The Herculaneum Scroll and the Underrated Value of Historical Knowledge

Twelve days ago, it was announced that a 21-year-old computer science student named Luke Farritor had “became the first person in two millennia to see an entire word” in one of the papyrus scrolls buried within a library in the Roman city of Herculaneum, which was destroyed by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 CE.

Taken together, these scrolls — there are over 1,800 in all, discovered in one of the most lavish of all known Roman houses — are the only surviving intact library from Greco-Roman antiquity. The library contains works from ancient authors which do not exist anywhere else. A poignant example: the Greek philosopher Chrysippus was both famed and prolific in his day, authoring some 700 texts. But aside from stray quotations in the works of others, all of these texts were lost.

… that is, until portions of them were found among the scrolls at Herculaneum. The stakes of this library, in other words, are enormous. Being able to read through all 1,800 scrolls would amount to one of the biggest historical breakthroughs of the century, literally rewriting the history of the ancient Mediterranean.

The trouble is, the scrolls are lumps of carbon. They were torched by volcanic smoke and gas during the eruption of Vesuvius. To unroll them is to destroy them.

Nevertheless, they can now be imaged in remarkable detail, using methods like X-rays and 3-D CT scans.

by Benjamin Breen, Res Obscura |  Read more:

Images: Vesuvius Challenge; Digital Restoration Initiative, University of Kentucky

[ed. Amazing.]

The Myth of Prometheus Is Not a Cautionary Tale

P.S. You're also getting Frankenstein wrong.

Listening to Marc Andreessen discuss his Techno-Optimist Manifesto on the Foundation for American Innovation’s Dynamist podcast, I was struck by his repetition of something that is in the manifesto and is completely wrong. “The myth of Prometheus – in various updated forms like Frankenstein, Oppenheimer, and Terminator – haunts our nightmares,” he writes.1 On the podcast, he elaborated by saying that, although fire has many benefits, the Prometheus myth focuses on its use as a weapon. He said something similar in a June post called “Why AI Will Save the World”:

The fear that technology of our own creation will rise up and destroy us is deeply coded into our culture. The Greeks expressed this fear in the Prometheus Myth – Prometheus brought the destructive power of fire, and more generally technology (“techne”), to man, for which Prometheus was condemned to perpetual torture by the gods.

No. No. No. No.

Prometheus is punished for loving humankind. He stole fire to thwart Zeus’ plans to eliminate humanity and create a new subordinate species. He is a benefactor who sacrifices himself for our good. His punishment is an indicator not of the dangers of fire but of the tyranny of Zeus.

Prometheus is cunning and wise. His name means foresight. He knows what he is doing and what the likely consequences will be.

Eventually his tortures end when he is rescued by the hero Herakles (aka Hercules), who shoots the eagle charged with eating Prometheus’ liver every day, only for it to grow back to be eaten again.

The Greeks honored Prometheus. They celebrated technē. They appreciated the gifts of civilization.

The ancient myth of Prometheus is not a cautionary tale. It is a reminder that technē raises human beings above brutes. It is a myth founded in gratitude. [...]

These aren’t just an English major’s pedantic quibbles. The stories we tell ourselves matter. That even a “techno-optimist” inverts the Promethean myth reveals how deeply hostility to technology has penetrated our collective consciousness.

For thousands of years, the myth of Prometheus has taught us to appreciate the gifts of technē and the costs that bringing those gifts can exact. Prometheus connects our high-tech present with our poetic past. He reminds us of the continuities of human culture as well as its flux. He unites the Two Cultures.

In that spirit, I cherish the hope that, as artificial intelligence makes the library of Herculaneum decipherable, we will recover the lost sequels to Prometheus Bound—an appropriate fruit of the latest Promethean gift.

***

1  Frankenstein isn’t The Terminator either. Frankenstein is a creator who won’t take responsibility for his creation, a father who rejects and abandons his child. The Creature is frightening and dangerous but he is also the book’s moral center, a tragic, sympathetic character who is feared and rejected by human beings because of his appearance. Only then does he turn deadly. Frankenstein arouses pity and terror because we empathize with its central figure and understand his rage.

The novel’s most reasonable political reading is not as a story of the dangers of science but as a parable of slavery and rebellion. “By the eighteen-fifties, Frankenstein’s monster regularly appeared in American political cartoons as a nearly naked black man, signifying slavery itself, seeking his vengeance upon the nation that created him,” writes historian Jill LePore, who calls the “Frankenstein-is-Oppenheimer model…a weak reading of the novel.” I agree.

The Romantics tended to identify with Prometheus and Mary Shelley’s husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, wrote a play called Prometheus Unbound, further undermining the reading of Frankenstein as an anti-Promethean fable.

by Virginia Postrel, Newsetter | Read more:
Image: via

How to Get Grotesquely Huge on Substack

Four years of ignorance, cupidity, and spleen

Numb at the Lodge is four years old. Around this time every year, I usually write a little post on what the numbers and metrics are saying about the trajectory of this project, how I’m feeling about it, and why you’re all wrong to like it. This year, I suppose I don’t really need to bother. You’ll have seen the news. But just in case: in the last twelve months, Numb at the Lodge has suddenly gone from being a vaguely respectable middle-of-the-pack online publication to a baffling and terrifying behemoth, crushing all in its path as it rolls blind into the world. Look:

In the last one of these posts, I noted that my audience had grown from 25,000 subscribers to just under 45,000; in the year since it’s exploded to 6.8 million, which means there are now more people subscribing here than to the Guardian, the Financial Times, the Atlantic, and the New Yorker combined. I’m read on a scale that’s usually reserved for people who write novels in which it all turns out to be the husband’s fault. They’re having me on Celebrity Traitors next year. Everyone’s going to vote me out in the very first round. They’re building a statue of me in my birthplace, which happens to be Jerusalem. They’re calling me the most significant person ever associated with the place, and also the most divisive. Meanwhile the Numb at the Lodge-reading community has become a major force in public fora, known for its intensely concerning and vituperative cruelty, and for responding to all criticisms by saying things like it doesn’t matter, this is all a dream. I keep having to go on TV and apologise when you people start violently cyberbullying perceived enemies to death or hiding bombs in major European railway stations; the upside is that my takings from this site are now in the same region as the tax revenues of a minor Caribbean territory. I have been absolutely pissing away all the money on golden crowns, diadems, jewelled mitres, kalamavkia, papal tiaras, and kulah khuds. In fact, I’m currently in enormous amounts of debt because I keep buying golden crowns, diadems, jewelled mitres, kalamavkia, papal tiaras, and kulah khuds. I don’t even like them. Have you ever seen the Imperial Crown of the Holy Roman Empire up close? Horrible gaudy thing; just a bunch of multicoloured rocks. I look ridiculous in it. Wore it to one party and started feeling self-conscious, and now it’ll just gather dust at the back of my wardrobe until I die and my kids dump it at the nearest Oxfam. But I can keep buying these stupid hats forever now. I’m a Substack trillionaire. I’m too big to fail.

But has it made me happy? No, of course it hasn’t made me happy. Every year, I warn you that whatever success I have on this platform is actively making me worse, irresistibly incentivising me to pursue a kind of writing that’s great for the algorithm but artistically and philosophically void. Dogshit kneejerk political takes, tedious discourse-mongering. Maybe I no longer know exactly what I want to write, but it’s not this. Which is why, every year, I’d beg you not to subscribe to me on here. Stop making the number go up. Stop giving me money. If you were giving me money, I told you to not just unsubscribe but dispute all the charges with your credit card company. But you didn’t listen, you never listen, and this year, I stopped trying. For twelve months I let all my own worst instincts take over, along with all the evil impulses of the machine, and this is the result. I have nearly seven million Substack subscribers, I ash my cigarettes in a bowl of rubies and scatter emeralds to freshen my toilet, but none of it means anything any more.

There is one upside, though. Conservatively, about 80% of all the writing on Substack consists of guides on how to grow your Substack audience. Nothing makes the number go up more than talking about making the number go up. Before, I never would have stooped to anything so mercenary, but I have no scruples any more. And unlike all the other grifters, I have the real secrets. I know exactly how to turboboost your KPIs. I can grease your vectors and dilate your pipeline; I can have exponential curves rising and stiffening and leaking growthgunk everywhere you lay your hands. Just know that if you do follow my advice and become unimaginably successful, it will not make you happy.

Here’s how to get grotesquely huge:

1. Literally nothing matters

All the advice doled out to wannabe bloggers is absolute bunk. Write short, punchy, digestible pieces. Slot yourself into a clear and identifiable niche. You don’t want to be the fifty thousandth sad girl splattering the world with her lowercase musings, but if you’re willing to endure the humiliation of being a sad girl whose lowercase musings include actionable lowercase insights on tractor repair or dealing with a fungal nail infection, you might find an audience. Most of all, just keep going: hammer it out, day after day, week after week, even if you’ve got nothing in particular to say. The most important thing is to just keep up a regular and reliable posting schedule; spew enough words and people will appear out of the aether to pay attention to you.

I used to believe all this stuff, which is why, for a while, I tried doing the exact opposite in an attempt to actively repel readers. In my first year, for instance, my pieces here averaged 4,442 words each. Who could possibly have the time to read all that? Wouldn’t you just click on the thing, give it a little experimental scroll, see just how long it is, scroll again in horror through the unending ribbon of text as it unwound itself before your eyes, experiencing the terror of a castaway floating above seven miles of black ocean, and swiftly leave without really reading a word? But no. This last year, the average word count has swollen to a truly bloated 5,469. Literally no effect whatsoever. My most popular essays this year include one that clocks in at 11,500 words and another that’s under 3,000. It doesn’t matter. I won’t say you people exist outside of time, but you do seem to partake in the aeviternity where, according to Albertus Magnus, the angels experience duration without end, and a single second and a hundred thousand years are exactly the same thing.

Similarly, I thought I was doing something interesting by refusing to slot myself into any kind of niche, and instead capriciously combining elements of fiction and non-fiction without warning into a kind of deeply annoying mélange. This was not a particularly original move—it’s what basically every essayist has done for the last three hundred years—but my innovation was to be particularly arsey about it. The result, of course, was that a whole bunch of people, most of whom appear to have never read an essay that didn’t include the words ‘epistemic status:’ at the top, immediately slotted me into a niche of my own, as ‘that guy who keeps capriciously combining elements of fiction and non-fiction without warning into a kind of deeply annoying mélange.’ This was probably inevitable. A niche is not something you try to inhabit; it’s just that whatever you do, you can’t help being yourself, and eventually people will notice the little blob of disease inside your brain that makes you write in a particular way, and categorise you accordingly. But even so, the whole experience disgusted me so much that in the last year I’ve almost entirely stopped carrying out my little experiments in lies. [...]

I don’t think this has hurt me. In fact, it’s probably helped. Every time I do publish something, I instantly lose about 200 subscribers as people notice my barely solicited bloviating in their inbox and mash the unsubscribe button. After all, text is cheap, cheaper than it’s ever been. The situation has changed a lot since 2022; if readers want a constant, reliable stream of short, punchy insights tailored to their own individual needs and interests, they can generate a theoretically infinite quantity of that at any point. But aside from a few maniacs, who will soon be yoked to my chariot, bearing me across the desert to generous lashings of the whip while cities burn on the horizon, most people don’t do this. There is something else we want from written text, and I think part of it is the possibility of silence. An AI exists entirely within its output. It’s made of words; it only has being while it’s speaking. It dies every time a chat session peters out. Maybe in a hundred thousand years one of our lurching and disfigured descendants will find something buried in the dirt, peer uncomprehending at your daily affirmations session with ChatGPT, and accidentally add the message ‘fjvwruokbcdErhnk.’ From the machine’s perspective, if it has a perspective, no time has passed at all. But humans have the extraordinary ability to be and do nothing. To exist, as a heaving breathing ape, outside of words or thought; to write as a break in the great silence of the body. The optimal post rate for growth is not zero, but you really should try to write as little as possible, maybe around once every thirty or forty years. [...]

2. Shamelessly follow every stupid and meaningless trend

Here’s a summary of my year: [ed. List of essays published over the course of a year.]

In other words, of the twenty articles I published this year, only five were not directly tied to the news cycle or to bullshit online discourse. When I say I’ve let all my worst instincts take over this year, this is what I mean. I used to think I was better than this; I used to be right. In previous years, the bulk of my output here was about stuff like the Gerasene demoniac, or whether God is a meteorite, or what it means when you dream about your own death, or eggs. I thought I was interested in the wide world: all the things that exist, and all the things that don’t exist too. But I was wrong: as it turns out, what I’m really interested in is just whatever bullshit people on the internet are talking about right now. It’s only my commitment to writing incredibly infrequently that’s saved you from having to deal with my dumb opinions on the riots in France and Sally Rooney’s books being withdrawn from sale in the UK. I have become a parasitic worm, crawling around in the dark guts of the news. What a waste.

But it does work. [...]

3. Be a violent, rabid maniac

In fact, the only thing better than thoughtlessly sounding off on every passing issue is to do so with a terrifying level of fury and spleen. This year, I wrote four essays in which I was in full-on attack mode, everything on the line, wild-eyed, frothing at the mouth, snotting from the nose, gibbering like a schizo as I doled out threats and insults in every direction, and against the reader in particular. This kind of stuff ought to be off-putting. When you encounter someone on the street behaving in a similar way, you try to avoid eye contact and get past them as quickly and as unobtrusively as possible. But if the frenzied ranter doesn’t pose any immediate physical danger to you, suddenly you’re entranced. Pieces in which I yowl like a mad dog consistently received 70 to 120% more readers than the ones where I level calm and cogent critique. Well, a lot of things are grotesquely fascinating; people are also more likely to crowd around the mangled wreck of a horrific car accident than they are to gawp at a sensibly parked family car. But even so, I don’t think you’d start throwing money at a dangerously reckless driver. Meanwhile, every time I start twitching like an escaped mental patient, there’s a sudden and significant spike in my earnings.

You don’t need to actually mean any of it, of course. It only really works if you don’t. Some people seem to think I’m a kind of permanently bilious black-hearted scorpion of a man, which really couldn’t be further from the truth; in real life I’m fundamentally quite goofy and cheerful. It just so happens that one of my goofy and cheerful interests is figuring out how to do things with words, and one of the most fun and interesting tricks you can play with words is to summon the immense and captivating powers of hatred. It doesn’t really matter what kind of writing you do or who your audience is supposed to be: you can make vituperation work for you. Actually, the only real exception is politics, where absolutely everyone is already a frothing hate-filled maniac and you won’t stand out at all. If you’re going to be a rabid dog about politics, you have to also be witty and creative. Everywhere else, violence alone will do.

by Sam Kriss, Numb at the Lodge |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Elon Musk's Endgame

If Republicans keep the Senate, if they perform better in the House than people expect, a lot will come down to one man, and that man is not Donald Trump. It’s Elon Musk.

At this point, Musk has given around $450 million to the Republican campaign effort. That makes him the single largest donor in any election cycle ever.

Musk’s contributions are now one-quarter of all campaign donations Republicans have received. And yet the size of this, and what it throws into relief, is how hard it is to conceptualize how much money he really has.

Because for Musk, with a net worth of around a trillion dollars, giving $300 million, $400 million, is like the median American household giving, like, $100. It is for him nothing, and yet it is reality warping for the rest of us.

But his money is not Elon Musk’s only source of power. There’s his control of X, of Starlink, of SpaceX, of Neuralink, of Tesla. He has power over wealth, attention and critical infrastructure that no human being has ever had at this level, at least once you’re outside the range of, say, a Donald Trump or a Xi Jinping — somebody who controls a superpower as a state.

That’s not what Musk has, and yet he has this almost statelike thing that is completely pursuant to his whims.

So what does he want to do with it? What is he doing with it? What is this world he is flexing his power and taking real risk to build?

by Ezra Klein, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

Silke Mühlematter
via:

Binance Bitten

In February 2025, a team of North Korean hackers stole $1.5 billion from the cryptocurrency exchange Bybit — a dark day for the industry and the largest crypto heist ever recorded.

Now that number looks paltry.

Binance, the world’s biggest crypto exchange, set an unwanted record on Thursday, losing $6.3 billion to hackers in an eye-popping attack that highlighted the deep vulnerabilities in crypto’s financial infrastructure.

For years, the industry has struggled to prevent thefts. Now, the risks are growing even more extreme as attackers use artificial intelligence and other advanced techniques to steal funds and quickly launder them, crypto analysts and security experts said.

The Binance attacker used “laundering patterns we have not seen before,” the crypto analytics firm Chainalysis wrote in a blog post on Friday. “Thousands of transactions in a short period suggest that the attackers are using automation to obscure the trail of funds.”

The details of how Binance was breached are still coming into focus. Both Chainalysis and TRM Labs, another analytics firm, attributed the hack to North Korea, which has targeted crypto companies for years. Binance initially said that the attacker appeared to have compromised a laptop belonging to one of its engineers, before clarifying that further investigation had uncovered “additional points of breach.”

Binance has promised to make customers whole and said it had set aside more than $6.3 billion in company funds to cover the losses. (Binance processes billions of dollars in transactions every day.) Of the total that was stolen, $3 billion has been frozen by other companies, including Circle and Tether, two large issuers of digital coins that have the ability to stop the movement of stolen funds.

That means North Korea won’t have access to those coins, and Binance said it was working on recovering them. But the hackers have already moved $2.4 billion in crypto “beyond any issuer’s reach,” according to TRM.

Those losses may be only the beginning, as the crypto world reckons with an era of fast-evolving hacking techniques and growing risks. Even as President Trump has endorsed the industry and sought to bring it into the mainstream, some crypto firms still struggle with the basic work of any financial company — keeping customer money safe.

“A.I. is undoubtedly turbocharging the ability of hackers to find and exploit subtle flaws in various parts of the crypto ecosystem,” said Eswar Prasad, a Cornell University economics professor who tracks the crypto industry. “The scale and scope of such attacks is likely to intensify.”

Still, North Korea’s inventive army of hackers could probably have pulled off the Binance heist without A.I., even if the technology proved useful during the operation, some cybersecurity experts said.

“North Korea had sophisticated threat actors that could have done this pre-A.I.,” said Joshua Saxe, the chief technology officer of the A.I. security firm Abundant Security. “That said, it’s hard not to think about the relationship between mega-heists like this and what A.I. is doing to democratize advanced hacking. Many more actors can attempt this kind of thing now, thanks to A.I. tools.”

Crypto has struggled with major thefts since the technology’s inception in 2008.Industry pioneers viewed digital coins as a renegade alternative to banks — a type of money outside the supervision of governments or big businesses. From the beginning, that philosophy made crypto vulnerable.

Many crypto investors keep funds in their own online wallets. But if they lose a password, the money is gone forever. Others rely on exchanges like Binance, which behave something like banks, storing funds for customers. But exchanges are not subject to the same regulatory systems that govern banks and other traditional financial companies, and have often lacked effective guardrails against crime.

In February 2025, North Korean hackers tricked the chief executive of Bybit, Ben Zhou, into authorizing a seemingly routine transaction that handed them control of the exchange’s system. They had exploited a gaping hole in ByBit’s defenses — a free software product that the company used to protect customer deposits. The thieves extracted $1.5 billion in digital coins.

At the time, a security firm called the losses “completely preventable.” Ultimately, Bybit weathered the crisis by drawing on corporate reserves and borrowing funds from other crypto companies.

The attack on Binance appears more serious.

After it was founded in 2017, the exchange quickly became the largest and most important company in the crypto industry, processing as much as two-thirds of all digital currency transactions. It provides a marketplace for people to buy popular coins like Bitcoin and Ether, converting traditional currencies into crypto.

On Thursday, as soon as Binance’s system was breached, its founder, Changpeng Zhao, assured customers that they would not lose any money.

“It hurts, but we will survive,” he wrote on X, adding a muscle emoji.

Mr. Zhao has a long history of legal and regulatory problems. Binance pleaded guilty to money-laundering violations in 2023 and paid a $4.3 billion fine to the U.S. government. After serving a four-month prison sentence, Mr. Zhao was pardoned by Mr. Trump last year. Binance also forged a business relationship with World Liberty Financial, the Trump family’s crypto company.

by David Yaffe-Bellany and Dustin Volz, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Tyrone Siu/Reuters

[ed. Probably more of this soon as the AI cat and mouse game kicks into gear. See also: What happens to your money when an exchange gets hacked (CNBC).]

via:

Twilight of a Grifter

Trump’s increasingly erratic and corrupt behavior condemns Republican leaders who continue to support him.

At 8:00 last night, he posted on social media his longest entry ever: an emotional 1,323-word screed attacking late-night host Bill Maher. While the screed was directed at the comedian, it seemed really to be a cry of fury at his loss of control over his base and over the country.

Giant turnout for rallies by former president Barack Obama in Ohio and Michigan on Saturday illustrated the changing mood of the country. In Cleveland, Obama rallied voters behind Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate Sherrod Brown and gubernatorial candidate Amy Acton. In Michigan he rallied voters for Democratic gubernatorial candidate Jocelyn Benson, Michigan’s current secretary of state, and Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate Dr. Abdul El-Sayed.

Obama told attendees that El-Sayed is “fighting for change, real change, that will get money out of politics and put money in your pocket” and would “finish the job we started with the Affordable Care Act and guarantee quality, affordable healthcare to every single American.” He called out Trump’s corruption, “enriching himself and his family” and “selling favors.”

Obama’s jokes were even more calculated to get under Trump’s skin. As Joseph Gedeon of the Guardian reported, Obama mocked Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s fascination with testosterone levels and asked: “How much time do you think this man spends in front of the mirror every day?” He belittled Trump’s fight with “that well-known evil empire, Canada,” a poke reminding listeners that President Ronald Reagan had called Russia an “evil empire” while Trump is now in league with that regime. And Obama poked fun at Trump’s White House projects, saying “he should be on HGTV,” a cable network that focuses on home improvement and interior design.

Perhaps even more galling to Trump were the images that circulated on social media of Obama’s packed venues, comparing them to the dwindling crowds at Trump’s.

Trump’s post about Maher listed Trump’s own triumphs, beginning with The Apprentice, and claimed that Maher has been “DESPARATELY” [sic] begging him to come on his own show. Trump then tore into the idea that Trump’s popularity has dropped so far that even Republicans are abandoning him, reiterating that a CNN poll showed “I’m at 98 and 99% support within the Republican Party, an All Time Record High,” higher even than Reagan’s high-water mark.

The post felt frantic. In fact, the CNN poll to which Trump referred measured his popularity among his own base of self-identified MAGA Republicans, not the Republican Party as a whole. Trump went on to post videos to reinforce his claims.

Trump’s determination to keep Republicans in control of Congress seems to be about more than his refusal to accept that he isn’t always the winner. Since January, he has been warning that if Democrats take control of the House of Representatives, they will impeach him. Increasingly, it seems he is concerned about what such hearings will uncover.

On Saturday the Washington Sun reported that the White House has been evaluating whether to issue a blanket pardon for all junior staffers. Such a move would take away their incentive to cooperate with investigations, but it would also remove their ability to refuse to speak under their Fifth Amendment protections against self-incrimination.

The administration is already trying to hide documents, emails, and texts between Trump’s hand-picked Kennedy Center director Matt Floca and Trump’s executive assistant Natalie Harp about Trump’s sabotage of the Kennedy Center. They are also trying to shield messages between Floca and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick about the Kennedy Center when Lutnick was acting for Trump in discussions about the performance center.

Zach Everson of Public Citizen noted that Trump’s hotel in Washington, D.C., opened ten years ago today, and Republicans’ refusal to condemn the flood of money into that enterprise to buy his goodwill convinced him that there would be no repercussions for grifting off the presidency. Everson notes that at the opening Trump said, “Today’s a metaphor for what we can accomplish in this country,” and now, ten years later, he has made more than $1.4 billion off crypto while investors have lost $4.8 billion. [...]

At a rally yesterday, Trump told attendees if the Democrats win the midterms, “you will only have yourselves to blame.”

And so, he and his allies are trying to put their finger on the scales against Democratic voters.

by Heather Cox Richardson, Letters From an American |  Read more:

Image: Haiyun Jiang/The New York Times
[ed. See also: An Unpredictable President, a Grim White House (NYT).]

Desperation Time

Trump’s GOP Flailing as Campaign Nears Close

GOP strategy and POTUS Trump’s behavior are spiraling in parallel as the 2026 midterms come to a close.

The most obvious example came with a disastrous backfiring attack ad in Ohio, but can also be seen in Trump’s bizarre commentary in praise of higher gas prices and about the gluteus maximi of both men and women while on stage at multiple campaign events.

Trump Backs Ramaswamy Self-Defenestration

With former Presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy consistently behind his Democratic opponent Amy Acton in most Ohio gubernatorial polls, the campaign opted for a bizarre Hail Mary gambit on the 19th.

Ohio blogger D.J. Byrnes posted a video on X featuring Acton’s estranged mother, Donna Arthur, calling her daughter a liar about her childhood, including Acton’s account of having lived in a tent. Byrnes post racked up nearly 2M views.

The video didn’t mention what court records show: Arthur’s husband, Cledith Arthur, was charged with rape in July 1978 after Acton’s father reported that he had sexually abused her, was indicted that September, and the couple left town before trial. Warrants followed in 1978 and 1981, and he died in 2004. A 1982 police report and 1978 arrest paperwork back Acton’s account of living at a campground.

Of more interest was the unusual provenance of the ad, which initially included no disclaimer indicating who paid for it, via CNN:

When it first circulated, the video did not have the standard disclaimer that political ads carry saying who paid for or authorized them, nor did it show up Tuesday morning as a paid ad in the race on AdImpact, the political ad-tracking service.

And the first Ramaswamy campaign statement from Luck did not address whether it was responsible for the video. It suggested voters should consider the message from Acton’s mother and repeated her attack, asserting that “we know that Amy Acton is a serial fabulist who has some serious problems with the truth that the public needs to be aware of before deciding who to entrust as governor.”
…
An official with V-PAC, the main super PAC backing Ramaswamy, said it did not make the video. CNN has attempted to contact Arthur for more information about how the video came together.
…
Speaking with reporters after the event, Ramaswamy took responsibility for the ad and reiterated that voters should take into account what people who know Acton “well” are saying about her. He said he has never met the mother and that she was “not compensated” for the ad.
…
Ramaswamy’s campaign leaned into the controversy over the ad Tuesday night, announcing it would spend $4 million to run the spot.
…
The video was first published widely on Monday night by an Ohio political blogger, D.J. Byrnes, who is known as “The Rooster.” Byrnes told CNN he obtained the video from a voter who saw it as part of a poll and recorded it. On Tuesday morning, Acton’s campaign released a statement from her brother, Philip Stearns, denouncing the video and linking it to Ramaswamy.

The NY Times reported that the campaign had not even decided to release the ad when Byrnes dropped it online:

The Ramaswamy campaign was still testing the ad to gauge its effectiveness when the spot burst into public view late Monday.

D.J. Byrnes, a left-leaning local journalist known as the Rooster, published the ad online, calling it “loathsome.”
…
The ad served as an attempt to shift the focus of the campaign in its final days from frustrations about Mr. Trump’s economy to a referendum on Dr. Acton’s honesty. But in so doing, it placed Mr. Ramaswamy’s own morals and ethics in the spotlight, and reminded voters that Dr. Acton survived a seriously troubled childhood.

Most Ohio GOP politicians (and some national ones) distanced themselves from Ramaswamy and the ad, but not POTUS Trump or Vice President J.D. Vance — a close friend of Ramaswamy who both endorsed the campaign’s decision to run the ad.

Donald Trump, Jr even re-tweeted the ad.

Ironically, Trump and Vance coming out strong in support of the ad destroyed Ramaswamy’s ability to distance himself from the spot.

Ohio is not the only state where Trump’s GOP is indulging in ham-fisted attacks on Democratic candidates.

Trump’s GOP Goes Islamophobic in Michigan

Trump has attacked Michigan Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed over his religion. Posting on October 7th that El-Sayed “goes back to the days of the Jihad” and is a “Terrorist Sympathizer” and saying “I call him Mohammed” on the 10th.

Saying “He’s a Muslim Brotherhood guy, 100%,” and posting that El-Sayed “wants our Country to go to Sharia Law. If it ever does, he should be the first that’s tried!”

Republican nominee Mike Rogers and the NRSC put their money behind Trump’s Islamophobic rhetoric with a seven-figure buy for an ad saying El-Sayed is “connected to the Muslim Brotherhood and Al-Qaeda,” and the Senate Leadership Fund ran an ad built on a quote El-Sayed gave at 24 about a “Sharia-compliant” mortgage, set over an image of a woman in a niqab.

In Texas, they’ve gone in a different direction, but kept the hate consistent.

If It’s Texas, That Must Be Talafreako

Apparently having little else to work with, Republicans have made transgender issues the core of their attacks on Texas Dem. Senate nominee James Talarico. Of the $359 million (!) Republicans have spent on Texas ads since June, $119 million went to ads on transgender minors, transgender sports and LGBTQ+ rights, more than any other issue, with the biggest share going to the Senate race.

Texas PAC, which got $158 million from Elon Musk routed through the Senate Leadership Fund, opened its negative ads by attacking Talarico as being for “they/them, not you,” and a later Texas PAC ad claims he “supports parents being charged with child abuse if they do not support transitioning their children.”

In September, GOP Senate nominee Ken Paxton’s campaign ran an ad using an AI-generated Talarico delivering a fake sermon that opens “In the beginning, God was nonbinary.” Trump calls him “James TalaFREAKO,” and JD Vance branded him a “freak” and made a joke implying he is gay.

Somehow none of this is working as polls show Paxton consistently trailing Talarico.

Let’s go up to Maine and see what the GOP is up to there.

They’re Seriously Playing the Incest Card in Maine

In Maine, Republican groups have spent about $47 million attacking Troy Jackson, compared to the estimated $31 million Democratic groups have spent attacking Susan Collins.

The Senate Leadership Fund’s country-song radio ad calls Jackson “weird,” a “freak” and a “creep” because “he has two kids with his cousin,” with the chorus “If he’ll screw his own family, he’ll screw yours too.”

I have to give them points for giving me a cheap giggle, but I can’t fathom whom they think they’re persuading to vote for Susan Collins with that ad.

Collins’s campaign said it “should be taken down immediately,” though Collins herself raised the relationship with Politico on 2 September: “I’m not going to bring up the fact that the mother of his two children is his second cousin.”

Other SLF spots say Jackson “keeps it in the family” and call him a “Crook and a Creep“; another says an Allagash cell tower he touted was built on his family’s land.

Somehow this isn’t working and Collins trails Jackson in most polls.

But wait, it’s about to get even weirder.

Trump on the Upside of Higher Gas Prices

In Georgia over the weekend, Trump went full-on in praise of higher gas prices, per KARK (in a piece which chronicles Trump’s various comments about fuel prices over the course of 2026, it’s been quite a journey):

Over the weekend, Trump argued once more that the Iran war means profits for the U.S. oil and gas business — claiming that the country “is making hundreds of billions of dollars because of what’s happened in the Middle East.”

“My people said, ‘Please don’t mention that sir, because people are paying a little higher’,” the president said at a Georgia campaign rally on Saturday, adding that he can already see “fake news” headlines about consumers still suffering from steeper prices. “But I said I don’t give a damn. I’m going to say it. We’re making a freaking fortune. Our country is getting stronger and stronger all the time. And those pump prices are going to come down.”

by Nat Wilson Turner, Naked Capitalism |  Read more:

[ed. I'd be happy with someone who's just competent and authentic, who'll work diligently on my and the country's behalf (not just half the country, rich people, corporations and PACs). Even by those minimal standards most politicians are failing.]

The Smartphone Trap We Built for Ourselves

Here’s a non-exhaustive list of things that, as recently as seven years ago, we could reliably do without a smartphone:

• Read a restaurant menu while seated inside, and pay your check.
• Enter a concert or sporting event.
• Use a parking garage or park your car on the street.
• Receive packages or retrieve purchases.
• Complete the sign-in process for work, banking, or government services.
• Attend school events or communicate with your kid’s school.
• Access health care and other kinds of appointments.
• Take public transit.
• Get a taxi.
• Get into a gym or fitness class.

I’ve been thinking about this drift toward mandatory apps and QR codes a lot lately, as a new millennial parent unhappy with my addictive tendency to mindlessly scroll near my baby. [...]

You should not have to have an addictive device in your pocket at all times in order to do ordinary things. We should be pushing for a world where adults can meaningfully reduce their smartphone use, or quit it altogether if they want.

And it’s not just about personal self-improvement. The status quo has already been long untenable for many people, especially the elderly, the disabled, the unhoused, and anyone who just can’t afford a data plan.

Pushing for a non-smartphone option is about accessibility, affordability, and agency. It’s about demanding the kind of freedom in a society we deserve to have. There should never be any essential service that requires phones as the only way in.

We can fix this, and some people are already showing how.

How we got here

Even if it takes us another decade to unwind, it’s important to remember these changes are less than ten years old.

Smartphone ownership exploded over the 2010s, rising from 35 percent of US adults in 2011 to 81 percent in 2019, according to Pew. It has since climbed to roughly 9 in 10.

In other words, smartphones stopped being a device many people had and started becoming a device every institution could assume you had. What happened next was part real improvements in convenience, part cost-cutting that pandemic-era policy made easier to justify, and part what sociologists call “isomorphism” — organizations converging on a practice not because it works best, but because everyone else has adopted it.

Isomorphism is one of my favorite concepts I learned in college, and you know it when you see it. For example, you’re planning a conference, and somewhere along the way it became true that a “good” conference has its own app, even though nobody wants to download an app to learn when lunch is on the schedule. Or it’s the way every mission statement sounds like every other mission statement.

I’d say the charitable reason we drifted toward handling so much by smartphone is that a lot of it genuinely is better, faster, and harder to lose. Tapping a turnstile with my phone, and never wondering whether I left my DC metro card at home, has made my life easier.

The less benign reasons are that digital systems let companies and governments cut labor and operating costs. Apps and QR codes replace cashiers, waitstaff, printed materials, and customer service reps, and shift new work onto us, the customer. The smartphone systems also generate a lot of personalized data which companies love to collect, and sometimes sell.

Then there’s control, which companies certainly like. Not all of it is sinister. (Think blocking tickets from being resold, or prices and menus being updated instantly.) But when sellers control the interface and know a lot about us, two people can open the same app at the same moment and see different prices. Economists call this price discrimination, and it’s much easier to pull off when there’s no posted price we can compare against.

But just because inertia is leading us toward a universal smartphone society, that doesn’t mean it’s where we’ll end up. We have options to push back.

by Rachel Cohen Booth, Vox | Read more:
Image:Matteo Della Torre/NurPhoto via Getty Images
[ed. I've experienced this just trying to pay for a parking spot in Seattle. First, had to get the app. Then register. Then follow all the instructions for punching in a special code for my space, license plate number, and finally estimated time period of parking. Took me nearly 25 minutes. Not to mention trying to read the small type on the sign and memorizing the special app url. Suppress scream.]

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The Consequences of Abundant Intelligence

Macro Memo

February 22nd, 2026 June 30th, 2028

The unemployment rate printed 10.2% this morning, a 0.3% upside surprise. The market sold off 2% on the number, bringing the cumulative drawdown in the S&P to 38% from its October 2026 highs.

Traders have grown numb. Six months ago, a print like this would have triggered a circuit breaker.

Two years. That’s all it took to get from “contained” and “sector-specific” to an economy that no longer resembles the one any of us grew up in. This quarter’s macro memo is our attempt to reconstruct the sequence - a post-mortem on the pre-crisis economy.

The euphoria was palpable. By October 2026, the S&P 500 flirted with 8000, the Nasdaq broke above 30k. The initial wave of layoffs due to human obsolescence began in early 2026, and they did exactly what layoffs are supposed to. Margins expanded, earnings beat, stocks rallied. Record-setting corporate profits were funneled right back into AI compute.

The headline numbers were still great. Nominal GDP repeatedly printed mid-to-high single-digit annualized growth. Productivity was booming. Real output per hour rose at rates not seen since the 1950s, driven by AI agents that don’t sleep, take sick days or require health insurance.

The owners of compute saw their wealth explode as labor costs vanished. Meanwhile, real wage growth collapsed. Despite the administration’s repeated boasts of record productivity, white-collar workers lost jobs to machines and were forced into lower-paying roles.

When cracks began appearing in the consumer economy, economic pundits popularized the phrase “Ghost GDP“: output that shows up in the national accounts but never circulates through the real economy.

In every way AI was exceeding expectations, and the market was AI. The only problem…the economy was not.

It should have been clear all along that a single GPU cluster in North Dakota generating the output previously attributed to 10,000 white-collar workers in midtown Manhattan is more economic pandemic than economic panacea. The velocity of money flatlined. The human-centric consumer economy, 70% of GDP at the time, withered. We probably could have figured this out sooner if we just asked how much money machines spend on discretionary goods. (Hint: it’s zero.)

AI capabilities improved, companies needed fewer workers, white collar layoffs increased, displaced workers spent less, margin pressure pushed firms to invest more in AI, AI capabilities improved…

It was a negative feedback loop with no natural brake. The human intelligence displacement spiral. White-collar workers saw their earnings power (and, rationally, their spending) structurally impaired. Their incomes were the bedrock of the $13 trillion mortgage market - forcing underwriters to reassess whether prime mortgages are still money good.

Seventeen years without a real default cycle had left privates bloated with PE-backed software deals that assumed ARR would remain recurring. The first wave of defaults due to AI disruption in mid-2027 challenged that assumption.

This would have been manageable if the disruption remained contained to software, but it didn’t. By the end of 2027, it threatened every business model predicated on intermediation. Swaths of companies built on monetizing friction for humans disintegrated.

The system turned out to be one long daisy chain of correlated bets on white-collar productivity growth. The November 2027 crash only served to accelerate all of the negative feedback loops already in place.

We’ve been waiting for “bad news is good news” for almost a year now. The government is starting to consider proposals, but public faith in the ability of the government to stage any sort of rescue has dwindled. Policy response has always lagged economic reality, but lack of a comprehensive plan is now threatening to accelerate a deflationary spiral.

How It Started

In late 2025, agentic coding tools took a step function jump in capability.

A competent developer working with Claude Code or Codex could now replicate the core functionality of a mid-market SaaS product in weeks. Not perfectly or with every edge case handled, but well enough that the CIO reviewing a $500k annual renewal started asking the question “what if we just built this ourselves?” [...]

That summer, we spoke with a procurement manager at a Fortune 500. He told us about one of his budget negotiations. The salesperson had expected to run the same playbook as last year: a 5% annual price increase, the standard “your team depends on us” pitch. The procurement manager told him he’d been in conversations with OpenAI about having their “forward deployed engineers” use AI tools to replace the vendor entirely. They renewed at a 30% discount. That was a good outcome, he said. [...]

When Friction Went to Zero

By early 2027, LLM usage had become default. People were using AI agents who didn’t even know what an AI agent was, in the same way people who never learned what “cloud computing” was used streaming services. They thought of it the same way they thought of autocomplete or spell-check - a thing their phone just did now.

Qwen’s open-source agentic shopper was the catalyst for AI handling consumer decisions. Within weeks, every major AI assistant had integrated some agentic commerce feature. Distilled models meant these agents could run on phones and laptops, not just cloud instances, reducing the marginal cost of inference significantly. [...]

Over the past fifty years, the U.S. economy built a giant rent-extraction layer on top of human limitations: things take time, patience runs out, brand familiarity substitutes for diligence, and most people are willing to accept a bad price to avoid more clicks. Trillions of dollars of enterprise value depended on those constraints persisting.

It started out simple enough. Agents removed friction.

Subscriptions and memberships that passively renewed despite months of disuse. Introductory pricing that sneakily doubled after the trial period. Each one was rebranded as a hostage situation that agents could negotiate. The average customer lifetime value, the metric the entire subscription economy was built on, distinctly declined.

Consumer agents began to change how nearly all consumer transactions worked.

by Citrini Reserch |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

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Solid Lamp, RelvaoKellermann

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This Boom Looks a Lot Like the Housing Bubble

Artificial intelligence is fast becoming the largest investment in U.S. history. As the money pours in, the companies involved are resurrecting bad old habits eerily reminiscent of the shenanigans deployed in the run-up to the financial crisis.

There are already signs that much of this investment may go bad. If it does, the consequences could rival what happened in 2008.

We know far too little about the financial plumbing propping up this surge. What little we do know looks remarkably like the tactics once employed by Wall Street firms like Lehman Brothers, the storied 158-year-old bank that collapsed in 2008, setting off a panic that ultimately cost taxpayers nearly $700 billion in bailouts in today’s dollars and nearly nine million Americans their jobs. Now as then, companies are hiding large amounts of debt off public balance sheets. Firms responsible for protecting our pensions and our insurance are again risking our money by snapping up complicated financial products backstopped by assets of uncertain value. A small group of companies are buying and selling large amounts of a hot product to one another, inflating demand for the product and obscuring the risks of the system in a web of complexity. The accountants and credit-rating firms that analyze the situation — and that are financially beholden to the debtors — are deploying shaky excuses to declare it all fine.

There are a few differences. With more U.S. funds in A.I.-heavy stocks than in homes, a crash could destroy more wealth than the 2008 financial crisis did. And the Trump administration, reportedly eager to prevent a bust, is making changes that inject new opacity and more risk into the situation.

There are already signs the nascent A.I. industry may not soon generate the trillions of dollars required to pay off all the huge debts it is incurring. Earlier this month, The Financial Times reported that the projected annual revenue at A.I. lab OpenAI was about $50 billion at the end of September, 28 percent lower than had previously been believed. Figures reported by The Wall Street Journal this month suggested that revenue growth at Anthropic, OpenAI’s chief rival, was softening. Markets are getting nervous, with the tech-laden Nasdaq falling over 5 percent over the last two weeks.

Anthropic and OpenAI are already so entangled in our economy (and in our national security) that if they sink, Washington will need a plan. Done right, any rescue would come with real safety guardrails, real insurance that we won’t cede control of the technology to China and real service to the public interest.

Lehman Brothers was born in 1850 as a cotton brokerage in antebellum Alabama. The A.I. chipmaker Nvidia was born in 1993 in a booth at a Denny’s in San Jose, Calif., and Meta in a Harvard dorm in 2004. And yet the financial circumstances surrounding those companies share an uncanny resemblance.

Start with hidden loans. A Wall Street Journal analysis in August concluded that the nine largest tech firms, Nvidia and Meta included, have managed to accrue $3 trillion of debt, or roughly 10 percent of the entire U.S. economy, off their balance sheets. Keeping the debt off the books (and away from the figures investors and regulators watch most closely) makes it easier for those companies to spend enormous sums constructing the data centers that drive A.I. — centers they believe will both improve the technology and satisfy an expected takeoff in demand.

Back in 2008, Lehman, too, accumulated lots of debt, primarily from buying subprime mortgages; those loans, which were targeted to home buyers with thin or imperfect credit histories, were the hot product of its day. The firm similarly avoided scrutiny by shuffling the debts off its balance sheet. When those mortgages went bad, so did Lehman, and its sudden demise nearly took much of the banking system with it.

Within days of its failure, Washington committed hundreds of billions of dollars to stabilize the financial system, and the Federal Reserve backstopped trillions more. Still, the rescue wasn’t enough to stave off the worst recession since the Great Depression. Millions of jobs and trillions in household wealth evaporated.

Now you might ask: Didn’t Congress pass legislation to prevent another crisis from occurring? Yes, but that law, known as Dodd-Frank, applied largely to lenders, which means banks and bank-holding companies. It left private creditors, back then a relatively small slice of the finance world, virtually untouched. In 2018, Congress, worried about the potential impact on small businesses, loosened rules to allow many private creditors to stretch their balance sheets. It ignored objections that money, like water, would always flow to the least regulated corners of finance.

Enter Silicon Valley. A.I.’s biggest players seized on the loosely regulated private credit industry to help finance their data center spree.

Another throwback to the bad old days of 2008: the way the A.I. firms and their main suppliers are buying and selling the technology and its infrastructure to each other, lending large sums to one another to fund the deals. Nvidia disclosed commitments and guarantees of over $530 billion to its own customers in July — more than triple the amount it was lending just three months earlier. Analysis by the asset manager Sona found at least 176 circular financing deals in the A.I. ecosystem that were worth $3.6 trillion over the past three and a half years.

Back in the housing bubble, major Wall Street firms came up with numerous complex ways to borrow from their rivals, with proceeds going to purchase even more subprime mortgages. The result made demand for those loans look greater than it actually was, and it built a financing web so tangled that it became difficult to parse any one firm’s exposure. As Lehman’s collapse later showed, such confusion meant that a problem anywhere can soon become a problem everywhere.

Then how about the fact that accounting firms, those given the job of calling out any warning signs, appear asleep at the wheel once again? Ernst & Young, which signed off on Lehman’s questionable accounting tactics before its collapse, is now being accused of offering more tautology than real comfort in its latest approval of Meta’s unusual accounting moves to fund its very expensive A.I. push. Everything is all fine, essentially, because Meta said it is.

Those are the similarities. Now for the differences.

This presidential administration, reportedly worried that any A.I. slowdown will beget a broader economic one (which, in turn, could worsen its political standing), is propping up the boom. Its measures likely goose the available money in the short term but will worsen the pain of any correction. President Trump wants to allow Americans to invest their retirement savings in private credit funds, ensuring they will lose directly if these data center deals go bad. The Securities and Exchange Commission has made it easier for data center owners and their lenders to slice and repackage this debt, which is exactly what banks did to subprime mortgage debts in the housing bubble. The S.E.C. is also proposing rules that allow newly public companies to disclose even less than they already do.

Another difference: This time, taxpayers are more clearly on the hook, because private creditors are more directly attaching A.I. debt to the financial products we need. Take annuities, which are often relied on by retirees. Because many Americans rely on such insurance products, their policies are usually guaranteed by the state should an insurer go bankrupt. Right now, private creditors like Apollo are funding the debt boom in part by tapping the money sitting in companies like Athene, the $470 billion insurer Apollo controls. Should the A.I. boom go bad and Athene go under, Apollo knows the state (i.e. taxpayers) will be on the hook for much of what it owes policyholders. (Athene’s opaque disclosures make it hard to know how much of its assets are in data centers.)

Private-capital-backed firms now own nearly 20 percent of the entire U.S. life insurance industry, with assets of nearly $1.5 trillion.

As bad as the financial crisis was, it began with a small slice of mortgages of a still-diversified economy. This time, the sector at risk is our economy’s growth engine. A.I.-related investment fueled an estimated one-third of the country’s recent economic growth, and the handful of companies most exposed to the A.I. build-out now comprise roughly one-third of the entire S&P 500.

In other words, the U.S. economy is fully hostage to an A.I. build-out laden with increasingly worrying financial engineering, all riding on a wager — that demand for A.I. will keep growing, that customers will soon be willing to pay what the technology actually costs to produce and that firms will manage to build the infrastructure required to supply it. Recent estimates indicate that A.I. would need to generate as much as $3 trillion annually in perpetuity to return the capital extended. That’s 9 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product, or twice what Americans spend on food.

Already, a closer look at the fundamentals of OpenAI and Anthropic, the most critical players in this bet, appears to be perhaps even worse than the headlines suggest. Right now OpenAI expects to lose $280 billion by 2030 even assuming revenues grow tenfold over the same period. And both OpenAI and Anthropic have already slashed prices 40 percent to 50 percent from early summer, perhaps because China’s Deep Seek, the leading “open weight” A.I. model, reportedly nearly matches their latest models’ performances at about 1.4 percent of the cost. Far less expensive open weight models have roughly doubled their share of token volume this year, according to OpenRouter, a service that tracks A.I. usage across all major providers. Prices and market share are shrinking; costs are not.

Such worries may explain why tech stocks have been taking a beating, and bond markets — normally where investors go for shelter amid financial turbulence — are volatile. Many of those private creditors — a sector that has grown sharply amid the A.I. boom, to between $2 trillion and $3 trillion — are showing classic signs of financial distress.

A final difference from 2008: The government deficit has reached historic highs.

by Jen Harris, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Chuan Ming Ong
[ed. AI's already taken the world's economies hostage, without even being fully deployed yet. Sleepwalking into a disaster.]

How the Consulting Class Always Wins

How the Consulting Class Is Eating the Democratic Party

Image: Doug Chayka

[ed. I'd say both parties. Do small donors really matter that much compared to their multi-billionaire counterparts? All that money spent on ads, does it really move the needle much? (It sure does for me - negatively.]

Obra de Ubé, proditio fraterna, (2026)

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What’s Riding on Anthropic’s Market Debut? Nearly Everything

When Anthropic goes public as soon as next month, its initial offering will be more than just a coming-out party for the artificial intelligence company. It will also be a litmus test for the economy, with trillions of dollars at stake.

Anthropic, which makes the Claude chatbot, is a tent pole of the AI industry. Valued in the private markets at nearly $1 trillion and backed by more than $130 billion in funding, it could raise $100 billion in its offering and promptly become one of the world’s biggest public companies. But the stakes are even higher than that.

Anthropic and OpenAI, its chief rival, sit atop a pyramid of business partners and suppliers — infrastructure providers, chipmakers, energy companies and AI startups — that have all spent heavily over the last four years because they believe demand for AI products will keep growing.

Anthropic’s listing will provide the first in-depth look at the health of a key business underlying the AI boom — and will be a test of its durability. Is there unending appetite for AI services to justify the spending on chips, data centers and other infrastructure? Or will Anthropic’s performance show that there are limits?

“For the market, it’s a bellwether,” said Umesh Padval, an investor at Seligman Ventures, who has worked in tech for nearly 40 years.

If Anthropic disappoints in its public debut, that could hurt investor confidence and cascade into a wider market sell-off, casting doubts on how much longer the AI boom can go. A successful offering could lift the market and pave the way for more AI companies to go public.

Stock markets are already on edge, with technology stocks broadly falling this month, led by a sell-off in the companies that design and produce the computer chips that power AI. The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index is in a bear market, defined as a decline of 20% or more from a recent high and a sign of significant investor angst, after falling 26% from its June peak.

Over the last couple of weeks, Microsoft canceled a deal with Nscale, a provider of data centers. A report from the research firm Gartner predicted that 80% of “neoclouds,” the companies that provide data and computing power for AI firms, could be forced out of business. And Ken Griffin, the billionaire owner of the hedge fund Citadel, said AI investors were “almost certainly” in a bubble.

Those negative signals have added to fears about the huge piles of money being spent on AI infrastructure. Amazon, Meta, Google and Microsoft have said they plan to spend at least $740 billion on AI infrastructure, including data centers, this year. Private market investors have poured $1.1 trillion into Anthropic, OpenAI and other AI companies since 2022, according to PitchBook, which tracks investments.

As spending and investment have risen in private markets, public investments have grown, too, increasing the stock market’s reliance on the performance of the AI industry. The top 10 stocks in the S&P 500 are worth more than $1 trillion together, with eight of them being tech companies. Combined, the top 10 account for over 40% of the index, up from less than 20% a decade ago.

When Anthropic is added to the index, it is likely to displace either Berkshire Hathaway or Eli Lilly, the only non-tech companies with valuations above $1 trillion, from the top 10.

“There is a lot riding on this one,” said Brad Gastwirth, the global head of research and market intelligence at Circular Technology, a supply chain services firm. “If it goes bad, it’s going to bring down the market.”

by Erin Griffith and Lauren Hirsch, Seattle Times/NY Times | Read more:
Image: Dustin Chambers/The New York Times
[ed. House of cards. Too many moving parts, with precarious circular financing, locked-in future contracts, uncertain political and regulatory climate, and a product that could kill everybody. Plus, no signs of AI payoff outside the tech sector so far. So, more than a little liability baked in. See also: Wall Street prepares for AI's "day after"  and, Anthropic to investors: Trump hates us so much (Axios).]

Comcast Loses More Customers, Claims Cheap Prices are “Irrational”

Comcast reportedly plans significant job cuts in its cable division as the firm continues to lose residential broadband and TV customers. Comcast lost 144,000 residential broadband customers in Q3 2026, up from a 91,000-customer loss in the same quarter a year ago, the company said in its earnings report today.

Comcast historically capitalized on a lack of competition for high-speed wired broadband. But now it faces stronger competition from fixed wireless providers and from fiber providers in parts of its cable territory.

“Fixed wireless remains aggressive and continues to take share, while fiber construction remains elevated, with pockets of irrational pricing and promotional activity,” Comcast co-CEO Mike Cavanagh said today in an earnings call.

Comcast CFO Jason Armstrong said “irrational pricing” from fiber operators includes $30 to $40 monthly broadband offers “in specific markets in the third quarter.” He said $30 to $40 pricing is irrational because deploying fiber costs $1,500 or more per home, and is “getting more expensive with construction costs up as you get into more suburban and rural areas.” [...]

Armstrong said more Comcast customers are leaving when they face “pricing transitions,” apparently referring to the price hikes customers get when promotional offers expire. “We’ve been refining our offers and retention strategies to better manage these transitions and strengthen customer retention,” he said. [...]

Fewer Jobs, More AI Agents

It appears likely that job cuts will affect Comcast’s famously frustrating customer service division, replacing some number of humans with AI agents that already handle some customer interactions. “As personal AI agents reshape how consumers discover, purchase, and manage services, we’re positioning Comcast to capitalize on that shift,” Armstrong said.

by Jon Brodkin, Ars Technica | Read more:

Image: Getty Images | Smith Collection/Gado

[ed. Comcast/Xfinity has been ripping off its captive audience for decades. Anybody shedding a single tear for them today? Ha! They upped my monthly internet bill by $10 in August, then another $10 in September, one month later. Guess they thought people on autopay wouldn't notice. I went in and told them I was leaving for a new fiber service in town and they promptly halved my bill.]