Demis Hassabis on the New Coming Age

Google CEO Demis Hassabis offered us a first rate second rate essay, A Framework for Frontier AI and the Dawning of a New Age. I’ll go over that essay and various responses to it in Part 1.

Interdependent Thoughts

Bookmarked Will A.I. Become the New McKinsey? by Ted Chiang in the New Yorker

The Anti-Intellectualism of Silicon Valley Elites

I recently re-read Richard Hofstadter's Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, and now every time a reactionary Silicon Valley billionaire opens his mouth, I think about it. So I wrote about it for The Nation. Here's the column: On Instagram, there’s an activist named Brian Patrick (@pano.

The Connections That Turned a Precocious Teen Into the Fallen ‘Nostradamus of AI’

A 24-year-old investor hailed as a visionary attracted billions—before turning into Wall Street’s latest cautionary tale.

Why We Need to Confront the Billionaires’ Paradise

The UBS/PwC report on the “new Gilded Age” of the billionaire class, and the Paradise Papers reveal ways corporations and the ultrawealthy avoid taxes.

Note-Taking and Personal Knowledge Management

My article critically examining Brennan Kenneth Brown’s Not-taking/PKM article. This was longer and more critical than intended.

Epstein and the Capitalist Conspiracy

Naomi Klein discusses what to do with a narrative that mirrors the worst anti-Jewish theories and the importance of holding our depraved elites…

More Everything Forever

This "smart and wonderfully readable" (New York Times) exposé shows why Silicon Valley’s heartless, baseless, and foolish obsessions—with escaping death...

Hype, financial narratives, and self-fulfilling prophecies in surveillance capitalism

The rise of platforms has transformed our understanding of contemporary capitalism, with the critical literature describing how these firms leverage unprecedented digital powers to extract monopoly rents – perhaps even heralding a new form of Feudalism. This paper draws on the literature on financial narratives to examine the role that such stories play within the form of capitalism that they describe, and what this suggests for the role of “hype” in contemporary capitalism. The same stories that for critical scholars appear as menacing threats of “technofeudalism” or “surveillance capitalism” for investors appear as optimistic stories of promising future returns. By driving financial investments, narratives afford platforms very real social and political powers, enabling them to function as a form of self-fulfilling prophecies. The paper argues for a cultural inflection to the political economy of Big Tech – viewing capitalism as neither mechanistic nor rational, but as an expression of a complex interplay between narrative, technology, and economic power. This suggests the need for a critical hype studies, geared at deconstructing the narratives undergirding the technological waves of capitalist pursuits, and examining the broader role of hype in coordinating and directing flows of capital within contemporary financialized capitalism.

“CEO said a thing!”

A blistering guide to what lazy journalism too often looks like

A.I. Should Elevate Your Thinking, Not Replace It - Blog - Koshy John

Read about the hidden divide between self-inflicted irrelevance and real engineering leverage.