Gold Coast
Where we’re headed this weekend.
Quote of the Day
”Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.”
- H.L. Mencken
Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
The Grateful Dead | Brokedown Palace (Live at Carter-Finley Stadium; Raleigh
Long Read of the Day
Silicon Valley’s long free ride is coming to an end. Tech companies are now increasingly unpopular with both the public and juries — which is why the other day Meta agreed to pay up to roughly US$18 billion, plus make major design changes to Facebook and Instagram, as part of a settlement it has agreed to in its most recent lawsuit about engineering teenage addiction into its products and services.
What’s even more dramatic is the rising public hostility — in the US and elsewhere — to AI and to data-centres in particular. I’d been looking for a good write-up on this and now Brian Merchant has provided it in this Substack post.
Americans overwhelmingly hate data centers. They overwhelmingly dislike Flock surveillance cameras. And now it seems they overwhelmingly despise Meta’s newest product, AI-infused Ray Bans that have been widely termed “pervert glasses,” too. Enveloping all of the above trends is a general, percolating dislike of Silicon Valley’s marquee pursuit, generative AI; a sentiment underscored, again, by a slate of recent polls.
It’s almost funny to think back to the mild wave of public consternation and Congressional wrist-slapping that pundits termed “the techlash” in the heady days of the first Trump administration, over concerns of disinformation on Facebook and social media, compared to what we’re seeing now. That is, a genuine, sustained demonstration of rage at some of the modern tech industry’s key aims.
And all of this has become so clear, so palpable, and so widespread that it’s apparently causing tech industry leadership and pro-AI policy wonks to enter either a state of denial or something more akin to fevered delusion.
Last week, in response to a fresh round of politicians announcing policies to slow or pause data center development, and the release of two new polls, including a Heatmap survey that found 75% of Americans would now oppose data centers being built where they live, AI industry players eschewed gestures towards contrition and essentially just melted down.
Some of the Valley’s responses include:
- The anti-data center movement is a ‘psy-op’ funded by the Chinese Communist Party or the product of “psychosis”
- Arguing that Silicon Valley shouldn’t need to defer to ordinary people on matters regarding technological development
- Claiming that the movement is propped up by paid shills backed by the “AI safety industrial complex”
- Claiming that opposing data center construction is inhumane because it amounted to genocidal population-control on soon-to-be sentient AIs.
I love the idea of the “AI safety industrial complex”!
Hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
Books, etc.
I was writing about AI and technocracy the other day and was suddenly reminded of a book that I read as a student in 1969 that had made a deep impression on me. Given the time-lapse it was unlikely that I still had it. But I went to my bookshelves and there it was! It’s about the ‘counter-culture’ of my student generation viewed as a revolt against the technocratic state, which has interesting resonances with the tech lash currently under way (and discussed by Brian Merchant on today’s Long Read above).
The Odyssey corner
Maureen Dowd, the New York Times columnist, is not impressed by Nolan’s “Zero-Eros” Odyssey. Basically, she says, all the sex has been edited out.
Nolan’s nearly three-hour masterwork, the classicist Mary Beard noted, does not have Homer’s “elusive sexiness.” In keeping with Gen Z’s waning interest in sex, the poem’s famous sex scenes have been excised, sapping erotic power from the female characters. As a headline in New York magazine wondered, “Is No One Horny in ‘The Odyssey’?”
Yeah, and what about the serial infidelity which delayed the hero’s return for ten years?
Nolan did not want his Odysseus betraying Penelope and enjoying his sojourns with other women. The director completely cut out the young princess Nausicaa, whom Homer’s Odysseus has a flirtation with, and neuters the text’s sexual encounters with Circe and Calypso.
One day I will have to watch the bloody thing. But first I have to buy a good pair of earplugs, if my friends are to be believed.
Linkblog
Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.
- The 2026 iPhone Photography Awards Link
Makes one wonder sometimes why we bother with traditional cameras.
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