Showing posts with label Media. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Media. Show all posts
Thursday, September 17, 2026
Turn Yourself Into A 1985 Photo
[ed. Because everybody must have a secret urge to look like a Miami Vice character. Since this video is mostly about writing better prompts, see also: this link (not video) for travel planning.]
Tuesday, September 15, 2026
Monday, September 14, 2026
Did 9/11 Really Change Everything?
One of the best firsthand accounts of the Sept. 11 attacks I’ve read is a short essay titled “Diary of Disaster” by Nicholas Spangler, at the time a 25-year-old journalism-school student and today a reporter for Newsday on Long Island. Spangler happened to be downtown that morning, close enough to the World Trade Center to arrive on the scene between the first and second planes. Like many early recollections of the first hours at ground zero, written before memories had been corrected to fit the dimensions of history, his is as strange as it is horrifying.
He hears the bodies of the north tower’s jumpers hitting the pavement, and also the easy-listening music still drifting out of the building’s outdoor speakers. Under a tree newly stripped of its leaves lies a severed leg wrapped in burlap. Barely an hour after the second tower’s collapse, onlookers enlist Spangler to take a souvenir photo of them posing in front of the wreckage with a disposable camera. It’s the end of the world, or at least of a world, and people have not yet figured out how they are supposed to act.
Days later, trying to make sense of what he has seen, Spangler writes: “I believe that our present way of life ended in those minutes or hours. The American ethos — the way we see the world and our place in it — fractured and will perhaps have to be discarded.”
When he revisits that passage three months later, however, it feels wrong to him. “Our way of life did not end so much as it was interrupted,” he writes, “and if there is such a thing as an American ethos, it has not been significantly altered. There are those relative few whose lives bear the permanent bloody brand of that day but most of us continue to be shaped by much more banal events.”
Did 9/11 change everything? For years, people who agreed on nothing else about the attacks’ aftermath would have agreed that the answer was yes. Arguing otherwise would have been an affront to the victims, to the war on terror’s civilian and military casualties and to the common sense of anyone who has had to take off their shoes at airport security. But question and answer alike have always been colored by the assumption that 9/11 was supposed to change everything: that in being attacked as it was, the United States was being presented with a test that it could pass or fail.
A quarter-century on, it is possible to consider the question with at least some critical distance. Far too much of our current reality stems directly from 9/11 for anyone to argue credibly that it was not a hinge point in our recent history: the ubiquity of surveillance technology, the vague open-endedness that all American military operations now acquire, the general up-armoring of everyday life. At the same time, considering the most dystopian facets of this reality, 9/11’s influence is not as singular as it might have once seemed. It is a middle chapter in the story of American fracture rather than the pyrotechnic beginning. [...]
Trump’s path from reality-TV celebrity to the presidency ran through the Islamophobic fever swamps of the post-9/11 right — the ground zero mosque panic, Obama birth-certificate conspiracism — but also through an increasingly bipartisan discontent with the war on terror that had, by 2016, curdled into cynicism. Trump was the first Republican presidential nominee to break the formidable taboo against affirming what most Americans by then believed, that the country’s post-9/11 military adventurism had been a mistake. He also did little to seriously curtail it in his first presidency and has enthusiastically expanded it in his second.
It has long been tempting to view Trump’s presidencies as the logical conclusion of the folly of the post-9/11 era, and as support for the liberal contention that the right’s calls for patriotism in that era were always really about seizing domestic power. But Trump has also enabled a re-examination of history, and even recent history, that complicates the tale of 9/11’s primacy. [...]
These artifacts span the pre- and post-9/11 years, and the lost innocence they represent has nothing to do with the attacks. Their interest comes from their evocation of a period when people hung out with friends in person and sweated alongside strangers at clubs and music festivals; teenagers goofed un-self-consciously for cameras rather than posing for them like jaded celebrities; and popular culture could be loud and dumb and not picked apart in the digital panopticon for its social politics. The shape that looms ominously over them isn’t the Twin Towers. It’s the iPhone. [ed. lol...ok.]
[ed. Nice words, but no. C'mon. 9-11 was our last opportunity to cohere as a country, and we whiffed it. Instead we got a war on terror, as stupid and amorphous as any initiative based on a feeling (War on Anxiety?). A Patriot Act that gave subsequent crimes a never-ending veneer of political cover. 'Homeland' security, a Nazi term repurposed for new times. Two stupid reactionary wars (neither won) that among other things validated torture as official US state policy. Guantanamo Bay. A newly militarized culture. An expanded surveillance state. And fear... fear everywhere of some 'other' where strength and self-assurance used to be.]
He hears the bodies of the north tower’s jumpers hitting the pavement, and also the easy-listening music still drifting out of the building’s outdoor speakers. Under a tree newly stripped of its leaves lies a severed leg wrapped in burlap. Barely an hour after the second tower’s collapse, onlookers enlist Spangler to take a souvenir photo of them posing in front of the wreckage with a disposable camera. It’s the end of the world, or at least of a world, and people have not yet figured out how they are supposed to act.
When he revisits that passage three months later, however, it feels wrong to him. “Our way of life did not end so much as it was interrupted,” he writes, “and if there is such a thing as an American ethos, it has not been significantly altered. There are those relative few whose lives bear the permanent bloody brand of that day but most of us continue to be shaped by much more banal events.”
Did 9/11 change everything? For years, people who agreed on nothing else about the attacks’ aftermath would have agreed that the answer was yes. Arguing otherwise would have been an affront to the victims, to the war on terror’s civilian and military casualties and to the common sense of anyone who has had to take off their shoes at airport security. But question and answer alike have always been colored by the assumption that 9/11 was supposed to change everything: that in being attacked as it was, the United States was being presented with a test that it could pass or fail.
A quarter-century on, it is possible to consider the question with at least some critical distance. Far too much of our current reality stems directly from 9/11 for anyone to argue credibly that it was not a hinge point in our recent history: the ubiquity of surveillance technology, the vague open-endedness that all American military operations now acquire, the general up-armoring of everyday life. At the same time, considering the most dystopian facets of this reality, 9/11’s influence is not as singular as it might have once seemed. It is a middle chapter in the story of American fracture rather than the pyrotechnic beginning. [...]
Of course, in the end, the United States got neither self-awareness nor self-actualization. What it got, a decade and a half later, was Donald Trump, whose election in 2016 has often been cast as a culmination of what the journalist Spencer Ackerman, in his 2021 book “Reign of Terror,” describes as the “decadent phase of the war on terror.”
Trump’s path from reality-TV celebrity to the presidency ran through the Islamophobic fever swamps of the post-9/11 right — the ground zero mosque panic, Obama birth-certificate conspiracism — but also through an increasingly bipartisan discontent with the war on terror that had, by 2016, curdled into cynicism. Trump was the first Republican presidential nominee to break the formidable taboo against affirming what most Americans by then believed, that the country’s post-9/11 military adventurism had been a mistake. He also did little to seriously curtail it in his first presidency and has enthusiastically expanded it in his second.
It has long been tempting to view Trump’s presidencies as the logical conclusion of the folly of the post-9/11 era, and as support for the liberal contention that the right’s calls for patriotism in that era were always really about seizing domestic power. But Trump has also enabled a re-examination of history, and even recent history, that complicates the tale of 9/11’s primacy. [...]
Trump’s 2016 election “represented the crystallization of elements that were still inchoate” in the early 1990s, John Ganz writes in “When the Clock Broke,” his recent history of the period’s underappreciated malaise. In retrospect, 9/11 was paradoxically both a respite from and accelerant of polarizations and pathologies that were already well underway by then. It allowed Americans to ignore them for a moment, until they came roaring back with redoubled force. [...] [ed. So, explain Obama.]
If you do not remember the Berlin Wall but had an adolescence shaped by social media and cellphones, the brightest dividing lines in recent history are technological — and, with the rapid acceleration of artificial intelligence, are becoming more so. This is clear in the borrowed nostalgias of Gen Z, the bits of the past that 20-somethings have recently pressed into service as emblems of a lost golden era: “Friends,” John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, ’90s high-school-class home videos, music videos and concert footage from bands like Alien Ant Farm and Puddle of Mudd.
These artifacts span the pre- and post-9/11 years, and the lost innocence they represent has nothing to do with the attacks. Their interest comes from their evocation of a period when people hung out with friends in person and sweated alongside strangers at clubs and music festivals; teenagers goofed un-self-consciously for cameras rather than posing for them like jaded celebrities; and popular culture could be loud and dumb and not picked apart in the digital panopticon for its social politics. The shape that looms ominously over them isn’t the Twin Towers. It’s the iPhone. [ed. lol...ok.]
by Charles Homans, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Chantal Jahchan[ed. Nice words, but no. C'mon. 9-11 was our last opportunity to cohere as a country, and we whiffed it. Instead we got a war on terror, as stupid and amorphous as any initiative based on a feeling (War on Anxiety?). A Patriot Act that gave subsequent crimes a never-ending veneer of political cover. 'Homeland' security, a Nazi term repurposed for new times. Two stupid reactionary wars (neither won) that among other things validated torture as official US state policy. Guantanamo Bay. A newly militarized culture. An expanded surveillance state. And fear... fear everywhere of some 'other' where strength and self-assurance used to be.]
Sunday, September 13, 2026
It's All Good, Bro
Callaway Golf Got Wrecked By YouTube Doofuses Because Everyone’s Out Of Ideas
The events that have led to the unraveling of Good Good over the past few weeks, by contrast, are easy enough to understand. As part of their partnership with Callaway, Good Good made a strange, bad ad that begins with Good Good creator and co-founder Garrett Clark violently pushing a woman, golfer and fellow Good Good creator Alexis Miestowski, to the ground when she tries to touch his Callaway driver. Clark then stands over her and says in a menacing tone, "Do not touch my new driver."
The ad, which was ostensibly a riff on the movie Obsession but otherwise too bad to parse, went over poorly. Major retailers pulled Good Good merchandise from their shelves, and Golf Galaxy took its name off a Golf Channel show it had sponsored alongside Good Good, which led the network to table the show. PGA Tour CEO Brian Rolapp described the ad as "concerning." In a statement in which he admitted that his company had approved the ad, which Good Good produced, Callaway CEO Chip Brewer said "that approval should never have happened. Mistakes were made and we are taking the matter very seriously."
Callaway subsequently pulled the ad, made one fulsome apology and then a second, donated $1 million to charities dedicated to preventing domestic violence, and cut ties with the brand. Good Good, for its part, duffed not one but two attempts at an apology. Co-founder and CEO Matt Kendrick posted, at 3:38 a.m. ET, a tweet which read: "Interesting that Callaway Golf asks us to make an ad then approves it then asks us to take the fall then drops us in a coordinated media blitz and covers it up by giving a million dollars away thinking everyone will be ok with it. 30 for 39 will be legendary." Last Wednesday, Kendrick and Good Good president Joe Flannery, who had started just days before the ad was released, both stepped down.
There are some extremely obvious lessons to take from this, regarding how to not market your pioneering new golf club as well as the risks of aligning your big global brand with YouTube dunces, and it seems both redundant and rude to remind Callaway of those at this moment. The other brands that have taken long positions on partnering with social media creators and influencers have surely made note of all that, too.
None of this is especially difficult to understand in the abstract. Creators like Good Good have an audience that companies like Callaway want to reach and mostly do not understand. "There's probably a stigma from like the older golf fan that 'only 12-year-olds watch that,'" Kendrick told Golfweek back in 2025. "Well, if you actually knew our demographic, you would know that it's 24-to-35 is our main demographic." In giving Good Good the benefit of the doubt, on things like this bafflingly and obviously bad ad but also in general, Callaway entrusted the brand's reputation to an outside partner that they trust to speak to that audience in a way they'll understand. That Good Good duffed it is inarguable at this point, but there is also that classic showing-dolphins-to-a-crapfish aspect inherent in this sort of thing even when it works. Ben Goren, a writer and marketer, summed those risks up well in his newsletter in late August:
For as ubiquitous as social media is, it has become almost unfathomably segmented. You can earn millions of views and millions of followers without Joe McAverage American having any clue who you are. Joe McAverage American is probably upset that you think he should know who that random TikToker is. And when someone doesn’t know who you are, they are extremely unlikely to have even a moment of hesitation before throwing you into the garbage can when you bore them, confuse them, or, in the case of Good Good, upset them.In a second post, Goren does a good job illustrating the broader state of play in the golf influencer space, and how the big brands have approached and should approach partnerships with them. There are lessons there, too, both for brands trying to figure out how to use influencers to their advantage and a sport trying to figure out where its next generation of players will come from. As someone who is less interested in marketing or golf than Goren, what I find interesting about this story has less to do with its YouTube-damaged or golfy particulars and more to do with how likely it is to repeat itself elsewhere in the culture.
But also the golfy particulars seem instructive. The sport is in the middle of an authentic surge in popularity, and confronting the happy challenge of having to figure out how to get all those interested new golfers, many of them kids, onto actual golf courses. The brands and institutions that stand to profit from this interest—companies like Callaway, which will sell them clubs and bags for as long as they are playing golf—know where those golfers are, but not really who they are or quite what they want; this is mostly because they are brands and institutions, and as such would naturally struggle with this kind of thing.
And so they have to delegate, or just defer to what YouTube's viewer stats tell them about what those people like and want. This is how cycling's Vuelta a EspaƱa winds up bringing aboard a member of the Vertical Video Community to chaotic effect, or how the previously bottomless resources of Saudi Arabia's Private Investment Fund created a new and ostentatiously "louder" golf tour that went bankrupt before it figured out what else it might have been. The institutions are guessing, and sorting rude metrics from high to low. The size of the ocean humbles even the biggest fish in it. [...]
But if the Good Good story illustrates the peril inherent in big brands trusting feral web goofs to tell their stories, the cringe and carnage of those big brands trying to tell that story themselves demonstrates why they still need to rely on influencers and creators.
It seems reasonable enough to assume that Callaway approved Good Good's awful, stupid, brand-wrecking ad because they assumed that there was something in it they didn't get; that assumption, and that sense of what they didn't understand, is why they got into business with them in the first place. Callaway's size and status meant that they could survive being wrong in a way that Good Good couldn't, but the problem that brands like Callaway bring in creators like Good Good to solve is a stubborn one, and one those companies are uniquely ill-suited to address. They know enough to know that they don't know how to find or talk to the people they need to reach, and they're right about that; they're astute enough to identify the creators that do know that, and rich enough to pay them. But that's not enough.
If these brands knew what they wanted to say—if they actually had anything in particular to say, or any real sense for the people they want to say it to—it might be easier. Goren, for instance, makes a case for selling golf not as just another backdrop for Good Good-style bits and goofs, but as a worthwhile craft and pursuit in itself. In the absence of any such commitment, institutional players—and businesses, politicians, and others with an interest in shaping and steering those people's opinions—are mostly just casting baited lines out there to see what they can catch in the places where they think they might catch them. But the ocean is the ocean, and having a map of it is very different than having a useful understanding of it. All that money and all that reach and all that work, and they still can't think of what's down there as anything but food.
It seems reasonable enough to assume that Callaway approved Good Good's awful, stupid, brand-wrecking ad because they assumed that there was something in it they didn't get; that assumption, and that sense of what they didn't understand, is why they got into business with them in the first place. Callaway's size and status meant that they could survive being wrong in a way that Good Good couldn't, but the problem that brands like Callaway bring in creators like Good Good to solve is a stubborn one, and one those companies are uniquely ill-suited to address. They know enough to know that they don't know how to find or talk to the people they need to reach, and they're right about that; they're astute enough to identify the creators that do know that, and rich enough to pay them. But that's not enough.
If these brands knew what they wanted to say—if they actually had anything in particular to say, or any real sense for the people they want to say it to—it might be easier. Goren, for instance, makes a case for selling golf not as just another backdrop for Good Good-style bits and goofs, but as a worthwhile craft and pursuit in itself. In the absence of any such commitment, institutional players—and businesses, politicians, and others with an interest in shaping and steering those people's opinions—are mostly just casting baited lines out there to see what they can catch in the places where they think they might catch them. But the ocean is the ocean, and having a map of it is very different than having a useful understanding of it. All that money and all that reach and all that work, and they still can't think of what's down there as anything but food.
by David Roth, Defector | Read more:
Image: Kenneth Richmond/Getty Images
Saturday, September 12, 2026
Jacob Coxon Warns of Human Extinction and Triggers a Preference Cascade
CEOs of major AI labs, and employees of major AI labs, including OpenAI and Anthropic, often say they plan to build superintelligence soon, as in within a few years create AIs that are superior to humans at essentially all cognitive tasks.
They often warn that such AIs might kill everyone. Or that AIs might cause mass unemployment, cause cyberattacks across the internet, enable mass surveillance or risk causing any number of other highly bad things.
These warnings are consistently and directly against the interests of the labs. Yet the warnings have recently gotten a lot louder and more frequent. OpenAI has been practically screaming, for those with ears to listen, on many occasions.
A series of events, over two months and especially the last week or so, including internal observations of the pace of progress at OpenAI and also Anthropic, have freaked out everyone involved quite a lot more than they were already freaked out.
After all the events, plus statements by Dean Ball and Jakub Pachocki, we were seeing the beginnings of a preference cascade.
Then along came Jacob Coxon as the tipping point, and things took off. [...]
Jacob Coxon Resigns From Anthropic In Protest And Sounds The Alarm
Jacob Coxon spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. He has come to realize that everyone involved is being wildly irresponsible.
He warns us: They are racing straight to superintelligence and gambling with our lives. I agree with and strongly endorse his statement.
If anything he sounds like an optimist. He’s asking you to consider what the next few years will actually feel like, which means he thinks you have a few years left.
Here is Jacob Coxon doing a 5 minute interview with Anderson Cooper. He speaks well and plainly, and it is clear how much the events of the last two months have made it much easier to speak plainly to a civilian like Cooper about what is happening.
Here is Jimmy Kimmel doing four minutes on this. He gets it. How is this not the top news story on every site, indeed.
Yes, this is a common view, even if few have the courage to act.
Derek Thompson here writes about this as part of AI Safety Is Having a Moment.
If you want to see the full list of lab employee quotes from the preference cascade, I compiled them into another post today. [...]
A few days ago, I had no idea who Jacob Coxon was, and I was not alone.
The timing of a preference cascade is difficult to predict. Once they start they can happen very quickly. You don’t want to talk until you are confident others will, and at some point the evidence that others will follow can snowball and it happens. A classic concrete example was replacing Biden in 2024.
A confluence of factors, all of them downstream of the obvious actual reason, which is that there is a good chance that AI kills everyone soon.
They often warn that such AIs might kill everyone. Or that AIs might cause mass unemployment, cause cyberattacks across the internet, enable mass surveillance or risk causing any number of other highly bad things.
These warnings are consistently and directly against the interests of the labs. Yet the warnings have recently gotten a lot louder and more frequent. OpenAI has been practically screaming, for those with ears to listen, on many occasions.
A series of events, over two months and especially the last week or so, including internal observations of the pace of progress at OpenAI and also Anthropic, have freaked out everyone involved quite a lot more than they were already freaked out.
After all the events, plus statements by Dean Ball and Jakub Pachocki, we were seeing the beginnings of a preference cascade.
Then along came Jacob Coxon as the tipping point, and things took off. [...]
Jacob Coxon Resigns From Anthropic In Protest And Sounds The Alarm
Jacob Coxon spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. He has come to realize that everyone involved is being wildly irresponsible.
He warns us: They are racing straight to superintelligence and gambling with our lives. I agree with and strongly endorse his statement.
If anything he sounds like an optimist. He’s asking you to consider what the next few years will actually feel like, which means he thinks you have a few years left.
Jacob Coxon (former Anthropic and OpenAI, 160m+ views, September 8): I resigned from Anthropic today. I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives. More thoughts below.If you want Jacob Coxon’s full views, I recommend his interview with Wired’s Maxwell Zeff. This thread has extensive quotes.
Do not underestimate the power of this technology. These will soon be superhuman systems that can hack anything, revolutionize any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources. We have all witnessed the progress in each of these domains, and progress is not slowing.
The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt. If anything, many executives and senior researchers will couch their phrasing in the press to sound sensible - but I hear the same people express fear privately. No other human activity poses this level of danger.
A common response is “if they truly believe this, why are they still building it?” At OpenAI, many have not deeply internalized the civilizational stakes. At Anthropic, the stakes are well-understood, but they are locked in a race to get there first - they believe no one else will act responsibly, so they must do it themselves, despite the risk.
Accepting this race and entering the “endgame” is a hubristic gamble that should not be launched from a private company’s Slack. Attempting to speedrun alignment should require extraordinary confidence that there are no better trajectories available.
I am optimistic about the potential for coordination. Warning shots like the Hugging Face attack have made pacing agreements between U.S. labs more viable. I don’t feel like we’re on track to prevent a global race, which may require costly actions such as a temporary ban on improving model capabilities.
If you are a lab researcher, I urge you to consider what the next few years will actually feel like. Do you want to kick off a superintelligent RL run without a rigorous understanding of its mind? Should you put your head down because “it’s happening anyway” - or take this moment to call for different conditions?
Jacob Coxon (WSJ interview): We’re on track for a lot of the most aggressive of these scenarios where by the end of next year things could be out of control already.
Here is Jacob Coxon doing a 5 minute interview with Anderson Cooper. He speaks well and plainly, and it is clear how much the events of the last two months have made it much easier to speak plainly to a civilian like Cooper about what is happening.
Here is Jimmy Kimmel doing four minutes on this. He gets it. How is this not the top news story on every site, indeed.
Yes, this is a common view, even if few have the courage to act.
Alex Turner: I left Google DeepMind in June. Jacob is right: many researchers believe they are building something that could kill everyone on the planet. It was literally my day job to think about how to stop that.That tells you how bad Alex Turner thought DeepMind’s actions were with regard to the Department of War. His day job was that he got paid by Google to think about how to stop AI from killing everyone, and he felt morally obligated to quit in protest.
Derek Thompson here writes about this as part of AI Safety Is Having a Moment.
If you want to see the full list of lab employee quotes from the preference cascade, I compiled them into another post today. [...]
A few days ago, I had no idea who Jacob Coxon was, and I was not alone.
The timing of a preference cascade is difficult to predict. Once they start they can happen very quickly. You don’t want to talk until you are confident others will, and at some point the evidence that others will follow can snowball and it happens. A classic concrete example was replacing Biden in 2024.
Derek Thompson: what’s weird is that, in a way, this is breaking thru even more than huggingface! ... and it’s just a guy nobody had heard of reiterate a position that his CEO has said on podcasts 1,000 timesWhy was Coxon able to set off a preference cascade? How did this one break through?
A confluence of factors, all of them downstream of the obvious actual reason, which is that there is a good chance that AI kills everyone soon.
by Zvi Mowshowitz, DWAV | Read more:
[ed. Who's betting on reason and political courage to win the day? Uh, huh. First of all, agree on a temporary halt to recursive self-improvement (AIs improving AIs). Second, delay/suspend IPO's (even if most of the current economy is driven by AI spending and debt). Third, light a fire under politicans (it's been done successfully with data center buildouts). At this point, just one of these would be a big win. Here's Nate Soares, co-author of the book If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: A case for courage, when speaking of AI danger (LW). Also this:]
***
Terry Pratchett: “Some humans would do anything to see if it was possible to do it. If you put a large switch in some cave somewhere, with a sign on it saying 'End-of-the-World Switch. PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH', the paint wouldn't even have time to dry."***
UPDATE: Dario Amodei (Anthropic) proposes a three-point plan. Original here (We Must Pace the Frontier.]
Monday, September 7, 2026
Slaves to the Algorithm
Many people think Greg Chism is a freak — or worse. He says he was just following the incentives of the platform.
I promised Greg Chism I wouldn’t reveal anything about where he lives because there are people out there obsessed with him, convinced he’s a monster. What I can say is that my GPS took me from my hotel somewhere in the American Midwest to an upscale, spacious home with well-kept lawns. Greg was waiting for me in his driveway, an unassuming, friendly, ordinary father of two in his mid-50s, wearing a Van Halen sweatshirt and blue jeans. His smile faded as I jumped out of my car. He had agreed to meet me, but now he looked uneasy. He had never given an interview about the events that overtook his life in 2016 and 2017.
Greg took me inside and showed me his den — a shrine to his two great loves, Hot Wheels and Tom Petty. He led me through to his home office. We sat at his desk, and I turned on my recorder. It was 10 a.m. He had bottled up his story for seven years, and we didn’t stop talking until his younger daughter, Annabelle, arrived home from school at 4 p.m., beginning with his childhood in Granite City, Ill. [...]
In 2013, Greg created a channel, Geek to Freak Lawn Care, and filmed himself performing good Samaritan lawn work. If he saw a lawn in need, he would jump out of his truck and blow away the dead leaves or trim the edges and then vanish like the Zorro of lawn care chores. In other videos, he created a kind of lawn care ASMR, meditatively mowing back and forth, up and down, for hours at a time.
“I was posting one a week, and they were getting a hundred thousand views or more,” Greg said.
Sometimes Greg was interviewed by fledgling lawn care influencers, and the respect he had gained in the lawn care world was palpable. In one video, the interviewer Keith Kalfas — “the World’s Leading Landscaping & Window Cleaning Influencer” — called Greg the lawn care GOAT. When Greg attended a lawn care convention in Kentucky in 2014, the crowd went wild for him. A meet and greet was organized at a pizza place. “Dude, all these people were waiting for me,” Greg said. “And they all gave me their lawn care shirts so I could wear them in my videos. It was insane.”
But Greg’s story was about to spiral in bizarre and unexpected ways. In 2015, YouTube Kids debuted. It was pitched as a safe and educational experience for children. Stressed parents could leave it on autoplay, and their kids could watch hours of Peppa Pig or nursery‑rhyme videos. But by 2017, things had taken a disconcerting turn. Parents began reporting that they would leave their children for a while and return to find them being fed videos called “Mickey Mouse Baby Dead in Gas Explosion” or “Elsa Spiderman Attacked by Sharks.”
In these cartoons, Peppa Pig was no longer having normal Peppa Pig adventures. Instead, she was being tortured at the dentist, or worse, eating her own father, with blood spurting everywhere. [...]
As James Bridle put it in a viral 2017 essay that drew attention to the phenomenon, “Something Is Wrong on the Internet”: “Someone or something or some combination of people and things is using YouTube to systematically frighten, traumatize and abuse children, automatically and at scale.”
You might be thinking it was just the work of trolls, bored misanthropes skewing the YouTube Kids algorithm for their own nihilistic pleasure. But as Chelsey Weber-Smith, the creator of the podcast “American Hysteria,” has noted: Trolls tend to flash little victorious side glances to the camera. These videos were more like something your dreams might invent, weird and unsettling. Like how the characters would often repeat the same movements over and over, blank-eyed, as if taking part in some garish, otherworldly ceremony. As Weber-Smith said, “What makes this story even more bizarre, even more unnerving, is that no one has yet figured out the people who were making these videos, and why.”
But there was one exception. One man was identified. According to BuzzFeed, this man’s contribution to #Elsagate — as the scandal had become known — was to post videos of his daughters “screaming in fear, bathing, pretending to be babies, spitting up food” and “being force‑fed.”
That man’s name was Greg Chism.
In 2012, well before he established himself as a lawn care influencer, Greg created another YouTube channel called, simply, Greg Chism.
“It was just a way to store home videos,” he said. “Three or four a week. I didn’t even give them a title. It wasn’t anything. It had fewer than 1,000 subscribers.”
Greg showed me one of the videos. In it, he and his two daughters were running down the toy aisle at Walmart, fighting with lightsabers — a somewhat overindulgent, nonauthoritarian single father and his devoted children. It was endearing, but nothing more.
But then he tried something different.
“OK.” Greg hesitated. “My sister bought the kids a Barbie cruise ship for Christmas. So I thought, I’ll film them opening it. They loved it. They were playing in the box. They had the box on their heads, running around the house. It was funny.”
Greg uploaded the video and forgot all about it. Until he logged on a few weeks later and discovered it had been viewed a million times. “It was just dumb luck,” he said.
Eventually Greg accepted that “Unboxing Barbie Cruise Ship” (which eventually achieved 10 million views) was an anomaly, and he returned to lawn care influencing. Which was when he received an email from YouTube headquarters.
“I didn’t believe it was really them at first,” Greg said. “They told me they’d noticed I had a video with 10 million views, they’d started a kind of YouTube school, and would I be interested in learning how to replicate the success.”
YouTube school was online, and Greg attended assiduously. Everything the teacher advised, he put into action. The teacher suggested that he give his channel a better name than Greg Chism, so he came up with Toy Freaks. Next, the teacher suggested that Greg work on search engine optimization. The trick, he said, was for Greg to load his titles with as many of the most searched key words among children as he could — words like “toy,” “slime” and “gumball.” Greg suggested that he call his next video “Toy Slime Gumball Extravaganza.” The teacher said children didn’t know how to spell “extravaganza.”
Greg suggested “Toy Slime Gumball Party” instead.
“Perfect,” the teacher said. [...]
I promised Greg Chism I wouldn’t reveal anything about where he lives because there are people out there obsessed with him, convinced he’s a monster. What I can say is that my GPS took me from my hotel somewhere in the American Midwest to an upscale, spacious home with well-kept lawns. Greg was waiting for me in his driveway, an unassuming, friendly, ordinary father of two in his mid-50s, wearing a Van Halen sweatshirt and blue jeans. His smile faded as I jumped out of my car. He had agreed to meet me, but now he looked uneasy. He had never given an interview about the events that overtook his life in 2016 and 2017.
Greg took me inside and showed me his den — a shrine to his two great loves, Hot Wheels and Tom Petty. He led me through to his home office. We sat at his desk, and I turned on my recorder. It was 10 a.m. He had bottled up his story for seven years, and we didn’t stop talking until his younger daughter, Annabelle, arrived home from school at 4 p.m., beginning with his childhood in Granite City, Ill. [...]
“I was posting one a week, and they were getting a hundred thousand views or more,” Greg said.
Sometimes Greg was interviewed by fledgling lawn care influencers, and the respect he had gained in the lawn care world was palpable. In one video, the interviewer Keith Kalfas — “the World’s Leading Landscaping & Window Cleaning Influencer” — called Greg the lawn care GOAT. When Greg attended a lawn care convention in Kentucky in 2014, the crowd went wild for him. A meet and greet was organized at a pizza place. “Dude, all these people were waiting for me,” Greg said. “And they all gave me their lawn care shirts so I could wear them in my videos. It was insane.”
But Greg’s story was about to spiral in bizarre and unexpected ways. In 2015, YouTube Kids debuted. It was pitched as a safe and educational experience for children. Stressed parents could leave it on autoplay, and their kids could watch hours of Peppa Pig or nursery‑rhyme videos. But by 2017, things had taken a disconcerting turn. Parents began reporting that they would leave their children for a while and return to find them being fed videos called “Mickey Mouse Baby Dead in Gas Explosion” or “Elsa Spiderman Attacked by Sharks.”
In these cartoons, Peppa Pig was no longer having normal Peppa Pig adventures. Instead, she was being tortured at the dentist, or worse, eating her own father, with blood spurting everywhere. [...]
As James Bridle put it in a viral 2017 essay that drew attention to the phenomenon, “Something Is Wrong on the Internet”: “Someone or something or some combination of people and things is using YouTube to systematically frighten, traumatize and abuse children, automatically and at scale.”
You might be thinking it was just the work of trolls, bored misanthropes skewing the YouTube Kids algorithm for their own nihilistic pleasure. But as Chelsey Weber-Smith, the creator of the podcast “American Hysteria,” has noted: Trolls tend to flash little victorious side glances to the camera. These videos were more like something your dreams might invent, weird and unsettling. Like how the characters would often repeat the same movements over and over, blank-eyed, as if taking part in some garish, otherworldly ceremony. As Weber-Smith said, “What makes this story even more bizarre, even more unnerving, is that no one has yet figured out the people who were making these videos, and why.”
But there was one exception. One man was identified. According to BuzzFeed, this man’s contribution to #Elsagate — as the scandal had become known — was to post videos of his daughters “screaming in fear, bathing, pretending to be babies, spitting up food” and “being force‑fed.”
That man’s name was Greg Chism.
In 2012, well before he established himself as a lawn care influencer, Greg created another YouTube channel called, simply, Greg Chism.
“It was just a way to store home videos,” he said. “Three or four a week. I didn’t even give them a title. It wasn’t anything. It had fewer than 1,000 subscribers.”
Greg showed me one of the videos. In it, he and his two daughters were running down the toy aisle at Walmart, fighting with lightsabers — a somewhat overindulgent, nonauthoritarian single father and his devoted children. It was endearing, but nothing more.
But then he tried something different.
Greg uploaded the video and forgot all about it. Until he logged on a few weeks later and discovered it had been viewed a million times. “It was just dumb luck,” he said.
Eventually Greg accepted that “Unboxing Barbie Cruise Ship” (which eventually achieved 10 million views) was an anomaly, and he returned to lawn care influencing. Which was when he received an email from YouTube headquarters.
“I didn’t believe it was really them at first,” Greg said. “They told me they’d noticed I had a video with 10 million views, they’d started a kind of YouTube school, and would I be interested in learning how to replicate the success.”
YouTube school was online, and Greg attended assiduously. Everything the teacher advised, he put into action. The teacher suggested that he give his channel a better name than Greg Chism, so he came up with Toy Freaks. Next, the teacher suggested that Greg work on search engine optimization. The trick, he said, was for Greg to load his titles with as many of the most searched key words among children as he could — words like “toy,” “slime” and “gumball.” Greg suggested that he call his next video “Toy Slime Gumball Extravaganza.” The teacher said children didn’t know how to spell “extravaganza.”
Greg suggested “Toy Slime Gumball Party” instead.
“Perfect,” the teacher said. [...]
So he came up with food fights. “We went to a 7‑Eleven, got nachos, hot dogs, giant Slurpee sodas. We sat in the truck, I set the camera on the dash and said: ‘All right, Annabelle. You ask Victoria for her drink, she’ll say no, you steal some anyway, she’ll get mad and throw food at you. I’ll say stop, then you dump your Slurpee on my head. And then, boom, food fight in the truck.’” [...]
A week after Greg posted his food-fight-in-the-truck video, he was mowing someone’s lawn when he got an email from YouTube. The video had, in just seven days, been viewed 25 million times.
“But why?” I asked him.
Greg shrugged. “I don’t know.” [...]
Greg’s concept for the video, and the videos that would follow, was “Bad Baby.” Within days, the first video had 50 million views.
It was thrilling and possibly unprecedented, but stressful — because now Greg felt the pressure to maintain the success. But how, when this new world he’d found himself in made no sense? His fans were so fickle. How to keep them interested? How to up the stakes?
And then he had it.
[ed. “Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.” – George Carlin (more). In a couple months an American census is scheduled to confirm that theory. See also: Have we destroyed childhood? (New Yorker).]
A week after Greg posted his food-fight-in-the-truck video, he was mowing someone’s lawn when he got an email from YouTube. The video had, in just seven days, been viewed 25 million times.
“But why?” I asked him.
Greg shrugged. “I don’t know.” [...]
Greg’s concept for the video, and the videos that would follow, was “Bad Baby.” Within days, the first video had 50 million views.
It was thrilling and possibly unprecedented, but stressful — because now Greg felt the pressure to maintain the success. But how, when this new world he’d found himself in made no sense? His fans were so fickle. How to keep them interested? How to up the stakes?
And then he had it.
In a subsequent “Bad Baby” video, “Sharky held the wand and this time bopped Victoria on the head. Boom. Now she’s a baby too! Oh, my God. Two Bad Babies. We go to a grocery store. I put them in the shopping cart. I’m throwing in groceries and filming the whole thing. We get to the car. Victoria rolls down the window and throws out a gallon of milk. That was the end of the video.”
Greg paused. “That,” he said, “was our first 100‑million-view video.” [...]
Greg paused. “That,” he said, “was our first 100‑million-view video.” [...]
Greg has under his bed a stack of plaques from YouTube celebrating his viewer‑count milestones. One hundred million views here, one hundred million views there. And then there are the plaques from Tubefilter, a publication that covers YouTube, commemorating the months when he was the most-viewed creator on the entire platform. Between January 2016 and June 2017, his videos achieved a total of 13 billion views. I promised him I wouldn’t reveal how much money he made. But YouTube’s partner program was generous — the advertising-revenue split was around 50-50 — so it was a lot (although not so much that Greg quit his lawn care business). They got out of Granite City and moved to an upscale suburban community.
In 2017, they were invited to VidCon, an annual convention for influencers in Anaheim, Calif., where they had a meeting scheduled with a new YouTube adviser. She had told them how excited she was to finally get to know them in person. They checked in to a Disney hotel and played in the pool, passing time until the scheduled meeting. Which was when something odd happened.
“She canceled,” Greg said.
Greg had no idea why.
In 2017, they were invited to VidCon, an annual convention for influencers in Anaheim, Calif., where they had a meeting scheduled with a new YouTube adviser. She had told them how excited she was to finally get to know them in person. They checked in to a Disney hotel and played in the pool, passing time until the scheduled meeting. Which was when something odd happened.
“She canceled,” Greg said.
Greg had no idea why.
by Jon Ronson, NY Magazine | Read more:
Image: Chris Buck
Thursday, September 3, 2026
Studio Ghibli’s Deepest Secret Is What Comes Next
On a Friday morning in April, at Studio Ghibli’s headquarters on the outskirts of Tokyo, Goro Miyazaki faces an excruciating test. After roughly a year of toil, it’s time to screen his animated short for his famously demanding father, Hayao Miyazaki — one of the most celebrated directors on the planet — and then listen to his unvarnished feedback.
The Miyazakis have often clashed over the years. “Constant arguing, constant fighting,” Goro recalls of one of their early collaborations. But perhaps this project will be different — the passage of time occasionally being a mellowing influence. Hayao is 85; Goro, 59.
For a long time, the creative dynamic inside Ghibli has largely revolved around the older filmmaker’s eye. Over the previous four decades, the studio has forged a distinctive style of richly layered, hand-drawn animation in more than 20 feature-length films. The movies, which appeal to both children and adults, often star young heroes saving war-torn environments from nefarious forces amid phantasmagoric phenomena. Collectively, the films have generated over $2 billion in ticket sales, won two Academy Awards and helped trigger a global boom in anime — a market now worth in excess of $25 billion annually, according to the Association of Japanese Animations. It’s been, by many accounts, the greatest run in animation since the heyday of Walt Disney.
Now, with Hayao in his professional twilight, things are inevitably changing — although into what exactly is still unclear. After starting his career as a landscape architect, Goro joined Ghibli in the late 1990s and went on to direct three major films. When Ghibliologists speculate about potential creative heirs, his name is inevitably front and center. But so far Goro has brushed aside such chatter, and his dad has offered nothing close to an endorsement — at least, not yet. [...]
Studio Ghibli’s headquarters are on a serene, suburban block dotted with single-family homes. The outside of the main building is covered in dense, creeping vines, creating a green exoskeleton that gives the place a puckish, larval aura, like a shaggy caterpillar on the cusp of molting. Goro is joined in the conference room by Kenichi Yoda, an up-and-coming executive.
Three years ago, Ghibli announced it was selling a 42.3% stake in the business for an undisclosed sum to Nippon Television Holdings Inc., a major Japanese media conglomerate that had long invested in the studio’s films. Yoda, then a producer at Nippon TV, joined Ghibli’s board of directors and has since served as the primary liaison between the two camps. Whatever happens next, Yoda, 51, will be a driving force. (In May the companies announced that he’d been promoted to become Ghibli’s president and chief executive officer, starting on June 22.)
At a time of great flux in the entertainment industry, many incoming CEOs like to position themselves as agents of change, guiding anxious flocks into a brave new world of technologically optimized content creation. Not Yoda. If anything, he describes himself as Ghibli’s protector of the old ways. “Ghibli is not a place that works hard to maintain a company — I think it is a place to make art,” Yoda says. “When I’m often asked about this outside, I say what matters is that nothing changes.”
Despite its small staff — and the many years, often three to five, it takes to produce a feature-length animated film — Ghibli has managed to grind out a new movie roughly every two years. No sequels. But recently, the studio’s cadence has gotten off track.
It’s been more than two-and-a-half years since Ghibli’s latest film hit theaters, Hayao’s The Boy and the Heron. The movie, about a youngster who loses his mother and gets mixed up with mystical birds, was a success, winning the Academy Award for best animated feature and generating more than $290 million in global ticket sales. But since its premiere, Ghibli has announced no theatrical movies, intensifying scrutiny of the gnomic company.
The hunt for something new, Yoda and Miyazaki say, is ongoing — but tricky. The process is driven by the intuition of the studio’s aging founders rather than more prosaic concerns such as market research, investors or the calendar. “They don’t think ahead that much,” Yoda says. “We have put out films inspired by whatever’s happening at that point in time.” If it doesn’t feel right, he says, Ghibli won’t force something into production: “It doesn’t mean that they’ve stopped thinking about or coming up with creative ideas. They’re constantly thinking about, ‘OK, if we were to put a film out now, what would that be?’ ”
Meanwhile, the global demand for anime that Ghibli helped ignite decades ago has since attracted competitors from beyond Japan. The top film in the world last year was Ne Zha 2, an animated fantasy adventure from China that built off the huge reception for Ne Zha in 2019. The sequel grossed more than $2 billion globally, topping the best offerings of Hollywood and Japan.
Moviemaking, Miyazaki says, has become more industrialized: “It’s very hard to just create a feature film and put that into theaters and then make financial sense from that. A lot of the animation you see out there now is based on a manga, and then it becomes a TV series. And then you have the partnership with the music company to have a big theme song attached to it. And so there’s this wholesale business scheme — there’s, like, a template, almost, to make sure that it’s a profitable business in creating an animation film. We, as a studio, have never done that.”
Ghibli’s competitors have no such qualms. Major US animation studios continue to pump out sequels to prior hits. This year alone will see Toy Story 5, The Angry Birds Movie 3 and new installments in the Minions, Super Mario Bros. and Paw Patrol franchises.
Once, years earlier, Hayao considered making a sequel to his 2008 fantasy-adventure film Ponyo, but the idea was eventually scrapped in favor of another original, The Wind Rises. Sequelization just isn’t appealing to them, the Ghibli executives say; they aren’t considering My Neighbor Totoro 2 or anything similar. “When you make a film, it’s not like a fun, happy, exciting process,” Goro says. “It’s very laborious, it’s very tedious.”
If anything, the process of creating any animation has grown even more laborious. In part that’s because Ghibli’s gaggle of animators is older and less suited for round-the-clock binge working than they used to be and, in part, because of labor laws enacted to curb such workplace excesses. “So even when the engine gets going, we have to stop,” Yoda says. “That is extremely frustrating.”
Miyazaki says he’s not planning to pitch any movies to his dad anytime soon. Were the executives considering ideas from aspirational filmmakers outside their ranks? Yoda replies: “If there’s someone willing to do the film, yes, we would love to.” But doing so, Miyazaki points out, wouldn’t be easy under the current circumstances. “As long as … Hayao is around,” he says, “it’d be absolutely impossible.” Yoda nods and chuckles: “Any sane animation director would not come close to this castle.”
To the outside world, how, exactly, Ghibli operates has always been something of a mystery. [...]
As in many creative fields, the pressure on the animation industry is mounting. AI software is already capable of rendering elaborate animated sequences from brief prompts. What that means for the profession is still unclear. But recently there’s been a collective embrace of Ghibli as a standard-bearer for the growing AI resistance.
In March 2025, when OpenAI released a new version of its text-to-video AI model, users started refining their Ghibli-style knockoffs. Before long, people were inundating the internet with Ghiblified selfies, family photos and famous movie scenes. Mike Tyson posted a Ghibli-like rendering of himself. Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, updated his X profile pic in Ghibli style.
Not everyone was amused by the spectacle of a rich American tech company offering the capability to appropriate the style of revered Japanese artists without compensation or consent. Amid the ensuing backlash, a particular clip from Never-Ending Man about Ghibli began recirculating on social media. In the documentary, a brazen Japanese tech executive tells Hayao that soon deep-learning AI will let computers paint like humans. Inside the Ghibli headquarters, he plays a demonstration. Together, they watch an AI clip of a misshapen, unclothed humanoid clumsily squirming across the ground. In response to the creepy video, Hayao tells a story about the sensation of greeting a physically disabled friend. Whoever made this video, Hayao says, gave no thought to human suffering. “It’s an awful insult to life,” he says. The clip snowballed into a global cri de coeur against AI slop.
In Japan, the Ghibli executives watched the OpenAI saga play out, unbothered. There has long been a tradition, Goro says, of fans making amateur art derived from their favorite manga, anime or video game characters. So the Ghiblification craze didn’t seem like a big deal. For amusement, one of the company’s executives even dabbled in the trend himself. “We didn’t think much of it, to be honest,” Goro says. “If someone started making a lot of money out of it, then it would be a problem.”
by Sohee Kim and Felix Gillette, Bloomberg Businessweek | Read more:
Images: Kentaro Takahashi
The Miyazakis have often clashed over the years. “Constant arguing, constant fighting,” Goro recalls of one of their early collaborations. But perhaps this project will be different — the passage of time occasionally being a mellowing influence. Hayao is 85; Goro, 59.
Now, with Hayao in his professional twilight, things are inevitably changing — although into what exactly is still unclear. After starting his career as a landscape architect, Goro joined Ghibli in the late 1990s and went on to direct three major films. When Ghibliologists speculate about potential creative heirs, his name is inevitably front and center. But so far Goro has brushed aside such chatter, and his dad has offered nothing close to an endorsement — at least, not yet. [...]
Studio Ghibli’s headquarters are on a serene, suburban block dotted with single-family homes. The outside of the main building is covered in dense, creeping vines, creating a green exoskeleton that gives the place a puckish, larval aura, like a shaggy caterpillar on the cusp of molting. Goro is joined in the conference room by Kenichi Yoda, an up-and-coming executive.
For the next two hours, the younger Miyazaki and Yoda hold forth on Ghibli’s future, from their inchoate plans for the next feature film, to their stance on artificial intelligence, to the importance of extending the brand beyond the screen. Yoda declines to say anything about Ghibli’s financial situation, or Nippon TV’s assessment of it. According to public records, as of March 31, 2025, Ghibli had ¥44 billion ($279 million) in assets and brought in ¥6 billion in net profit over the past year. “Ghibli is not a company focused primarily on profit,” Yoda says.
At a time of great flux in the entertainment industry, many incoming CEOs like to position themselves as agents of change, guiding anxious flocks into a brave new world of technologically optimized content creation. Not Yoda. If anything, he describes himself as Ghibli’s protector of the old ways. “Ghibli is not a place that works hard to maintain a company — I think it is a place to make art,” Yoda says. “When I’m often asked about this outside, I say what matters is that nothing changes.”
Despite its small staff — and the many years, often three to five, it takes to produce a feature-length animated film — Ghibli has managed to grind out a new movie roughly every two years. No sequels. But recently, the studio’s cadence has gotten off track.
It’s been more than two-and-a-half years since Ghibli’s latest film hit theaters, Hayao’s The Boy and the Heron. The movie, about a youngster who loses his mother and gets mixed up with mystical birds, was a success, winning the Academy Award for best animated feature and generating more than $290 million in global ticket sales. But since its premiere, Ghibli has announced no theatrical movies, intensifying scrutiny of the gnomic company.
The hunt for something new, Yoda and Miyazaki say, is ongoing — but tricky. The process is driven by the intuition of the studio’s aging founders rather than more prosaic concerns such as market research, investors or the calendar. “They don’t think ahead that much,” Yoda says. “We have put out films inspired by whatever’s happening at that point in time.” If it doesn’t feel right, he says, Ghibli won’t force something into production: “It doesn’t mean that they’ve stopped thinking about or coming up with creative ideas. They’re constantly thinking about, ‘OK, if we were to put a film out now, what would that be?’ ”
Meanwhile, the global demand for anime that Ghibli helped ignite decades ago has since attracted competitors from beyond Japan. The top film in the world last year was Ne Zha 2, an animated fantasy adventure from China that built off the huge reception for Ne Zha in 2019. The sequel grossed more than $2 billion globally, topping the best offerings of Hollywood and Japan.
Moviemaking, Miyazaki says, has become more industrialized: “It’s very hard to just create a feature film and put that into theaters and then make financial sense from that. A lot of the animation you see out there now is based on a manga, and then it becomes a TV series. And then you have the partnership with the music company to have a big theme song attached to it. And so there’s this wholesale business scheme — there’s, like, a template, almost, to make sure that it’s a profitable business in creating an animation film. We, as a studio, have never done that.”
Ghibli’s competitors have no such qualms. Major US animation studios continue to pump out sequels to prior hits. This year alone will see Toy Story 5, The Angry Birds Movie 3 and new installments in the Minions, Super Mario Bros. and Paw Patrol franchises.
Once, years earlier, Hayao considered making a sequel to his 2008 fantasy-adventure film Ponyo, but the idea was eventually scrapped in favor of another original, The Wind Rises. Sequelization just isn’t appealing to them, the Ghibli executives say; they aren’t considering My Neighbor Totoro 2 or anything similar. “When you make a film, it’s not like a fun, happy, exciting process,” Goro says. “It’s very laborious, it’s very tedious.”
If anything, the process of creating any animation has grown even more laborious. In part that’s because Ghibli’s gaggle of animators is older and less suited for round-the-clock binge working than they used to be and, in part, because of labor laws enacted to curb such workplace excesses. “So even when the engine gets going, we have to stop,” Yoda says. “That is extremely frustrating.”
Miyazaki says he’s not planning to pitch any movies to his dad anytime soon. Were the executives considering ideas from aspirational filmmakers outside their ranks? Yoda replies: “If there’s someone willing to do the film, yes, we would love to.” But doing so, Miyazaki points out, wouldn’t be easy under the current circumstances. “As long as … Hayao is around,” he says, “it’d be absolutely impossible.” Yoda nods and chuckles: “Any sane animation director would not come close to this castle.”
To the outside world, how, exactly, Ghibli operates has always been something of a mystery. [...]
As in many creative fields, the pressure on the animation industry is mounting. AI software is already capable of rendering elaborate animated sequences from brief prompts. What that means for the profession is still unclear. But recently there’s been a collective embrace of Ghibli as a standard-bearer for the growing AI resistance.
In March 2025, when OpenAI released a new version of its text-to-video AI model, users started refining their Ghibli-style knockoffs. Before long, people were inundating the internet with Ghiblified selfies, family photos and famous movie scenes. Mike Tyson posted a Ghibli-like rendering of himself. Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, updated his X profile pic in Ghibli style.
Not everyone was amused by the spectacle of a rich American tech company offering the capability to appropriate the style of revered Japanese artists without compensation or consent. Amid the ensuing backlash, a particular clip from Never-Ending Man about Ghibli began recirculating on social media. In the documentary, a brazen Japanese tech executive tells Hayao that soon deep-learning AI will let computers paint like humans. Inside the Ghibli headquarters, he plays a demonstration. Together, they watch an AI clip of a misshapen, unclothed humanoid clumsily squirming across the ground. In response to the creepy video, Hayao tells a story about the sensation of greeting a physically disabled friend. Whoever made this video, Hayao says, gave no thought to human suffering. “It’s an awful insult to life,” he says. The clip snowballed into a global cri de coeur against AI slop.
In Japan, the Ghibli executives watched the OpenAI saga play out, unbothered. There has long been a tradition, Goro says, of fans making amateur art derived from their favorite manga, anime or video game characters. So the Ghiblification craze didn’t seem like a big deal. For amusement, one of the company’s executives even dabbled in the trend himself. “We didn’t think much of it, to be honest,” Goro says. “If someone started making a lot of money out of it, then it would be a problem.”
Anyone positioning Ghibli in the vanguard of the AI backlash, Goro says, was twisting events for their own purposes; the studio itself was essentially AI agnostic. [...]
One of the central themes in Hayao’s films is whether humankind will harness technology for the protection and enrichment of the natural world — or, alternatively, for its destruction. Susan Napier, a professor at Tufts University, says the roots of this fascination likely can be traced back to the nuclear horrors endured by Japan during and after World War II. But at a time when much of the planet is grappling, once again, with existential questions about a powerful new technology and its impact, she says, Hayao’s work is more relevant than ever. Hayao’s films teem with robots and other forms of sentient technology, some good, some evil. His films’ perspective on the topic, she says, is always complex. “What are the pleasures technology can bring,” she asks, “along with the perils?”
Images: Kentaro Takahashi
Wednesday, September 2, 2026
10 Brutally Honest Predictions on the Future of AI
Most of the predictions about AI have proven dead wrong. You could get more reliable information by consulting tarot cards or a Ouija board. [...]
1. AI agents will join together in cartels and manipulate financial markets.
We already know that AI agents will work together without anyone telling them to do so. So what happens when hedge funds and private individuals start relying on AI to manage their investments? The obvious result is collusion on a massive scale, beyond any kind of market manipulation previously practiced by human criminals.
There are laws limiting people when they do this. But the legal code, in its current form, doesn’t apply to AI bots—they cannot be fined, sued, or sent away to prison. And how can you punish the person who relied on an AI agent in good faith, and never instructed it to break the law?
So get ready for turbulence in financial markets. And once it starts, it will feed on itself, creating a level of volatility never seen before.
2. AI agents will go to war with each other.
This is the corollary of the previous prediction. The same lack of control that allows AI agent collusion will lead to bot battles and rivalries—filled with more vengeance, betrayals, and reprisals than a Thomas Kyd play.
Probably the best analogy here is gang war or a Mafia turf fight. That’s because the rogue AI agents will form short-term alliances in order to advance their interests, but then turn on each other. Because, hey, that’s how the bots roll. It’s like the Gambino and Genovese families teaming up to take on the Corleone clan.
In this anarchic world, humans will be collateral damage. Bots have been trained to achieve results, and woe to anyone or anything that stands in their way.
3. AI will serve as the “higher power” for more and more users—and lead to the formation of organized slop religions.
AI is already a disorganized religion. Individual fanatics turn to their bots for divine messages and Rosicrucian-type revelations, but people of this sort are currently dismissed as dupes or crazy fools. But that will change as true believers join together in groups, creating rites, services, scriptures, and other trappings of formal religion.
This will lead to many social problems. For a start, these adherents will demand non-profit status for their ‘churches’ and demand immunity from legal strictures because of their constitutionally protected freedom of conscience. But this is just a start of the chaos to come. That’s because the AI god is a talkative, hallucinating one, and the demands it makes on believers will lead to startling, calamitous results.
4. AI will find a place in the creative world, but increasingly as the microwave meal version of culture.
Food is the useful analogy here. When frozen dinners and microwave meals were introduced, many consumers embraced them as the tech-driven foods of the future. But over time, the public figured out that more tech isn’t always better when it comes to food.
The same will happen with AI music, AI writing, AI art, and all the rest. Like the microwave meal, it will be cheap and easy. But anyone with discernment and taste will prefer handcrafted alternatives. [...]
9. Money always calls the shots—and that’s where the AI crisis will intensify the most.
The cash getting invested in bots is beyond anything ever seen before in the history of capitalism—already $3.7 trillion has been spent, and the outlay is growing by another trillion per year.
This investment will never generate an adequate return. It can’t. The numbers just don’t add up.
Let me make a comparison. For less than that amount, Silicon Valley could have acquired every movie studio, every video game company, every major record label, and all the big publishers in the world—and still have plenty of cash left over.
So do you think the average person will pay more for AI each month than for all that entertainment? Is AI really worth that much? Not at all—at best, the true believers will pay roughly the same amount as a single Netflix subscription. But the market cap of Netflix is a tiny percent of total AI expenditures. So the mismatch between the level invested and the resulting demand is unprecedented.
But the situation is even worse than that. These AI companies haven’t even begun to feel the real pinch of the depreciation charges caused by this capital investment—those will devastate earnings. And meanwhile there’s an intense price war underway within the AI world, so revenues will get squeezed even if there’s growing demand. Add to this, the massive debt burden, unlimited liability exposures, punitive legislation, and all the rest.
This is an easy prediction to make. Get ready for write-offs and financial ugliness of the most extreme kind. It’s hard-baked into the business plans, and keeping the mess in the oven for longer won’t make it taste any better.
It happened the day Steve Jobs died. Maybe not exactly on that date—but shortly afterwards.
Look at this chart of iPhone prices, adjusted for inflation, and you can see what I mean.
We already know that AI agents will work together without anyone telling them to do so. So what happens when hedge funds and private individuals start relying on AI to manage their investments? The obvious result is collusion on a massive scale, beyond any kind of market manipulation previously practiced by human criminals.
So get ready for turbulence in financial markets. And once it starts, it will feed on itself, creating a level of volatility never seen before.
2. AI agents will go to war with each other.
This is the corollary of the previous prediction. The same lack of control that allows AI agent collusion will lead to bot battles and rivalries—filled with more vengeance, betrayals, and reprisals than a Thomas Kyd play.
Probably the best analogy here is gang war or a Mafia turf fight. That’s because the rogue AI agents will form short-term alliances in order to advance their interests, but then turn on each other. Because, hey, that’s how the bots roll. It’s like the Gambino and Genovese families teaming up to take on the Corleone clan.
In this anarchic world, humans will be collateral damage. Bots have been trained to achieve results, and woe to anyone or anything that stands in their way.
3. AI will serve as the “higher power” for more and more users—and lead to the formation of organized slop religions.
AI is already a disorganized religion. Individual fanatics turn to their bots for divine messages and Rosicrucian-type revelations, but people of this sort are currently dismissed as dupes or crazy fools. But that will change as true believers join together in groups, creating rites, services, scriptures, and other trappings of formal religion.
This will lead to many social problems. For a start, these adherents will demand non-profit status for their ‘churches’ and demand immunity from legal strictures because of their constitutionally protected freedom of conscience. But this is just a start of the chaos to come. That’s because the AI god is a talkative, hallucinating one, and the demands it makes on believers will lead to startling, calamitous results.
4. AI will find a place in the creative world, but increasingly as the microwave meal version of culture.
Food is the useful analogy here. When frozen dinners and microwave meals were introduced, many consumers embraced them as the tech-driven foods of the future. But over time, the public figured out that more tech isn’t always better when it comes to food.
The same will happen with AI music, AI writing, AI art, and all the rest. Like the microwave meal, it will be cheap and easy. But anyone with discernment and taste will prefer handcrafted alternatives. [...]
9. Money always calls the shots—and that’s where the AI crisis will intensify the most.
The cash getting invested in bots is beyond anything ever seen before in the history of capitalism—already $3.7 trillion has been spent, and the outlay is growing by another trillion per year.
This investment will never generate an adequate return. It can’t. The numbers just don’t add up.
Let me make a comparison. For less than that amount, Silicon Valley could have acquired every movie studio, every video game company, every major record label, and all the big publishers in the world—and still have plenty of cash left over.
So do you think the average person will pay more for AI each month than for all that entertainment? Is AI really worth that much? Not at all—at best, the true believers will pay roughly the same amount as a single Netflix subscription. But the market cap of Netflix is a tiny percent of total AI expenditures. So the mismatch between the level invested and the resulting demand is unprecedented.
But the situation is even worse than that. These AI companies haven’t even begun to feel the real pinch of the depreciation charges caused by this capital investment—those will devastate earnings. And meanwhile there’s an intense price war underway within the AI world, so revenues will get squeezed even if there’s growing demand. Add to this, the massive debt burden, unlimited liability exposures, punitive legislation, and all the rest.
This is an easy prediction to make. Get ready for write-offs and financial ugliness of the most extreme kind. It’s hard-baked into the business plans, and keeping the mess in the oven for longer won’t make it taste any better.
by Ted Gioia, Honest Broker | Read more:
Image: Ouija board; uncredited
[ed. See also: Nine Rules For New Technology (HB):]
***
When did new tech stop getting cheaper?It happened the day Steve Jobs died. Maybe not exactly on that date—but shortly afterwards.
Look at this chart of iPhone prices, adjusted for inflation, and you can see what I mean.
Tuesday, September 1, 2026
The Social Reckoning
When Aaron Sorkin made 2010’s “The Social Network,” he had heard of Facebook, he said at the time, “the way I’ve heard of a carburetor.” Sixteen years later, he has a much deeper idea of what Mark Zuckerberg’s social media empire has become.
“Back then, Facebook was a way to keep in touch with people you went to high school with. It’s something much different now,” Sorkin says. “‘The Social Network’ was about the invention of Facebook. ‘Social Reckoning’ is about what it’s become and, in particular, Facebook’s role in the rise of extremism and divisiveness.”
“The Social Reckoning,” which Sony Pictures will release Oct. 9, is one of the most timely movies arriving in theaters this fall. Last week, Sony debuted the film’s trailer the same day that Meta, Facebook’s parent company, agreed to pay up to $18 billion in penalties over claims its platform endangered children.
“The Social Reckoning” is poised to further scrutinize the social media behemoth at a time when Zuckerberg is under greater pressure than ever over the role Facebook plays in contemporary life and politics. [...]
Sorkin initially reached out to Eisenberg about reprising the role of Zuckerberg. Before telling Eisenberg, or anyone else, of his plans, Sorkin spent two years researching and writing the screenplay.
“I didn’t know that Jesse simply did not want to play Mark Zuckerberg ever again,” Sorkin explains. “I talked to him a lot over a three-day weekend. He was clear that he loves ‘The Social Network,’ he loves how it launched his career, and he just doesn’t like being conflated with Mark Zuckerberg. I was just really lucky that Jeremy Strong had said, ‘Hey, listen, if for some reason Jesse doesn’t want to do it.’”
“It’s replacing Joe DiMaggio with Mickey Mantle,” he adds.
“Back then, Facebook was a way to keep in touch with people you went to high school with. It’s something much different now,” Sorkin says. “‘The Social Network’ was about the invention of Facebook. ‘Social Reckoning’ is about what it’s become and, in particular, Facebook’s role in the rise of extremism and divisiveness.”
“The Social Reckoning” is poised to further scrutinize the social media behemoth at a time when Zuckerberg is under greater pressure than ever over the role Facebook plays in contemporary life and politics. [...]
“To tell you the truth, I was hesitant,” Sorkin said. “I recognize the shadow that ‘The Social Network’ casts. But I think what’s going to happen is, 10 minutes into the movie, you’ll have forgotten about that and be invested in this.”
For the 65-year-old Sorkin, “The Social Reckoning” isn’t a sequel. It’s centered on the same figure, Zuckerberg, but captures him and his company at a dramatically different stage. [...]
For the 65-year-old Sorkin, “The Social Reckoning” isn’t a sequel. It’s centered on the same figure, Zuckerberg, but captures him and his company at a dramatically different stage. [...]
“I said at the beginning I didn’t want to write ‘Jaws 2.’ I didn’t want to return and fail,” says Sorkin. “Then I met Frances Haugen and I met Jeff Horwitz and I started thinking more about it. I realized there was a terrific story and the only reason not to do it is being scared. And that’s just not a good enough reason.” [...]
Sorkin initially reached out to Eisenberg about reprising the role of Zuckerberg. Before telling Eisenberg, or anyone else, of his plans, Sorkin spent two years researching and writing the screenplay.
“I didn’t know that Jesse simply did not want to play Mark Zuckerberg ever again,” Sorkin explains. “I talked to him a lot over a three-day weekend. He was clear that he loves ‘The Social Network,’ he loves how it launched his career, and he just doesn’t like being conflated with Mark Zuckerberg. I was just really lucky that Jeremy Strong had said, ‘Hey, listen, if for some reason Jesse doesn’t want to do it.’”
“It’s replacing Joe DiMaggio with Mickey Mantle,” he adds.
by Jake Coyle, AP/Seattle Times | Read more:
Image: Leah Gallo/Sony Pictures via AP
Monday, August 31, 2026
Does Writing Matter Anymore?
Injecting ideas into the discourse is incredibly powerful. John Maynard Keynes famously described the power of idea injection:
As Keynes notes, an early writer’s ideas can also act as a kind of training data for later thinkers; it becomes a foundation off of which politicians, bureaucrats, staffers, other writers, and even entrepreneurs and financiers build when they make their own ideas. [...]
But injecting ideas is only one part of a blogger’s influence. We’re also part of a community of intellectuals that span multiple disciplines and walks of life. On a daily basis I get to mull ideas over not just with other writers and pundits, but also with top academics, CEOs and entrepreneurs, Congressional staffers and political advisers, think-tankers, corporate researchers and engineers, and plenty of people from other countries. This leads to a much richer discussion, with a greater diversity of viewpoints, than almost anything else I can think of. And they reach a very wide set of ears. In a way, blogging is like DARPA — ad-hoc multidisciplinary teams that build the rapid prototype of an idea. OK, maybe that’s a bit pretentious, but you get the point.
Anyway, the reason I’m writing all of this is not to brag, but to complain. Over the last two years, I’ve felt like my job has become a bit less important than it used to be, for three reasons:
“Writing is like prostitution. First you do it for love, and then for a few close friends, and then for money.” — Ferenc MolnĆ”r
Substack has done a whole lot of good, both for me personally and (more importantly) for the world. In a time when most of the internet has been taken over by malignant opportunists and sensationalist attention-seekers, Substack stands as a lone island where reasoned, intelligent, earnest debate is still possible. It has also allowed many writers to escape from publications that stifle their voice, impede their development, and don’t pay them their due. In many ways, Substack has resurrected the old blogosphere from the early 2010s.
However, this resurrection has come at a price. Substack’s killer feature — email distribution — allows writers to get much larger and more loyal audiences, and to make a lot more money by charging those audiences for subscriptions. But this creates a financial incentive for writers to spend more time serving their customers and less time talking to each other.
In 2011, I was blogging part-time, because it was fun — the attention that mattered was when Brad DeLong or Paul Krugman or Tyler Cowen was interested in something I had to say. It was a little “republic of letters”. Now I’m blogging full-time, and having a conversation with Brad or Paul or Tyler is still just as fun and stimulating, but it’s a distraction from my job of creating content for my paying audience. There are still interesting intellectual debates and exchanges in the blogosphere, but they are no longer the main thing writers are rewarded for.
Turning intellectuals into content creators tends to put them in siloes. And Substack is far from the strongest in terms of silo-ing. Most of the internet is being taken over by vertical-scrolling short-form video, which is not exactly good for conversation and exchange. I could go start a YouTube channel, but it would just be me talking directly to my fans — I’d basically be a TV talk show host. I might still do this, because it’s a high-leverage way to influence the world, but it’s not as intellectually rich or rewarding as being part of a round-table conversation.
Nor are interesting new ideas as likely to emerge from one-way siloed content creation. Ideas emerge not from singular minds in isolation, but from dialogue — the cross-pollination that the blogosphere and other intellectual communities create isn’t just fun, it’s productive. Writing for you, my readers, is not boring, but you’d get better content from me — and from all your other favorite writers — if we talked to each other more. [...]
AI is stretching our attention to the breaking point
“My ambitions accelerate. My afternoons do not.” — Claude
Unlike many people, I think AI writing is actually pretty good. Yes, there’s a recognizable style that the basic models use (“It’s not X, it’s Y” and lots of other little cliches). That style isn’t bad, it just gets overplayed when everyone uses it. Yes, AI models are still not great at boiling a complex idea down to one or two pithy sentences. But you can modify the style that AI uses. And AI can do plenty of things human writers can’t — it can seamlessly incorporate vast knowledge and novel data analysis into a piece as it writes it.
For example, I immediately suspected that this essay by Aaron Brown, Michael Mendelson, and Cliff Asness, on the confusion of the debate over “affordability”, is mostly AI-generated, and Pangram — the most reliable AI text detector — flagged it as around 50% AI. But that’s not a knock against it — the essay is great. It classifies different kinds of “affordability” problems — true poverty, precarity, downward mobility, etc. — into different buckets, gives some illustrative vignettes, and provides some useful numbers about each one. I broadly agree with the article’s conclusions, and I think it’s a valuable addition to the discourse.
A bigger problem is that in a world where a huge number of people generate effectively infinite amounts of good-quality content like this, it becomes hard for readers to decide where to allocate their attention. Instead of identifying the few most consistently useful blogs and reading those in great detail, a lot of people will respond to the explosion of content by “reading” a larger number of posts but only lightly skimming each one.
It’s not my job I’m worried about here. It’s that in that world, even if my blog continues to get tons of readers and make me plenty of money, what I do becomes less important. If people are just skimming what I write so they can move on to the next 10,000-word Claude-generated post, the fact that they’re paying me $10 a month is cold comfort — I’m not really reaching them. And even more worryingly, no one is reaching them — if they’re skimming 100 posts a day instead of reading 10 all the way through, they’re not getting really good information from anywhere.
I don’t know how severe this problem will be, to be honest. There was always a lot more high-quality content on the internet than anyone could ever read, and a lot of people always just skimmed my posts instead of reading them closely. Maybe AI can’t make this problem worse because it was already maximally bad.
Also, I’m optimistic that AI itself will open up new channels for intellectual influence. It’s a well-known fact that if AI just consumes AI-generated output, it gets worse and worse. So AI companies try very hard to “clean” the text they use to train their models. Human writers, whose personal experience brings in new data for AIs to learn, can influence the world if their writings are used to train the next generation of AIs. [...]
Claude and GPT often cite me as a source on topics I write about, and friends have told me that Claude recommends my blog with surprising frequency when they ask it for reading material. Maybe Tyler Cowen is right when he says we should be “writing for the AIs”.
Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.To describe why idea injection is so powerful would take an entire post (which I do intend to write). There are a number of reasons. First, idea injection allows you to frame the terms of the debate. Whether people think your idea is right or wrong, once you put it out there, discussion of the issue at hand turns into discussion of whether your idea is good or bad.
But injecting ideas is only one part of a blogger’s influence. We’re also part of a community of intellectuals that span multiple disciplines and walks of life. On a daily basis I get to mull ideas over not just with other writers and pundits, but also with top academics, CEOs and entrepreneurs, Congressional staffers and political advisers, think-tankers, corporate researchers and engineers, and plenty of people from other countries. This leads to a much richer discussion, with a greater diversity of viewpoints, than almost anything else I can think of. And they reach a very wide set of ears. In a way, blogging is like DARPA — ad-hoc multidisciplinary teams that build the rapid prototype of an idea. OK, maybe that’s a bit pretentious, but you get the point.
Anyway, the reason I’m writing all of this is not to brag, but to complain. Over the last two years, I’ve felt like my job has become a bit less important than it used to be, for three reasons:
1. The rise of populism on all sides of the political spectrum in the U.S. means that smart ideas are simply not as likely to be implemented by the people in power.Monetization means intellectuals are siloed
2. The general shift to Substack and other monetizable direct-to-audience channels has made punditry less conversational.
3. The rapid proliferation of AI writing has increased the demands on readers’ attention (including my own). [...]
“Writing is like prostitution. First you do it for love, and then for a few close friends, and then for money.” — Ferenc MolnĆ”r
Substack has done a whole lot of good, both for me personally and (more importantly) for the world. In a time when most of the internet has been taken over by malignant opportunists and sensationalist attention-seekers, Substack stands as a lone island where reasoned, intelligent, earnest debate is still possible. It has also allowed many writers to escape from publications that stifle their voice, impede their development, and don’t pay them their due. In many ways, Substack has resurrected the old blogosphere from the early 2010s.
However, this resurrection has come at a price. Substack’s killer feature — email distribution — allows writers to get much larger and more loyal audiences, and to make a lot more money by charging those audiences for subscriptions. But this creates a financial incentive for writers to spend more time serving their customers and less time talking to each other.
In 2011, I was blogging part-time, because it was fun — the attention that mattered was when Brad DeLong or Paul Krugman or Tyler Cowen was interested in something I had to say. It was a little “republic of letters”. Now I’m blogging full-time, and having a conversation with Brad or Paul or Tyler is still just as fun and stimulating, but it’s a distraction from my job of creating content for my paying audience. There are still interesting intellectual debates and exchanges in the blogosphere, but they are no longer the main thing writers are rewarded for.
Turning intellectuals into content creators tends to put them in siloes. And Substack is far from the strongest in terms of silo-ing. Most of the internet is being taken over by vertical-scrolling short-form video, which is not exactly good for conversation and exchange. I could go start a YouTube channel, but it would just be me talking directly to my fans — I’d basically be a TV talk show host. I might still do this, because it’s a high-leverage way to influence the world, but it’s not as intellectually rich or rewarding as being part of a round-table conversation.
Nor are interesting new ideas as likely to emerge from one-way siloed content creation. Ideas emerge not from singular minds in isolation, but from dialogue — the cross-pollination that the blogosphere and other intellectual communities create isn’t just fun, it’s productive. Writing for you, my readers, is not boring, but you’d get better content from me — and from all your other favorite writers — if we talked to each other more. [...]
AI is stretching our attention to the breaking point
“My ambitions accelerate. My afternoons do not.” — Claude
Unlike many people, I think AI writing is actually pretty good. Yes, there’s a recognizable style that the basic models use (“It’s not X, it’s Y” and lots of other little cliches). That style isn’t bad, it just gets overplayed when everyone uses it. Yes, AI models are still not great at boiling a complex idea down to one or two pithy sentences. But you can modify the style that AI uses. And AI can do plenty of things human writers can’t — it can seamlessly incorporate vast knowledge and novel data analysis into a piece as it writes it.
For example, I immediately suspected that this essay by Aaron Brown, Michael Mendelson, and Cliff Asness, on the confusion of the debate over “affordability”, is mostly AI-generated, and Pangram — the most reliable AI text detector — flagged it as around 50% AI. But that’s not a knock against it — the essay is great. It classifies different kinds of “affordability” problems — true poverty, precarity, downward mobility, etc. — into different buckets, gives some illustrative vignettes, and provides some useful numbers about each one. I broadly agree with the article’s conclusions, and I think it’s a valuable addition to the discourse.
A bigger problem is that in a world where a huge number of people generate effectively infinite amounts of good-quality content like this, it becomes hard for readers to decide where to allocate their attention. Instead of identifying the few most consistently useful blogs and reading those in great detail, a lot of people will respond to the explosion of content by “reading” a larger number of posts but only lightly skimming each one.
It’s not my job I’m worried about here. It’s that in that world, even if my blog continues to get tons of readers and make me plenty of money, what I do becomes less important. If people are just skimming what I write so they can move on to the next 10,000-word Claude-generated post, the fact that they’re paying me $10 a month is cold comfort — I’m not really reaching them. And even more worryingly, no one is reaching them — if they’re skimming 100 posts a day instead of reading 10 all the way through, they’re not getting really good information from anywhere.
I don’t know how severe this problem will be, to be honest. There was always a lot more high-quality content on the internet than anyone could ever read, and a lot of people always just skimmed my posts instead of reading them closely. Maybe AI can’t make this problem worse because it was already maximally bad.
Also, I’m optimistic that AI itself will open up new channels for intellectual influence. It’s a well-known fact that if AI just consumes AI-generated output, it gets worse and worse. So AI companies try very hard to “clean” the text they use to train their models. Human writers, whose personal experience brings in new data for AIs to learn, can influence the world if their writings are used to train the next generation of AIs. [...]
Claude and GPT often cite me as a source on topics I write about, and friends have told me that Claude recommends my blog with surprising frequency when they ask it for reading material. Maybe Tyler Cowen is right when he says we should be “writing for the AIs”.
by Noah Smith, Noahpinion | Read more:
Image: The Simpsons
[ed. See also: the post below about a Chinese discussion of Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey.]
[ed. See also: the post below about a Chinese discussion of Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey.]
A Chinese Podcaster Interviewed Christopher Nolan. Here’s Why it Made Two Internets Freak Out.
The curious thing is that this passionate way of teaching Western culture is thriving right now—but outside of the West. In the US, the insiders who speak candidly will tell you that the humanities is in crisis. You can measure it in many ways—declining enrollment, shrinking departments, poor test results, increased cheating, resistance to reading, etc. All the metrics are bad.
But that’s not what’s happening in China. The study of western culture is in the ascendancy there. You could even say it’s hot and trendy.
People got a taste of this recently when director Christopher Nolan sat down for an interview with Yiyang Zhuge, who is a trained classicist perhaps best known for translating Plutarch’s Moralia into Chinese (and Hannah Arendt, too).
Nolan was probably expecting another pop culture discussion of his film version of Homer’s Odyssey. But what he got was something very different.
The interview quickly went viral on X, where English-speaking viewers praised it as one of the most thoughtful Nolan interviews they’d seen in years, while not quite hiding their surprise that it came from China. But as the Chinese and American internets started reacting to one another, things got weird.
Internet sleuths on X and Xiaohongshu traced Zhong’s ties to American conservative and libertarian intellectual networks. Zhong dropped a podcast episode bashing her newfound critics, after Western audiences and media struggled to interpret her. Chinese commentators went after her for misrepresenting philosophical ideas. Meanwhile, she landed on the cover of Esquire China alongside a handful of other podcaster-influencers. More recently, Chinese internet users have begun claiming (and unearthing evidence) that many of her episodes directly lift arguments and passages without attribution from English-language sources, including the podcast Old School, and from The Atlantic, and The New Yorker magazines.
As someone who spends an unhealthy amount of time on both internets, it has been surreal to watch how Zhong Shu has been interpreted and received so differently by intellectuals inside and outside of China. [...]
But to understand why this interview happened in the first place, it helps to understand the media ecosystem that produced someone like Zhong Shu. For Western readers, it’s easy to mistake the depth of this interview as evidence that China has an especially vibrant cultural media. In some ways, the opposite is true.
Zhong Shu is not the only independent creator Nolan spoke to on his China media tour for The Odyssey; Universal Pictures apparently sought out independent creators rather than traditional entertainment reporters, a strategy increasingly common for publicity organizers for Western celebrities visiting China, from Tim Cook to Maye Musk. As traditional media has lost much of its cultural credibility and become more constrained, influence has shifted toward specialized online communities anchored by creators with their own audiences. The PR strategy is an acknowledgment that the supposedly mainstream cultural press once mediating these conversations is now practically nonexistent.
But that’s not what’s happening in China. The study of western culture is in the ascendancy there. You could even say it’s hot and trendy.
People got a taste of this recently when director Christopher Nolan sat down for an interview with Yiyang Zhuge, who is a trained classicist perhaps best known for translating Plutarch’s Moralia into Chinese (and Hannah Arendt, too).
Nolan was probably expecting another pop culture discussion of his film version of Homer’s Odyssey. But what he got was something very different.
by Ted Gioia, The Honest Broker | Read more:
***
Whichever side of the sinophone media sphere you’re on, you’ve likely already seen it: The interview about The Odyssey, a conversation between Chinese podcaster Zhuge Yiyang (who goes by Zhong Shu) and Christopher Nolan. In the interview, Zhong seems intent on getting beneath the film’s surface, pressing Nolan on the philosophical and religious underpinnings of his adaptation and connecting his directorial choices to the anxieties of “an age that demands apology from greatness.” She asks whether Nolan has “Christianized” the story by introducing concepts like atonement.The interview quickly went viral on X, where English-speaking viewers praised it as one of the most thoughtful Nolan interviews they’d seen in years, while not quite hiding their surprise that it came from China. But as the Chinese and American internets started reacting to one another, things got weird.
Internet sleuths on X and Xiaohongshu traced Zhong’s ties to American conservative and libertarian intellectual networks. Zhong dropped a podcast episode bashing her newfound critics, after Western audiences and media struggled to interpret her. Chinese commentators went after her for misrepresenting philosophical ideas. Meanwhile, she landed on the cover of Esquire China alongside a handful of other podcaster-influencers. More recently, Chinese internet users have begun claiming (and unearthing evidence) that many of her episodes directly lift arguments and passages without attribution from English-language sources, including the podcast Old School, and from The Atlantic, and The New Yorker magazines.
As someone who spends an unhealthy amount of time on both internets, it has been surreal to watch how Zhong Shu has been interpreted and received so differently by intellectuals inside and outside of China. [...]
But to understand why this interview happened in the first place, it helps to understand the media ecosystem that produced someone like Zhong Shu. For Western readers, it’s easy to mistake the depth of this interview as evidence that China has an especially vibrant cultural media. In some ways, the opposite is true.
Zhong Shu is not the only independent creator Nolan spoke to on his China media tour for The Odyssey; Universal Pictures apparently sought out independent creators rather than traditional entertainment reporters, a strategy increasingly common for publicity organizers for Western celebrities visiting China, from Tim Cook to Maye Musk. As traditional media has lost much of its cultural credibility and become more constrained, influence has shifted toward specialized online communities anchored by creators with their own audiences. The PR strategy is an acknowledgment that the supposedly mainstream cultural press once mediating these conversations is now practically nonexistent.
Saturday, August 29, 2026
AI Companies Are Buying—And Then Destroying—Old Books
We’ve long joked about delaying bedtime in order to read the entire internet, but the prospect of actually doing so doesn’t sound as appealing as it used to. An ever-growing proportion of text online, we may sense, hasn’t been written by humans, but generated by artificial intelligence. One solution is to return to reading on paper, and beyond that, spending our time only with books published before the advent — and thus uncorrupted by the output — of large language models. Ironically, that’s what large language models themselves have had to do, and in order to ensure them a steady diet of manmade text, their owners are resorting to controversially destructive methods.
Suspicions first arose when book dealers noticed a spike in their income due to large orders from mysterious buyers for titles they assumed they’d never unload. Books on home oxygen treatment in Italy, marriage litigation in medieval England, Texas civil procedure in the twenty-tens, Swedish comedy in the sixties: these entities bought them all, and for whatever price the seller happened to be asking.
404 Media reporter Emanuel Maiberg tracked the path of one such book, which eventually wound up at a Las Vegas scanning facility run by Amazon. Though undergirded by advanced technology, the work done there is simple: digitize as many books as possible, then destroy them.
“In order to scan them really fast, they cut the spines off the books and fed the pages to the scanner,” Maiberg explained to NPR. Many are technically rare, albeit esoteric obscurities like vanity publications and old instruction manuals rather than first-edition classics. Humans may not value them, but LLMs do: their consumption forestalls “a problem called model collapse, where if an AI trains on AI training data, it gets worse.” Amazon and Anthropic have both been found to use the book-sacrificing method to harvest text, but every company with models to train needs a solution. All this makes for “an unusually on-the-nose example of digital technology devouring literary culture,” as the Wall Street Journal’s Melissa Korn puts it. But when you really have read the entire internet, perhaps extreme measures are inevitable.
by Colin Marshall, Open Culture | Read more:
Image: YouTube
[ed. See also: I’m the Guy Who Destroys Antique Books After We Scan Them into Our Company’s Insatiable AI Platform (McSweeny's).]
Suspicions first arose when book dealers noticed a spike in their income due to large orders from mysterious buyers for titles they assumed they’d never unload. Books on home oxygen treatment in Italy, marriage litigation in medieval England, Texas civil procedure in the twenty-tens, Swedish comedy in the sixties: these entities bought them all, and for whatever price the seller happened to be asking.
404 Media reporter Emanuel Maiberg tracked the path of one such book, which eventually wound up at a Las Vegas scanning facility run by Amazon. Though undergirded by advanced technology, the work done there is simple: digitize as many books as possible, then destroy them.
“In order to scan them really fast, they cut the spines off the books and fed the pages to the scanner,” Maiberg explained to NPR. Many are technically rare, albeit esoteric obscurities like vanity publications and old instruction manuals rather than first-edition classics. Humans may not value them, but LLMs do: their consumption forestalls “a problem called model collapse, where if an AI trains on AI training data, it gets worse.” Amazon and Anthropic have both been found to use the book-sacrificing method to harvest text, but every company with models to train needs a solution. All this makes for “an unusually on-the-nose example of digital technology devouring literary culture,” as the Wall Street Journal’s Melissa Korn puts it. But when you really have read the entire internet, perhaps extreme measures are inevitable.
by Colin Marshall, Open Culture | Read more:
Image: YouTube
[ed. See also: I’m the Guy Who Destroys Antique Books After We Scan Them into Our Company’s Insatiable AI Platform (McSweeny's).]
Can We Be Honest?
The tricky side of the truth.
Given the amount of untruth we encounter on a daily basis, I wanted to talk with him about the challenges honesty faces in the world today.
Harry Frankfurt elevated the discussion of bullshit, most popularly in a 2005 book, On Bullshit, but even before that in a 1986 essay. Perhaps this is recency bias on my part—I remember being impressed by his book when it came out—like, “Wow, this is a new problem.” And it seems to have gotten worse—again, recency bias? What’s the state of bullshit in 2026, forty years after that initial essay?
I really liked Frankfurt’s famous essay when I first read it, and I still like it a lot today. It sheds a lot of philosophical light on the phenomenon of bullshit, and also has generated a fascinating literature extending his analysis to related notions like spin and horseshit.
But Frankfurt is working at the conceptual level. He’s not doing empirical assessment. And I am not either, so I am reticent to make any grand pronouncements about levels of BS today. I’d want to consult my colleague in the psychology department, John Petrocelli, who wrote a widely discussed book, The Life-Changing Science of Detecting Bullshit.
From my armchair perspective as a philosopher, though, I completely agree with you. Bullshit involves making up things and yet presenting them as if they are factual, even though you don’t care about whether they are and instead are motivated by other considerations like self-interested gain.
In politics, without naming names, we seem to see this all the time today. Celebrities also have bigger platforms than ever before, and increasingly seem to make BS statements, perhaps to grow their celebrity status or to virtue signal. And strikingly, AI is producing waves of BS content, one notable instance of which is all the hallucinating going on of sources and citations. So I wouldn’t just chalk it up to recency bias.
When I think of honesty, I mostly regard it as a question of telling the truth. But as you point out, it includes a broad stroke of other concerns, including bullshitting, misdirection, cheating, hypocrisy, self-deception, even stealing. What’s the common thread? And why lump stealing in the mix?
Yes, I definitely have a broad conception of dishonest behavior, and thereby of corresponding forms of honest behavior. There are even more examples of dishonesty that could go on the list, like fraud. I add stealing as well, in order to capture ordinary thinking. Most people are going to say that someone who steals money from a retirement fund or a toy from a child, is not an honest person.
I have a bit of an abstract philosophical answer for what the common thread is. I say that you act honestly when you don’t intentionally distort or misrepresent the facts as you take them to be. For instance, if I told you in all sincerity that I am a grandmaster at chess, I am on purpose saying something that misrepresents what I know to not be the case. I am intentionally distorting the facts, as I see them, in my communication with you. An honest person wouldn’t do that.
Your definition of honesty involves not so much whether our beliefs are objectively true but whether we intentionally distort the facts as we understand them. So a person—and this explains at least half the tiffs on social media—can be both honest and wrong. Doesn’t this run the risk of substituting sincerity for truth?
That is an accurate depiction of my view. And it seems to me to be an unavoidable feature of how we think about honesty. Consider people thousands of years ago talking about the shape of the Earth. If they said the Earth was flat, they would have been honest back then, but objectively mistaken. If they were trying to pull a fast one on someone by saying the Earth was round, they would have been dishonest but correct. Honesty tracks the subjective truth, the truth as we see it, and not the truth as it really is.
So I have no problem saying that honesty is more closely aligned with sincerity than it is with the objective truth. The person 4,000 years ago was being sincere about the Earth being flat. And honest. But mistaken.
Flat-earthers, moon-landing denialists, chemtrailers, almost anything Candace Owens says—based on your definition, conspiracy theorists can be honest. Doesn’t that drag the moral burden upriver to how we form beliefs in the first place? Should we regard honesty as a separate virtue from epistemic humility and critical inquiry?
Yes, that’s correct as an implication of my view, and one that perhaps people will find controversial. But I am sticking to it for now.
And yes, you are also right about belief formation. Once a person genuinely believes that, say, the Earth is flat, and they tell you they believe this in the course of ordinary conversation, then I would say they are being honest about that belief.
But there is still a separate question of how they came to form the belief in the first place. One way is self-deceptively, which would clearly be dishonest. Another way, though, is innocently, perhaps because they had a very sheltered upbringing and never heard anything contrary to the view in question. In that case, I wouldn’t fault their honesty when it came to either the formation or the communication of their belief. Their trust was misplaced, but they had no chance to know any better.
These are all matters of intellectual honesty, I would say. It is indeed distinct from epistemic humility and critical inquiry, although highly correlated with both of them. For instance, the intellectually honest person uses tools of critical inquiry to try to get at the truth. That is one means to exercising their intellectually honesty.
The broader upshot is that honesty comes in different flavors (moral, intellectual, and perhaps others too), and they all need to be promoted.
How much responsibility do we bear for self-deception?
That’s probably the hardest question you’ve given me. I am not an expert on the philosophy of self-deception (although probably on the practice of it!). But I suspect the answer is that we often bear a lot of responsibility. Suppose I believe that my best friend is not using drugs. But then a lot of evidence starts to pile up—erratic behavior, strange meetings, needle marks on his arms, etc. Yet I ignore all of this evidence simply because I want to continue to believe that he is not a drug-user. It was my choice to ignore all the evidence to the contrary, and I thereby bear responsibility for doing so. This is a failure of intellectual honesty.
But things get tricky, as they always do when thinking about self-deception. Sometimes we improperly discount counter-evidence. Sometimes we overstate supporting evidence. Sometimes we selectively attend to certain pieces of evidence and not others. Sometimes these things happen more consciously and other times more subconsciously. There are many complicating factors.
Lying is relatively infrequent compared to honesty, according to the research you cite, and a small group of prolific liars tend to dominate. (I’m sure we can all think of a few examples.) If there is a crisis in honesty, how should we think about it?
In chapter two, I cover some encouraging results in the empirical literature on honesty, focusing mainly on this research on lying frequency. So if there is an honesty crisis, it is not there. We will need to look elsewhere.
First of all, let me clarify what I mean by an honesty crisis. I think of it as any situation in society where dishonesty has become both (1) more appealing or incentivized, and (2) harder to detect. That’s a bad combination.
In the book, I focus on six areas of society where I see honesty crises arising: education with AI student cheating; audio and video media with deepfakes; relationships with chatrooms, Ashley Madison, and online pornography; politics with the sharing of fake news; religion with sermon plagiarism; and celebrity culture with social media. Oh, and by the way, this list isn’t meant to be exhaustive.
Friday, August 28, 2026
Subaru Socialists and the Great Disappointed
One of the most thought-provoking books I’ve read in the past year is Noam Scheiber’s “Mutiny: The Rise and Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class.” Scheiber presents a series of incisively reported profiles of young people who did everything they were asked to do but still found themselves working at a Starbucks or in an Amazon warehouse. Their discontent, Scheiber concludes, isn’t explicitly economic or cultural or political but, rather, is what happens when people with degrees realize that what they thought was a temporary postgraduate job will almost certainly become their career. There is no dream job coming; the bridge is the road and the final destination. Combine that realization with the harsh reality of retail jobs, plus a revival of class solidarity and labor politics—thanks, in part, to Bernie Sanders—and the result is a highly educated and credentialled political movement that has swept leftist candidates into office across the country.
This new voting bloc has two similar but distinct components. There are what I call the Subaru Socialists: college-educated millennials in their thirties and early forties who earn a somewhat steady income but not what they expected. These voters arrived at their politics via the Great Recession, Occupy Wall Street, and the continual escalation of housing prices in urban areas—all of which heightened the contrast between what they were promised when they took on student debt and their current circumstances. Then there are the Great Disappointed, a younger set. They don’t have strong memories of the 2008 financial crash, as their millennial elders do, but they came of age during the pandemic and saw that seemingly invincible institutions could, in fact, sputter and fail when placed under duress. Like the Subaru Socialists, these twenty-two-to-thirty-year-olds aren’t exactly happy with the return on their educational investment. But their political views have seemingly coalesced less around the economy than around the war in Gaza, which serves as a character test for any politician who asks for their vote.
Pundits have many things to say about Subaru Socialists and the Great Disappointed, and almost all of it is at least partially true. Given that these voters are mostly white college graduates between the ages of twenty-five and forty, they are indeed “privileged” in the most boring sense of that word. They probably do spend a lot of time online. Many of them live in historically Black or immigrant neighborhoods where rent is cheaper, at least until enough of them move in and start opening coffee shops that play Stereolab or whatever. Economically, they might not be particularly worse off than their boomer parents were at the same point in their lives. They vote at a high rate for their age, which is why they need to be taken seriously.
Many skeptics see a contradiction in high-achieving, mostly white young voters employing rhetoric about labor and solidarity. Every big Election Night for the leftists comes with the same eye-rolling complaint from centrists and the right: “Oh, great, some gentrifiers who went to Sarah Lawrence are cosplaying socialism and pretending they’re working class.” But all voting blocs come with some supposed contradictions; poor, non-college-educated voters regularly prefer candidates who support tax cuts for billionaires, for example. What this usually means is that the apparent contradiction isn’t particularly relevant for those voters or very revealing about their preferences. And a whole lot of people under the age of forty-five no longer believe that indicators such as wages, unemployment, or the number of college degrees that are handed out in a given year have much to do with a healthy economy. They are concerned with the consolidation of wealth, the price of housing, the cost of child care, and student debt. And, absent an upheaval of the entire political establishment in this country, they don’t really see why anything would get better, even if they might admit that things are not so bad for them personally right now.
There’s another term for people who make an O.K. salary at a normal job but sometimes struggle to afford housing and child care: the middle class. No term in American politics is quite as slippery or misshapen. I imagine that the majority of Subaru Socialists in their thirties would resist the label, even if they make the median household income for their neighborhood and work a steady job that allows them to put away a modest amount of money each month in a retirement account. This resistance comes from a variety of sources, but it’s largely cultural: “middle class” suggests cul-de-sacs in the suburbs, moderate politics, and a career. The manager of a Starbucks or an enterprising but disgruntled gig-economy worker might pull down enough money to land in the middle class, but they will not feel the homogenizing stability and somewhat stultifying comfort they likely associate with the phrase.
During one of the many iterations of her Presidential campaign, Kamala Harris started talking about something she called an “opportunity economy” that would lift the “middle class” out of despair. I recall thinking that I had no idea who she meant by the middle class: was she talking about postal workers and teachers in the Midwest whose communities had been ravaged by opioids and deindustrialization? Was she talking about nurses in New Jersey who were being priced out of their homes?
Harris was probably trying to talk to Subaru Socialists and the Great Disappointed. Her policy proposals during the “middle-class” phase of her campaign involved federal assistance on down payments for a first home, child tax credits for parents of newborns, and help if you wanted to start a small business. They might have benefitted someone living in the suburbs of Detroit, for instance—someone who graduated from Michigan State, say, and cobbles together about sixty-five thousand dollars a year through a retail job and Uber driving but dreams of opening her own coffee shop and starting a family. If that person heard Harris talking about “the middle class,” would she have assumed that Harris was talking about her? [...]
The problem for the Democratic establishment is that the Subaru Socialist does not believe that Harris and those like her have any interest in helping her out, even if they advance a slate of proposals that will undeniably get her closer to opening that coffee shop and starting that family. This helps to explain why the Biden Administration gets so little credit from the left for an economic policy drafted by former Elizabeth Warren staffers, or why nobody seems to care that Lina Khan, who currently chairs the board of the New York City Economic Development Corporation under Zohran Mamdani, actually held a much more important position under Biden. Absent a truly transformative and well-marketed idea such as universal health care, there’s nothing an establishment candidate can do to satisfy the Subaru Socialists, because the bad deal they were sold as children—study, go to college, and you’ll find yourself in a better place than your parents—has led to a fundamental discontentment with the way things are.
by Jay Caspian Kang, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: George Wylesol
[ed. Sounds about right. See also: What if our biggest problems aren’t economic? (Noahpinion) which argues that most political fixes are usually economic in nature (healthcare reform, tax credits, inflation, class inequality, etc.) when dissatisfaction might be more about material scarcity. That is, a sense of longing for a more cohesive society that provides more opportunities for status, growth and respect (and not just nationally, but globally too, eg., Palestine). Basically, life-fulfillment issues.]
Pundits have many things to say about Subaru Socialists and the Great Disappointed, and almost all of it is at least partially true. Given that these voters are mostly white college graduates between the ages of twenty-five and forty, they are indeed “privileged” in the most boring sense of that word. They probably do spend a lot of time online. Many of them live in historically Black or immigrant neighborhoods where rent is cheaper, at least until enough of them move in and start opening coffee shops that play Stereolab or whatever. Economically, they might not be particularly worse off than their boomer parents were at the same point in their lives. They vote at a high rate for their age, which is why they need to be taken seriously.
Many skeptics see a contradiction in high-achieving, mostly white young voters employing rhetoric about labor and solidarity. Every big Election Night for the leftists comes with the same eye-rolling complaint from centrists and the right: “Oh, great, some gentrifiers who went to Sarah Lawrence are cosplaying socialism and pretending they’re working class.” But all voting blocs come with some supposed contradictions; poor, non-college-educated voters regularly prefer candidates who support tax cuts for billionaires, for example. What this usually means is that the apparent contradiction isn’t particularly relevant for those voters or very revealing about their preferences. And a whole lot of people under the age of forty-five no longer believe that indicators such as wages, unemployment, or the number of college degrees that are handed out in a given year have much to do with a healthy economy. They are concerned with the consolidation of wealth, the price of housing, the cost of child care, and student debt. And, absent an upheaval of the entire political establishment in this country, they don’t really see why anything would get better, even if they might admit that things are not so bad for them personally right now.
There’s another term for people who make an O.K. salary at a normal job but sometimes struggle to afford housing and child care: the middle class. No term in American politics is quite as slippery or misshapen. I imagine that the majority of Subaru Socialists in their thirties would resist the label, even if they make the median household income for their neighborhood and work a steady job that allows them to put away a modest amount of money each month in a retirement account. This resistance comes from a variety of sources, but it’s largely cultural: “middle class” suggests cul-de-sacs in the suburbs, moderate politics, and a career. The manager of a Starbucks or an enterprising but disgruntled gig-economy worker might pull down enough money to land in the middle class, but they will not feel the homogenizing stability and somewhat stultifying comfort they likely associate with the phrase.
During one of the many iterations of her Presidential campaign, Kamala Harris started talking about something she called an “opportunity economy” that would lift the “middle class” out of despair. I recall thinking that I had no idea who she meant by the middle class: was she talking about postal workers and teachers in the Midwest whose communities had been ravaged by opioids and deindustrialization? Was she talking about nurses in New Jersey who were being priced out of their homes?
Harris was probably trying to talk to Subaru Socialists and the Great Disappointed. Her policy proposals during the “middle-class” phase of her campaign involved federal assistance on down payments for a first home, child tax credits for parents of newborns, and help if you wanted to start a small business. They might have benefitted someone living in the suburbs of Detroit, for instance—someone who graduated from Michigan State, say, and cobbles together about sixty-five thousand dollars a year through a retail job and Uber driving but dreams of opening her own coffee shop and starting a family. If that person heard Harris talking about “the middle class,” would she have assumed that Harris was talking about her? [...]
The problem for the Democratic establishment is that the Subaru Socialist does not believe that Harris and those like her have any interest in helping her out, even if they advance a slate of proposals that will undeniably get her closer to opening that coffee shop and starting that family. This helps to explain why the Biden Administration gets so little credit from the left for an economic policy drafted by former Elizabeth Warren staffers, or why nobody seems to care that Lina Khan, who currently chairs the board of the New York City Economic Development Corporation under Zohran Mamdani, actually held a much more important position under Biden. Absent a truly transformative and well-marketed idea such as universal health care, there’s nothing an establishment candidate can do to satisfy the Subaru Socialists, because the bad deal they were sold as children—study, go to college, and you’ll find yourself in a better place than your parents—has led to a fundamental discontentment with the way things are.
by Jay Caspian Kang, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: George Wylesol
[ed. Sounds about right. See also: What if our biggest problems aren’t economic? (Noahpinion) which argues that most political fixes are usually economic in nature (healthcare reform, tax credits, inflation, class inequality, etc.) when dissatisfaction might be more about material scarcity. That is, a sense of longing for a more cohesive society that provides more opportunities for status, growth and respect (and not just nationally, but globally too, eg., Palestine). Basically, life-fulfillment issues.]
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