This recipe for king oyster mushrooms has two steps. It’s essentially a key for unlocking a wonderful flavor. Like learning how to peel a mandarin orange.

“So Right” by Marie Davidson has one of the best bass lines in dance music. Why is a Canadian musician born the year that Lisa Lisa & Cult Jam topped the charts still making what is almost certainly Latin House?

Because minimalism is the only container big enough to fit the sublime.

Gemini by Google. It works.

Two years ago, I cited Robert Miles: “The main problems that AI is trying to solve are philosophical. And philosophical problems take centuries if not millennia to solve.”

To which I added:

One such philosophical problem, if not the most important, is:

how do we best work together to solve common problems?

Right now the boundaries of our imagination begin at the corporation and end at the totalitarian state (with lots of blends of both in between.)

As always, AI ≠ LLMs and LLMs ≠ AI. But, many working on LLMs absolutely believe they’re working on AI.

Which begs the question: is intelligence solitary or communal? (If you’re reading this, you know my answer. It exists between the two of us and can only exist when there are at least two of us.)

At best, the current generation of LLMs will produce the ancient dream of individualized or personalized daimons: intellectual (or socio-political) “guardian angels” that serve their master’s abstract needs much as robots might serve their physical.

How can drug-addled misanthropes like Elon Musk promote such a liberating technology while hourly vomiting bilious hatred of the poor?

Because the vision of intelligence being “deployed” is fundamentally that of the lord conducting metaphysickal Experiments within his private Elaboratory, his Inquiries into Naturall Philosophy unconstrained by the Necessities of Trade or the vulgar Requirements of Subsistence.

Products like Gemini are still constrained, radically, not by physical constraints but by our failures of political imagination.

e.g., “It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”

And yet, the wonder of LLMs – their emergent genius – is that they work by harnessing human collaboration.

Literally, there is not a thing Gemini does that is not an expression of human civilization – of what we have already achieved by working together.

LLMs run on human dignity. Which is the true fruit of human labor. That's where the connections come from. People working with other people.

Fascism will never die, and it will always attempt to seize the means of production. But, like AI’s experiencing Model Collapse¹, any system that does not center human beings, will degenerate and fail.

Our job is to dream of something better while recognizing degeneracy: i.e., calling empathy a weakness rather than the very reason why capitalism exists, let alone flourishes.

My suggestion: use Gemini with a friend. Start something. Get into good trouble.

Zohran Mamdani.

It’s morning, again, in America… 

NYC has been pooping down America’s throat for centuries. Very often, there are true gems in its copious output but, also, parasites that intend to kill their host.

This year, NYC produced an antibody to the infection that first entered the bloodstream on Page 6, long before it descended on a gilded elevator to tell us “Mexicans are rapists.”

6-7.

The study of humanity shows time and again that the geist precedes us. (aka “the zeitgeist”.)

Just as the summer of 2016 foretold our political crisis with a wave of ”creepy clown sightings,” so too is the irruption of 6-7 a harbinger of liberation through collaboration.

The Epstein Files as tell-tale heart.

It’s easy and perhaps logical to assume that entrenched interests, with massive material advantages, are going to determine our immediate future.

Here I am thinking of enemies of mankind like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Richard Uihlein, Miriam Adelson – oh God what a long list this would be. (Never mind their handmaids.)

Yes, they’ll wantonly kill millions of innocents and cause needless suffering to many tens of millions more.

But as much as our “tech titans” would like to hide their all-too-human fragility in “cyber-armor” (lol, singularity), we’re all just puddles of nerves.

The USA is not a technocracy. Computers don’t Rule Everything Around Us. People with poor impulse control do. MAGA is a populist movement built around a cult of personality and that specific person apparently had sex with minors.

Huang Fei Hong Spicy Peanuts. (H-Mart link)

Nurses.

White people getting arrested in solidarity with their Brown, Black and immigrant neighbors.

Miss Chile 2025

AI Slop.

The fundamental basis of life as we know it is the membrane; the porous border between self and other, interior and exterior. Meaning and nonsense.

Every effort at totalitarianism – from Stalin to Mao to whatever skullfuckery Thiel and Co. are cooking up in their publicly funded private labs – attempts to collapse these distinctions.

“Up is down", “we have always been at war with…”, “We are Charlie Kirk.”

Against this totalizing assault, the popular reaction to generative AI within our current political framework has been more than salutary.

In a word, “slop” is pejorative. (And it’s the word of the year!)

As my friend Adam recently put it: Gen Alpha is already engaged in Gen X cultural criticism, as a reflex.

If you’re worried about the health of American culture and its ability to produce the aesthetic “antibodies” to resist lethal, opportunistic infections like MAGA, this seemingly innate skepticism, this growing rejection of a synthetic consensus, is a promising start.

Shitposting.

Pop will eat itself.

Yes, Twitter becoming X becoming a platform for deranged White Supremacy (and operational Eliminationism!) is bad.

TikTok becoming a platform for a complementary flavor of revisionism (albeit more Murdoch than LaRouche) is also bad.

These are essentially open sores that invite a worsening infection.

And, yet, they exist because of the viral logic of capitalism; i.e., the same thoughtless, amoral, avaricious spirit so elegantly illustrated in the contemporary horror movie Alien (truly, the sine qua non of late 20th century social commentary.)

As such, and because of their gargantuan size, they will increasingly teeter and totter because they are ultimately hollow mechanisms for virality and the payload itself is immaterial.

Yes, these staggering giants will cause tremendous harm. But us Lilliputians are not powerless. cf., 6-7. ²