On Sunday Hope and I went to a screening of Avengers Endgame: Encore at a local theater. It's what it sounds like, a re-release of the 2019 superhero film with a few minutes of additional footage to gin up excitement for Avengers Doomsday this December. We went to an 11:20am IMAX screening because I’m a grown adult and that's when professionals go to the cinema, while the chatting and phone scrolling amateurs are still asleep in their beds.

After the movie we went to Shake Shack for a late lunch. As we entered the manager was standing near the entrance and directed us toward a kiosk to place our order. I looked at him and said “if possible, I'd like to order from a human.” He chortled and called over someone from the kitchen to come to the register.

When it was time to pay they asked if I had the [name withheld] rewards app for the mall. I raised my hands and said “sorry friend, no apps, and no kiosks.” He chuckled and as I grabbed that weird flashing and vibrating puck and headed for the booth I apologized to the manager for being complicated. He said “good for you, the app steals your data.”  

As I sat down to eat my burger, I realized I didn’t know if he was referring to “my data” as in it uploads and downloads in the background, causing me to use “data.” Or did he mean the app takes my personal information, location data, and my purchase history to sell to the highest bidder. The most likely answer is both and that my friends is the whole problem in a nutshell. 

Nobody wants this. 

For the record, Nobody Wants This is also the name of a newsletter written by Anne Lutz Fernandez. She is one of my favorite people on the internet, a former teacher and investment banker turned journalist. Anne has cursed me to have that phrase in my head all the time.

Over the last year or so I've found myself saying it over and over again about the privacy invasions and non-consensual introduction of AI into my life and routines. No, I don’t want AI to “shorten” the quote from Madison I am showing my students. No, I don’t want AI to take notes on the meeting I’m in—taking notes is how I cope with being in so damn many meetings. No, I don’t want AI to turn the PDF I am reading into a podcast! Who the hell wants to listen to a podcast about their PDFs? 

I am not alone on this.

If you look at public polling about AI, the data centers it's dependent on, and the oligarchs who are foisting it upon us, all are deeply unpopular. See below: 

Nine percent more harm than good. Sixty-one percent opposed. Thirty-seven percent favorable.

These numbers are comparable to the dying days of the Nixon administration. The oligarchs know and understand this. They are duplicitous, not stupid. Their collective response has been to seize control of major media companies and to bend them to ensure the information the public gets is reflective of their worldviews and aspirations. 

In 2013, Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, purchased the Washington Post for $250 million. At the time the Post was arguably the second or third most important paper in the country, depending how much you value the Wall Street Journal. Since then he has slashed the staff, laying off reporters, correspondents, and editors. He also shifted the editorial stance towards consistent advocacy of pro-business and pro-corporate policies. Consequently, the number of print subscribers has plunged below 100,000. 

In 2022, Bezos’ Amazon purchased MGM, one of the big five legacy Hollywood studios.

In 2021, aware of its influence on popular discourse, Elon Musk (already the richest man in the world) purchased Twitter. He became the most followed person on the app. Under him the company lost millions of users, became less profitable, and lurched rightward, while transforming into a safe place for virulent right-wing/neo-Nazi ideology, including the Great Replacement Theory. It has also become a place where calls for genocide and fascistic terms like “Remigration” are rampant. 

Earlier this month, David Ellison, son of Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle, won regulatory approval for his merger of Paramount and Warner Brothers. Ellison purchased Paramount last year with a massive financial backstop from his father. That purchase gave him control of CBS including its flagship new show 60 Minutes.  Along with gaining control of Warner Brothers’ studio, the merger will bring CNN under his influence. Last week, there  were reports that Musk is being eyed as a potential major investor for the new “Warner-Mount.” 

Oh, and if that’s not enough consolidation, with the direct intervention of the President, Ellison's father previously purchased a major stake in the US-based version of TikTok.

I hope you see the pattern by now.

The first, third, and seventh richest man in the world own three of the five remaining legacy Hollywood studios, two of the largest social media networks (two of the others are owned by Zuckerberg, himself the sixth richest), and the paper of record in the nation's capital.

We live in an era of tech oligarchy where our information environment is manipulated to breed consent for privacy invasions no one understands and "innovations" no one asked for.

Nobody wants this and they know it. So they’ve seized the means of cultural production and consensus building and are warping them to their ends.

For instance, this week all of the major social media companies including TikTok, YouTube, and Meta (owner of Facebook and Instagram) refused to run paid ads for a forthcoming documentary about Elon Musk directed by Alex Gibney. This is called elite solidarity (trailer below).

Similarly, Amazon’s MGM Studios has produced and now buried a film called Artificial, a reportedly scathing biopic of OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman, written and directed by Luca Guadagnino. The film is finished and for months MGM has refused to release it. However, recently it was purchased by Neon and will be released by the independent distributor (trailer below). 

This is a level of control over the spigot of information the Robber Barons of the last century could only dream of. 

The wealthy have always enjoyed sympathetic coverage in US media. This is the thrust of Noam Chomsky's 1988 book Manufacturing Consent. But this isn't sympathetic coverage. It’s media capture: a level of control that would make a mid-twentieth century authoritarian jealous. 

When it comes to non-consensual AI deployments, networked surveillance, and deep invasions of personal privacy, nobody wants this. They know it, but we’re gonna get it anyway.

– 

Thanks to those who checked in after not getting the newsletter for two Sundays. On the 20th, I was celebrating my birthday with the group chat in the deep desert. This Sunday, grading won my attention.