Good morning sorry I am late. Slept in. Emma did school drop-off today. Had two whole G&Ts last night so even with the 8 ½ sleep I feel horrible. Fun times, fun times. Maybe I’ll go back to bed.

RIP Marjane Satrapi. Persepolis is an amazing, haunting, beautiful film. And newly timely. Never read the comic, guess I should. Also apparently she directed a film starring Rosamund Pike about Marie Curie? I want to see this now.

Good news they are not gonna cram SpaceX stock into your index funds so we can all breathe easy on that one little itty bitty slice of hell pie that is reality. Whew. That was going to be a pain in the ass. Hey did I tell you I think AI sucks?

Also good news the first person got a religious exemption from using AI. Man I was ahead of the curve on that one. But I was wrong: we didn’t need to start a new religion, just needed to become catholics. Didn’t see that coming.

Look at me copping out by reporting the news to you.

Hey Adobe can you clean up after yourself? do I really need three versions of Photoshop on my computer at once? Delete that old shit. Or at least have a preference for it.

Yes, I am old. I — well, we, my wife and I jointly — still subscribe to the Adobe Creative Suite. It’s the GenX equivalent of when your grandparents kept making stroganoff or making you go to a Shoney’s.

Join the GMHHAY slack! Reply to this email and ask for an invite if you’re a human who likes chatting with other humans about topics such as these within!

Big news today there is a new album from Slift, perhaps the greatest current psych rock band. It is awesome. It is not as crazy, so far, as their previous albums, but I am here for it. It is called Fantasia. I am on track four. Slift fuckin rules. My god I love this band.

Unfortunately my copy is not yet here. Thank Sub Pop.

We will have to tide us over with perhaps one of the greatest “studio sessions” videos ever made. Who doesn’t want to play psych rock in a giant van der graff generator.

Some music-related bits:

Afghan Whigs tickets go on sale for the new dates on their US tour. The Presale code in the email was incorrect and I literally hit “reply” to their marketing email saying that and someone manually personally sent me back an email with the correct code and that was pretty awesome. So I bought mine on Wednesday. But you can buy yours now. Did I write to you a month ago about how I left a Whigs show halfway through because it was the same as always? Yes, yes I did. Am I going to go again anyway? Yes I am. Cmon man, it’s at Cat’s Cradle. That’s gonna rule.

This band I love, Faetooth, is also playing Cat’s Cradle, but they are the opener to Die Spitz and were added to the bill after it sold out, and I do not especially care about Die Spitz. But I am sad. I want to see Faetooth. Their last record was phenomenal. There was a band Emma wanted to see tonight and it was sold out, but we got tickets for cost on Subhub, though. First time I ever tried to buy second-hand Cats Cradle tickets. If it works, I guess I will try this with Faetooth. I’ve also got half a hope to go there and beg my way in promising to leave after the opener. Those dudes have seen me around enough. Maybe it’ll work. Fingers crossed.

Hrm. Bit of a dilemma here. The two “writeable” topics that have been rolling around in my head the last few days are the recent Mike Masnick essay about the “despotification” of the internet, and good ole Graham Platner. But neither topic is, um, exactly right for gmhhay?

The Masnick essay is a bit inside baseball and probably too hefty of a load for GMHHAY. Like first you gotta read his essay and then read my thoughts and really it is the sort of thing that should actually be a Medium post or a skeet thread but god I hate doing those things these days. But I do think the distinctions between his analysis and mine are important?

Eh, fuck it. I’ll keep it brief. I gotta get it off my chest. Better to do it here than go all pundit and public-intellectual again. Can’t have that.

Masnick attributes most of our online woes to closed systems and capture by the fascists and plutocrats and he is, of course, correct there. He is correct to say that the architecture of the internet is important. He is correct to say that open is better than closed and we need more open internet systems. I agree with all of this. I disagree in two areas:

First: I disagree advertising is responsible for this. Mildly, peripherally contibutory? Yeah. If advertising never existed at all these people would have had to find a different business model which maybe would have lead to a completely different — closed, exclusive — internet. Good or bad, that one. Debatable we’d be any better off. Definitely in a different place, though.

And yes there is an “attention economy” now — though I dispute we did not have one before. Yes advertising needlessly and awfully collects way too much data on people and spies. But this has been going on forever on the internet, and for a long time the internet was still pretty groovy even when AdTech was doing its thing. Shit, man, Doubleclick is 30 years old. The data thing is mostly a B2B financial grift in the battle against television, mostly a lie. Tim’s book summarizes this quite nicely.

But more to the point, in my day job, I have been sitting here in this lovely perch watching all of this supposed big evil AdTech economy for a decade now and nothing has fucking changed. Even now, as fascism rises, as Facebook and Twitter turn into the Goebbels channels, AdTech just keeps on doing its thing, stressing about app install rates, selling stupid Temu garbage, and rewarded ads in games. You could argue it’s indifferent or complicit to the current fall of America, but it is by no means the cause.

AdTech wasn’t the Goebbles in this metaphor, they were, like, Volkswagen or something. Ending up being complicit, but not the cause of the downfall. I mean we can SEE this: the Nazis and Russia and whatnot were trying to use adtech for their ends for ages. But they didn’t make real progress until social media and algorithms.

I’d also point out that the vast majority of consumer surveys say that customers don’t care that much about brands having their data. What they do care about, of course, is the government having their data to use against them, and you will notice right now there is a big outcry over the government buying consumer ad data. That is new. And if it were up to me the ad industry never would have had that data. But, like much in our life, that is a new violation of norms that we took for granted.

Second:

No one’s going to build a new open internet magically, because it can no longer be done by a bunch of maverick heroes. The plutocrats did not just realize they could control us through the platforms and algorithms, they realized they could capture the open internet and use it for their own ends. Their discovery is made. You cannot put that genie back in the bottle.

Masnick seems to have not fully shed Silicon Valley and still thinks the solution lies in the little guy just building a thing and beating the big guy. Ain’t gonna happen. The big guys have mastered crushing the small app. They got bribery, they got economic starvation, they got fast-follow imitation. Shit soon they’ll probably have targeted prosecution and deportation at their disposal.

Only way to make an open internet now is the way it started — the government needs to do it. Maybe built it themselves, at the very least codify what Lina Khan attempted through the courts and radically expand what can be tackled with antitrust.

We need attention antitrust. At the minimum. We probably need an actual public social media network like we have NPR.

What ACTUALLY should happen is the government should prosecute Musk for the kiddie porn on X and confiscate the whole damn imminently-public company. Fold SpaceX into NASA, spin out Starlink to a public internet platform, make X.com a publicly-owned PBC, and Grok as, god help me, the basis of a public AI.

Rallying the troops to make more and better open internet aint gonna do it any more than those poor individual oil wildcatters could fight against Standard Oil before we had antitrust. This is exactly why governments exist, man. Don’t let those fuckers convince you governments can only be evil. Screwworms what?

Moving on to Platner…

I kid, I kid. I’ll spare you long thought explorations about Schumer’s sanity, Death in June, redemption, the distinction between opinions, public vs private humor, ideals, reality, all of it. It’s a mess. We are in this mess because of Schumer mainly. My opinions on who I would vote for in the primary are different than the general and all of that is different than were I to put any effort into campaigning for my ideas.

Maybe Monday. Except we’ll have quality Walmart and Studio work content for you on Monday.

I guess we’ll see how things shake out this week.

I do think at this point, though, that it’s a mess we’re gonna have to just ride out.

Unless Stephen King steps up.

Jane let’s see what was up with Jane yesterday. Oh right Girl Scouts, last meeting of the season, the Daisies do a bridging ceremony into Brownies, there is an actual bridge involved and a mirror and these amazing cupcakes that were half daisies and have brownies and had an actual little brownie on one half of the cupcake damn I don’t know who decorated those, but they were next level.

Jane was insane basically the whole time. Said her Gril Scout pledge in cat language - “meow meow meow.”

Before that while at dinner she covered Emma’s mouth to stop her from saying something and we spent most of dinner trying to break through to her to apologize. I am trying so hard to get her to learn that the quicker you apologize, the eaiser it is. That an apology isn’t real if the subject doesn’t hear it. That her brain isn’t going to think of a clever way to avoid it. That that is the path to no friends.

But then Emma pointed out that, you know, kids her age: they barely ever apologize to each other, and they are all still friends?

Man I don’t know. Maybe all of society is a myth.

Justa mix for you today. Mostly new stuff. Except the Cramps and the Carter Family I guess. Lol. New Gelli Haha live on KEXP last night maybe she’ll suddenly get as big as Angine De Potrine.

OK have a good weekend. See you Monday. Off to Walmart now so, you know. I feel good.