Google Rolls Out Street View 'Time Travel'

Celebrating 20 years of Google Earth.

After 20 years, being able to look at any corner of the planet in Google Earth doesn't seem that impressive, but it was a revolution in 2005. Google Earth has gone through a lot of changes in that time, and Google has some more lined up for the service's 20th anniversary. Soon, Google Earth will help you travel back in time with historic Street View integration, and pro users will get some new "AI-driven insights"—of course Google can't update a product without adding at least a little AI.

Google Earth began its life as a clunky desktop client, but that didn't stop it from being downloaded 100 million times in the first week. Today, Google Earth is available on the web, in mobile apps, and in the Google Earth Pro desktop app. However you access Earth, you'll find a blast from the past.

For the service's 20th anniversary, Google was inspired by a social media trend from last year in which people shared historic images of locations in Google Maps. Now, Google Earth is getting a "time travel" interface where you can see historic Street View images from almost any location.

While this part isn't new, Google is also using the 20th anniversary as an opportunity to surface its 3D timelapse feature. These animations use satellite data to show how an area has changed from a higher vantage point. They're just as cool as when they were announced in 2021.

by Ryan Whitwam, Ars Technica |  Read more:

Image: Google

[ed. From 15th anniversary:]

Google is also introducing a new in-house camera built specifically for Street View. The company says it's "roughly the size of a house cat" and weighs less than 15 pounds. The goal is to take "all the power, resolution and processing capabilities that we’ve built into an entire Street View car" and cram it into an ultra-portable package that can be shipped to underserved areas "like the Amazon jungle."

Google already has several versions of a backpack-mounted "Trekker" Street View camera for hiking trailers, so this camera is designed to augment its car fleet. Street View cars are big, rolling computers that are hard to move around the world, while this camera is completely self-contained. It can be easily strapped to the roof racks of a car and is controlled via a smartphone app. There's even a modular system for add-ons like lidar.  ~ Read more:

Seeing Our Future in China’s Cameras

I heard some surprising refrains on my recent travels through China. “Leave your bags here,” a Chinese acquaintance or tour guide would suggest when I ducked off the streets into a public bathroom. “Don’t worry,” they’d shrug when I temporarily lost sight of my young son in the crowds.

The explanation always followed: “Nobody will do anything,” they’d say knowingly. Or, “There’s no crime.” And then, always, “There are so many cameras!”

I can’t imagine such blasé faith in public safety back when I last lived in China in 2013, but on this visit it was true: cameras gawked from poles, flashed as we drove through intersections, lingered on faces as we passed through stations or shops. And that was just the most obvious edge of the ubiquitous, multilayered tracking that has come to define life in China. I came away troubled by my time in some of the world’s most-surveilled places — not on China’s account, but because I felt that I’d gotten a taste of our own American future. Wasn’t this, after all, the logical endpoint of an evolution already underway in America?

There was a crash course on the invasive reality of a functionally cash-free society: credit cards refused and verge-of-extinct paper bills spurned. I had to do the thing I’d hoped to avoid, link a credit card to WeChat. That behemoth Chinese “super app” offers everything from banking to municipal services to social media to shopping, and is required to share data with the Chinese authorities. (Elon Musk, by the way, reportedly wants to turn his own app, X, into an invasive offering modeled after WeChat.) Having resigned myself to all-virtual payments, I knew I was corralled like everyone else into unbroken visibility, unable to spend a single yuan or wander down a forgotten side street without being tracked and recorded.

Crisscrossing China as a chaperone on my son’s school trip, I felt that a country I’d fondly remembered as a little rough-and-tumble had gotten calmer and cleaner. A part of me hated to see it. In my own mind, I couldn’t separate the safe, tidy streets from the repressive system of political control that underpins all those helpful cameras.

The Chinese Communist Party famously uses surveillance to crush dissent and, increasingly, is applying predictive algorithms to get ahead of both crimes and protest. People who screen as potential political agitators, for example, can be prevented from stepping onto trains bound for Beijing. During the Covid pandemic, Chinese health authorities used algorithmic contact tracing and QR codes to block people suspected of viral exposure from entering public spaces. Those draconian health initiatives helped to mainstream invasive surveillance and increase biometric data collection.

It would be comforting to think that China has created a singular dystopia, utterly removed from our American reality. But we are not as different as we might like to think. (...)

As my face was getting scanned all over China, Elon Musk’s minions with the so-called Department of Government Efficiency were ransacking federal agencies to seize Americans’ data and sensitive information. Legal experts maintain that accessing this data is illegal under federal privacy laws, which broadly forbid government agencies from disclosing our personal information to anyone, including other parts of the government, without our written consent. But, in the event, neither the law nor our lawmakers protected us.

Mr. Musk’s team moved to access Social Security Administration data containing medical and mental health records, bank and credit card information, and birth and marriage certificates. This month, the Supreme Court temporarily allowed DOGE to access sensitive Social Security records. That means that DOGE staff, under the vague slogan of eliminating wasteful spending, can peruse files containing the most jealously guarded details of millions of American lives — everything from salary to addiction and psychiatric health records. (...)

The government’s enthusiasm for this emerging technology is disquieting. A.I. could help to supersize the surveillance state, offering the potential to quickly synthesize and draw inferences from massive quantities of data.

“The really powerful thing is when personal data get integrated,” said Maya Wang, associate China director at Human Rights Watch. “Not only am I me, but I like these things, and I’m related to so-and-so, and my friends are like this, and I like to go to these events regularly on Wednesdays at 6:30. It’s knowing relationships, movements and also any irregularities.” 

by Megan K. Stack, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Gilles Sabrié for The New York Times

Studio Ghibli’s Midlife Crisis

Disney, Pixar … Ghibli. For its legions of admirers, the Japanese studio hasn’t just held its own against the American powerhouses, it has surpassed them with the impossible beauty of its hand-drawn animation and its commentary on the ambivalence of the human condition.

Although he would refuse to acknowledge it, much of Studio Ghibli’s success is down to one man: Hayao Miyazaki, a master animator whose presence towers over the studio’s output. Making a feature-length anime the old-fashioned way may require a large and multitalented cast, but Miyazaki is the thread running through Ghibli’s creative genius.

Now, as the studio marks its 40th anniversary, it faces an uncertain future, amid renewed speculation that its figurehead auteur really has wielded his pencil for the last time.

Roland Kelts, a visiting professor at the school of culture, media and society at Waseda University, said Ghibli had failed to anticipate a time when Miyazaki, who is 84, would no longer be at the helm, even after the succession question grew more urgent following the death in 2018 of co-founder Isao Takahata.

Instead, the studio shifted its focus to commercial activities. “The studio failed to produce heirs to Miyazaki and Takahata, and now it’s a merchandising monster,” says Kelts, author of Japanamerica: How Japanese Pop Culture Has Invaded the US.

In 2013, Miyazaki announced that he would no longer make feature-length films, citing the difficulty of living up to his own impossibly high standards.

But four years later, Ghibli said its co-founder had had a change of heart and would make “his final film, considering his age”. The result was The Boy and the Heron, winner of the 2024 Academy Award for best animated film.

While Ghibli performs alchemy on the screen, there is nothing it can do to shapeshift itself clear of the march of mortality: Miyazaki’s main colour designer, Yasuda Michiyo, whose work appeared in most of his films, died two years before Takahata, while another co-founder, producer Toshio Suzuki, is 76.

As a result, the studio is finally looking ahead to a future without its leading creative light, notwithstanding persistent rumours that Miyazaki is not quite done yet. “Miyazaki is 84 and may not have time to make another movie,” says Kelts.

A cultural phenomenon

The studio was formally established by Miyazaki, Suzuki and Takahata in 1985 – a year after it released the post-apocalyptic Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. It has since become a cultural phenomenon, winning an Oscar in 2003 for Spirited Away, and a second Oscar in 2024 for The Boy and the Heron.

Told through the prism of the fantastical, and featuring characters and themes that defy the pigeonholing that underpins much of Hollywood’s output, Studio Ghibli’s films are widely considered masterpieces of their genre, earning two Oscars and the devotion of millions of fans across the world.

Watching a Ghibli movie is like reading literature, says Miyuki Yonemura, a professor at Japan’s Senshu University who studies cultural theories on animation. “That’s why some children have watched My Neighbour Totoro 40 times,” she says. “Audiences discover something new every time.”

In some ways, Ghibli shares certain values with Disney, says Susan Napier, a professor of Japanese studies at Tufts University in the US, believes. “Both are family oriented, insist on high production standards and have distinctive worldviews.

“But what is striking about Ghibli is how for the last 40 years the studio has reflected and maintained a set of values and aesthetics that are clearly drawn from its founders and not from a corporate playbook,” adds Napier, author of Miyazakiworld: a Life in Art.

Miyazaki has made no secret of his progressive politics, informed by his experience living through conflict and postwar austerity, and has publicly criticised attempts by conservative politicians to revise Japan’s war-renouncing constitution. His films address the themes of war and the environment, but stop short of distilling the narrative into a simple battle of good versus evil.

The Boy and the Heron, for example, opens with Mahito Maki, the 12-year-old protagonist, losing his mother in the US’s aerial bombardment of Tokyo in March 1945, in which an estimated 100,000 people died.

However, Ghibli’s decades of independence ended in 2023 when the studio was acquired by Nippon TV – a move that the studio conceded came amid uncertainty over its future leadership.

Speculation that Miyazaki’s eldest son, Goro, was heir apparent has dampened since the latter voiced doubt about his ability to run the studio alone, and amid reports that artistic differences had contributed to “strained” relations between father and son.

Now it will be up to Nippon TV to develop a pool of directors to gradually replace the old guard, including those with expertise in computer animation, considered anathema to Ghibli’s fierce commitment to hand-drawn frames. (...)

While computer-generated animation and AI make the painstaking, aesthetically stunning animation that Ghibli is renowned harder than it was a generation ago, Napier is not convinced the octogenarian auteur is ready to retire.

“I can’t imagine someone like Miyazaki, with his intellectual and artistic vivacity, simply being content to sit around, so who knows?”

by Justin McCurry, The Guardian |  Read more:

Images: Studio Ghilbi/Deviant Art; and Chris Pizzello/AP

[ed. See also: Welcome to the Semantic Apocalypse (DS).]

The Risk of Serialized Reality

When David Lynch died, the internet filled with quotes from him. I usually cringe at these sudden and predictable proliferations of soundbites that become nearly meaningless in their ubiquity. The point in moments like this is to show that you are the kind of person who posts a David Lynch quote, the quote itself is secondary at best, you might as well just post a square with the words “David Lynch Quote.” This time though, there was one quote that made its way through to me, that stuck in my brain, looping. “Ideas are like fish,” David Lynch supposedly said. “If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you've got to go deeper. Down deep, the fish are more powerful and more pure. They're huge and abstract. And they're beautiful.”

I wrote the quote down. I repeated it to myself. I repeated it to my students. I kept repeating it because Lynch is talking about risk and lately I have been obsessed with the interplay of art and risk. I don’t know exactly when the seed of this obsession began, but I can point to two things I read that brought it into full bloom: Dan Sinykin’s Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature and Shane Denson’s “The New Seriality.” I read Sinykin’s book with the same dread and thrill as a true crime narrative — aha, so this is what killed idiosyncratic literature! And then I read Denson’s article in a similar but even more impulsive way — this is what is continuing to kill idiosyncratic lit, the crime is happening right now as I read.

Sinykin’s Big Fiction tracks the conglomeration of publishing and how editors went from talking jazz and pouring drinks with their writers in the 1950s to poring over profit-and-loss statements and how these shifts were caused by the buying up of independent, often family-owned, publishing houses by companies like RCA and other large corporations, and how the consolidation of these multinational corporations led to a risk-averse model with no room for low-demand commodities. What this means practically is both a refusal to publish books that do not mimic other recent, financially-successful books and the death of the long-range model wherein an editor like Albert Erskine could continue to publish an author like Cormac McCarthy whose pre-Border Trilogy novels never sold more than 2,500 copies each. (...)

I began to be obsessed with risk and art because I felt like it had become so difficult to find new (recently published) books that were utterly unique; in recent years, fewer publications review books at all, and the ones that do tend to prioritize the same few, already well-publicized titles. The books in the windows of stores I pass are all some version of the same trend, and social media repeats the same names on a shrill loop. I am of course far from the only person to note this tendency and even my complaining about a lack of uniqueness is in no way unique. In 2022, there arose a spate of thought pieces on cultural boredom. Literary critic Christian Lorentzen posted to Substack that “boredom is pervasive,” then went on to lay the fault at the feet of the “cult of marketing,” which has led to a scenario where:

. . .books and movies shilled by corporations have started to become indistinguishable from their own marketing campaigns. Indeed, it’s been argued that pop songs are merely advertisements for tours now that albums are dead, movies are advertisements for their sequels, and books are applications for their authors’ teaching gigs or else merely bloated streaming-TV treatments.

Three months later, in the New York Times, Michelle Goldberg complained not only about her own boredom but also about Lorentzen’s boredom and his supposedly misdirected conclusion about the source of his boredom. Goldberg didn’t like that Lorentzen blamed marketing, complaining that the “risk aversion of cultural conglomerates can’t explain why there’s not more interesting indie stuff bubbling up.” I wonder how Goldberg thinks that anything “bubbles up” without marketing of some sort, but the point of her op-ed was really to hail W. David Marx’s Status and Culture: How Our Desire for Social Rank Creates Taste, Identity, Art, Fashion, and Constant Change. Marx himself responded to Goldberg (and the 1,200 or so comments on her piece) by underscoring the role of the internet in Goldberg’s boredom:

In the last few decades, mass culture successfully neutralized the constant aesthetic challenge of indie avant-garde experimentation, either by delegitimizing it as pretentious or quickly absorbing and defusing its innovations. The internet meanwhile promised to be weirder, more niche, and more interesting, and yet the zeitgeist is anchored to mega-moments, rehashed reboots, and lowest common denominator viral content . . . . [The] explanation for this is that (1) status value was always key to the appeal of avant-garde and indie culture, and (2) the internet conspires against providing such content with status value. In the ensuing vacuum, the mass media and elite consumers spend their energy engaging with mass culture, which is more likely than niche content to be conventional.

Goldberg laments the lack of the “truly cool” by complaining about music in coffee shops but what she is, almost inadvertently, pointing out is a trend that threatens not just to deny us groovy café vibes but to remake the ways in which we receive and metabolize all new art. I try not to be too alarmist, but I think this is a time for alarm.

It is not unique to blame the internet. Many others have written about the impacts of the digital age including Lorentzen who, in his 2019 article for Harper’s, outlined the shift in his role as a literary critic, saying that he was “put on notice” that he was now a simple link in capitalist food chain, a purveyor of products to fill the feeds of those who “believe in the algorithm” and to comfort them by demonstrating that “everyone else is watching, reading, listening to the same things.” Blaming the internet for artistic uniformity is nothing new but in reading Big Fiction and “The New Seriality,” I began to conceptualize the overlap between conglomeration and algorithmicity as the perfect storm in the true crime death of the availability of idiosyncratic literature. I am not complaining that distinctive books do not exist, but rather that we are rapidly losing the means of accessing them. (...)

Comparison or “comp” titles are not an entirely new phenomenon, but their importance has risen meteorically as conglomeration and serialization have become the new norms. Comp titles are now often printed right on the cover of new books along with the phrase “for readers of . . . ” and their importance throughout the acquisition process is unparalleled, or as one Big Five editor recently told researcher Laura McGrath, “Comps are king in this business.” McGrath has done extensive research on the impacts of comp titles and the ways in which they reinforce whiteness and other conservative trends in publishing. In her 2021 article for American Literary History, she quoted an agent as saying:

If [editors] can’t find a book that [a potential acquisition] is like [i.e. a comp title] — if it’s really, really original — then they can’t buy it. Which is crazy! Because the whole point is that people should want to read something that they’ve never read before! That’s what publishers were asking for a couple years ago. They said, “We want something new and fresh and different!” So I would say, “Here! Read this! Here you go! On a platter! New, fresh, different!” And they’d say, “But we can’t find the comps!”

McGrath demonstrates that while comp titles have always served a supposedly instructive role (“this book is like that book”), in recent years they “have become prescriptive (‘this book should be like that book’) and restrictive (‘ . . . or we can’t publish it’).” (...)

The term “”literary” has been debated for years. It is not a very useful term at all and I for one would like to see it replaced, although I’m not sure what to replace it with (maybe we should just borrow from Lynch and call them “down deep books”). For me, the word literary is only useful as a way to denote books that are meant to be read on their own, with focus and deliberateness, where the experience of each word and sentence is foregrounded. I don’t want “genre” books to not exist, I just don’t think that anyone benefits from a blurring of the difference between “genre” and “Down Deep.” We do not need to talk about these kinds of books hierarchically, but it is ridiculous and harmful to everyone if we pretend that there are no differences between highly-serialized books and books intended to be interacted with outside of the seriality. I purposely say “intended to be interacted with outside of the seriality” and not “created outside of the seriality” because it is no longer possible to entirely create something outside of algorithmized seriality. As Denson says, our very lives are serialized. There do, however, still exist works of music, art, and books that are intended to be interacted with individually and in a foregrounded way. The problem is, how do we find them? With so much of our lives being lived online and so much of book promotion happening on social media, this is becoming a real problem.

by Mesha Maren, The Metropolitan Review |  Read more:

Image: Rene Magritte, The Beautiful Relations, 1967

[ed. See also: no one told me about proust (Personal Canon).]

No Increase in Radiation After US Strikes on Iran, Says UN Nuclear Watchdog

The International Atomic Energy Agency said Sunday that there has been no increase in off-site radiation levels after US airstrikes on Iranian nuclear sites.

The UN nuclear watchdog sent the message via the social platform X on Sunday.

The IAEA can confirm that no increase in off-site radiation levels has been reported as of this time, it said. The IAEA will provide further assessments on situation in Iran as more information becomes available.

Iran said early Sunday there were no signs of contamination at its nuclear sites at Isfahan, Fordo and Natanz after US airstrikes targeted the facilities.

by Business Standard |  Read more:

Image: Reuters

[ed. See also: Officials Concede They Don’t Know the Fate of Iran’s Uranium Stockpile (NYT/DNYUZ). And apparently have no obvious contingency plans or long-term strategy for dealing with whatever Iran decides to do. Hmm... sounds familiar.]

Woody Herman

[ed. Fusion before there was Fusion - this example from the 1970s. A highly regarded bandleader in the 40s and 50s, always evolving. Bio here. ]

Should I Gamble on Music?

A few weeks ago, I wrote about how pop music was becoming a sport. Some of this transformation was related to the language fans used to describe their favorite artists. Other pieces were connected to new-ish betting markets, like Kalshi and Polymarket, that allow you to gamble on basically anything, music included. In researching that piece, I gambled a few hundred dollars and netted $1.98. Caleb Davies has made a lot more money than that. Hundreds of thousands of dollars more.

Though he initially made a name for himself betting on politics through PredictIt a decade ago, Davies — who has been featured in the Washington Post, Politico, and Bloomberg — has branched out from politics and made thousands of dollars gambling on music and movies in recent years. We hopped on the phone last week to talk about how he chooses what to bet on, why Rotten Tomatoes is more complicated than Spotify, and if all this gambling is good for society.

Do you make all of your money through betting markets?

Nope. I work in IT. I do make more money betting than I do working, but I still work.

How long have you been active in betting markets?

I started in 2015 with some political bets.

Were you always interested in gambling or did you just think you had knowledge that you could make some money with?

The latter. I was pretty interested in politics for a long time. I’d be on forums where I could discuss it for a long time. Then I saw ads for this thing called PredictIt ,and I thought I’d give it a try. Before that, my only experience gambling was some poker when that was super popular in the 2000s.

Over the last few years, so many betting markets have gone mainstream, the two biggest probably being Polymarket and Kalshi. What have been the biggest changes in this space since you got started a decade ago?

The biggest change is that it’s gone from something you can make a little bit of money with to something you can make a living with. When I started on PredictIt, you could only bet $850 at a time. Because of that, you probably couldn’t make six figures. With Kalshi and Polymarket, you can easily drop $100k in a market.

Though your initial interest was politics, you seem to be quite active in cultural markets these days, meaning music and movies. How did you get involved in those?

Same type of thing. I love music. I love movies. When those markets appeared, it gave me an outlet to make money on things that I love.

Recently, I saw you betting on what would be the top song on Spotify on a given day. Can you give me some insight into how you assess a market and size your bets?

There are several music markets on Kalshi. Originally, they were all connected to Billboard. The way Billboard constructs their charts is kind of opaque unless you want to pay a bunch of money for their data. Spotify markets caught my eye because all of their data is public. It’s completely transparent. Because of that, I can analyze the data and identify trends. It’s like 95% math and 5% your gut.

So, you are building statistical models to find an edge?

Yup. Most days I’m analyzing decay rates of the most popular songs and growth rates of viral ones. I then compare those to historical trends. I also look at proxies for performance. None of them are perfect, but Apple Music and iTunes will also give you some insight into how something is doing on Spotify.

Do you manually place bets or are they handled automatically through an API?

I’m 100% manual. I’ll monitor markets throughout the day and just look for a price that I want. I will use limit orders, so I don’t have to watch things continuously, though. But I’m still the guy pressing buttons to execute trades.

You’re also very active in betting on what score a movie will get on Rotten Tomatoes. Is your process there similar?

It’s similar, but the complexity around Rotten Tomatoes is far greater. Spotify is really just a single data drop every day and then monitoring some proxies. Rotten Tomatoes involves more modeling ahead of time. I have to track when new reviews drop and gauge how they will affect things. It’s just more complicated.

Are those the most complex markets you bet on?

I think so.

It’s clear to me that markets provide utility in some cases. For example, some people claim that betting markets on inflation are more accurate than experts. It’s valuable to have accurate inflation forecasts. But the utility of other markets is not clear to me. Like is there any value by having markets to bet on how songs will chart? Or is it just a way to make money?

I think you’ll hear many defenders of prediction markets claim that they are great sources of information. In many cases, they are. But there are also tons of examples where the information from the market provides little to no value. Like does it matter if “Luther” by Kendrick Lamar is going to top Spotify’s daily chart on April 14, 2025? No. It’s not elections or economics data. It’s just a way to gamble. Nothing more.

Over the last few years, gambling markets — especially those around sports — have become very accessible. Everyone is carrying a casino in their pocket. Though I think that people should be able to gamble if they want to, do you think there are downsides to how prevalent gambling has become?

Absolutely. I don't try to fool myself. I've done very well on this stuff, but I don't think the majority of people can control their betting very well. They often lose more than they should be losing. It’s a fairly large problem, and I think it's getting worse with the prevalence of sports betting. It's all over the place. It's so easy for a fun hobby to become a bigger problem. I think it's definitely a societal problem, even though I benefit greatly from it.

by Chris Dalla Riva, Can't Get Much Higher |  Read more:

Image: PredictIt

Honda Rockets

Honda’s hopper suddenly makes the Japanese carmaker a serious player in rocketry.

An experimental reusable rocket developed by the research and development arm of Honda Motor Company flew to an altitude of nearly 900 feet Tuesday, then landed with pinpoint precision at the carmaker's test facility in northern Japan.

The accomplishment may not sound like much, but it's important to put it into perspective. Honda's hopper is the first prototype rocket outside of the United States and China to complete a flight of this kind, demonstrating vertical takeoff and vertical landing technology that could underpin the development of a reusable launch vehicle. (...)

Developed in-house by Honda R&D Company, the rocket climbed vertically from a pedestal at the company's test site in southeastern Hokkaido, the northernmost of Japan's main islands. The vehicle reached an altitude of about 890 feet (271 meters). The vehicle descended to a nearby landing target and settled on its four landing legs just 15 inches (37 centimeters) from its aim point, according to Honda.

What's more, the rocket stood on its four landing legs for liftoff, then retracted the landing gear as it climbed into the sky. At its highest point, the vehicle extended aerodynamic fins akin to those used on SpaceX's reusable Falcon 9 and Super Heavy boosters. Moments before reaching the ground, the rocket folded the fins against its fuselage and deployed its four landing legs for touchdown. The flight lasted approximately 57 seconds.

by Stephan Clark, ArsTechnica |  Read more:

[ed. A company deeply committed to R&D, over short-term shareholder returns, applying its expertise across a variety of platforms. Very impressive.]

American Brownshirts

Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” that the House passed is objectionable for many reasons, most obviously because it is the most regressive economic bill of my lifetime, the class war condensed in legislative form. Its tax policies and spending cuts will erode the well being of Americans slowly for decades to come. Its most immediate destabilizing impact, however—the one that has the potential to push our democracy to the brink—is its vast expansion of the Homeland Security budget, which will be used to build ICE into a huge national army of loyalists under Trump’s control. The money to build America’s brownshirts is in the pipeline. Whereas our military-industrial complex is a threat to the rest of the world, this force will be a direct threat to all of us in the USA. This is the Proud Boys, at national scale, with badges. It is a very dangerous prospect.

Everything I am writing about here has been previously reported in the past few weeks since the House sent the bill to the Senate. But, from my vantage point, the public has not quite grasped just how horrifying a precipice we are on. When you consider the scale of protest already unleashed by the ICE raids in LA; Trump and Stephen Miller’s clear intent to double and triple and quadruple down on the ICE raids and crush the protests with military force; Trump’s unhinged declaration yesterday that “we must expand efforts to detain and deport Illegal Aliens in America’s largest Cities, such as Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York” to achieve “the single largest Mass Deportation Program in History”; and then connect this deep well of poisonous intent with the staggering expansion of ICE’s size and scope that will occur if this bill’s funding comes through, what you will see is the setup for not just a mass deportation program, but a violent national clash between a militarized, government-sanctioned army of Trump loyalists and everyone else. (...)

Let’s focus on the most dangerous funding of all: the direct funding for law enforcement agencies. To level-set you here, understand that right now, before this bill passes, the combined funding of the FBI, DEA, ATF, Secret Service, and all other federal law enforcement is only half the size of the federal funding for immigration and border enforcement. So we are already pouring an inordinate amount of money into stalking immigrants. If the new bill passes, we will add $167 billion to immigration enforcement. Cato helpfully produced this chart to illustrate just how insane this would be: (...)

Part of this funding increase would go to hiring 10,000 new ICE agents, and more than 8,000 new Customs and Border Patrol agents. That would give ICE more agents than the FBI has in the field. It goes without saying that this would be a disaster for not only undocumented immigrants, who would be ruthlessly hunted down like fugitives, but also to any brown-skinned person in America, who can expect to be subjected to harassment by agents sent out to please Stephen Miller’s insatiable desire for public displays of racism at all costs.

It’s even worse than that. Think about this expansion of ICE in the context of the entire arc of Trump’s rise to power. This man falsely claimed to win the 2020 election, tried to have his supporters overthrow the government to keep him in power, came back and won again, and pardoned the people who tried to overthrow the government on his behalf. The main thing he learned from his first term was to surround himself only with fanatical loyalists. The entire top level of the federal government is now staffed with a buffet of lunatics, incompetents, and extremists whose defining characteristic is their loyalty to Trump above the law. This includes the military and the federal law enforcement agencies.

Within the ranks of the military and law enforcement, however, absolute loyalty cannot be achieved so quickly. Even though those constituencies are strongly Republican, there is also some significant level of anger at Trump as well. FBI agents have seen colleagues purged just for working on January 6 cases; Army soldiers were forced to march in Trump’s stupid parade; Marines, many of them from immigrant families, have been outrageously deployed to patrol Los Angeles. These things create dissatisfaction in the ranks that is hard to measure, but real.

So how can Trump be sure that the absolute loyalty he demands extends all the way down to his foot soldiers? By hiring new ones. Who do you think those ten thousand fresh new ICE agents will be? Well, one thing we can say for sure is that they will be people who are okay with the proposition of taking a job with ICE as it is run under Donald Trump. This is not a job anyone will take by accident. It’s on the news every day. Hundreds of thousands of people are in the streets protesting against it. This creates a self-selecting pool. It will attract only those who are not repulsed by it. Job applicants will consist of those who see pictures of dudes wearing tactical vests and face coverings jumping out of unmarked trucks and grabbing people and think to themselves, “that looks cool.”

The new and expanded version of ICE will not just be immigration enforcers. They will be the most ideologically reliable armed branch of government for Donald Trump. They will be the 2025 parallel of the brownshirts. They will be the most obvious place for the president to turn for dirty work in the streets. Because of this, I guarantee, once they are in place, you will see their sphere of activities expand. Enforcing immigration laws will be defined to include “going after those who try to impede the enforcement of immigration laws”—a group that, according to Trump and Miller, includes protesters, journalists, and Democratic politicians. The increasingly outrageous expansion of ICE activities will certainly be rubber stamped by a Republican Congress which is already busy trying to make it illegal to report the identities of the masked men who have come to arrest your neighbor.

The question to ask yourself about what is coming is not, “Is that legal?” It is, “With Donald Trump and Stephen Miller fully in control of the government, and with no checks on their power within the government’s three branches, what is the next thing they need to achieve their agenda?” What they need is a loyal private army. And that is what they’re building.

by Hamilton Nolan, How Things Work |  Read more:

Image: Getty

Congress Passes Blank Bill For Trump To Write Whatever Law He Wants

New Legislation Frees Up President To Do Pretty Much Anything, Really

WASHINGTON—After weeks of eliminating what many lawmakers called “frivolous” and “unnecessary” provisions, Congress reportedly passed a blank bill Thursday in which President Donald Trump can simply write whatever law he wants. “Today we are sending to the president’s desk 200 completely clean sheets of paper that are hereby codified such that anything he chooses to fill those pages with will have the full force of law,” House Speaker Mike Johnson said as he ushered the bill through his chamber, overcoming minor pushback to ultimately win bipartisan support for the measure, which gives Trump the power to enact federal statutes, declare war, or spend the entirety of the U.S. Treasury without a single check or balance. “With this bill, the president will finally be able to take any thought that crosses his mind, write it down, and have it instantly become an enforceable part of the U.S. Code,” Johnson added. “Americans have spoken, and they want Donald Trump to have carte blanche to do whatever he wants. It’s our job as members of Congress to simply get out of the way.” Just hours after the bill’s passage, President Trump took to Truth Social and sharply criticized Congress for making him write down anything at all.

by The Onion |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. Just as important - reading skills not required.]

This War Will Destabilize The Entire Mideast Region And Set Off A Global Shockwave Of Anti-Americanism vs. No It Won’t

Point

This War Will Destabilize The Entire Mideast Region And Set Off A Global Shockwave Of Anti-Americanism

George W. Bush may think that a war against Iraq is the solution to our problems, but the reality is, it will only serve to create far more.

This war will not put an end to anti-Americanism; it will fan the flames of hatred even higher. It will not end the threat of weapons of mass destruction; it will make possible their further proliferation. And it will not lay the groundwork for the flourishing of democracy throughout the Mideast; it will harden the resolve of Arab states to drive out all Western (i.e. U.S.) influence.

If you thought Osama bin Laden was bad, just wait until the countless children who become orphaned by U.S. bombs in the coming weeks are all grown up. Do you think they will forget what country dropped the bombs that killed their parents? In 10 or 15 years, we will look back fondly on the days when there were only a few thousand Middle Easterners dedicated to destroying the U.S. and willing to die for the fundamentalist cause. From this war, a million bin Ladens will bloom.

And what exactly is our endgame here? Do we really believe that we can install Gen. Tommy Franks as the ruler of Iraq? Is our arrogance and hubris so great that we actually believe that a U.S. provisional military regime will be welcomed with open arms by the Iraqi people? Democracy cannot possibly thrive under coercion. To take over a country and impose one’s own system of government without regard for the people of that country is the very antithesis of democracy. And it is doomed to fail.

A war against Iraq is not only morally wrong, it will be an unmitigated disaster.

Counterpoint

No It Won’t

No it won’t.

It just won’t. None of that will happen.

You’re getting worked up over nothing. Everything is going to be fine. So just relax, okay? You’re really overreacting.

“This war will not put an end to anti-Americanism; it will fan the flames of hatred even higher”?

It won’t.

“It will harden the resolve of Arab states to drive out all Western (i.e. U.S.) influence”?

Not really.

“A war against Iraq is not only morally wrong, it will be an unmitigated disaster”?

Sorry, no, I disagree.

“To take over a country and impose one’s own system of government without regard for the people of that country is the very antithesis of democracy”?

You are completely wrong.

Trust me, it’s all going to work out perfect. Nothing bad is going to happen. It’s all under control.

Why do you keep saying these things? I can tell when there’s trouble looming, and I really don’t sense that right now. We’re in control of this situation, and we know what we’re doing. So stop being so pessimistic.

Look, you’ve been proven wrong, so stop talking. You’ve had your say already. Be quiet, okay? Everything’s fine.

You’re wrong.

by The Onion |  Read more:

Images: uncredited

[ed. Here we go again. F**king idiots. See also: A Look Back at How Fear and False Beliefs Bolstered U.S. Public Support for War in Iraq (Pew Research Center).]

Up a Creek With Abbey Road

We want things to fit, like square pegs in square holes. But there are no square holes. There are stones in shoes, bumps in roads, clouds in skies. It rains and pours, and each drop triggers a drum, a fretless bass, a guitar hero, a fiddle, a tuba, a brass band, otherworldly organs, three singers so earnest they sound as if they’re pleading for their lives. It’s like a Disneyland treatment of Deliverance — three hicks singing “It’s a small world after all” in such a way that you can’t tell when one member of the trio lets off and the next one starts.

In The Band’s music, it is a small world: You hear bar-band rock & roll steeped in crotchety American folksongs, but you also hear authentic soul — voices joining, musicians who just plain care. It’s the best beer-commercial music of all time.

Last year, Capitol reissued The Band’s eight albums for the label. The Last Waltz, a 1978 album and film documenting their star-studded farewell concert, has just been re-released. When The Band’s debut, Music From Big Pink, emerged late in 1968, it was already clear they had invented something unique. It was a vibe record in the guise of rock music — a warm-sounding pastiche in which “feel” and songwriting were taken equally into account. At the same time, they are one of the most potent precursors of Americana, a broadly defined catch-all genre coming into prominence today. Only now does The Band’s music make sense, so let’s explore their sound. (...)

The Band were a bunch of Canadian hayseeds (save for Helm, a Southern hayseed). They drifted together in Toronto under the aegis of an obscure rockabilly performer, Ronnie Hawkins. Joining one by one, they were all in his band, the Hawks, as of 1961, but they left him in 1964. (Other names they recorded under or considered include the Canadian Squires, the Honkies and the Crackers.) Used to playing fraternity parties and dark, bloody bars, they were plucked from obscurity in the fall of 1965 when Bob Dylan chose them to back him on his electric folk-rock world tour. (Again, save for Helm: Sick of the booing that greeted his first few dates with Dylan, he quit and moved back to Arkansas for the span of the tour.) Documented on innumerable bootlegs and 1998’s Live 1966, the Hawks were electric Dylan’s wild mercury sound.

The tour’s final show was in May 1966; Dylan’s legendary motorcycle accident happened in July. To recover, he retreated to Woodstock, and The Band joined him. There they recorded collaborative demos (which later emerged as The Basement Tapes) off and on throughout 1967 at Big Pink, the group’s gathering place. After helping Dylan define rock on tour, they now explored folk music’s outer edges, drawing out new shapes and sounds, weaving in strands of ’50s and ’60s R&B.

When their debut came out in 1968, they faced a barren field. If only by virtue of others’ exhaustion, the group had beaten out the competition. The Beatles had retired from live performance in August 1966; mired in fame, the Rolling Stones were in the midst of a two-year concert hiatus; Dylan would perform in public only five times over the following six and a half years, three of those backed by or accompanying The Band.

by Alec Hanley Bemis, HHB Goodies | Read more:
Image: The Band; Big Pink uncredited

***

Following Paul McCartney’s closing of the 50th Anniversary broadcast of Saturday Night Live, my wife wanted to listen to The Beatles the following day.
“Early, middle, or late?” I asked.
“What did McCartney sing last night?” she asked.
“Ah, ‘Golden Slumbers’ from Abbey Road, side two,” I said.

I reached for my vinyl copy. In my collection are the original 1969 release and its 2009 remixed and remastered counterpart. I went for the latter. I must say, I’ve worn out my first copy. In fact, I don’t play The Beatles on my turntable much anymore, having played them over-and-over when I was a teenager. The music, a pleasant earworm, burned itself into my brain granting me the chance to call it up in my head on demand. Abbey Road, the pen-ultimate release in the band’s discography, isn’t my favorite. I prefer Revolver. So, I was due for another listen to Abbey Road, this time under Giles Martin’s careful remix.

“Come Together”s bass line initiates one of music history’s most meticulously crafted albums. This is no ordinary collection of songs. The opening track, a funky rap by John Lennon, is an ear-catching statement because this record is different from all the rest. Abbey Road is a gumbo of Beatles tracks featuring a groove or as we say in jazz circles, music that’s in the pocket. It was amazing to hear the songs again after Macca’s appearance on television, which I’ll discuss in context, but first my revisit with the album.

As most people know, Abbey Road was the name of the EMI studios where The Beatles made their sound. It was home and when the cold January roof-top concert, at Apple's offices, ended in 1969, it looked like the band was done. By the spring, George Martin their producer, took control, calling them back into the studio to record. It was going to be a high-mark in technical achievement. EMI invested in eight-track reel-to-reel tape machines, a solid-state transistor mixing desk in stereo, the band’s first.

Yet, hearing the songs again in my living room, I noticed something new. After “Come Together” and “Something”, “Oh, Darling” hit me as a tribute to Fats Domino. It still kicks because of McCartney’s intention to sing as raw as possible. He wanted to sound desperate and he does on the line, “When you told me, you didn’t need me anymore, well, you know, I nearly broke down and cried.” His Little Richard “ooos” and the song’s cheeky oh yeah ending, sounds terrific. The band loved Little Richard, and Fats Domino so in this sense, Abbey Road is a homage to the artists who got them into music in the first place. But it’s hiding in plain sight. The arpeggiated guitar during the chorus pushes the intensity to the extreme. Beneath, the unassuming background falsetto oos and ahs. Gorgeous!

by John Corcelli, Random Access Music Notes |  Read more:

Image: Iain MacMillian via

via:

How to Find Musicians and Music Writing on Substack

How to find musicians and music writing on Substack ( Rock 'n' Roll with Me)

***

Listings by functional categories (musician, writer, DJ, educator, etc.)

Shanté has very generously set up The Music Directory where you can find alphabetical listings for the following functional categories (click the link to go to a post containing that listing):

Writers/Journalists
Musicians
DJs/Selectors
Playlist Curators
Reviewers/Critics
Producers
Composers
Historians/Scholars/Researchers
Podcasters & Radio Hosts
Collectors
Educators — **New as of 3/30/25

via:

Kikagaku Moyo

To a New Shining Hill

Beyond woke and anti-woke

Midway through 2025, it’s safe to say woke and anti-woke are exhausting themselves. Cultural clashes that characterized so much of the last decade just do not matter any longer. Woke has dissipated, and the blindly anti-woke have lost their raison d’etre. Some have defaulted to furious Israel advocacy or embrace of MAGA, while others keep their free speech commitments. The woke have mostly gone quiet, with a few outliers straining to revive a movement that is mostly done. If they have any hope for a comeback, it’s in Donald Trump’s overreach. But while Trump’s attacks on civil liberties and academic freedom have provoked a great deal of backlash, they have not created any environment remotely like the 2010s, when many different social justice causes were dominant and the power elite were desperate to keep up. Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo will never be cultural giants again. Their moment has passed.

All of this is easy enough to declare, but what is actually next? What is post-woke? Post-anti-woke? We are now going to find out. On the whole, I am optimistic: culture is reaching a healthier state, and you’re slowly seeing a richer, calmer discourse. The histrionics of the last decade are absent, and hustlers on each side of the war are not able to drum up so much attention. If I understood the allure of anti-woke in those years bookending Covid, much of it now seems stale, and most of the writers and intellectuals worth paying attention to have moved on. Cultural shifts do happen, as much as some might pretend otherwise, and we’ve got to take stock of where we are and what this all might mean. This is hardest to do in the moment itself, but that doesn’t make the work any less vital. It is important to try to grasp at the fluidity of culture itself, even when the waters run right through one’s fingers.

The new age is neo-Romantic in scope, but it’s early yet—it’s difficult, still, to describe particular works of art appearing today as “Romantic” or sharing a similar sensibility. In part, this is because novels, movies, and even music can have long incubation periods, and the individuals creating them may be reacting to currents that are more personal in scope. At the same time, 2025 is starting to feel like a turning point for art broadly: this year, the writer Mo Diggs has argued, is already a great one for cinema, and it feels there is a hunger again for excellence from filmmakers and movie-goers alike. The retreads can still dominate, but we’ve passed peak Marvel, and are exiting the Hero era. The Hero era transcended the movies themselves and extended to virtually all facets of life: politics, the internet, and the rise of Silicon Valley. In the late 2000s, 2010s, and early 2020s, the influencer model was dominant. Influencers, in most contexts, are individuals who post frequently on YouTube and TikTok, amassing large followings and parlaying the attention they receive into sponsorships, brand deals, and other marketing opportunities. These influencers were in deep parasocial relationships with their audiences, to the point where many viewers believed them to be their personal heroes. This engagement extended beyond YouTube—consider, for a moment, how men like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg and even Jeff Bezos were once viewed by the culture. Musk, in the 2010s, was Iron Man, the brilliant, cosmopolitan polymath who could turn any company he touched to gold. Zuckerberg’s Facebook, in the late 2000s, was considered a new political Eden that could usher in America’s first Black president and make us all less lonely. Silicon Valley titans were not so different than Marvel superheroes, worshiped by millions while convincing the younger generations that such fortune-making—and even blatant monopolization and oligarchic behavior—was to be celebrated. How many Americans truly worried about Zuckerberg’s decision to buy Instagram and WhatsApp? Who truly fretted over Amazon acquiring Whole Foods? The tech heroes were rarely questioned.

A hallmark of the new era is skepticism of leaders in all walks of life; I can’t remember a time in which Americans were more jaded by celebrity culture and the range of influencers who exerted so much pull on the zeitgeist over the last decade. Katy Perry is a punchline and the Kardashians are a punchline. Taylor Swift is impregnable, but the heights of 2023 will never return again. Travis and Taylor are increasingly passé. Who is cool anymore? Who are today’s heroes? In any other period of recent history, these were very easy questions to answer. No longer. I wrote, a year ago, about an American left wing devoid of leaders—and not wanting them—and I am starting to believe that this trend now extends everywhere. Politicians are no longer unifying figures, and whatever fan bases they boast are deeply polarized—if these politicians, excepting Donald Trump, can truly exert a pull on most voters. Celebrity endorsements have certainly never meant less, as Kamala Harris’ failure demonstrated. The emergence of Trump and then AOC marked a sort of Hero era apotheosis; close your eyes and try to imagine, in 2025, a candidate for Congress winning one election and becoming a national celebrity literally overnight. It just would not happen.

Mass culture, as a concept, is rapidly dying off. It exists, and there are certain movies or streaming shows that can get Americans talking, but it is frailer than ever. There might be figures who are famous to one person who may mean nothing to another. There are fewer cultural totems, fewer shared reference points. The internet has created an eternal present and handed off the task of cultural curation to the users themselves. The term user speaks to how the relationship between human beings and digital technology has long been framed—the goal, from the perspective of anyone who reaps a profit off this tech, is to make the human being addicted, to own their time as much as any drug might—and it’s one, in this new protean era, that we are now aware of, if we haven’t necessarily broken free. Smartphone bans in public schools are becoming more and more common. Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation is a massive best-seller. There are more people conscious of their tech consumption in 2025 versus 2015, and there are growing, if limited, movements built around rejecting the smartphone. Physical books endure, and readers defiantly purchase them. The mere fact that AI is being challenged at all speaks to how differently technology is being approached in the 2020s; we are more reflexively wary. If ChatGPT had emerged in 2014, Sam Altman would have become, by now, a household name, with fawning media coverage burnishing his image as one of the great thinkers of our age. AI is popular, no doubt, and its usage will only expand with time. What is clear, though, is that techno-optimism is not returning soon. The tech titans will not be heroes again.

by Ross Barkan, Political Currents |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. See also: MAGA in Twilight.]

Richard Baratta

Critique of Infinite Freedom

A few months ago, a retired tech entrepreneur, a co-founder of Loom (a video software company), wrote a short essay titled: “I am rich and I have no idea what to do with my life.” The author seems to be a young guy, maybe in his thirties, who sold his company and then found himself in an unfamiliar state of not having to work ever again. To write an essay with such a provocative title in this day and age, could’ve just been a deliberate attempt at trolling or engagement farming, collecting spiky replies and tiny violin GIFs in the comments. But it wasn’t that. The short text comes across as an earnest, almost despairing grappling for answers that are existential in nature. (...)

The young man suffers from an existential problem, but he’d been steeped for too long in a tech-heavy ecosystem to try anything outside a set of formulaic ‘if x then y’ solutions. He doesn’t know where to begin, what to do, how to think about this new reality. For now, this young man had retreated to Hawaii to study physics.

And what can one do after he’s been on top of the world? It’s a precarious, unstable mental place. There’s a disorienting emptiness mixed with residual dynamism that’s built up from the years of hustle and combat and that now lacks an outlet and direction. There is a creeping dread borne out of unexpected idleness. The restless mind longs for action, like a street fighter, flexing muscles and crackling knuckles, looking to beat up the next villain. But there’s no villain to beat up this time. You are alone with your thoughts and with nothing to do. The problem is unidentifiable. There’s no solution. This is a state that can create monstrosities.

Limits of Infinite Freedom

Musk, Bezos, Zuck, Andreessen, Altman––these men have a degree of freedom that is limited only in a sense that they can’t commit murder in broad daylight. None of their other ambitions, assisted and facilitated by lawyers, powerful connections, friendly lawmakers, favorable legislation, and weak or non-existent law enforcement, meet resistance or accountability. What could and does prevent them from fully realizing their grand schemes into reality and from experiencing absolute freedom, are obstacles of amorphous and capricious nature that are difficult to single out and attack: irrational human behavior, fickle customer loyalties, collective skepticism of or disenchantment with the products that they’re selling, public mockery of their ideas and egos, elections that don’t go their way, etc. These phenomena can’t be harnessed and corralled by a corporate decree or by an army of lawyers or by money thrown at it. To have almost no institutional or legal restraints coming up to this point, and then to suddenly face these volatile, unpredictable masses who deny them their due respect, who refuse to acknowledge their unrivalled acumen, and who question the usefulness of their inventions, makes them feel confused, frustrated, and unfree.

What can’t Musk do at this point? He has more money than God. He has our attention. He can have as much sex as he wants, he can buy a US president, he can go into space. He has Putin on speed dial. He can get access to your personal data. He can get away with naming his kids Techno Mechanicus and X AE A-12. But he’s still unhappy. He’s still striving. He still feels like a victim.

Musk is famously sensitive to being stifled. Paranoidally, he sees an insidious censure coming at him from all sides. His algorithms on X are set so that his own tweets reach the most audience. Well, he gets our attention, but then what does he do with it? All these elaborate tweaks in the algorithm, all the billions spent, all these free speech proclamations––all of this, so that he can peddle conspiracy theories and tell 420/69 jokes. Why would a billionaire many times over, owning a bunch of other, more serious companies, would spend most of his waking hours on this platform, getting into juvenile name-calling, spats with libs, and retweeting Catturd? Is it not enough for him to lord over us? Does he also want us to think he’s witty, cool, and funny? Does he also want to be loved?

Love then, whether public or private, is the elusive final frontier of a centi-billionaire. Like Trump, Musk is not entirely unloved. Both are leaders of cults with millions of followers, and yet they’re dissatisfied. They’re loved, yes, but by the wrong people. Somewhere deep in their hearts they both know that the people who worship them have been suckered into it. They don’t want the love of dimwits and morons––of the marks. They want to be loved by the smart and serious set, by the kind that could be invited to a black-tie event without risk of embarrassment, by the NYT opinion page, by the Nobel Peace Prize committee, by the European leaders, by bond traders––people and entities who are not swayed by the silly theatrics, who are immune to bluster. But Wall Street, once a lonely pocket of tepid support among the smart set, is second-guessing them now. The inability to control this slice of important reality, while dominating everything else, can derail Musk and Trump into feeling helpless. And it is this helplessness that brings about feeling of unfreedom, of unjust restraint. And when they feel unfree they seek an exit, any exit by any means.

The Road to Batshit

I think, in a way it was quite inevitable that Musk would venture out, like Trump, into the public sphere. There were no questions left in the business world and the world of engineering about Musk’s abilities. There, he was God-like. So it was a natural next move for him to step outside the familiar zone of tech entrepreneurship and try his hand at public works.

Musk and Trump want to make policy. But they’re both constitutionally (as in temperamentally) incapable of being bogged down in policy details. It’s like that time, during Trump’s first term, when he thought that he could write a new ‘bigger and better’ healthcare bill to replace Obamacare in two weeks. One look at a Cybertruck, and you know how it was designed: Musk drew it on a paper napkin, handed it to his engineer, and told him “make it look like this.” The engineer didn’t dare to ask further questions. Their policy is a feeling, a shapeless, broad-strokes sketching, a ten-thousand foot view. A size of the government must be cut. How? They’re not going to go into minutia. “Boom-boom-boom-bing”––that’s how.

So it was also inevitable that Musk would soon get bored with it. Entering public service exposed him to having to deal with those very amorphous forces that frustrated him in his business life, but now more prevalent and more entrenched, and lacking due deference. He was accustomed to rule by decree, to cutting costs and personnel without any remorse, but here, in the public sector, the riffraff, the immanent, cretinous masses, the unproductive, the retarded, have the nerve to talk back, demanding to know how they will benefit from his grand vision. They want to know how cutting Medicaid will help improve their health and other such silly things. And Musk can’t just tell the ingrates to take a hike, because the whole purpose of a billionaire entering public spotlight is, supposedly, to show the rubes how great he is.

He is mocked, unloved, and prevented from showing us what a great guy he is. What good are billions if you have no control over these things? What a guy to do?

by Katya Grishakova, The Center Holds |  Read more:

Image: uncredited via

[ed. See also: For the Men Who Have Everything (Political Currents).]

"They are running out of goals. Musk longs for Mars because the Earth can’t satisfy him any longer. Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg try on new outrageous personas because they can’t feel comfortable in the skin they always knew. Sam Altman speaks of OpenAI like it can guarantee eternal life for all who might sign up for a ChatGPT subscription. All of these men enjoy an unfathomable amount of freedom. Absent murdering a few bystanders in the middle of Fifth Avenue, they really can do whatever it is they want. The old emperors and feudal lords were accountable, in some form, to the polity, and even they were constrained by technology and geography. These oligarchs are nation-states unto themselves. Legal and institutional restraints mean little to them.

Yet they ache. None of them, publicly, appear especially content, and some like Musk are in constant online combat with their critics. Musk bought off an American president and it wasn’t enough; Bezos is trying now. What they can’t seem to accrue—not Bezos, Musk, Zuckerberg, Altman, Peter Thiel, or Mark Andreessen—is broad popularity and respect. (...)

The tech oligarchs understand this well enough. As insulated as they are, they are uneasy because they have to keep straining for attention and approval. If they, outwardly, shun the left-leaning, college-educated cognoscenti, they’d still, like Donald Trump, prefer some kind of affirmation. Much of Trump’s career can be understood through the lens of a Queens boy trying to get Manhattan to take him seriously. Most troubling for the oligarchs is that it’s not just the Times editorial board turning from them—it might be Wall Street, too. The bond traders are second-guessing them. Trump found his “liberation day” tariffs were not, in fact, going to liberate the world. They were going, instead, to crash the economy until Trump beat a hasty retreat. The tariffs are one kind of failure; the various business pivots of the tech elite are another. AI, in the end, might be too big to fail, treated by the federal government like the development of nuclear weapons. But there is no real business model otherwise: AI costs many billions of dollars and there’s no way to recoup on these losses unless ChatGPT or Claude subscriptions start costing individuals thousands of dollars per month. If Amazon, in the early years, lost money, it always had a road to profitability that seems indefinitely foreclosed to AI. One can detect a subtle angst: AI must happen because Silicon Valley is otherwise out of ideas. There are few great leaps forward left. AI cannot stack up to the invention of the internet or the personal computer, or even the introduction of the iPhone. Zuckerberg is chasing AI too, now that the Metaverse is emptied out. All the billions in the world can’t buy a new idea. Nor, after a while, validation. Musk’s retreat from the White House is proof enough of that. Tesla is losing to Chinese electric vehicles and will probably keep losing. Mars, meanwhile, remains uninhabitable, and always will be. The space-age billionaires cannot even match the achievements of the federal government in the analog age: fifty-six years ago, we put men on the moon, and neither Musk nor Bezos appear especially capable of replicating that feat. Instead, Bezos shoots his fiancé and a few fading celebrities into the lower reaches of outer space and begs for accolades. All anyone will remember of that voyage is the round of mockery aimed at Katy Perry, who wishes, more than almost anyone on Earth, it was still the year 2010 and not 2025. The “girl boss” and “lean in” era is as dead as techno-optimism. The Facebook whistleblower’s book is outselling Sheryl Sandberg these days, and will be for a while longer."

Maia Delilah

Welcome to the Semantic Apocalypse

A photo of my kids reading, transformed Studio Ghibli style by an AI (the AI flipped the book upside down).

An awful personal prophecy is coming true. Way back in 2019, when AI was still a relatively niche topic, and only the primitive GPT-2 had been released, I predicted the technology would usher in a “semantic apocalypse” wherein art and language were drained of meaning. In fact, it was the first essay ever posted here on The Intrinsic Perspective.

I saw the dystopian potential for the future the exact moment I read a certain line in Kane Hsieh’s now-forgotten experiment, Transformer Poetry, where he published poems written by GPT-2. Most weren’t good, but at a certain point the machine wrote:

Thou hast not a thousand days to tell me thou art beautiful.

I read that line and thought: “Fuck.”

Fast forward six years, and the semantic apocalypse has started in earnest. People now report experiencing the exact internal psychological change I predicted about our collective consciousness all those years ago.

Just two days ago, OpenAI released their latest image generation model, with capabilities far more potent than the technology was even a year ago. Someone tweeted out the new AI could be used as a “Studio Ghibli style” filter for family photos. 20 million views later, everything online was Studio Ghibli.

Every meme was redone Ghibli-style, family photos were now in Ghibli-style, anonymous accounts face-doxxed themselves Ghibli-style. And it’s undeniable that Ghiblification is fun. I won’t lie. That picture of my kids reading together above, which is from a real photo—I exclaimed in delight when it appeared in the chat window like magic. So I totally get it. It’s a softer world when you have Ghibli glasses on. But by the time I made the third picture, it was less fun. A creeping sadness set in. (...)

Similarly, the new image model is a bit worse at other anime styles. But for Studio Ghibli, while I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s passable, it’s also not super far from passable for some scenes. The AI can’t hold all the signature Ghibli details in mind—its limitation remains its intelligence and creativity, not its ability to copy style. Below on the left is a scene that took a real Studio Ghibli artist 15 months to complete. On the right is what I prompted in 30 seconds.

Studio Ghibli (left); the scene re-created using ChatGPT (right)

In the AI version, the action is all one way, so it lacks the original’s complexity and personality, failing to capture true chaos. I’m not saying it’s a perfect copy. But the 30 seconds vs. 15 months figure should give everyone pause.

The irony of internet Ghiblification is that Miyazaki is well-known for his hatred of AI, remarking once in a documentary that:

While ChatGPT can’t pull off a perfect Miyazaki copy, it doesn’t really matter. The semantic apocalypse doesn’t require AI art to be exactly as good as the best human art. You just need to flood people with close-enough creations such that the originals feel less meaningful.

by Eric Hoel, The Intrinsic Perspective |  Read more:

Images: the author, ChatGPT, uncredited