AI Overwhelm, Weekend Whats
The dawning of the internet enabled a creative revolution, where one guy like me, with a laptop, could develop a publishing system and an audience that could compete with major, branded publications. During the dot-com boom, five people from the New York Times came to my South of Market, San Francisco office because they wanted to get advice about their newsletter strategy. The age of indies had arrived. We were where it was all happening. During the current AI boom, it feels more like something is happening to us. Giant corporations with unprecedented amounts of capital and no real oversight other than the hollow promises of self-regulation are making massive decisions about the future of everything, while we’re left to hope our tech overlords are benevolent in the way they choose to delete the role of mere salaried NPCs, and where they decide city-sized data centers will drink our milkshake. All that indie creativity has been sucked into giant database farms, where it gets regurgitated as bulleted outlines. The internet empowered. AI is overpowering. Both the reality and the marketing around AI are overwhelming. Charlie Warzel explains why so much of the current tech revolution makes people want to hit a giant ESC key. “That you can’t begin to wrap your mind around the AI boom or orient yourself in it is a feature, not a bug, for those building the technology. But for anyone just trying to adapt, it’s difficult not to feel resentful or alienated. Silicon Valley is trying to speedrun the singularity, and it’s polarizing the rest of us in the process.” The Atlantic (Gift Article): Too Much Is Happening Too Fast. “I’d argue that the most common feeling about AI is somatic: a low-grade hum of difficult-to-place anxiety that’s the result of loud people constantly suggesting that the near future will look very little like the present and that nothing—your job or the social contract—might survive the transition.” (To save space, I’m skipping the interim tech years where the internet annihilated attention, polarized populations, razed reality, totalled truth, and demolished democracy.)
Zero Summit Game
A lot of China-US summit deals have been touted, even though, predictably, details are scarce. (Boeing got a big airplane purchase deal, but it was smaller than expected and the stock is down). David Sanger (who Trump called treasonous on Air Force 1) has a good overview in the NYT (Gift Article): Trump Was Flattering, Xi Was Resolute. The Difference Spoke Volumes. “Mr. Xi arrived highly scripted, leaving no doubt that for all of China’s problems — deflation, depopulation, the bursting of the real estate bubble — the moment when China acts as a peer superpower had arrived. At every turn, at least as he began his two-day trip to China, Mr. Trump sounded conciliatory, the exact opposite of his portrayals of China in public appearances back home.”
+ By 2026 standards, the summit actually went pretty well. Ian Bremmer sums it up in this short video piece: “We are in the books on the Xi Jinping, Donald Trump summit in Beijing, certainly, one of the most consequential summits that we have witnessed in a long time. And yet very little concrete has come out of it, and on balance, I think, most observers are very comfortable with that.”
+ Time: Trump’s China Trip Underscores How Power Has Shifted East.
+ Of course, there’s the question of how the summit went for America vs how the summit went for Trump. To get an answer to the latter question, we may have to wait until Trump’s next financial disclosure. Trump Has Made Bank Off of Government Contractors’ Stock. And from Bloomberg (Gift Article): Trump’s More Than 3,700 Trades Provoke Wall Street Astonishment.
+ Time will tell who were the biggest winners of the summit. For now, the biggest loser seems to be CBS News anchor Tony Dokoupil, who reported on the China summit from Taiwan. Oh, and his cameraman passed out (probably over confusion over what they were doing in Taiwan). Defector: Tony Dokoupil Flew 8,000 Miles Just To Eat More Sh-t.
Lord of the Fliers
“Tractors, like the one his father frequently drove, had been hit in the fields. In March, a drone blew up a car next to a shop. Another had exploded on Anatolii’s street just the day before. Now, the one he spotted was heading right for his house. As he clung to the tree trunk, the black quadcopter buzzed past, flying just off the ground and bearing down on a cluster of buildings where three of his younger siblings were playing with other kids in their yard … What Anatolii did next — something he had rehearsed, something few civilians in Ukraine have been taught — might have saved the lives of those children, his mother changing a diaper inside or other neighbors on the block.” WaPo (Gift Article): In northern Ukraine, it was boy vs. Russian drone. The boy won.
Weekend Whats
What to Binge: An inexperienced crew of civil servants is quickly thrust into roles as undercover agents trying to slow the flood of heroin into 1990s Britain in the new series, Legends on Netflix.
+ What to Book: The very popular novel Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke is told from the perspective of a trad-wife influencer. The less you know going in, the better.
+ What to Read: If you missed it yesterday … a great writer (Wright Thompson) wrote about a great guy (Steve Kerr). From ESPN: The Warrior Still Remains. Yes, this is an article about my favorite coach and my favorite NBA team. But it’s much more than that. It’s about loss, politics, chronic pain, retirement, decision-making, community, family, and a lot more. To get something out of this piece, you don’t have to be into the NBA or the Warriors. You can be a road warrior, a keyboard warrior, a social justice warrior, or a weekend warrior, and you’ll relate.
Extra, Extra
Slush Fun: “President Donald Trump is expected to drop his $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service in exchange for the creation of a $1.7 billion fund to compensate allies who claim they were wrongfully targeted by the Biden administration.”
+ Kush Job: “They’ve agreed to pay Kushner’s firm tens of millions of dollars in fees annually in hopes of gaining influence at the White House as well as returns for their portfolios, according to people familiar with the matter. Trump’s decision to move forward with an Iran war that all three opposed shows the constraints of that approach.” Bloomberg (Gift Article): Kushner Disappoints Mideast Clients Who Spent Millions Seeking Sway. (Wait, I just thought they wrote the checks because Jared is such a good investor?)
+ Last Deport of Call? “Hugo Palencia said he was delivering meals in Aurora, Colo., for DoorDash and Uber around this time last year. Now, he is in a hotel in the Democratic Republic of Congo, dazed by a journey that he said took him in shackles from the United States to a Central African country that he had barely heard of before last month.” U.S. Migrants Deported to Congo: ‘Where on Earth Is This Place?’
+ Little Shop of Horowitz: The same investors that are dominating the biggest tech deals are also dominating politics. Andreessen Horowitz Is Spending on Politics Like No Other. Even with Trump’s low approval rating, it will be tough to compete with this kind of cash…
+ Shoot First Ask Questions Later: “The Trump administration has consistently sought to justify the killings, which began during last year’s military buildup towards Venezuela, by arguing those targeted were “narco-terrorists” transporting drugs to the US. But a joint effort by 20 journalists led by the Latin American Center for Investigative Journalism this week published the identities of 13 of those killed, some of whom showed no indication of involvement in drug trafficking.”
+ Commercial Endeavors: “He directed nearly 1,000 comedic commercials, including a much-quoted spot for Wendy’s and one for FedEx featuring a manic speed talker.” You may not know the name, but it your of a certain age, you definitely know the work. Joe Sedelmaier, Auteur Behind ‘Where’s the Beef?’ Ad, Dies at 92.
+ Bad Kar-ma: Earworm Kars4Kids jingle yanked from California airwaves for false advertising.
Feel Good Friday
“Pancreatic cancer is one of the most dire diagnoses in medicine. There are few available treatments, and they do little to help. For decades, experimental drugs flopped in trials. Many researchers believed the biological obstacles could not be surmounted. In what seems the blink of an eye, all that has changed.” How an ‘Impossible’ Idea Led to a Pancreatic Cancer Breakthrough.
+ “Rita Collins had a dream for her retirement: bringing books and people together all over the country. Behind the wheel of a van she’s making it happen.” NYT: This Bookstore Gets Good Mileage.
+ Adults relive the musical camaraderie of their youth at band camps reprised for grown-ups.
+ Before ‘Ted Lasso,’ Cristo Fernández had pro soccer dreams. Now he’s living them. Futbol is life (imitating art).
+ The surprisingly strong case for feeling great about your coffee habit.
+ YouTube taught a Japanese teen how to kick field goals. Now he’s in the NFL.
