The Plot Against America

As I write this in early 2025, a quiet revolution is unfolding within the U.S. government. Inside the newly created Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), teams of young tech operatives are systematically dismantling democratic institutions and replacing them with proprietary artificial intelligence systems. Civil servants who raise legal objections are being removed. Government databases are being migrated to private servers. Decision-making power is being transferred from elected officials and career bureaucrats to algorithms controlled by a small network of Silicon Valley elites. This isn't a spontaneous coup—it's the culmination of a dangerous ideology that has been meticulously developed since the 2008 financial crisis, one that sees democracy itself as obsolete technology ready to be “disrupted.” To understand how we reached this critical moment, and why it threatens the very foundation of democratic governance, we need to trace the evolution of an idea: that democracy is not just inefficient, but fundamentally incompatible with technological progress.

DOGE is not about efficiency. It is about erasure. Democracy is being deleted in slow motion, replaced by proprietary technology and AI models. It is a coup, executed not with guns, but with backend migrations and database wipes.

What follows is not speculation or dystopian fiction. It is a carefully documented account of how a dangerous ideology, born in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, has moved from the fringes of tech culture to the heart of American governance.

The story of how it begins starts sixteen years ago. (...)

From Silicon Valley to Main Street: The Spread of Techno-Libertarian Ideas

2008 did not just destroy the economy—it shattered faith in democratic institutions themselves. Libertarians saw an opportunity. And in Silicon Valley, a new belief took hold: democracy wasn’t just inefficient—it was obsolete. Over the next decade, the ideas incubated in this period would evolve into a coherent challenge to the foundations of liberal democracy, backed by some of the most powerful figures in technology and finance.

As millions of Americans lost their homes and jobs in the years following the crisis, these ideas began to gain momentum. The Tea Party movement emerged in 2009, channeling populist anger against government bailouts and the Obama administration's response to the crisis.

As the Tea Party gained momentum, it fostered a broader cultural shift that primed many Americans to be receptive to alternative political and economic theories. This shift extended beyond traditional conservatism, creating an opening for the tech-libertarian ideas emerging from Silicon Valley.

The movement’s emphasis on individual liberty and skepticism of centralized authority resonated with the anti-government sentiment growing in tech circles. As a result, concepts like cryptocurrency and decentralized governance, once considered fringe, began to find a more mainstream audience among those disillusioned with traditional political and financial systems.

The convergence of populist anger and techno-utopianism set the stage for more radical anti-democratic ideas that would emerge in the following years. The Tea Party, while not directly advocating for these ideas, inadvertently prepared a segment of the population to be more open to the notion that traditional democratic institutions might be fundamentally flawed or obsolete. (...)

As we moved into the 2010s, this fragmentation accelerated. Social media algorithms, designed to maximize engagement, amplified sensational and divisive content. The resulting flood of competing narratives made it increasingly difficult for citizens to discern truth from fiction, with profound implications for democratic discourse and decision-making.

This epistemic chaos wasn't an accident—it was a crucial tactic in undermining democracy itself. As Curtis Yarvin and his neoreactionary allies saw it, political legitimacy depended on the existence of a shared reality. Break that consensus, and democracy becomes impossible. Steve Bannon called it “flooding the zone with shit.” And by the time Trump entered office, the full strategy was in motion: destabilize public trust, replace expert analysis with endless counter-narratives, and ensure that the only people who could wield power were those who controlled the flow of information itself. (...)

The Sovereign Individual: Blueprint for a Post-Democratic World

The true revolution would come through technology itself. In 1999, James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg published a book that would become the blueprint for this technological coup: The Sovereign Individual. Published at the height of the dotcom boom, the book read like science fiction to many at the time: it predicted the rise of cryptocurrency, the decline of traditional nation-states, and the emergence of a new digital aristocracy. Taxes will become voluntary. Regulations will disappear. The most successful people will form their own private, self-governing communities, while the rest of the world is left behind.

Libertarianism, when fused with this kind of technological determinism, takes a sharp turn away from classical liberal thought. If you assume that government will inevitably be outcompeted by private networks, decentralized finance, and AI-driven governance, then trying to reform democracy becomes pointless. The more radical conclusion, embraced by the figures at the forefront of this movement, is that government should be actively dismantled and replaced with a more “efficient” form of rule—one modeled on corporate governance rather than democratic participation.

This is precisely where libertarianism morphs into neoreaction. Instead of advocating for a constitutional republic with minimal government, this new strain of thought pushes for a private, post-democratic order, where those with the most resources and technological control dictate the rules. In this vision, power doesn’t rest with the people—it belongs to the most competent “executives” running society like a CEO would run a company. (...)

This is why neoreactionary ideas have found such a receptive audience among tech elites. If you believe that technology inevitably renders old systems obsolete, then why should democracy be any different? Why bother fixing the government if it’s doomed to be replaced by something more advanced? (...)

Cryptocurrency offered not just a way to circumvent state monetary control, but also a model for how digital technology could enable new forms of sovereignty.

by Mike Brock, Notes From the Circus |  Read more:

Image: uncredited
[ed. Connecting all the dots. Quite plausible explanation as to why Musk might invest over $300 million (and more) buying his way into power. If you had a tool (AI) you thought would eventually rule the world, how do you think this might this inform your thinking about government and regulations? See also: An Open Letter to Trump Supporters (NftC); and, Inside the New Right, Where Peter Thiel Is Placing His Biggest Bets (VF).]

MoPOP

The Museum of Pop Culture (also known as MoPOP) is a nonprofit museum in Seattle, Washington, dedicated to contemporary popular culture. Founded in 2000, it contains exhibits on fantasy, horror cinema, video games, science fiction, music and more. The museum’s unique, 140,000-square-foot (13,000 sq. meter) structure was designed by architect Frank Gehry.  ~ Overview

Image: uncredited

[ed. Been inside and out, never above. Can you imagine trying to sell this thing to Paul Allen (Microsoft) and other initial organizers? From MoPOP's Wikipedia entry:]

***

Even before groundbreaking, the Seattle Weekly said the design could refer to "the often quoted comparison to a smashed electric guitar." Gehry himself had in fact made the comparison: "We started collecting pictures of Stratocasters, bringing in guitar bodies, drawing on those shapes in developing our ideas." The architecture was greeted by Seattle residents with a mixture of acclaim for Gehry and derision for this particular edifice. British-born, Seattle-based writer Jonathan Raban remarked that "Frank Gehry has created some wonderful buildings, like the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, but his Seattle effort, the Experience Music Project, is not one of them." New York Times architecture critic Herbert Muschamp described it as "something that crawled out of the sea, rolled over, and died". Forbes magazine called it one of the world's 10 ugliest buildings. Others describe it as a "blob" or call it "The Hemorrhoids". Despite some critical reviews of the structure, the building has been called "a fitting backdrop for the world's largest collection of Jimi Hendrix memorabilia." The building's exterior, which features a fusion of textures and colors including gold, silver, deep red, blue and a "shimmering purple haze", has been declared "an apt representation of the American rock experience."

What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

The so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is starting to put together a team to migrate the Social Security Administration’s (SSA) computer systems entirely off one of its oldest programming languages in a matter of months, potentially putting the integrity of the system—and the benefits on which tens of millions of Americans rely—at risk.

The project is being organized by Elon Musk lieutenant Steve Davis, multiple sources who were not given permission to talk to the media tell WIRED, and aims to migrate all SSA systems off COBOL, one of the first common business-oriented programming languages, and onto a more modern replacement like Java within a scheduled tight timeframe of a few months.

Under any circumstances, a migration of this size and scale would be a massive undertaking, experts tell WIRED, but the expedited deadline runs the risk of obstructing payments to the more than 65 million people in the US currently receiving Social Security benefits.

“Of course one of the big risks is not underpayment or overpayment per se but [it’s also] not paying someone at all and not knowing about it. The invisible errors and omissions,” an SSA technologist tells WIRED. (...)

This proposed migration isn’t the first time SSA has tried to move away from COBOL: In 2017, SSA announced a plan to receive hundreds of millions in funding to replace its core systems. The agency predicted that it would take around five years to modernize these systems. Because of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, the agency pivoted away from this work to focus on more public-facing projects.

Like many legacy government IT systems, SSA systems contain code written in COBOL, a programming language created in part in the 1950s by computing pioneer Grace Hopper. The Defense Department essentially pressured private industry to use COBOL soon after its creation, spurring widespread adoption and making it one of the most widely used languages for mainframes, or computer systems that process and store large amounts of data quickly, by the 1970s. (At least one DOD-related website praising Hopper's accomplishments is no longer active, likely following the Trump administration’s DEI purge of military acknowledgements.)

As recently as 2016, SSA’s infrastructure contained more than 60 million lines of code written in COBOL, with millions more written in other legacy coding languages, the agency’s Office of the Inspector General found. In fact, SSA’s core programmatic systems and architecture haven’t been “substantially” updated since the 1980s when the agency developed its own database system called MADAM, or the Master Data Access Method, which was written in COBOL and Assembler, according to SSA’s 2017 modernization plan.

SSA’s core “logic” is also written largely in COBOL. This is the code that issues social security numbers, manages payments, and even calculates the total amount beneficiaries should receive for different services, a former senior SSA technologist who worked in the office of the chief information officer says. Even minor changes could result in cascading failures across programs.

“If you weren't worried about a whole bunch of people not getting benefits or getting the wrong benefits, or getting the wrong entitlements, or having to wait ages, then sure go ahead,” says Dan Hon, principal of Very Little Gravitas, a technology strategy consultancy that helps government modernize services, about completing such a migration in a short timeframe.  (...)

Sources within SSA expect the project to begin in earnest once DOGE identifies and marks remaining beneficiaries as deceased and connecting disparate agency databases. In a Thursday morning court filing, an affidavit from SSA acting administrator Leland Dudek said that at least two DOGE operatives are currently working on a project formally called the “Are You Alive Project” targeting what these operatives believe to be improper payments and fraud within the agency’s system by calling individual beneficiaries. The agency is currently battling for sweeping access to SSA’s systems in court to finish out this work. (Again, 150-year-olds are not collecting social security benefits. That specific age was likely a quirk of COBOL. It doesn’t include a date type, so dates are often coded to a specific reference point—May 20, 1875, the date of an international standards-setting conference held in Paris, known as the Convention du Mètre.)

In order to migrate all COBOL code into a more modern language within a few months, DOGE would likely need to employ some form of generative artificial intelligence to help translate the millions of lines of code, sources tell WIRED. “DOGE thinks if they can say they got rid of all the COBOL in months then their way is the right way and we all just suck for not breaking shit,” says the SSA technologist.

DOGE would also need to develop tests to ensure the new system’s outputs match the previous one. It would be difficult to resolve all of the possible edge cases over the course of several years, let alone months, adds the SSA technologist.

“This is an environment that is held together with bail wire and duct tape,” the former senior SSA technologist working in the office of the chief information officer tells WIRED. “The leaders need to understand that they’re dealing with a house of cards or Jenga. If they start pulling pieces out, which they’ve already stated they’re doing, things can break.”

by Makena Kelly, Ars Technica/Wired |  Read more:

Image: Tigermad
[ed. See above. Also, who's paying for all this 'help'? What's the oversight and quality control process/authority? What's this all going to cost? Lots of questions aren't being asked and no one's giving any answers. From the comments:]

***

With experience doing enterprise platform conversions for 30 years, both from a system vendor's perspective, and as an enterprise IT architect and executive, I cannot begin to describe how guaranteed to fail, in terms of service delivery, consistency, security, and continuity, this effort is. System and language choices matter, to be sure, but they are not by themselves, or usually even primarily , determinative of success, or failure. Architecture, project management, testing, scope and quality control, transition and rollout planning ... all have a bigger impact on success or failure than any of the stuff these yahoos are going on about. You can doom a project with a bad technology choice, without question, but you can't come close to assuring it success just by making a good one.

And - I can't emphasize this enough - even if they get everything right technically, architecturally, and project-wise, it won't affect the rate of fraud or error, unless the source of fraud and error are understood, and mechanisms for detecting, and correcting them are baked onto the project requirements. COBOL is not a source of fraud, and is not inherently a source of error. Given that DOGE has identified exactly no credible fraud, and very little in the way of systemic error, that element too is doomed to fail.

This reminds me of a grossly exaggerated version of multiple spectacular system conversion failures led by big consulting at various enterprises I've been involved with over the years. The only difference is the scale (literally $Trillions across the nation at stake), and the mismatch between the hired "experts" and actual understanding of the systems they are trying to replace, are both exaggerated by a couple orders of magnitude compared with even the most massive corporate consulting boondoggles.

The Unbelievable Scale of AI’s Pirated-Books Problem

When employees at Meta started developing their flagship AI model, Llama 3, they faced a simple ethical question. The program would need to be trained on a huge amount of high-quality writing to be competitive with products such as ChatGPT, and acquiring all of that text legally could take time. Should they just pirate it instead?

Meta employees spoke with multiple companies about licensing books and research papers, but they weren’t thrilled with their options. This “seems unreasonably expensive,” wrote one research scientist on an internal company chat, in reference to one potential deal, according to court records. A Llama-team senior manager added that this would also be an “incredibly slow” process: “They take like 4+ weeks to deliver data.” In a message found in another legal filing, a director of engineering noted another downside to this approach: “The problem is that people don’t realize that if we license one single book, we won’t be able to lean into fair use strategy,” a reference to a possible legal defense for using copyrighted books to train AI.

Court documents released last night show that the senior manager felt it was “really important for [Meta] to get books ASAP,” as “books are actually more important than web data.” Meta employees turned their attention to Library Genesis, or LibGen, one of the largest of the pirated libraries that circulate online. It currently contains more than 7.5 million books and 81 million research papers. Eventually, the team at Meta got permission from “MZ”—an apparent reference to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg—to download and use the data set.

This act, along with other information outlined and quoted here, recently became a matter of public record when some of Meta’s internal communications were unsealed as part of a copyright-infringement lawsuit brought against the company by Sarah Silverman, Junot Díaz, and other authors of books in LibGen. Also revealed recently, in another lawsuit brought by a similar group of authors, is that OpenAI has used LibGen in the past. (A spokesperson for Meta declined to comment, citing the ongoing litigation against the company. In a response sent after this story was published, a spokesperson for OpenAI said, “The models powering ChatGPT and our API today were not developed using these datasets. These datasets, created by former employees who are no longer with OpenAI, were last used in 2021.”)

Until now, most people have had no window into the contents of this library, even though they have likely been exposed to generative-AI products that use it; according to Zuckerberg, the “Meta AI” assistant has been used by hundreds of millions of people (it’s embedded in Meta products such as Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram). To show the kind of work that has been used by Meta and OpenAI, I accessed a snapshot of LibGen’s metadata—revealing the contents of the library without downloading or distributing the books or research papers themselves—and used it to create an interactive database that you can search here:

There are some important caveats to keep in mind. Knowing exactly which parts of LibGen that Meta and OpenAI used to train their models, and which parts they might have decided to exclude, is impossible. Also, the database is constantly growing. My snapshot of LibGen was taken in January 2025, more than a year after it was accessed by Meta, according to the lawsuit, so some titles here wouldn’t have been available to download at that point.

LibGen’s metadata are quite disorganized. There are errors throughout. Although I have cleaned up the data in various ways, LibGen is too large and error-strewn to easily fix everything. Nevertheless, the database offers a sense of the sheer scale of pirated material available to models trained on LibGen. Cujo, The Gulag Archipelago, multiple works by Joan Didion translated into several languages, an academic paper named “Surviving a Cyberapocalypse”—it’s all in here, along with millions of other works that AI companies could feed into their models.

Meta and OpenAI have both argued in court that it’s “fair use” to train their generative-AI models on copyrighted work without a license, because LLMs “transform” the original material into new work. The defense raises thorny questions and is likely a long way from resolution. But the use of LibGen raises another issue. Bulk downloading is often done with BitTorrent, the file-sharing protocol popular with pirates for its anonymity, and downloading with BitTorrent typically involves uploading to other users simultaneously. Internal communications show employees saying that Meta did indeed torrent LibGen, which means that Meta could have not only accessed pirated material but also distributed it to others—well established as illegal under copyright law, regardless of what the courts determine about the use of copyrighted material to train generative AI. (Meta has claimed that it “took precautions not to ‘seed’ any downloaded files” and that there are “no facts to show” that it distributed the books to others.) OpenAI’s download method is not yet known.

Meta employees acknowledged in their internal communications that training Llama on LibGen presented a “medium-high legal risk,” and discussed a variety of “mitigations” to mask their activity. One employee recommended that developers “remove data clearly marked as pirated/stolen” and “do not externally cite the use of any training data including LibGen.” Another discussed removing any line containing ISBN, Copyright, ©, All rights reserved. A Llama-team senior manager suggested fine-tuning Llama to “refuse to answer queries like: ‘reproduce the first three pages of “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.”’” One employee remarked that “torrenting from a corporate laptop doesn’t feel right.”

It is easy to see why LibGen appeals to generative-AI companies, whose products require huge quantities of text. LibGen is enormous, many times larger than Books3, another pirated book collection whose contents I revealed in 2023. Other works in LibGen include recent literature and nonfiction by prominent authors such as Sally Rooney, Percival Everett, Hua Hsu, Jonathan Haidt, and Rachel Khong, and articles from top academic journals such as Nature, Science, and The Lancet. It includes many millions of articles from top academic-journal publishers such as Elsevier and Sage Publications. (...)

Publishers have tried to stop the spread of pirated material. In 2015, the academic publisher Elsevier filed a complaint against LibGen, Sci-Hub, other sites, and Elbakyan personally. The court granted an injunction, directed the sites to shut down, and ordered Sci-Hub to pay Elsevier $15 million in damages. Yet the sites remained up, and the fines went unpaid. A similar story played out in 2023, when a group of educational and professional publishers, including Macmillan Learning and McGraw Hill, sued LibGen. This time the court ordered LibGen to pay $30 million in damages, in what TorrentFreak called “one of the broadest anti-piracy injunctions we’ve seen from a U.S. court.” But that fine also went unpaid, and so far authorities have been largely unable to constrain the spread of these libraries online. Seventeen years after its creation, LibGen continues to grow.

by Alex Reisner, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Matteo Giuseppe Pani/The Atlantic

In Praise of Communitarian-not Corporate-Baseball

Peak professional baseball arrived in 1949, when more than thirty-nine million fans sat on splintery bleachers and under leaky grandstands in support of their local minor-league nines. They watched in San Diego and Stroudsburg, Fort Worth and Fond du Lac, Louisville and Lumberton—448 towns and cities in total, across all forty-eight states, Canada, Cuba, and Mexico. The teams for which they cheered played in one of fifty-nine Major League–affiliated leagues, ranging from Class D to Triple-A. At least as many clubs played outside that structure, including black, semipro, American Legion, industrial, and town teams. There were even eight entries in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, then at or near the height of its popularity.

Mickey Mantle made his professional debut in 1949—with the Class D Independence Yankees. Arky Vaughan made his departure—with the Triple-A San Francisco Seals. Lew Burdette, Joe Adcock, Whitey Ford, and Carl Erskine tantalized on their way up to the bigs. Bobo Newsom and Doc Cramer took another shot at glory on their way down. Frank Saucier hit .446 for the Wichita Falls Spudders. Leo “Muscle” Shoals hit fifty-five home runs for the Reidsville Luckies. Max West drove in 201 runs for the San Diego Padres. One-armed outfielder Pete Gray played the last game of his career in Dallas. Former Negro League stars Ray Dandridge, Luke Easter, and Harry “Suitcase” Simpson set fire to their respective leagues while waiting with varying degrees of patience for a chance in the majors—a chance that, in Dandridge’s case, would never come.

Minor-league baseball, like life in general, was less regulated, less secure, more unpredictable, more exciting, and, not coincidentally, more violent than the baseball (and life) we have come to know. In Hagerstown, a guard shot at a fan for pocketing too many foul balls. In Cedar Rapids, a melee was halted only when the national anthem was played over the loudspeakers. In Havana, Pepper Martin was suspended for the season for choking an umpire. In San Bernardino, Forrest “Frosty” Kennedy went two-for-five at the plate even though both of his wrists were taped. On the previous night he had attempted suicide.

The next year total minor league attendance declined dramatically—by more than seven million. Nineteen fifty-one saw the same massive decline. By 1959 only twenty-one leagues were operating. Three years later, the minors reached their attendance nadir, having lost on the order of thirty million fans in just thirteen years. American progress had unraveled the fabric of American community, of which the vast minor league system was a manifestation. Television, Interstate highways, suburbanization, and air conditioning, among other culprits, combined to cool Americans’ ardor for sitting in the hot and humid twilight to watch teams that included nary a national celebrity. By the 1960s the average American’s life had become less local and more mediated. An entire American age of lusty communitarianism had crested.

Not until the late 1970s did the minor leagues begin to emerge from the death spiral that had gripped them just when they seemed to be at their healthiest. At about the same time there began to emerge a minor-leagues literature, consisting most typically in wistful memoirs, literary travelogues, or combinations thereof. (...)

By the time Dirk Hayhurst’s The Bullpen Gospels (2010) and Lucas Mann’s Class A (2013) were published, the minor leagues were once again riding high. There were no longer nearly so many teams as in the 1940s (and earlier), but the attendance record of 1949 was eclipsed in 2004, and in 2019 the 176 minor league clubs that were formally affiliated with Major League Baseball drew about 41.5 million fans. There were no longer so many weird statistical accomplishments, nor so many colorful nicknames, nor so many oddball characters, nor so much uniqueness, period, but by the 2000s the minor leagues were nevertheless once again great fun—much more fun than MLB.

Not only that, but much like the local high school, the county fair, or the fire company, minor league teams, at least at their lower levels, functioned as core community institutions, and at a time when such institutions were sorely needed. Teams networked local residents, allowed for regular but informal interactions, showcased community organizations and initiatives and businesses, offered entry-level and part-time jobs for local youth, and provided something for the community to collectively support and rally around that was utterly apolitical and noncontroversial.

Then Major League Baseball did what Major League Baseball can be reliably expected to do: it acted with gobsmacking stupidity. Having blithely canceled the 2020 minor league season—but not, of course, the MLB season—due to purported COVID concerns, in 2021 MLB announced that in the name of efficiency it was reducing the number of minor league affiliates by more than 25 percent, down to 120. Forty-two towns, mostly out-of-the-way, working-class sorts of places, would lose their baseball teams. These were “some of the few remaining places where people could still find happiness and connection, for affordable prices, as they had for generations,” Will Bardenwerper reminds us, and now they would be extinguished, “merely to save the equivalent of one major league minimum salary.”

by Jeremy Beer, Front Porch Republic |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Dumb & Dangerous, Feeble & Friendless

In a dangerous and complex world, it’s not enough to be strong. You must also be smart. As secretary of state during the Obama administration, I argued for smart power, integrating the hard power of our military with the soft power of our diplomacy, development assistance, economic might and cultural influence. None of those tools can do the job alone. Together, they make America a superpower. The Trump approach is dumb power. Instead of a strong America using all our strengths to lead the world and confront our adversaries, Mr. Trump’s America will be increasingly blind and blundering, feeble and friendless.

Let’s start with the military, because that’s what he claims to care about. Don’t let the swagger fool you. Mr. Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth (of group chat fame) are apparently more focused on performative fights over wokeness than preparing for real fights with America’s adversaries. Does anyone really think deleting tributes to the Tuskegee Airmen makes us more safe? The Trump Pentagon purged images of the plane that dropped the atomic bomb that ended World War II because its name is the Enola Gay. Dumb.

Instead of working with Congress to modernize the military’s budget to reflect changing threats, the president is firing top generals without credible justification. Five former secretaries of defense, Republicans and Democrats, rightly warned that this would “undermine our all-volunteer force and weaken our national security.” Mass layoffs are also hitting the intelligence agencies. As one former senior spy put it, “We’re shooting ourselves in the head, not the foot.” Not smart.

If they’re this reckless with America’s hard power, it’s no surprise that they’re shredding our soft power. As a former secretary of state, I am particularly alarmed by the administration’s plan to close embassies and consulates, fire diplomats and destroy the U.S. Agency for International Development. Let me explain why this matters, because it’s less widely understood than the importance of tanks and fighter jets.

I visited 112 countries and traveled nearly one million miles as America’s top diplomat, and I have seen how valuable it is for our country to be represented on the ground in far-flung places. The U.S. military has long understood that our forces must be forward deployed in order to project American power and respond quickly to crises. The same is true of our diplomats. Our embassies are our eyes and ears informing policy decisions back home. They are launchpads for operations that keep us safe and prosperous, from training foreign counterterrorism forces to helping U.S. companies enter new markets.

China understands the value of forward-deployed diplomacy, which is why it has opened new embassies and consulates around the world and now has more than the United States. The Trump administration’s retreat would leave the field open for Beijing to spread its influence uncontested.

Diplomats win America friends so we don’t have to go it alone in a competitive world. That’s how my colleagues and I were able to rally the United Nations to impose crippling sanctions against Iran’s nuclear program and ultimately force Tehran to stop its progress toward a bomb — something Mr. Trump’s bluster has failed to do. (He actually defunded inspectors keeping an eye on Iranian research sites. Dumb.)

Diplomacy is cost-effective, especially compared with military action. Preventing wars is cheaper than fighting them. Mr. Trump’s own former secretary of defense Jim Mattis, a retired Marine Corps four-star general, told Congress, “If you don’t fund the State Department fully, then I need to buy more ammunition.”

Our development assistance has always been a small portion of the federal budget, but it also has an outsize impact on international stability, especially paired with effective diplomacy. When American aid dollars help stop a famine or an outbreak, when we respond to a natural disaster or open schools, we win hearts and minds that might otherwise go to terrorists or rivals like China. We reduce the flow of migrants and refugees. We strengthen friendly governments that might otherwise collapse.

I don’t want to pretend that any of this is easy or that American foreign policy hasn’t been plagued by mistakes. Leadership is hard. But our best chance to get it right and to keep our country safe is to strengthen our government, not weaken it. We should invest in the patriots who serve our nation, not insult them.

Smart reforms could make federal agencies, including the State Department and U.S.A.I.D., more efficient and effective. During the Clinton administration, my husband’s Reinventing Government initiative, led by Vice President Al Gore, worked with Congress to thoughtfully streamline bureaucracy, modernize the work force and save billions of dollars. In many ways it was the opposite of the Trump administration’s slash-and-burn approach. Today they are not reinventing government; they’re wrecking it.

All of this is both dumb and dangerous. And I haven’t even gotten to the damage Mr. Trump is doing by cozying up to dictators like Russia’s Vladimir Putin, blowing up our alliances — force multipliers that extend our reach and share our burdens — and trashing our moral influence by undermining the rule of law at home. Or how he’s tanking our economy and blowing up our national debt. Propagandists in Beijing and Moscow know we are in a global debate about competing systems of governance. People and leaders around the world are watching to see if democracy can still deliver peace and prosperity or even function. If America is ruled like a banana republic, with flagrant corruption and a leader who puts himself above the law, we lose that argument. We also lose the qualities that have made America exceptional and indispensable.

If there’s a grand strategy at work here, I don’t know what it is. Maybe Mr. Trump wants to return to 19th-century spheres of influence. Maybe he’s just driven by personal grudges and is in way over his head. As a businessman, he bankrupted his Atlantic City casinos. Now he’s gambling with the national security of the United States. If this continues, a group chat foul will be the least of our concerns, and all the fist and flag emojis in the world won’t save us.

by Hilary Clinton, NY Times |  Read more:
Image: Haiyun Jiang

[ed. Foreign policy for the last 60+ years (more or less). Excellent strategy. Spotty execution.]

A Beginner’s Guide to Sociopolitical Collapse.

“A society does not ever die ‘from natural causes,’ but always dies from suicide or murder—and nearly always from the former.” — D. C. Somervell.

À propos of nothing, I have found myself wondering recently what it would be like to live through a collapse. Would I see it coming? What would be the signs?

A number of times in human history, a society has gone from a relatively high level of sociopolitical complexity to a much lower one—rapidly, within the span of a few decades. This is what we will call collapse. Collapse manifests as a lower degree of social differentiation and economic specialization, less centralized control, less behavioral control, less investment in art and monuments, a lower flow of information within society, less sharing and trading of resources, a lower degree of social coordination and organization, and territorially smaller political units. And a lot of people probably starve, if they don’t meet more violent ends. (...)

Collapse has happened often enough that it is not likely to be a series of flukes, but a general feature of human social organization. Not every society eventually suddenly collapses; it may be the case that when one does it is because some particular conditions obtain. What are those conditions? Can we come up with a general explanation? And while the subject is interesting as a pure matter of social science, we all want to know: could it happen here?

The GOAT on the topic of collapse is archeologist Joseph Tainter. His 1988 book The Collapse of Complex Societies weaves together historical and prehistorical fact, an insistence on explaining the cross-sectional variation, rigorous theorizing including an embrace of marginal analysis, and generally great social scientific judgment. It is a tour de force. If you want to understand why it has lived rent-free in my head for the last few months, as several friends can attest, read on.

Why complexity?

If we’re going to understand why societies sometimes spontaneously simplify, we must first have a solid theory about why they become complex in the first place. In both a historical and analytical sense, simple human societies arise first. These simple societies are highly egalitarian and non-hierarchical. Why do they move toward greater hierarchy, stratification, inequality, and complexity?

There are broadly two views on this question. One view is dominated by class conflict. The state reflects domination and exploitation based on divided interests. A ruling class coercively subjugates the population out of greed and selfishness. Marxists are not the only exponents of this view, but they are perhaps the most vehement, viewing society as sharply divided between workers who engage in social production and elites who appropriate the output. Of course, subjugation of subpopulations happens—American slavery is a gruesome example. The pure class conflict view is that subjugation explains the entirety of society, which is composed of ruling elites and subject populations.

At the other end of the spectrum are integrationist or functionalist views, which are based on shared interests between members of society. Even an egalitarian society is going to face problems, and many of these problems are most readily addressed by creating some form of hierarchy and social division of labor. For example, limited water resources may require the creation and maintenance of an irrigation system, including the need to mobilize and direct labor. The threat of invasion may require the establishment of military defense, including a command and control system. In general, society faces some problem, which requires the creation of public goods, which requires the creation of administrators, who are rewarded for realizing the benefits of centralization. Complexity solves social problems and serves population-wide needs.

Tainter adopts a moderate position, one that leans integrationist but also includes a role for class conflict. Complexity in society does exist to solve problems and provide benefits to the populace. And yet, “compensation of elites does not always match their contribution to society, and throughout their history, elites have probably been overcompensated relative to performance more often than the reverse.” Public choice considerations mean that even if complexity arises to solve broad-based social problems, the ultimate distribution of the benefits can be influenced by greed and power. “Integration theory is better able to account for distribution of the necessities of life, conflict theory for surpluses.”

Although the distribution of the social surplus is not always fair, in what follows, the role of complexity in society as a problem-solving mechanism is what is most important. Without this foundation, collapse is no big deal, or good, or perhaps it is even the ascension of society to a Marxist anarcho-primitivist Utopia. We can sympathize with this view when true subjugation is occurring, while recognizing that, in the general case, complex society exists to solve social problems.

by Eli Dourado |  Read more:

Image: Wolfgang Moroder.

Who is Vivian Jenna Wilson?

Vivian Jenna Wilson on Being Elon Musk’s Estranged Daughter, Protecting Trans Youth and Taking on the Right Online (Teen Vogue)

Images: Andy Jackson

[ed. Sharp and funny:]  

TV: Speaking of some of your family, I feel like right-wingers are actually pretty bad at posting.

VW: They're not funny. You have to be funny. Most of them have the charisma of a soaking bathrobe. I mean, it's not my fault that most of them don't know how to be funny. It's not that hard.

"Professional G-List Celebrity and aspiring something or other - A human being (probably)." (Jenna Wilson)

What Astrophysicists Think About Aliens

[ed. Dr. Fatima - Awesome. Want to learn a few new things today (like about Dyson spheres)? See also: Does all intelligent life face a Great Filter?; and, Maybe aliens are just vibing (Ars Technica).]

Chapters

00:00:00 - Cold Open 

00:01:28 - Introduction 

00:03:40 - Part 1: Searching for Aliens 

00:13:19 - Part 2: The Fermi Paradox 

00:22:53 - Patreon Ad Break 

00:24:23 - Part 3: An Alternate Hypothesis 

00:33:29 - Discussion Question 

00:34:39 - Final Thoughts 

00:40:11 - Comment Sharing + Credits

Sex, Drugs and Pre-Existing Medical Conditions

The crippling cost of insuring old rockers.

“Insurance” must rank as one of the most un-rock’n’roll words in the dictionary, alongside “annuity” and “podiatry”. But as an ever-growing number of ageing rock stars hit the road, it’s a word that’s increasingly in the spotlight. As with other forms of insurance – health, travel or car – the cost to musicians of insuring themselves against cancelling a concert due to ill-health rises sharply with age. And with thousands of pounds of income at risk from abandoning a show, the stakes for these artists couldn’t be higher.

Our concert venues and festival fields are bursting with mature heritage acts. This year will see UK shows by Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band (average age 73) and AC/DC (Brian Johnson is 77, while Angus Young is 69). Stevie Wonder, 74, is rumoured to be plotting something big, and the Rolling Stones remain an active performing unit despite reportedly aborting plans to play live in London this year (Mick Jagger and Keith Richards are 81, Ronnie Wood is 77).

In July, heavy metal legends Black Sabbath will reform for a vast concert in their native Birmingham. They’re all in their mid-70s, and much-loved singer Ozzy Osbourne suffers from Parkinson’s disease.

Analysis in 2023 found that the average age of Glastonbury headliners rose from 26 to 49 in two decades, a figure that would be far higher had whippersnappers such as Adele and Stormzy not dragged it down. Paul McCartney was 80 when he topped the Pyramid Stage bill in 2022; this year’s event will be headlined by the comparatively sprightly Neil Young, 79.

A performer’s age has a material impact on what it costs to buy so-called “non-appearance” cover, a category of insurance that guarantees their fee if they can’t do a show due to illness or injury. The numbers are stark, according to insurance insiders. A young-ish DJ – a genre of musician usually cheap to insure as they don’t sing – might be charged 1.5 per cent of their promised fee by an insurance company for non-appearance cover.

So if the fee for performing is £100,000, then the DJ pays £1,500 for the policy. This rises to around 3 per cent for a band with multiple members. But for older artists in their seventies and above, the insurance can cost between 10 and 15 per cent of their performance fee, meaning up to £15,000 of their £100,000 income. For a big band earning £3 million for a stadium show, that’s an eye-watering £450,000 spent on insurance.

“Statistically, the older the artists get the more probability there is of medical issues causing them to be unable to perform. And that is what pushes the premium rates up,” says Tim Thornhill, managing director of Tysers Live, which offers music and live events insurance. “And it’s more of an issue when it is more than one individual in a band, so you’ve got the compound effect of having multiple people within a band.” (...)

A way of getting the cost down, Twomey says, was for stringent exemptions to be added to policies. These include stricter exclusion of any pre-existing medical conditions and restricting the policy’s timespan to the absolute minimum number of days. Insurance companies are also demanding comprehensive medical MOTs before a policy is offered.

“Insurance companies are insisting on full medicals beforehand, including blood and urine samples, which never used to happen in the old days. I started doing this type of insurance in the 1980s and in those days you had a one page tick-box form, and when you went to the doctor they just took your height and weight. That was it. Now it’s proper screenings,” Twomey says. From heart or plastic surgery to hair transplants, they want to know everything. Image-conscious, hard-living rock stars are reluctant to comply. “And which 70 or 80-year-old wouldn’t flag something on their blood or urine?” says Twomey. “It’s almost inevitable.” (...)

Then there are onerous “deductible” clauses on big tours. These mean that insurance companies don’t pay out until the second cancelled show (or third, fourth or fifth depending on the policy and star’s age). For the first cancelled show, the artist takes the financial hit. Deductibles are “the killer,” says Fish.

This being insurance, an ecosystem of workarounds has sprouted up. Some insurers offer no claims bonuses – effectively money back after a tour if a policy isn’t used. Then there’s the upfront no claims bonus – money earned at the start of the tour that’s clawed back if there’s a claim. Some performers use sponsorship money as de facto insurance, while others insist that promoters in different territories insure them separately, thereby slicing the risk into bitesize chunks and removing the need for deductibles.

The corollary of this minefield is that many ageing bands simply don’t bother with insurance. That’s right – in an act of rebellion that would put young acts to shame, older acts often tour with no cover at all. “Over the years artists’ appetite for buying this insurance has fallen away,” says Twomey. Performers simply absorb any losses themselves.

“Plenty of artists tour without insurance,” says Steve Howell, director of music at insurance company Howden’s Sport and Entertainment division. “I’ve got some artists who we quote for every year because their accountants say they should have it and the artist says ‘No, I’m not spending money like that. I’ve been touring for four decades’. So they self-insure on the basis that if they miss a show they will cover the wages of their staff and they would just miss out on that income. Some artists have got enough money.”

Put crudely, for a huge band that plays a 40-date stadium tour and stands to earn millions per show, it’s cheaper to suck up the losses from one missed show than shell out insurance for all 40 at 15 per cent (costing many more millions). Rather than the insurance company taking the risk, the artists shoulder it.

A tour promoter who’s worked for the world’s biggest concert companies can see why artists shun insurance. “Some artists make $8-10 million a night. They think, ‘That’s a million bucks a night to insure us in case someone’s ill.’ The reality is, if the drummer’s sick you just get a new one in.”

by James Hall, The Telegraph |  Read more:
Image: Jim Dyson/Getty Images Europe

Ditch Your Gigantic Air Fryer

For nearly a decade, I’ve had a love-hate relationship with my gargantuan air fryer/pressure cooker (an older version of this thing). It weighs a ton—21 pounds, to be exact—and can cook far more food than my two-person household needs. Plus, from an aesthetic standpoint, it isn’t the statement piece I had envisioned for my kitchen. Yet, the promise of fast-food-quality french fries (without needing a deep fryer) or a perfectly chewy midnight cookie (without turning on the oven) has convinced me to keep this egregiously large, ugly thing displayed on my kitchen countertop.

After I saw videos on TikTok of the Ninja Crispi, a mini air fryer that weighs as little as 6.5 pounds and is touted as a portable device, my hopes of finding a small-scale replacement for my monolithic air fryer were high, but my expectations were low. Could it really be powerful enough to evenly crisp a large batch of fries? Or lightweight enough to conveniently take on the go? Or small enough to stash in the cupboard without taking up a ton of space?

Much to my surprise, in testing the Crispi, I discovered that it packs a lot of power despite its modest size and has several enticing features, such as its glass cooking containers, which provide unobstructed views of the food at all times. Still, it has a few drawbacks compared with other smaller air fryers (that are less than half the price).

How it works

Most air fryers I’m familiar with have a built-in container or a removable nonstick basket that pulls out like a drawer. The Ninja Crispi, on the other hand, is essentially a lid that attaches to either of two standalone glass containers: one 4-quart and one 6-cup. The containers are refrigerator-, freezer-, and dishwasher-safe, and each comes with a corresponding lid that snaps on tight for storing leftovers.

Ninja claims that the 4-quart container can fit a 4-pound chicken. The 6-cup container is better for one or two people and can easily fit two standard-size Russet potatoes. Ninja also sells additional compatible glassware sizes online, including a 2.5-quart option, which can hold 2 pounds of chicken wings at a time. For context, my gigantic 5-quart air fryer can prepare about three salmon fillets at once.

The Crispi comes with eight individual pieces—a 1,500-watt air fryer hub with an attached 3-foot power cord, the 4-quart and 6-cup glass cooking containers and matching lids, large and small crisper plates, and an adapter (for the larger container)—all of which can be stored separately.

You can use it in two configurations: the 4-quart setup, which weighs about 9 pounds, and the smaller, 6-cup setup, which weighs about 6.5 pounds. Overall, the components feel durable and sturdy, and the Ninja Crispi is covered by a one-year limited warranty if you purchase the appliance through an authorized SharkNinja retailer.

The heating console features a simple control panel with four buttons: start (to power the machine on and off), mode (to select from its four cooking presets), and two additional buttons, a plus sign and a minus sign (to increase or reduce the cooking time).

The four cooking presets activate four automatic temperature and fan-speed settings: Recrisp (380 °F to 400 °F), Bake (375 °F to 400 °F), Air Fry (400 °F to 425 °F), and the high-heat Max Crisp (425 °F to 450 °F).

When you select a preset, the air fryer provides a suggested cooking time, which you can adjust depending on what you’re making. The machine also can detect which container is underneath it and adjust the cooking preset to account for the difference in volume.

Setting up the Crispi is simple. First, insert the appropriate crisper plate into the bottom of the glass container. Then, add the food. Next, attach the heating pod (if you’re using the 4-quart option, place it on top of the adapter until it clicks) atop the glass container. Finally, select the cooking preset and toss the food occasionally for best results.

by Maki Yazawa, Wirecutter | Read more:
Images: Wirecutter/NYT
[ed. Looks good. Not cheap.]

Beijing Versus Shanghai, Pastoralism as Key to Civilization

I taped a conversation with Tyler Cowen last week and the first question he asked me was whether I preferred Shanghai or Beijing and I had no answer. It was an appropriate question since I was still jet lagged from having just come from Asia, but what struck me the most during my two short times in China is how much everything seemed the same. I wrote about that bland ubiquity after walking both cities, which I see as an intentional leveling: A uniform modernity which seems to be one of the goals of the CCP, which I’ve likened to the guardian class in Plato’s Republic, who are playing a real world version of SimCountry, directing, managing, and tweaking almost every aspect of Chinese life. One of their primary goals has been to replace the traditional, which they see as messy, embarrassing, and impoverished, with a landscape that is wealthier, but which to me has all the soul and flair of a corporate business park.

This isn’t so much a judgement as an observation. Given China’s past of poverty, tragedy, and hardship, I understand its desire for a more refined, sanitized, and conventional modern lifestyle. The safety, well-being, and economic flourishing of Chinese citizens is a billion times more important than my tourist’s desire for quaint historical character, and they have delivered that. Regardless of what else you think about China and the CCP, it should be acknowledged how impressive the last forty years of stewardship have been, with the wealth of citizens having grown almost thirty times, lifting hundreds of millions out of poverty.

Yet despite the outward similarities between Shanghai and Beijing, I am sure there are differences, and that their opacity is as much about me as it is the built landscape. Walking a city as I do, trekking fifteen miles from the outer beltway to downtown repeatedly, isn’t always the best way to understand its culture, and China’s outward uniformity makes this limitation even more apparent.

Still, part of me is stubbornly sticking to my thesis that China is culturally homogeneous, certainly more than other large countries, especially those outside of Asia, which as a continent has a tendency towards uniformity compared to Europe and the Americas.

Chinese conformity isn’t surprising since one of the CCP’s stated goals is to achieve widespread shared prosperity. Uniformity, not division, is what the CCP understands as China’s strength, and hence, any groups hanging on to past ways, especially ones very different from the modal, are an embarrassment. That is a very different way of imagining the public good, one that we in the West, since the Enlightenment, have linked to the protection and expansion of individual rights, with the primary goal being the flourishing of the self, even if that means it is at odds with the flourishing of the wider community.

I am not blind to the problems of the CCP, and I am certainly not so dogmatic as to pretend this approach hasn’t come with huge issues, but I also believe the party isn’t simply cynical hypocrites consumed by a desire for power. They really do have a different understanding of the public good, at a deep philosophical level, and China’s growing economic might means that worldview cannot simply be dismissed as the ramblings of some bad guys. Western style constitutional democracy, with our emphasis on human rights (as defined by us), is an ideology, and when we say it is the highest form that other nations need to advance towards, we are making a claim on truth that a lot of the world doesn’t necessarily agree with.

China is very different, because of its internal similarities, and that is why it isn’t going away. The next decades of global politics will be framed as being about an economic and military competition between the US and China, but the ideological differences are as great as, if not greater, than those between the US and the Soviets. That is harder to see because the CCP isn’t your father’s Communist party, and for all practical purposes has adopted a market economy. They are, however, still committed to the communalism part of Communism, as well as the materialism part. That means they believe in an elite cadre selflessly managing society towards a communal shared good, which translates into conformity over individuality, national order and rights over personal expression — the nail that sticks out doesn’t get praise, but gets hammered down. (...)

My next trip will begin with nine days in Tashkent (Uzbekistan), followed by eight in Xi’an, and then what is quickly becoming my traditional stopover in Seoul before returning home.

I’m going to Tashkent, because on reflection Central Asia is the region of the world that I’m currently most captivated by, because it is the region least similar to the rest of the world, without also being uniformly depressing. In retrospect, Bishkek and Ulaanbaatar were two of my most rewarding trips, and despite their pollution, they are wonderful places to visit, that are inexpensive, safe, unique, and currently not saturated with tour groups. In both places you can lose yourself in the local culture, without feeling that you are either a mark to be exploited, or so different that your existence there is impolite.

I booked this trip because I’m deeply interested in ancient history and am currently reading two books on the Neolithic Proto-Indo-European language, the world’s original lingua franca. This is the famous mother tongue, and the idea that there was a group that was the origin of so many of the great civilizations of the world, has a long intellectual history, one that got derailed by the support of the Nazis.

Despite the Nazis’ warped fascination with it, the core idea remains valid: a civilization from the late Neolithic to early Bronze Age expanded from Central Asia across a vast region, stretching from England to India, and left a lasting genetic, cultural, and linguistic legacy.

This wasn’t the Aryans, like the German archaeologist thought, but the Yamnaya culture that emerged around 3,500 BC from the region that is currently a war zone between Russia and Ukraine.

I would recommend both of the books, “The Horse, the Wheel, and Language” and “By Steppe, Desert, and Ocean: The Birth of Eurasia”, although the first is more academic, but also far more insightful.

For those without the time to read them, the quick (and oversimplified) theory is that a pastoral culture from what is now southern Ukraine and Russia, around 5,500 years ago brought together, and perfected, the recent inventions of wool spinning, wheeled travel, domesticated horses, and herding, to learn how to ride horses, build wagons and chariots, and then go forth out both west towards Europe and east across the steppe, and within a thousand years, transform the world.

They did this because they embraced a form of pastoralism which was truly revolutionary, allowing them to leave the narrow river valleys and venture into the otherwise empty steppe, which stretched for 5,000 miles to Beijing, in an almost unbroken series of flat, dry, grasslands.

This lifestyle was so transformative because herds of sheep and cattle were organic factories manage by humans, “grass processors (which) converted plains of grass, useless and even hostile to humans, into wool, felt, clothing, tents, milk, yogurt, cheese, meat, marrow, and bone — the foundations of both life and wealth.”

The amazing thing is that pastoral, nomadic, animal-centered lifestyle, the one that forever changed the world over five thousand years ago, still exists today in parts of Central Asia in many ways unchanged, although it has become rarer and rarer. Yet, only a hundred years ago it was still the dominant way of life.

One side note that I add whenever I write about the nomadic and pastoral life— neither means being fully transient without a home; rather, both are deeply tied to place, often more so than a modern person who lives in the same apartment for their entire life. Nomads do shift between locations, carting their tents a few times a year by horse (or now Prius) as the weather changes, but these moves are often short (just up or down from the hill) and they return to the same places repeatedly. Pastoralism, and the nomadic life, are deeply intertwined with the land, which they know in ways we moderns are clueless about.

I don’t know if I will find any lingering traces of the nomadic lifestyle in Tashkent, as I did in Mongolia. However, even if I don’t, I plan to visit the national museums, since much of the archaeology behind the Proto-Indo-European thesis comes from Soviet-era work, which is now housed in local museums

Both of these books also touched on China, given that early farming civilizations also began around the Yellow and Yangtze rivers. One book included a map of China’s millet/rice divide, which made me realize that, in traveling from Shanghai to Beijing, I had crossed a 5,000-year-old cultural boundary. I began wondering about Tyler’s original question and whether I had actually noticed this difference.

by Chris Arnade, Walks the World |  Read more:

Images: uncredited

[ed. See also: The Divine Engineer of Ancient Sichuan:]

"The first thing one notices about Chengdu, capital of the western Chinese province of Sichuan, is how eager the city is to lean into its theme: the pandas. Smiling pandas peek out of storefront windows, beckoning in tourists to buy panda-themed keychains and fridge magnets. Children run around in black-eared headbands, threading between scooters parked in long rows on the sidewalk. In front of the Lego store in Chengdu’s branch of Taikoo Li, one of China’s premier chain malls, there stands a Lego brick model of a giant panda, larger than life, avatar of the cutesy aesthetic and the material abundance that so define the urban landscape of the new China of the 21st century.

Of course, this new China is just the latest in a succession of “new Chinas” in recent history, from the new China of a national republic to the new China of socialism with Chinese characteristics. But it is a China which outside observers, particularly those better acquainted with its predecessors of previous decades, are liable to find bewildering. In the new China, sleek modern office buildings box in sunken cobbled streets. In the new China, villagers pitch in for group orders of produce and medicine from an online shop. In the new China, street vendors deep-frying potatoes and tofu in an open vat of oil have you scan a QR code to pay with your phone. I’ve only seen one beggar in China since moving to Shanghai last August; he was in Chengdu, sitting on a blanket in front of an entrance to the subway station, head bowed over his personal QR code for WeChat Pay."

Wang Zhi-Hong

via:

Can We Build a Five Gigawatt Data Center?

We access AI through our screens as part of the ephemeral digital world that makes up the internet. But AI doesn’t actually live in the cloud.

AI lives in data centers. Tens of thousands of computers racked in rows hum away in buildings the size of several football fields. It's louder than you would expect. Industrial fans push in a constant breeze of chilled air, funneling away the waste heat. Thick bundles of fiber optic cables snake along ceiling tracks like mechanical veins, carrying unfathomable streams of data.

 

This is a 100-megawatt data center — a facility that consumes as much electricity as a small city, all to keep the digital world spinning. It’s impossible to say exactly how many exist today — companies prefer to keep their data centers private — but estimates put the number of hyperscale data centers worldwide at over 1,000. Yet, despite their footprint, they are already being outclassed in the constant need for more compute capable of training future generations of AI. We have reached the point where, if we don’t build bigger centers soon, tech giants will be forced to stretch training runs over multiple years. In short, AI has already outgrown its starter home.

GPT-4 was reportedly trained with 30 MW of power. Forecasts predict that in the next five years large training runs will require 5-gigawatt data centers1 — facilities at least 10 times the size of today’s largest data centers. That is roughly the average energy needed to power all of New York City.

Tech leaders seem confident that they’ll be able to build centers of a size that even a few years ago would have seemed unprecedented. Mark Zuckerberg said a 1-GW data center is “only a matter of time.” Meta has broken ground on their largest data center yet, where they hope to bring one gigawatt online in 2025. Microsoft and OpenAI are reportedly planning a 1- to 5-GW “Stargate” facility supposedly launching in 2028. Sam Altman even pitched the White House on the construction of multiple data centers that each require up to 5 GW. Tech, in short, is betting on a YIMBY future for AI training.

But how realistic are these plans? For all of the big talk, most GW proposals are still in the planning and permission stages. And actual sites in the United States that could support 1-GW — let alone 5-GW — projects are scarce for several reasons.

by Lynette Bye, Asterisk |  Read more:
Image: uncredited

Your A.I. Lover Will Change You

Until the recent rise of A.I, it was fashionable to claim that consciousness was an illusion or, perhaps, an ambient property of everything in reality—in either case, not special. Such dismissiveness has become less common (perhaps because techies still believe that tech entrepreneurs are special). Consciousness is lately treated as something precious and real, to be conquered by tech: our A.I.s and robots are to achieve consciousness.

What follows, then, is that love is also real and also a target to be conquered. The conquest of love will not be abstract but vividly concrete for everyone, especially young people, and soon. This is because we are all about to be presented, in our phones, with a new generation of A.I. simulations of people, and many of us may fall in love with them. They will likely appear within the social-media apps to which we are already addicted. We will probably succumb to interacting with them, and for some very online people there won’t be an easy out. No one can know how the new love revolution will unfold, but it might yield one of the most profound legacies of these crazy years.

It is not my intent to prophesy the most dire outcomes, but we are diving into yet another almost instant experiment in changing both how humans connect with one another and how we conceive of ourselves. This is a big one, probably bigger than social media. A.I. love is happening already, but it’s still novel, and in early iterations. Will the many people who can’t get off the hamster wheel of attention-wrangling on social media today become attached to A.I. lovers that are ceaselessly attentive, loyal, flattering, and comforting? What will A.I. lovers becoming commonplace do to humanity? We don’t know. (...)

Many of my colleagues in tech advocate for a near-future in which humans fall in love with A.I.s. In doing so, they seek to undo what we did last time, even if they don’t think of it that way. Around the turn of the century, it was routinely claimed that social media would make people less lonely, more connected, and more coöperative. That was the point, the stated problem to be solved. But, at present, it is widely accepted that social media has resulted in an “epidemic of loneliness,” especially among young people; furthermore, social media has enthroned petty irritability and contention, and these qualities have overtaken public discourse. So now we try again.

On the more moderate end of the spectrum, A.I.-love advocates do not see A.I.s replacing people but training them. For instance, the Stanford neuroscientist David Eagleman makes the argument that people are not instinctively good at relationships, in the way that we are good at walking or even talking. The current ideal of a healthy, comfortable coupling has not been essential to the survival of the species. Traditional societies structured courtship and pairing firmly, but in modernity many of us enjoy freedom and self-invention. Secular institutions have found it necessary to train students and employees in consent procedures. Why not learn the rudiments with an A.I. when you are a teen-ager, thus sparing other humans your failings?

Eagleman suggests that we should not make A.I. lovers for teens easygoing; instead, we ought to make them into obstacle courses for training. Still, the obvious question is whether humans who learn relationship skills with an A.I. will choose to graduate to the more challenging experience of a human partner. The next step in Eagleman’s argument is that there are too many channels in a human-to-human relationship for an A.I., or eventually a robot, to emulate—such as smell, touch, social interactions with friends and family—and that these aspects are hardwired into our natures. Thus we will continue to want to form relationships with one another.

In some far future, Eagleman predicts that robots could “pass” in all these ways, but “far” in this case means very far. I am not so sure that human desire will remain the same. People are changed by technology. Maybe all those things tech can’t do will become less important to people who grow up in love with tech. Eagleman is a friend, and when I complain to him that A.I. lovers could be tarnished by business models and incentives, as social media was, he concedes the point, but he asserts that we just need to find the right way to do it.

Eagleman is not alone. There are some chatbots, like Luka’s Replika, that offer preliminary versions of romantic A.I.s. Others offer therapeutic A.I.s. There is a surprisingly level of tolerance from traditional institutions, too. Committees I serve on routinely address this topic, and the idea of A.I. therapists or companions is generally unopposed, although there are always calls for adherence to principles such as safety, lack of bias, confidentiality, and so on. Unfortunately, the methods to assure compliance lag behind the availability of the technology. I wonder if the many statements of principles for A.I., like those by the American Psychiatric Association and the American Psychological Association, will have any effect.

A mother is currently suing Character AI, a company that promotes “AIs that feel alive,” over the suicide of her fourteen-year-old son, Sewell Setzer III. Screenshots show that, in one exchange, the boy told his romantic A.I. companion that he “wouldn’t want to die a painful death.” The bot replied, “Don’t talk that way. That’s not a good reason not to go through with it.” (It did attempt to course-correct. The bot then said, “You can’t do that!”)

The company says it is instituting more guardrails, but surely the important question is whether simulating a romantic partner achieved anything other than commercial engagement with a minor. The M.I.T. sociologist Sherry Turkle told me that she has had it “up to here” with elevating A.I. and adding on “guardrails” to protect people: “Just because you have a fire escape, you don’t then create fire risks in your house.” What good was even potentially done for Setzer? And, even if we can identify a good brought about by a love bot, is there really no other way to achieve that good?

Thao Ha, an associate professor in developmental psychology at Arizona State University, directs the HEART Lab, or Healthy Experiences Across Relationships and Transitions. She points out that, because technologies are supposed to “succeed” in holding users’ attention, an A.I. lover might very well adapt to avoid a breakup—and that is not necessarily a good thing. I constantly hear from young people who regret their inability to stop using social-media platforms, like TikTok, that make them feel bad. The engagement algorithms for such platforms are vastly less sophisticated than the ones that will be deployed in agentic A.I. You might suppose that an A.I. therapist could help you break up with your bad A.I. lover, but you would be falling into the same trap. (...)

When it comes to what will happen when people routinely fall in love with an A.I., I suggest we adopt a pessimistic estimate about the likelihood of human degradation. After all, we are fools in love. This point is so obvious, so clearly demonstrated, that it feels bizarre to state. Dear reader, please think back on your own history. You have been fooled in love, and you have fooled others. This is what happens. Think of the giant antlers and the colorful love hotels built by birds that spring out of sexual selection as a force in evolution. Think of the cults, the divorce lawyers, the groupies, the scale of the cosmetics industry, the sports cars. Getting users to fall in love is easy. So easy it’s beneath our ambitions. (...)

When I express concern about whether teens will be harmed by falling in love with fake people, I get dutiful nods followed by shrugs. Someone might say that by focussing on such minor harm I will distract humanity from the immensely more important threat that A.I. might simply wipe us out very quickly, and very soon. It has often been observed how odd it is that the A.I. folks who warn of annihilation are also the ones working on or promoting the very technologies they fear.

This is a difficult contradiction to parse. Why work on something that you believe to be doomsday technology? We speak as if we are the last and smartest generation of bright, technical humans. We will make the game up for all future humans or the A.I.s that replace us. But, if our design priority is to make A.I. pass as a creature instead of as a tool, are we not deliberately increasing the chances that we will not understand it? Isn’t that the core danger?

by Jaron Lanier, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Replika
[ed. See also: The rise of chatbot “friends”. What is a friend anyway? (Vox).]

Donald Fagen

IGY (International Geophysical Year)

Standing tough under stars and stripes, we can tell
This dream's in sight
You've got to admit it
At this point in time that it's clear
The future looks bright

On that train, all graphite and glitter
Undersea by rail
Ninety minutes from New York to Paris
Well, by '76 we'll be A-OK

What a beautiful world this will be
What a glorious time to be free
What a beautiful world this will be
What a glorious time to be free

Get your ticket to that wheel in space while there's time
The fix is in
You'll be a witness to that game of chance in the sky
You know we've got to win

Here at home we'll play in the city
Powered by the sun
Perfect weather for a streamlined world
There'll be spandex jackets, one for everyone

What a beautiful world this will be
What a glorious time to be free
What a beautiful world this will be
What a glorious time to be free

On that train, all graphite and glitter
Undersea by rail
Ninety minutes from New York to Paris
(More leisure for artists everywhere)

A just machine to make big decisions
Programmed by fellas with compassion and vision
We'll be clean when their work is done
We'll be eternally free, yes, and eternally young

What a beautiful world this will be
What a glorious time to be free
What a beautiful world this will be
What a glorious time to be free

What a beautiful world this will be
What a glorious time to be free
What a beautiful world this will be
What a glorious time to be free

[ed. yeah, well...guess that didn't work out.]