How one white supremacist’s rejection of economic common sense stuck — I don’t usually get upset when I see The New York Times screw up. Most of the journalists are trying their best to get things right, pressured for time, and scared for their jobs in a shrinking industry. Still, that’s no excuse for David Leonhardt’s companion piece this morning to…

What if magic is our most probable path to a sustainable future? — I’ve been treading a lot of unfamiliar head and heart space lately. Engaging with a few different kinds of hopelessness — both on the personal and macro level. And while I see the efficacy of logical, engineered solutions to problems, I’m also becoming painfully aware how engineered solutions often engender…

How the quest for empirical evidence can undermine our power — I gave a talk the other night for an event thrown by my friends at Digital Void, who have been mounting what can only be called evenings of stand-up memetics at night clubs in New York City and beyond. The theme of the evening, “Memes, Myth, and Magic,” inspired me…

Don’t hide AI in writer’s rooms. Make AI the center of the show. — Almost everyone I speak with in the entertainment business sees ChatGPT and as-yet undeveloped AI technologies as a new way to write scripts or generate animations, and replace screenwriters and animation artists in the process. That’s dumb, on many levels. First off, machine-generated writing sucks. It’s a reversion to the…

Why older people make more plausible candidates — I believe there’s a significant possibility that neither Biden nor Trump will be candidates by the time the major parties finish their conventions next summer. That may be a good thing, but it would make for a challenging election. …

Don’t give up your local, home-field advantage by fighting for change on a huge abstract level — As I often do between writing books, I’ve been reading various reviews of my work for clues on what to write next. This time I noticed that, more than once, a reviewer has remarked that while my analysis and deconstruction of the digital economy and its many problems is sound…

Tech Bro warnings feel more like a coordinated money grab — Sorry, but I’m just not buying it. The same guys who can’t even successfully stream a presidential campaign launch are really going to spawn an AI capable of taking over humanity? Not likely. …

Logan Roy is Dead. But can television still live forever? — “You’re not your dad. No no no no. You cannot win against the money. The money is going to wash you away. Your dad knew: Tech is coming. We are over. Make your accommodations.” So explains Gerri Kellman, sometimes CEO of Waystar Royco on HBO’s satirical black-comedy billionaire soap opera…

How my demonstration of why not to use ChatGPT backfired — A couple of months ago, when mainstream media finally decided that AI was a “threat,” CNN called to interview me about the typical, first-order fears: kids cheating on papers, the loss of jobs, impact on the economy, and so on. …