing exercise. (“The last time I checked on them was two years ago when I wrote a piece I was convinced was terrible,” she said. “I knew someone in there would agree.”) But the person on staff who possesses, by far, the most comments-related trauma is Slate Jurisprudence editor Jeremy Stahl. In his early days at the magazine, Stahl was made a community moderator of the Fray—the venerated message board that Slate operated in the 2000s. Even in those days, Stahl remembers, the tenor of the comments was largely the same as it is now.

“It was, for a while, a very hostile, troll-y commenting community,” Stahl said. “They said some of the meanest things anyone has ever said to me. It was a bummer.”

This all brings me back to my personal troll. Unlike some of my fellow Slatesters, I’ve never felt especially victimized by the comments section. I have thick skin, and I’ll happily admit that I have a perverse fondness for the backlash that results from an incendiary blog. (I’m also white and male, which excludes me from some of the gnarlier flavors of trolldom.) But if I’m being honest, there is one user who has a unique talent for vexing me. He posts under the username Flexo, and he is the person who has picked on me the most during my time at the magazine. I’ve gotten to know his rancorous countenance well over the months and years, as my byline has become flush with essays. In fact, when I take my ambling scrolls into the comments section, my eyes instinctively seek out his name. I think I’m morbidly curious to see if I’ve finally won Flexo over. The answer—eternally—is no.

“This guy is far and away the worst writer I’ve ever read. I feel like I need to have a lime bath to disinfect myself after using the word ‘writer,’ ” wrote Flexo beneath the aforementioned Tucker Carlson piece.

“Don’t post here, it only encourages him,” he commented on a story I wrote about a viral dieting trend. “Winkie is a blight on what still passes for journalism,” he added.

“Never heard of him. Winkie is the worst.” This is Flexo one more time, offering his assessment on a profile I wrote about the right-wing comedian Tony Hinchcliffe. Someone responded to him saying that I “like the obscure” in my writing subjects and enjoy “being on the edge of a movement.” To which Flexo countered: “A bowel movement?”

It goes without saying that Flexo and I have not met, nor have we ever spoken to each other. This is how it always is between a writer and their commenters, and as such, I’ve never been quite sure how to interpret the flavor of his smarm. Is my dear Flexo just an ordinary jerk? Is he trying to offer me some tough love? Did one thing gradually transform into the other? Really, all of those questions led me to another question: How much does Flexo hate me, really? The only thing I knew for sure is that, for better or worse, the people at the bottom of my articles—the ones responsible for the thousands of comments tapering off into an infinite scroll—are, beyond a shadow of a doubt, the most dedicated readers I’ve ever had, in a moment in media history when “having readers” is harder than ever. Despite all the negativity, a clear kinship exists between us. With Slate’s 30th anniversary around the corner, I wanted to get a better sense of their relationship with me—and the magazine as a whole.

That meant I needed to give Flexo a call.

*****

In order for this project to work, I needed to create a dossier of my biggest haters. Evan Urquhart, Slate’s veteran community manager, agreed to help. I gave him 30 usernames to help me track down. Urquhart seemed to do this out of love for the community he has helped steward for more than a decade. He struck a considerably different tone than Stahl did. I think he knew what I was up to.

“Our commenters are really funny, and really smart. Some of the meanness is more like their love language,” he told me. “Our community is made up of lovable, crotchety grumps. God bless them.”

And so, armed with my dossier, I fanned out dozens of emails to the denizens of the Slate comments section. This presented another challenge: Was I crossing some sacred line? Especially when the commenters in question have said so many nasty things about your work? I worried that seeing my name pop up in the commenters’ inboxes might come off a little intrusive, or perhaps even narclike—a fracturing of a trust. And seriously, I wasn’t here to settle scores. Instead, I told these commenters that I was working on a story about Slate’s longevity, and that I wanted to know what has kept them around the magazine across so many different eras. That was basically true, as far as I was concerned.

Flexo replied in less than 15 minutes.

“You sometimes drive me crazy, but I do love our community, and none of it would be possible without the writers,” wrote Flexo, striking a much more conciliatory tone than I had grown accustomed to. “We have a great community and it’s nice you recognize that. This was a very nice email to send.”

One week later, I jumped on the phone with him. After years orbiting around the exterior of the comment box—peering inside with macabre curiosity to witness the ways I’ve annoyed the regulars most recently—it felt a bit like making first contact.

Flexo, as it turns out, is a 62-year-old guy named Ron who lives in the Pacific Northwest. I learned that he holds a degree in physics from the University of Oregon, and that he worked as a professional musician for decades. He told me that he loves jazz, and onetime Slate staff writer Jamelle Bouie, and that he hated my longform feature about the Creed cruise. (It wasn’t about the writing, Flexo told me. He just can’t stand the band’s music.) Most importantly, I learned that he isn’t active on any forms of social media. Facebook bores him, and he doesn’t have accounts on Twitter or Bluesky. No, the only place that Flexo posts is the Slate comments, which he visits almost every day.

There is a long history of people, adrift in the frigid expanses of cyberspace, finding close fellowship in unexpected places—be it a niche subreddit, or a lonely Discord outpost, or the stately vestibules of World of Warcraft. The saga of Flexo, and the underbelly of Slate as a whole, is proof that the same dynamic can be replicated in a venue that exists primarily for readers to gripe about Dear Prudence letters. That makes it a testament to the tenacity of digital communion. For instance: Flexo has an Instagram account, but it is set to private, and he follows only 13 people—all of whom are fellow Slate commenters. They hang out sometimes, offline. (“I’m friends with several regulars,” he said.) Together, they work around the limited social features of our commenting interface—no direct messaging—by ferreting over burner emails to each other. (“It’s like a Slate-only email address,” Flexo said.) Failing that, Flexo is happy to treat Slate the same way you or I might treat Nextdoor. A few months ago, Flexo offered up a characteristically off-topic comment on a random Slate story complaining that one of his amps was on the fritz. Another user, who lived in Flexo’s area and had some mechanical know-how, replied, right there in the comments, offering his help.

“He wrote, ‘Swing the amp by my house, I can fix it,’ ” Flexo said. “I’m like, ‘Are you serious?’ ” He was, and he took care of it.

All of this is to say that Flexo is not some nihilistic troll. His participation in Slate’s discourse isn’t driven by the arbitrary destructiveness of, say, the average Twitter shitposter. Flexo has an investment in Slate, mostly because without Slate, its comments section would cease to exist. This is the symbiosis that defines the community, and it’s also why former Slate staff writer Dan Kois always thought that the comments section might as well exist in a “different universe” from Slate proper. I get what he means: While the community relies on Slate’s infrastructure and is fluent in the magazine’s tone, the section also possesses its own hermetic culture—one replete with idiosyncratic norms and insulated memes, like a Petri dish embedded in the HTML of one of the few publications to survive the wipeout of digital media. As for why these folks have stuck around despite their occasionally acrimonious attitude toward Slate itself, Kois just thinks that’s an immutable reality of the internet. If you build it—if you provide a blinking text box and the chance to pester an author—they will come.

“It’s like that scene in Jurassic Park with Jeff Goldblum,” Kois said. “Life finds a way. Wherever there’s a little crack, they will flourish.”

by Luke Winkie, Slate |  Read more:

Image: Mark Alan Stamaty
[ed. I've often wondered about Comment Section personalities. What do they hope to accomplish? Maybe in this case just the name Winkie sets them off.]

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Poems on the painting of cranes. Painting by Tawaraya Sotatsu (1570-1643), calligraphy by Hon'ami Koetsu (1558-1637)

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Tomorrow is Waiting

If you want the truth, it happened because Anji was feeling lazy. Her AI class wasn't all that interesting, nor was it a field she wanted a career in, so there wasn't any reason she could see for trying especially hard. So she came up with a project that didn't look like too much work, and she picked what looked like the easiest way of doing it. Things just got a little out of hand, after that.

Anji's AI class was taught by a grad student who seemed as bored as her students. It was a graduation requirement for programmers, even though everyone knew AIs, as a field, weren't going anywhere much. In seventy years of computing nobody yet had designed an AI that passed the Turing test, let alone did anything really interesting. No matter the computing power behind them, AIs just couldn't be as complex as a human brain; everyone knew that. Anji and her classmates still needed to know how to use the little crippleware bots that ran traffic lights and production lines, though, and that meant knowing the basics of AI programming. At least well enough to pass the final.

So Anji decided to pick the easiest-looking project off the list of options: Design an AI that mimics the behavior of a public domain character. There was a list of characters to choose from, mostly stuff she'd never heard of. She picked Kermit the Frog because, she figured, there was a ton of footage of Kermit, even if it was mostly fifty years old, and she could just feed old TV shows to a bot until it started acting enough like Kermit to get her a passing grade.

Only it wasn't that easy. For one thing, the bot was too stupid to understand that it was meant to be Kermit. Anji used off-the-shelf open-source language- and image-parsing software, so the bot would understand what it what watching, but she had to write a program to key the bot to Kermit in particular. It took forever. It was actually a pretty good challenge, writing a program to convince the bot that it was Kermit the Frog, that the little fuzzy green thing in the old video was itself—that it had a self, for that matter. She ended up using concepts and bits of code from the other classes she was taking, pulling a few all-nighters at the library with books on AI design, and just plain making stuff up in a few places. Her code wasn't anything like elegant, but Anji found herself liking the project a lot more than she'd expected to, even as it got harder.

She also found herself liking Kermit a lot more than she'd expected to. Anji had never really watched the Muppets before; her parents, like most parents she knew, had treated TV as only slightly less corrupting an influence than refined sugar and gendered toys. But The Muppet Show was really funny—strange, and kind of hokey, but charming all the same. She ended up watching way more of it than she needed just for the project.

Then her friend Brian, who was really into robotics, got wind of what she was doing, and demanded the chance to participate. Apparently he had weird, nostalgic parents who'd actually allowed him to watch TV as a kid, and what he'd mostly watched was Sesame Street and the Muppets, so the chance to make a real live AI-powered Kermitbot was too good to pass up.

Of course, that made more work for Anji. She had finally gotten the bot keyed to Kermit properly, so it didn't get confused every time there was another Muppet on screen that looked vaguely froggy or was voiced by Jim Henson, and it was sucking down footage at a pretty good clip—luckily there was so much to feed it, on top of the movies: hours and hours of TV specials and commercials and interviews and even outtakes, all of it in character. But now she had to write a whole new suite of programs so the little AI could operate a robot body. Anji started to worry about finishing the project by the due date. For that matter, she was getting behind in her other classes, and it would be downright embarrassing to do poorly in them because AI design, of all things, was taking up her time.

The thing was, her little AI was getting kind of interesting. It had started writing its own code about the time she'd gotten it keyed to Kermit properly, which was one of the project requirements, but Anji hadn't expected much more than a few badly parsed lines. Nobody else in her class was getting more than that, but Anji's AI was producing more code all the time. And weird code, too. Anji couldn't really make sense of it, but it was working, apparently: the bot hadn't frozen up or crashed, and it wasn't having any trouble parsing the footage Anji fed it.

Brian finished his robot a couple of days after Anji got through the last of the footage. He presented it to her proudly, like a cat gives you something really good it's killed and expects your praise for it. "Good, isn't he?" Brian asked, beaming at her, and Anji had to admit it was convincing. Brian had really gone all out: the little robot was fully articulated ("Enough to play the banjo!" Brian pointed out), and perfectly accurate, with plenty of internal memory built in, and a wireless charger. It didn't even need to be plugged in to upload Anji's code. Not that most of it was really Anji's, anymore. She was starting to wonder if this project wasn't getting away from her a little.

The one change Brian had made, in designing his robot, was to give it eyelids. He said it was creepy without them. So when Anji hit the key that uploaded her code, the first sign she had that it had worked was when Kermit gave a couple of slow, sleepy blinks. "Oh," he said, sitting up (Anji was glad to see she'd done a good job with the movement programs), "hello there."

"Hi, Kermit!" Brian said, all dorkily excited. "I'm Brian. It's really nice to meet you."

He elbowed Anji. "Uh, hi," she said. "I'm Anjali. Anji, really."

"Hello, Anji," Kermit said. "Pleased to meet you. I'm Kermit the Frog," and hey, that sounded exactly right. Anji was totally getting an A.

Anji let Brian keep talking to Kermit, and went to check her computer to make sure everything had uploaded okay. It looked fine: everything running smooth. Only the bot was still writing new code, even as it chatted with Brian. Huh. Anji looked back over at them; Kermit had said something that was making Brian laugh really, really hard. Bots weren't supposed to be very good at telling jokes, were they? They'd covered that in class: how AIs never really seemed to get how jokes worked, and even AIs designed to tell them mostly just produced a sort of unfunny word salad. Maybe Kermit was just quoting the jokes from the footage she'd fed him. AIs could mimic like that, although if she'd built a bot that could mimic good comic timing she deserved more than just an A.

In the weeks that followed, it got harder to treat Kermit like a school project. He spent a lot of his time with Brian, who claimed to need to do a bunch of unspecified adjustments to the robot, although this mostly seemed to entail Kermit being shown off to all Brian's friends. Anji didn't mind it too much, though, because it gave her more time to try and puzzle out Kermit's code, and also it meant that Kermit acquired a very small banjo and several sets of little clothes from Muppet fans among Brian's friends. And that seemed to make Kermit happy.

That was the freaky thing: Anji had designed a bot that could seem to be happy. She wasn't supposed to be able to do that. She was way, way outside the parameters of her project now, into territory that people who studied AI for a living hadn't covered anywhere Anji could find. Because Kermit could, in fact, make jokes—and if he was mimicking them, the originals weren't in the footage Anji had fed him—and he could noodle around on the banjo in a way that sounded nothing like the precision of music-playing AIs Anji had heard. And he could also do things that freaked Anji out on a deep and meaningful personal level, like the afternoon when Kermit, perched on the edge of the bed in Anji's dorm, stopped strumming his banjo and sighed wistfully.

"You know, I sure do miss Fozzie," he announced, and Anji stopped typing mid-keystroke.

"What did you say?" Anji asked, trying not to sound as startled as she felt.

"Oh, it's not that I don't like it here, Anji. You and Brian are awfully nice. But Fozzie's my best friend, you know? After a while, you get to miss things. The squeak of a rubber chicken. The smell of custard pie on fur. Little things like that."

He sighed again, and went back to strumming his banjo. Anji waited five minutes, excused herself, and ran full-tilt across campus to Brian's dorm.

He answered the door, looking concerned. Well, Anji had been hammering on it pretty hard. "What's the matter? Is Kermit okay?"

"Brian, I think we invented sentient AI." Anji tried not to sound like she was panicking. She totally was, though. "We weren't supposed to invent sentient AI! I was just supposed to get a passing grade! Now there's an artificial life-form in my dorm room who plays the banjo!"

"Whoa. Calm down. Why are you freaking out now? Kermit hasn't gotten any more sentient than he was last week, has he? And why is it such a big deal if he is?"

"People have been trying to build a sentient AI for like seventy years, Brian. And I knocked one together out of spare parts for a freshman project in a class I didn't even want to take!" Anji wasn't sure how people were going to react, but she didn't think it would be good. The grad student who taught her class would probably be pissed. "No one's going to believe I actually programmed him, or that he's really sentient. But he just told me he misses his friend and made a couple of novel jokes that made sense, so I'm pretty sure I've created life. And I bet I'm going to get in trouble for it."

Brian, damn him, thought she was overreacting. Worse, he thought she was mostly worried about her grade. They ended up fighting over it, getting into a yelling match that drew Brian's RA in to tell them they were damaging the rest of the floor's calm. Anji really didn't like Brian's RA.

Anji trudged back across campus to her dorm that night in a gloomy frame of mind. Sure, it was pretty cool that she had created sentient AI, but she was afraid it would cause more problems than she really knew how to handle. There was the issue of convincing people Kermit was really sentient, just for starters, and then what was he supposed to do with himself, if people ever believed he was for real? He was just a little frog in a big world, when you got down to it.

Lost in her own thoughts, Anji didn't hear the music until she was nearly back to her dorm. When the sound finally made its way through her thick skull, she paused outside her door, and just listened for a minute. Kermit was singing a song.

It wasn't anything Anji had heard before. The lyrics were sweet and simple, all about looking towards the future, and how it was always just a day away. "I won't miss yesterday," Kermit sang, "because I can see—tomorrow is waiting for me." He strummed a few more chords on the banjo, and fell silent.

Anji pushed the door open. "I liked your song, Kermit," she said.

"Thanks, Anji," Kermit said. "It just kinda came to me, you know? That's why I like singing."

"Yeah," Anji said. She thought about her project deadline, three days away, and the other homework she wasn't getting done. Then she sat down at her desk and called up a fresh copy of the generic AI, the same blank template she'd started from with Kermit, and got to work keying it to Fozzie.

She wasn't anything like done, three days later, when it was time to present her project, but she'd gotten a lot of good practice with Kermit, and she thought she could have Fozzie up and running inside of two weeks. Kermit walked with her to class, carrying his banjo slung across his back, and Anji ignored the funny looks they got from the other students passing them. She was busy with a sudden, unexpected flurry of guilt: what right, she thought, did she have to show Kermit off to her class like—like some kind of show frog? If he was sentient, he deserved better. Just because he didn't seem to mind—was, in fact, excited to be performing for an audience—didn't mean that Anji was doing the right thing.

But right or wrong, if she didn't show up with something to show for a semester's worth of work, her GPA would be toast. Anji felt guilty, but that didn't stop her from being practical. And she could hope for allies among her classmates, maybe. Once they saw Kermit, they might understand.

Or she could get in a lot of trouble. That was the thought at the top of her mind as Anji came into the classroom, and nervously eyed Malika, the grad student waiting at the front of the room. A few other students had already arrived, most of them carrying the tablets or laptops they'd demonstrate their own projects with. A few had robots, but theirs were little bug-like creatures or wheeled rovers.

To her surprise, Malika brightened as soon as she saw Kermit, and came over to talk to Anji. "You did Kermit?" she said, sounding delighted. "Wow, he looks really great. Just like the real thing. Who built him?"

"Um," Anji said, already embarrassed to be talking like Kermit wasn't there. "There's something I'd like to talk to you about, actually. In private?"

"Sure, sure, after class," Malika said. "I can't wait to see your presentation!"

Somehow, it was worse than if Malika hadn't been interested at all. Kermit looked up at her, concern showing on his small green face. "Are you all right, Anji?"

She hadn't known how to talk to Kermit about the problem. And now it seemed like it was too late. "Just nervous, that's all," she lied.

"You don't have to be nervous," Kermit said. "I mean, sharing something with an audience for the first time is always a little scary, but I've got lots of practice. You don't need to worry about me."

Yes, I do, Anji thought, but she didn't say it.

Kermit didn't seem to be bothered by the fact that the other presentations were all about code and AIs and made frequent mention of bots and programming. Anji wished she'd gotten up the nerve to talk to him about what, exactly, he thought he was—if he knew he was a robot, if he understood he was a sentient AI, if he even got what any of that meant. But she'd been too scared to do it, and Brian had been too excited about his new little green friend. She felt miserably like she'd betrayed Kermit's trust.

When Kermit's—when Anji's turn came, Kermit strolled down to the front of the room and hopped easily onto Malika's desk, settling his banjo on his lap. "Hi-ho everyone," he began. "Kermit the Frog here. My friend Anji asked me to put on a show for you. I haven't got the backup I usually have—and anyway, I don't think there's room in here for a chicken chorus, or a penguin orchestra, or a cannon—but I thought I might sing you a song. I hope you all like it."

The class, who had giggled a little at Kermit's joke, fell quiet as he began to sing. It was the same song Anji had heard him working on before, but he'd changed some of the lyrics, and the arrangement wasn't quite the same. The new version was a little better, actually, to Anji's ear. She looked anxiously at her classmates' faces, at Malika, as Kermit sang the chorus again. He played a little flourish on his banjo, sang "Tomorrow is waiting for me" one last time, and strummed a final chord.

There was silence in the classroom, for a long moment. Then someone started clapping, and the rest of the class joined in, and Anji smiled with relief until she saw that Malika wasn't clapping. She looked serious, and thoughtful.

After class, in the empty lecture hall, Malika still looked grave. "Anji, you've put me in kind of a difficult position," she said. "You're obviously a talented programmer, but the project requirements were pretty clear. You weren't supposed to program a performance, you were supposed to get some novel behavior out of your AI."

"Um," said Anji. "This is what I wanted to talk to you about before class, actually. I was kind of afraid of this. See, I didn't program that."

"Then who did?"

"No one did! Kermit came up with it on his own. I'm tone-deaf, anyway; I can't write music."

"Aw, I wouldn't say tone-deaf, Anji," Kermit said. "I've heard you humming along a few times. Tone-confused, maybe, but I bet with a little practice you could get better."

Malika stared at Kermit. Then she said, "Anji, can I have a minute alone with your—with Kermit?"

Anji looked anxiously down at him. "She just wants to ask you a few questions, I think," she said. "Is that okay?"

"No problem," said Kermit. "I interview well."

Anji sat with her back to the wall outside the classroom, the minutes stretching out like taffy. She watched the other students passing by, and wondered if any of them had ever managed to get themselves into a fix like this.

Well, no. Probably not. None of them had invented sentient AI, after all. That was pretty much a one-time thing, unless she got Fozzie off the ground.

Finally, the door opened, and Malika leaned out into the hall. She looked puzzled, like she'd just eaten something and wasn't sure yet if she liked the taste. "Okay, either you've spent the last three months doing nothing but program in responses to every conceivable question, or he's as close to sentient as any AI I've seen. Either way, you must have been seriously slacking off at the beginning of the semester, because your early assignments don't reflect this level of dedication. How the hell did you do it?"

"It was an accident!" Anji said weakly. "I just kept feeding him footage of Kermit, until he kind of was Kermit. I can show you my notes?"

"I think you'd better," Malika said, and stood aside so Anji could come back into the lecture hall.

The next few weeks were confusing, but in a good way. Anji had a truly terrifying meeting with her AI professor, which was mitigated a little by Malika going to bat for her. Her professor didn't come around as easily—apparently he wasn't a Muppet fan—but Anji's code made his eyebrows go up in a promising way, and when they left his office he was already emailing some other AI experts.

Meanwhile, Kermit was becoming something of a star on campus. People were always excited to meet him—some because they were meeting what might be a sentient AI, and other just because they were meeting Kermit the Frog. Brian started working on the bot for Fozzie, and Anji hit the stage where her Fozzie program started writing its own code. This time it was a lot better-documented, with Malika practically peering over her shoulder as the first lines appeared.

Some friends of Brian's at another school got in touch with her, asking if they could use her keying programs to bring Gonzo to life; they apparently had a build team ready to go. Anji said yes. That set off a wave of Internet chatter. Up to now, there hadn't really been any media attention—her professor wanted to wait until enough experts had met with Kermit and agreed that he was sentient. Or "close enough to sentient to fool me," which was his begrudging way of putting it.

But Brian's friends were blogging the whole build process, and the attention they drew eventually found its way back to Anji. For the first time, she found herself fielding interview requests, and a local news team actually came out in person to film her and Kermit talking to their reporter.

Kermit took the whole thing in stride. Well, he would be used to media attention, Anji figured; he had lots of experience dealing with famous people and reporters. When they weren't being interviewed, Kermit spent his time playing music, writing in a little notebook, walking around campus with Anji and talking to people, hanging out with Brian and his friends. He seemed happy, especially when Anji told him Fozzie would be joining them soon. But part of Anji wasn't convinced that everything was okay.

Finally, she got up the nerve to talk about it. "Kermit," she asked, "what—exactly what are you?"

by Holly Mintzer, Strange Horizons |  Read more:

Image: The Muppets

[ed. Repost (10/30/2023). Cute story. As relevant as ever.]

Yu Huan Huan, Lotus Pond
via:

Agricultural ‘Guest Workers’ in WA Describe Their Lives and Ambitions

The majority of the 400,000 or so agricultural “guest workers” in the United States last year were Mexican men who left the border on chartered buses and rolled, almost nonstop, to American farms and orchards. The first worker I met — in Mattawa, Grant County, — was young and, according to Wendy Lopez, who manages the housing complex where he’d been dropped off a few hours earlier, here on his own. This was supposed to be his first big money-making day in America, but so far, things weren’t going well for him.

Wendy got on her phone to make an appointment for him at a mental health clinic. Away from home for the first time, she told me, he was overwhelmed by anxious thoughts and dark emotions. For now he stood in a hallway, looking at the floor.

Mattawa is in sage steppe desert country. The guest worker housing complex Wendy Lopez manages — built and operated by the Washington Growers League, a nonprofit association — was designed so that contingents of men can live in dormlike units, sharing sleeping quarters, bathrooms, elbow room and kitchens. Wendy led me into one that was empty due to disrepair, turned on the air conditioning and the lights in that order, then went out and soon came back with two men who’d agreed to be interviewed: Odilon, 50, and his son Víctor, 25, from the state of San Luis Potosi in Central Mexico.

We shook hands, then sat. Neither Odilon nor Víctor asked me why I wanted to interview them. I explained myself anyway, thinking I should. “People drive by you every day while you’re working,” I said — or something like that, with Wendy interpreting — “but they don’t know anything about you. Do you think it would be good for them to know some things about you? If you do, tell me what they are and I’ll write them down.”

****

“Guest worker” is an oxymoron. Guests don’t work; to the contrary, hosts do. “Guest worker” is an odd way to refer to people who earn wages by crossing a border in two directions annually. Most come into the U.S. in early spring and leave in late fall.

There was a time — the Great Depression — when the United States didn’t need guest workers. There were enough impoverished people inside our own borders to do all the poorly paid agricultural work that needed doing until, in the early 1940s, millions of them left the country in uniform. At that point the U.S. turned to Mexico to meet its wartime farm labor needs, bringing people across the border on short-term work contracts. For several decades this arrangement went forward as the Bracero Program. Today it’s known as H-2A.

“H-2A worker” isn’t any clearer than “guest worker,” though, as a term pointing at a reality. “H-2A” is a visa category, like “B-2” for tourists. The United States offers four different “H” visas, all of which allow holders to work here for set durations. There is, for example, an H-1B visa often used for hiring in academia, medicine and technology, among other fields, and an H-2B for landscapers and construction workers. The people I interviewed hold H-2A visas, which allow them to come here for agricultural work. All were hired by labor contractors in Mexico and live here in housing provided by the orchardists who employ them. Some orchardists pay the Growers League or other contractors to provide housing; others provide it on private land.

According to the U.S. Department of Labor, almost 36,000 H-2A positions were certified in Washington state for 2024. Washington accounts for more than 9% of H-2A visas nationally, and Washington employers are among the top 10 in the nation in H-2A hiring.

****

Víctor didn’t say much. Every once in a while his father, Odilon, looked at him to see if he agreed about something, or wanted to corroborate, embellish or modify something, but mostly Víctor didn’t. Instead he sat patiently while his father talked.

Odilon is a stocky, broad-faced man whose close cropped black hair stands up like bristles. After we’d spent some time together calculating, I understood that in Mexico he makes about $600 a year doing construction work, and that Víctor makes about $400 doing, as Víctor himself put it while chuckling, a little of everything. Víctor is the oldest of six children, and some of them earn money too, and so does Víctor’s mother. In the end, the family of eight makes about $1,500 a year in Mexico. That didn’t make sense to me at first, because Odilon had said earlier that his family spends $100 a week on food alone, and when I did the math on that it seemed to say they could eat for only 15 weeks every year, assuming they spent all their money on food. I was explicating the financial mystery of this aloud when Víctor cut me off to say, “That’s why we come here.”

Odilon said he and Víctor have been coming to Mattawa as guest workers for the past six years on six-month contracts. He added that he has three daughters legally eligible to be guest workers, but since they were female, he explained, their chances of obtaining visas were slim. Among his family members, only he and Víctor come year after year for half-year stints of earning dollars. Together they bring home $30,000 annually, he said, and who would pass that up? [...]

After the Bracero guest worker program was discontinued in 1964 — largely due to pressure from labor unions — Secretary of Labor W. Willard Wirtz tried to replace the 180,000 Mexican workers who would not be coming back for the 1965 farm season with American high school boys through a program he called the A-TEAM, which was an acronym for Athletes in Temporary Employment as Agricultural Manpower.

It didn’t work. Wirtz was only able to recruit 3,300 young athletes. Some quit after a few days; others went on strike. As for the Braceros, a lot of them crossed the border in 1965 and returned to their American jobs. Farm work was done that season mostly by the same people who’d done it before, but now it was illegal for them to be here.

Bad policy often repeats itself. At a news conference last summer in Washington D.C., the federal government’s Secretary of Agriculture, Brooke Rollins, pledged a 100% American workforce. “There are 34 million able-bodied adults in our Medicaid program,” she said. “There are plenty of workers in America.”

Odilon and Víctor support seven people on the $30,000 they jointly make annually as H-2A workers. If the two of them were among Rollins’ able-bodied Americans on Medicaid, their family would be living far below the federal poverty line, which for them would be $47,340 a year.

You’re looking at a “FARMWORKERS WANTED” ad. Fifteen thousand dollars for six months. Yes or no? Take the job or not? Now pretend you’re Odilon and Víctor in Mexico looking at the same ad.

American food security depends on people who cross its southern border. H-2A visas exist so they don’t stay.

*****

Odilon and Víctor left, and in came Daniel, 31, a slight and gentle man who, while soft-spoken, isn’t reticent. Daniel, in fact, spoke unilaterally often, and extensively too, as if there were things that needed to be understood that I was failing to ask him about. [...]

We went over the numbers together: in Mexico, Daniel makes about $2,500 working as a lawyer each year. In the U.S., he makes another $8,000 picking fruit. He owns a house, but he and his family moved out after living there for only 15 days because, he said, “someone fired a gun at us.” He rents it out now, so there’s income from that, too.

I told Daniel that Americans would be surprised to hear that a Mexican lawyer comes to the United States every year to pick fruit for six months. It happens, he explained, because good-paying legal jobs in Mexico are hard to come by. Daniel has a degree and some experience but, in his words, “doesn’t know the right people.” He’d been coming to the U.S. to pick fruit for four years, and hoped that, if he did so for a few more, maybe between stints he would impress the right people and land a good paying law job at home.

Daniel said he’d agreed to be interviewed because he wanted to meet someone who had an important job. He wanted to talk about important things, he explained, with important people. What did he mean, I asked, by important people with important jobs? Lawyers, politicians, professors, journalists, people like that, he answered. He wanted to listen to how they spoke and ponder how their minds worked.

Daniel told me I should read his favorite book, “El Hombre Mediocre,” or “The Mediocre Man,” written in 1913 by an Argentine named José Ingenieros. It explained everything, he said ambiguously. Later I found a bad English translation. It’s philosophy of the loosely academic sort, written by a man influenced by Ralph Waldo Emerson and by the 19th century English sociologist Herbert Spencer. “El Hombre Mediocre” begins this way: “When your visionary bow aims toward the stars and you unfold your wings toward such unreachable loftiness, eager to perfection and rebellious to mediocrity, you carry deep within, the mysterious spring of an Ideal.”

That was Daniel, it seemed to me — despite the mangled translation — in the throes of his life. [...]

H-2A is controversial. Some critics, advocating for an end to the program, believe there’s no point in tinkering with, modifying or reforming something that, in their opinion, is intractably unjust and inhumane at its core. Farmworker unions and labor advocates have compared it to slavery.

One problem is extortion. Odilon told me he sends home $15,000 during his stints of work in the U.S.; Daniel said he sends home $8,000. Given that there are hundreds of thousands of Mexican men in the United States each year on H-2A visas, it’s safe to assume that billions of dollars leave the American economy annually and end up in Mexico as personal earnings. Bad things can happen when money moves like that. For instance, labor recruiters who arrange for H-2A visas — and are paid for their services by American employers — might demand fees from people like Odilon and Daniel, whose accumulated dollars make them vulnerable generally. (That’s why they’re referred to in this story only by their first names.) [...]

Meanwhile, there’s broad support in government and agribusiness for the H-2 program. Its growth, supporters argue, would allow for the deportation of workers here illegally while insuring a reliable and stable workforce. This, though, is just their short-term solution. “Ultimately,” Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins said last July, “the answer on this is automation.”

by David Gutterson, Seattle Times |  Read more:

Images: Ivy Ceballo/The Seattle Times