We need a guide to how to deal with the new rounds of escalating weaponized cancel-culture to the max. But only a fool would trust the New York TImes to help think these things through, as here it is once again dealing from the middle of the deck…

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Wait!

Alex Bronzini-Vender says he is writing about what is wrong with Harvard.

And yet his two concrete examples are from Northwestern and Texas A&M?

The most concrete thing he says about Harvard as an institution is that Harvard does bad by (a) pointing to IHRA and (b) saying that the university “considers the examples that accompany the IHRA definition [of anti-semitism] to the extent that those examples might be useful in determining discriminatory intent”?

You see the problem here?: NU. TA&M. might. If all ya got is that Harvard said something you object to “might” be useful, something from TA&M, and something from NU, then ya got nuthin:

Alex Bronzini-Vender: At Harvard and Elsewhere, the New Campus Orthodoxy Is Even More Stifling <https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/29/opinion/harvards-campus-speech-trump.html>: ‘That’s not how it’s playing out. Under federal pressure, Harvard and other universities around the country now police academic inquiry according to murkier standards of fairness. The goal, it seems, is to avoid offending anyone, anywhere, across an ever-expanding matrix of identities and standpoints. Rather than dismantling the excesses of the woke era, the new Trump-friendly programs and policies simply repurposed them to serve a different ideological agenda. The result is a new orthodoxy even more stifling than the last…

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Now I would be eager to hear from Ryan Enos and from Steve Levitsky—who are quoted in seeing significant problems with Harvard’s current institutional position. But I want to hear from them in full context. Not what we have here.

And so, once again, I find myself in the same position I find myself with respect to, say, The Free Press. I very hard to see the New York Times editors as working in good faith here.

(Alex himself is, of course, young and a student—and so the appropriate attitude to take to him is to urge him to sharpen and stress-test his arguments.)

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OK. What, then, you ask, should we in universities be doing?

We should be doing our jobs. We should not be entering into any transactional “compacts”, but simply do our jobs. And we are deserving of support to the extent that we do our jobs well.

As my brother-in-law Paul Mahoney, still Interim President of the University of Virginia for one more day, wrote in the letter that—in my reading, which could be wrong—made the MAGA Regents of UVA bounce him out of the job tomorrow:

October 17, 2025

The United States Department of Education
Washington, DC 20202

Dear Secretary McMahon, Ms. Mailman, and Mr. Haley,

Thank you for your letter inviting comment on the proposed Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education. We wholeheartedly agree that “American higher education is the envy of the world.” We also agree with many of the principles outlined in the Compact, including a fair and unbiased admissions process, an affordable and academically rigorous education, a thriving marketplace of ideas, institutional neutrality, and equal treatment of students, faculty, and staff in all aspects of university operations. Indeed, the University of Virginia leads in several of these areas and is committed to continuous improvement in all of them.

We seek no special treatment in exchange for our pursuit of those foundational goals. The integrity of science and other academic work requires merit-based assessment of research and scholarship. A contractual arrangement predicating assessment on anything other than merit will undermine the integrity of vital, sometimes lifesaving, research and further erode confidence in American higher education.

Higher education faces significant challenges and has not always lived up to its highest ideals. We believe that the best path toward real and durable progress lies in an open and collaborative conversation. We look forward to working together to develop alternative, lasting approaches to improving higher education.

Sincerely yours,

Paul Mahoney
Interim President
University of Virginia <https://news.virginia.edu/content/community-message-interim-president-paul-mahoney>

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“Academic work requires merit-based assessment of research and scholarship”, and so any “contractual arrangement predicating assessment on anything other than merit will undermine the integrity of vital, sometimes lifesaving, research and further erode confidence in American higher education”.

But what is our job? It is complicated. A university is different from the public square. A university is a place in which its members have duties:

1. to speak,

2. to listen,

3. to think,

4. to learn,

5. to support one another in those first four duties.

That means that members of a university have academic freedom, not public-square 1st-Amendment free-speech freedom. The idea is to generate, improve, and evaluate ideas; and then to disseminate those ideas; and to create and maintain a community that those who want to take on those duties find a safe, welcoming, and supporting place to do so.

How to arrange an institution and a community that does that best is, as I said, complicated.

The key dilemma is how to support those who are here to listen and to learn, and to weed out those who are not here to listen and to learn (and to encourage them to their proper place(s) go) without discouraging the speaking and the thinking. And here my go-to guru is the most learned Jacob Levy:

Jacob Levy (2016): Safe spaces, academic freedom, and the university as a complex association <https://bleedingheartlibertarians.com/2016/03/safe-spaces-academic-freedom-and-the-university-as-a-complex-association/>: ‘“Academic freedom”… is not… freedom of speech… not the freedom to lie, to commit research fraud, to submit plagiarized work…. It’s not the freedom of a professor to stand in front of a class and say “have you heard the word of God as I best understand it? Let me preach to you for an hour”. Or “you all really need to vote for Bernie Sanders, his is the one true way for politics.”…

The scope that a professor has… [is] constrained by the subject matter of the… class… the… institution… [and the] identity… [of the] discipline…. [It] is the freedom of both professors and students (researchers and those pursing knowledge), to be judged only according to what they do in the classroom or as researchers and only according to the standards of the discipline…. [That] excludes… evaluat[ing] students, or for the university to evaluate us at all for our political or religious opinions expressed off campus…

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And:

Jacob Levy (2024): Campus culture wars are a teachable moment in how freedom of speech and academic freedom differ <https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-campus-culture-wars-are-a-teachable-moment-in-how-freedom-of-speech/>: ‘Academic freedom… [is] the freedom to follow arguments and evidence where they lead, according to scholarly methods… the freedom to teach, within the confines of the scholarly mission of the class… and, finally, freedom from evaluation on non-academic grounds, of which the traditionally most important are political and religious grounds….

The university has to protect not only the safety of its other members but also the security of its academic functions. It can’t rule against the language on a sign, but it must intervene to prevent violence between students, or occupations and blockades that would prevent a class from meeting, or an invited speaker from speaking…. Escalation, overreach and the chilling of legitimate protest are all constant dangers…. Police helicopters and billy clubs on campus are always a sign of failure…. These are genuine problems… but many universities have probably erred too far in the direction of the shrug, letting the belief grow that classes may be disrupted or speakers blockaded without consequence….

In the autumn of 2023… members of university… conspicuously did not all sympathize with the same cause…. [So] universities often fell back on… institutional neutrality. But critics… said the institution had shown that it didn’t take it seriously either…. [Plus] the rule that the university shouldn’t take any interest in the rhetoric that’s used in a protest or on social media was harder to take seriously in an era of hate-speech rules, restrictions on exclusionary speech, and a discourse around “safety” that treated hostile language as violence….

The best time to have started to do the right thing was yesterday, but the second-best time is today…. Recommit to academic freedom, freedom of extramural speech, and institutional neutrality, starting now…. A firm defence of the right of pro-Palestinian students to protest non-disruptively; a clear stand against professors using their classrooms as political platforms; a refusal to adjudicate and police the meaning and intent of extramural political slogans or social-media posts; and the discipline to avoid adopting institutional political platforms on foreign, political or social policy. With those rules in place, they can provide the site and space for students and faculty alike to study, explore, discuss and debate, to celebrate, mourn and protest, even the most divisive questions in political life…

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Plus MOAR, for example: <https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/9789633866542-003/html> ; and <https://digressionsimpressions.substack.com/p/on-academic-freedom-and-institutional>.

As I put it in the past:

Brad DeLong (2017): “Any Community… Flourishes only When Our Members Feel Welcome & Safe…” <https://web.archive.org/web/20170926230940/https://www.bradford-delong.com/2017/09/any-community-flourishes-only-when-our-members-feel-welcome-and-safe.html>: ‘A university has three goals: 1. A university is a safe space where ideas can be set forth and developed. 2. A university is a safe space where ideas can be evaluated and assessed. 3. A university is a safe space where scholars can develop, and gain intelligence and confidence. Speech whose primary goal is to undermine and defeat one or more of those three goals does not belong on a university campus. If you come to Berkeley, and if your speech is primarily intended to—or even, through your failure to think through what you are doing, has the primary effect of (1) keeping us from developing ideas that may be great ones, (2) keeping us from properly evaluating and assessing ideas, or (3) driving members of the university away, your speech does not belong here. There are lots of people who want to take advantage of free speech week to neither: 1. develop ideas that may be great ones, 2. thoughtfully and rationally evaluate and assess ideas, nor 3/ make the university a welcoming place for young scholars. Some will want blood in the streets. Some will hope to take advantage of blood in the streets. Somebody may wind up dead, or maimed, as part of a game of political-cultural dingbat kabuki largely orthogonal to the three proper missions of the university. It is a serious concern.

This is still, today, a hill I will defend—but I will listen to reasoned arguments against it, and try to think and learn. For others disagree. Noah Smith for example:

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I think Paul Musgrave has it correct here: face-to-face check-ins are the way to turn MAMLMs from a crutch into an intellectual force multiplier.. Then there is the next, harder step: What is the best way to use our new information-age MAMLM to get our students able to enrich their lives and their bank accounts by becoming wise in their ability to utilize the best that has been thought and known?

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AI is here; the question is whether we let it hollow out cognition or use it to strengthen it. The answer, I think, starts with outside-the-class essays and inside-the-room interviews. It continues with hard thoughts about what use to make of these technologies, for MAMLMs are superb survey accelerants and terrible oracles. That combination is, potentially, pedagogically golden.

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This is, I think, 100% correct, at least for those professors who want to get real feedback with respect to what their students are learning, or who simply want the grades they give to not be grossly unfair and to do something to motivate students to study:

Paul Musgrave: How to Assess Students in the AI Age <https://musgrave.substack.com/p/face-to-face-university-examinations>: ‘Bringing back the most ancient form of scholarly assessment…. In-person examinations are probably the best route to stress-testing students’ mastery of the work they submit…

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Then of the four options for who to examine face-to-face he offers, I vastly prefer his option 4:

[Have the student] write a project or a step of a project and then have an interview or check-in about what is going on with the work…

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These students are going to have modern advanced machine learning models where their descendants at their elbows for their entire lives going forward. They need to get good at using them productively. Teaching students to perform intellectual exercises in a way that assumes these things away is not, in the long run, going to do much to help anybody. So: write the essay outside of the classroom, submit it, and then come in to talk about it.

Paul goes on:

Face-to-face exams involve an enormous amount of upfront investment… [and] scheduling exams outside of class time….

There is a nice advantage, however: once you have administered the face-to-face exam and written your notes…you’re done….

There should be a rubric… breaking out each learning objective to be assessed so that it can be quickly measured. There should also be room for notes…. These should be filled out immediately after the exam and saved quickly…

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This means, at least as I see it, half-hour blocks: ten minutes reminding yourself what the student’s outside-the-class work was about, a three-minute opening presentation, your first question and their answer, ten minutes of back-and-forth, a thank-you and five minutes making your notes, and then on to the next student.

Now this is a substantial speedup—an extra thirty hours of professor and TA labor devoted to assessment. Then again, having students give oral presentations and answer questions on their work has a lot of value as a teaching technique. And there is some reduction in time spent undertaking other forms of grading.

But it is not clear that this speedup is not something we deserve to suffer. And, anyway, we are pretty good at kicking and crying with respect to defending our perquisites and lifestyle—feel sorry for underpaid, overworked lecturers in the age of MAMLMs. But even for them, in the university wants performance, it should budget to pay for it.

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Paul Musgrave still sounds somewhat defensive and pessimistic in his piece. So let me lean in and be much more optimistic.

Start with Chad Orzel’s <https://chadorzel.substack.com/p/learning-stuff-is-supposed-to-be> reminder: learning is supposed to be fun. If that sounds quaint against the steady drumbeat of “Crisis in Academia!!!!”—the handwringing over status collapse and cheating panics—then perhaps we need to step back and recollect what universities are for. For five millennia, since clay tablets and cuneiform, higher education has had one overwhelming purpose: to train front-end nodes to the East African Plains Ape Anthology Super-Intelligence—our real ASI. We teach people to plug into humanity’s collective brain. We teach people to draw on its accumulated knowledge. We teach people to remix it for their situation. We teach people to use it as a springboard for their own incremental analyses. We teach them to then add their own insights back to the store. And we teach them to then communicate those insights so others can act in the world.

That training is stable across technologies. It is still, as I said, the seven academic labors:

1. survey a subject;

2. identify the live issues;

3. hone a key question;

4. research the question;

5. analyze evidence to obtain an answer;

6. store that answer in useful, durable form; and

7. persuade others that your answer fits reality.

If you are doing lower and higher education right, you are teaching this process, modeling it, and goading students to practice it. Every new layer of information technology—papyrus, codex, press, arXiv, the internet—changes how we engage with texts and data, but not the core pedagogy. MAMLMs—modern advanced machine-learning models—are simply the latest layer. They are very big-data, high-dimensional, flexible-function engines. They do two prominent things:

• serve as natural-language front-ends to un/structured data, and

• produce stochastic prose (and code) interpolations—slop machines at their worst, copilot force multipliers at their best.

The lecture survived Gutenberg. The seminar survived MOOCs. The core task—training front-end nodes of EAPANASI—survives MAMLMs.

Why is this going to be fun? Because we get to redesign the pitch and the practice around what actually delights, motivates, and builds capability. Orzel’s point is simple and powerful: much of higher education used to be sold as fun—freedom to choose classes, stay up absurd hours pursuing ideas and projects, and play with lasers (or datasets) in a lab. That joy made it easier to power through the inevitable bureaucratic sludge and credential box-checking. If our public posture has turned grim—caught between “skills-for-jobs” instrumentalism and “last-bulwark-against-fascism” moralism—we can fix that, by re-centering the seven labors and integrating the new tools as intellectual force multipliers rather than crutches, as we together explore new tools for amplifying human thought

What does that look like in the classroom?

What I think I am going to be doing next semester on Day One: I am going to tell the story of the medieval university, of the trivium and quadrivium—how to think, write, speak; arithmetic, geometry, harmony, astronomy—and how they were always about enabling rich lives and rich livings as front-ends to the ASI as it stood in the middle ages. Then I will say, “As then, so now”, for our task is to teach students to do (1) through (7) with today’s tools of thought, definitely including MAMLMs. Make explicit the difference between using a tool to accelerate cognition and outsourcing cognition. The former builds intellectual muscle; the latter atrophies it.

I think this will be hard, but the right kind of hard—the kind of hard that makes teaching worth doing. And fun.

Fun, because MAMLMs let you reallocate attention to higher-order intellectual play. Consider step (1), surveying a subject. A good model can generate competent, if bland, maps of the terrain. Use that as a baseline, then push students to find what the baseline misses—conflicts in sources, under-explored subfields, data series with holes, or historiographic rabbit holes where the debate changed meaning but the keywords did not.

On to step (2), identifying live issues: have them prompt, critique, and iterate until the “live issues” are truly live—specific enough to be tractable, rich enough to be consequential.

Step (3), honing the key question: MAMLMs can produce long lists of candidate questions; the real work is pruning, sharpening, and linking the question to available data and methods.

Step (4), research: models are superb front-ends to archives, APIs, and corpora. They are terrible truth-oracles. That is pedagogically golden. Students must learn provenance, triangulation, replication, and error-detection—skills that are more valuable than ever precisely because the front-end is now more powerful and more fallible.

Step (5), analysis: ask students to build small analytic scaffolds—back-of-the-envelope calculations, toy models, code snippets—and then use the model to stress-test assumptions. The delight is watching them discover that changing one assumption flips their result, and then asking why.

Step (6), storage: the durable forms have shifted—papers, databases, notebooks, reproducible repos. MAMLMs can help them outline, summarize, tag, and index. But the student must choose the representation that is reusable by the next front-end node. Teach them to produce artifacts that other humans can pick up and use: clean datasets with documentation, notebooks with narrative and tests, papers with explicit claims and boundaries.

Step (7), persuasion: here models can help generate drafts and check tone. Yet the heart of persuasion remains human: audience, structure, evidence, and ethos. The fun is having students practice rhetorical craft and then use models as sparring partners to anticipate objections and strengthen argument.

The real joy will come, I hope, from the meta-pivot: students will, I hope, come to see education as play with intellectual force multipliers. They will learn the discipline to work without the tool when needed, and the wisdom to use it when it accelerates them. They learn that writing is thinking, but so are prompting, debugging, and oral explanation.

Will this produce a “degraded education”? Only if you mistake tool use for tool worship. Only if we cannot re-sell higher education to the young not as grim credentialing or joyless bulwark politics but as a dream worth living: the freedom to think, build, and persuade with better tools. If we do that, the coming of MAMLMs is not doom but delight.

It is, in truth, still a pretty sweet gig.

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From Imperial Russia & World War I to Lenin, the antinomies of NEP, & collectivization-terror as the only path to True Communism—but, then, incomprhensibly, with the Great Terror Stalin crashed the plane. Why? Plus a few preliminary notes on MAMLM LLM-assisted “deep” active reading…

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The third volume of Stephen Kotkin’s Stalin biography—Stalin: Totalitarian Superpower—may, but probably will not, come out in July 2026, things being as they are. But I have already started getting ready, putting volumes 1 and 2 (Stalin: Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928 and Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941) on my bedside table, along with Kotkin’s Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization and Tolstoy’s War & Peace.

So far, two things of note:

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(1) “Deep, active reading” is much easier—and more fruitful—when a capable LLM sits at your elbow: Reading has always been a joint production between author, text, and the reader’s prior scaffolding: what you already know, what associations spring to mind, which gaps you can bridge. An LLM, judiciously prompted, supplies scaffolding on demand. It can surface the hidden priors, name the unstated interlocutors, and map the argumentative terrain the author assumes, thereby lowering the cognitive transaction costs of comprehension. The risk—always—of confabulation is real; but so too, historically, were the risks of misremembered seminar notes and half-digested secondary sources. Net-net, the marginal productivity of your attention rises. You can spend less time decoding the context and more time evaluating the claims.

Situating the author in their proper mise-en-scène is now tractable in minutes rather than weeks. Intellectual work occurs in conversations—institutions, journals, polemics, funding regimes, ideological wars of position. With a few prompts, an LLM can reconstruct the immediate discursive neighborhood: who the author is disagreeing with, which schools they borrow from, which case studies are canonical, and what counts as a “win” in that subfield. This is not just garnish; it changes interpretation.

You no longer have to argue in your own mind with a pale shadow of the author, animated by your partial memory and wishful reconstruction. You can spin-up a serviceable proxy—call it “Author*, footnoted”—that can crisply restate their position, test how it survives steelmanning, and explore counterfactuals (“what if they accepted X?”). The point is not ventriloquism; it is triangulation. By iterating the author’s commitments against alternative premises, you learn where their results are robust and where they are leverage-sensitive. In the Old Régime, that labor was expensive and failure-prone; now it is cheap. If you keep a falsification mindset—verify quotes, check references, demand page numbers—the exercise saves you from arguing with your own projection and, therefore, from flattering your own prejudices.

Hence Platon’s character Sokrates’s dismissal of reading in the Phaidros—book is to mind as painting is to animal—no longer holds. The painted animal does not move; the written text, historically, did not answer back. Today, the text can be made to move. Not the original author, granted, but a dynamic, interrogable model that reconstructs the argument space and responds within it. That changes the epistemic game. A book is now an interface to a live discourse, not merely a frozen artifact. The safeguard is humility: treat the model as a fast index plus an argumentative simulator, not an oracle. But once you do, the asymmetry that worried Plato—passive reader, inert text—erodes. We get something closer to dialectic: a quick, cheap, approximate Sokrates, always on tap, who is good enough to raise better questions and bad enough to force you to check the footnotes.

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(2) A very nice conversation a decade ago between Stephen Kotkin and Slavoj Žižek about Stalin:

<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=torL-Q6htQo>

Slavoj Žižek and Stephen Kotkin discuss Kotkin’s monumental biography of Joseph Stalin. Stalin: Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928 covers the Soviet dictator’s youth, from his humble origins in Georgia as the son of a shoemaker to his days as a revolutionary organizer in Lenin’s inner circle.

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My take on their conversation, and on the picture of Stalin that emerges from it:

Stephen Kotkin is convinced that politics, not childhood psychopathic demons, made the man, for it was the experience of building and operating a personal dictatorship that shaped his character; and it was the placement of that character against the wider sweep of geopolitics, ideology, and institutions that explain that character’s choices and the horrible genocidal outcomes. Start with the cataclysm of World War I, which normalized mass violence in politics. Continue with the very hard man Vladimir Lenin—a product of imperial Russia in his ruthlessness, his contempt for softness, his extremism in principle, and his devious tactical pragmatism. Note that a Trotsky who publicly saw himself as Lenin’s equal could not gain control of Lenin’s party in the face of a Stalin who saw himself as Lenin’s immediate pupil, and add the importance of personnel and patronage that enables the General Secretary to construct a personal dictatorship within a bureaucratic state.

For the Bolsheviki, the 1920s presented a structural contradiction: Urban Russia was a Bolshevik single-party dictatorship with state ownership of industry’s “commanding heights”, The countryside—home to more than 85% of the population and 70% of the wealth—remained marketized under the NEP, capitalist-like and socially distinct. The regime repeatedly undermined its own quasi-market because, as Communists, they aimed not to ameliorate capitalism but to eradicate all of it, down to the village market and the private blacksmith forge. Viewed through communist lenses that equated capitalism with imperialist war and wage slavery, forced collectivization and the terror-famine became, tragically, the only effective instrument for doing the job. Party, ideology, siege mentality, youthful mobilization all mattered. But would they have done the job without Stalin? Could anyone else have “gone all the way,” reënserfing a hundred million peasants, collectivizing agriculture, and persisting through the catastrophe of five to seven million dead by starvation, tens of millions starving yet surviving, with cannibalism emerging and régime destabilization a growing threat.

But then comes Kotkin’s hardest problem. The terror-famine of collectivization and forced industrialization has at least a simulacrum of means-ends logic, given the ends, given permissibility of all means given what means had already been used in World War I. But after the success of the collectivization of agriculture and the restabilization of the régime, Stalin then, in Kotkin’s term: crashes the plane. Having consolidated power and built socialism’s foundations, he turns the purging scythe on loyal elites—friends, factory heads, diplomats, intelligence, and the Red Army officer corps—at a scale unmatched by fascist analogues, and Communist analogues too. The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was a veritable tea party in comparison.

How can political explanation take us to where we want to go? Similar dictatorships did not produce coordinated mass murder of loyal elites.

The revolution was real—mass, participatory, energized by the injustices of tsarism. Yet institutions govern, not brilliant ideas. Lenin and his cohort deliberately built a dictatorship. The methods and core ideas of reigning communism—class absolutism, anti-market dogma, siege geopolitics—were at odds with freedom, abundance, and happiness. Stalin’s story, in Kotkin’s telling, is thus the convergence of structure, ideology, and political technique—made decisive by one man’s willingness to go further than anyone else.

And my notes on the event below the fold:

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From three years ago: 2022-10-27. Did I get this right back then?...

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I find my friend John Holbo writing:

John Holbo: Russell Jacoby Against the Buzzwords: ‘Russell Jacoby… in “Tablet”… approvingly retweeted by Richard Dawkins, then by Elon Musk…. I’m sympathetic to Jacoby’s old line… ‘theory’ silliness… in the 80’s-90’s… perverse incentives… for doing ‘philosophy’ badly in various ways. This was not good…. But… as Jacoby himself used to acknowledge… pretend[ing] ‘ivory tower-types being eccentric’ = ‘barbarians at the gates of western civ’ is one more funny, bug-in-his-ear character in some David Lodge novel. But now Jacoby’s updated his script… these leftists don’t even have power in the Ivory Tower!—they don’t have jobs! they are bitter baristas! resentful HR drones!—that makes them so dangerous!… Their weakness is their terrible strength!… The black comedy quality of this twist—surely this is shaping up [as] a sad David Lodge novel...

And this is the illustration Russell Jacoby chooses to illustrate his article:

Oohhh… kaaaayyyy…

Who is this guy?

I did, long ago, read a very nice, book by Russell Jacoby called Dialectic of Defeat: Contours of Western Marxism. It was worthwhile, even if written in embarrassingly crude-and-creaky New Leftese.

Jacoby’s work did cast a long shadow not on my contribution but on some of the other contributions than mine to our 2016 conference volume Public Intellectuals in the Global Arena: Professors or Pundits?

I do remember Dan Drezner citing Jacoby’s The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe in his 2017 The Ideas Industry.

Scanning my hard disk, I see his name come up in a few of my notes. So: someone who took the Long March from New Left (“I was part of a Boston bookstore ‘collective’ that interminably discussed everything from the titles the store should stock to the details of our lives…”) to, today, the Paleolithic Right:

Russell Jacoby: The Takeover: Self-righteous professors have spawned self-righteous students and unleashed them into the public square: ‘The leftists who would have vanished as assistant professors in conferences on narratology and gender fluidity or disappeared as law professors with unreadable essays on misogynist hegemony and intersectionality have been pushed out into the larger culture… staff the ballooning diversity and inclusion commissariats that assault us…. Buzz words of the campus—diversity, inclusion, microaggression, power differential, white privilege, group safety—have become the buzz words in public life. Already confusing on campus, they become noxious off campus…

Let me give the mic back to John Holbo:

What indefensible barbarism do these buzz words buzz on behalf of, sez Jacoby?: “Orwell targeted language that defended ‘the indefensible’... the British rule of India, Soviet purges and the bombing of Hiroshima.... But today, unlike in 1946, political language of Western progressives does not so much as defend the indefensible as defend the defendable.”

So they defend the… defendable.

That doesn’t sound SO indefensible...

And I gotta concur with John. Jacoby feels beseiged by noxious buzzwords:

Wonder about the significance of microaggression? You are a microaggressor. Have doubts about an eternal, all-inclusive white supremacy? You benefit from white privilege. Skeptical about new pronouns? You abet the suicide of fragile adolescents…

I am at U.C. Berkeley.

If the Woke Beast has a belly, the place where I am must be its Ground Zero.

Yet in my personal experience:

1. Microaggressions: I have come home to my house to find my house-sitter and two of her friends sitting on the floor drinking wine, unburdening themselves on the microaggressions of being a female economics graduate student here at Berkeley. These are powerful, brilliant, capable, accomplished women all—and it grinds them down. It is one of the reasons why Economics does so badly and our pipeline of women (and underrepresented minorities!) leaks so much. Economics’s Talmud-like culture of challenge and debate has many advantages, but it does make microaggression (and macroaggression) a privileged and honored lifestyle.
   
   So my reaction is: Time spent reflecting upon how to make the social world less of a zero-sum dominance and more of a positive-sum cooperation game is rarely wasted.
   

2. Pronouns: I had thought that the first principle of being a gentlemen is to treat people as they want to be treated, and, in polite society, at least, take their presentation-of-self at surface value: if a man is introducted to you as M. le Comte de St.-Germain, you refer to him as M. le Comte or St. Germain. There was such a man, who dazzled contemporaries in the 1700s with languages, music, chemistry, and gem‑polishing, claiming exotic pasts—sometimes Spanish, sometimes Portuguese or Transylvanian—and hinting at great age, moving among élites sometimes as a minor fixer or informal envoy, cultivating patronage, performing chemical demonstrations, keeping to a strict diet and nocturnal work habits, with strong relationships to figure like le Duc de Choiseul and Prinz Karl von Hesse. Perhaps the one thing certain about him was that he was not, in fact, M. le Comte de St.-Germain.
   
   If Jacoby wants to write a brief for how impolite society is in fact superior, I might read it.
   
   But he has not done so.
   
   So my reaction is: Adolescence is a time in which everyone is fragile, and needs sympathy and compassion. Civilization is empathy and consideration. Barbarism is the reverse.
   

3. White Privilege: If you are an elderly or middle-aged straight white male in America who does not know that you have been playing the videogame of life on the “easy” setting, I judge you to be a pathetic loser. And I cannot interpret Jacoby’s “have doubts about an eternal, all-inclusive white supremacy? You benefit from white privilege” as anything other than a denial that he has been playing on the “easy” setting.
   
   So my reaction is: Knowing how much you are, as Milton and Rose Director Friedman liked to say, “supremely lucky people” is a very important part of self-knowledge.

Am I deluded?

Should I join those like Russell Jacoby who complain about snowflakes—women are snowflakes who are annoyed when told in class that “solving this will put hair on their chest”? Should I complain about those who want a different pronoun—they should just suck it up and recognize that they are “he” or “she”? Should I complain about those who tell me and others that something called “white privilege” has in fact played a substantial part in what success they have had?

Let’s think about that last: White privilege makes you a lucky person who has been, undeservedly, successful. Milton and Rose Friedman could recognize and stress that they had been supremely lucky people. But it is a macroaggression to tell Russell Jacoby, ex-New Leftist, that he is such?

I head over to the internet to look at Jacoby’s curriculum vitae.

I cannot find it anywhere.

The closest I can find is not a .pdf but, instead, an email link to request it.

Odd. I do so. Nothing comes back.

Googling around, I find:

• He became professor emeritus at UCLA in 2020. The UCLA website says “education: Universities of Chicago, Wisconsin and Rochester. Ph.D. Rochester, 1974”.

• I find little else until I follow a Google link over to a “World Biographical Encyclopedia”, of which I have never heard. Is it reliable?

• In any event, Prabook says: ”Bachelor, University Wisconsin, 1967. Master of Arts, University Rochester, 1968. Student, Ecole Pratique Hautes Etudes, Paris, 1970. Doctor of Philosophy in History, University Rochester, 1974. Lecturer, Boston University, Boston, 1974-1975. Scholar in residence, Brandeis U., 1975-1976. Lecturer department History, University of California, Los Angeles, 1976-1979. Visiting assistant professor History, University of California, Irvine, 1979-1980. Visiting associate professor Humanities, Simon Fraser U., Vancouver, B.C., Canada, 1983-1984. Visiting scholar, associate professor, Lonergan U. College/Liberal Arts College Concordia U., Montreal, Canada, 1985-1986. Visiting senior lecturer, University of California, San Diego, 1986-1987. Visiting associate professor of history, University of California, Riverside, 1988-1991. Visiting associate professor of history, University of California at Los Angeles, 1992-1994. Adjunct professor of history, University of California at Los Angeles, 1995-…”

And I think:

• Here is someone who bounced around for twenty years with no academic stability…

• From short-term non-renewable three-year-or-less position to position—UCLA, UCI, SFU, Concordia, UCSD, UCR, UCLA…

• Before finally landing a semi-permanent position at UCLA…

• But one potentially insecure: it might well vanish the next time a budget crunch came around…

• Or his slot might evaporate into smoke should someone powerful in the senior tenured faculty wants a teaching-heavy job slot for a protégé…

• And, as an adjunct, a poition likely to carry a much higher teaching-load burden at UCLA than that of the other professors sitting in the front two rows at seminars…

And so I guess: He doesn’t see himself as lucky.

He didn’t go from Ph.D. to tenure in seven years. He always saw himself as failing to run the course in the expected time, as hanging onto his academic post by his fingernails, as not someone whom patriarchy and white privilege conspired to give him an easy-mode speed-run but as someone whom THE MAN kept down for his entire career. Max Weber would have understood. Weber strongly cautioned those seeking academic careers thus: ““Do you in all conscience believe that you can stand seeing mediocrity after mediocrity, year after year, climb beyond you, without becoming embittered and without coming to grief?” If you don’t believe that you can do that, he said, you should leave academia immediately.

I drop over to Amazon’s “Look Inside the Book” feature. I am struck by the beginning of the acknowledgements to his 2020 On Diversity:

In my previous books I have been chagrined by the brevity of my acknowledgments; no lengthy roster of esteemed colleagues and devoted friends or rollcall of foundations, institutiosn, and conferences that fêted the author. Alas, my short list has barely changed over the decades…

And I again guess: Another sign that he sees himself not as lucky but as unlucky—as lacking the devoted friends, esteemed colleagues, and, perhaps most important, the hard-working and tireless but interested adversaries to read his stuff and point him in a better direction.

Plus: I am struck by the beginning of Jacoby’s introduction to the 1996 reissue of his 1975 Social Amnesia:

Social Amnesia… written amid the dying embers of the New Left…. I was part of a Boston bookstore “collective” that interminably discussed everything from the titles the store should stock to the details of our lives. Anti-psychoanalytic sentiment…. Kate Millet’s Sexual Politics…. The bookstore carried Pavlov… billed as a materialist and revolutionary, not Freud who was attacked as an idealist and reactionary…. What bothered me was not a sheer ignorance of psychoanalytic thinking, but the cheap criticism that Freud was nineteenth century…. The criticism implied that those who come later are smarter: the critics and their friends. This outlook had a great future…

And I again guess: He sees himself not as lucky but as vastly unlucky: Even his friends were not his constructive adversaries but, rather, his enemies—in the sense that they made deliberate decisions to remain ignorant of what he saw as crucial.

So I think: Maybe what Jacoby is doing is crying out that he was not, personally, privileged?

Maybe what Jacoby really wants to say, but cannot quite bring himself to, is that his ancestors’ American white-ethnic experience was not all that easy, and he does not see his experience as all that easy?

That others had it easier?

That—let me list the surnames of all of my great-great-grandparents—the Wymans, Richardsons, Paysons, Ushers, Wards, Carters, Andersons, Lords, Slocums, Creases, Parkinsons, Bradfords, Whipples, DeLongs (solid WASPY Huguenots), Siglins (token Protestant Germans), Gallaghers (token Irish Catholics!), and such all had it easy, but the Jacobys did not? That the Jacobys should be numbered not among the goats but among the sheep, on the side of the strivers who deserve good things, on the side of those who never yachted off of Marblehead or Newport, as opposed to the entitled parasites who did?

But if that is what he really means to say, then he should say that!

I have constructed an image of Russell Jacoby in my mind’s eye. It may well be a false image. But it is a strong one.

In the image in my mind’s eye HE REALLY REALLY RESENTS being told that there was anything “easy” about his life and career: About being born in New York in 1945. About leaving New York for Chicago as a teenager and then dropping out of the University of Chicago (for academic? financial?) reasons. About finishing his B.A. at lower-status (and cheaper!) Wisconsin-Madison in 1967. About using graduate-school to avoid being drafted and sent to Vietnam. About finding his New-Left commitments blocking him from getting the tenure-track job he deserved while the universities were still fat and growing through the mid-1970s, even as he recognized that they were idiots. About having three years to prove that he deserved a tenure-track slot, and it not appearing, and getting bounced. About trying to do it again. And again. And so on.

In this image, he REALLY does not like being called THE MAN—someone who has an unearned position, who benefits from white privilege, who needs to recognize that he is one of the, as F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote of Tom and Daisy Buchanan, “careless people” who can and does unthinkingly break things with their actions, and even their words, and so must be careful.

This image I have constructed does explain to me how ex-New Leftist Jacoby can write:

The New York Times published an opinion piece by Sen. Tom Cotton that called for the national guard to stem looting in the wake of the George Floyd riots. Employees of the Times protested and charged that the piece put Black staffers “in danger.” Again, this was an article in the editorial section of the paper, page 14. In the American adaption of Stalinist show trials, the editor of the opinion section [James Bennet] confessed. He regretted “the pain” he caused. He resigned…

For, as John Holbo points out, that is not at all an adequate description of what went down:

Jacoby has his parade.... But in each case (and others) isn’t it more complicated?... I’ll only offer one example.... Tom Cotton.... A bunch of NYTimes staffers say Cotton’s op-ed made them feel ‘unsafe’, which does sound snowflake-y. But... Cotton explicitly called… for the extrajudicial execution of American citizens, en masse, by the US military....

Indeed. Would anyone sane and balanced not think that massively boosting Tom Cotton’s violent fantasies beyond their normal spread has the potential to make us all unsafe?

And James Bennet? The victim of the “American adaption of Stalinist show trials”? James Bennet is, right now, a senior editor at the Economist. He writes the Lexington column. He did not suffer the fate of a defendant at a Stalinist show trial: He was not shot dead with a bullet in the back of his skull in the basement of Lubyanka Prison on Dzerzhinsky Square in Moscow.

Do I have the gist of Russell Jacoby right here?

Or am I completely off base here?

#neofascism
#wokeism
#hoisted-from-the-archives
#public-reason
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#the-horrible-atrocity-of-defending-good-causes-badly

It is going how it is going.,..

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I came for the cowboys-&-indians movie with the evil Comanche warrior queen crossed with “Apocalypse Now” <https://braddelong.substack.com/publish/post/182676675>, lampshaded in the movie by General Ardmore’s snarky calling Colonel Quarrick “Cochise”.

I must admit, however, I was not then expecting to be confronted with the sacrifice of Isaac, a mega-Moby-Dick with not one but thousands of angry whales, a high-tech AI-driven military with no ability to identify whether its IFF tags are being carried by soldiers with the proper biometric markers that decides to build its major base in the middle of the galaxy’s most gigantic petroleum refinery ever, plus elements from every single other story ever made, all in a package a clear hour shorter than the Extended Edition version of “Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King”.

On the other hand, the Odyssey trailer they showed seemed to me to be very skillfully handled: It simply tells the story of the Trojan Horse and then cuts off—compelling, with a realistic-looking Late Bronze Age Anatolia, and genuine dramatic tension that also paints Odysseus as, clearly, a villain: a very complicated man indeed.

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Long story short: a 40-year-old woman named Bari with an Ivy League pedigree, who maintains a constant spotlight on her identity as a Jewish lesbian snuffed out a story about a concentration camp on CBS News 80 years after Edward R. Murrow’s broadcast from Buchenwald. Time erases memories for individuals, but also collectively, within societies…

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<https://steveschmidt.substack.com/p/bari-weiss-killed-cbs-news-in-76>

The Warning with Steve Schmidt

Bari Weiss killed CBS News in 76 days

Time erases memories for individuals, but also collectively, within societies…

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2 days ago · 504 likes · 62 comments · Steve Schmidt

It would have astonished Americans living in 1885 that the most famous American in the world, Ulysses Grant, who saved the Union, would at best ring a vaguely familiar bell for some Americans just two lifetimes after his death.

The same is true of another titan — the American broadcast journalist Edward Roscoe Murrow, who died in 1965. His news values at CBS were murdered in 2025 by a woman born in 1984 and a boy with a wealthy daddy born in 1983.

Pity.

Murrow was a truth-teller and a serious man in a world gone mad and consumed by lies.

His was a voice that the American people could trust in a moment of enormous consequence — just like they can trust the voice of Sharyn Alfonsi today.

The collapse of trust in the American media is a result of the business decisions that destroyed Murrow’s ethic by the corporate executives he warned about with tremendous prescience. Before then, when broadcast journalism was in its infancy, there was only possibility.

Many people say that the following is the greatest news broadcast in history.

There were no pictures that accompanied the report. Only Murrow’s words.

Close your eyes and listen to them. You will quickly move past the scratchiness of the recording, and be transported back to a relatively recent moment at a profoundly evil place.

Below is Murrow’s report from Buchenwald.

This is where the fascist road led.

The man describing the scene had chartered a plane to Vienna seven years earlier, as the Nazi Army rolled into Austria during the Anschluss of 1938.

The justification for the Anschluss was a doctrine of racial purity that sought to unify Aryans and the Germanic people around a thousand-year Reich that promised freedom, prosperity and national greatness. It would protect them from the hordes of subhumans stepping on the master race and closing in from all sides. What Hitler said was needed was “living space.”

Edward R. Murrow’s first live report was from Vienna on March 13, 1938. It was a multi-point broadcast of a live event over shortwave radio that reached seamlessly into millions of American homes, a modern miracle of technology, engineering and journalistic grit.

Here are the words that began the greatest career in modern American journalism.

This is Edward R. Murrow, speaking from Vienna.

It’s now nearly 2:30 in the morning and Herr Hitler has not yet arrived.

Murrow surely could not have predicted the journey that would take him from Vienna to Buchenwald, but the American people could count on him to explain what was happening as the crisis grew into human civilization’s greatest test and catastrophe.

Murrow was trusted because he earned trust. Trust builds by drops, but is lost in buckets — a fact about which the majority of America’s media mandarins seem oblivious or wholly indifferent.

“This is London” meant something because the man delivering the news could be counted on to explain it, as well as be trusted to deliver it.

He built the greatest assemblage of broadcast journalists in world history. They illuminated the opaqueness, horror, truth and challenges of World War II. They looked over the edge of the abyss into the pit of tyranny, war, suffering and evil.

Listen to Murrow tell the truth about fascism before we jump and talk about Bari Weiss, who is much closer to Leni Riefenstahl than Murrow:

tahl than Murrow:

If you are unable to listen to his news report, you can read it here.

When the Nazis needed to show the International Red Cross how good the Jews had it in the Reich, they needed a stage to impress the cynical, gullible and naive. The place to which the Nazis took their moral dupes was the fortress town of Terezin in conquered Czechoslovakia.

There they built Theresienstadt, the show camp, and filled the store windows with bread that the Jews could not eat, and clothes they could not buy with money they were not allowed to possess.

A key difference between the Nazis and MAGA is that, while both practiced cruelty, MAGA glorifies it. The Nazis downplayed their viciousness.

They hid it from the world, themselves and their own citizens to the maximum degree possible.

This was the purpose of places like Terezin. The camp was created to prove that the Nazis weren’t in fact cruel, but gracious keepers of their subhuman charges.

MAGA has no such concerns. They practice cruelty expressly to celebrate it, and market it to inspire more cruelty. The old Nazis would have loved Silicon Valley’s algorithms, but only MAGA has gotten the chance to harness their innate and vicious power to bring out the worst in ordinary people. Look at this example of a message from an ICE public affairs team member from a Washington Post article about ICE’s “media machine,” as the story refers to it:

The last time I visited Terezin I sat on a bench outside of the school attended by the Jewish children that were mostly gassed at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

They did not survive the monstrous lie of their imprisonment and the awful power of the state to decide who was human, and who was not.

It turned out that Terezin was not what the Nazis said it was.

In the end, it was a death camp.

So is this:

The watch that Kristi Noem is wearing is a $50,000 Rolex.

Democracy is what keeps you safe and protects your liberty. This does not.

All over the world, wherever people are oppressed and downtrodden, trampled and abused, they must know that there is a place that rejects their oppression and tormentors in the name of freedom and the rights of each human being.

They must know that in the darkest nights there is a place and a people who will not only stand with them, but see them.

Freedom is the most powerful force in the world, but it is fueled by hope. Hope can be smothered and strangled by indifference, which is always seeded by cynicism and hypocrisy.

America is that place in the world, and the American presidency is the office that must never become faithless towards the cause of human dignity and freedom.

Bari Weiss is a cynical, corrupt and deeply unserious character who is partisan, frivolous and incompetent.

There hasn’t been a ship’s captain with more water over their head since John Smith on the morning of April 15, 1912.

She is an abysmal leader and a worse journalist, with the judgement of Donald Trump Jr. on an all-you-can-sniff night at the Cartagena Trump Hotel and Casino.

This is what was published in The Free Press in April 2025 about the concentration camp covered by “60 Minutes” in the story spiked by Weiss…but not before it aired on Canadian TV. OOPS!

→ The hottest campaign stop is this Salvadoran supermax: House Republican Riley Moore went to the super maximum security prison in El Salvador to take some photos in front of the inmates. “I just toured the CECOT prison in El Salvador,” he writes, with pictures of him giving a thumbs-up, shirtless inmates standing at attention behind him. Moore gave a double thumbs-up in front of the men, densely packed in their cold metal bunk. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem took the same tour recently, posting a fun videoin front of caged, tatted men.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the aisle, Senator Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) tried to visit that very same prison in El Salvador this week. He was calling for the release of a mistakenly deported Maryland man, but was denied access. It seems as though Cory Booker is planning a similar trip.

The El Salvador supermax prison is becoming the new Ohio Diner. It’s the new Iowa State Fair. It’s the new Jeffrey Epstein jet: It’s where every political leader needs to visit, the place to see and be seen if you’re ambitious and in politics today. Journalists will be hanging out at the prison to get everyman voices from the El Salvador supermax. Lobbyists will be standing by the metal detectors, pollsters in the outdoor gym yard. A gorgeous steakhouse will open up in the nearby shantytown (I actually have no idea what’s nearby the supermax, but I assume it’s a shantytown). And at the rate we’re going, soon TGIF will be written from inside one of the cells.

Back in the States, D.C.’s top party guest is El Salvador’s president Nayib Bukele, who came for an official White House visit this week. He and Trumpo discussed—what else?—that supermax prison!

They agreed that there was nothing to be done about the mistakenly deported Maryland man, now in Salvadoran custody.

Two leaders of two great countries simply cannot find that one random wrongly deported man, and everyone should move along (I’m assuming that means he’s dead, right?).

After Bukele left the White House, he thirstily tweeted, “I miss you already, President T.” Trump returned the favor, learning to sayMAGA in Spanish: “¡America grande, otra vez!”

→ Homegrown criminals: Trump, who literally cannot take his mind off that Salvadoran prison, was asked if he is considering deporting criminals who are American citizens.

He said he would love to. “I call them homegrown criminals, the ones that grew up and something went wrong, and they hit people over the head with a baseball bat and push people into subways just before the train gets there, like you see happening sometimes.

We are looking into it and we want to do it. I would love to do that.” I like the addition of homegrown to criminals. It makes it feel a little fancier.

A little more bespoke. These aren’t big-box store criminals. They’re locally grown!

Ponder the indecency and immorality involved in publishing this.

What does this say about Bari Weiss, and maybe more importantly, all of the billionaires like Bill Ackman, who share the Bari Weiss fetish, and think her repeating their delusions back to them in the language of millennial empowerment is evidence of both their clairvoyance and wisdom?

Funny stuff.

Hilarious.

Now let’s put it through another filter:

lter:

Does Bari Weiss understand these symbols?

As someone who is Jewish and gay, does she appreciate who was made to wear them?

Now, imagine going back in time 80 years.

Imagine Murrow getting ready to report from Buchenwald, but being told that the story isn’t ready because there was no one from the SS or Himmler’s staff available.

This is precisely what Bari Weiss just did.

The decision by the administration to remain silent was their statement.

Bari Weiss reached for Stephen Miller’s number like he was her preferred cat sitter, and demanded that his voice be included in a story for which he had already made the decision to include his voice by refusing to share it.

The silence was the point, and the point was very simple.

What Bari Weiss lacks is the common sense to interpret the message, which was perfectly clear.

It was aimed at Sharyn Alfonsi, “60 Minutes,” CBS News and the American people.

The message was, “F*#k you.”

Bari Weiss responded like a true MAGA lady.

Bari Weiss is a sinister force in America, who serves two sinister families. One is named Ellison, and the other is named Trump.

They aren’t on the level.

Bari Weiss isn’t on the level.

Here’s the truth: CECOT is a concentration camp to which the American government shipped human beings with full knowledge that they would be tortured.

Bari Weiss didn’t just kill the story for Trump.

Bari Weiss laughed at the story with Trump and Stephen Miller. She’s in on it with them. She’s the cheering section, and she believes that the brown people sent there deserve it, just like the Nazis said of the Jews. What does that make her exactly?

Bari Weiss, it is fair to say, is quite enamored with her origin story — even going so far as to describe her resignation letter from The New York Times as “the resignation letter heard around world,” which it wasn’t. Mostly, no one knew or cared outside the elite cliques she pals around with that have convinced themselves that they are victims of a woke conspiracy that only Bari can see.

Very few people have the raw hustle skills to look the billionaire male in the eye and convince themselves they are omniscient, omnipotent, wiser than the gods and a bigger victim than the next billionaire. It is the type of skillset that leads to a giant security detail, a casting opportunity on “The Megyn Kelly Show,” an Erika Kirk town hall, an invite to the Bezos wedding and the corner office at CBS News.

It has nothing to do with journalism, and everything to do with politics, which, of course, is Bari Weiss’s true passion.

She is in the propaganda business.

Bari Weiss doesn’t serve the public interest. She serves the Ellison family, and the Ellison family has a partnership with MAGA and Trump.

The head of CBS News shouldn’t be the glue cementing the union.

Should they?

The story about CECOT is a story about evil. It is a story that cracks open massive government lying and abuse. It is a story that was dangerous for Donald Trump, so Bari Weiss killed it.

I’ve seen the story. You need to watch it too if you haven’t yet. Here it is:

I know what Bari Weiss did.

Long story short: a 40-year-old woman named Bari with an Ivy League pedigree, who maintains a constant spotlight on her identity as a Jewish lesbian snuffed out a story about a concentration camp on CBS News 80 years after Edward R. Murrow’s broadcast from Buchenwald.

It was the most despicable act by an American media executive in the 21st century — and that is no small accomplishment. Even more amazing is that it took the unctuous millennial only 76 days to do it.

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The Day Trek Changed: From “Where No Man” to Wrath— & a real franchise was born. Sixty years ago, production wrapped on the second “Star Trek” pilot: Where No Man Has Gone Before” Friday, December 24, 1965. That, I think, was the first true franchise-hinge moment. The second came seventeen years later, with Nicholas Meyer taking the quarterdeck of HMS Star Trek on the voyage of “The Wrath of Khan”…

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Sixty years ago, Friday, December 24, 1965, production wrapped on the second “Star Trek” pilot: Where No Man Has Gone Before” . That, I think, was the first true franchise-hinge moment. It created “Star Trek”. But it did not make “Star Trek” a cultural phenomenon, or an economic IP franchise engine worth the attention of the princelings and princesslings of Hollywood. That came after.

I recall a friend whose daughter returned home from her first semester at an engineering college. She immediately said: This vacation we are going to watch all 80 episodes (including “The Cage”) of the three seasons of ST:TOS. And they did.

But that would not have happened without the second franchise hinge moment, the one that came second came 17 years later. What was that second moment? It was the launch and then the phenomenal launch of the movie: “Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan”.

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The way things had gone down between 1964 and 1982 was, roughly:

• 1964: Gene Roddenberry drafts his “wagon train to the stars” concept and pitches “Star Trek” at Desilu (Desi-Lucy, i.e, Desi Arnez’s and Lucille Ball’s studio); initial series bible takes shape.

• 1964–1965: Pilot “The Cage” is produced with Jeffrey Hunter as Captain Pike; NBC famously passes but asks for a second pilot.

• 1965–1966: Second pilot “Where No Man Has Gone Before” (Shatner as Kirk) convinces NBC to order the series.

• September 1966: “Star Trek” premieres on NBC; Season 1 begins the Kirk–Spock–McCoy era.

• 1967: First-season episode “Space Seed” introduces Khan Noonien Singh, once and future super-villain.

• 1968: Season 2 airs; ratings struggles continue despite critical and fan support.

• 1969: Season 3 airs after a time-slot move; series is canceled after three seasons and 79 episodes (pilot “The Cage” still unaired).

• 1973-4: the animated series briefly revives the brand.

• 1979: “Star Trek: The Motion Picture” releases; financially strong but seen as ponderous, triggering a rethink of tone and budget.

• 1980: Rethink and budget finishes, with “Star Trek” getting one more swing at the ball.

• 1982: “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan”—Nicholas Meyer’s Hornblower-in-space reframe—restores energy, stakes, and audience enthusiasm.

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Did ST:TMP actually make any money?

Hollywood accounting is notoriously the domain of thieves, but $139 million worldwide on a roughly $35–44 million budget. But expectations had been sky-high after Star Wars, and overruns plus marketing and distribution costs meant Paramount judged the return underwhelming.

There is a peculiar kind of mindwarp found in the big-budget-studio piece of Hollywood that is in sharp contrast to the Golden Age of pre-TV. Pre-TV, you needed a lot of movies to fill a lot of theatres owned by studios. So you made movies, rapidly. And a base hit was a base hit. But in the post-TV post-theater-chain-breakup world, simply saying “this will be a solid single” in terms of market no longer got the greenlight. For there were others out there pitching things they promised were guaranteed homers. And since you did not have to fill your theaters, committing studio and investor money to something that did not aim high tended not to get the enthusiasm: better to hold your financing for someone whose this-will-be-a-homer pitch was convincing. That almost always the people making that this-will-be-a-homer pitch were delusional, and that their sole superpower was one of hypnosis, was something that studio executives and investors rarely learned.

Thus never mind that ST:TNG almost surey was, ex post, a better financial use of Paramount’s own and investors’ money than the marginal other Paramount project. It wasn’t cloud-castle good and profitable. And so, if “Star Trek” were to have a future in the 1980s and beyond, the successor movie would have to show better performance-price ratios. Hence Paramount pushed for a cheaper, livelier sequel model. $12 million budget for ST:TWoK.

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And here came the second franchise hinge: At least as Nicky Meyer recounts it (and I find him completely plausible), it turned out to be a very strange hinge of the franchise indeed as he carried: ST:TWoK on his back, from plot and script coherency through the final day of shooting and into post-production. The final script, and then on through direction and editing to produce Khan’s coiled rage, Spock’s earned death, Kirk shaved down from preening star to captain outmatched by foe and fate, and submarine-tight direction restored stakes and audience trust.:

No Nicholas Meyer taking control of the quarterdeck to produce a final script in twelve days, no “Wrath of Khan”. No “Wrath of Khan”, and “Star Trek” as a Hollywood, cultural, and economic phenomenon dies after ST:TMP. Odds are that nothing subsequent—extraordinarily varying in quality as it has been—from the best moments of ST:TNG and ST:DS9 to the bizarre and strange storm of photons that is the recent ST:§31 Michelle Yeoh vehicle would ever have been made.

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If someone keeps advancing despite demonstrable incompetence at public‑reason journalism, perhaps they are doing a different job than advancing public reason—effectively, and deliberately…

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Dan Drezner says that Bari Weiss’s claims, and her allies claims, that she had valid editorial objections to the “60 Minutes” El Salvadorian GULAG Trumpist deportations story are horseshit:

Dan Drezner: The Amateurism of Bari Weiss <https://danieldrezner.substack.com/p/the-amateurism-of-bari-weiss>: ‘Weiss fails to comprehend the difference between reading about the abuse of prisoners in CECOT and watching video demonstrating the same. This is the kind of story where video packs a much bigger wallop…. The segment would have been stronger with an on-the-record interview with Miller or Homan…. But—and this is a very important but—it’s not obvious to me how Weiss or 60 Minutes producers could have secured such interviews…. Third… damning… is… Weiss[’s], “but what about all the violent criminals Trump did deport?” schtick[. It] puts the lie to her faux-balance horseshit and convenient hypocrisies. The CECOT story is not about any deportations of violent criminals. It is about the Trump administration disregarding proper evidentiary standards and the rule of law…

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He notes the possibility that it was a political decision, writing “at worst she’s ham-handedly trying to help appease Trump in the interest of promoting her boss’ business empire”. Because:

Paramount’s [has a] hostile bid [in] to buy Warner Brothers Discovery (WBD)…. [Frida Ghitis:] “Trump sent a message that he was unhappy with ‘60 Minutes’ since the Ellisons bought CBS…. Paramount clearly understood: ‘60 Minutes’ would have to treat him better. It’s reasonable to conclude that this is the reason CBS did not broadcast the story…. Shelving a ‘60 Minutes’ story critical of the administration only moments before it’s about to air, in the middle of a battle for the president’s approval of a merger, is not routine. And the timeline here… is damning…

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But then he backs off, a bit. And so Drezner concludes:

At best, Bari Weiss is unserious and unschooled about her job…. In either case, she is not very good at her job…

But I have a different view: Suppose that people do succeed, even though you think they are not good at doing their job. What should your response be? Perhaps the right response is one of Bayesian humility, of stepping back and asking what the job that they are doing really is. Quite probably it is a different job entirely. And perhaps they are doing it well.

What is the job?

In my view, much of our discussion of what is going on with respect to the sphere of public reason these days would be improved if people had 1984 on their bedside table, and committed themselves to read daily from it:

George Orwell [Eric Blair] (1948): Nineteen Eighty-Four <https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks01/0100021h.html>: ‘It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions, though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering along with him. The hallway smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats…

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What happens if we combine a sensitivity to Nineteen Eighty-Four with Bari Weiss’s actions and the maxim that “the purpose of a system is what it does”?

Then we are led to this conclusion: Stop asking whether Weiss is good at journalism. She is good at the job she’s actually doing: performing submission to power and recruiting others to the ritual. In today’s media oligopoly, that job pays. The big tell is her “I am eager and available to help. I tracked down cell numbers for Homan and Miller and sent those along. Please let me know how I can support you…” As if she does not know that the “60 Minutes” staff has a bigger contacts rolodex database than she does.

Let me explain my thinking:

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The latest Epstein postcard, DeepFakes, & the Rufo Doctrine when nothing matters: Trump, predation, excuses, & the neofascist right marches on…

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We have long known that Trump thinks that grabbing women by the crotch and raping women in Bergdorf-Goodman dressing rooms is a thing, because celebrity. But does it matter that it is also fourteen-year-old girls?: “Our president shares our love of young, nubile girls. When a young beauty walked by he loved to ‘grab snatch’, whereas we ended up snatching grub in the mess halls of the [prison] system…”

This may not be genuine—although it certainly looks like it is: <https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%208/EFTA00035768.pdf><https://x.com/MeidasTouch/status/2003334181217271872>

And even if it is genuine, in this world of DeepFakes it may not matter at all that it is genuine, and even if there is a trusted chain-of-custody it may not matter even so:

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After all, we do have a critical mass of people like Christopher Rufo, do we not?:

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They will stay the course. And our pluto-kleptocrats will amplify their voices.

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Fake “standards” become real censorship: the segment Bari Weiss & the Ellisons do not want you to see—a cleared 60 Minutes report vanished, and why that matters for power and truth, as corporate calculus meets state cruelty on the Cecot story’s path to the cutting room floor’ the demand for a Stephen Miller cameo wasn’t “balance”—it was veto…

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The Trump Administration refused to be interviewed by 60 Minutes for this segment on El Salvador’s prison camps and migrants to the U.S. deported by I.C.E. Bari Weiss declared that the segment could not be aired without a segment interviewing a Trump Administration senior official. Full stop.

Alison Gill: WATCH: The 60 Minutes CECOT Segment <https://www.muellershewrote.com/p/watch-the-60-minutes-cecot-segment>: ‘I was sent the CECOT segment anonymously in a group chat. The segment apparently aired on Canada’s Global TV app and was shared by this Bluesky user jasonparis.bsky.social. You can watch the entire segment below! Please share widely!…

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WATCH: The 60 Minutes CECOT Segment

The segment apparently aired on Canada’s Global TV app and was shared by this Bluesky user @jasonparis.bsky.social. You can watch the entire segment below! Please share widely! The Breakdown is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber…

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16 hours ago · 5087 likes · 710 comments · Allison Gill

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Jamelle Bouie thinks that Bari Weiss is just dumber than a post:

Jamelle Bouie: <https://bsky.app/profile/jamellebouie.net/post/3makcfe5xrk2h>: ‘It’s not that you have to be stupid to be an effective regime mouthpiece, but it certainly helps bari weiss that she has a wind tunnel between her ears:

I think she probably sincerely believes an investigative team at 60 minutes would have a difficult time getting in touch with stephen miller, or that they haven’t thought about the language they’re using…

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And let’s remember what the Atlantic found worthy of publishing just 2.5 short months ago:

Caitlin Flanagan: Don’t Bet Against Bari Weiss <https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/10/bari-weiss-success/684480/>: ‘The new editor in chief of CBS News triumphs over her critics…

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I am not so sure. There is serious money involved in keeping Trump not-sour on the Ellisons and on Paramount Skydance. Their view may be that this will simply blow over—and, if it doesn’t, if CBS News collapses, well it was never going to be a profit center for Paramount Skydance anyway, but was only a point of vulnerability. The plutocratic Ellisons almost surely know by now that the kleptocratic Trumps view them not as their allies but as their prey. But they may think that the Trumps have them by the plums, and that a short-run libtard media storm is of very little account.

After all, give it a month, and the Atlantic will be happy to run another “Bari Weiss confounds critics!” story, won’t it?

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With my comments appended. Adrian Monck’s introduction to the post: 3.7 million applicants. 40,000 positions. One professor’s survival guide: Renmin University Professor and social media star Nie Huihua explains what China’s civil service exam gets you – and why the prize 3.7 million applicants are chasing might not be worth winning…

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Adrian Monck: How to Get a Job in the Chinese Communist Party <https://7thin.gs/p/china-communist-party-jobs>: ‘There’s a phrase that circulates on Chinese social media: “every road leads to biānzhì”—biānzhì is a job with the state, which means a career, benefits and a pension…. Tech jobs disappeared in the regulatory crackdowns. Property sector careers vanished with the developers. Export manufacturing faces tariffs and reshoring…. The only rational destination was… government…. Your parents were right. Nie Huihua… has become an unlikely guide to this world. His videos on bureaucratic life have racked up tens of millions of views. His new book, The Operating Logic of Grassroots China, is a bestseller. In a recent podcast, he asked a question his audience of aspiring civil servants rarely considers: what happens after you get in?

‘Before you apply, understand what you are joining. Nie’s core insight[:]… “hierarchical resource allocation.”… Resources flow toward power, and power is organised by administrative rank…. Higher-ranked officials can secure resources from above. Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen are not rich because they are efficient. They’re rich because they are politically important, which attracts resources, which makes them efficient, which reinforces their importance. This has practical implications… The position you secure determines… the entire infrastructure of a decent life…. Geography is destiny, but geography is set by administrative hierarchy….

The examination tests memorisation and procedural knowledge. It doesn’t test what actually determines success.

Nie is pretty direct about what you need to do well…

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The rest of it is below Adrian Monck’s paywall. But let me excerpt the list of things you need to succeed as a government official, according to Nie Huihua are:

• Sharp eyes (眼尖) – knows who’s rising, who’s falling, and what superiors actually want as opposed to what they say

• Zipped lips (嘴紧) – keep secrets, no leaking, don’t gossip

• Tireless legs (腿勤) – run errands without complaint, always available, never say no

• Write well (文笔好) – draft reports, speeches and minutes fluently, makes superiors sound intelligent

• Poker face (喜怒不形于色) – conceal frustration, anger, and over-enthusiasm

• Thick skin (能忍辱负重) – accept unfair criticism, take the blame for others’ failures, don’t fight back

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Let me now reflect on what I have posted from Monck’s piece, and on the rest of it below his paywall:

I have to start with the big and major point: Most of this is normal—for the human collective societal-organizational institution we call “bureaucracy”. Every civil service everywhere—across time, across space, across political systems—complains about the same things. The gap between what gets measured and what actually matters. The perverse incentives that emerge when you try to make legible what is fundamentally illegible. The paperwork that crowds out the actual work. The patron who falls and drags you down (or, optimistically, rises and carries you up). These are not Chinese characteristics. These are bureaucratic characteristics—as true in Washington and Brussels and Whitehall as in Beijing, as true in the 800s as in the 2000s.

What makes China most interesting is not that it has a bureaucracy, and that its bureaucracy has these problems. What makes China most interesting is that it has so much bureaucracy, and has and has had it for so long. Its bureaucracy has thus had more time to think about itself and adjust itself, as a hegemonic institution, than bureaucracy has had anywhere else.

That, I think, must have consequences.

The keju imperial examination system ran from 607 to 1905: over 1,300 years. It was the world’s first meritocratic institution. The effects persist today—prefectures with more jinshi degree-holders in the Ming-Qing period still show higher educational attainment in 2010; a doubling of jinshi holders, an 0.7-year increase in schooling today. Tang Dynasty poets like Bai Juyi were already writing about preferring “the carefree life” to the burdens office-holding, when “palace eunuchs had gained control of the throne” and political advancement had grown uncertain.

Now Chinese bureaucracy has been, historically, better than most—better than nearly all. Stability, Relative prosperity. Relative peace. Face it, in the long agrarian age, more likely than not CHINA RULED!!

Why? As I see it, three reasons: First, the exam selected for competence. Second, the exam acculturated, for studying hard enough to succeed in it could not but bath the scholars’ brains in the Confucian moral philosophy that emphasizes virtue, merit, and reciprocity. Third, the exam acculturated in another way, as it trained candidates in S.O.P. that meshed with those above, below, and beside you in your position.

You thus got a baseline of meritocratic competence, objective alignment, and confidence that you understood what your collaeages were likely to do. Other systems struggled to match this, and failed.

But—here is the rub—since before the first Tang Emperor, “exam” and “job” have selected for different things. The exam selects for competence. The job selects for compliance with the will of your superior, who if you are lucky becomes your patreon. If you are not lucky, he makes you the fall guy and moves you out so one of his clients can move in. If you are lucky, and if your patron rises, you rise as well, with high probability. But if your patron falls, you fall.

All this is par for the bureaucratic agrarian-age course. The defects of the hegemonic Confucian bureaucratic order and the scholar-bureaucrate-extractor-landholder-student-scholar cycle were small beer compared to the defects of other agrarian-age societies-of-domination.

But this is no longer the agrarian age. In the modern Schumpeterian Age, stability = ossification and dysfunction as the underpinning of every single ruling-class order vanish as the mode of production earthquakes. And that puts prosperity and peace in grave danger.

Plus we now have to layer on top of this the specific dysfunctions of contemporary Chinese governance. First, a great deal of Chinese local government is based on lthe sale of land development rights. That only works with rising land values. That only works with income growth. It might work, alternatively, with population growth, but without income growth you have population decline. Statistics are dodgy. But it does look like, since the plague, land sales revenue has collapsed from 2/5 to 1/5 of local government revenue. This is a dire crisis, without—so far—even a hint of a solution.

Second, Chinese local government officials are tasked with conducting regional industrial development policy, including venture capital investments. They have no particular skill at these. Moreover, their incentive structure is bad: short tenures, risk aversion, pressure to show activity and so forth. That makes them likely to be systematically worse than private investors would be. And, of course, credit for any successes are taken out of the hands of worker-bee bureaucrats and grabbed by higher-upstream bosses; while the manure from failures higher up rains down.

Third, since 2012 Xi Jinping has attempted to curb corruption and improve bureaucratic performance by instituting what the Russian writer Gogol dramatically wrote about in 1836 in his story of Khlestakov, who is mistaken for the real Inspector General. increased central inspections. The —central investigators examining local officials—dates to imperial times but has intensified into what Minxin Pei describes the transformation of this xunshi system as a shift “from purge to control”: rather than pruning the worst, guarding against the inevitable arrival of the Inspector General becomes a major focus of effort. Overcentralization looms.

The Party-State recognizes all of this: Nie Huihua’s analyses are critique sanctioned and welcomed by the highest levels, not samizdat whispers. And yet Nie Huihua offers no systemic solutions. None. Instead, he offers a survival guide for careerists—including exercise (as you can control your health even though you control nothing else), read history (to gain a sense of how things might suddenly change and be different), and learn English (to keep as many options open as possible).

Are China’s bureaucratic pathologies truly worse than those of its peer aspirants to “forging the future” status on this here globe?

I think they are different in kind and—right now—more constraining:

• India’s problem-set is state capacity scarcity: fragmented administration, uneven tax extraction, limited local delivery—yet also plural centers of accountability and competitive politics that, while noisy, periodically refresh incentives.

• Europe’s challenges are coordination and risk appetite: it can write excellent rules and mobilize subsidies, but often hesitates at the frontier—industrial bets arrive diluted, and macro impulses are counter-cyclical at precisely the wrong times.

• America’s maladies are polarization and veto-point overload: it still does science, scale, and capital formation superbly; it does follow-through haphazardly.

China’s disadvantage is that the greater hegemony of the bureaucratic operating system—hierarchical resource allocation, land-finance dependence, inspection-centric control—makes discretion costly and truth dangerous. When promotion follows patrons rather than performance, risk shifts downward and blame flows downward faster. In that environment, Nie Huihua’s survival lexicon—sharp eyes, zipped lips, tireless legs—is rational. But it is not developmental. And with land sales now a fraction of pre‑pandemic revenues, local governments’ room to maneuver has shrunk at precisely the moment when experimentation is most needed.

Can Xi Jinping and other forces surmount this?

To a degree:

• Xi Jinping can recentralize fiscal capacity.

• He has already intensified oversight.

• He can compel sectoral mobilizations (chips, EVs, grid, machine tools) and will get visible output.

• But my inner von Hayek forces me to believe that the deeper problem is informational: overcentralization starves the center of honest signals and starves the periphery of initiative.

• The historical Chinese fix—meritocratic exams and shared Confucian norms—uniquely aligned competence in an agrarian-age society-of-domination.

• It did not align incentives for dissent, error-correction, and local search.

Unless the Party-State rebalances toward transparency, longer tenures, accountable budgets, and permissioned risk at the edge, China will continue to deploy capacity impressively while discovering—too late—that that was not where it actually needed most to adapt.

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Agglomeration locks in advantage; weaponized tariffs unlock dysfunction. Macro self‑sufficiency hides micro choke points—and China sits at the hub. The U.S. lost trust; China gained leverage; decoupling shrank to slogans…

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Big economies look nearly self‑sufficient—until a single input fails. China’s hub advantage, the U.S.’s trust deficit, and Brexit’s self‑inflicted friction show why weaponized trade weakens coalitions more than China. Global supply chains are an omelette—entangled, efficient, and hard to reverse. The macro story (large domestic shares) masks micro fragility: specialized intermediates, scaled clusters, and dense spillovers that make agglomeration self‑perpetuating. China’s role as dominant supplier of intermediates creates asymmetric leverage; the U.S., Japan, and Germany are more exposed to China than vice versa. Tariffs, deployed unpredictably, erode allied coordination and deepen reliance on precautionary stockpiles rather than capacity. Brexit exemplifies how added friction shreds regional resilience. If the race to be the furnace that forges the global future isn’t already decided, agglomeration economics—not punitive trade optics—will decide it soon.

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A very nice piece from Richard Baldwin:

Richard Baldwin: Does Geopolitics have an Omelette Problem? <https://rbaldwin.substack.com/p/does-geopolitics-have-an-omelette>: ‘Coordinating complex manufacturing processes at great distances was impossible in the days of landlines, faxes, and express mail…. With ICT, G7 firms found they could lower costs by taking their technology and managerial know-how and combining it with low-wage labour abroad. This offshoring, and the industrialisation it triggered in emerging economies, reorganised and entangled manufacturing on a global scale…. By the 2000s… a global supply chain “omelette.”… Cooking the omelette propelled efficiency and progress… had miraculous results… pulled hundreds of millions out of poverty…. [But] today, shocks are no longer rare, localised, and passing…. Extreme weather events and purposeful or accidental digital disruptions…

Look at… the row countries’ imports of industrial inputs from the column countries… normalized by the gross manufacturing output of the importing nation…. All the entries below 1% are zeroed out for clarity….

China is the dominant supplier of intermediates… [but] has very low exposure…. The US is the second most significant source of industrial inputs… but the numbers are smaller than China’s…. The exceptions are… “Factory North America”…. Germany is number three…. Its column is lit for most nations, and its role is especially important in “Factory Europe”…. All the big European nations are significant suppliers to each other….

One general observation…. The numbers are all pretty small. At the macro level, the big nations are largely self-sufficient…. However, these average over all inputs and all manufacturing sectors. The vulnerabilities that are a major concern today take place in very special inputs and very specific importing sectors…

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And I have a few thoughts:

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As Axel Oxenstierna wrote to his son Johan in 1648: ”Do you not know, my son, with how little wisdom the world is governed?” Perhaps the biggest reason to reject the idea of meritocracy is the extraordinary absence of merit of any sort, including, indeed of basic ethical standards, among those who claim to be its exemplars…

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Michael’s Restaurant in Long Beach appears to seat 40 people in its upstairs dining room.

Nathan Myhrvold’s pictures <https://web.archive.org/web/20170419075524/https://www.edge.org/event/the-edge-billionaires-dinner-2011> of the 2011 Edge Dinner show 28 people, including New York Times columnist David Brooks—and Jeffrey Epstein, recently released from jail.

A New York Times spokesperson not named because they were not willing to be named says:

As a journalist, David Brooks regularly attends events to speak with noted and important business leaders to inform his columns, which is exactly what happened at this 2011 event. Mr. Brooks had no contact with [Epstein] before or after this single attendance at a widely-attended dinner…

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Note that “widely-attended” is here a term of art. A typical New York Times use of the term refers to the 500,000 people who attended a Renoir exhibition, or the 2000 who attended the Las Vegas SALT conference Not 40.

But we are here because this dinner meeting of Brooks and Epstein—part of John Brockman’s attempt to rehabilitate him post-sentencing—is not mentioned a month ago, when we had:

David Brooks: The Epstein Story? Count Me Out <https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/21/opinion/epstein-trump-conspiracy.html>: ‘What has America’s political class decided to obsess about over the last several months? Jeffrey Epstein. This is a guy who has been dead for six years and who last was in touch with Donald Trump 21 years ago, Trump has said….

America can’t get itself back on track if the culture is awash in distrust, cynicism, catastrophizing lies and conspiracymongering….. The smart play, I’d say, is to rebut conspiracymongering, not abet it. When the giant issues like A.I. and Chinese dominance come crashing down on us, we will look back on the Epstein moment and ask: “What the hell were we thinking?”…

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If you had asked me, I would have replied “zero” to the question:

What are the chances that Brooks attended a relatively small dinner with Jeffrey Epstein after his conviction, and yet did not mention it in his column?

Because there is nothing more likely to raise the credibility of conspiracies than to be one degree of separation from a pedophile, and yet pretend that you are a dispassionate, disinterested observer of the whole situation.

And it is not as though David Brooks could have believed that his one degree of separation from Epstein would go unnoticed.

This had already been out there, from BuzzFeed, for six years:

Peter Aldhous & Ryan Mac (2019): In 2011, Jeffrey Epstein Was A Known Sex Offender. Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, And Sergey Brin Dined With Him Anyway <https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/peteraldhous/jeffrey-epstein-bezos-musk-billionaires-dinner>: ‘After pleading guilty to charges of soliciting prostitution from an underage girl, Jeffrey Epstein spent part of 2011 reintroducing himself to elite society. A March 2011 dinner [the Edge dinner]… was an exclusive gathering, dominated by tech industry leadership. A gallery of photos… named 20 guests, including just one media representative: New York Times columnist David Brooks…. Brooks…said he had not heard of Epstein in 2011…. A manager at the Italian restaurant that hosted the 2011 billionaires’ dinner in Long Beach said she dealt directly with Brockman and was the only one allowed to check people in for the “hush hush” event. She wasn’t even allowed to save the list of attendees. “After the event, they took the guest list and shredded it,” she said…

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And can be reached from the second page of pre-November 2025 Google searches for “‘David Brooks’ and ‘Jeffrey Epstein’”.

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The platforms aren’t gambling on AI—they are trying to tax it. The labs dig for gold while clouds sell shovels and give away the map. If anyone is going to profit from AI infrastructure, it’s the effective platform monopolist incumbents. The rest are highly likely to discover that “core AI” is a product with negative margins and fickle users. Or, to put it bluntly: This is nuts! When’s the crash? Unless Sam Altman’s ChatGPT or Elon Musk’s GrokAI or Dario Amodei’s Claude or Demis Hassabis’s Gemini really does become DigitalGod…

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Now comes:

Rob Armstrong: Big Tech’s AI business models <https://ep.ft.com/permalink/emails/>: ‘We’ve looked at charts like this before:

Unhedged’s argument has been that the market, far from blindly throwing money at AI and Big Tech, is making distinctions… based on cash generation…. The market has lost patience with Oracle and Meta. Might the same happen to the other three before long?…

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And he then sends us to Andy Wu:

Andy Wu: Should U.S. be worried about AI bubble? <https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2025/12/should-u-s-be-worried-about-ai-bubble/>: ‘They [the five] positioned themselves well to benefit from the rise of AI, but they don’t stand to lose that much if AI [tanks]…. Microsoft has mostly outsourced… to… OpenAI…. Amazon will support anybody’s AI model . . . Meta spent billions of dollars building an open-source AI model…. [They] don’t really think that core AI technology is a meaningful business…. Instead, they’re focused on profiting from… adjacencies…. OpenAI, Anthropic and xAI are out there digging for gold. Nvidia is the consummate shovel seller…. Meta is the consummate jewellery maker… social media, advertising, wearables and metaverse businesses stand to benefit…. Microsoft does a bit of shovel selling and jewellery making, but the key thing is they’re not stuck digging for gold…. Amazon and Microsoft and Google might make less money on their cloud computing than they ideally would like if AI growth slows or declines, but they would not end up in financial distress…

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Rob then writes:

We might sum up Wu’s view[:]… Big Tech’s data centre spending is significant… [but] core business models… remain “virtual”…. They are not making an existential bet on AI; they are spending to make sure that their core businesses can coexist with AI, should they need to…. Those core businesses should still be valued on high multiples of cash flows…

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What do I think?

Briefly: The Big Five—the Magnificent Seven minus Nvidia, Tesla, and Apple; plus Oracle—are making sure that if anybody makes any money off of AI data centers, it is going to be them. And they are also taking steps to make sure that nobody makes any money off of providing core AI services by giving away for free whatever else OpenAI, Anthropic and Grok might try to make money be selling.

That has implications:

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Theodore Adorno, Greta Karplus, & a Late-Capitalist Frankfurt-School Marriage; or, why what Theodore Adorno needed was not respect and attention from philosophers, but treatment by psychiatrists for a tremendously dire case of patriarchal misogynistic self-oblivious delusion. Or, bluntly, for being a callow ahole egomaniac (which is, admittedly, a common failure mode for boys whom too many authority figures told them they were very special when young, but even so)…

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How did I get there? By chasing links due to an insufficient ability to keep myself on-task.

Let me start with a little throat-clearing: Back in the Day, when I was a college senior, I had the extraordinary privilege of taking a seminar on “Deconstruction” from the truly brilliant Stanley Cavell.

I ended it thinking that much of “Continental Philosophy” was an intellectual power game, in which sometimes the—very true—argument that “the map is not the territory” was decisive and led to the rejection of a group of authors positions, sometimes it did not, and that the only intelligible reasons for why it was sometimes one and the other were reasons of social-network allegiance and academic-positional power.

In short, bad “Continental Philosophy” was a series of the following intellectual moves:

1. Viewpoint X is bad because it is a map.

2. The map is not the territory.

3. Therefore we reject viewpoint X.

4. Here is my map: viewpoint Y.

5. My map is good.

6. FULL STOP.

Now there are good “Continental Philosophers”! I was and am wowed by Keith Tribe’s deployment of Foucaultian theory to understand the British classical economists: <https://braddelong.substack.com/p/hoisted-from-e-archives-two-months>

But there are a very great many bad Continental Philosophers.

And so I find myself agreeing with Matthew Adelstein here:

Matthew Adelstein: How Continental Philosophers “Argue” <https://benthams.substack.com/p/how-continental-philosophers-argue>: ‘On the unseriousness of the discipline…. One way [bad] continental philosophers argue is by brazenly asserting “A is not B… but instead C” where C is some random thing that makes no sense… [and so] A is C and anyone who thinks it’s B is naive…. An example… from Butler…. “Gender is not to culture as sex is to nature; gender is also the discursive/cultural means by which ‘sexed nature’ or ‘a natural sex’ is produced and established as ‘prediscursive’, prior to culture, a politically neutral surface on which culture acts. This construction of ‘sex’ as the radically unconstructed will concern us again in the discussion of Lévi Strauss and structuralism in chapter 2…”. Got that?…

And I see a protest:

Nathan Witkin: Continental Philosophy Needs Better Critics—and Defenders <https://arachnemag.substack.com/p/continental-philosophy-needs-better>: ‘Regardless of what you think of this passage’s substance, we should be able to agree it does not contain an inference…. There is a series of positive claims that are related…. They do not, however, entail one another, nor is there any evidence that Butler thinks they do. Adelstein is conflating a common rhetorical pattern (“A is not B, but C”) with a “rule of inference,” and suggesting that it is continental philosophers, rather than he who have confused the two…

But what, then, is the reason that Butler claims that we ought to view A as not B but C?

Why should we of that A (the relationship of gender to culture) as not B (as sex is to nature, i.e., a fitting of a conceptual frame to the patterns of mammalian reproduction that exist out there in the real world), but instead as C (gender is the discursive/cultural means by which ‘sexed nature’ is produced)?

I mean: certainly B is there: There are processes of meiosis and fertilization, there are animals in which flipped genetic switches make some providers of ova and a substantially disjoint set providers of sperm, there are all kinds of other biological structures and patterns that usually but not always cohere with those flipped switches (but not always! seahorse fathers carry the young, after all!). And we call this “sex” and we call highly correlated cultural labels of biological bodies “gender”. But we all agree that this is a map, not the territory: There are no platonic ideals of ♂ and ♀out there. There is no “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created He him; male and female created He them…”. (This is so, even though most human cultures assume that there are such platonic ideals of ♂ and ♀out there and the assumption is so strong that it seriously and badly misled Platon as to the inner structure of the universe.)

But while you can truly say that gender is not congruent to biological sex in nature, Butler provides us with no good reasons, anywhere, to take “gender… [to be] the discursive/cultural means by which ‘sexed nature’ or ‘a natural sex’ is produced…”

Our homines habilenses ancestors had a sexed nature before there was any human culture, after all.

So I went down the rabbit hole. And, today, chasing links leads me to see another protest, this time about Matthew on Theodore Adorno:

James: Arguing for Continental Philosophy <https://enrichedjamsham.substack.com/p/arguing-for-continental-philosophy>: ‘Continental philosophy…. aims to describe experience, often with a focus on “problematizing,” and questioning received wisdom, and… critiquing dominant power structures… to help you to see your existence, your culture, and the world, in a new, more critical light. A representative quote [from Theodore Adorno’s Minima Moralia:

“Marriage, living on as an abject parody in a time that has removed the basis of its human justification, usually serves today as a trick of self-preservation: the two conspirators deflect outward responsibility for their respective ill-doing to the other while in reality existing together in a murky swamp. The only decent marriage would be one allowing each partner to lead an independent life, in which, instead of a fusion derived from an enforced community of economic interests, both freely accepted mutual responsibility. Marriage as a community of interests unfailingly means the degradation of the interested parties, and it is the perfidy of the world’s arrangements that no-one, even if aware of it, can escape such degradation. The idea might therefore be entertained that marriage without ignominy is a possibility reserved for those spared the pursuit of interests, for the rich. But the possibility is purely formal, for the privileged are precisely those in whom the pursuit of interests has become second nature—they would not otherwise uphold privilege…”

Okay. That was Adorno.

What does James have to say to explain it? This:

This passage… [is] aiming to cast marriage in a new light, forcing the reader to reconsider what marriage means…. What if marriage were simply a cultural arrangement enabling you to deflect responsibility, and an economic arrangement forcing you to remain tied to each other[?]… You might not agree with this reframing… but reframing is the goal… not careful argumentation…. Use words… to avoid any connotations or implications… [engage in] a degree of purposeful obfuscation… [to] serve the goal of problematizing. They also like to keep themselves from being pinned down to any one interpretation…

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My response is: No. Simply Not. Bulls*. The rhetorical moves of bad Continental Philosophy—1. Viewpoint X is bad because it is a map. 2. The map is not the territory. 3. Therefore we reject viewpoint X. 4. Here is my map: viewpoint Y. 5. My map is good. 6. FULL STOP—are best understood not as intellectual arguments but rather as deployments of social-network power and as products of human psychology.

And so I have once again come back up the same rabbit hole I came back up back in 1982, with much the same conclusion: that looking inside the texts of the bad “Continental Philosophers” (NOT ALL CONTINENTAL PHILOSOPHERS!) is the very worst place to seek for any valid insights.

Thus one had to look very much outside the text at the psychological life-experiences and socio-cultural-institutional settings of the bad “Continental Philosophers” to understand why they were at the rhetorical level, spending so much energy and time doing nothing but wasting their own and their students’ brains—and trying to waste mine. (Admittedly, I had been predisposed to think this by having read, the year before, E.P. Thompson’s The Poverty of Theory critique of Continental Philosopher Louis Althusser the year before; which reading had been followed a month later by Althusser’s descent into deadly madness and his murder of his wife Hélène Rytmann.)

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Let me stick to Adorno. Contrary to what James claims, Adorno, after all, is not saying “the standard map is not the territory: here are some other ‘what-if’perspectives on it that give us a broader and less constricted view”. There is no “what if…?” in Adorno’s passage.

There are, instead, declarations:

THIS IS HOW IT IS:

Marriage… abject parody… [no] human justification… conspirators deflect[ing]… responsibility for their respective ill-doing… an enforced community of economic interests… degradation of the interested parties…

What happens when I take the black marks on the pages of the codexes of Minima Moralia and Dialectic of Enlightenment, when from it I spin-up a subTuring instantiation of the mind of Theodore Adorno, run it on its separate partition in my wetware, and then ask SubTuringAdorno why his map is to be preferred? In what sense is his view less “not the territory” than, say, Archbishop Cranmer’s view: that marriage is for the sake of the “children… [as] a remedy against sin and to avoid fornication… [and] for the mutual society help, and comfort, that the one ought to have of the other, both in prosperity and adversity”?

I get no intelligible answer at all.

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Jane Austen wrote amid a peculiar peace: rents flowed, muskets hung idle, and reputations ruled, and in that context crafted Great Novels with each sentence a step in the moral education of the leisured upper class…

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And Henry Oliver has thoughts:

Henry Oliver: Why we love Jane Austen more than ever after 250 years <https://www.commonreader.co.uk/p/why-we-love-jane-austen-more-than>: ‘She wrote about what really matters…. [But] it is still easy to be dismissive…. Giles Coren th[inking]… it… funny to describe her as “an average chick-lit writer of her day”…. Giles Coren had his little joke, but Pride and Prejudice has sold over twenty million copies…. Her novels are about questions that are still central to our lives. How to live a good life in a commercial society? What is a moral education in the modern world? Who should we marry? Jane reigns supreme because no other novelist else invented such important narrative techniques or had so much to say to readers about their lives and what it means to live in modernity. To some, Austen looks like a romance novelist. A clever, ironic, wry romance novelist, it’s true…. This is only part of the truth.

Austen did unprecedented things with narrative. There are very few books that move so subtly between impartial narrative and the character’s perspective…. Defoe made real characters…. ichardson gave us direct access to the wild and exciting thoughts and feelings…. Fielding gave us rollicking, rolling, ever diverging tales within tales. But it was Austen who gave us the perfect art of… people having to overcome their inner problems—rather than having to overcome problems imposed upon them by the world. Austen did no less than create what we now expect from a novel…. Austen’s novels are all about what it means to see things from someone else’s point of view. That is the moral lesson Lizzie Bennet learns about Mr. Darcey, it is what Marianne learns about Elinor, and it is what Emma Woodhouse learns about all her meddling…. Her innovations are still relevant to our lives today.… Long may she be read…

Plus there is:

Hugh Hou: Explore Jane Austen’s Bath, UK in 16K Immersive Video | 250 Years Celebration from Royal Crescent to Roman Bath <https://www.patreon.com/cw/HughHouFilm/> <https://public.hey.com/p/L6toez2am6UX6nQaSZ8aFfVz>

I seem to have written a fair amount about Jane Austen here on this SubStack:

And there was still more over at Þe Olde Weblogge, Back in The Day…

What do I think you should focus on as you read the Great Novels, in addition to simply absorbing them as Great Novels, doing what Great Novels do, and specifically these particular Great Novels? This:

Start here: Register the oddity that the Bennets, the Bingleys, and the Darcys exist as they do—comfortably ensconced, with incomes large enough to allow idleness, conversation, and the occasional social humiliation—without either knights to enforce their will or factories to justify their rents? Two centuries earlier, their predecessors were and had armed men—warriors and magistrates with the power to deal out death and order. A century later, their successors would claim legitimacy through capital accumulation, organization, and skill.

But in Austen’s England—call it 1795–1815—the landed gentry sits in a curious institutional interregnum: revenues flowing, status revered, power formalized mostly through habits and the yeomanry’s muskets, not through any visible contribution to production. And yet the world does not burn; there is no English August 4, 1789. Even though it is the era of the American, the French, and the Industrial Revolutions.

This is a distinct oddity. A little less than a generation before in France, rumors of aristocratic conspiracy and tangible fiscal crisis fuse into what Lefebvre called the Great Fear: peasants arm themselves, châteaux burn, the records of feudal obligation go up in smoke, and the National Assembly preempts further conflagration by abolishing feudal dues.

In England, the jacquerie does not arrive. Edmund Burke, admittedly, is terrified, writing of how “sophisters, economists, and calculators” will set in motion chaos that will destroy all socieal order but the English state’s fiscal capacity, legitimacy of taxation, and a less acute harvest-fiscal shock defuse any potential revolutionary moment. There is discomfort—enclosure riots, Luddite distress, food price spikes—but the social order that makes Austen’s drawing rooms possible remains intact.

Austen’s fiction places its characters inside this remarkably bizarre historically peculiar equilibrium. Mr. Bennet of Longbourn—£2,000 yearly income—is not a technologist, not a warrior, not a manager of complex production. He did not make the land.

He barely rouses himself to swat a fly.

Yet something very real and quite hard to change binds 300 families to transfer roughly a third of their product in rent, tithe, and fees to the local proprietors. That “something” is an institutional package: property rights embedded in common law and custom; a state capable of taxation and public debt management without unraveling; parish poor relief as a pressure valve; and a social psychology that legitimates status via gentility, reputation, and the promise of paternal governance. Austen never lectures about this machinery. She shows it—by making it the water her characters swim in.

Thus I at least find myself focusing on:

First, the economic history lesson: Pure rents can persist when the fiscal state is strong enough to keep order, when the legal architecture makes land ownership the bedrock of claims, and when the opportunity set for the non-propertied is narrow enough that exit is costly. England’s Glorious Revolution settlement, the rise of the Bank of England, and the normalization of public borrowing make for a polity in which taxes can be levied, debts honored, grain imported when possible, and local violence minimized. A world safe for £2,000‑a‑year incomes—and for Elizabeth Bennet’s walks—rests on the boring triumph of administrators over zealots. No Necker, no immediate fiscal break, no August Night.

But there is much more here:

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100,000 eyeballs here, & yet less influence than I would want to see; increasingly the sphere of public reason, such as it is, has migrated to video; the question is whether we follow or fade…

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Text still builds ideas, but video spreads them—thus text is where ideas are born and sharpened, but without a video connection they cannot win. Why? Because short-form video is increasingly a better #discoverability layer both for those who will and those who won’t read, and one of the few effective ways of pulling those who want deeper engagement back into the text.

So how to design a workflow to do both and maximize potential wins?

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Provoked by seeing the powerful public-reason voice that is Jamelle Bouie <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamelle_Bouie> throwing down the gauntlet:

Jamelle: <https://bsky.app/profile/jamellebouie.net/post/3ma2efylh5c2g>: ‘I have said this before but if you are actually interested in influencing people beyond a narrow circle of too-online journalists you will be making direct to camera videos on tiktok, instagram and youtube. if you primarily post on text-based social media then you’re just dicking around. To be clear, it is fine if you just want to dick around! That’s what I mostly do on here. But the idea that “you’re giving up the fight to influence people by not using X” is belied by the fact that effectively no one uses X. And I don’t see any of the “use X!” people on TikTok or YouTube.

The proximate reason I post here—beyond the fact that I like a lot of you and enjoy reading your thoughts and jokes and observations—is that this is a non-algorithmic platform where people share lots of stuff and people read what is shared. That’s still valuable even if it doesn’t “influence!”, and because I still primarily think by writing, text-driven social media is very useful for sketching thoughts into ideas…

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I am becoming increasingly convinced that he is right, and wise.

And I note that he has successfuly pivoted to video himself:

• <https://www.tiktok.com/@jamellebouie?lang=en>

• <https://www.youtube.com/@jamelle-bouie>

And so with the coming of the new year, it will be time for me to start throwing some spaghetti against the wall, and seeing what sticks. The question is: What kind of spaghetti? Continue the weblog, yes. Revive the Hexapodia Podcast <https://braddelong.substack.com/s/hexapodia-is-the-key-insight-by-noah> and also make it video, yes. But what else audio? What else video? At what length? And on what platforms?

And with what tools?

The goal is not to surrender to the algorithm but to ally with the reality.

I will put interesting suggestions from the comments behind the paywall, and then comment on them:

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Is this wrong? It really looks right to me.

Now there is a bull case for Tesla. But it depends not on FSD service subscriptions, robotaxi dominance, and humanoid robot butlers and… ahem… but rather on industrial scale economies in EV powertrain and battery manufacturing, software integration, and charging infrastructure. Which requires that Tesla have found its Gwynne Shotwell two years ago, and a flood of new, attractive models to boost scale arriving any time now. Or that Trump standardize the entire U.S. government on Teslas. Or at least restore the EV subsidies, and give Tesla carveouts and exemptions from tariffs. And restore green-consumer vibes to Tesla, for the market for Dukes-of-Hazzard Confederate-flag CyberTrucks is very limited…

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WILL LOCKETT

DEC 13, 2025 ∙ PAID

Musk’s Pathetic Robot Is Looking More And More Like Bad Vapourware:

The Wizard of Oz is wearing the Emperor’s New Clothes

<https://www.planetearthandbeyond.co/p/musks-pathetic-robot-is-looking-more>

If one thing has characterised Elon Musk’s career, it has been illusion. From faking a supercomputer to hooking in his first investors to simulating self-driving car demos, the hype that drives Musk’s wealth and power does not come from material results but from the illusion of progress. However, Musk is not a very skilled magician, and the illusion breaks every now and then. Occasionally, we get a glimpse into how phony this empire of speculation is — just look at the non-existent new Roadster, the easily shatterable windows of the Cybertruck, and even the hilarious failure of the Hyperloop. Last weekend, the illusion was broken yet again when, at Tesla’s Miami ‘Autonomy Visualised’ event, one of Tesla’s robots took a very suspicious fall, which made it look less like a cutting-edge robot and more like a decade-old Disney animatronic. The implications of this are nothing short of devastating for Tesla.

Before we get into this hilarious incident, we first need to understand what Musk claims this robot will do.

In short, Musk wants this robot to completely transform the economy. He, in all seriousness, expects to sell a million of them a year by 2030, with a billion sold per year following shortly thereafter. Musk has claimed these robots can replace most forms of labour and will have 5x the productivity of a human per year, and that this will create a “sustainable abundance”. He estimates that soon these robots will account for 80% of Tesla’s overall value and that they could generate $10 trillion in long-term revenue. He has also called Optimus Tesla’s “most important product ever”, but he said the same thing about the CyberTruck <https://x.com/cixliv/status/1997878834956525898?s=20>, so go figure….

Take a look at the video below, taken at the recent Miami event: <https://x.com/cixliv/status/1997878834956525898?s=20>. Notice how it looks like the robot knocks everything over, takes off a nonexistent VR headset, and then goes so rigid it falls backwards?

Yeah, this looks exactly like the bot was being remotely puppeteered, the operator forgot the shutdown sequence, and began to remove the VR headset before control had been totally severed, causing it to grab at a nonexistent headset and lose its balance.

Indeed, I can’t think of a single other reason this robot could have acted like this…

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The rest of it is below Will Lockett’s paywall. But let me give you some takeaways:

• Musk’s “projections” are not projections: “A million of them a year by 2030… 5x the productivity of a human… 80% of Tesla’s overall value… $10 trillion in long-term revenue…”

• Repeated previous admissions of remote operation: “The ‘bot folding clothes… the VR puppeteer in the frame. Second… ‘bots at the We Are Robot event that talked… acknowledge[d as]… operated remotely…”

• Development stagnant: “After four years of development, we have yet to see this robot do anything more than shuffle around under its own control…”

• Humanoid form inefficiency: “The guy who Musk hired to lead… development… said this form factor limitation means i[t’s merely a]… novelty…”

• Tesla’s core EV outlook is not good: “They have pretty much entirely abandoned developing any new EVs… [while] even legacy competitors are thoroughly outpacing them...”

• Valuation at risk: “Tesla… worth ten times more than it should be because investors believed it would deliver considerable, disruptive growth…. This stupid robot is the only [project] left open, but only because it hasn’t hit the market yet…”

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Notes from the SSRC: 2025 College and University Fund Conference…

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• Trustworthiness: Universities as institutions must earn trust through actions: The first step on the path to public trust is making organizations worthy of trust by their practice—fixing monocultures, sharpening focus, and ensuring courses teach tools that grant access to real knowledge: The answer to the question of trust from our perspective is that we, first, need to be trustworthy. We know more or less how we do that…

• Reframing ASI: Human civilization’s cumulative “Anthology Super-Intelligence”: ASI is not Artificial Super-Intelligence, the product of electronic microcurrents running through doped silicon crystals in square-mile data centers running roiling boils of linear algebra. The real ASI is the Anthology Super-Intelligence crystalized in the five-millennia‑long global—wide corpus of human ideas encoded in writing and scholarship: It is only to the extent that humans, or indeed summarization text-processing machines, can successfully jack-in to good ideas contained in that ASI that they can be worth anything, either in terms of living well as our graduates can do things that their employers find valuable, or living wisely by using the ASI as a source of ideas to enrich their lives…

• Pedagogy’s core aim: Training people to plug into this collective human mentalASI: Education should equip students to connect to, interpret, and extend the accumulated corpus of human ideas; that is the durable mission across eras: When it does that, it is worth an absolutely, absolutely enormous amount. We are all in the business of training our students to do such. And what “such” is changes radically over time…

• Skills evolve; the intellectual enterprise endures: The practical skills required to access and produce knowledge change radically over time, but the underlying intellectual task remains the same: 5,000 years ago, a good hour of your day as a scribe would be mixing the clay to the proper consistency o it would properly take the imprint of the stylus. Now we teach and need rather different skills. But it is still the same global overall intellectual enterprise...

• Curricular focus on tools that grant access: Courses must deliver concrete capabilities—methods, literacies, and practices—that genuinely open pathways into the human ASI: Classes that do not give people the tools that they need to access that real ASI are classes that fail…

• Continuity of knowledge work across media: From clay tablets to keyboards, knowledge work is still organizing, interpreting, and producing ideas: Now we are not punching in clay but punching on keys; however, it still in the service of the same overall intellectual enterprise…

• Historical craft vs. modern competence: Expertises that once were essential underpinnings of competence (cuneiform clay mixing, fine chancery hands) become obsolete, underscoring the need to continually redefine “literacy” and “craft” for current mediums. Being “useful” is historically contingent on prevailing media and methods: Not only do I today not have any expertise at all in mixing clay to make a proper cuneiform tablet, I can’t even write an approximation of a fine chancery hand. Thomas Cromwell would dismiss me s completely useless: “You can’t prepare a legal document for me. Go away!”…

• Doped-silicon microcurrent machines as summarizers, not sovereign oracles: Present‑day text‑processing systems have value insofar as they serve as relatively dumb natural-language front-ends to trusted, curated, scrubbed databases, not as oracles: OpenAI created a technology demonstration by setting out to create a text-prediction program that was the best possible approximation of an internet s***poster. And it succeeded. Now, on top of that, we have added RLHF, which has layered on a desperate desire to get the highest teaching ratings possible. So now you have two mammoth sources of complete FAIL built-in at a fundamental level. The solution is just enough neural network power to translate an English question into a well-formed database query, and no more…

• Popperian falsification as a methodological anchor: Exposure to Karl Popper’s philosophy is recommended to ground scientific and social inquiry in testability and error correction…

• Epistemic humility as civic virtue: The Oliver Cromwell injunction is a guiding ethic for inquiries and institutions: As Oliver Cromwell said, addressing the Scottish General Assembly: “Consider in the bowels of Christ that you may be mistaken…”

• Historical patterns: With the post-medieval disenchantment of the world, or at least Western Europe, the things that students would study at university—so they could then understand and maneuver in society—those things shifted: from Aquinas’s “Summary of Theology” to Machiavelli, Montesquieu, and Mill; Plutarch, Puffendorf, and Petty. And the students were happy with this—they were then enabled to tap into the time- and space-binding library of written-down human thought: both to enrich their lives by living wisely; and by being useful to their employers enabling them to live well as well.

• How did the universities of these days figure out that this shift—this going all-in on proto-social-science—was the way to both become worthy of being trusted and become trusted? And what are the immediate actionable lessons from this for us now today?

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If reading this gets you Value Above Replacement, then become a free subscriber to this newsletter. And forward it! And if your VAR from this newsletter is in the three digits or more each year, please become a paid subscriber! I am trying to make you readers—and myself—smarter. Please tell me if I succeed, or how I fail…

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This is, when you think of it, not something I would ever have had on my pre-2016 BIngo card for a thing that could happen without that president being 25th-Amendmented that very afternoon…

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Almost every sentence in this is false:

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Almost every professional Republican and every media reporter knows that almost every sentence in this is false.

Yet, overwhelmingly, they do not say so. What conclusions can we draw from that? I am not sure. But here is my present take:

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Real Gains, Nominal Prices, Broken Promises, & Disparate Senses of Just Entitlement…

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The middle class moved; the male one‑earner family ideal stayed put—and turned highly punitive to rightwing males who bought into it as a sense of their social identity. That is a piece of the “affordability” meme- and vibe-cloud, but only a piece. And it is by no means the whole or even more than half of the piece, even though that is where Matt Bruenig wants to wind up. Matt Bruenig gnaws on the “affordability” question, and i think has smart things to say, but that he has hold of only one piece of a very large elephant—an ear, perhaps:

Matt Bruenig: Why Do People Feel Like They Are Falling Behind? <https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2025/12/05/why-do-people-feel-like-they-are-falling-behind/>: ‘[No] way to salvage Green’s actual argument. It’s too much of a mess. But given that so many… talk so… specifically [about] single-earner married families in the mid-[20th]-century, there may be some value in trying to tease out an argument that these commentators perhaps feel but can’t really articulate….

A single-earner family headed by [a 25-54] man [working 50 weeks] should be able to have a standard of living that is at least equal to their 1963 predecessor. But… the median family income of these same men….

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In 1963 spouse’s (and other family members’ incomes gave a 20% boost above the male level for median earnings. By 2024 those incomes gave an 85% boost. Thus—and i think this is Matt Bruenig’s main point—in 1963 median prime-age full-time male earnings bought you a participation ticket to an American Middle-Class TradLife, with a stay-at-home spouse and roughly median family income. Now it does not buy you such a participation ticket. If you are a right-wing male you thus see yourself as being forced to accept one of two forms of status dérogeance:

1. Deal with the fact that you cannot look the real two-career American middle-class family in the face with respect to your standard of living.

2. Deal with the fact that your spouse plays a key role as a secondary (or primary) breadwinner along with all the other things she brings to the marriage, and that that has powerful implications for the balance of respect and within-family authority.

And the “but we can afford more stuff!”—2.5 times as much stuff, according to standard statistical measures (and as a follower of Nordhaus I believe that standard statistical measures are a substantial understatement and that it is fact much more)—does not make up for either fork of the status derogeance, no matter which one you choose.

All this is, I think, fine and smart and right on the part of Matt Bruenig. But it is incomplete: it covers only the right-wing TradLife slice of the

many people of all political stripes talk[ing] so much about… specifically single-earner married families in the mid-[20th-]century… [who] feel but can’t really articulate… their intuitions and feelings about the state of things… [that] often wind up grasping at straws that are “directionally right” but “actually wrong”…

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What is going on with all the rest, with the non-rightwing non-TradLife aspirational reciters of the mantra “housing, childcare, college, medical costs”?

And why is the requirement among the rightwing male TradLife aspirational that you accept the status dérogeance so painful? I mean: not only is she a fox, and not only does female peer pressure focus here on effective and successful household management, but she also brings in a lot of money as well. It is surprisingly close to what the 1960s would have been, but with the overwhelming majority of women bringing a dowry worth 15 years of your income to the marriage as well. What, really, is not to like?

This is a complicate knot here. Let me try to cover a piece of it on the next three Thursdays, focusing on: (1) rightwing TradLife aspirational males, (2) distribution lower-tail males, and then (3) the “housing, childcare, college, medical costs” mantra.

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But let me telegraph a good deal of what my conclusion from the whole series will be by noting that I wrote about this a week and a half ago <>, concurring with Paul Krugmana and Matthew Yglesias that most of the discontent and the discourse around #affordability is—after you get away from the rightwing male TradLife-aspirational nutters—simply levels of nominal (not so much real) prices that seem out of line, and a breaking of the contract society and the government made with you when it granted you your level of nominal income, particularly in “housing, childcare, college, medical costs”, but not exclusively or even primarily there.

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References:

• Bruenig, Matt. 2025. “Why Do People Feel Like They Are Falling Behind?” People’s Policy Project. December 5. <https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2025/12/05/why-do-people-feel-like-they-are-falling-behind/>.

• DeLong, J. Bradford .2025. ”Trump Promised Voters Lower Prices: He Lied—& People Are Angry”. DeLong’s Grasping Reality. Decemer 2.<https://braddelong.substack.com/p/trump-promised-voters-lower-prices>.

• Green, Michael. 2025. “The Valley of Death: Why $100,000 Is the New Poverty”. The Free Press. November 24. <https://www.thefp.com/p/why-do-americans-feel-poor-because>.

• Krugman, Paul. 2025. “Another Talk With Martin Wolf”. Paul Krugman. November 29. <https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/another-talk-with-martin-wolf>.

• Nordhaus, William. 1994. “Do Real-Output and Real-Wage Measures Capture Reality? The History of Lighting Suggests Not.” Cowles Foundation Discussion Paper No. 1078. New Haven, CT: Yale University. <https://cowles.yale.edu/sites/default/files/2022-08/d1078.pdf>.

• Yglesias, Matt. 2025. “‘Affordability’ is just high nominal prices”. Slow Boring. November 10. <https://www.slowboring.com/p/affordability-is-just-high-nominal>.

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Dropping next Monday 2025-12-15, I think, is me on Sean Illing’s “Grey Area” podcast...

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Growth keeps delivering but agency keeps slipping. The question is no longer how to get richer as fast as possible, but how to use our riches to live wisely and well as technological change creatively enriches and destructively dislocates. In the forthcoming Attention Info‑Bio Tech society, the fight will be for us to focus our attention so that it serves our purpose rather than the purposes of those who wish us ill, so that we can use wealth to create and enhance freedom rather than find technological power used to create techno attention-serfdom.

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Sean has a preview:

Sean Illing: The world has gotten richer—so, why aren’t we happier?<https://www.vox.com/podcasts/471467/gray-area-brad-delong-progress-abundance>: ‘Technological progress and economic growth are preconditions for human happiness, not a guarantee…. We live longer, healthier, safer lives than almost any generation that came before us. And yet, the experience of modern life often feels unsettled. People are anxious, politics are brittle, and the promise of progress feels shakier than ever. Few thinkers have grappled with these contradictions more deeply than Brad DeLong. He’s an economic historian at UC Berkeley and the author of Slouching Towards Utopia, a sweeping account of the “long twentieth century” when technological progress reshaped every aspect of human life. I invited DeLong onto The Gray Area to talk about the purpose of progress, the tension between getting richer and living well, and whether our politics are capable of stewarding another era of transformation….

Key takeaways:

• Growth has allowed humanity to conquer privation and disease – but discontent remains, and prosperity hasn’t solved the deeper question of what progress is for.

• Abundance doesn’t necessarily lead to a sense of agency; many people still feel that impersonal systems shape their lives without their consent.

• The 21st century will continue to be defined by growth and prosperity, but the center of gravity will shift to the developing world.

• The defining question of our era may well be whether humans can direct their attention toward what truly matters in an era when there are increasingly competing claims to it…

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Some more bite-sized pieces of the conversation:

• Progress conquers scarcity but not meaning: Material abundance has largely ended the Malthusian world of pervasive hunger, disease, and early death, yet it hasn’t answered what progress is for: “Progress begins with escaping the Malthusian condition… But no longer living under the pressure of absolute scarcity, how much of our time and energy should still be devoted to producing more? And what kind of more?”

• Means vs. ends confusion: Increasing GDP and consumption is not 100% aligned with living wisely and well: “The question then becomes: how do we use absolute abundance to create the conditions in which human beings can flourish?”

• Agency deficit amid abundance: Wealth does not deliver meaningful freedom from impersonal systems—ideologies, bureaucracies, markets, algorithms—that control our lives without our ever remembering giving them permission to do so: “Material wealth does not automatically produce a sense of agency—indeed, it can produce a strong sense that one cannot afford to grasp one’s agency for fear of falling off a hedonic treadmill.”

• Attention as the scarce resource: After the social-democratic mass-production New Deal Order society and the globalized value-chain Neoliberal Order society, there will come the Attention Info-Bio Tech Society. The key to living wisely and well may hinge on the ability to recapture attention and focus from the Zuckerbergs and the Murdochs who want to glue your eyeballs to screens they own so they can make a few more pennies by selling ads: “Directing your attention toward what matters in your becoming your best self is a defining challenge.”

• Uneven technological change drives dislocation: Each generation since 1870 about 4/5 of the economy has seen a rough 1/4 increase in productivity, while about 1/5—a different albeit overlapping 1/5 each generation—has seen a doubling at the price of an utter transformation that upends life-patterns in a radical-change way: “This repeated experience of radical dislocation for some is one of the central political and economic challenges of the modern world.”

• We’re handling this wave of disruption ‘moderately badly’: “Current politics and institutions manage transformation better than early 20th century, worse than postwar decades.“It’s better than the first half of the twentieth century. But, really, that is not saying much.”

• Growth’s global center is shifting: The 21st century’s increasing prosperity is real, but its most powerful effects are increasingly centered in the developing world, especially China and India: “1980 is the moment when first China, then India, and later much of the rest of the poorer world managed to move onto the escalator of industrial and post-industrial growth, shifting the balance of the global story.”

• Material gains enable purpose-seeking: Hundreds of millions now have reliable food, medicine, and education—freeing attention from survival to meaning: “They now have the chance to think about what it means to live well, not just how to survive. This is one of the great achievements of humanity.”

• AI’s dual nature—cognitive leverage and capture risk: AI improves research and reasoning but will intensify attention-targeting and screen addiction: “Many people will gain access to tools that make complex reasoning and analysis easier. But Zuckerbergs and Murdochs and their ilk will use these same tools to target our attention even more aggressively for harvesting, in their financial interest and definitely not in our human interest.”

• Speculative overinvestment with real advances: Hype drives misallocated capital (e.g., excess data centers), yet durable capability gains emerge: “We will end up with large amount of misallocated capital but also real advances that genuinely expand human capabilities—capabilities we can then use to live wisely and well, or to persuade other people not to.”

• Crisis of representation in the info age: Shared reality is harder to sustain; constitutional designs assumed information environments that no longer exist: “Our information environment is now so vast and so open to manipulation that it’s harder than ever to sustain a shared sense of reality. Figuring out how to rebuild trust in both the representation of reality to us and the representation of us to the decision-making nexuses of the political system—those are both essential.”

• Freedom as conditions for living well: The task is building institutions that expand real freedom—capabilities, dignity, agency—not just consumption.: A political and economic system should create the basic conditions in which people can become more free and more fulfilled. But we are not doing a great job of that.”

• Two watchwords for the 21st century—growth and attention: Continued advancing prosperity, centered in the developing world, and the human struggle to control our attention to be mindful of what is good for us: “Whether we learn to navigate this environment successfully may be the most important story of the century.”

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References:

• DeLong, J. Bradford. 2025. Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the 20th Century. New York: Basic Books. <https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/j-bradford-delong/slouching-towards-utopia/9780465019595/?lens=basic-books>.

• Illing, Sean. 2025. “The world has gotten richer—so, why aren’t we happier?” The Grey Area. Forthcoming. <https://www.vox.com/podcasts/471467/gray-area-brad-delong-progress-abundance>.

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#abundance-dislocation-the-fight-to-focus-our-attention-in-the-21st-century
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From 2011-12-16: there is demand for this, so here it is back again... <https://web.archive.org/web/20111219144609/ttps://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2011/12/i-dont-fully-buy-stiglitzs-argument-that-our-macro-problems-have-deep-structural-roots-but-i-do-see-its-coherence.html>

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I Don’t Fully Buy Stiglitz’s Argument That Our Macro Problems Have Deep Structural Roots. But I Do See Its Coherence

Truth is, I don’t understand all the hating on the Vanity Fair Stiglitz piece, “A Banking System is Supposed to Serve Society, Not the Other Way Around”.

Perhaps I am giving Joe too charitable a reading. But I really do not see a serious analytical problem. Not that I buy the argument--I don’t think that our macro problems today have deep important structural roots in the decline of manufacturing due to its rapid productivity growth, and I don’t think that a massive governmental borrow-and-spend program is the only way out (but Stiglitz may be right in his claim that it would be the best way out).

However, even though I do not fully buy it I do think I understand the argument. And I do not think it is incoherent.

As I understand the Greenwald-Stiglitz hypothesis--about the Great Depression as applied to agriculture and about today as applied to manufacturing--it goes like this:

1. Rapid technological progress in a very large economic sector (agriculture then, manufacturing now) leads to oversupply and steep declines in the sector’s prices. Poorer producers have less income. They come under pressure to cut back their spending. Others--consumers--are now richer because they are paying less for their food (or their manufactures), but their propensity to spend is lower than that of the stressed farmers or ex-manufacturing workers.

2. Moreover, the oversupply of agricultural commodities (or manufactured goods) means that only an idiot would invest at their normal pace in those sectors. To the shortfall in consumption spending is added a shortfall in investment spending as well.

3. Thus we have systematic pressures pushing spending down below economy-wide income. These aren’t going to go away until the declining sector (agriculture then, manufacturing now) is no longer large enough to be macroeconomically significant.

4. Macroeconomic balance requires that the economy generate offsetting pressures pushing spending up. What might they be?

5. For a while, those receiving the income that farmers (or ex-manufacturing workers) have lost and those who use to invest in the declining sectors can lend it to the farmers (or ex-manufacturing workers) so that they can keep up with the Joneses. But lending more and more to poorer and poorer debtors is, like lawn darts, only all fun-and-games until somebody loses an eye.

6. An alternative possibility is to switch investment away from the farm value-chain complex (or the manufacturing value-chain complex) to something else. But what? Nobody really knows. The future is uncertain. Other investments are clearly riskier then funneling money into the old channels of boosting the capital of the farm value-chain complex (or the manufacturing value-chain complex) had been. Given the extra risks, this pressure can only manifest itself if the cost of capital falls. But here we hit the zero lower bound on interest rates. And we are off to the secular liquidity-trap races. This won’t work either.

Now at this point I disagree with Greenwald-Stiglitz. I see three plausible ways to fix the unemployment-generating aggregate demand shortfall:

• (a) This could be fixed by expectations of inflation that push you sustainable real cost of capital down below zero far enough that savings no longer exceeds planned investment at full employment. (But normal monetary ease it does not produce expectations of secular inflation won’t do anything useful.)

• (b) This could be fixed by government loan- or bank-guarantee programs that transfer the risk of new and untried investments away from entrepreneurs and investors onto taxpayers, so that even without expected inflation planned investment at full employment no longer falls short of saving when the cost of capital is at the zero nominal lower bound. so that you don’t need a cost of capital less then be expected rate of deflation. It can be fixed by the government running up debt and buying stuff.

• (c) This could be fixed by having the government borrow and spend on a large scale.

Stiglitz, however, doesn’t see either the “expected inflation” or the “loan- and bank-guarantee” roads as possible. Stiglitz’s conclusions:

Two conclusions…. The first is that the economy will not bounce back on its own, at least not in a time frame that matters to ordinary people. Yes, all those foreclosed homes will eventually find someone to live in them, or be torn down. Prices will at some point stabilize and even start to rise. Americans will also adjust to a lower standard of living—not just living within their means but living beneath their means as they struggle to pay off a mountain of debt. But the damage will be enormous. America’s conception of itself as a land of opportunity is already badly eroded. Unemployed young people are alienated. It will be harder and harder to get some large proportion of them onto a productive track. They will be scarred for life by what is happening today. Drive through the industrial river valleys of the Midwest or the small towns of the Plains or the factory hubs of the South, and you will see a picture of irreversible decay.

Monetary policy is not going to help us out of this mess…. [A]nyone who believes that monetary policy is going to resuscitate the economy will be sorely disappointed. That idea is a distraction, and a dangerous one.

What we need to do instead is embark on a massive investment program—as we did, virtually by accident, 80 years ago—that will increase our productivity for years to come, and will also increase employment now. This public investment, and the resultant restoration in G.D.P., increases the returns to private investment. Public investments could be directed at improving the quality of life and real productivity—unlike the private-sector investments in financial innovations, which turned out to be more akin to financial weapons of mass destruction.

I think that if I asked him Stiglitz would say that (a)--zero interest rates and expected inflation--would help if you could get there, but that you cannot get there through monetary policy. Only if people expect full employment will there be enough inflation to sustain a full employment equilibrium. And since they don’t expect full employment there isn’t enough expected inflation no matter how easy monetary policy is. I think he would say that (b) might work in the sense of restoring full employment in the short run, but it would be an unfair upward redistribution of wealth from taxpayers to financiers, and moreover would not help resolve the underlying structural problems that created the shortfall between savings and planned investment at full employment in the first place.

Stiglitz does say that (c) is best:

The private sector by itself won’t, and can’t, undertake structural transformation of the magnitude needed—even if the Fed were to keep interest rates at zero for years to come. The only way it will happen is through a government stimulus designed not to preserve the old economy but to focus instead on creating a new one… out of manufacturing and into services that people want—into productive activities that increase living standards, not those that increase risk and inequality…. Education…. [B]asic research. Government investment in earlier decades—for instance, to develop the Internet and biotechnology—helped fuel economic growth…. Meanwhile, the states could certainly use federal help in closing budget shortfalls…. [C]leaner and more efficient energy production…. [O]ur decaying infrastructure, from roads and railroads to levees and power plants, is a prime target for profitable investment.

And once we have both restored full employment and accelerated the structural transformation needed then we can return to normality. But in order to get there:

we must fix the financial system. As noted, the implosion of the financial sector may not have been the underlying cause of our current crisis—but it has made it worse, and it’s an obstacle to long-term recovery…. What’s needed is to get banks out of the dangerous business of speculating and back into the boring business of lending. But we have not fixed the financial system. Rather, we have poured money into the banks…. We have, in a phrase, confused ends with means. A banking system is supposed to serve society, not the other way around…

I’m not sure that I buy Stiglitz’s argument that massive government borrow-and-spend is the only, or even the best, way out of our current mess. And I agree that Stiglitz’s piece could have used a couple more paragraphs about life at the zero nominal interest rate lower bound explaining why Stiglitz thinks the belief “that monetary policy is going to resuscitate the economy will be sorely disappointed. That idea is a distraction, and a dangerous one”.

Perhaps I have seen so much really bad macroeconomics over the past four years that I now suffer from the soft bigotry of low expectations. But this does not seem to me to be, as Nick Rowe calls it:

really bad macroeconomics. God it’s depressing. If you want to talk about a deficiency of aggregate demand, and why Say’s Law sometimes fails, you really do need to talk about monetary exchange economies and an excess demand for money at the aggregate level. You can’t just do partial equilibrium analysis and cobble it all together.

So then why does Nick have such an adverse reaction to Stiglitz?

I think it is because Stiglitz is at bottom a Wicksellian and Rowe is a Fisherian. A Wicksellian is a believer that the key equation in macro is the flow-of-funds equation S = I + (G-T), savings S equals planned investment I plus government borrowing (G-T), and that the money market exists to feed the flow-of-funds an interest rate that has a (limited) influence on planned investment I. A Fisherian is a believer that the key equation in macro is the money market’s quantity theory equation PY = MV(i), and that the flow-of-funds exists to feed the quantity theory an interest rate that has a (limited) influence on velocity V.

Thus they have a hard time communicating. From the Fisherian viewpoint, the Wicksellians are talking nonsense because they spend their time on things that have a minor impact on velocity while ignoring the obvious shortage of money. From the Wicksellian viewpoint, the Fisherians are talking nonsense by ignoring the obvious fact that movements in money induce offsetting effects in velocity unless they somehow alter the savings-investment balance.

And it is we Hicksians, of course, synthesize both positions into a single unified and coherent whole…

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Think of airlines: very useful, very high-tech, immense user surplus, next to no profits. Even if AI works, and even if it gets adopted very fast, it might not make much in the way of profits for anyone. The part of Noah Smith’s post above his paywall…

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Very much worth reading, because, I think, highly likely to be correct.

Noah sees three ways that the current AI-bubble and MAMLM-capex buildout could spectacularly crash:

• (1) The Virtual Reality Scenario is if “AI” as we know it is just a useful enough technology to justify the capital-expenditure build-out, given that it is not write-once run-everywhere for-all-time, but rather train and infer, train and infer, train and infer again and again and again without mammoth economies of scale.

• (2) The Railroad Scenario is if the financing seizes up as the profits do not appear in time before those who have been shorting the build-out and those who own the leveraged debt decide it is time to take their profits and cash-in their chips, respectively. The historical model is the Panic of 1873 that took down Jay Cooke & Co. In this case the sector and the technology are fine, but only after a very disruptive five-year final AI-Winter.

• (3) The Airline Scenario is one of a very useful high-tech technology deployed at scale, but because markets are contestable and increasing returns largely absent, there are next to no profits as prices keep getting pushed down to short-run marginal cost.

This last is, I think, the most likely. And Noah thinks so too: The technology works. It diffuses. It becomes infrastructural. Yet the rents flow not to the operators, and in the long run not that many rents flow to the toolmakers and the suppliers. Instead, what rents there are flow to the downstream complementors. And the overwhelming bulk of value flows to customers in the form of user surplus. It is glorious (provided our AI can preserve our attention from being hacked to our detriment by Zuckerberg’s AI)! But it is not profitable for investors! And it is profitable for lucky entrepreneurs who keep their wits about them and understand that their trees will not grow to the sky. And it is profitable for only those VCs who understand that they are basically rerunning their crypto grift, and prioritize exit while the getting is still good and the crash has not yet come

There is one very important feature of the situation that, I think, Noah misses. It is a very powerful, and I think likely decisive, factor that pushes us toward the (3) Airline Scenario.

It is this:

Google and Facebook and Amazon do not want anybody—anybody—to take their search and social-media profits away from them by providing front-end natural-language interfaces to exploring the internet and to connecting with friends and entertainment and to shopping. Apple does not want anybody—anybody—to take its iPhone hardware sales profits away from it by providing a better cloud-based natural-language software interface to cheap Android smartphones than the iPhone’s software suite provides. Microsoft does not want anybody—anybody—to take its office-work and cloud-enterprise profits away from it by providing better natural-language interfaces to smithing words and numbers and bureaucratic paperflow.

All of these will do what Microsoft did to Netscape before they will let any of that happen.

If it ever looks like OpenAI or anyone else is attaining platform-aggregator scale by selling AI-based services, Google or Facebook or Amazon or Apple or Microsoft—or probably all five at once—will stop that from happening by giving good-enough substitutes away for free.

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The AI bust scenario that no one is talking about

Even if AI works, and even if it gets adopted very fast, it might not make profit.

Noah Smith

Dec 08, 2025∙ Paid

<https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/the-ai-bust-scenario-that-no-one>

Noahpinion

The AI bust scenario that no one is talking about

I’ve actually already written a number of posts about the possibility of an AI bubble and bust. Back in August, I wondered if the financing of data centers with private credit could cause a financial crisis if there was a bust. I followed that up with…

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11 hours ago · 230 likes · 33 comments · Noah Smith

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I’ve actually already written a number of posts about the possibility of an AI bubble and bust. Back in August, I wondered if the financing of data centers with private credit could cause a financial crisis if there was a bust. I followed that up with a post about profitability, and suggested that the AI industry might be a lot more competitive than people expect. In October, I wrote about how AI is propping up the U.S. economy.

But I feel like I need to write another post, because almost all of the discussion I see about an AI bubble seems to leave out one crucial scenario.

Since I wrote those posts, popular belief that there’s an AI bubble and impending bust has only grown. A lot of prominent people in the industry are talking about it:

“Some parts of AI are probably in a bubble,” Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis told Axios’ Mike Allen at the [Axios] AI+ Summit on Dec. 4. But, he added, “It’s not a binary.”…“I, more than anyone, believe that AI is the most transformative technology ever, so I think in the fullness of time, this is all going to be more than justified,” Hassabis said…“I think it would be a mistake to dismiss [AI] as snake oil,” OpenAI Chairman and Sierra co-founder Bret Taylor said at the AI+ Summit…Taylor acknowledged that there “probably is a bubble,” but said businesses, ideas and technologies endure even after bubbles pop. “There’s going to be a handful of companies that are truly generational,” Taylor said.

And:

Every company would be affected if the AI bubble were to burst, the head of Google’s parent firm Alphabet has told the BBC…Speaking exclusively to BBC News, Sundar Pichai said while the growth of artificial intelligence (AI) investment had been an “extraordinary moment”, there was some “irrationality” in the current AI boom.

The market is also starting to get skeptical. Here’s a chart from Bloomberg:

Almost everyone I read is basically talking about two scenarios for an AI bust. I call these the Virtual Reality Scenario and the Railroad Scenario. I’ll go over these, and then talk about the third scenario

The Virtual Reality Scenario

What I call the Virtual Reality Scenario is if AI, in its current form, turns out to just not be a very useful technology at all — or at least, not nearly useful enough to justify the amount of capital expenditures. This might happen because AI hallucinates too much, or because progress in AI comes to a halt. Bloomberg reports:

The data center spending spree is overshadowed by persistent skepticism about the payoff from AI technology…[R]esearchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that 95% of organizations saw zero return on their investment in AI initiatives…More recently, researchers at Harvard and Stanford [found that e]mployees are using AI to create “workslop,” which the researchers define as “AI generated work content that masquerades as good work, but lacks the substance to meaningfully advance a given task.”…

AI developers have also been confronting a different challenge. OpenAI, Anthropic and others have for years bet on the so-called scaling laws — the idea that more computing power, data and larger models will inevitably pave the way for greater leaps in the power of AI…Over the past year, however, these developers have experienced diminishing returns from their costly efforts to build more advanced AI.

This is basically what happened to VR technology. Meta spent $77 billion on developing the virtual reality “Metaverse”, but outside of gaming and some niche entertainment applications, nobody really wanted VR for anything, no matter how good the headsets got. Meta is now throwing in the towel and pivoting away from the Metaverse.¹

But I just don’t think this is going to happen to AI. Very few people use VR, even a decade after it started getting hyped. But AI is being adopted more rapidly than any technology in history. As far back as a year ago, 40% of people were already using AI at work:

Household adoption is similarly rapid.

Humans just know when a technology works. If AI weren’t useful, we’d see people trying it for a while and then setting it aside. But we don’t see that. Despite hallucinations and the other limitations of the technology, most people are finding some reason to keep using AI after they try it.

Sorry, haters. This tech is for real.

As for progress hitting a wall, I just don’t think that’s an important question anymore. The consensus in the industry² seems to be that scaling up in terms of training AI models on more data has hit a wall, but that our ability to improve AI’s capabilities via inference scaling (basically, having it “think harder” before answering) is still going, and improvements in reinforcement learning and other algorithmic techniques are still coming.

But I don’t think this is the right question to be asking, because “better chatbots” are only one of many ways that AI can create value. The world of AI applications, including “agents” (AI that does stuff on its own) is still in its infancy. Andrej Karpathy is good at talking about this; I recommend his interview with Dwarkesh Patel.

Essentially, we haven’t even begun to build AI yet. Anthropic sort of has — it’s focused on AI business applications, and it’s making some money doing this. But most of the actual technology we’re going to create with AI is still in the future. And there’s a chance that AI as it exists today will be able to provide the foundation for a whole bunch of incredibly useful applications, even without any continued improvement in capabilities. The typical pattern is for most of the useful (and lucrative) applications to manifest decades after a new general-purpose technology is introduced.

The Railroad Scenario

Which brings us to the second scenario: the Railroad Scenario. Railroads were even more economically useful and lucrative than their biggest boosters in the 1860s imagined. But there was still a huge bust in 1873, because those economic benefits didn’t show up before railroad companies’ debt came due.

Here’s what I wrote about that back in October:

The railroad buildout in the 1800s was, in percentage terms, the greatest single feat of capital expenditure in U.S. history, dwarfing even what the AI industry is spending on data centers right now. In 1873, a bunch of railroad-related loans went bust, causing a banking crisis that threw the economy into a decade-long depression.

And yet despite the carnage in the railroad industry, the number of miles of railroad in the U.S. never stopped increasing — it just slowed down briefly and picked back up again!…In other words, the great railroad bust did not happen because America built too many railroads. America didn’t build too many railroads! What happened was that America financed its railroads faster than they could capture value…

There’s basically no technological limit on how many…loans [the financial system] can disburse in a short period of time…And yet there is a limit on how fast businesses can create real value. In order for a railroad to pay off, you need to build it, and then you need to find people to pay you to ship things on it. That takes time, especially because the full economic value of the railroad doesn’t manifest until new cities, new industries, and new supply chains that are enabled by the railroads get created.

Just to give one example, the famous Sears Catalog — which allowed people all across America to order products and have them delivered by railroad — eventually revolutionized American retail. But it didn’t even start to do that until 1888 — fifteen years after the big railroad crash of 1873…

Why is this important for AI? Because even if AI creates all the value its biggest boosters say it’ll do — supercharges growth, enables the automation of most kinds of production, and so on — it might not do it fast enough for the data center “hyperscalers” to pay back everything they borrowed. In that case, there will be a wave of defaults on bonds and loans.

We don’t know how likely this scenario is, because we don’t know how fast AI value creation will increase. But we can get some basic idea of the risk of this scenario by looking at the financing side.

If the companies building and operating the data centers (the main cost of AI) are spending less than they make, then everything is basically safe. Suppose you have a company that makes $50 billion in profit every year, and you spend $40 billion every year on data centers. Even if AI suffers a catastrophic crash and all your money is wasted, you’re safe; you just take a hit to your profit margins for a year, your stock price goes down, and then you just move on. This is true even if you borrowed the money to build the data centers; if things go bad you can afford to pay off the loans.

If you’re spending $70 billion a year things get dicey; you might have to take a couple of years of losses to pay back the loans if there’s a bust. And there’s some level of borrowing and spending where you’re actually in danger of bankruptcy. There’s no hard and fast rule for when a certain amount of spending becomes dangerous; it’s just sort of a sliding scale of worry.

Right now, much of the AI buildout is being done by big tech companies like Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Meta that make lots and lots of profit.³ Until recently, these “hyperscalers” have been making enough cash to cover their AI spending. But spending is rising, so that may not be true for much longer. If spending keeps increasing, some companies, like Amazon, may start to have to borrow against future cash flow soon. And Meta, which doesn’t have its own cloud business, and thus has to pay other companies to do its AI stuff, may be in greater danger.

Meanwhile there are a bunch of other companies that are investing a ton of money in AI that don’t make enough profit to fund it out of their own pockets, but which have borrowed a bunch of money to invest in AI. These include the big model-making companies — OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI. They also include some cloud providers like CoreWeave that aren’t attached to a big profitable business. And they include various construction companies and service providers.

If AI takes 10 or more years to generate enough value to pay back all these debts, many of these companies could go bankrupt. Whatever financial institutions they’ve borrowed money from — private credit firms, banks, etc. — may fail or have to pull back significantly when their loans suddenly go bad. And that could touch off a financial crisis, even if AI continues to advance and companies continue to build data centers. That would be like what happened in 1873 with the railroads. AI itself would be fine, but the economy, the financial system, and a bunch of specific companies could be hurt.

This scenario seems at least fairly likely, given that this is basically what happened with both the railroads and the telecoms in past industrial booms. Currently, many observers are highly skeptical that AI companies will be able to earn enough revenue to pay back their debts by 2030, even under optimistic assumptions. As I said, the typical pattern is for the economy to take a long time to figure out how to use each new general-purpose technology, and the financial system may not be able to wait around.

But there’s also a third scenario, which relatively few people seem to be paying attention to. Even if AI works and manages to create value very quickly, that value may not be captured by the AI companies themselves. AI itself may turn out to be a commoditized, low-margin business, more like solar power…or airlines.

The third scenario: The Airline Scenario

The third scenario for an AI bust is that AI succeeds as a technology, but that the companies that make AI models — OpenAI, xAI, and so on — don’t manage to capture much of the value that AI creates…

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The perils of Speculative Nonfiction, the Grand Narrative trap, the importance of basing yourself in reality, & the recognition that it is not ideas that control social reality, but rather underlying modes of production, distribution, coërcion, and communication that set the boundaries of the playing field on which ideas contend for honors in influencing—not controlling—social reality…

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Can we “rediscover the freedoms that make us human” by rewriting the past into fake patterns? Or does such fact-unmoored idealism trap us in a cage of our own making? The case of Graeber and Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything offers a cautionary tale for would-be utopians and their readers. It claims to be a bold reimagining of human history. But since the scaffolding of fact is too thin to support the Grand Narrative, they resort to fake facts, and so we leave us with more than faërie gold? “Speculative Nonfiction” is not, I think, a useful intellectual genre.

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On my mind because <http://readwise.io> surfaced this today:

Bret Devereaux: <https://bsky.app/profile/bretdevereaux.bsky.social/post/3lyawbqzsmk2g>: ‘For as often as I get asked "What do you think of Graber and Wengrow's The Dawn of Everything" I need to just have a blog post titled, "What I think of The Dawn of Everything" which is just a link to @walterscheidel.bsky.social's devastating review (here: escholarship.org/uc/item/9jj9...)…

Scheidel Resetting Historys Dial

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Indeed.

Here are some highlights from Scheidel:

Walter Scheidel: Resetting History’s Dial? A Critique of David Graeber & David Wengrow, “The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity” <https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9jj9j6z7>: ‘Graeber and Wengrow condemn “conventional narratives of world history, which present the planting of a single seed as a point of no return” (260). Yet as hyperbolic as this claim is made out to be, it is, in the end, true…. Farming had managed to spread almost everywhere 2,500 years ago and… unlocked terrestrial carrying capacity in ways that allowed our species to grow in number by three orders of magnitude between the end of the Holocene and today…. [Their] directing the spotlight at hybrid forager-farmers and at developmental lags, detours and hiatuses [in the process of the conquest of humanity by agriculture and our consequent enslavement in societies-of-domination] is… worthy…. Yet… a trap that was slow in closing was, in the end, a trap….

Strenuous mental gymnastics…. The authors advance the “speculative” claim that certain structures on the late fourth millennium BCE acropolis of Uruk may have been assembly halls (306)…. Yet this explicitly “speculative” take swiftly morphs into fact, turning into “at least seven centuries of collective self-rule” at Uruk (380)…. The presence of a citadel with monumental purification facilities in the city of Mohenjodaro (317–18)… [leads them to] envision… “a clear hierarchy between groups… [but] doesn’t necessarily mean that the groups themselves were hierarchical in their internal organization,” or, for that matter, that the higher caste called the shots in “matters of day-to-day governance” (319)…. “Necessarily” does a lot of heavy lifting… yet readers… harboring doubts are promptly chided for their lack of imagination (319)….

A single solid case of a large city without clear signs of highly centralized authority, Teotihuacan… 100,000 residents… has not left written records but lacks iconographic evidence of royalty, even as men hailing from there occupied positions of power in Mayan Tikal (331–36). Conventional beginnings… derailed…. Pyramid construction ceased, the fanciest temple was desecrated, and high-quality stone-built multi-household apartment compounds were erected to house the urban masses, arranged around 20-odd local temple complexes…. This situation prevailed for several centuries before things started falling apart, culminating in the abandonment of much of the site (341–45)…. [But] Teotihuacan was… without precedent and successor…. Something unusual was clearly going on, and a non-royal form of governance seems more likely than not. It is unclear how far beyond this we can push… Graeber and Wengrow infer from all that a “surprisingly common pattern” of scaling-up “with no resulting concentration of wealth or power in the hands of ruling elites” (322)….

Graeber and Wengrow’s extensive discussion of “why the state has no origin” is even more disappointing…. Their vaguely Weberian model of three different bases of social power— control of violence, control of information, and charismatic politics (365 and passim)—is a perfectly workable template…. [But] instead of acknowledging existing frameworks, Graeber and Wengrow prefer to invoke the most extraordinary strawpeople who are said to “assume that there is only one possible end point… that these various types of domination were somehow bound to come together, sooner or later, in something like the particular form taken by the modern nation states in America and France at the end of the eighteenth century” (369). Considering how strongly the study of state formation tends to be infused with notions of European or Western exceptionalism, nothing could be farther from the truth….

Graeber and Wengrow confuse space and people. Thus, their observation— intended to de-center state formation as a key feature of human history—that for “most” of the last 5,000 years, “cities, empires and kingdoms” were “exceptional islands of political hierarchy, surrounded by much larger territories whose inhabitants (…) systematically avoided fixed, overarching systems of authority” (382) is technically correct yet wildly misleading by prioritizing territory over population number. As far as we can guesstimate, the majority of our species has been claimed by polities with entrenched political hierarchies for several thousand years. Around the beginning of the Common Era, up to three quarters of all people on earth lived in just four Eurasian empires….

Much as in their discussion of agriculture, Graeber and Wengrow eventually revert to concessions. “Overall, one might be forgiven for thinking that history was progressing uniformly in an authoritarian direction. And in the long run it was” (323)…. [So] they decide to move the goalposts…. They muse, that… just as in the case of farming, state building took a long time but became a big success: once grain states grew, so did their populations, and they outcompeted other forms of organization (443–44). That, of course, is exactly what happened. But did it absolutely have to be that way? “How inevitable, really, were the type of governments we have today?… Was this really the necessary culmination of human history?” (446)…. Inevitability sets a pretty high bar…. Counterfactual reasoning might be an option, but that they dismiss as “at best an idle game” (449). Where are real-life alternatives to be found? Graeber and Wengrow… [claim] the Americas… “the one truly independent point of comparison” (451)…. [But] the emergence of the Aztec and Inca autocracies from more diverse beginnings effectively put Central and South America out of play as well (370–78).…

In the eleventh century… Cahokia… 15,000 residents, marked by monumental construction, social hierarchies, mass killings, and elite control over the city and its hinterland, plus extensive cultural influence elsewhere—in other words, the emergence of an incipient grain state. Yet Cahokia was abandoned…. Graeber and Wengrow… note that “populations were relatively sparse” (469, also 472), a condition essential in creating affordable exit options…. The absence of horses constrained the capacity of aspirants to project power…. Both of these factors sustained an unusual lack of circumscription…. [Moreover] collapses and hiatuses were common around the world, even in places where the deck was not as stacked against early states as it was for Cahokia and Cahokianism…. In view of… [a] familiar template of concentration and abatement, the lack of circumscription, the growing impact of European-induced attrition—it is not quite obvious how developments among Indigenous groups could represent a genuine alternative to conventional trends.

Yet Graeber and Wengrow, bereft of other candidates elsewhere, need it to be… a “backlash” against the Cahokian experience—a backlash that “was so severe that it set forth repercussions we are still feeling today” (482)…. Some might see a tangle of conjectures, others a scenario worth thinking with. Graeber and Wengrow are more confident: “Certainly, the overall direction, in the wake of Cahokia, was a broad movement away from overlords of any sort and towards constitutional structures carefully worked out to distribute power in such a way that they would never return” (491). And it was that “backlash” that allowed indigenous North Americans to “almost entirely sidestep the evolutionary trap that we assume must always lead, eventually, from agriculture to the rise of some all powerful state or empire.”…

7,000 years separated the earliest known traces of crop cultivation and the appearance of archaic states in Central America and the Andes. Lag times were similar in the Middle East and only somewhat shorter in East Asia, the Sahel and southern Africa…. In view of timelines elsewhere, the failure of sustainable state formation to catch on in North America prior to the European takeover can hardly count as anomalous. If the anti-Cahokia backlash scenario is the best Graeber and Wengrow can come up with to demonstrate alternative trajectories of social evolution, determinists can rest easy….

Only once does their charge against the present become concrete: “There is no doubt that something has gone terribly wrong with the world. A very small percentage of its population do control the fates of almost everyone else, and they are doing it in an increasingly disastrous fashion” (76). How this notion squares with the fact that the proportion of humankind living in liberal or electoral democracies has increased from next to nothing a couple centuries ago to about a third today is left unexplained. Nor does it account for the concurrent growth in prosperity, health, longevity and knowledge. No matter: while Graeber and Wengrow concede early on that it is hard to argue with the statistics of progress, they query whether “‘Western civilization’ really made life better for everyone” (18)—truly a high bar if taken literally.

However we define the flaws of the present, the authors seek redress. That, in the end, is what the book is for: an improved understanding of the past will help us improve our own future. To do so, we must first “rediscover the freedoms that make us human” (8); rediscover them, that is, in the historical record. Graeber and Wengrow are aware that their account might be seen as even more tragic than foreshortened teleological versions precisely because it highlights alternatives that once existed but are long gone. “But on the other hand it also suggests that, even now, the possibilities for human intervention are far greater than we’re inclined to think” (524). In the context of their own narrative, this “even now” comes out of the blue, even as they present it as axiomatic, as self-evident….

Is it at least plausible? As a particular way of life became dominant, earlier alternatives slowly but surely lost their relevance, both in terms of their legacy— their impact on our own world—and in terms of inspiration—what they can make us do today…. How much do these faded traditions have to offer to us today, how can they teach us to make different choices in the present?… Is it enough simply to remind us that it once existed? Do they who control the past really control the future?

Their idealist purism traps Graeber and Wengrow in a cage of their own making. Acknowledgment of materialist perspectives would have helped them draw more meaningful connections between past and present. If it was their mobile lifestyle and hybrid mode of subsistence that made it easier for Holocene foragers to step in and out of different forms of cooperation than it was for fullblown farmers who found themselves tied to their lands and crops, how do we compare? Do service economies, digital tools and globalization hold out the promise of a new dawn? Materialism is not the enemy of historical understanding: it is essential to it. Nor is it the enemy of social activism. It might even be its best friend…

Scheidel focuses on the main red thread of Grand Narrative argument in Graeber and Wengrove: that only malign contingency and bad luck landed humanity in agrarian-age societies-of-domination which left a legacy that still shadows us today, as opposed to a belief that the coming of “civilization” was we knew it in 1500 and know it today was the result of very strong pressures and trends. And he—convincingly and, I believe, completely accurately—points out that that argument makes absolutely no sense at all, relying entirely on rhetorical misdirection tricks with smoke and mirrors.

What Scheidel does not focus on is that, by my count, 1/3 or so of Graeber and Wengrove’s claims about how things went down in individual episodes in the past are wrong, 1/3 or so are extremely tortuous and Prokroustean misrepresentations, and only 1/3 or so are what any fair-minded observer would say are broadly right. This is a pattern I am familiar with from Graeber’s Debt, in which he claimed, falsely, that “it was all true” that the world’s gold reserves were stored in basement vaults beneath the World Trade Center on 9/11/2001.

To me that lack of factual mooring to reality makes G&W useless, even as “a tangle of conjectures… [evoking] scenario[s] worth thinking with…” And thus I have a bone to pick with Henry Farrell, who says his final view on David Graeber is a:

Henry Farrell: Debt, 4102 Days Later <https://crookedtimber.org/2023/07/08/debt-4102-days-later/>: ‘somewhat complicated compliment…. Graeber is as a writer of speculative nonfiction. He is often wrong on the facts, and more often willing to push them farther than they really ought to be pushed, requiring shallow foundations of evidence to bear a heavy load of very strongly asserted theoretical claims. But there is value to the speculation—social scientists don’t do nearly enough of it. Sometimes it is less valuable to be right than to expand the space of perceived social and political possibilities. And that is something that Graeber was very good at doing…

That seems to me to be unhelpful. Rely on something David Graeber wrote about how some historical episode went down and try to use it as payment as you construct an argument, and you are very likely to find that you have tried to buy something with faërie gold—enchanted temporarily, yes, but misled. And then comes the awakening on the cold hillside.

References:

• Farrell, Henry. 2023. “Debt, 4102 Days Later”. Crooked Timber, July 8. <https://crookedtimber.org/2023/07/08/debt-4102-days-later/>.

• Graeber, David, & David Wengrow. 2021. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. <https://openlibrary.org/works/OL24663287W/The_Dawn_of_Everything>.

• Scheidel, Walter. 2022. “Resetting History’s Dial? A Critique of David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity.” Cliodynamics 0(0). <https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9jj9j6z7>.

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