I wrote about the Bumble founder's dream of AI dating concierges.

We're entering a world of disabling algorithms: AI services that promise to empower us, but that actually make us anxious and inept, incapable of carrying out basic human activities sans algorithmic mediation. 1/

'You are nine meals away from anarchy,” he said in one ad for buckets of food rations, from a website called MyPatriotSupply dot com.'

Smart Ali Breland on the closed off right-wing world building being created by anti-woke brands and podcasts.
theatlantic.com/technology/arc…

The ads 'enhance and reinforce the arguments that Kirk and others are already making on their podcasts... The commercial breaks are the final screws needed to construct a self-contained conservative chamber.'

Oh look, it's Ali Breland in The Atlantic.

He went deep into the advertising ecosystem of far-right podcasts:

theatlantic.com/technology/arc…

wrote my first story in the atlantic. it's about the *real* function of the rightwing ad ecosystem (besides making money): conservative world building theatlantic.com/technology/arc…

scarlett johansson openai thing has echoes of the time harmony korine said “james franco’s spring breakers character is *not* based on riff raff [pictured left]. it based on a *completely different* rapper in florida you’ve never heard of, ‘dangeruss’” [pictured right]

they are the same. two non-places. two liminal spaces that are only occupied in error. the non-place “proceeds as if space had been trapped by time, as if there were no history other than the last forty-eight hours of news…an unending history in the present.”-marc auge

think at least 70% of the reason girard has been trendy for a bit is because the basics of mimetic theory are simple enough for anyone to immediately get, and bc describing things as the result of 'girardian mimetic desire' sounds very impressive

Fellas, be careful when your grizzled mentor breaks into a coughing fit, holds his napkin to his mouth and it comes away bloody — he *will* say, “It’s nothing, kid,” there *will* be a cut to his funeral, and you *will* wonder if the simpler world that produced him is dying, too

I bought a ticket to a conversion therapy conference to see how the “ex-gay” movement is adapting to the rise of anti-trans politics… and it was a RIDE. Here’s my report, with Henry Carnell: motherjones.com/politics/2024/… 1/

listening room culture is going to go to far. i can already feel it. it’s going to become a scourge

an error in the simulation's code has caused 2018 venice beach club bro skins to run on the silicon plutocrat map. engineers are working to resolve.

i think i finally “get” george strait. great stuff

corporate memphis reggie watts

good story on passage press—a thing that seems fringe, but actually has access to money, people in power, some cultural cache, and is attempting shift the norms of right wing intellectual discourse towards race science kind of stuff

new: I've IDed the man behind 'New Right' Twitter pseudonym 'Lomez' and Passage Press--publisher of Steve Sailer, Curtis Yarvin, and Nick Land. theguardian.com/world/article/…

NEW Businessweek feature investigation: Corporate America Never Really Quit Forced Labor.

Inmates do billions of dollars of work, touching almost every corner of US life. A trafficking lawsuit claims many are kept in prison because the business is just too good:

bloomberg.com/news/features/…

I have written about iPad, with Charlie Warzel theatlantic.com/technology/arc…

I present to you 5,000 words aboard the Creed Cruise, where the band reunited for the first time in 12 years. Pure catharsis. Let us all ponder one of the great questions of modern society: Is all music good now?

slate.com/culture/2024/0…

FINALLY OUT! 'Neo-Nazi Terrorism and Countercultural Fascism: The Origins and Afterlife of James Mason’s 'Siege'' shows how today’s popular neo-Nazi terrorist manual—the “bible” of the Atomwaffen Division—was created.
routledge.com/Neo-Nazi-Terro…