While I was writing about the beautiful dream of Trump probably dying and how the media is handling it, which is to say barely touching it and enjoying a refreshing cool drink on the porch while still basking in the dopamine jacuzzi they filled to the brim by having hounded a sitting President out of his own re-election campaign for much less hyenashit insane behavior; I wrote a line, then kept moving it down the essay hoping to find a space to explore the idea…until I ran out of room entirely.

But that’s what the follow-up posts are for!

So here goes.

The line was this: legacy media no longer reports on threats to citizens or America itself, at least not with any real enthusiasm. It reports breathlessly on threats to the regime. We are no the presumed audience of the fourth estate.

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This week on my podcast, I read “By all means, tread on those people,” a recent column from my Pluralistic newsletter; about the way that the American descent in fascism is connected to its abandonment of the rule of law more broadly:

Just as Martin Niemöller’s “First They Came” has become our framework for understanding the rise of fascism in Nazi Germany, so, too is Wilhoit’s Law the best way to understand America’s decline into fascism:

In case you’re not familiar with Frank Wilhoit’s amazing law, here it is:

Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

The thing that makes Wilhoit’s Law so apt to this moment – and to our understanding of the recent history that produced this moment – is how it connects the petty with the terrifying, the trivial with the radical, the micro with the macro. It’s a way to join the dots between fascists’ business dealings, their interpersonal relationships, and their political views. It describes a continuum that ranges from minor commercial grifts to martial law, and shows how tolerance for the former creates the conditions for the latter.

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GOOOOOD MOOOOORNING, VALE OF TEARS!

Things are going great, aren’t they? All those problems we were having, the problems that were so bad, so intolerably painful, so fucking urgent we just HAD to turn to Insane Clown Fascism because there was no time to lose waiting for actual policy to work, those problems are all gone now, right? Inflation, crumbling infrastructure, cost of living, wages and the jobs that hate them, Gaza, Ukraine, broken immigration system, broking electoral system, broken media, broken real estate market, broken educational system, broken healthcare system, inflation again, AI creep, homelessness, mass shootings, the Epstein files, gas prices, ancient and crumbling husk of a President, and also inflation?

All fixed, right?

No? Absolutely all of that is way, way worse and no one is even working on any of it, nor will they ever? It’s just been nine months of arresting and torturing random people, yelling fucking cartoon nonsense at microphones, cancelling things that are so basic and fundamental ten years ago hardly anyone realized you could get rid of them, like vaccines and rights, various incredibly famous people clearly and obviously stealing huge sacks of money and data then tip-toeing off with a dramatic shhhh like old-timey bandits, and people wandering through it all in a daze while the media just COMFORTABLY FUCKING RETIRES FROM BEING A THING I GUESS?

Oh, man, that’s so fucking crazy, because I was repeatedly told, by people of all socio-political-economic persuasions, that these issues were so disastrous and so pressing we simply could not elect anyone but…the guy whose only plan for anything is to lower his own taxes, then murder an immigrant.

And I feel like…oh, gosh, it’s just so hard to remember, but I feel like the idea that the President was dummy old, couldn’t speak right, and might secretly be dying was a huge deal a year ago. And also a few months ago. And also Jake Tapper is still yelling at random passers-by about it—because not so very long ago, the age and health of the President of the United States was so cosmically fucking important a household-name national newscaster kicked his own entire career down a well about it, well after that guy wasn’t even President anymore.

Oh well, at least you guys over there festering on the right got your super duper massively important issues addressed by Big Daddy, right? You got Disney to only make exclusively and only Big Strong White Boy Uber Alles media, trans kids banned from JV softball in all 50 states, all women executively ordered to stop excelling and do a pregnant with the nearest 8chan shitposter, and the Epstein files released for all to see, right?

Oh, none of those, either, really?

SO WEIRD.

It’s almost like this whole Ten Years at Donnie’s ride through the fucking Wonka Tunnel of Nightmares wasn’t about anything real whatsoever, apart from securing the freedom to act like a total dick to everyone at all times, which we already had. At least nothing philosophical, ethical, moral, or even particularly political.

Now don’t get me wrong, Project 2025 is a thing and it has been for a lot longer than it’s had a name. Progress has been made on the “what happens if we just take everyone’s rights away?” front. Shit has been going down, and it is terrible, reeking, authoritarian, bugfuck bonkers shit.

Look, if I said today the administration announced it’s banning all vaccines because vaccines are gay wokeism, you wouldn’t immediately dismiss that at all. You might not even fact-check me. And there’s a whole strain of conspiracy theory that definitely does insist vaccines make you gay and trans, and since the country is by and large being run according to the contents of early internet chain emails and misspelled grandpa memes, that’s not even a particularly wild possibility. Certainly not for RFK (the F stands for fucking brain worms!) who looks and behaves like a mini-Thanos just super excited to snap them kids.

But most of it has almost nothing to do with Donald Trump himself. You know he doesn’t actually give a shit about any of that (other than mild interest in the murder parts) He clearly cares most about the monumental task of spray-painting every available surface with Home Depot brand metallic “gold.”

And he’s, you know, pretty obviously dying.

Or at least having some kind of allergic reaction to existence. Seriously, this guy is stumbling around puffed up like a demonic shar-pei that ate several thousand bees and his entire government keeps growling shut the fuck up he’s fine and anyway the bees were Democrats we’ve already begun construction on Bee Buchenwald and yes we are officially calling it that you’re a Democrat bee aren’t you, admit it, admit it! at anyone who so much as peruses the Get Well card section at CVS too long, except for J.D. Vance doing the chicken dance on camera and yelling I’m feeling fantastic, thanks! every time he does the stupid wing-flap.

Truly, you have done a spectacular job at life if the entire world starts putting champagne on ice and warming up the fireworks because you didn’t post on social media for a few days.

But something bothers me about how this is all going down—other than the 3-5 obvious things.

Is Trump actually at death’s door? Probably? Maybe? He looks like Violet Beauregard stuffed into a half-inflated rubber mask of James Austin Johnson, but evil just loves not dying when it should. Presidents have access to whatever Roswell-derived super serum medicine any lab could dream up, so he could go on for years as a vaguely human-shaped Franzia hooch-bag full of steroids, statins, stem cells, and probably adrenochrome, given the absolute state of GOP projection, that wobbles alarmingly whenever lightly grazed. (SCOTUS would decide that said wobbles constitute legally-binding Executive Orders, 6-3.)

Maybe that’s just what an old overfed vampire looks like past a certain point.

What bothers me is that if the last newsweek had happened in 2019, we’d know.

The first Trump administration was a constantly-rotating zoo display of monsters, to be sure. But they were, by and large, known monsters, who’d monstered their way through previous administrations monstrously, and rolled up their sleeves to kick it up a lil’ notch. They were creatures, but creatures of a long-standing system, invested in that system, with half an eye on where they’d stand in that system in the After Times. I mean, yeah, it’d be totally awesome if they could bring the whole thing down and crown themselves Kings of Eternity, but every step down from that goal was also a win, so they focused on partying while the party was hot.

Which is why they all leaked like fucking colanders.

They wrote tell-all books, they placed blind items, they whispered national secrets to anyone who even faintly smelled of social media clout. And as soon as they were fired, which was all the fucking time, they couldn’t repress their giggles about what an idiotic asshole Large Marge truly was for a second before running to blab it all to the first camera they could find. To the point that regular human people, neither part of the media nor the government, knew about a lot of things before they happened, things it’s literally insane for everyday citizens to know about, like January 6th.

Back a century or two ago when Trump was shot, I dismissed the various conspiracy theories about it being staged because I couldn’t believe a scheme that big wouldn’t instantly spew leaks like a football field full of sprinklers. None of them could keep a secret, surely we’d hear whispers the way we always did about everything.

But we didn’t. So it must have been real.

Oh and by the way, it’s sheerly astonishing how we’ve just helplessly accepted this empty-tabled no-chairs potluck of dork-ass potato-water-blooded failsons corralling us into a corner where we cannot even allow ourselves to consider any idea that remotely resembles a conspiracy theory, even when CONSPIRACIES SO MELODRAMATICALLY BLATANT THE WORLD’S RICHEST MAN IS OPENLY GIGGLING ABOUT DOING BIG CRIMES ON LIVE TV WHILST HIGH AS A CUMULUS CLOUD IN THE OVAL OFFICE are happening right in front of us, with only the most half-hearted attempts to hide them behind THE OCCASIONAL FUCKING HALF-DEAD POTTED PLANT. The President of the United States has repeatedly said Elon Musk secured the election for him with those gosh-dang computers he’s so good at and we just sigh and tell ourselves we can’t think about it or we’re just like them. Trump constantly panics, incredibly loudly, about the Epstein Files and hysterically screeches for people to forget they exist at least once a week, but we’ve voluntarily forbidden ourselves to even entertain the thought that, since he must know his base can’t stop slobbering all over him for longer than five seconds about anything, and everyone already knows he likes young girls, maybe there’s more to this than him being one of many customers. So now we just live like this, refusing to consider that several conspiracies might be underway from the exact kind of people who love doing conspiracies, and have done them before, over and over again, is a required demonstration of not being a fascist. So much so that I’ve almost deleted this paragraph three times because I don’t want to sound like those loose pinballs, either. FANTASTIC WORK ALL AROUND.

Anyway, the point is, that was my first tiny little alarm-bell ringing in the back of my head. It’s not 2019 anymore. It’s the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment, and this administration isn’t like the last one. Nobody’s been fired yet. I doubt they’re going to be. The people working for Trump Two: Apocalyptic Boogaloo mostly don’t have any real interest in government at all, unless you thought Linda McMahon just really passionately cared about education. For the most part, they don’t come from previous administrations. They’re not keeping their eye on a future in which the system goes on. They’re unearthly-rich tech oligarchs who are betting on AI removing the need for the masses entirely and parentless nineteen year olds named Big Balls and 80s celebrities trying out wildly off-label uses and a festive assortment of nepobabies and just Stephen Miller again because I guess he’s the squirrel-flaying little boy whose Christmas wish created this timeline in the first place or fucking something.

They don’t leak. Because they’re in this for themselves, not America or the GOP or even Trump specifically, except as the car the clowns came in. They’re all on their own individual grift and/or crusade for whatever (evil) cause they (evilly) dreamed about one time at (evil) band camp and felt a new tingly sensation suffusing their souls, which was all the evil.

Last time around, Trump was an unexpected limo appearing out of nowhere to pick up the hitch hikers of the old Republican party and get them to the church on time just when they thought they might have to change. The limo was rented, payments past-due, the muffler was barely holding on, and the floor was covered old stains everyone knew not to ask about, but no one really knew that yet, so they called it the best and most beautiful car ever and off they went.

This time, Trump is a crumbling meth-camper up on cinderblocks with a racial slur spray-painted on the side that will never move again but keeps pumping out product that keeps the addicts coming back: power, pain, and profit.

And I’ve started to wonder if the new Rogues’ Gallery knew it the whole time. That this was less an election than the handshake on a deal.

Because what’s happened here is REALLY odd. Trump is a storebrand freezer bag full of id-ichor, but he is actually the President of the United States, and the White House let rumors that he was fucking dead light up the planet for days before posting a hilariously hamfisted, half-assed, zero effort proof of life photo that made him look, somehow, more dead despite technically standing upright.

If you or I didn’t post on social media for a few days, and people started seriously speculating that we’d DIED, most of us would immediately log on and say we were fine, stop being weird. And the Trump we all know and hate would absolutely respond to any kind of rumor that he was anything less than the star of the new Superman franchise with a full-court media-barf of swaggering, pustulant Garbage Pail Kid villain-monologuing.

But that didn’t happen. Nothing happened, really. Other than things that made it worse, like clips of Trump whimpering about going to heaven and Vance volunteering that he was hyped to do Trump’s job, which, not for nothing, but Pence would never. Why, he’d rather actually have sex with his wife! And if by some chance his room-temperature water got spiked, there would’ve been severe consequences once Pizza the Hut heard about it.

But there weren’t.

It might’ve only been a few days, but that’s SUCH a long time for the Trump administration to let us laugh and rejoice at the prospect of his death. We all know they don’t care about the national security problems with that, but the psychological problems should’ve sparked some kind of response other than “nothing to see, it’s whatever” then “meh, here’s a shitty picture,” if Trump being active, in charge, or alive at all mattered to any of the people he brung to the ball.

The passivity of their side of it is genuinely remarkable. And I don’t think it’s about a distraction from Epstein or anything else, because Trump would never agree to look this weak, no matter how advantageous it might be. He hasn’t even done anything to punish us for openly cheering for his death for days on end. Anything he wasn’t already doing, anyway.

Then again, remarkable passivity seems to be a catching sickness. It would seem to be the motto of the era. It’s almost impossible to believe this quiet, unconcerned media is the same one that utterly detonated over Biden’s debate and continue to throw out wild theories about him even now. But the media is just…fine now. Fine with all of it. With their jobs being boiled down to copy-pasting social media posts for however long it takes for their bosses to figure out how to use ChatGPT and the President zombie-walking across the White House roof looking like RFK’s dead, decapitated whale isn’t even interesting enough to investigate.

If Biden, at any point, looked anything close to what Trump looks right now today, the uproar would blow out your fucking eardrums.

Instead, it’s already out of the news cycle.

Something isn’t right here, but not the way it hasn’t been right for a long time. Either he really is Reaper-adjacent or there’s some other reason he is or will be neutered enough that his own government (and their cute little three-legged rescue media) is acting like whether he lives or dies is none of our business, and barely theirs.

Look, I doubt he’s gone any time soon. I’m sure they’ll pump him full of orphan’s tears or whatever as long as possible. But it’s either bad enough that no one’s talking, or it doesn’t matter enough for anyone to feel like they have to talk.

That deal I was talking about? NOT TO SOUND LIKE A CONSPIRACY THEORIST BUT I wonder if, beyond the ego-wound of losing the last election, this entire downfall of America was a handshake between an already-dying old man who needed to keep his secrets secret, and a dozen different (evil) agendas crammed into an Amazon.com trenchcoat, who all knew that as long as the meth-camper crashed directly into the White House, it didn’t matter whether the driver lived. They weren’t going camping anyway. They never considered any of those problems up top, or any problems at all. They just wanted to get together with their internet buddies and steal everything, hurt some people, and have a go at forcing a future even they don’t want, but fancy they’d enjoy watching from afar.

And you know, much like those gay woke vaccines , now that I type it out, that doesn’t even seem like much of a leap.

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I know, I know. I’m so sorry, guys.

It’s been a real fuckwit of a summer, and between no childcare, a novel deadline, home repair catastrophes, and a bunch of life drama, I've done an insanely bad job with the whole regular upddating thing.

BUT!

The novel is DONE. School has STARTED. The house is STILL STANDING. And peace has returned to my little world. I mean, except for the entire lake of flaming sewage that is my nation and many, many parts of the world. EXCEPT FOR THAT HA HA THINGS ARE FINE.

So this is just a note to let you know I’m not dead (awkward unpleasant proofs of life are SO HOT RIGHT NOW), and I’ll be actually corralling my shit and not letting things slide slowly into the sea so much from now on, starting with a new piece here tomorrow, and every two weeks after that.

AFTER ALL, IT’S ALL STILL FUCKING GARBAGE OUT THERE, ISN’T IT?

See you on the flipside, faithful Garbagetowners. Thanks for sticking around.

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Science fiction’s superpower isn’t thinking up new technologies – it’s thinking up new social arrangements for technology. What the gadget does is nowhere near as important as who the gadget does it for and who it does it to. Your car can use a cutting-edge computer vision system to alert you when you’re drifting out of your lane – or it can use that same system to narc you out ...Read More

It’s the 500th edition of my podcast, and to celebrate, I’m bringing you an hour-long excerpt from the audiobook of my forthcoming book Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What To Do About It (Farrar, Straus and Giroux US/Canada; Verso UK/Commonwealth).

Because Amazon won’t carry my audiobooks (or any DRM-free audiobooks), I have to produce my own books and pre-sell them on Kickstarter campaigns. The Kickstarter for this one is underway and going great.

I hope that listening to this long sample will convince you to pre-order your copy! I don’t ask for Patreon donations, I don’t put ads on my work – these Kickstarters are a big part of why I’m able to pursue my open access, enshittification-free publishing program, and I really thank you for your support.

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Before getting started… these days, I am already writing a lot about digital policy issues on FOSS Force. Therefore, here I will mostly, but not exclusively discuss what I consider the ten biggest errors of our time, summarized here. Please let me know if you agree, commenting here or by email, and please pass around the requests at the end.

The ten biggest errors of our times are, in semi-random order…

Error 1: Environmentalism without class

As I read somewhere online, environmentalism without class is just gardening, and that's why it cannot gather enough votes to make a difference. One good example is politics that push electric cars as good for the environment, instead of politics to free the millions of working poors from the slavery of forced car ownership with much more transit, with collateral but huge environmental benefits.

Error 2: believing we still have an overpopulation problem

Demography is the science that tells you what you should have done thirty years ago, in order to have around you today just the type and quantity of people you'd like. Sure, today there are on Earth three times more people than when I was born, but they are a very different mix of generations than just one or two... generations ago.

Today almost all countries, even in Africa, are aging fast, and the time to manage that change is yesterday. Regardless of what the material economy will look like thirty years from now, most people already alive today will live very strenuous and very, very depressing "golden" years if they don't seriously, concretely encourage and support now those among us who do want to have as many kids as possible.

Error 3: demeaning the 3Fs = Flag, Faith and Family

The Enlightenment was absolutely necessary, but could never be enough. Fascism does very often come "wrapped in a flag and carrying a Bible". However, automatically equating all flags, religions and, why not, preferences for traditional families with fascism is a non-negligible reason why today there are more, not less authoritarian, reactionary governments in western countries than ten or twenty years ago. We do have to get rid of all the many, real phobies, intolerance and bigotry that still plague us. But why keep doing in a way tha, no matter how right it could be in principle, is obviously backfiring?

Error 4: believing that "more is better" is progress, and that any progress must be endless, mandatory and FAST

The brains and bodies of our species are not built for instantness and excesses of any kind, be they food, communication or simulations of thinking. Physically speaking, it doesn't matter if it's inside (excess body fat) or inside (excess clothing, car, home...): we cannot be healthy with too much stuff crushing us. Brain-wise, it's the same: we cannot function properly, both individually and as a society, with brain plugs doubling as electronic tags that either drown our consciences and sense of being with just too much data or do the exact opposite, that is mine data.

Error 5: believing that Work = WORTH

Abandon the "absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living" to be valuable. People still thinking they must absolutely have a job, any job, to do good and be valuable need counseling, not a job. What human beings actually need is money to stay alive, and a purpose to make being alive worth it, vut the more the two things are separate, the better. Continues here and here.

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Error 6: believing that education and schooling must prepare for work

The purpose of education is to prepare for life, not work. Education must prepare people to be good citizens, partners and parents, not good employees for roles that may not exist anymore by the time one graduates. That's the purpose of vocational training, which is something else entirely, and as such should happen outside, or after, school and college.

The confusion of education with training has created two huge problems, one short- and one long-term: the first is the myth that education MUST be always high-tech, complicated, and expensive. The second is what's called elite overproduction, that will make many people very angry. The sooner that confusion stops, the better.

Error 7: snobbing text, that is HUMAN writing and reading

99% of the knowledge we need to be really diffused across society is still text. Human-written text. That is something that requires writing and reading to master. See the purpose of education above, and the tips for parents below.

Error 8: Granting human status to what is NOT human

Real entrepreneurships is good, and so can be markets, when properly regulated. Granting the same rights of frail but precious human beings to immortal, ubiquitous, omnipotent entities is instead a hugely stupid mistake. Corporations must not have personhood, or any other human right. Ditto for what passes for AI today, which is just a really fragile smokescreen for something that is not unavoidable at all.

While I'm at this, pets. Regardless of their environmental impact or the very ethics of owning another living being for personal gratification, if we have come to benefiting from pets as much as from a spouse, fulfilling pets needs with AI and needing expensive pet insurance to cure pets we created with health issues... Maybe we must re-learn relationships, both with animals and among humans.

Error 9: not demanding a reform of MONEY before everything else

Beyond ending corporate personhood, no real reform of work and society could last without a reform of money and how it is managed, from creation to taxation. Personally, I have no idea if stuff like Modern Monetary Theory or Wörgl negative money could be the solution, but I cannot accept that the geniuses who already screwed the real economy with financial schemes "too complex to fail" except for working poors cannot also conjure something that would benefit everybody.

Error 10: believing we can act alone

Fuck lontermism, that is the advice to put the wellbeing of humans that may never exist before yours... given by the only people rich enough to never have any of your problems today. Fuck longtermism, but never do it alone. We have all been told for decades that we are only allowed to fight the system as individuals, but the only way to fix those errors and make the world a better place in your lifetime is to vote and work together now, even (especially?) with people who have very different ideas than yours on some issues.

Back to the future

Besides what I already mentioned, many of the problems above would be much, much smaller if we only were mature enough to go back to the levels of material comforts and tech sophistication of the western 1980s, rebooted and optimized with modern technologies and adult common sense. I'm talking of something nobody could dare call "degrowth, like:

• personal goods, from cars and appliances to clothes and computers, built to last decades with cheap maintenance, without idiotic "smart" additions, plus

• long overdue infrastructural changes like efficient public transit, rebooted air conditioning, and rebooted cement industry for all the crumbling infrastructures, from bridges to pipes, that we can't live without…

• and yes, even mobile Internet, just with RSS and slowness in social media, at the right age

I mean, if even the rich are back to living like we all used to do, why shouldn’t you?

Final note on education...

On one hand, many of the jobs that pay well, are more resistant to automation and offshoring, and are also sources of great self-realization don't need a degree. More than programmers or MBAs, today's world needs plumbers, electricians, roofers and many other technicians, who also know and appreciate the humanities.

On the other hand, if I ran parenting classes, which I would like, almost all the tricks I would teach are those that you hear very seldom, because they cost nothing: avoid personal smartphones (not the internet!) until your kid is at least 14/15 years old; teach kids to always sleep regularly, make your kids addict to reading; and make kids play outside alone, as they want, as much as possible. Do this, and what will increase sensibly will be your chances of growing balanced, happy adults, instead of their student debt.

... and final personal requests to all readers.

The more support I get, the more I can write. If you want and can become a paid subscriber, thanks, that's wonderful, really. But I know we've reached peak subscription, and I think that one-time donations can be even better, for both me and and my readers. To do that, go here. Also, I am available to speak, teach, consult on any of those errors. Just email me.

First, one update and one reminder: if I’ve been silent here lately, is because I’ve written a lot at FOSS Force, please do check out my weekly column there! Also, please remember my "unusual request”: I do appreciate paid subscriptions but, for the reasons explained at the end of this post, I feel one time donations for any amount you want, via PayPal (mfioretti@nexaima.net) or LiberaPay may be even fairer, for both you and me.

Back to the story now: Sixty years ago Pablo Picasso more or less said that computers are useless because they just give answers.

Sixty years later, I see more and more signs that current AI, which is not unavoidable at all and is not even "intelligence", just peak software, is useless, if not harmful, for exactly the same reason.

Of course, Google's AI Overview (yes, the same "intelligence" that plagiarizes to give cringeworthy answers") disagrees. On August 4, 2025, when I searched for that quote, it parroted that "Today, computers, especially with the rise of artificial intelligence, can be used for a much wider range of tasks...Therefore, Picasso's statement is more a commentary on the limitations of early computers and his perspective on the role of human creativity rather than a timeless truth about the nature of computing."

No way. If anything, Picasso's quote, apocryphal or not, is even more valid for today's AI and Web than for the ancient mainframes he knew.

All the big players on the Web want you to see only answers, possibly their own answers. With AI summaries, search engines now deliver their own answers instead of links, making as much as 34% less people follow links to websites. Even book publishers anticipate a massive decrease in sales, due to chatbots.

Social Media are just as bad. They force on people, causing a traffic apocalypse for media companies, any stupidity they can think of to keep them locked inside their playpens, with nothing but answers, that must be as as few as possible, but always time wasters.

Right now, the biggest but by no means the only offender in this violence of never giving people anything but answers is Facebook. Zuckerberg's playpen has tamed millions of people (including journalists and other "professional communicators" who should really know better) to adopt at least two astonishingly stupid practices.

One is convincing users to annoy all their followers with @followers or @highlight tags that aren't even answers, just notifications that someone said or answered something, but not what. Even if we didn't have the real solution to "get the news", that is RSS, those tags are as stupid as a newspaper or website front page that only contained titles like "Trump said something" or "Something happened in Turkmenistan", without any detail, ever.

The other, even bigger abuse is the all but mandatory push to put "links in the first comment", instead of inside the original post. The same happens on X, which is one of the two things I'll never forgive to Elon Musk.

@followers, @highlight and "link in comment" are not "practices". They are digital lobotomies that make us defecate, multiple times a day, exactly on what made the Web great and useful, that is links labeled with text.

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All the media companies that, by any combination of greed, dumbness and desperation, are trying to replace writers with chatbots are the best allies of the Big Tech that's killing them, by flooding the web with nothing but their own Big Tech answers. The media companies that still exploit human writers, however, aren't much better. A particularly telling example of the latter category, for reasons I'll explain in a moment, is in this screenshot:

That's an "article" by a major Italian newspaper that is mostly text cut and pasted from the automatic translation of a CNN one, obviously without attribution.

Are answsers enough? Ask the experts

All the diseases above have three things in common: they are supercharged by the peak software bubble we've been led to call AI; they only provide answers, never access to questions, or resources that would stimulate more questions; and those answers are getting worst every quarter.

I also believe that in "developed" but not English speaking countries like Italy, a general degradation of answers is happening even faster, thanks to the abuse of AI-powered translation, as in the example above. Eventually, that extra step can only make the average quality of any non-English text produced by any AI worst than the quality of their English text, because the former will be the result of training on text corpuses that were born one step farther from human thought.

Nothing you've read so far is new, but it's important to connect the dots: how, and why, exactly, all this is bad? Several experts confirm that the right answer is Picasso's one:

1. The key to curiosity is asking the right questions

2. Learning to ask good questions matters more than finding answers

3. [Real] knowledge itself is impossible without understanding causation, which AI chatbots can't do because they lack a "rational soul"

4. "Answers-only" AI cannot "encourage the ethical practice of open-ended curiosity so desperately needed in today’s complex information environment."

5. Communication with machines that never listen, just respond, only trains us to respond back

6. in full "broken clock that's right twice a day" fashion, Sam Altman himself said that "figuring out what questions to ask will be more important than figuring out the answer."

The problem of getting only answers, never meaningful questions, is made worst by answers given when no answer at all would have been better. One of the surest signs of real intelligence is to know when to stop. Chatbots (or search engines) designed to make money cannot do that. They must always provide answers, including those they could not possibly know, even if that means making things up or, in extreme cases, suggesting people to kill themselves.

Equally obvious, but seldom appreciated enough, are the facts that a) one can get decent answers from an AI only if she is already competent enough to ask good questions and judge the quality of the answers, and b) no one cannot get that competence only from AI-generated resources. More explicitly, no kid, or adult, can ever aquire that competence from AI bots trained on AI translations of the same text, that maybe was AI-generated to begin with. Read text like this, instead, by humans for humans.

It's questions that give us sense, not answers

The seventh reason why finding good questions is more important than answers, which includes all the others, is as obvious as it is important: to feel that our life is worth living, and our very existence actually valuable, we humans need to find the right answers by ourselves. That, however, can only happen when we get (from each other or even by machines, why not?) the right questions.

Concretely, that's why we need search engines and social media that encourage and increase both sharing links to human content, and we need to actually read that content, and to teach kids to do the same

This is the exact reason why any AI that can only give answers, and will never stop giving them, is useless. Trust Picasso.

Side note

While I was collecting material for this piece, I found people posting on Facebook what they present as an excerpt of some interview to Altman (without providing any source. Of course, see above) in which he also "warned about AI dependency and parasocial relationships: "People will develop problematic parasocial relationships, society will have to figure out new guardrails." Especially with kids who grow up thinking AI is their friend."

I'm pretty sure any real AI would summarize that answer as follows: "My pals and I are too busy screwing people minds to make money and feel like gods, you please figure out how to clean up the mess we're making. Meanwhile, we rich people will keep living as everybody lived before, because that's saner."

As I said, trust Picasso instead.

Welcome back to literally everything falling apart around us!

Hope you’re all having a great summer watching everyone be bizarrely chill with an ancient (guess that never mattered!) dementia-riddled President Pedo governing via ChatGPT and a half-drained Magic 6 Ball stuck on Tariff Again Later, roving masked gangs of money-choked secret police grabbing people off the street, the government fighting the weather, the government fighting the economy, the government fighting itself, the government fighting the planet, and the government fighting Superman, apparently. Turns out we were all just terribly silly biscuits because there isn’t and never was an Epstein list, and that, too, is miraculously super totally fine with the media and the exact same people who made sure we had nine thousand Congressional hearings to view Hunter Biden’s tool of the establishment. Looking out the right side of the flaming plane crash of all our lives, the word “deportation” has been redefined to mean all sorts of things it doesn’t, but mostly “alligator torture.” The Secretary of Defense openly slams whiskey at press conferences while abandoning Ukraine without texting the group chat and actively planning an invasion of Greenland at least, and the President’s personal advisor/Twi’lek dancer gleefully tweeted about feeding every Latino in the nation to alligators. The Temu Trujillo on his throne of skulls has decided to end satire forever and just hold a UFC cage match right on the White House lawn, shoved a bill through Congress that no one read except to get mildly concerned about the line items involving setting the entirety of rural America on fire, defunding trans hurricanes, and mailing every child an envelope full of neo-measles personally signed by President Mola Ram. Oh! Then he threatened to deport/alligator torture a Democrat for winning a primary and take personal control of New York City because we live in the shittiest straight-to-Betamax Bond movie. And again, no one’s really that upset. At least, not a tenth as upset as they were about ending a war in Afghanistan, the price of eggs, having a cold at a debate, or the existence of a new Superman movie!

Plus, while a brown person holding a job a white person imagines other white people (not them) should be doing is an affront so intense it must be answered by ripping each and every one of them apart until the Atlantic turns to a sea of blood, it’s very completely awesome for every single human profession and activity to be outsourced to a couple of billionaires’ poorly-socialized neopets that can’t pass their bite test, even though we can all see them being actively manipulated to spew hatred in real time right in front of us. Don’t worry, one of them is calling itself MECHAHITLER, and hundreds of thousands of people are actively using fucking MECHAHITLER as a goddamned therapist and/or life partner.

Am I caught up? Probably not. Hours to go before end of business, after all. I don’t know what to tell you, man. It’s weird living in whatever luxury living sub-development of hell managed to sprawl into reality. Every time I try to finish this series, something so fucking Jacobean happens, so dredged from the ultraviolent nethermind of Gargamel’s id, that I feel like my brain is being sawed in half with a broken spork. And all anyone does in response is get absolutely apoplectically furious with Democrats.

So I’ve been thinking about magic lately.

I’m not going full woo on you, relax. I’m fully vaccinated and this is still about the internet unintentionally ending human civilization. But I am a professional fantasy and science fiction writer, most of the time. I’ve invented a magic system or two. And it’s as good an explanation as any. Honestly, between you, me, and the ever-watchful eye of Mechahitler, if I didn’t know better, I’d say magic is the only explanation that makes any coherent sense.

Not crystals-and-potions magic. Not sparkly spells cast at the dark of the moon by elves of great power.

But maybe abracadabra magic. Maybe slight-of-hand. And, you know, maybe some light demon-summoning.

Because we all know none of this is coming from a place grounded in realism.

And while we all make jokes about Trump having made a deal with some devil or other to be able to, without seeming to actually try at all—in fact, occasionally attempting to try not to—mind-flay millions of people and turn them into extensions of his fish-greasy will, and still be converting new ones right now, even with all the alligator torture and public brainmelts and unforced economy-impaling, to be able to turn every single conversation to the topic of himself, every piece of art to address him first…he kind of did. We just didn’t understand the technology had already sufficiently advanced to become indistinguishable from magic.

And the thing about magic is, there’s always a price. A trade. For power, for ease, for plenty, for the objects of divers desires. For every magical gain, there must be an equal and opposite sacrifice.

If you let something out, you have to let something in. If you let something in, something will escape.

So yes, we worshipped assholes, told two and a half generations to study STEM and nothing else (definitely not rhetoric or history or critical analysis because fuck the blue curtains am I right fellow cool kids ha ha teachers suck thinking about stuff is dumb!) or they were wasting the lifeblood of their ancestors, removed, first the necessity, then the possibility, of having to interact with other people on a daily basis, got a huge percentage of humanity to spend all their free time in the same intangible, easily-manipulable place, and wrapped the whole thing up in a pandemic-colored bow that forced everyone who wasn’t living like that yet into their homes, away from other people, and glued their eyeballs open while they observed the unfiltered vortex of the internet 24/7.

But it’s not just that we replaced human life and activity with the internet at approximately the same time that a living (mostly), walking (sort of), talking (I guess technically) low-res edgelord meme failed at failing to get his burnt-out hamburger heat-lamp of a frontal lobe elected President.

We did do that; slowly, without a plan, excitedly perusing points-of-interest on a technological roadmap-cum-skill-tree for an entirely other country, one we were gonna speed through at the speed of loneliness, following the siren-song, not of Pleasure Island, but Convenience Island—where we could see our troubles were all monetizable and everyone knew our names because they’d stolen our data before we were born. By the time anyone clocked the donkey ears, they were trending on TikTok, the hottest red carpet accessory, required to qualify under business-casual dress codes, knock-offs for the plebs available from Temu in bulk, shipped to your door.

But as we let the internet into our deepest selves…we also left the door open, and the internet escaped into the real world.

And that’s what’s going on right now. What’s been going on for a some time. You can see it with almost every single scandal that hits the mainstream hive-mind—and it is a hive-mind, a constant feed of everyone’s most random, formerly private thoughts, good and evil, mundane and bizarre, running constantly in the background of every simple action we ever take? Yeah, that’s a hive-mind, and primitive as it is, we weren’t even close to ready to handle knowing everybody’s lunch order, let alone the nasty crawlies clicking around the brainpans of people who had never felt seen or valued until clickingcrawlies.com gave them an unlimited dopamine drip.

It would almost be funny if it weren’t a wrecking ball coming in for a kiss.

See, some of us have seen all this before. It just didn’t matter then.

Because we allowed, nay, encouraged and cheered on, the internet metastasizing into every corner of the real world and take it over, the problems we who lived online before it was decidedly not fucking cool, during the awkward adolescence of the internet, had to deal with in the 00s became the problems that are, right this very minute, dissolving this world in acid and dancing through its slowly liquefying flesh like Gene Kelly in Singing in the Rain.

Power mods gone mad, lolcows, fandom flamewars, sockpuppets, trolls fed and unfed, dogpiling, meme wars, scams, images having been pastede on yay, lies and facts being mostly interchangeable, walled gardens, weaponized irony, parasocial relationships, the economy of attention, viral everything, sea lions, slacktivism, hacktivism, the endless September…all of these have been ported directly into real life, where they are happily chewing away at the deepest root of society: the ability to connect to another human being in some way other than bashing their head in on sight.

What is Elon Musk but the ultimate Power Mod gone mad? He runs his little message board as he pleases, banhammering away, boosting those who praise him and running multiple sockpuppet accounts while insisting lurkers support him in email, making random shit up on the internet, calling his minions to dogpile anyone who suggests any of it isn’t the precise truth, and accidentally roping in a lot of lonely people who just want to feel something bigger than dread about work tomorrow…we’ve been through all of this when it was about Harry/Hermione fanfic or Slenderman or poorly photoshopped images of Dominic Monaghan and if you don’t know what I’m talking about THAT IS SIMPLY WONDERFUL FOR YOU.

But all that, in the early 00s, was going on online while the real world was real worlding along separately. The run-up to the Iraq War did not take place on Livejournal. Dick Cheney did not buy YTMND.com or SomethingAwful and turn it into a Nazi petting farm (real talk: wouldn’t have been necessary, really). But millions upon millions of young people who are far past youth now, and millions more all over the age spectrum, were super busy laying down dopamine mechanisms in their brains that they’d never escape. They were just too intense, too immediate, too randomly-reinforcing, too easy to refine into money, power, fame, and an infinite narcissistic supply of praise.

Sadly for the future of humanity, the early 2000s were not an overly kind time on the pimply, awkward internet, and one of the easiest ways to get that attention was through trolling, which did originally mean posting things you didn’t actually mean just to get a reaction. But the problem with irony is, if you do it often enough, no one can tell the difference between you being a dick for a laugh and you just being a deep-down dick. Not even you. After a couple of decades of saying the opposite of what you mean being the marker of a Cool and With It Person, FUCKING NO ONE KNOWS WHAT’S REAL ANYMORE. The Epstein Files fiasco is classic power mod behavior—lie, delete anything contradicting the lie, refuse to engage, ban everyone, change your username, and pretend it never happened. My god, how many times, in how many places you loved, has that shit gone down?

Elon Musk is 53 years old. He was part of that early internet boom, and as utter whaleshit as his version of his role in that is, he very clearly got hardcore addicted to internet attention long before ketamine. What he does is to get his fix, however he can. He will never stop, because it’s been 30 years of wiring his psyche to digest only the adulation and approbation of strangers.

Even the tsunami of bots, troll farms, and AI slop is just the industrialized Pokemon evolution of sockpuppet accounts, forum trolls, and shitty Photoshop wars. ChatGPT is a great chatbot, but it’s literally in the name, my friends. That’s all it is. A jumped-up Furby who fucked a Clippy.

My friends, the Blair Witch Project kids had real human adults totally convinced they released genuine footage of a real supernatural witch murdering people into theaters near you for $5 on matinee Tuesdays. And my siblings in Satan, that was in 1999.

And then there’s Donald fucking Trump. My god. If I hadn’t grown up hearing what a piece of shit this guy was, a hundred million years before I knew what a modem sounded like, I might think the internet had just invented a person. It’s so easy to forget that he was there from fairly early in the game, gossiping about celebrities and being a general-issue bloviating dork on social media talking shit about rubbish. The reality TV show was a big deal in terms of putting him in the living rooms of Americans, but—and when I say this, I am not meaning to downplay in any way how dangerous, horrific, or murderous this long, dark shart of the American soul truly is—but I think his real power, the reason his grip is so unshakable, is that Donald J. Trump is the Apotheosis of the Lolcow.

If you’ve never heard that word, or if hearing it in 2025 merely wakens something deep within you from a dark slumber, a “lolcow” is the subject of particularly fierce internet drama. Someone whose activities can literally be milked for laughs, both because they never, ever stop fucking up, and because their fuck-ups are so positively Byzantine in their elaborate, over-the-top, pants-on-Pluto stupidity that you simply cannot look away. More than that, people often encouraged the lolcow into even further, messier, more dangerous acts of life-ruining idiocy, simply to enjoy the show and consume the popcorn, literal and metaphorical, that accompanied watching someone ruin their own very real lives and others’ for entertainment.

Any of this sound vaguely familiar?

I honestly don’t even want to give examples because severe mental illness is a constant factor, some of them were deeply abusive people, others true victims, and either way, milking said lolcows was almost always an act of intense cruelty. It doesn’t feel kind to drag any of these actual human beings (or their victims, or their enablers) up again. But the fact is, Trump’s swollen udder has overflowed with unceasing bounty for over ten years, and will never dry even after his death. Chris-Chan could never begin to compete with the dairy production of the Little Caesar’s Caesar and his gang of edgy, edgy trolls.

Lolcows provide adrenaline to themselves and dopamine to everyone involved in the drama, whether they invited that drama or not. That’s why the big ones go on and on. Why people followed their trashfires so intently, why it became addictive, why to this day there are people all over the Chan boards still milking lolcows from twenty years ago. Unless a bigger lolcow comes along, it really did tend to keep going and going until someone implodes. I suspect that’s why Trump kept Elon so close for so long—Musk was the only one to actually threaten Trump’s deathgrip, by showing the potential to become a bigger mushroom cloud of stupidly dangerous clownshit and stealing his userbase. There was always a huge microeconomy of weird activity around a lolcow, pushing them into more extreme behavior, forming fake friendships and narratives with and around them in order to have access, outside sites documenting the whole thing and commenting on it—each one is a little industry.

Or a big one.

Back in 2015? The people who did support him almost always said they did because he was funny. The young Trump voters in 2025 often say the same.

And a lot of both groups are still laughing. They do actually think Alligator Alcatraz is hilarious. Because it’s abstract to them. It barely registers as real; they treat it as a meme. Our government goes on television and laughs about feeding human beings to alligators and the media barely yawns and that’s just life now.

Those who aren’t laughing have joined the document and commentate portion of the lolcow cycle—and because the internet got way better at monetization streams than it was in the aughts, shittons of the Fandom Wank mods of today rely on this lolcow for their entire income. They won’t stop, either. It’s how they get what they need, too. Unless a bigger lolcow comes along, it tends to keep going and going until someone implodes. I suspect that’s why Trump kept Elon so close for so long—Musk was the only one to actually threaten Trump’s deathgrip, by showing the potential to become a bigger mushroom cloud of malignant fuckery.

What is Donald Trump but the infinite lolcow that now dominates and nourishes every moment of the media cycle with his antics. No one can look away—because the internet got out and now online drama is threatening our lives and livelihoods instead of our fandoms. We replaced our everyday lives and connections with the internet, and then the internet poured itself into a carcass called Trump, the walking embodiment of the worst shit that went down on the worst sites you ever knew about. 4Chan, and later 8Chan, made the Trump Presidency. He was their lolcow first. Now he;’s our nocow to, and the nos and the lols define the whole being of the country..

And now we’re fucking stuck. Every newsday is about him. Every sporting event. Every movie release. Every fucking half-time show. Every holiday. When it’s not about Elon Musk or one of the other Big Name Fans on the periphery of the constant, constant drama. It all swirls around what he’ll do next. And even those of us who hate him beyond words spend the precious hours of our lives doomscrolling and commenting, dissolving into the adrenaline (fear at the next disaster for us, fear of the other for them)/dopamine (validation at others sharing our fear for us, Trump’s IV line to their entire endocrine system for them) combo it seems impossible for so many to turn away from. We aren’t enjoying this on any level—but we’re stuck. We’re engaging. All the time. We want it to stop. We need it to stop. But they don’t. They need it to go on. A lot of Trump’s most fervent followers were never really online much before his rise—they have no natural defense or suspicion of this stuff, because by the time they logged on, the engagement algorithm had already made a shitstew of the concept of the truth, and people who’d cut their teeth lying and manipulating on the internet were ready and excited to screw the noobs.

Now, please understand I’m not trying to make jokes by calling him a lolcow, it’s deadly, grimly serious. It’s a disaster that might very well be the end of us, and I am afraid every day. The other ghouls behind Trump aren’t anyone’s lolcow—they’re the same fucking assholes who were pulling puppet strings on the internet back then, too. And Stephen Miller. I’m just trying to explain why this wet sack of a man has become the hemlock of the masses. We’ve trapped ourselves in a forum flamewar without end, and the billions of words spilled on actual forums back then should tell you how truly long this can go on. Even though it truly seems that no one, least of all the trolls themselves, is having any fun whatsoever these days. Well. Addiction is like that. You always need more intense highs to feel anything anymore.

Gotta bomb Iran or send the army into California or kill the concept of schools and weather. I do think Trump, deep in the dim corners of his alleged mind, understands one thing with crystal clarity: his power comes from engagement, just like the demonic algorithm. If he lets things get boring, even for a few days, he’ll begin to lose ground. He has to produce for his audience, and yesterday’s drama will never be enough for today’s maw.

And when you combine that “one good trick” with a clear, step-by-step agenda from the Republicans who’ve always been sociopathic Christofascist white supremacist monsters in Project 2025, you get July 16th, 2025.

And it does matter now. It is serious now. Very real people are dying, families are being torn apart, the economy is exsanguinating jobs and every one of those jobs is a real person’s next dinner. But the problem is, for a very significant number of both left and right white, straight, cis, privileged, vaguely Christian-ish Americans, which demographics are still in the bare majority, all of that, and the resistance to it, is only happening online. It’s happening through a tesseract of screens and performances that occlude reality just enough to paralyze almost everyone in either horror or delight.

Politics, for those with the privilege to only experience them through screens, is precisely fandom drama. People all the fuck over the place refer to themselves as fans of Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders, AOC or DeSantis (not so fast, Vance) rather than supporters, and that poisonous toadshit’s been going on for a minute. What a victory for the media to finally fully be able to smash politics into a fire3hose of turbogruel with sports and Hollywood and spray it in our faces without too much of that annoying pretending to be serious about anything or anyone. The horrors of the Texas floods, alligator torture, Palestine, assassinations, loss of rights everywhere, it all flows by in the same font, on the same background, as news of the latest Marvel casting or skibidi meme, and it directly affects most of those groups just about as much—so far. As long as they’re not one of the targeted groups yet, it’s all just fodder for the machine, that now pays out not only in “lols” (which were always somewhat sadistic), but in money, power, attention, praise, and brain chemicals real life has struggled to supply with the same overwhelming intensity, especially since we all got together, held hands, sang fucking Imagine, and worked very earnestly to come up with a holistic method of running society without human beings interacting directly with one another during the pandemic.

Is it absolutely revolting? Yes, of course it is. It’s fucking gross. But I’ve been on the internet a long time, and I’ve seen people bend themselves into Escher’s own pretzels justifying their participation in these lolcow orgies of shame. People like watching others suffer. Some a little (heh that young fellow was struck in the testicles with a sporting implement, eh wot?) some a lot (Alligator Alcatraz). But most people have that in them. They come up with a way to feel it’s deserved. That they would never be the sufferers on display, since they don’t deserve it. Cancelling, outside of people like Weinstein and Spacey, is really just this sort of behavior with a superiority complex. And so they kept, and keep, watching, and participating, even though it’s clearly grotesque.

And Trump is the zenith of this. The one true talent he actually has, and has leveraged his entire life—because he was a much more benign lolcow in the 80s, too—is letting people laugh at him or seethe at him for money and attention. And I don’t believe it truly matters to him which one.

Is there a way out? I’m…not sure there is. Because it’s been way too long. Multiple generations have been trained to expect this cycle of adrenaline and dopamine to be the main service government provides. Back in the time known as the day, lolcows ended when enough people got banned effectively enough, someone got very seriously hurt, and occasionally, when people got bored and wandered off. I’m not sure analogues of any of those are really on the table at the moment. It truly is something to be the man to enshittify liberal democracy and simple every day life. The only thing that ended that adolescence of the internet was this. So where we go from here, I struggle to say. Except that finding some way back to each other in the real world, to connecting, to talking, not to the FUCKING VOID THAT IS AI, but to other actual people face to face, is probably the only possible road, not out, but maybe, just maybe, through.

Trump pulled off his deal for power by trading the rules of the internet for the rules of real life. He stands in the middle of a planet full of pain like a sloppy, drooling Virtuvian Man, gorging on the left dogpiling him with rage and the right dogpiling him with worship.

It’s all the same to him, just as long as he’s covered in bodies.

It’s going to be the work of the rest of our lives to dig our way out.

Epilogue to follow on Thursday (promise this time, it’s already done)

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• Leserbriefe
• Tern BYB S11 – Faltrad für Pendler im ländlichen Raum und im Gebirge
• Umgangssprachlicher Unsinn und Ungenauigkeiten bei Begriffen der Fahrradtechnik
• Spezi – quo vadis?
• Eine Fahrradzukunft in Madagaskar
• Mein Lieblingsrad: R&M Birdy red von 1996
• Gelesen
• Tobis Fahrradgeschichten
• Hohlspeiche
• Impressum

If there’s one thing I can’t abide, it’s nontechnical technothrillers. You know the trope: “We’ve got eight minutes to crack this mainframe, but it’s protected with encryption that is rated for ten minutes. We’re gonna have to hack really hard. Come on, hacker, HACK AWAY!”

Technothrillers are consumed by an increasingly computer-savvy audience, which means that the kind of technical elision and corner-cutting that dominates the field grows thinner by ...Read More

I am alive!

Is the book done? No. About ten chapters left, because everything that could go hilariously wrong last week, from a massive heat dome in New England to my ceiling flooding and falling through, did indeed happen, plus more outlandish rubbish on top of it. Thus, I am still drowning in stress, plus more stress, plus bathtub water and it’s still too hot.

So hold tight, I shall not perish, yet. I’m looking to have the last post in Move Fast and Break People up over the weekend.

In the meantime!

I have a new short story out at Uncanny Magazine, and I’m super excited about it, so I’m taking the step of telling my political readers to hey maybe check out a bit of my fiction. The personal, and fictional, is always political, after all.

Plus…the premise is just a ton of cheeky fun and I don’t want to tell you what it is, because it’ll spoil the whole thing, but you will recognize it and laugh some minor, unimportant body part off before the whole thing veers wildly into new territory.

When He Calls Your Name

Give it a read if you want! And I’ll be back this weekend with some more yelling about our grim tech-lich overlords.

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Hey everyone!

I realize I have not yet finished the Move Fast and Break People series. I am often full of failures. However! There are reasons! And not just the totally bugfuck pinwheeling madness that is every single headline every single day!

On top of The Horror of It All, I am not just a Yeller of Swears, but a science fiction and fantasy novelist, believe it or not, and sometimes the Big Job makes Big Demands.

I appear to actually be near to finishing Nobody But Us, the near-future gender dys/utopia thriller I’ve been working on for quite some time, can’t imagine why I’d want to write about that sort of thing these days, total coincidence I’m sure.

I have not disappeared on you, I promise! But I will be a bit quiet for the next 10-ish days while I try to put this beast to bed. Trust I have many things to say and want to say them, but at the moment, I must attend to the world in my head, which is also on fire, only this fire I can fix. Writing books is nice that way.

Thank you all so much for your patience and support! The series will finish around the end of the month once the book is done and my brain can brain reality once more. Lord, I cannot fucking wait to see life on the other side of this.

See you all on the flipside, T-10ish days!

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Please excuse a brief pause in our series on the internet slowly absorbing and replacing all human life with yelling to…yell.

I just have some things I need to say. For my own health, because I’m pretty sure shoving all this what-the-fuckery down into my innards to rot with the absolute tonnage of reeking fucking trash I have to suppress my fury about every single day is bad for you. In fact, I’m pretty sure the entire reason middle-aged people are in such a sour little snit of a mood all the time is the crushing weight of years of bullshit, our own, others’, and most definitely the world’s, accreting directly on our lower backs.

AT SOME POINT, YOU EITHER KEEL OVER OR GET A STUPID SPORTS CAR ABOUT IT BUT WE’RE ALL BROKE SO BLOGGING IT FUCKING IS.

Oh, and this one’s going under a paywall. If you want to yell back at me about how super chill and cool the allegedly-lefty internet is being about Biden’s diagnosis right now, you gotta kick me a buck because oh my god, my back is killing me.

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If a group of people have been trying to get something done for some time without success, there are two possibilities: Either they’re failing because of bad tactics, or they’re failing because they simply lack the power to achieve their goals. When things start changing in big, dramatic ways, that means that some group in society has either discovered a new tactic, or they’ve found some new coalition partners.

Most ...Read More

Welcome back to your nuclear hellscape of infinite human torment already in progress! What a fucking beautiful day in the goddamned cursed-ass neighborhood of slowly-deflating dreams, in which the very concept of hope is being pilloried daily in every town square. King Friday just sent a kindergartner to a Salvadorean prison, then slept the guiltless, unperturbed sleep of a baby.

IT’S GREAT HERE. Did you know hell always had the option of adding more rings? That franchise opportunities for torment-expansion and new items on the Value Menu of Breathtaking Moral Putrescence was just…always on the table for us? NEAT FACT!

We last left our dingus century slowly burgeoning into a digital technocracy and blundering through the long process of kicking down fundamental pillars of civilization, replacing them all with apps, and expecting the overall structure to stay totally fine and cool and never, ever wobble despite no one taking care of it, at all, in any way.

But that wasn’t enough for us, oh no. We are such very clever, super rad, bold and edgy futuremonkeys. So we started kicking it, too.

Just a little bit. Not because we hated the basic structure of interconnected human systems. Because most of us never really understood anything about the basic structure of interconnected human systems. The particular pillars we were whacking on weren’t exactly obviously load-bearing. In fact, for quite a long time, a little vigorous boot-smacking seemed to improve things. And a bunch of people who confidently said they did understand those structures insisted it wasn’t kicking, it was industry disruption, and hey, who doesn’t love disrupting nasty fat greedy old industry? Yeah, fuck the system, give it a roundhouse this time!

So when, eventually, the janky societal stud-finder that is the American Electoral Cycle started coming up catastrophically empty, we’d spent so long saying fuck the system and getting rapturous, deafening cheers for it (and absolutely nothing but acidic disdain for maybe system good just need fix?) we never should have been surprised to find the system, well, totally fucked.

This essay concerns one of those not-obviously-integral societal pillars: trends in fictional televisual storytelling. OH WE GETTING HOT NOW.

No, but we kind of are. Everything we thought and taught about these two things was changing throughout the first quarter of the 21st century, converging on a new consensus at the exact same time as people slowly learning how much they genuinely enjoyed not having to deal with other human beings for every little thing and not thinking too hard about how the bedrock definition of society is human beings having to deal with other human beings for every little thing.

The thing is, the kinds of stories we take in on a daily basis and the professions we choose to pursue are enormous, broad-sweeping cultural movements. The issues this series is trying to address, concerning the dominance of the internet and digital living, are not uniformly experienced. How much or how little daily life has been made physically intangible varies from person to person, country to country. (And of course, all these thoughts are heavy on the American landscape because…well, the American landscape has been weaponized against both itself and everyone else plus I live here.) A large rural family, to whose address Instacart delivers only thoughts and prayers, does not have the same relationship with the internet, or daily direct human interaction quotients, that a single, WFH, recent college graduate living in a major test-market city does.

But they’ve all heard that Iron Man is a badass.

Here’s the lede, unburied above the fold: I’m not saying Tony Soprano ended the American experiment. That’s just silliness.

But I’m not not saying Tony Soprano ended the American experiment, either.

This whole digression started because a friend and I were talking about politics (it’s like doomscrolling! But you do it in person, and maybe there is whiskey, and maybe there is yelling, but yelling together, and at least probably also no one calls you a shitlib) and they asked: how could anyone think these assholes were actually going to be effective at solving any problems? I just don’t get how you can even trick yourself into thinking these are the guys, even if you’re a very devoted Nazi.

And I knee-jerk answered:

Oh, that’s easy! Because we’ve spent the last quarter-fucking-century consuming virtually infinite movies, shows, games, and books in which the Asshole Anti-hero is the only guy who can cut through all the bullshit and get the job done. Then we told everyone growing up or coming of age during that time not to study the humanities or they were a stupid waste of flesh destined to starve to death in a ditch, so they couldn’t think critically about any of it.

If you didn’t experience the pre-2K media environment in real time, it’s hard to express the size and depth of the sea change I’m talking about here. From the advent of mainstream televisual entertainment in the 20s and 30s up through the very late 90s, the heroes of major tentpole media units were many things, but they were almost always…you know…heroes. All narrative has a moral agenda, and while yes, a big part of the 20th century moral agenda was sit down and shut up if you’re not a straight white man or else, for straight white men themselves, the moral lessons of film and television was very much centered on a kind of post-doc Sunday School hey, I know you have this rage without form or focus inside you all the time, but have you considered being a good person about it? Here’s how!

The heroes of the stories America most liked to tell about its Golden Children were never screaming fucking sociopaths quipping the day away cleverly, clothed in the the tattered shreds of the lives they’ve carelessly destroyed, for whom everything more or less works out, even when they die, because when and if they do eat it, their worldview is almost always upheld, and their nihilistic dog-eat-dog death forms a supporting argument, or at least an emphatic underline, for their nihilistic dog-eat-dog way of life, Mr. I-Am-the-One-Who-Knocks SIR.

Before you hop on the comment section to note well, actually The Screaming Fucking Sociopath Show ran from 1971-1974 on CBS—look, there’s never 0% or 100% in media analysis, there’s always exceptions and outliers. GENERAL TRENDS, PEOPLE. Plus, on the rare occasion that an unutterable nightmare of human psychology was the protagonist of a movie or show, that was the point of the story, and they weren’t rewarded for it. For all Hollywood’s heavy breathing over the Italian mafia in the 1970s, Al Capone still dies in prison unloved and unmourned, and hubris was still a fatal flaw instead of a singularly required virtue. While the beginning of the douche-as-imperfect-but-semi-lovable-hero genre might have started with shows like The Simpsons or Married With Children or literally anything Martin Scorsese ever touched, Homer and Al are not effective at life, they aren’t right about very much, most people around them don’t really like them, and a huge number of plot points revolve around the Dipshit In Question learning some kind of basically pro-social lesson.

Pre-1999ish, monstrous, dick-swinging assholes and their tediously identical personal philosophies about how the whole system, whatever the system in question is, should be replaced with the hypnotic motions of that selfsame swinging dick, weren’t often presented, shot, or reacted to by others as attractive, or delightful, or highly competent, or posited as maybe actually a legitimate way to conduct yourself in real life. And the horrifying, violent, anti-social, hate-pickled soul-amputee didn’t regularly end up being pretty much right all along while regular people just moving through life trying to mostly do the right thing are lame suckers or even hateful bitches who exist only to be fodder for or obstacles to This Fucking Guy’s big plans because that’s a fucking crazy thing to embed in the brains of a traumatized post-two-different-world-wars population.

It might not seem important. It might not seem like it could really make much of a difference. But our brains crave stories and the stories those brains gorge on become the way those brains expect life to work, at least on some level. Millions upon millions of people spend more focused, intentional time with their favorite OMG SO BINGEABLE movie and TV show characters than they do with anyone but their actual immediate families, and for many, many more, the math may not actually come out in favor of family. That’s a tremendous amount of influence, whose hypnotic immersion doesn’t even break for commercials anymore. So when the most common archetype of the Successful and Effective HeroMan fundamentally changes, what people expect to find when they go looking for successful effectiveness also changes. Mr. Smith going to Washington starts to look like a gormless boring weirdo who doesn’t remotely understand what’s Really Going On and is defending a shitty system anyway so why root for him? Now, Walter White, Don Draper, Tony Stark, Patrick Bateman, Jack Bauer, Tyler Durden? Jaime/any Lannister, Jordan Belfort? Those guys are so fun—and they get shit done.

This isn’t a post-9/11 nihilism thing, either, though it ramped up a lot after that. I glibly blamed it on Tony Soprano, but that’s not really wrong. Oz has a real claim to starting the trend in 1997, but few shows have ever had the mainstream in the palm of their hand the way The Sopranos did from 1999-2007, and it was Ground Zero for the Age of the Rewarded Asshole.

1999-2001 saw an absolute supernova of televisual stories whose protagonists were dark, edgy, violent, cruel, angry at “the system” (always for denying them the status and rewards they’re clearly owed, never for the specific flaws of that system), totally without empathy, disrespectful and obnoxious to everyone around them, narcissistic, and 24/7 surly without for one second not being the absolute hero of their stories—Fight Club, The Matrix, Boondock Saints, 24, Boiler Room, American Psycho, Dark City, Memento, Snatch, Angel, even comedies like Pushing Tin, Futurama (don’t @ me, I love that show but they’re all assholes), Family Guy, High Fidelity, Black Books, The fucking Man Show…and yes, even my beloved Farscape. Because you could be pretty sure that if the hero wasn’t a complete dickwagon, the rest of the story was gonna work real hard to make you love the villain, think they’re WAY cooler than the heroes, and feel bad for their poor widdle hurt villanous feewings.

Suddenly there was a whole crop of assholes running around being pretty damned successful at solving problems, where before THE archetype of even the Complicated Hero was a basically decent guy put upon by life and doing his best to make the moral choice in an unfeeling universe.

And then, saints and ministers of grace defend us, there’s The Phantom Menace. George Lucas created from the definitional SpaceGood vs. SpaceEvil clear-cut heroic trilogy where decent people try real hard to make decent choices and it works, in the 70s, when nothing was clear-cut or very heroic. Then, before anyone had anything bad to say about Star Wars, spent the entire first decade of the new century spending hundreds of millions and bending everything he’d ever done into unloosesable narrative knots, all to make us love and empathize with Darth Ever-Fucking Vader because reasons. And then Disney built the sequels and almost all their sequel-merchandising around Han and Leia’s psychotic dirtbag homo/geno/patri/regi/avunculi/arguably matricidal son as some kind of “blood-drenched fascism is fine if you’re hot and tortured while you do it” brooding hero and it worked. (not to make a thesis out of it, but the only reason any of these brooding heroes brood at all is that people just inexplicably refuse to treat them with the deference and awe they’re owed by their very nature. Probably because people are bad and need to be punished into worshipful adoration. That sounds right, doesn’t it? It also sounds like a certain voting bloc’s bedrock policy complaint.)

And all those movies were ostensibly aimed at kids. Whose moralities were under construction, excuse the mess.

It’s like there was a meeting and we all just decided good people are boring and stupid and we wanted to hear way less of them for the foreseeable future.

There was another huge explosion of this in 2008-10, not coincidentally as Obama was elected, the shadow of Bush/Cheney, a decade of war, fear, and disastrous Wall Street auto-fellatio seemed to be lifting. A good dude was in the White House, so no need to push hard on stories about doing the right thing to attempt some kind of pressure on the powers that be to maybe think about not being shrieking beholders all the time. It was definitely time to shove our faces right down into Bad People Fiction like a pile of freesia-scented cocaine. Breaking Bad, The Dark Knight, Mad Men, Sons of Anarchy, Archer, Fringe, Luther, Iron Man, Sideways, Inglorious Basterds, Inception (and also everything Christopher Nolan has ever done), on and on.

Gen X had a lot going on. Just…a significant number of issues to work through.

And these heroes are literally all the same person. “Morally grey” always means the same guy is about to fart his way into your psyche.

SEE IF THIS SLUDGE RINGS A SHITBELL:

• Doing pretty solidly at life within the parameters of the socio-economic class to which they belong, but hasn’t gotten to the tippy-top of that class, either, for reasons the story insists are beyond their control.

• Either extremely physically attractive or conspicuously not attractive whatsoever, yet possessing a seriously obscene amount of weird, cruel charisma/affability that comes out most entertainingly during his worst actions

• A consistent garbage asshole to any wife, family, social circle, and co-workers, who gives nothing back for the mountain of love, grace, patience, time, money, and favors showered upon him, yet somehow the shower never ends because occasionally he shows reluctant affection to a child or animal or the memory of a dead wife. Maybe a sled, idk.

• Hates the system, man. What system? It doesn’t matter, he hates it and he’s gonna bring it down. And he’s not gonna do it by being a good boy, no way! Fuck you, DAD! He’s gonna do it with a bunch of crazy shit that looks suspiciously like just acting on your id 100% of the time but totes isn’t that, promise. Whatever plans he has to get rid of the old system or building a new one are nebulous at best, the point is SYSTEM BAD, SYSTEM DOWN, MAN AWESOME. He’s so edgy and cool! He says things you’re not supposed to! He’s above the law! You want him to be above the law because that’s the only way the story continues so FUCK YOU, LAW. And when he does his cool violence the audience isn’t supposed to have uncomfortable feelings about it the way they normally would if anyone else did them, because having uncomfortable feelings about things is just another part of the system, my dudes.

• Because it’s so entertaining, the story has now taught you to fucking hate anyone who stands in the way of this super cool swaggerboss, even if they’re doing that by committing such heinous acts as…asking any questions at all of Broody Mclotsadrugs or politely offering an alternative course of action to Bigjaw Gruntybear’s “fuck everyone who isn’t me” plan.

• Because, you see, the normal rules just don’t apply to this zomg so cool and fuckable and powerful lone rebel, vessel of dgaf masculinity and mechanism of applying irrationality to rational life that he is! Normal rules would actually be taking something ineffable away from him, damaging his soul, making him less of a man, nay, less of a human.

• Has zero hesitation about hurting people (physically, mentally, emotionally, financially, socially, etc depending on genre) to achieve their goals, in fact, profoundly believes their goals are unachievable without hurting people. The story itself usually revolves around incredibly vivid and creative expressions of that hurt, without depicting the aftermath. The story rarely presents any other workable means of achieving the protagonist’s goals, ultimately proving him right without having to say so and letting all the creators do a Dr. Evil pinky-smirk about how they never meant these characters to be attractive role models admired by millions.

• White dude, because obviously we get super uncomfy when any other kind of human acts like this. Straightness may or may not wobble, but if wobble, must wobble at a decidedly masc angle.

Now, it’s never been so concentrated in slower media like books and plays, other trends were also going on, and certainly, in recent years the trend has recoiled a bit in the face of this shit not turning out to be so thrillingly fun in real life, but the visual (i.e. easiest to consume) storytelling landscape of the 21st century was colonized by assholes to a truly clownshoes and their accompanying clownstockings degree. By the end of the aughts, the vast majority of stories committed to film involved some kind of anti-hero, and they were almost always proven effective at their goals in the end, often the only people who could accomplish them, and only by their chosen means. Those means might look insane at first, but they always prove more, or at least more quickly, effective than being good and moral. And then Game of Thrones premiered!

Even Michael Scott was repeatedly shown to be the best salesmen in the company despite his horrible behavior and clear idiocy. (So we get the “even an idiot asshole is more effective at the same job than a competent person” narrative in the most popular comedy of its decade) And Ron Swanson, much as I love him, was regularly a totally heinous shit to everyone around him, at times even approaching malevolent sabotage of the entire local government apparatus simply because it is the government apparatus. And the show made it, and his school of pug-nosed libertarianism, so endearing and cool people were actively disappointed when he grew and evolved. The Marvel movies are absolutely chock full of horrifying narcissists, now with SWEET BRANDING AND MERCHANDISE.

Of course, there’d always been bad people and complicated protagonists—noir wouldn’t exist otherwise. But usually, especially in the period betwen the end of WW2 and the end of the Cold War, when America felt the need to at least appear morally upright to contrast with those nasty communists, those guys got some kind of comeuppance. Citizen Kane still dies alone and unloved, no matter how sick his sled was when he was 8. Michael Corleone doesn’t exactly have a nice time, and his methodologies become obsolete almost as soon as the sequel rolls film. Most people involved in noir stories end up face down in a pool of their own consequences.

The difference wasn’t necessarily that obnoxious bullies were in media, but that they suddenly were the heroes we needed.

Because they always won, even though they had to suffer through one or two Good Person DEI Hires on the way. They always win even when they die in the end. Yeah, Walter White ate it…in the series finale, in very epic fashion, after accomplishing literally all of his goals, none of which were ever “be a nice family man people enjoy spending time with.”

And that’s without even mentioning Reality TV, the Skinnerian Box that disgorged Donald Trump’s final form, in which the villains very often triumphed, and the promise of cruelty meant a great episode.

The worst part is, nobody telling these stories was necessarily doing anything wrong or bad. This was a new(ish) way to tell stories to a massive worldwide mainstream audience in a world with precious few of those. It was exciting and fresh and so fun to write, to act, even more fun to watch and discuss. We liked watching it because it was made to be liked. We liked making it because it feels good to make art that feels challenging and dangerous.

Unfortunately, it also trained us, over the course of almost three decades, to see slick monsters as necessary heroes, victims as suckers, and the smashing of all systems as inherently moral and FUCKIN’ BADASS, no matter what the qualities of the system itself.

Which had also, not coincidentally, been the underlying message of most of the heroes of the previous generation—they were rarely out-and-out psychopaths and monsters, but almost all of them were edgy outsiders with contempt for “normie” life, who could eat 50 eggs, who couldn’t forget about Chinatown, who made offers that couldn’t be refused, who always wanted to be a gangster, as far back as they could remember. Boomer media is FULL of guys raging against the system and being totally unsatisfied with even the richest rewards of that system. That the system existed was enough reason to hate it and punch it in the face while laughing at the dumb rubes who just wanted to have an okay normal time in life and maybe a job. Right or left, it didn’t and doesn’t matter, the only unforgiveable sin, artistically and politically, for the last thirty years, has been to be seen as part of, beholden to, or standing up for any tiny sliver of, any kind of established societal system.

Was it really any wonder no one cared about defending the system by the time we crawled over broken glass to 2025?

After all, the angry, unpleasant, rude, anti-social, obnoxious, violent, capricious, sadistic, unrefined, swaggering, totally emotionally unregulated anti-protagonist who blasts through everyone else like a demented Kool-Aid man always turns out to be right, or at least, the very coolest one of us all.

At least, that’s what I’ve heard. FOR MY ENTIRE ADULT LIFE.

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The mental health of teens and pre-teens worldwide is far from satisfactory, and two famous American psychology researchers and authors, Jonathan Haidt and Peter Gray disagree as to what the main cause is. After following their work through their Substack blogs (1) for more than one year now, I just can't understand why, at least in those places, there is no mention so far of what would surely be one of the best solutions, whoever is right.

Who's to blame for teens' mental health?

Haidt says the main culprits are smartphones and social media, and as solution he proposes:

1. no smartphones before high school (or age 14)

2. no social media before 16

3. phone-free schools

4. more independence, free play, and responsibility in the real world

Gray, instead, argues (also here) that the mental health crisis preceded smartphones, social media and even public access to the Internet, and that the "smartphone/social media panic that has been simmering for several years and exploded with the publication of Jonathan Haidt's The Anxious Generation" just follows the script of all the other moral panics about kids before it. For Gray it's not a coincidence that, at least in some countries, "the increased rates of anxiety, depression, and other indices of poor mental health coincided with the time when government mandates made schooling more unpleasant and stressful than it had been before."

There are surely more causes for the young's mental health status, from sleep deprivation and wrong ways to restore it to smartphones making parents anxious, not children and every other form of overparenting, but let's stick to Gray and Haidt.

Personally, I think that they are both right, but that even if Haidt were wrong, at least 99% of parents should do what he suggests anyway. As a minimum, it would make things much simpler, without any real drawback. I say so because, in the real world I see around me and almost everybody else there is just what, one every 1,000 real parents with both the competence and the time to educate and support his or her kids to get more benefits than hassles from having personal smartphones too early.

For all the other parents, delaying personal smartphones until high school can't go wrong: it's easy, immediately doable, doesn't involve censorship or governments intervention, saves money and does not mean at all "growing up without internet". Let's go back to what Gray and Haidt don't say then.

Where Gray and Haidt agree

As much as they disagree on the main cause of the teen mental health crisis, both Gray and Haidt have the same vision of how sane kids should live, as these deliberately mixed, almost literal quotes from their blogs prove:

• Haidt: More independence, free play, and responsibility in the real world

• Gray: "Children are biologically designed to play, explore, daydream, and mess around in their own self-directed ways. Through behaving in these natural ways, they learn about themselves and the world around them; discover what they like to do and develop passionate interests; learn in social play how to get along with others; learn in risky play how to manage fear; learn they can fail and bounce back from it; learn they can get into trouble and find their way out. That is how they acquire the resilience, confidence, and real-world skills required for success in life.

• Haidt: Keep kids as safe as necessary, not as safe as possible.

• Gray: Learn about your world, your self, and how the two fit together. Because the first fifteen to eighteen years of a person’s life are... primarily years of self-chosen play and exploration in which young people make sense of the world around them, try out different ways of being in that world, develop and pursue passionate interests, and create at least a tentative plan about how they might support themselves as independent adults.

• Haidt: No matter the weather, the darkness, the kids’ protests... just get them outside

• Gray: Kids who grow up in a self-directed education community... are given the time and space they need to figure out who they are and what is important to them. They are able to delve deeply into their own interests, develop deep and meaningful social connections, and create rich and fulfilling lives together.

• Haidt: Find ways to give boys something to be proud of. Help them to discover high-quality leisure activities that... are active, not passive; develop skills to produce valuable things in a physical world

• Gray: [it's bad that] already by 1990 we had taken away most of kids opportunities to play, explore, and communicate with one another independently of adult control in the real world.

The Solution that Must(???) Not Be Named

See what I mean? No matter how much Gray and Haidt disagree on the role of smartphones, social media and school systems, the solution they propose to restore kids' mental health is basically the same: self-directed life, directly interacting with peers, outside more often than not. So why do they never mention one of the already existing, already successful and well time-tested implementations of that philosophy? Why do they repeatedly tiptoe around it, without ever mentioning it?

That is, why ignore a solution based on principles like:

• A week of camp life is worth six months of theoretical teaching in a room

• Know exactly what to do when anything unexpected happens

• Living indoors without fresh air quickly poisons the blood and makes people feel tired and seedy when they don't know why

• Happiness doesn't come from being rich, nor merely from being successful in your career, nor by self-indulgence. One step towards happiness is to make yourself healthy and strong while you are a boy so that you can be useful and so you can enjoy life when you are a man

• Life without adventures would be deadly dull

• The real way to get happiness is by giving out happiness to other people

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In case you didn't see it, I'm talking of Scouting. The list above is all quotes from the founder of Scouting, B-P. Scouting associations worldwide have been doing literally everything Gray and Haidt preach for 117 years now. Any of the quotes by Gray and Haidt in the previous paragraph has almost literal equivalents in Scouting mission statements and manuals, if one only bothers to look. And still, as of April 12th, 2025, if you search for "scout" or "scouting" inside those two websites, those words only show up a few times... in readers comments, not in the articles. Why?

Surely, it's not because Scouting is "old". Human psyche changes thousands times slower than technology, and if some education approach worked well one or two centuries ago, its age it's the last reason to abandon it, if it's a reason at all. So, why?

Part of the answer may be the simple fact that, since both Haidt and Gray are American, they may confuse Scouting as such (or fear their audiences do so) with the main American Scouting associations, and the problems those specific associations have had in the last one or two decades. I am also aware that certain problems and misconceptions about Scouting aren't limited to the US, but please do not distract yourself or waste time in the comments by denouncing them!

All those issues could be reasons to bring back to its origins, or otherwise reform, this or that particular association, not to ignore the potential of Scouting for mental health. The only topic worth discussing here is:

Scouting is not the only solution, and it's obviously possible to grow up sane without it. But if the original proposal of Scouting is so close to what (at least) two major experts propose for improving teen mental health, why aren't those experts and everybody else openly telling parents to go for more true Scouting, now? Please let me know, here or by email, I'm really interested!

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Last but not least, two public Service Announcements

First, last month I joined Foss Force with a column where I specifically cover digital politics issues, with an European perspective, so please follow that too! For the same reason, from now I will use this front-end to my main, original blog (1) to also cover other areas where "if we keep asking the wrong questions, the answers won't matter", with the same attitude that earned me these endorsements.

Second, divulgation like this is a big part of what I do to pay bills, but I do it without paywalls because otherwise it wouldn't be divulgation. For this and other reasons, I do welcome paid subscriptions, but one time donations are even better. To see how and why, please read the final "Unusual Request" part of this other post. Thanks!

1. Because that's what we all really have here, not "Substacks" nor newsletters, which are just the way to make posts visible because nobody can be bothered anymore to click on link in social media posts or, which would be THE right way to get news, just use RSS, for heaven's sake!

This week on my podcast, I conclude my reading of my 2003 Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine story, Nimby and the D-Hoppers” (here’s the first half). The story has been widely reprinted (it was first published online in The Infinite Matrix in 2008), and was translated (by Elisabeth Vonarburg) into French for Solaris Magazine, as well as into Chinese, Russian, Hebrew, and Italian. The story was adapted for my IDW comic book series Cory Doctorow’s Futuristic Tales of the Here and Now by Ben Templesmith. I read this into my podcast 20 years ago, but I found myself wanting to revisit it.

Don’t get me wrong — I like unspoiled wilderness. I like my sky clear and blue and my city free of the thunder of cars and jackhammers. I’m no technocrat. But goddamit, who wouldn’t want a fully automatic, laser-guided, armor-piercing, self-replenishing personal sidearm?

Nice turn of phrase, huh? I finally memorized it one night, from one of the hoppers, as he stood in my bedroom, pointing his hand-cannon at another hopper, enumerating its many charms: “This is a laser-guided blah blah blah. Throw down your arms and lace your fingers behind your head, blah blah blah.” I’d heard the same dialog nearly every day that month, whenever the dimension-hoppers catapaulted into my home, shot it up, smashed my window, dived into the street, and chased one another through my poor little shtetl, wreaking havoc, maiming bystanders, and then gateing out to another poor dimension to carry on there.

Assholes.

It was all I could do to keep my house well-fed on sand to replace the windows. Much more hopper invasion and I was going to have to extrude its legs and babayaga to the beach. Why the hell was it always my house, anyway?

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This week on my podcast, I once again read my 2003 Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine story, Nimby and the D-Hoppers” The story has been widely reprinted (it was first published online in The Infinite Matrix in 2008), and was translated (by Elisabeth Vonarburg) into French for Solaris Magazine, as well as into Chinese, Russian, Hebrew, and Italian. The story was adapted for my IDW comic book series Cory Doctorow’s Futuristic Tales of the Here and Now by Ben Templesmith. I read this into my podcast 20 years ago, but I found myself wanting to revisit it.

Don’t get me wrong — I like unspoiled wilderness. I like my sky clear and blue and my city free of the thunder of cars and jackhammers. I’m no technocrat. But goddamit, who wouldn’t want a fully automatic, laser-guided, armor-piercing, self-replenishing personal sidearm?

Nice turn of phrase, huh? I finally memorized it one night, from one of the hoppers, as he stood in my bedroom, pointing his hand-cannon at another hopper, enumerating its many charms: “This is a laser-guided blah blah blah. Throw down your arms and lace your fingers behind your head, blah blah blah.” I’d heard the same dialog nearly every day that month, whenever the dimension-hoppers catapaulted into my home, shot it up, smashed my window, dived into the street, and chased one another through my poor little shtetl, wreaking havoc, maiming bystanders, and then gateing out to another poor dimension to carry on there.

Assholes.

It was all I could do to keep my house well-fed on sand to replace the windows. Much more hopper invasion and I was going to have to extrude its legs and babayaga to the beach. Why the hell was it always my house, anyway?

MP3

This week on my podcast, I read Why I don’t like AI art, a column from last week’s Pluralistic newsletter:

Which brings me to art. As a working artist in his third decade of professional life, I’ve concluded that the point of art is to take a big, numinous, irreducible feeling that fills the artist’s mind, and attempt to infuse that feeling into some artistic vessel – a book, a painting, a song, a dance, a sculpture, etc – in the hopes that this work will cause a loose facsimile of that numinous, irreducible feeling to manifest in someone else’s mind.

Art, in other words, is an act of communication – and there you have the problem with AI art. As a writer, when I write a novel, I make tens – if not hundreds – of thousands of tiny decisions that are in service to this business of causing my big, irreducible, numinous feeling to materialize in your mind. Most of those decisions aren’t even conscious, but they are definitely decisions, and I don’t make them solely on the basis of probabilistic autocomplete. One of my novels may be good and it may be bad, but one thing is definitely is is rich in communicative intent. Every one of those microdecisions is an expression of artistic intent.

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(Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0, modified)