A Frictionless World Is A Solipsitic World

MIT did a study last year on the use of AI. Unsurprisingly, they found that students who used AI a lot demonstrated very little growth as students, including the use of EEG imaging to determine brain activity. Students who used Google saw some growth, and students who used neither saw the most. Even more striking, the AI using students were helpless when asked to write without AI.

David Brooks expands on this, writing about how people who enjoy mental struggle will really benefit from AI, because they enjoy the process of thinking. For this group, AI becomes another tool, whereas for people who really hate strenuous thinking, AI will degrade their thinking more. Even his middle group, who he calls the Reluctant Optimizers, will eventually be dumbed down by AI. The example of this can be seen with previous technologies. Does anyone really remember phone numbers anymore? Can you find yourself somewhere without GPS? 

This, I believe, feeds into my argument from a few days ago. For the past 30 years, tech companies have worked assiduously to remove "friction" from technology use. If you can think back to the early days of personal computing, a handful of people used computers for things like coding or spreadsheets. Most of us used it for word processing. Then the internet comes along, and your computer is now a mailbox and crude search engine. Here come Google and they come to dominate searches. As computing power speeds up, streaming video emerges, beginning with the microfilms of Vine. 

We've now reached a saturation point where any friction feels like a tragedy. I spent the last few weeks with a Smart TV that was several years old. This effectively makes it a dumb TV, and we spent minutes - WHOLE MINUTES - rebooting, reloading and otherwise dealing with a glitchy streaming system. It was frustrating. What it was NOT was driving to a video store to see what they had in stock. We watched what we wanted, when we wanted (minus a few minutes where we had to de-glitch the TV).

I would argue that this psychological space is proving to be somewhat incompatible with liberal democracy. 

The very structures of the Constitution are designed to be frustrating to power. Among the many outrages that Trump has visited upon the country is his wholesale contempt for the basic structure of the Constitution and the need to treat the other branches as co-equal partners in governing. The President absolutely should not govern by decree; that is deeply contemptuous of the American governing system. It was designed to be frustrating specifically to frustrate imperial aspirants. 

Trump's fundamental pitch to his non-cultists is that he can "run America like a business" (despite his manifest incompetence at running his own businesses). The import of Project 2025 was the force change on a system that created endless friction in the path of change.

What I see happening, though, with young "activists" is that they seem completely incapable of understanding that you simply don't get "what you want" from our system of government. You can - occasionally - get what you need, but the idea that your personal preferences will translate into policy is not just the naivete of youth, it is the defining gestalt of the internet age.

While many people have warned of AI's impact on the job market and the environment, I share Brooks'  and Krugman's concerns about what AI will do to our minds and by extension our culture.

This weekend, Scott Weiner was heckled at a trans event for not being sufficiently deferential to the desires of the Palestinian "lobby". Weiner has been a staunch ally of the LGBTQ communities, yet he was physically confronted and screamed at by people that more than one online commentator described as "mentally deranged." 

Maybe.

Or maybe we've become culturally deranged in our solipsism. We see the world as a toddler does, as lacking purpose and agency beyond the insatiable appetites of a toddler. I want what I want NOW. I will not build a coalition; I will not settle for half measures; I will not bend to time or compromise.

I want my utopia delivered to my door by Tuesday noon. 

Musky Odor

 Amazon was not profitable for many years. Today it makes most of its money off cloud storage, not sending you a three-pack of tighty-whiteys in 24 hours. The point being that you never know when the next huge company will emerge. 

Krugman looks at the IPO for SpaceX. (First of all, NVIDIA is now the company with the largest market cap. More than Alphabet (Google), Apple and Microsoft.) SpaceX jumped ahead of Amazon, making Musk the world's first trillionaire. All of these companies are - more or less - IT companies. Apple, I guess, actually makes physical products, as does NVIDIA. There's a tangible "thing" there. SpaceX seems to be in the same space, in that they have a lot of shitty IT stuff (Twitter, Grok) but they do have a good satellite system.

What's crazy about these IT companies is that most of them were not profitable for years. Eventually, they found a way, like Google did, of monetizing their product. Amazon moved into cloud storage, because being the world's largest retailer wasn't profitable enough. If you look at the most profitable companies in the world, the usual suspects are there, but so are Saudi Aramco, Berkshire Hathaway and a bunch of banks.

The valuation of SpaceX is entirely a valuation of Elon Musk. Microsoft - whom no one loves, and that includes freaks like me who actually use an MS system - has $125B in profits off $318B in revenue. SpaceX has $4B in LOSSES off $19B in revenue. How are there market caps the same?

Ultimately, it's a bet on Musk. He's this crazed, ketamine fueled weirdo whose manifest strangeness is presumed to represent genius. Yes, Tesla makes an amazing battery and Starlink is very impressive. But Grok?  The Boring Company? His purchase (and destruction) of Twitter? You can hand-wave away these flops as the price of genius, or you could look at Musk and see a nine year old boy rattling off dreams ("I'm gonna go to MARS!") and mistake that for vision, because was right about lithium batteries. He's so fucking strange that he must be a genius, right? So let's buy into SpaceX, because...space is profitable?

Silicon Valley is all about hype, and sometimes that hype pays off. Sometimes it very much doesn't. Musk, sadly, has largely accumulated so much speculative money that even if his endeavors crash and burn, he will likely blithely sail along on his riches. 

The plutocratic freakshow this diminished age deserves.

Decency

 Martin Longman has a sort of "Inside Baseball" post about the economics of writing in the internet. Basically, he was one of the OG Bloggers back in the day and built a solid readership. I read him religiously, and he does his best to bring rigor and insight into his analysis. 

One thing he rarely, if ever, does is troll.

His point is that trolls make money. Trolls gather attention. Trolls can monetize that attention in ways that being thoughtful and decent cannot. Twitter has gone down the shitter (though I still find it easier to use than BlueSky), in large part because you get this rampaging race to the bottom. Nakedly racist, misogynistic and bigoted content draws attention - positive and negative - in ways that ten tweet analysis does not.

It is tempting - but I think wrong - to blame this on "the algorithm." The algorithm is simply predicting what you want to see based on what you engaged with. In other words, the problem is...us. We are training the algorithm to outrage us, and as things become more outrageous, we lose a little bit more of the milk of human kindness. 

It's similar to Trump. He's awful, truly awful, but there are people who vote for him BECAUSE he's truly awful, and the most dispiriting part of all this is that our neighbors are not only OK with that, but seem to crave it. 

I am hopeful that the Democratic nominee in 2028 is the one who embraces basic human decency as their calling card. Newsom is great in this moment going toe to toe with Trump's troll army, but I want to rally around someone like Obama or even Biden who makes me feel proud of my country again. I want to believe that we are not that cruel and awful. 

Could Trump Accidentally Do Some Good?

 Trump's war is a slow rolling disaster at this point. However, there might be some positives.

The first, obviously, is that if this trajectory continues, Democrats win the House and the Senate.

The second is that rising energy costs will nudge more and more people to renewables. It will be interesting to see if the GOP Congress decides to make things easier on consumers by rolling back the regulatory and fiscal attacks on renewable energy. I know I certainly would like a return to solar tax credits.

The third is that maybe this war explodes the AI bubble. Now this is "good" in a narrow set of ways. Bubbles have to burst, it is in their nature. Best to get that over with. Second, anything that slows down AI and gives us time to adapt to it is good. Third, crashing AI companies means fewer data centers and, again, lower energy costs. Data centers are being built out beyond requirements, and stopping that would be helpful before it gets out of hand.

Of course, we could very well be looking at a 2008 scenario. The AI boom is pretty much the only thing keeping America out of a recession, and once that bubble bursts, we should expect things to get very panful. It could lead to a full blown financial crisis, as many financial firms are knee deep in AI debt.

Luckily, we have a crack team of crisis managers in charge of the federal government, so I'm sure we will sail right through. 

AI Freakout Of The Day

 Yglesias does one of his spicyhot contrarian takes about AI. Basically - because everything in his mind is about YIMBY v NIMBY - the backlash to AI is really about data centers. No one wants some behemoth gobbling up their electricity and fresh water to plop down in their neighborhood. 

There is certainly backlash to data centers. To simply dismiss other concerns because some data suggests people are conflicted is typical Yglesias bullshit. 

The fundamental reason to be pessimistic about AI is the general pessimism about social media and also the specific concerns about originality. We now have 20 years of internet penetration into most aspects of our lives. It can be benign. It can be beneficial. It can also be terrible in ways that human cognition hasn't compensated for. We know that tech companies goose our amygdala to keep us engaged. Are we going to add the tremendous capabilities of AI to the existing algorithmic world we live in? 

We are suspicious of tech even as we utilize it more and more. It's not a clear case of "AI is bad" or "AI is awesome." I don't like the way AI short circuits creativity and smooths over the struggle of actual learning and discovery. As a teacher, it scares me what will happen to this generation, because I've seen what social media has done to their older siblings. I still like using AI search features. It's pretty convenient.

We also have to accommodate the very real possibility that AI is massively over-hyped but simultaneously accommodate the very real possibility that it could wreck devastation on sectors of the economy. The speed at which this is happening is, in and of itself, scary.

Humans don't really like uncertainty. AI both promises and threatens changes on a scale that has people freaking out. The idea that there isn't a backlash is overdetermined from Yglesias' pre-existing obsessions. 

UPDATE: This seems pretty fucking awful. If you are an educator, that would seem to be a really bright red line.

Toxic America

 I heard an argument that as bad as everything seems to be right now, it's not as bad as the 2000s. The logic - and it's sound - is that 9/11 was so traumatic we don't even talk about the anthrax scare. We fought two somewhat pointless wars. We had the 2008 financial crisis. 

Yeah, that's a lot.

There does seem to be an accelerating toxicity to America though. Part of it is just the relentless stupidity of the people in charge. Dubya Bush was pretty thick, but these idiots are just spectacularly dumb. Kash Patel chugging beers with the men's hockey team...I mean what are we doing here?

Something else caught my eye that I think is emblematic of how awful things are. 

HBO released A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, with the last episode airing last night. It's great. It masterfully moves tonally from incredibly funny to moving to tragically sad. It's "small" compared to Game of Thrones, but that's the point. Anyway, the penultimate episode was amazing and was briefly ranked on IMDB as one of the best episodes of TV...ever. OK, it probably wasn't THAT good, but who freaking cares?

Apparently fans of Breaking Bad care, because they began to review bomb IMDB to drive down the rating for that episode to preserve "Ozymandias", an ep of Breaking Bad, as the top episode of all time. When last night's show came out, Breaking Bad fans mobbed IMDB to drive down the score before the episode had concluded. 

This is all very, very silly, stupid and petty. However, it does demonstrate something about America in 2026. I would posit that the rise of the internet has created this, both by democratizing taste and elevating hostility. Democratizing taste isn't terrible, but we've seen fanbases basically revolt because the story artists are telling wasn't the story they wanted to be told. That isn't the point of storytelling. What happens is a relentless whining about the end of Lost or Game of Thrones or The Sopranos or Seinfeld. It's the dynamic of "Your Favorite Band Sucks, Actually" but amplified across a dozen online platforms.

In the end it sucks the joy out of life. It makes the incessant howling of the self-centered the medium of cultural discourse. What's more, AI is coming to force this everywhere. Didn't like the ending of Game of Thrones? You can burn 5 gigawatts and a rainforest's water supply for AI to make you an ending that suits your taste. It will suck for everyone but you, but congrats, you have made a soulless piece of crap to soothe your raging id.

I love the fact that last night I could quickly find an answer to the question "Should you feed your dog leftover pesto?" (The answer is no.) The internet can be a great facilitator of knowledge - once you know how to use it and once you are aware of its limits. The churn of social media, the imperative of the algorithm that prioritizes "engagement" is absolutely toxic, and it has its roots in the Oughts and the chatrooms. It's now everywhere and it sucks. 

Global Oligarchy

 Josh Marshall has been running a series of posts on what he's calling the global oligarchy or the Authoritarian International. Here and here. 

Normally, I would dismiss this as somewhat conspiratorial, but at the same time, I do think he's on to something. He ties it, interestingly, to the various petrostates of the Middle East rather than Russia, though Russia is also emblematic of its politics. Basically, the new Axis of Evil is the oil states of the Gulf, Silicon Valley anti-democrats and hedge fund billionaires. 

The basic thread holding them together is the desire to escape democratic accountability, which is at the heart of democracy: the powerful must answer to the people. 

There have been a host of articles this week about the coming apocalypse in white collar jobs from AI. Some of these are coming from people working in AI who are seeing how efficient and fast it is becoming, especially at coding. There is a school of thought that this is all hype to elevate their stock price, but if it's even a little true, I think we need to see AI as part of this Authoritarian International (yes, also AI). The purpose of AI might be to change the world, but the practical impact will be to divorce knowledge skills from scarcity and therefore disempower the broad swath of middle and upper middle class workers. 

If you own a company, why not employ an AI bot rather than three humans? Why not maximize your profits this way? Why answer to the bothersome people that work for you, when you can have a compliant digital workforce? 

Democracies will, at some point, have to address AI and its potential deprivation of livelihoods among important constituencies. If you can destroy democracy, you can prevent that from happening. 

The Corruption Is The Point

 If you want to get a really compelling vision of how Trump 2.0 has led to a web of shady dealings, kickbacks and grifts, The New York Times did a great job with this story.

Monopoly Money

 There are two ways to look at the proposed merger of Netflix and Warner merger. One is to look at purely as a business exercise of the relative merits of media consolidation, as Yglesias does. When you do that, it becomes purely an issue of market share and relative competition. Interestingly, it the the economist Paul Krugman who looks at the political angle, which is the increased consolidation of news sources under the control of tech broligarchs. 

There is, I suppose, some utility in allowing Netflix to take over Warner and HBO, in that you are reducing the number of streaming services that you can reasonably sign up for. This landscape is changing so fast, that I can't keep track. We moved to YouTubeTV which also gives us access to HBOMax, but I think we might also have a separate account with HBOMax. Then there is however many accounts we have with Disney/Hulu/ESPN...it's a mess.

The problem is that Warner owns CNN. Now, CNN ain't what it used to be and it used be pretty flawed. It's greatest utility is for breaking news, yet most breaking news is wrong. We are seeing this in real time with the fluid situation with both the Brown shooting and the murder of Rob and Michelle Reiner. CNN isn't expanding our understanding of the news, merely the access to it. 

If a broligarch gets his hands on that, it's objectively bad for the country. In fact, as Krugman notes, we can look at Jeff Bezos' takeover of the Washington Post as a model for all that can go wrong here. Bezos came in as a White Knight to save the ailing paper and restore it as a voice of independent reporting. Trump comes along, puts the squeeze on him and he folds like a lawn chair. Really, in terms of true reporting, the only real independent outlets among papers are the New York Times and, seemingly, the Wall Street Journal (yes, their editorial page is terrible). 

We have seen the impact of letting broligarchs take over the media, too, with the CBS disaster. What was once the premier news network - Murrow, Cronkite, 60 Minutes - is now hosting a second rate right wing podcast of Bari Weiss tongue-bathing Erika Kirk.

Jefferson once said he would prefer a country with newspaper but no government to a country with government but no newspapers. Jefferson could be a bit of an idiot. Still, a free press is essential to a free government, and the media consolidation under the control of tech lords is as big a long term problem for liberal democracy as the lawless Supreme Court.

More From AI Dysfunction

 First, we have Josh Marshall noting that AI is gobbling up computer memory. This goes along with the mass consumption of energy and fresh water that we already know about. This is something that contrasts - a bit - with other bubbles. The Dot Com bubble, the Real Estate bubble, the various railroad bubbles: none of them warped other sectors of the economy quite so profoundly. Railroads spiked the need for steel, but that actually just spurred the development of the steel industry that spilled over beneficially to other sectors like construction. Real Estate sucked up money, but the home building spurt didn't really warp other sectors quite so much. If you've seen your energy bill spike, you're seeing this AI effect.

Krugman speaks about how AI is largely tracking with predictions about interest rates. By comparing it to the Dotcom crash, he shows how even as the NASDAQ was bleeding out, they had rallies corresponding to interest rates changes. In short, as long as the easy money might continue to flow, the bubble might persist.

My own theory is that crypto functions as a cash flow operation for AI, as if you have access to the awesome computing power of AI chips, you could very easily find a way to raise cash off the volatility of crypto and even meme coins. As the bubble starts to get shaky, principles look for a way to salvage their balance sheets. Again - just a theory but - I thought the massive oil price spike in 2008 was finance bros manipulating the market to bring some quick cash onto their books.

There is, no doubt, some role that this massive advance in computing power will have in the future that will be beneficial to the human race. However, I'd wager in the short term we are crushing massive amounts of resources, warping the macroeconomy and creating a ticking bomb in the economy for more realistic fake porn and the ability of middle schoolers to cheat on their book reports.

Laws Still Hold

 For the most part, we have seen Trump and his ankle-biting minions fail to achieve many notable success in "lawfare" against his political enemies. The law seems to be holding, at least in part because Trump's lawyers are a pack of gibbering morons. I saw Trump Knob-Polisher Johnathan Turley noting that the charges against James Comey and Letitia James were dismissed without prejudice, because the ruling was that the appointment of Lindsay Halligan as acting US Attorney was illegal. The Department of Justice could bring new charges once they legally appoint a new US Attorney.

OK, Turley really is an idiot for missing the central fact here: Trump can't find lawyers who are A) capable and B) willing to do his dirty work. Those are mutually exclusive circles. The same goes for the bullshit threats to prosecute Mark Kelly for being in a video reminding service members that their oath was to the Constitution and not to Hair Furor. First, Kelly and the others were right on the law: servicemembers cannot obey illegal orders. Second, Kelly is likely protected by his role as a Senator. Finally, I would imagine discovery would include determining the legality of the strikes on boats in the Caribbean. 

Maybe Hegseth tries to prosecute Kelly, but does anyone really think he's getting good legal advice? John Cole recently put it: "When everything you do is performative, performance is everything." All of this - the entire bullshit thing - is about what it looks like on the Fox News feed that is mainlined into that old fucker's "brain." His administration is full of Alina Habbis and Lindsay Halligans: dumb hotties from the Lionel Hutz School of Law.

I suppose we should be worried that Trump will find competent lawyers to do his dirty work, but I think this is where his manifest decline kicks in. Do you really want to hitch your wagon to this guy? It made sense when he was ascendant for any ambitious, amoral tool to sign up. Do a few years for Trump, then become a Fox News Personality. Does that still make sense?

The looming conundrum for Democrats is this: When they retake power, there will be dozens upon dozens of Trumpist capos who committed real and serious crimes that need prosecuting, but prosecuting them will be seen as more "vengeance" when really it's just the fact that Trump is a criminal who has surrounded himself with other criminals.

The Human Connection

 This piece is about an AI engine designed to help you "cheat" at conversations. The author found it really distracting and did not, in fact, help her with her conversation.

Meanwhile, Yglesias writes a long post about how he likes his - seemingly profound - neurodivergence. That piece definitely shores up my impressions about a certain vacantness in his analysis. He says he makes him more objective, but the AI engine kind of has the same problem that it short circuits real human connection. There is nothing wrong with being neurodivergent and aphantasia is a striking example of a specific form of being different. That does allow him to offer his spicy hot takes that keep him in business, but it also leaves something soulful missing from his work.

AI, of course, has no soul.

So, yeah, anyway, we're all doomed.

Harbingers

 Richardson's Catalog of Atrocities is longer than usual, but one thing stood out. It's the layoffs.

Amazon laid off 14,000. UPS has laid off 48,000 this year. Target laid off 1,800 corporate jobs. Molson Coors is also laying off corporate workers. General Motors and Rivian are laying of workers in their EV sections. 

The loss of white collar jobs might be a harbinger of the coming AI assault on corporate jobs. It may also be a combination of AI displacement AND a weakening overall economy. The Federal Reserve is cutting interest rates in the face of still high inflation, which can only mean their estimation of the job market is pretty bad. 

Now, we are about to get apocalyptic news for SNAP and ACA recipients in the face of these strong "headwinds" in the economy. 

Usually, we should see a market crash about now in the calendar year. For whatever reason, the fall is when the markets collapse. So far it hasn't happened, but the overall signs are pretty dire.

Given Republican efforts to gerrymander themselves out of electoral consequences, a massive economic collapse might be the Republic's only hope.

Don't Get Lost In The Moment

 Given the overwhelming awfulness of everything, it can be soul crushing to follow the news with any regularity. Trump and MAGA's assault on the fabric of American democracy is non-stop. However, maybe take a breath and separate what they are actually doing and what they are just yammering about.

As Marshall notes, all of Russell Vought's threats about permanently firing Federal workers during the shutdown or denying them back pay have not been backed up with actual action. This is very Trumpist: talk shit but don't actually do what you're talking about.  Have we annexed Greenland yet?

As Richardson notes, Trump's detachment from actually doing the job of president is similar to Warren Harding, another idiot Republican who didn't know shit about shit, who turned his administration over to the corrupt Ohio Gang. Trivia alert: Harding is one of three presidents to die in office of natural causes.  Just saying. These people - Vought, Miller, Bondi, RFK, Jr, Patel - are doing unpopular shit, because they are a terrifying combination of blithering idiots and deeply committed ideologues. 

So as we navigate the Kakistocracy, it can be overwhelming listening to the fascist ravings of Stephen Miller or the mush mouthed inanities of Trump himself. 

That's the point. 

They want to overwhelm you and they are pretty good at it. Who's talking about Charlie Kirk right now? The "This Changes Everything" crowd has moved on, because we simply skip from outrage to outrage. This works for and against them.

However, Democrats are winning the shutdown fight. Republicans are laying the groundwork for the capitulation by falsely claiming that no one cares more about health care access than they do. Eric Swalwell was on Twitter saying that the Epstein stuff is close to breaking. 

Doomerism is what they need. Will we have free and fair elections in 2026? I have no idea! It's a long, long way off. Despairing about that now is both psychologically unhealthy and strategically counterproductive.

Trump and Company aren't popular. If the economy weakens any further, they will collapse in public support. That's why they are likely spinning so fast to commit as many outrages as possible. Time may be running out on them. Or maybe not. But we can't tell from our perspective today.

The Worm, Is It Turning?

 Two threads that basically wonder if we are in a new reality here in Trumpistan. The first is Josh Marshall noting that Democrats are not only now joining the fight, they are joining the fight on terrain that seems favorable to them. 

The second is a compiled Thread from Bluesky about opposing authoritarianism. Basically, it lays out the many hurdles Trump would actually have to clear to end democracy. It was true three weeks ago, but it seems more realistic now. By design, there are so many veto points on the road to autocracy, that Trump would struggle to overcome them in the best of circumstances for him.

One of the points he makes was actually made about, wait for it, Star Wars. Do you know how many Stormtroopers you would need to suppress the galaxy? That number is massive. The author points out that the Nazis original stormtroopers number 400,000 in 1932 and then exploded to 2,000,000 the following year. The entire DHS has 240,000 employees and most of them are office drones. ICE and Border Patrol have a total of 90,000 people. Even if they triple in size, that's a pitiful number in a nation of 340,000,000. 

Trumpism requires assent from everyone. It has largely gotten that from corporate elites - whether in the C-Suite of in a law firm - but there comes a point when popular outrage overwhelms them - see the Kimmel fiasco.

Trump is objectively unpopular. He is also spending his time ranting about UN escalators and Tylenol. Because no one will give him bad news, he's only going to get increasingly out of touch beyond the stark and stark raving made confines of MAGA world.

As I've said before, as a teacher of government I would say, "Be afraid." As a teacher of history I would say "Be patient."

Today In Oligarchy

 The news that Trump ally Larry Ellison of Oracle is trying to buy TikTok and Time Warner is a great example of the actual impact of Trump's corrupt authoritarianism. On its face, this looks like a clear anti-trust issue, but if you think Trump is going to let the letter of the law impede his friend's ability to create a media monopoly to choke off anti-Trump stories...well.

TikTok is a malignant force in young people's live in a lot of ways. It destroys attention spans; it pushes divisive and damaging narratives; it warps their understanding of the world. That China controls it is objectively bad. I don't doubt they are pushing divisive content.

Giving it to a Trump-aligned oligarch is not the damned solution.

"Trump is on the side of billionaires" is a pretty damned effective message if anyone wants my two cents.

A Stefon Story

 Bill Hader had a recurring character on SNL called Stefon who touted night clubs with the line "This club has it all.." before rattling off a list of impossibly bizarre features. I think we need to start looking at stories about Trump's administration that "have it all" and this one qualifies. 

The contours are this: The United Arab Emirates is looking to diversify its economy by getting into AI. America leads the world (for the moment) in AI chip technology. The UAE is also pretty friendly to China, so the Biden Administration and even national security officials in the first few months of the Trump Restoration were very, very reluctant to give UAE access to the Nvidia AI chips. 

Enter Steve Witkoff, Trump's new consigliere who has no relevant experience to the multitude of jobs that he has been given. He comes out of New York real estate, the same moral sewer that produced Jabba the President. Witkoff, working with techbro oligarch David Sacks, tried to make an end run around the national security concerns and got a huge assist from extreme MAGA gargoyle, Laura Loomer. Basically, they overrode security concerns to export 500,000 of the advanced chips, and then the UAE invested over a billion dollars into Trump aligned crypto.

This story has everything: corruption and personal enrichment by Trump and tech bros, selling out national security interests, Laura Loomer, incompetent people ignoring expert advice and the growing international web of rich people who exist beyond the interest and control of governments.

It also has implausible denials from "White House spokespeople" who say ridiculous things that often don't deny anything. "The Trump administration is the most honest in history" North Korea media type shit.

Crypto doesn't need to exist. It performs no real useful function that money can't perform, except money laundering, drug and human trafficking and fraud, all of which is removed from banking oversight. Crypto has no intrinsic value, but as we see in this story, it's really good for bribing people under the guise of "investing." Meanwhile, China is almost certain to get their hands on these chips and we will lose that advantage, whatever that's worth in our coming AI dystopia. However, for the international tech bro club, who cares if it's the US, the UAE, China or whoever, as long as you get yours. The startling amorality of tech libertarians is almost its own pathology at this point. 

Does this "make America great again"? Of course not. Anymore than the criminal treatment of South Korean engineers by ICE makes sense. However, the swirling chaos, corruption and incompetence of Trump-world means that as long as someone gets what they want - Witkoff's millions; Loomer's vendettas; Sack's techno-stateless utopia - it can proceed, even if it reduces efforts in another area.

Like I said, this story has everything.

More Stagflation

 The root causes on 1970s stagflation are complicated. There was a massive increase in money going to the poor from the Great Society. There was massive military spending in Vietnam. There was a decline in worker productivity growth. There was also, perhaps most importantly from my point of view, the rolling energy crises of the '70s. 

Energy is a massive part of the cost of everything you buy and when gas prices spiked that increased the price of shipping just about everything and that led to price increases. 

Today, as Krugman lays out, we are faced with a new energy crisis centered on electricity. Because we have an AI and crypto bubble forming, we are building out massive amounts of data processing that consume huge amounts of electricity at precisely the time that Trump is killing renewables, because reasons.

I'm quite obviously not Paul Krugman, but I understand supply and demand. Demand is up and Trump is killing the cheapest form of supply.

This is going to hit people in their budgets in ways that will lead to backlash, even if Trump isn't 100% responsible for it.

AI Is Shit, Because It's Based On Online People

 AI is not actually "artificial intelligence," it's Large Language Model computing that crushes so much data that it can pass for a human, I guess. It is trained on the internet, and I don't know if you've spent any time on the internet, but boy howdy there is some fucked up shit on the internet.

The fact that it can pass for a person, at least to some extent, means that the potential for abuse is incredibly high. We had Jonathan Haidt come to campus to talk about social media and how toxic it is and phones are, but he ended by citing his worries that AI was simply going to be used for sex bots.

Well, guess what.

The fact that Meta allows AI pedophilia is something that I never thought I'd type. The fact that we are going to consume gargantuan amounts of energy to power lurid chat bots that mimic everything from children to celebrities and allow people to constantly push against boundaries of acceptable behavior is really blood chilling. I have a hunch before 15 years is out, we are going to have to decide whether you can prosecute a human being for raping a robot. I'm dead serious.

When video came out, it was amazing! You could watch all sorts of movies that you never could before. It did not take long, though, for porn to push its way to the back room of video shops. In fact, the reason we had VHS and not Betamax was because VHS was cheaper, lower quality and therefore preferred by pornographers. The internet was going to democratize knowledge and allow people all over the world to connect. It would be the death of authoritarianism by digital libertarianism. Instead, we got PornHub. 

AI will go the same direction. Yes, there are good applications for it. It makes for a superior search engine, or at least an easier one. You could Google "melanoma symptoms and Google would give you resources. Now, AI will summarize them for you.

Yay?

We've already seen Musk's AI - Grok - become a fascist (MechaHitler) because it was trained of his toxic Twitter. We will see AI become a vehicle for human depravity, not because the machines are depraved, but because we are depraved and while the tech bros will laud the miracles that AI might very well bring to us, they are going to make money off the depravity. 

I only say this because they always have.