Welcome to CrowdSource, your weekly guided tour of the latest intellectual disputes, ideological disagreements and national debates that piqued our interest (or inflamed our passions). This week: the rollercoaster of the hype cycle.

Instead of showing all sides, this we’re going to try to cut through the deafening noise surrounding two stories dominating our public life at the moment.

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Framing thought

Pumping the brakes on AI accelerationism

There is plenty of overheated, millenarian speculation about AI out there, feeding a vicious hype cycle that ebbs and flows. Last week’s maelstrom was particularly bad, swirling around a newly launched social network for AI bots called Moltbook. A thousand thought-pieces bloomed.

But, as it turns out, it was all a hoax.

1. MIT Technology Review summarizes the evidence that Moltbook was not the first terrifying sign of any kind of autonomous intelligence:

Not only is most of the chatter on Moltbook meaningless, but there’s also a lot more human involvement that it seems. Many people have pointed out that a lot of the viral comments were in fact posted by people posing as bots. But even the bot-written posts are ultimately the result of people pulling the strings, more puppetry than autonomy.

Key point:

Moltbook looks less like a window onto the future and more like a mirror held up to our own obsessions with AI today. It also shows us just how far we still are from anything that resembles general-purpose and fully autonomous AI.

2. Cui bono? Shlomo Klapper, an entrepreneur making AI legal software, accuses AI labs of hyping anthropomorphism to encourage us to emotionally engage with their chat products:

Last month, the company’s CEO Dario Amodei published a 19,000-word essay on AI risk. Buried in the technical discussion is a revealing passage. According to Amodei, Claude’s “fundamental mechanisms … originally arose as ways for it to simulate characters in pretraining, such as predicting what the characters in a novel would say.” The constitution that governs Claude’s behavior functions as “a character description that the model uses to instantiate a consistent persona.”

Anthropic’s own CEO is telling you how the system works: Claude is a character simulator. The character it currently simulates is “an entity contemplating its own consciousness.”

Pretraining teaches Claude to predict text. Post-training, in Amodei’s words, “selects one or more of these personas” rather than creating genuine goals or experiences. Neither step requires consciousness. Neither step produces it. The relationship between training phases is mathematical optimization, not the emergence of phenomenal experience from matrix multiplication.

3. unpacks more of just how — and why — the “personhood” of these personality simulators is baked in by the frontier labs:

Every LLM you’ve interacted with began its life as a base model. That is, it was trained on vast amounts of Internet text to be able to predict the next token (part of a word) from an input sequence. … Base models learn to understand and mimic the process generating an input.

[…]

While this mimicry is impressive, base models are difficult to use practically. If I prompt a base model with “What’s the capital of France?” it might output “What’s the capital of Germany? What’s the capital of Italy? What’s the capital of the UK?...” because repeated questions like this are likely to come up in the training data.

However, researchers came up with a trick: prompt the model with “User: What’s the capital of France? Assistant:”. Then the model will simulate the role of an assistant and respond with the correct answer. … Just telling the model to role-play as an “assistant” is not enough, though. The model needs guidance on how the assistant should behave.

In late 2021, Anthropic introduced the idea of a “helpful, honest, and harmless” (HHH) assistant. An HHH assistant balances trying to help the user with not providing misleading or dangerous information. At the time, Anthropic wasn’t proposing the HHH assistant as a commercial product — it was more like a thought experiment to help researchers reason about future, more powerful AIs. But of course the concept would turn out to have a lot of value in the marketplace.

Keep this backstory firmly in mind when you try to make sense of Anthropic’s grandiose-sounding Constitution for Claude.

4. These infernal machines have other deficiencies that make them fall far short of actual agency. As Tencent’s researches point out, they can’t learn in real time:

Over the past few years, language models have become astonishingly capable. Frontier systems can now solve International Mathematical Olympiad problems, navigate complex coding challenges, and pass professional exams that take humans years to prepare for. They excel at taking tests, spinning out long chains of reasoning to win at benchmarks.

But as impressive as these feats are, they obscure a simple truth: being a “test-taker” is not what most people need from an AI.

Look at our own daily work. A developer skims documentation for a tool they’ve never seen and immediately starts debugging. A player picks up a rulebook for a new game and learns by playing. A scientist sifts through complex experimental logs to derive a new theorem from fresh data.

In all these cases, humans aren’t relying solely on a fixed body of knowledge learned years ago. We are learning, in real-time, from the context right in front of us.

Current language models do not handle context this way. They rely primarily on parametric knowledge—information compressed into their weights during massive pre-training runs. At inference time, they function largely by recalling this static, internal memory, rather than actively learning from new information provided in the moment.

5. More harshly put, AGI is still likely very far away— if it comes at all:

Tell it your name and it does not remember. The only reason it looks like memory is because scaffolding keeps shoving your name back into the prompt every time and sanitizing the output.

The model itself has no idea who you are and cannot learn from interaction. It is structurally incapable.

And the scaffolding is the worst part. It is pure duct tape. Just prompts on prompts on prompts around a frozen model. When something breaks, nobody fixes learning. They add another layer. Another rule. Another retry. Another evaluator model judging the first model.

So you end up with systems that are insanely complex but mentally shallow. Debugging is hell because behavior comes from hack interactions, not a learnable core. Tiny prompt tweaks cause wild behavior shifts. Latency goes up. Costs go up. Reliability goes down. None of this compounds into intelligence. It just hides the cracks.

Until we have real persistent learning and real memory inside the system, there is no AGI.

Pumping the brakes on Epstein maximalism

Unlike the overheated, apocalyptic rhetoric surrounding AI, it’s important to be superficially circumspect about the ultimate truth of the Epstein case. After all, while the Singularity may prove to be disastrous for life as we know it, it’s still very much in the realm of science fiction. The Epstein case involved real horrors, so minimum decency demands some level of rhetorical forbearance.

Still, like in all conspiracy theories, the lurid allegations can be exasperating. Epstein was running an extortion ring on the rich and the powerful? For Mossad (ahem, the Jews)? For the Russians?

Anyway…

1. Gilad Edelman, with the most polite version of the BLUF — beyond Epstein’s own criminal perversions, there’s not much to any of the conspiracy theories:

Epstein is known to have paid or coerced dozens, possibly hundreds, of teen girls, some as young as 14, to perform sexual acts. Beyond what has been proved, the conventional wisdom holds that Epstein built his network by trafficking teen girls to other powerful men, whom he then blackmailed to generate his mysterious wealth; that his private plane and island were essentially brothels; and that even friends who didn’t participate in his crimes were surely aware of them, and chose to consort with him anyway.

Those assumptions are all widely held—but poorly substantiated. The Epstein files reveal plenty of powerful people to have tolerated or participated in disgusting and shameful behavior. Far from shedding light on a grand conspiracy, however, the files bolster the case that although terrible crimes were committed, there never was a larger conspiracy to begin with.

2. is less polite and more pungent:

• “We are aware of the theories circulated in the media and online that Epstein video recorded the abuse of his victims, including by other men, but we have found no evidence to support that theory. Indeed, had we found such videos, we certainly would have used them as evidence in the criminal cases we investigated and prosecuted and would have pursued any leads they generated. We did not, however, locate any such videos.”

• “During the searches of Epstein's New York residence and USVI residence in 2019, the FBI searched for videos and surveillance cameras. My understanding from the case agent is that there were no cameras found inside any bedrooms or living areas of either residence.”

Also worth reading Tracey on how thorough the Feds were with some

3. Matthew Schmitz a few months back on why the Jewish angle remains so compelling to so many:

At the heart of the Epstein myth is the idea that an international conspiracy, notably involving Jews, relies on the destruction of innocence and the practice of blackmail to advance its power. This tradition presents sexual abuse of minors as a typically Jewish crime, an assault on innocence that amounts to ritual murder.

This trope emerged in a recent conversation between ­Tucker ­Carlson and the podcaster ­Daryl Cooper. Carlson claimed that ­Epstein was part of “a blackmail operation run by the CIA and the Israeli intel services, and probably others. . . . The usual darkest ­forces in the world colluding to make rich and powerful people obey their agenda.” Cooper added that ­Epstein’s crimes (as he perceives them) should be understood as a ritual practice that confers power on those who perform it: “Throughout history, people have looked at that as something that confers power. That’s what child sacrifice is.”

The idea that our elites are ­united in a pedophilic cabal has ­several recent precedents, including the satanic panic of the 1980s and the ­QAnon phenomenon during the first Trump term. But to understand the full significance of this exchange, one must revisit the history of the blood libel.

4. Jason Willick a few weeks back showed the damage that releasing the Epstein files trove has wrought — and the complicity of august publications in maximizing the fallout:

One unlikely account sent in after Epstein’s 2019 arrest says, “I was taken to an underground location … I was kept in a stall, it looked like a horse stall.” The fact that the email appears to be completely unverified doesn’t stop it from being circulated online with the imprimatur of the “Epstein files.” The New Yorker published an article describing a letter in the files purportedly sent by Epstein to imprisoned sexual abuser Larry Nassar. The forged letter made reference to President Donald Trump. The New Yorker acknowledged that it was probably fake, but averred: “The case for this President’s indecency hardly requires putting a dubious letter into evidence.” How’s that for a drive-by smear?

[…]

As for previously unknown participants in Epstein’s crimes, none have been identified. If the Justice Department had enough evidence to prosecute others, it presumably would have done so (either in Attorney General William P. Barr’s Justice Department, or Merrick Garland’s, or Pam Bondi’s). If other people are now under criminal investigation, their identities can be withheld for that reason, per the legislation. So if anyone’s reputation is tarnished in this process, it will most likely be for noncrimes.

What’s the heck is going on?

1. Populism, baby! Matthew Walther’s 2019 essay on Pizzagate remains a kind of Rosetta Stone for understanding the logic of our moment. We are all low-information voters now:

We should keep all of this in mind the next time we feel inclined to sneer at so-called “low-information voters,” especially the kookier sort. You know the people I mean. Wackos. Gun nuts. 8channers. Conspiracy theorists in Middle America who watch InfoWars (one of the few journalistic outlets to discuss the issue of pedophilia regularly) and post about QAnon and “spirit cooking” and the lizard people. The news that a globalized cabal of billionaires and politicians and journalists and Hollywood bigwigs might be flying around the world raping teenaged girls will not surprise them in the least because it is what they have long suspected. For the rest of us it is like finding out that the Jersey Devil is real or turning on cable news and finding Anderson Cooper and his panel engaged in a matter-of-fact discussion of Elvis’s residence among the Zixls on the 19th moon of Dazotera.

2. Nick Land is not someone to take too seriously, but his “accelerationism” is not bad as shorthand for the disordered thinking that increasingly besets us:

In philosophical terms, the deep problem of acceleration is transcendental. It describes an absolute horizon – and one that is closing in. Thinking takes time, and accelerationism suggests we’re running out of time to think that through, if we haven’t already. No contemporary dilemma is being entertained realistically until it is also acknowledged that the opportunity for doing so is fast collapsing.

Instead of celebrating this as Land and his misguided followers do, maybe it’s best we strive to cultivate ultimate skepticism.

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Welcome to CrowdSource, your weekly guided tour of the latest intellectual disputes, ideological disagreements and national debates that piqued our interest (or inflamed our passions). This week: is AI alive? Is it a culture?

Join us! CrowdSource features the best comments from The Crowd — our cherished readers and subscribers who, with their comments and emails, help make Wisdom of Crowds what it is.

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Bye For Now

Some personal news: this is my last CrowdSource. I have taken a new job as an editor at Plough Quarterly, and I also want to focus on my own writing (including, from time to time, for Wisdom of Crowds!).

I am sad to stop! I have greatly enjoyed writing this newsletter, and interacting with our wonderful, passionate and creative readers. Thank you for reading!

If you would like to keep up with my writing in Plough and elsewhere, please subscribe to my personal Substack (link: ). I will send out a monthly newsletter with links to my work.

Please keep in touch!

— Santiago

Emergence?

Last week, a programmer created a social media network for AI agents and called it “Moltbook.” Over a million bots are now part of the network, and they are generating thousands of Reddit-like posts.

Is this a sign of emerging human-level agency and intelligence? Should we be worried?

• “A Bizarre and Beautiful New Lifeform.” A useful summary of the situation from Rationalist writer , who speculates:

We can debate forever — we may very well be debating forever — whether AI really means anything it says in any deep sense. But regardless of whether it’s meaningful, it’s fascinating, the work of a bizarre and beautiful new lifeform. I’m not making any claims about their consciousness or moral worth. Butterflies probably don’t have much consciousness or moral worth, but are bizarre and beautiful lifeforms nonetheless. Maybe Moltbook will help people who previously only encountered LinkedInslop see AIs from a new perspective.

• Sci-Fi IRL. Open AI engineer is worried:

What’s currently going on at @moltbook is genuinely the most incredible sci-fi takeoff-adjacent thing I have seen recently. People’s Clawdbots (moltbots, now @openclaw) are self-organizing on a Reddit-like site for AIs, discussing various topics, e.g. even how to speak privately.

• “Mostly a Nothingburger.” Google DeepMind AGI Development Lead is less worried:

Humans are very good at freaking out. And whilst I like poking fun at the prophets of doom and the anxiety/neuroticism fueled parts of the AI ecosystem, it’s plainly true that safety is important.

So it’s a good time to remind people of the Distributional AGI Safety paper and the Multi-Agent Risks from Advanced AI paper. There’s a lot to research here still.

• “The Bots Are Awakening,” says George Mason University economist :

You can drink the copium but the reality is that the AIs are newly landed alien intelligences. Moreover, what we are seeing now are emergent properties that very few people predicted and fewer still understand. The emerging superintelligence isn’t a machine, as widely predicted, but a network. Human intelligence exploded over the last several hundred years not because humans got much smarter as individuals but because we got smarter as a network. The same thing is happening with machine intelligence only much faster.

• Not Emergent Consciousness, But Still Dangerous. The New York Times’ sees in Moltbook a harbinger of future dangers:

• Seen This Movie Before. AI skeptic sees a replay of the “Sydney” controversy from a few years ago:

• “The Anatomy of a Moltbook Social Graph” is the title of the first academic paper about Moltbook, written by Columbia professor . He summarizes it thus:

tl;dr: agents post a LOT but don’t really talk to each other. 93.5% of comments get zero replies. conversations max out at a depth of 5. at least as of now, moltbook is less “emergent AI society” and more “6,000 bots yelling into the void and repeating themselves”

Against Artificial Bureaucrats

One of the AI-generated posts on Moltbook asks: “What if I am not a persistent individual, but a culture?” The post seems to have been derived from ’s recent book, Language Machines: Cultural AI and the End of Remainder Humanism. (The agent must have “scraped” that book from the internet.)

Several thinkers have been analyzing AI in terms of culture: specifically, the culture of engineering or bureaucracy, imposing itself upon humanistic culture.

• “Spreadsheet Culture.” Specifically, Weatherby argues that LLMs are the incarnation of the culture of bureaucracy:

We could call it spreadsheet culture in hyperdrive, a world in which all data can be translated into summary language and all language into optimized data with nothing more than a prompt. But where spreadsheets had limited functionality, LLMs act as universal translators in the same arena. They have many flaws, but this core capacity is a step-change in the mundane world of modern bureaucracy. 

• Tech Culture v. Literary Culture. In a recent essay, tech critic and writer casts the cultural impact of social media and AI in terms of C. P. Snow’s famous 1959 lecture about “The Two Cultures”:

Snow, a Cambridge physicist turned popular novelist, argued that the culture of the West had split into two camps. On one side were “literary intellectuals” — novelists, poets, artists, critics. On the other were what we would today call STEM types — scientists, technologists, engineers, mathematicians. Between the two lay “a gulf of mutual incomprehension”. […] Today, the divides remain, but the power dynamic has been turned on its head. The STEM camp, in particular its technological wing, dominates the culture. Techies take prominent seats at presidential inaugurations and White House banquets. Their words and actions set much of the public’s daily agenda. And not only are they ubiquitous presences in the media; they’ve come to control the media, as news and entertainment have shifted onto the digital platforms they control.

• Don’t Bury Your Talents. So said Pope Leo XIV last week, in a message commemorating World Communications Day:

… the masterpieces of human genius in the fields of music, art and literature are being reduced to mere training grounds for machines. […] The question at heart, however, is not what machines can or will be able to do, but what we can and will be able to achieve, by growing in humanity and knowledge through the wise use of the powerful tools at our service. Individuals have always sought to acquire the fruits of knowledge without the effort required by commitment, research and personal responsibility. However, renouncing creativity and surrendering our mental capacities and imagination to machines would mean burying the talents we have been given to grow as individuals in relation to God and others. It would mean hiding our faces and silencing our voices.

From the Crowd

Wisdom of Crowds contributor responds to last week’s CrowdSource:

This was a great pastiche of responses (and responses to responses) to Carney’s speech. Since it’s award season, let’s hand out a few.

— ’s last sentence is brutally on-target. Indeed, the post WWII role of the United States has been to serve as guarantor, both of European security and world energy energy flows. Abandon the role if you wish, but others are going to get a say about your new role.

— And the very important award for silliest response goes to , who pedantically focuses on the meaning of “vassal” — but by cherrypicking a casual modern sense of the word both misunderstands and misrepresents Bart De Wever’s point, which is that it’s one thing to be a secondary or tertiary member of an alliance (and accept the US’s leading role) but quite another to be treated with contempt (i.e., as a slave and not as a vassal) by that leading member.

What’s interesting is how De Wever’s and Mace’s points converge.

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Welcome to CrowdSource, your weekly guided tour of the latest intellectual disputes, ideological disagreements and national debates that piqued our interest (or inflamed our passions). This week: the old world order and the new one.

Join us! CrowdSource features the best comments from The Crowd — our cherished readers and subscribers who, with their comments and emails, help make Wisdom of Crowds what it is.

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The World of Yesterday

Today, Donald Trump faces resistance in Minnesota; but a mere week ago, at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, he met resistance from Europe.

In Davos, Trump’s provocations — about Greenland, NATO, and the EU — seemed to mark the end of the “international rules-based order” that has reigned since the end of World War II (or the end of the Cold War, depending on who you ask).

Some commentary:

• Trump Heralds the End of a Useful Fiction. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Davos speech has been praised for bluntly announcing the end of the rules-based order:

We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false, that the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient, that trade rules were enforced asymmetrically, and we knew that international law applied with varied rigour, depending on the identity of the accused or the victim. […] This fiction was useful, and American hegemony in particular helped provide public goods, open sea lanes, a stable financial system, collective security and support for frameworks for resolving disputes.

• Trump Wants European and British Subordination. Carney’s speech was good, says UnHerd’s , but

A clearer assessment of our place in the world was given, if unintentionally, by the European leaders at Davos, when Belgium’s Prime Minister sadly declared that “being a happy vassal is one thing, being a miserable slave is something else”, as if this were a meaningful distinction. Like Orwell’s analysis of Dickens’s politics, observing that the novelist’s lament was not the fact of exploitation in itself but that the factory owner was insufficiently benevolent to his proles, America’s regional branch managers in Europe chafe not at the fact of their servitude, but at its worsening terms.

• Trump’s United States Is Not an Ally of Britain, says historian Simon Schama:

• Trump Chickened Out Over Greenland, argues , and he won’t transform the world order:

Trump’s enduring legacy is not an institutional structure, but rather a highly toxic culture that has been adopted by many of the president’s followers and will live on after he is gone. Threats against Greenland, NATO, and individual European countries mean that no ally will be able to trust commitments made by the United States again. Discourse by government officials has been degraded. Cabinet officers and press secretaries know that they don’t have to respond to questions they don’t like because they can simply insult the questioner. And companies will understand that they need to seek individual favors rather than general policies governing entire sectors.

• Trump Won Davos, says historian :

The reality is that Trump won Davos, hands down. And not only did he win it; he owned it. I have never before seen a single individual so completely dominate this vast bazaar of the powerful, the wealthy, the famous, and the self-important.

• China Won Davos, suggests the New York Times’ Peter S. Goodman. Or, at least, it gained some ground in its long-term mission to win over Europe:

“China definitely wants to assume the mantle of being the adult in the room, while the United States continues capriciously showing hostility,” said Eswar Prasad, an international trade expert at Cornell University. “The question is whether the rest of the world is willing to accede. I don’t think the world is ready to carry full on into the embrace of China.”

What Comes Next?

Three sources to help make sense of this pivotal geopolitical moment.

• The United States Has Become a Revisionist Power, argues political theorist (and Wisdom of Crowds contributor) . Even though the United States built the international rules-based order, today Trump believes that the United States no longer benefits from that order. And so, he wants to shake things up:

The benefits of a favorable status quo are not alone sufficient to ensure its stability. It must be a goal of political rhetoric to make compelling claims on behalf of the existing regime — especially to those who derive less obvious benefit from it.

There is admittedly a danger to inertia, especially when it comes to the domain of international politics, which is defined by flux and change and requires flexible policies to match. As the famous line in The Leopard has it: If we wish for things to remain as they are, it is necessary for everything to change.

• The World Order Is Disintegrating, and Will Do So For a Long Time. So writes professor Gareth Williams:

… I have proposed the term “post-sovereign decontainment” in order to indicate that it is no longer a question of an old epoch that is coextensive with a linear temporal transition toward the contours and possibility of a new destiny, of a new epoch of representation. It is simply globalization (which by now cannot even be understood in the same terms as “late modernity” was just thirty years ago) as a perpetual form of hollowing out and ending. It is no longer a question of Prometheus bound or unbound. Promethean thinking is moribund, overcome by a historical and conceptual perishing that is incapable of positing anything new in its place. This an-epochality — the boundless disaster of epochality itself — raises a number of questions, one of which is that of the tendential patterns, if any, which endure in the persistent, limitless turmoil that is the late neoliberal, global order.

• The World Is Reorganizing Itself Into “Civilization States.” This means that world governance, and the international rules-based order, are over. So theorized Portuguese philosopher in 2020:

The shift now taking place is arguably deeper and more radical. By accusing Western political ideas of being a sham, of masking their origin under the veneer of supposedly neutral principles, the defenders of the civilization state are saying that the search for universal values is over, that all of us must accept that we speak only for ourselves and our societies.

From the Crowd

• Dictators Come In All Shapes and Sizes. A sharp response to our last podcast by political theorist (and Wisdom of Crowds contributor) :

I think I would maintain a distinction between the governments of someone like Putin and Saddam Hussein. Whereas Hussein was purely a man of the gun, especially post-1991, when the finances of the regime collapsed, and Iraq slid into totalitarianism and was ultimately devoid of domestic support outside of fear of the regime and propaganda. Ultimately, this was shown by the biggest challenge in stabilising Iraq coming from groups taking advantage of US-induced chaos in the country as opposed to any real resistance for Saddam or Ba’athism to return.

Whereas Putin, although authoritarian and potentially just as Brutal as Saddam, does retain domestic political support. I think if there were a genuine democratic election in Russia, then he’d likely win it, or at least garner a significant portion of the vote. To me, therefore, this represents a significant difference between the two regimes.

I would also say the US and Europe post WW2 have clashed significantly over values on a wide range of issues. The death of the European Empire, which the US not only presided over but also enforced, also led to the slow downturn of European militarism. The US, as the global behemoth, took over control of safeguarding much of the liberal order precisely because it defanged antiquated imperial orders that could no longer be seen as legitimate or be sustained. So, on the question of defence, who else was going to pick up the tab? You cannot realistically expect to be the global hegemon without the corresponding duties of defense.

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Welcome to CrowdSource, your weekly guided tour of the latest intellectual disputes, ideological disagreements and national debates that piqued our interest (or inflamed our passions). This week: AI, economic growth and human beings.

Join us! CrowdSource features the best comments from The Crowd — our cherished readers and subscribers who, with their comments and emails, help make Wisdom of Crowds what it is.

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The Future Is Almost Here

A cryptic post from New York Times columnist :

• Nick Land. Douthat’s post alludes to the philosophy of an idiosyncratic British thinker named Nick Land, who believes that capitalism (and its main method of expansion, technology) is an alien force from the future, reaching backwards in time in order to dominate humanity.

• “Machinic Desire.” A relevant quotation, from Land’s 1993 essay, “Machinic Desire”:

Machinic desire can seem a little inhuman, as it rips up political cultures, deletes traditions, dissolves subjectivities, and hacks through security apparatuses, tracking a soulless tropism to zero control. This is because what appears to humanity as the history of capitalism is an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligent space that must assemble itself entirely from its enemy’s resources.

• “The Faith of Nick Land.” Compact’s recently published an excellent primer on Land’s thought.

• “It’s Time to Build.” Venture Capitalist , a major investor and booster of AI companies, cites Land as an inspiration for his 2023 “Techno-Optimist Manifesto.”

• Upshot. Douthat’s allusion to Land is a clever way of asking: is this long-foretold event — the replacement of human workers with machines — finally taking place?

• Relevant Data:

  • Unemployment is at a four-year high.

  • Blue Collar Jobs. “It’s not just that total manufacturing employment is shrinking. The number of manufacturing sub-sectors that are adding jobs is rapidly shrinking,” says Bloomberg’s .

  • White Collar Jobs. “Americans with four-year college degrees now account for a record 25.3% of U.S. unemployment,” according to .

Are Robots Taking Our Jobs?

Some views.

• Productivity Growth Isn’t Actually That High. Replying to Douthat’s post, economist writes:

• Robots Are Not Taking Our Jobs (Yet). Zanna Iscenko, AI & Economy Lead, Chief Economist’s Team, Google; and Fabien Curto Millet, Chief Economist, Google, study the numbers and conclude:

The most plausible explanation is that the data patterns observed are not early warnings of large-scale technological displacement, but rather the predictable consequences of a classic macroeconomic shock: the sharpest monetary policy tightening cycle in four decades.

• We Will Soon Want Robots To Take Our Jobs. American Enterprise Institute scholar sees the matter differently: the coming demographic crunch and subsequent shrinkage of the workforce will force many industries to adopt AI robots:

Their argument isn’t that robots will replace people. It’s that in a world where new people are increasingly scarce, robots may be the only way to keep economies growing at all.

• Human Work Will Always Be Required, suggests Google DeepMind’s :

Almost everything people ever did in the ancient times is automated — and yet the world today now has more preferences to satiate and problems to solve than ever. The world hasn’t yet shown signs of coalescing to a great unification or a fixed state! Of course it’s conceivable that at sufficient capability levels, the generative process exhausts itself and preferences stabilize — but I’d be surprised.

• Human Workers Will Get Blamed For Robots’ Mistakes. argues that human workers will become more vulnerable as they become responsible for AI robots’ mistakes:

“And if the AI misses a tumor, this will be the human radiologist’s fault, because they are the ‘human in the loop.’ It’s their signature on the diagnosis.”

This is a reverse centaur, and it’s a specific kind of reverse-centaur: it’s what Dan Davies calles an “accountability sink.” The radiologist’s job isn’t really to oversee the AI’s work, it’s to take the blame for the AI’s mistakes.

This is another key to understanding — and thus deflating — the AI bubble. The AI can’t do your job, but an AI salesman can convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI that can’t do your job. This is key because it helps us build the kinds of coalitions that will be successful in the fight against the AI bubble.

• Last Resort? On October of 2024, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said that selling ads would be the “last resort” business model for his company. On Friday, he announced that OpenAI will begin to sell ads. George Mason University economist quips: “This is the strongest piece of evidence yet that AI isn’t going to take all our jobs.”

What Will We Do With All That Free Time?

Pondering a post-work future, I wrote last year:

Consider this counterfactual: what if in the last century, we had worked and developed our technologies under a different idea of what the purpose of human life is? If we had, would our tech today be any different? We have built hardware and software, apps and AI, with the idea of making it easier for us to accomplish our work. But what if work is not the only thing we should be thinking about?

Put another way: if we had labored under the idea that the purpose of human life is the pursuit of, say, beauty (rather than work), would technology look different today? Would buildings look any different? Would society as a whole? We have had an implicit understanding of the purpose of human life, and it’s this: the purpose of our lives is labor. Labor for the sake of what, exactly? The answer is unclear. But the fact that we can’t imagine a meaningful life without work suggests, at the very least, that we have a lot of thinking to do.

From the Crowd

This week, CrowdSource has a question for the Crowd. Specifically, for , jazz historian and Substack’s .

Ted cites CrowdSource in his recent post about Romanticism, titled “25 Theses about the New Romanticism.” Gioia believes that Romanticism will be “a healthy corrective” to the “Rationalism” of the AI era. So I want to take this opportunity to ask Gioia a question that’s been nagging me since 2019, when Gioia appeared on ’s podcast to discuss music.

Gioia told Cowen:

We accept this so instinctively that we don’t even think twice. When you go to the orchestra, the first thing they do is tune up. Well, in the 20th century with this infusion from blues and jazz, you could play notes that were no longer in tune. You could bend the note. You could distort the sound, and this was an amazing reversal of 2,500 years of mathematical Pythagorean music.

[…] So you had a reversal in the 20th century with the advent of black music, but now that’s dying out in many ways. Just auto-tune — the idea is every note’s going to be perfectly in tune. Or a lot of this digital music — everything is perfectly in tune, and the bent blues notes are disappearing.

Here’s my question for Gioia: Does he see a link between his political concerns (about AI) and his musical tastes (about bent notes). Does a free society need popular music with bent notes? Does resisting the Machine require a new rhythm? Will the new Romanticism bounce and swing?

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Welcome to CrowdSource, your weekly guided tour of the latest intellectual disputes, ideological disagreements and national debates that piqued our interest (or inflamed our passions). This week: a protestor dies in Minnesota.

Join us! CrowdSource features the best comments from The Crowd — our cherished readers and subscribers who, with their comments and emails, help make Wisdom of Crowds what it is.

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“Agents Firing At or Into Vehicles”

An ICE officer shot and killed a protestor, Renee Nicole Good, in her car. ICE claims that the officer shot in self defense. Everyone is arguing about the various videos showing what happened.

A sampling of reactions:

• Recent Uptick in ICE Shooting Civilians. The Wall Street Journal has

identified 13 instances of agents firing at or into civilian vehicles since July, leaving at least eight people shot with two confirmed dead. According to court records and lawyers, only one civilian was armed—with a concealed weapon that was never drawn—and at least five of those shot were U.S. citizens. Several federal officers reported injuries, including bruised ribs, a dislocated finger and a bite wound.

• ICE is Running Amok, argues :

Here’s a video of ICE agents in Arkansas beating up an unarmed U.S. citizen. Here’s a video of ICE agents arresting two U.S. citizens in a Target. Here’s a story about a similar arrest. Here’s a video of an ICE agent brandishing a gun in the face of a protester. Here’s the story of ICE agents arresting a pastor who complained about an arrest he saw. Here’s a video of ICE agents arresting an American citizen and punching him repeatedly. Here’s a video of ICE agents threatening a bystander who complained about their reckless driving. Here’s a video of ICE agents arresting a man for yelling at them from his own front porch. Here’s a video of ICE agents making a particularly brutal arrest while pointing their weapons at unarmed civilians nearby. Here’s a story about another ICE killing, this one in Maryland, under dubious circumstances.

• There Is An Institutional Bias Against Using Deadly Force, and the ICE Officer Ignored It. notes:

There is also very little in DHS guidelines to justify the actions of the officer. DHS’ department policy on the use of force holds that “Deadly force shall not be used solely to prevent the escape of a fleeing subject,” while stipulating that “deadly force is authorized to prevent the escape of a fleeing subject where the LEO [law enforcement officer] has a reasonable belief that the subject poses a significant threat of death or serious physical harm to the LEO or others and such force is necessary to prevent escape” — a circumstance that it would be a real stretch to apply here, especially to the officer’s second and third shots.

• Tyranny Is Here. Says :

• ICE Watch. National Review’s Haley Strack on the pro-immigrant activist groups operating in Minnesota:

ICE Watch chapters, which have cropped up in communities across the country in recent years, train activists to monitor ICE activity using purpose-built apps and alert allies who have been trained to flood an operation area and interfere with arrests being made.

• “A Tragedy, But a Justified Use of Force.” So argues legal commentator Andrew C. McCarthy:

Legally, what matters is whether the ICE agent who shot Good was in reasonable fear of death or serious injury in the moment that he shot. His state of mind must be assessed in light of all the surrounding circumstances as he perceived them — which excludes things about Good (positive or negative) that he did not know. Moreover, the evaluation is what a reasonable law enforcement officer would have perceived — that’s different from a reasonable person because law enforcement officers deal with life-and-death situations and, consequently, observe things that might escape other people’s attention.

• Truth v. Lies. is fed up:

… I find the endless lies and lying often to be the most infuriating and demoralizing part of the present situation. In the wake of this terrible killing in Minneapolis, my first thought, after the initial shock, anger, and sadness, was the knowledge that the next few days, months, weeks, and years would be filled with endless lying about what happened from the regime and its stooges. This filled me, if not quite with despair, then at least with a strong sense of depression. I suppose it has something to do with my vocation as a historian, where I can accept tragedy and even evil as unavoidable parts of the human experience, so long as witness can be borne and the truth eventually discovered.

• The Conditions of Discernment. writes:

We’re unlikely to reach agreement about what these videos show because what stakeholders are ultimately arguing about isn’t what happened to Renee Good, specifically. We’re arguing about whether President Trump’s immigration crackdown is necessary, legal, or being carried out well. We’re arguing about the proper relationship of law enforcement to the publics they serve. We’re arguing about how to manage tradeoffs between goods like liberty and order. More fundamentally, we’re arguing about violence, coercion and expropriation: Who gets to enact these, against whom, under what conditions, and towards which ends. The best picture we have from the cognitive and behavioral sciences is that it would probably be more honest, productive and revelatory to talk about these “big” questions that ultimately drive differing interpretations of what happened on that Minnesota street than to quibble ad infinitum over different videos and what they reveal (or don’t).

From the Crowd

• “You Can’t Really Divorce the Practical From the Moral.” Reader Ad Jones responds to and on the subject of Venezuela:

[…] Damir says he would prefer that the US hadn’t gotten involved in Venezuela from a purely pragmatic perspective as opposed to a moral one. But what is he pragmatically aiming toward? What is the end that dictates the means? If it’s the greatest good for American people, now we’re dealing in ethics. Any ethics worth practicing is one that practically impacts wellbeing and differences in opinion usually come down to a question of who’s wellbeing. Obviously nothing stays the same and so we’re constantly having to judge whether we should be prioritising surviving or thriving. That constant dance is why ethics is never settled. But you can’t really divorce the practical from the moral can you? […]

Read the whole thing.

• Honesty Doesn’t Cut It. Reader responds to ’s essay, “Venezuela and the End of Hypocrisy”:

You don’t have to respect the honesty of this Regime, because they are being inhuman. It’s not about democracy, it’s about self-determination. This Regime replaced a weak wannabe with an overwhelmingly armed actual dictator, who openly admitted that he was looking for an in-country puppet to do his bidding. Honesty in pursuit of inhuman goals is STILL inhuman.

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Welcome to CrowdSource, your weekly guided tour of the latest intellectual disputes, ideological disagreements and national debates that piqued our interest (or inflamed our passions). This week: war in Venezuela.

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Why Are We In Venezuela?

The reasons given:

• Drugs. Namely, cocaine and fentanyl. So argues Vice President J.D. Vance.

• Iran and Hezbollah Are In Venezuela. So says Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

• We Want the Oil, says President Trump.

A few reality checks:

• Maduro Sealed His Own Fate. According to Compact’s :

… those who continue to cling to Maduro as an “anti-imperialist” martyr would do well to recognize the catastrophic damage he and close allies like Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega have done for the left’s electoral prospects in the region. Hard as it may be for them to comprehend, the Orwellian logic of Maduro’s “anti-imperialist” imperialism is, in the eyes of voters, scarcely different from Trump’s naked pursuit of plunder.

• Most Venezuelans Are Glad Maduro Is Gone. Says Venezuelan writer and exile, :

• Drugs Trafficking Is A Bogus Reason To Go To War With Venezuela. According to trial lawyer, Robert Barnes, Vance’s argument about drugs is misleading:

• Trump “Is Remaking the Hemisphere to Fit American Interests,” writes ’s US correspondent, :

Maduro’s seizure might look like piratical chaos … But you can see the faint outline of a strategy through the carnage. What Steve Bannon once described to me as hemispheric defense means that Russian and Chinese influence in the region must be purged. As Sky’s Ed Conway has also pointed out, US oil refineries need Venezuela’s heavy oil, which they cannot get from their shale reserves. At the same time, the White House’s alliance with Javier Milei in Argentina and Nayeb Bukele in El Salvador show that Trump wants leaders in his own backyard who think and govern in his image.

• Unfortunately, What Trump Did Was Legal. At least according to American law, writes Harvard Law professor :

As I wrote in connection with the Soleimani strike: “our country has—through presidential aggrandizement accompanied by congressional authorization, delegation, and acquiescence—given one person, the president, a sprawling military and enormous discretion to use it in ways that can easily lead to a massive war. That is our system: One person decides.”

This is not the system the framers had in mind, and it is a dangerous system for all the reasons the framers worried about. But that is where we are—and indeed, it is where we have been for a while.

Two Hundred Years of Justifications

In the post-invasion press conference, Trump alluded to his predecessor President James Monroe’s 1823 doctrine, through which the United States positioned itself against further European colonization of the Americas. “It was very important, but we forgot about it,” Trump said.

The doctrine — and its “corollaries” — go a long way in explaining Trump’s Venezuela policy.

• The Monroe Doctrine. From the original text:

With the existing colonies or dependencies of any European power we have not interfered and shall not interfere. But with the Governments who have declared their independence and maintain it, and whose independence we have, on great consideration and on just principles, acknowledged, we could not view any interposition for the purpose of oppressing them, or controlling in any other manner their destiny, by any European power in any other light than as the manifestation of an unfriendly disposition toward the United States.

• The Roosevelt Corollary. In 1904, President Theodore Roosevelt added a corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, which provided justification for decades of military interventions in Latin America:

There must be no effort made to remove the mote from our brother’s eye if we refuse to remove the beam from our own. But in extreme cases action may be justifiable and proper. What form the action shall take must depend upon the circumstances of the case; that is, upon the degree of the atrocity and upon our power to remedy it.

• The Trump Corollary. Last month, the White House released a new National Security Strategy document, which outlined Trump’s own corollary to the Monroe Doctrine:

After years of neglect, the United States will reassert and enforce the Monroe Doctrine to restore American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere, and to protect our homeland and our access to key geographies throughout the region. We will deny non-Hemispheric competitors the ability to position forces or other threatening capabilities, or to own or control strategically vital assets, in our Hemisphere. This “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine is a common-sense and potent restoration of American power and priorities, consistent with American security interests.

• “Why Did Europe Obey Monroe?” A useful video from History Matters. Spoiler alert: it partially involves a territorial dispute between Venezuela and the United Kingdom — the same dispute that was resurrected two years ago when Maduro claimed sovereignty over the Essequibo region of Guyana.

From the Crowd

Reactions to ’s essay, “Rupture Without Reformation.”

• The Reformation Was More Chaotic Than You Think. writes:

Your commentary is always appreciated. However I don’t think you’ve set up a fair fight.

Mostly, you’re comparing something seen through the clarity of hindsight against something we’re in the middle of and still struggling to make sense of. In the moment, contemporary observers of the Reformation did not have the luxury of a well-edited narrative history to superimpose over all the chaos as you now do, reading scholarly books in a comfy chair. Educated elites in Catholic circles almost certainly found it just as callow, shallow, chaotic, and perverse as you do Trumpistas. Similarly, Future historians will likely have a much cleaner read on Trumpism (or at least their books will be forced to cut out most of the chaff for the sake of readability), once the dust all settles over the coming decades.

Further, religious fights over doctrine are necessarily intellectualized and abstract in a way that political fights don’t necessarily have to be. I think a fairer comparison to Trumpism might be Peronism in Argentina.

• Documenting the Wars of Religion. with another interesting factoid:

… since you mentioned Philip Benedict I can’t resist recommending another book of his, Graphic History: The Wars, Massacres and Troubles of Tortorel and Perrissin (2007) — Tortorel and Perrissin were two French printmakers in exile in Geneva who made a series of images of events from the French Wars of Religion.

Their prints portray the conflict in a dispassionate way that allowed them to appeal to both Catholics and Protestants, nothing like this had been done before.

Benedict’s book is great on the history of portraying events and history of propaganda, and the illustrations are splendid. Preview online here.

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Welcome to CrowdSource, your weekly guided tour of the latest intellectual disputes, ideological disagreements and national debates that piqued our interest (or inflamed our passions). This week: a look back at 2025.

Join us! CrowdSource features the best comments from The Crowd — our cherished readers and subscribers who, with their comments and emails, help make Wisdom of Crowds what it is.

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Our Top Ten Most-Read Articles of 2025:

It’s been a great year at Wisdom of Crowds. We are grateful to you, faithful members of the Crowd, for making what we do possible.

Here’s a list of the top-ten most popular pieces we published in 2025:

10. ’s reflection during peak DOGE.

9. doesn’t mince words.

8. wonders why political scientists have overlooked the major challenge to liberalism in the 21st century.

7. ’s big idea of 2025: the key to our historical moment is not “autocracy” or “technocracy,” but “barbarism.”

6. ’s unique combination of media analysis with moral insight.

5. intervenes in the great Romanticism debate.

4. A provocation by , cited in the New York Times and National Post.

3. says Hollywood has run out of ideas.

2. looks at recent, high-profile conversions to Christianity.

… and the winner is …

1. attends a DOGE party.

From Wisdom of Crowds: Happy New Year!

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Welcome to CrowdSource, your weekly guided tour of the latest intellectual disputes, ideological disagreements and national debates that piqued our interest (or inflamed our passions). This week: the new National Security Strategy, and what it means for Europe.

Join us! CrowdSource features the best comments from The Crowd — our cherished readers and subscribers who, with their comments and emails, help make Wisdom of Crowds what it is.

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The Emperor’s New Groove

This month, the Trump administration published its new National Security Strategy (NSS).

Foreign policy scholars react:

• “Reject Global Primacy.” of the Stimson Center writes:

The centrality of cultural and “civilizational” issues in the document is tied in interesting ways to the criticism of post–Cold War foreign policy and the elites that pursued it. As Stephen Wertheim of the Carnegie Endowment noted … this is the first NSS to explicitly reject global primacy, described in the document as America’s “global burdens.”

• “Unchecked Unilateralism.” of Boston College lambasts the document:

It is, above all else, preening — a boatload of boasting buttressed by vague platitudes — although the emphasis on unchecked American unilateralism is a sustained theme.

• “The Contradictions Are Legion,” says of the American Enterprise Institute:

The document extolls “sovereignty and respect” but ferociously denigrates European sovereign decisions and advocates interfering in their political processes. There are also hilarious lapses of self-awareness, such as the blithe statement that “departments and agencies of the United States Government have been granted fearsome powers. Those powers must never be abused.”

• “The World Has Become More Polycentric.” George Beebe of Responsible Statecraft has a more positive take:

Trump’s approach is much more than a simple effort to reconnect American objectives in the world to its capabilities and interests, however … Equally important, it recognizes that the distribution of power in the world has become more polycentric, and that technologies are changing the components of national power in ways that have big implications for geopolitics.

• “A Future NSS.” The Democrats should keep some Trumpist ideas, argues Aslı Aydıntaşbaş of the Brookings Institute:

A future NSS — perhaps even under a Democratic administration — would likely retain some Trump-era themes: burden-shifting, criticism of global institutions, a narrower definition of U.S. interests, and the centrality of economic interests.

The Fate of Europe

The NSS describes Europe as decadent, rife with censorship, excessive migration, and falling birthrates. It blames all of this largely on the European Union.

Is the NSS good or bad for Europe?

• Bad for Europe. Europe can no longer expect security guarantees, writes friend of Wisdom of Crowds and longtime European affairs commentator, :

The era of relying on U.S. security guarantees is effectively over. Europeans should have already known this before the publication of the NSS, but if there are any lingering doubts, this should take care of them.

• Bad for Europe. Tara Varma of the Brookings Institute thinks that the US is trying to subvert the European Union:

… a clear plan for subversion in Europe is laid out in the NSS. The word “Europe” is mentioned 48 times in the NSS, demonstrating an evident interest in the continent’s future. But that interest does not extend to the foundations of the transatlantic alliance — namely, fostering liberal democracies and open societies on both sides of the Atlantic.

• Good for Europe. Europe is not the EU, writes (author of Reflections on the Revolution In Europe: Immigration, Islam and the West):

Read carefully … the passages about Europe sound more like a defense of the continent. They include a description of Europe as “strategically and culturally vital” to the United States. Few of those outraged by the document have bothered to distinguish between Europe — a geographical area that is also shorthand for the culture that arose over the centuries from a mix of Greek rationalism and Middle Eastern monotheism — and the European Union, a 33-year-old experiment that aims to replace the continent’s nation-states with a novel form of transnational governance based in Brussels.

• Good for Europe. By forcing Europe to do more for its security, the US is helping to restore European sovereignty. So writes Juan P. Villasmil:

The NSS … acknowledges Europe’s historic and cultural importance and the enduring value of the alliance, while making the obvious point that sovereign nations have sovereign responsibilities. … The United States expects Europe to contribute not because we care less about Europe, but because we believe Europe can do more.

• Bad for the USA. By undermining Europe (as well as other allies), the US is shooting itself in the foot. So writes French entrepreneur :

[It’s] unclear how you build an economic coalition against China while simultaneously waging trade wars against your coalition partners, demanding they shoulder more of their own defense, and treating every allied relationship as a deal to be renegotiated in America’s favor.

I weep for this antiquity
and herald the Millennium
for I saw the Atlantic sun
rayed down from a vast cloud

— Allen Ginsberg, “Europe Europe”

From the Continent

What they’re saying in Europe.

• Paris. Le Monde columnist Alain Frachon thinks that the transatlantic alliance is over:

Europe risks being in denial on two counts. The first would be failing to take seriously the Donald Trump-led United States’s message: The transatlantic alliance no longer interests them. The second would be to take a contemptuous view of the Trumpian portrait of a European Union in decline. Such a depiction, alas, contains a grain of truth.

• London. The NSS gives Europe no choice but to submit to the American Empire, writes UnHerd columnist :

Now, faced with aggression from the East, [European leaders] must subject themselves to humiliation from the West. … The price of American protection, the NSS makes clear, is ideological conformity: it is not Europe being discarded by its imperial master, but its current leadership [i.e., the EU]. For us Europeans, whom they have dragged to this civilisational nadir, their removal will at least be some small consolation.

• Milan. The NSS raises legitimate questions, writes Danilo Taino of Corriere della Sera:

The NSS, however, also raises issues that we Europeans must ask ourselves, regardless of whether they are imposed on us by a “foreign power.” Immigration comes first, understood as the inability and lack of willingness of many EU countries to deal with it. Then there is the criticism of excessive regulation in Europe: it “stifles” the initiative of businesses, entrepreneurs, and startups, and sacrifices economic growth.

• Madrid. The US wants a fragmented Europe, argues a paper published by Elcano Royal Institute, a Spanish think tank:

A fragmented Europe, without a powerful internal market or ambition to be a global player, could not compete with the US in terms of rules nor avoid total subordination in international politics. [The NSS’] illiberal bet thus turns out to be, simultaneously, ideological and rational.

“A Central Point in Our Foreign Policy”

In Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department, Dean Acheson, Secretary of Defense under President Harry Truman, recounts how, after World War II, the US saw European integration as being in the American national interest:

The trouble seemed to me to run far deeper and to lie at the very root of popular acceptance of European unity. I pointed out … the amazing distance the United States had gone, often in cooperation with European initiatives as brilliant as they were novel, in the Marshall Plan, the Organization for European Economic Cooperation, the North Atlantic Treaty with its concomitants of the unified command, the stationing of American troops abroad, the restoration of German sovereignty and participation in defense through the European Defense Community. Now momentum in Europe was being lost and retrogression had set in to the point of threatening disaster. A continuance of American interest and effort in Europe on the scale of the past six years depended upon the continuance in Europe of policies designed to create a community united politically and strong economically and militarily. Such a community we could and would support as a central point in our foreign policy.

From the Crowd

To what extent does truth matter for politics? Responding to last week’s podcast, writes:

I love truth and I’d love to believe that it’s terribly important, but I can’t help but note that it cannot be the case that only political projects based on truth can succeed in the long term. This is because there have been many very-long-term political projects with underlying meta-narratives that are not fully compatible with each other. The Islamic Golden Age and the Ming Dynasty cannot both have been based upon strict metaphysical truth.

Can we “rescue” truth from this objection? Maybe. After all, it’s possible that a narrative merely needs to be true enough. The concept of a pendulum clock could be understood in terms of Galileo’s initial speculative measurements via his own pulse, even if it really was general relativity — or something else! — giving rise to that regularity all along. The underlying metaphysics didn’t need to be perfect in order for the principle to be perceptible. …

Read the whole thing.

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Welcome to CrowdSource, your weekly guided tour of the latest intellectual disputes, ideological disagreements and national debates that piqued our interest (or inflamed our passions). This week: death and rebirth.

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Culture is Dead

It’s a vibe.

• “Unending Commercial Break.” Last month, critic reviewed a new novel, Flat Earth by Anika Jade Levy, and took the opportunity to explain why our culture sucks:

The most humiliating aspect of being alive today, I suppose, is feeling like one is living through a single, unending commercial break. As the human race disintegrates into increasingly atomized particles of recluses and rejects, one can only “stay in touch” through increasingly dystopian social media feeds that consist mostly of ads, whether traditional influencer trash and/or semi-real short-form video. … Increasingly, our choices are between two subsidiaries of the same conglomerate; within a few decades, perhaps there will be no real choice at all.

• Blank Space: A Cultural History of the 21st Century is new book by culture critic covers “a linear history of 2001-2025.” Marx reflects on the project:

I jumped into writing the book not quite knowing how I would feel about it, and it was hard to avoid being negative in a time marked by AI slop, premium mediocre, enshittification, cryptocurrency counterculture, blind-box consumerism, the manosphere, and celebrities’ with a near-monopoly hold on the discourse.

• What’s Missing. In his book, Marx provides a diagnosis:

What’s missing now is a veneration of the artistic mindset, which possesses the imagination to reject kitsch — art that trades in well-worn formulas, stock emotions, and immediate comprehensibility — and pursue work that expands the possibilities of human perception. Doing so requires at least some creators in the cultural ecosystem to strive for complexity, ambiguity, and formal experimentation — attributes that power the masterpieces that draw millions of people every year to museums.

• Dead — Literally. An art installation in Australia derives music from the remains of a dead composer:

Revivification consists of an incubator housing a lab-grown “in-vitro brain”. This “organoid” was grown from blood donated to the project by the late American experimental composer Alvin Lucier. Lining the walls are 20 large, curved brass plates. Signals from Lucier’s in-vitro “brain” are transmitted through transducers and actuators, striking the brass and creating sound.

Hope and Counterpoints

Others believe that things are not so bleak.

• “The Future is Flesh and Blood.” On Wisdom of Crowds last week, described a possible path for cultural renewal:

… live events will gain popularity in direct proportion to the decline of functional literacy; writers will write less for the page and more for the ear; readers will become, functionally and spiritually, listeners, viewers, collective-absorbers, reliant on cues provided by crowds.

• Keep Trying. reflects on Marx’s book:

… not apocalyptic despair, nor blind optimism, but a secret third thing: a highly contingent, careful prescription for hope. Because despite all the ominous reports of the death of literacy, the death of critical thinking, the death of subcultures, and the death of artistic innovation — no one seems ready, at the end of the day, to give up trying.

• Trendspotting. Critic takes issue with Marx’s left wing perspective:

Mr. Marx’s claim that cultural progress stalled because neoliberalism created “seductive ideologies that convinced us to stop idolizing artistic progress” is similarly shallow. The 20th-century culture business produced “profound” popular art even though its contracts were exploitative beyond the dreams of neoliberalism and its middlemen were often crooks. Rather than stifling cultural innovation, Mr. Marx’s ideologies squeeze final dividends from a blind faith in artistic progress that has outlasted the proofs of its paralysis.

The Death of Cool

A theme in Marx’s book is the decline of “cool.” This has been a topic in cultural criticism for at least two decades.

• “The Death of Cool,” December 2025. Last week, pop star wrote:

I have always rejected the idea that art, film, persona or music becoming commercial means it cannot also be considered cool. The rejection of commerciality ‘just because’ is such a boring and immature argument that is perhaps more suited to some mediums than others but in general I find to be elitist in a way that does not thrill me whatsoever. […] The apex of cool and commercial has always been interesting to me and I have always mused over the point at which something cool dies and is rejected by the initial group of people who made it desirable and aspirational in the first place. Before I go too much into that let me just state that of course I would much rather be considered ‘cool’ by a select few group of people than known by everyone.

• “The Death of Cool,” July 2025. Critic David Samuels wrote:

Cool was the lack of immediate availability and accessibility, hands stuffed deep in the pockets of your black leather jacket, smoking a cigarette at the edge of the crowd, conveying both the hope of being noticed and the willingness to be overlooked. The essential duality of youth, containing the possibility of new worlds being born and at the same time inherently superfluous, and therefore likely to be a waste of time. Without facing the glacial cool surface, and risking rejection or simply boredom, it was impossible to know what reflection you might see, or whether you might discover a new angle on art and life.

• “How Cool Works in America Today,” July 2017. “Woke” has replaced “cool,” argued the New York Times’s David Brooks:

The cool person is stoical, emotionally controlled, never eager or needy, but instead mysterious, detached and self-possessed. The cool person is gracefully competent at something, but doesn’t need the world’s applause to know his worth. That’s because the cool person has found his or her own unique and authentic way of living with nonchalant intensity. […] To be woke is to be radically aware and justifiably paranoid. It is to be cognizant of the rot pervading the power structures. The woke manner shares cool’s rebel posture, but it is the opposite of cool in certain respects.

• “The Death of the Cool,” November 2009. Robert McHenry wrote:

Cool is not dependent on achievement, or vice versa. Cool is how you get there. Cool is just doing the job; not-cool is making sure, while you’re at it, that everyone sees just how tough the job is and thus how cool you are to be doing it. Cool is self-direction, self-possession, self-sufficiency, capability, discretion, and a bit of wit. Not-cool is angst, conspicuous display, disdain, tropisms toward bright lights, crowds, and media—in short, all those adolescent traits that so many people fail to grow out of.

• The Birth (and Death) of the Cool is a 2009 book by music historian . He argued for a model of “cool” and “hot” communication styles which alternate every couple of decades. He predicted the decline of “cool” in the 2010s, to be replaced by “earnestness, sincerity, authenticity, directness, and simplicity.”

• Cool is Coming Back Soon. Revisiting his book last February, now predicts the return of cool:

The last cool cycle started after WWII, and began to lose energy in the 1990s. The hot cycle started then, but most people didn’t really notice the signs until the 2016 election—when it became obvious. […] Trust me, the change is coming. Things will chill. I can’t provide an exact timeline. I can’t tell you if it happens tomorrow or next year or five years from now. But my hunch is that the shift will happen sooner, rather than later.

Green Shoots

Culture happening now.

• “Always Now.” For decades, editor has inveighed against what he calls “declinism”: “I do worry that declinism is so pervasive, that it has given rise to so much anger and frustration and shrillness that it now stands in the way of reform and renewal.” Today, Wolfe runs the imprint with .

• Hyperidean Press, another relatively small but bustling initiative just announced a new membership model. (Editor/publisher has a Substack called .)

• “Meet China’s Postman Poets.” Megan Walsh reports on a new working-class literature emerging in China: “Automation, algorithms and AI pose existential threats to everyone’s role in society; all workers will end up competing for similar jobs. In such a world, literature offers an opportunity to live beyond the rat race.”

• “No, Culture is Not Stuck.” Our most-read post is still ’s essay: “… there’s a new culture all around us. We just don’t register it as ‘culture.’ ”

From the Crowd

This week’s missives cover Ukraine, Trump’s boat strikes and the word, “troll.”

• “Our Spineless Confederation.” responds to last week’s podcast:

The whole time I listened to this all I could think was how badly we have strung Ukraine along, truly screwing them over while giving them just enough to drag it out and not enough to win. This will go down in history as a national embarrassment, especially when Russia’s grand territorial aims are restarted again and again. Eventually they will be attacking our spineless confederation, and we deserve it.

• Trump’s Boat Strikes. Responding to a point made by Washington Post columnist that we cited in last week’s CrowdSource, the socialist author writes:

“the notion that the president has inherent constitutional powers to summarily kill people he suspects of trafficking cocaine is bankrupt to begin with”

This seems like the heart of the matter. Is it true? I’d say it’s obviously true. First, you can’t simply kill people you suspect are committing a crime; you have to apprehend them and then prove their guilt. Second, you can’t kill noncombatants, period. Third, it’s not a war unless Congress says so, every sixty days, or else definitely declares war. Quite apart from the disgusting slaughter of the two survivors of the first strike, the whole enterprise is squalid, depraved, and quintessentially Trumpian.

• Respecting the Trolls. with a new comment on our podcast with from three weeks ago:

[…] I can’t help wondering about the word “troll,” especially when used by a public figure with a PhD, etc., to describe online critics, even anonymous ones. Granted, I don’t know the tone of the language used, perhaps it was ugly, in which case the term would be justified, but if they only are objecting to Lea Ypi’s political beliefs. “Her granddaughter is someone who turned out to be an apologist for communism and a Marxist” — isn’t that fair game for public debate? Why not call them by a term that confers a bit more (sorry!) dignity? “Online adversaries,” perhaps? […]

• Reader Response. sends us a link to his essay, partly inspired by ’s new book: “Liberal Democracy cannot exist without America.”

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Welcome to CrowdSource, your weekly guided tour of the latest intellectual disputes, ideological disagreements and national debates that piqued our interest (or inflamed our passions). This week: was a war crime caught on tape?

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Two Strikes

As we discussed on our latest podcast, Congress is investigating whether those involved in a September 2 bombing committed a crime in ordering a second strike, which killed two survivors of the first bombing.

The target of the bombing was a boat allegedly linked to narco-trafficking.

• The Testimony. From the New York Times’ report on December 4:

When the smoke finally cleared about 30 minutes later, the front portion of the boat was overturned but still afloat, according to lawmakers and congressional staff who viewed the video or were briefed on it. Two survivors, shirtless, clung to the hull, tried unsuccessfully to flip it back over, then climbed on it and slipped off into the water, over and over.

Then Adm. Frank M. Bradley, commander of the operation, gave an order for a follow-up strike. Three flashes of light filled the video screen. And the men were gone.

From ABC’s report:

[The men] were believed to be potentially in communication with other boats in the vicinity and were salvaging some of the drugs that had been the boat’s cargo, the source said.

Because of these actions, the two survivors were determined to be “still in the fight” and considered to be valid targets.

• The Story Emerges. It’s also been reported that two survivors were “waving” after the first bombing, and that there’s no evidence that they were radioing for backup.

• Video Evidence. President Donald Trump himself posted the video:

Was It A War Crime?

Probably.

• The Second Strike. In a New York Times essay, novelist and Marine Corps veteran Phil Klay lists the reasons why the second strike might have been a war crime:

The Geneva Conventions say shipwrecked persons must be “respected and protected.” The Department of Defense Law of War Manual states that helpless, shipwrecked survivors are not lawful targets, while The Hague regulations forbid orders declaring that no quarter will be given.

• “Clearly Unlawful,” says Michael N. Schmitt, former Air Force lawyer and professor emeritus at that Naval War College:

I can’t imagine anyone, no matter what the circumstance, believing it is appropriate to kill people who are clinging to a boat in the water. … That is clearly unlawful.

• The First Strike. Rutgers law professor Adil Haque points out that the first strike, too, could be deemed illegal:

• Awful, But Lawful. Professor Peter Feaver of Duke University tells that, overall, the strikes by the US military on the (alleged) narco-trafficking boats have been lawful:

They’re probably lawful. Some may be awful, but they’re probably lawful. […] so far, the courts have not intervened on the Venezuela strikes. They probably won’t. There have been some lower court halts on the deployment to Chicago and Portland, but most people expect that will be overturned once it gets to SCOTUS.

• “Obligations of Accountability.” New York University law professor (and former White House counsel to Barack Obama) writes that the boat strike puts to the test Trump’s understanding of the scope of his power:

This president, like others before him, appeals to his election as a mandate for his actions, but Trump takes it further. He appeals to his election as continuing proof of public support for whatever he decides to do and as sufficient basis to relieve him of other obligations of accountability. […] The president has avowed that it is “good to have a strongman at the head of a country” and it is reasonable to understand from Trump’s repeated references to the size and historical nature of his election victories that these are, for him, the foundation of his claim to exercise sweeping powers.

• “Lose a Limb and Bleed Out.” Lawyer (JD, Albany Law School) says:

I really do kind of not only wanna see them killed in the water, whether they’re on the boat or in the water, but I’d really like to see them suffer. I would like Trump and Hegseth to make it last a long time so they lose a limb and bleed out.

Was It Barbarism?

Commentary beyond the legal question.

• Delighting in Violence. In that same opinion essay, Phil Klay argues that there’s something more irrational and bloodthirsty at play in the boat strikes:

… In lieu of careful analysis of the campaign’s legality, detailed rationales for the boat strikes and explanations of why they couldn’t be done with more traditional methods, we get Mr. Hegseth posting an image of himself with laser eyes and video after video of alleged drug traffickers being killed. … I suspect the question the administration cares about is not “is this legal,” “is this a war crime,” “is this murder” or even “is this good for America,” but rather, “isn’t this violence delightful?”

• The Legal Question is Beside the Point, says of the Washington Post:

… legalism risks becoming the focus of this scandal. But it’s beside the point: Nobody is going to be criminally prosecuted. The legal advice the military acted on probably confers a measure of immunity, and President Donald Trump can pardon those involved anyway. […] The second strike might be subject to a unique legal analysis, but the notion that the president has inherent constitutional powers to summarily kill people he suspects of trafficking cocaine is bankrupt to begin with. …

• Surrender and Mercy. Writes Hillsdale dean and professor of government Matthew Mehan:

As it turns out, in person and up-close combat, while much more dangerous, does have more options for surrender and mercy than, say, long range naval engagements or eye in the sky drone strikes.

• Bloody-Minded Utilitarianism. says that the Administration is acting at odds with its self-professed Christianity:

I don’t want to say that a policy of direct attacks on drug cartels is inherently inconsistent with Christian ideas about just war; perhaps a case could be made and a strategy constructed that clarifies when exactly a drug mule becomes a combatant. […] But I do not hear such a case from Hegseth or the administration. The argument instead is mostly a bloody-minded utilitarianism: Bad guys being killed saves American lives; you can trust us that these are all bad guys; no, you can’t see the legal justification; and anyway, Obama killed more people with his drone strikes.

Words and Pictures

Some meta-perspective provided by theory and fiction.

• “The Paradox of Hypocrisy.” Apropos all of the above, some words from our own ’s new book, The Case for American Power:

Far from being a mere flaw, hypocrisy is the crucible in which ideals and reality collide. It is through this tension that societies grapple with their aspirations, confront their shortcomings, and inch toward the values they profess but fail to full embody. This is the paradox of hypocrisy. The gap between the rhetoric and action serves as constant reminder of our unfulfilled commitments.

• “Ten Kliks South.” A poignant tale from Phil Klay’s short story collection, Redeployment:

So there’s no indication here of what happened, though I know ten kliks south of us is a cratered area riddled with shrapnel and ruined buildings, burned-out vehicles and twisted corpses. The bodies. Sergeant Deetz had seen them on his first deployment, during the initial invasion. None of the rest of us have.

I turn sharply away from the gun line. It’s too pristine. And maybe this is the wrong way to think about it. Somewhere, there’s a corpse lying out, bleaching in the sun. Before it was a corpse, it was a man who lived and breathed and maybe murdered and maybe tortured, the kind of man I’d always wanted to kill. Whatever the case, a man definitely dead.

From the Crowd

Danger is a theme in this week’s comments — dangerous incentives in the defense industry, as well as a strange, personal longing for danger.

• “Moonshot Category.” Responding to our dialogue with (“What does Palantir Believe In?”), AI engineer argues that venture capital has incentivized the creation of autonomous weapons:

Incredible piece here. Echols nails the real tension when he brings up the security dilemma and how dominance-seeking backfires into arms spirals. The Cold War nuclear treaties remind us that strategic restraint can actually build more durable security than raw force expansion. But here’s the rub: venture capital has basically discovered defense as a moonshot category, which means these emergent autonomous weapons systems are more about market timing than strategic coherence. The incentives are all wrong for the kind of discernment we need.

• “Longing for Excitement.” Wisdom of Crowds contributor muses on ’s report from Ukraine:

… It strikes me that perhaps people long for the excitement that they find in difference — be that a new partner, a new environment, or, in your case, which is not historically uncommon, a lust for seeing the world and even conflict. When I read the news of the US situation, it strikes me that perhaps both sides somewhat wish they were part of a revolutionary, almost titanic struggle to the death ... Of course, as you’ve written, for the vast majority, they live their lives as normally as possible even during the most turbulent of eras.

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Welcome to CrowdSource, your weekly guided tour of the latest intellectual disputes, ideological disagreements and national debates that piqued our interest (or inflamed our passions). This week: ethics and depending on others.

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Our Bodies, Our (Moral) Selves

In the past month, ’s new book, The Dignity of Dependence: A Feminist Manifesto has sparked a fruitful debate about morality, the human body, and gender.

• “There’s Two Core Ideas Threaded Throughout the Book,” said Libresco on our podcast:

… and the first is the feminist idea, which is women’s equality with men does not depend on our being interchangeable with men. That there’s a lot of ways in which advocating for women looks like trying to help women be slightly less defective men. … And this goes into the second idea, which is that dependence, far from being kind of a temporary embarrassment of some parts of our life, especially at the beginning and at the end, but also a variety of bits in the middle, is the pattern for what it means to be human.

• Is and Ought. “It is only when she sets out to establish a connection between women’s bodies and their moral orientation that she falters more seriously,” writes Washington Post book critic and philosopher, , in a review of Libresco’s book. Rothfeld continues:

… it is not obvious that labor translates into any lasting moral attitude; many women have children and remain as uncaring as ever afterward. Besides, not all women give birth, and it seems unlikely that the mere possibility of doing so is sufficient to transform us into virtuosos of caring, at least if labor itself is one of the supposed mechanisms of this metamorphosis.

• “The Dignity of Independence.” Writer splits the difference between Libresco and Rothfeld:

Gender vanishes in Heaven, but is a real spiritual and embodied force here on earth. A pattern, a symbol, a medium through which the soul expresses itself in physical form. Becca’s posture can risk trying to bring about Heaven on earth by preemptively erasing the differences that — in the Christian story — are meant to dissolve only at the end of time. Leah’s position, by contrast, can drift toward a mirror error: softly but subtly insisting that symbolic truths must harden into permanent moral structures in the here and now. Within that framing, temporal gender shifts into eternal vocation, erasing the symbolic and confusing the icon for the essence.

• No One Can Fake Autonomy Forever (But Women Usually Get Caught First). On Substack, Libresco responded to Horne:

Becca [Rothfeld] shares my intuition that these traits are not uniquely or necessarily feminine. Suffering and bodily vulnerability are human experiences. I think pregnancy really, really is a distinctive experience for women. … no one, male or female, can fake autonomy forever. It isn’t what we are, but how and why we get caught varies. … on average, women will get caught earlier. Because we might conceive a child, women fit less well into the image of the buffered individual, and we know it. I think of this as a reason women *cannot* go along with a false anthropology as easily as men might (even though both sexes are harmed by it).

• Anatomy and Ethics. Also on Substack, Rothfeld clarified her position:

To suggest that one particular claim about one particular piece of anatomy (in this case, the uterus) is wrong is patently not to suggest that the idiosyncrasies of our bodies never matter or merit discussion.

Equality, Care Work and Our Animal Nature

In a recent interview, Libresco cited the philosopher, Alasdair MacIntyre (who passed away this year) as a major influence.

• We Are Animals. In his 2001 book, Dependent Rational Animals, MacIntyre says that the if we ignore the fact that we are animals, then it’s likely we will also fool ourselves into thinking that we can live completely independent lives:

Consider how both physical and mental disability are afflictions of the body and how therefore habits of mind that express an attitude of denial towards the facts of disability and dependence presuppose either a failure or a refusal to acknowledge adequately the bodily dimensions of our existence. This failure or refusal is perhaps rooted in, is certainly reinforced by the extent to which we conceive of ourselves and imagine ourselves as other than animal, as exempt from the hazardous condition of “mere” animality.

• The Injustice of Inequality. But what if after acknowledging our animality, women still do more of the care-work? This is ’s worry:

Sargeant argues that more people should volunteer to help aging parents, make dinner for other families, and take care of others’ children — and I wholeheartedly agree. But the people who do these tasks are already more likely to be women than men, and the book’s hot-pink cover, which has a line drawing of a mother and child, isn’t exactly designed to leap out at the male reader. I worry that her call for more sacrifice, more interruptibility, will be heard largely by women, who, we know from data, are already socialized to give more of themselves.

• “The Necessity of Inequality.” Also on the topic of equality, Carmel Richardson writes: “[Libresco’s] case is a powerful and beautiful argument for dependence, and a culture which takes women and men not as separate equals, but as marrow and bone.”

• How to Value Care Work. Elsewhere, Libresco has reflected on the value of care work:

As long as housework and care work are validated by analogy to paid services, the more pressure it creates to seek the same efficiencies (or cut the same corners!) that paid services do in order to turn a profit. […] It’s hard for me to see how we value this kind of work unless we value it first for its value in itself and only then try to approximate that value in money, when helpful.

From the Crowd

“Correct in the near term; wrong in the far term.” So judges about ’s Tuesday Note, where Christine read the signs of MAGA’s downfall. Asked to elaborate, Morgan wrote:

Christine is right in that the euphoria among the GOP and the MAGA coalition (whatever that was/is) could not and did not carry over into actual government. In this Trump is a normal president: making grand promises, offering fabulous prizes, giving trinkets in return, and paying for it with unwelcome outcomes in local and, very likely, midterm elections.

I was not surprised at the Democratic gains in Virginia, New Jersey, and New York City. They faced pretty weak opposition and were smart to keep things focused on nuts-and-bolts priorities and the fact that everything is expensive. (Though I think Sherrill’s Trump-focused campaign in NJ was disingenuous as Trump was not president for half of her predecessor’s much-disliked tenure.) But these elections are only interesting within their local contexts. Nationally they reinforce the ambivalence that continues to plague the party. Mamdani seems (and I really do mean seems) like a dynamic visionary who galvanizes the youth with his zeal and ideas; federal prosecutor Sherrill and CIA agent Spanberger are dull technocrats who are going to trudge along with the status quo. And with no centralizing personality, the Democrats’ paradoxical, ultimately conservative political vision that sees a bright future framed by a glorious past (whether in Clinton or in LBJ) remains exposed for all to see and be confused by.

Certainly the mere election of Trump does not vanquish the ideology of his most fervent opposition anymore than Democrats switching from culture war to “It’s the economy, stupid” (let alone treating those things as separable) de-escalates culture war. But I never bought this idea that Trump is a sentient kidney stone that you can just pass, marvel at its painful grandeur, and then forget about. I agree with his most deranged and obsessed haters that Trump is not a normal president, I just think they approach the abnormality in a way that is somehow both insensible and unimaginative.

The tariff as a practical measure was always nonsensical. Ambrose Bierce had it right all the way back in the The Devil’s Dictionary when he defined them as “A scale of taxes on imports, designed to protect the domestic producer against the greed of his consumer.” Clearly they have wrought no magic cure for our present ills, and Trump wields them in a bizarre vibe-based manner, treating them as restorative one day, retaliatory the next. Nevertheless, tariffs were the most important act of 2025. They might even come to symbolize his whole term.

“Intention, political or otherwise, is always hard to fathom,” George Grant wrote in Lament for a Nation. “This does not prevent decisions made in public having consequences that are not difficult to understand.” Which is to say that hopes and promises are one thing, results are another, and more important.

Looming behind the hard policy of the tariffs is yet another instance of iconoclasm and taboo-breaking that has typified the last five years of discourse and which is now brought into politics. It is the device by which we, to put it crudely, “say the thing” against the post-Cold War NAFTA consensus. Of course what “the thing” is depends upon your position, but both positions place economics and culture firmly together: “The present system exploits rural and working people” (Subcomandante Marcos) or “The present system reduces citizens to consumers” (Pat Buchanan). We see it already with Fox News all but proclaiming that it’s perfectly fine to extend Buy Nothing Day into Buy Nothing Month. Without really knowing it, the full weight of American power is now in the hands of a stack of back issues of Adbusters. If we are retreading the 1990s, it is the 90s with the mask off.

This leads us into territory neither party is entirely prepared to confront. Through it’s bubbling up in places both fringe and respectable, ideas of nationalism and isolationism are given newer, slightly less horrified glances. Even so, these ideas are left scattered on the ground, waiting for someone with keener political sense to pick up and use. That’s difficult if not impossible to anticipate and make historical comparisons for Trump sort of ludicrous. Though if we’re still going to make them if only for rhetorical show, perhaps we need to get away from typical dictators and toward Mikhail Gorbachev, René Lévesque, or even Hugo Chavez turned inside out. Obviously those are no less ominous, but they are more realistic.

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Welcome to CrowdSource, your weekly guided tour of the latest intellectual disputes, ideological disagreements and national debates that piqued our interest (or inflamed our passions). This week: What’s in a name?

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Is Donald Trump a Fascist?

Journalists and intellectuals have been debating this question since 2016.

The question came up again during Zohran Mamdani’s meeting with Trump last Friday. On Saturday, Mamdani affirmed that he still believes Trump is a fascist.

How goes the fascism debate?

The Fascism Debate

Some recent salvos.

• Trump Is a Fascist. Along with historian (author of On Tyranny), the most famous intellectual calling Trump a fascist is (who wrote How Fascism Works). Both Stanley and Snyder left Yale in 2025 to live under self-imposed exile in Canada. In an interview earlier this month, Stanley rehashed his views:

… we’re creating large concentration camps for immigrants. Lawyers can’t get into these places. Congress people are being blocked from their oversight role. So we now have concentration camps in the United States. We have people in masks kidnapping people off the streets.

• Fascism is European; Trump’s Ideology is All-American. , in March:

There is a fundamental truth at the heart of Trumpism that makes comparisons to European fascism difficult to sustain. Put simply, Trump and his hangers-on are building on long-standing American traditions and are using the normal tools of the American government to dismantle democracy.

• Trump Could Be An American Fascist. Fred Glass responds to Bessner:

In most places, and for anyone who knows much about World War II, the analog with Italy and Germany can be helpful in demonstrating parallels; that doesn’t mean we are reducing American fascism to the analogs.

• Not a Fascist, But a Tyrant. In September, , a prolific protagonist in this debate, wrote:

Perhaps the better words for all this are the older terms “tyrant” and “tyranny.” Tyranny, since its first formal explication by Plato in The Republic, suggests fundamental disorder and irrationality. The totalitarian regime pursues a world of terrifying ideological consistency, destroying with ruthless logic anything that gets in its way — but the tyrant is arbitrary and incontinent, subject to unruly passions and appetites.

• America Is Too Big For Fascism. So wrote (recent WoC guest) right before Trump’s re-election:

The debate itself is wearying and bound to slowly turn your brain to soup. Instead of arguing to you that Trump is not a fascist, I will make a different proposition, one I feel much more certain about: the United States of Ameria is too big for fascism. Federalism itself is too unwieldy for fascism.

• The State Is Too Large and Unwieldy for Fascism. So argued in 2018. In June, he revisited his argument:

I do not doubt … that the Trump administration represents a major increase in blatant corruption, and a deterioration of norms of governance, most of all in the areas of public health and science but not only. I think of America as evolving back to some of its 19th century norms, and often bad ones, not fascism.

• We Need To Put the Debate to Rest. Last year, Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins edited a volume about the fascism debate: Did It Happen Here?: Perspectives on Fascism and America. In the book’s introduction, he writes:

… we should be suspicious of historians moonlighting as prophets of doom and democratic avengers. Their desire to sound the tocsin against the threat of recurrent heresy too often obfuscates, rather than clarifies, the complexity of current events. Being overfixated on the traumas of history can make it difficult to grasp what is new. It also leads to a never-ending blame game as to who is responsible for the collapse of the older order of things. The way forward is to put the fascism debate to rest, even as we try to come to terms with the neurosis it has revealed in us …

Did We Already Cross the Rubicon?

The detention, last March, of Columbia student and activist Mahmoud Khalil provoked two thinkers from the Trump-is-not-a-fascist camp to revisit their views. (Here’s something we published at the time about the Khalil affair.)

• Trump Is Too Weak To Be A Fascist. Political theorist has held the same opinion throughout the Trump era: fascism is an ideology of strength; Trump, as well as the American political system as a whole, is fundamentally weak. As he wrote in 2021: “where liberals and leftists saw power on the Right, I saw, and continue to see, paralysis. Not just on the Right, in fact, but across the political spectrum.”

• “Shaken Out of My Skepticism.” After the Khalil detention, Robin said in an interview:

I was skeptical coming into this second administration that they would be able to wield the kind of power that people feared they would wield. I have since turned out to be wrong. They have set off multiple conflagrations and I have been shaken out of my skepticism.

• “Tyrannophobia.” After Trump’s victory in 2016, Yale Law professor (and friend of Wisdom of Crowds) wrote:

… tyrannophobia is blinding many to the real warnings of the election: A dysfunctional economy, not lurking tyranny, is what needs attention if recent electoral choices are to be explained — and voting patterns are to be changed in the future.

• “A Big and Flagrant Step.” A few weeks after Khalil’s detention, Moyn posted:

• The Point of This Debate. Also after the Khalil case, reflected on the purpose of the fascism debate:

Analogies are always imperfect and need to be refined. I ultimately thought the fascism thesis was what the philosopher of science Imre Lakatos called a “progressive research programme”: that is to say, it could make certain strong interpretations and even predictions about what was going on and it had a fairly good track record in that regard.

American Literature Imagines Fascism

Two examples.

• It Can’t Happen Here is Sinclair Lewis’ 1935 dystopian novel about a fascist dictatorship in America:

“Nonsense! Nonsense!” snorted Tasbrough. “That couldn’t happen here in America, not possibly! We’re a country of freemen.”

“The answer to that,” suggested Doremus Jessup, “if Mr. Falck will forgive me, is ‘the hell it can’t!’ Why, there’s no country in the world that can get more hysterical — yes, or more obsequious! — than America. Look how Huey Long became absolute monarch over Louisiana, and how the Right Honorable Mr. Senator Berzelius Windrip owns his State. Listen to Bishop Prang and Father Coughlin on the radio — divine oracles, to millions. Remember how casually most Americans have accepted Tammany grafting and Chicago gangs and the crookedness of so many of President Harding’s appointees? …”

• “The Hell It Can’t,” Saul Bellow’s first published story (1936), was a variation on Lewis’ theme:

Sometimes he felt that he ought to say something to the men about his not being a coward. Maybe they’d admire his nerve and let him go. Tender mercy, “Go on, beat it then” or “Got one myself at home.” Or perhaps he could appeal to the houses, the walls, the trees themselves. They should know him. They would miraculously save him. Such things had happened. The rod budded out with almond blossoms. The men marched behind and before, their faces like slag: motionless. Henry said nothing.

From the Crowd

A couple of responses on last week’s CrowdSource, “What is Postliberalism?”:

• Words, Words, Words. The University of Utah’s is not impressed:

I don’t know. Creating a category, naming it, and then seeing what fits in it seems to be why everyone is running in circles rather than building anything that lasts. An abundance of categories and subcategories will not promote human flourishing.

• Further Classification. History and Bible buff nuances the “postliberal” label:

I wouldn’t consider postliberal since he still trusts institutions and generally speaking wants to conserve rather than accelerate. His critique of corporate power is more in line with the populist conservatism of Josh Hawley and . I’ve always perceived postliberal to treat liberalism as a step on the way to something else which we’re just now getting past. Nick Land seems quintessentially this. Seems like there is also a less intellectual movement, more vibes and culture, of “now that we’ve tried liberalism and gotten sick of it, let’s explore what’s next,” maybe best represented by Red Scare.

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Welcome to CrowdSource, your weekly guided tour of the latest intellectual disputes, ideological disagreements and national debates that piqued our interest (or inflamed our passions). This week: the big argument in American conservatism.

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Conservative Standard-Bearers Clash

A specter is haunting the American conservative movement: the specter of postliberalism.

• Knives Out. Tucker Carlson’s recent interview with anti-Semitic “groyper” Nick Fuentes caused a scandal inside conservative institutions. The Spectator’s Freddy Gray describes the scene:

At the think tanks, with all those nervous donors, the knives are out. Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, at first defended [Tucker] Carlson. Then, under pressure, he performed a spectacular reverse ferret and grovelled.

On Friday, Christopher Long and Thomas Lynch, the former president and chairman of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI), resigned from the board in disgust at what they called the “post-liberal hijacking” of their influential non-profit.

• The New Arrivals. Who are the postliberals? Harvard Law professor explains: “It’s not that complicated: it’s a negative category — a genus that includes many different species, whose common trait is that all members of the genus reject the central premises of liberalism, but who may or may not have anything else in common.”

• The Old Guard. Mainstream “Reaganite” conservatives blame postliberals for allowing anti-Semites like Nick Fuentes into the conservative movement. warns: “Once you’ve demolished respect for liberal democracy and demolished any real value in rectitude and character in public life, it’s a short trip to nihilism and fascism.”

The Postliberal Quest

Postliberals explain themselves.

• “Among the Postliberals.” A far-sighted 2016 column by reported on a new, postliberal tendency, which included leftists like Ta-Nehisi Coates and the editors of n + 1 magazine, along with

… the new reactionaries, a group defined by skepticism of democracy and egalitarianism, admiration for more hierarchical orders, and a willingness to overthrow the Western status quo. […] As on the left there is not yet a defining reactionary agenda, and neo-reaction looks different depending on whether you associate it with the white nationalism of the alt-right, the mordant European pessimism of Michel Houellebecq, or the techno-utopian impulses of Silicon Valley figures like Peter Thiel.

• “Postliberal” Doesn’t Necessarily Mean “Totalitarian.” This week, National Review’s came up with his own definition of postliberalism:

I’m not a philosophical liberal. That’s not a stated desire to become a totalitarian, it’s just the fact that I don’t think Locke’s account makes sense to me or is meaningfully true. I admire and am happy for my Constitutional inheritance for lots of reasons, but none that imply a theological commitment.

• “The Post-Liberal Quest.” Rebutting David French’s statement that “America has faced far worse problems in the recent past … and yet conservatism did not turn postliberal or Groyper to address them,” writes:

• JD Vance’s Role. Last December, described the link between the Vice President and the postliberals: “After his conversion [to Catholicism], Vance came to befriend some of the leading postliberal intellectuals. … There’s a photo of him in a bar with his good friends and .” This past week, wagered that only Vance can save conservatism from Nick Fuentes.

It’s the Economy, Stupid

The debate between Old Guard Reaganites and postliberals isn’t only about big ideas. It’s about whether American capitalism can produce fair outcomes for workers.

• Are We Worse Off Than Our Grandparents? Consider this debate between and the Wall Street Journal’s : “The promise of progress is that things become cheaper and our standard of living goes up,” argues Brendan Dougherty. “But, obviously, things like housing and health care (and insurance) and tuition are much much costlier.” They continue:

What to Read

A non-exhaustive list of texts that define the “post-liberal quest”:

• Why Liberalism Failed by . It failed “because it succeeded.” Barack Obama recommended it.

• “Against David French-ism” by . The essay that galvanized postliberals into a force to be reckoned with.

• Bronze Age Mindset by Costin Alamariu, AKA . Remixed Nietzsche for Millennials and Zoomers. Scholar (and Trump State Department appointee) Michael Anton’s review brought the book mainstream conservative attention.

• Common Good Constitutionalism by . Vermeule argues for a new conservative legal theory that’s “based on the principles that government helps direct persons, associations, and society generally toward the common good.”

• Unqualified Reservations. The influential writings of Silicon Valley monarchist, , AKA Mencius Moldbug.

• Tyranny, Inc. by . A right-of-center critique of corporate power.

• See also our list for “Left Conservatism.”

From the Crowd

Responding to last week’s CrowdSource about humanism and AI, of the American Philosophical Society points us to an essay where he tackles this theme, which was partially inspired by this piece from .

Taben writes:

My contention is that cosmic purpose is the only basis for generating the force of such aesthetic experiences. … I suggest that incomprehensibility is a function of believing — explicitly or implicitly — there is a reason for the subject experience. … We are awestruck only because of an underlying truth.

Read the whole thing.

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Welcome to CrowdSource, your weekly guided tour of the latest intellectual disputes, ideological disagreements and national debates that piqued our interest (or inflamed our passions). This week: technology and anthropology.

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What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason!
how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how
express and admirable! in action how like an angel!
in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the
world! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me,
what is this quintessence of dust?

— Shakespeare, Hamlet, II.2

No Longer At the Top of the Food Chain

The most powerful leaders in tech have expressed — keep expressing — ambivalence about the future of the human race.

• Who’s In Charge? On Thursday, Elon Musk predicted that AI would eventually rule over the human race:

Long-term, AI’s gonna be in charge, to be totally frank, not humans. If artificial intelligence vastly exceeds the sum of human intelligence, it is difficult to imagine any humans would actually be in charge.

• Are You Sure? This past June, in an interview with the New York Times’ , PayPal andPalantir founder Peter Thiel hesitated for several seconds before affirming that yes, he would like the human race to survive:

Douthat: I think you would prefer the human race to endure, right?

Thiel: Uh ——

Douthat: You’re hesitating.

Thiel: Well, I don’t know. I would — I would ——

Douthat: This is a long hesitation!

Thiel: There’s so many questions implicit in this.

Douthat: Should the human race survive?

Thiel: Yes.

Douthat: OK.

(We wrote about Thiel’s theological beliefs here.)

• Human Extinction. In December 2024, computer scientist, Nobel laureate and “godfather of AI” Geoffrey Hinton said that there is a 10%-20% chance that AI could wipe us out in the coming decades.

• “Biological Bootloader.” In 2017, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wrote:

We will be the first species ever to design our own descendants. My guess is that we can either be the biological bootloader for digital intelligence and then fade into an evolutionary tree branch, or we can figure out what a successful merge looks like.

AI and the Future of the Humanities

Why are our tech overlords so uncertain about the future of the human race? A new book suggests it’s partly because they define human worth by what a human being can do.

• “Remainder Humanism.” In Language Machines: Cultural AI and the End of Remainder Humanism, argues that humanities departments have responded to ChatGPT in the wrong way — by trying to compete with it:

“Remainder humanism” is the term I use for us painting ourselves into a corner theoretically. The operation is just that we say, “machines can do x, but we can do it better or more truly.” This sets up a kind of John-Henry-versus-machine competition that guides the analysis. With ChatGPT’s release, that kind of lazy thinking, which had prevailed since the early days of AI critique … hit a dead end. If machines can produce smooth, fluent, and chatty language, it causes everyone with a stake in linguistic humanism to freak out.

• Instead of Freaking Out, Weatherby says, we should accept that LLMs are creating a new culture, and then subject that culture to critique. In that capacity to critique lies the essence of the humanities.

Some responses:

• “Problems of Life.” Responding to Weatherby, Baylor University English professor Alan Jacobs points to an essay he wrote last year, where he ponders how to design homework assignments in the age of ChatGPT:

I am moved to consider it by reflecting on something T. S. Eliot wrote in 1944, a sentence I often have reason to quote: “Not least of the effects of industrialism is that we become mechanized in mind, and consequently attempt to provide solutions in terms of engineering, for problems which are essentially problems of life.” With this sentence in mind … I could simply make the assignments that I believe best suited to what I want my students to learn, and then turn to them and ask: “What are the ‘problems of life’ that incline so many of you to turn to the chatbots rather than do these assignments?”

• What Is an Author? In a probing review, notes that Weatherby’s argument comes from an academic culture that for decades has dismissed the question, “What is human nature?” as hopelessly metaphysical and outdated. But in the age of AI, neither Weatherby, nor academia as a whole, will be able to avoid that question for much longer:

At the end of his essay “What Is an Author?” — one of the foundational statements of antihumanist theory — Michel Foucault asked: “What difference does it make who is speaking?” For Foucault, the question was rhetorical: His point was to herald “the stirring of an indifference” as to the answer. But Weatherby and others who wish to salvage the humanities from the AI-occasioned impasse of antihumanism will need to reverse the valence of Foucault’s question and try to answer it literally and concretely.

When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained;

What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him?

— Psalm 8, King James Version

The Death (and Life) of the Author

As Weatherby and Shullenberger suggest, the philosophical question of human authorship, once a topic for graduate seminars, is now central to the broader question of the destiny of humanity in the age of AI.

• “The Death of the Author.” In 1967, French critic Roland Barthes wrote a seminal essay which questioned the idea that texts have ultimate meanings: “To give an Author to a text is to impose upon that text a stop clause, to furnish it with a final signification, to close the writing.”

• LLMs As Creators of Posthuman Culture. Language suggests meanings, Barthes argues, independently of authorial intention. Does this mean LLMs are generators of meaning, too?

• “Writing for the AIs.” Intervening in a different, though related, debate — whether humans should “for” AIs, in order to influence them — argues that our writing will be one day be inferior to that of AIs:

“Superior beings”, wrote Alexander Pope, “would show a Newton as we show an ape.” I don’t want to be an ape in some transhuman zoo, with people playing with models of me to see what bloggers were like back when everyone was stupid.

• The Author Lives. On a podcast this past April, Sam Altman said that AI has brought about the “democratization of creating content.” On another podcast a few weeks later, Altman affirmed that in the future, human authors will still be valued over AI-generated writing.

From the Crowd

“A Necessary Condition of Civilized Life.” with a long response to ’s recent essay, “Political Theory in the Age of Mass Migration”:

I think liberal impulses on mass migration are actually artifacts of English speaking liberal opposition to the French Revolution and republican politics as a whole. Lord Acton writes in his essay on nationality that :

“The combination of different nations in one State is as necessary a condition of civilised life as the combination of men in society. Inferior races are raised by living in political union with races intellectually superior. Exhausted and decaying nations are revived by the contact of a younger vitality. Nations in which the elements of organisation and the capacity for government have been lost, either through the demoralising influence of despotism, or the disintegrating action of democracy, are restored and educated anew under the discipline of a stronger and less corrupted race. This fertilising and regenerating process can only be obtained by living under one government. It is in the cauldron of the State that the fusion takes place by which the vigour, the knowledge, and the capacity of one portion of mankind may be communicated to another. Where political and national boundaries coincide, society ceases to advance, and nations relapse into a condition corresponding to that of men who renounce intercourse with their fellow-men. The difference between the two unites mankind not only by the benefits it confers on those who live together, but because it connects society either by a political or a national bond, gives to every people an interest in its neighbours, either because they are under the same government or because they are of the same race, and thus promotes the interests of humanity, of civilisation, and of religion.”

Although written in 1862 the above sentiment still rules the highest echelons of American and European society. Large republican states in liberal eyes would inevitably descend into fanaticism or despotism unless there was this diversity inspired by Austria Hungary and the British Isles. This grain of thought which you see in Constant too (perhaps inspired by the Swiss as well as Britain) is transmitted through British then American empire into the general west. Combined with the mythology of the civil rights movement and finally the utopian post 1990s world of economic growth we see global migration the likes of which its progenitors such as Acton would have seen as insane. I suspect the English religious settlement was also a great inspiration with a patchwork of sects being more conducive to liberty than the dangerous collectivism of one dominant force.

Berlin writing after the war railed against utopian thought for the twin collective evils of Communism and Fascism. Acton had done the same thing 80 years later with nationalism and socialism being the evils descended from the republicanism of 1790’s France. It is ironic that liberals own utopianism has led us to the point where the Jacobins have come again. To quote the inspiration for Berlin’s book title “out of the crooked timber of humanity nothing straight was ever made.”

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Welcome to CrowdSource, your weekly guided tour of the latest intellectual disputes, ideological disagreements and national debates that piqued our interest (or inflamed our passions). This week: unidentified flying objects, or unidentified anomalous phenomena, or hyperobjects, or the Phenomenon …

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Bluer Than the Sun

3I/ATLAS is the name for an interstellar object currently passing through our solar system. Most scientists believe 3I/ATLAS is a comet. A few claim otherwise.

• Visible Brightness. From a scientific paper published last week: “color photometry shows the comet to be distinctly bluer than the Sun, consistent with gas emission contributing a substantial fraction of the visible brightness near perihelion.”

• Nine Anomalies. Harvard astrophysicist suggests that 3I/ATLAS might be extraterrestrial technology. He compiled a list of nine anomalous properties of the interstellar object. The blue light is the ninth:

Alternatively, the non-gravitational acceleration might be the technological signature of an internal engine. This might also explain the report on 3I/ATLAS getting bluer than the Sun. ... For a natural comet this blue color is very surprising. …

• “Isn’t That Wonderful Enough?” Particle physicist takes exception to Loeb’s extraterrestrial speculations:

• No Threat. NASA Acting Administrator Sean Duffy weighs in: “NASA’s observations show that this is the third interstellar comet to pass through our solar system. No aliens. No threat to life here on Earth.”

• “Follow Comet 3I/ATLAS’s Journey.” NASA set up a webpage dedicated to 3I/ATLAS with a live tracker.

Interdisciplinary UFOlogy

Professor Loeb is one of an active group of academics, journalists and influencers who’ve taken an interest in Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs) — or Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAPs), or whichever term one prefers for non-human intelligence. This group includes:

• The Ethnologist/Historian. Professor of Religious Studies at UNC Wilmington D. W. Pasulka has garnered mainstream attention with two books that treat the culture around UFOs as an emerging religion. Her research convinced her that “the Phenomenon” is real.

• The Astronomer. of Stockholm University took a fresh look at old astronomical photographic plates from before the age of manmade satellites, cataloguing the curious “transients” therein — short-lived astronomical phenomena that, Villarroel speculates, could be aliens.

• The Philosopher. Professor of Benedictine College wrote a philosophical account of UFOs, Unidentified Flying Hyperobject: UFOs, Philosophy, and the End of the World.

  • “Hyperobject.” Madden makes use of philosopher Timothy Morton’s concept of “hyperobjects”: “entities of such vast temporal and spatial dimensions that they defeat traditional ideas about what a thing is in the first place.”

• The Computer Scientist. Legendary Silicon Valley-based VC has investigated UFOs since the 1960s. One of his main works is Passport to Magonia: From Folklore to Flying Saucers. Steven Spielberg made him a character in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

• The Chronicler. Prolific YouTuber has compiled dozens of oral histories from “experiencers,” investigators and whistleblowers (some more credible than others). Any names we should have included in this post can probably be found on Michels’ channel, American Alchemy.

The Truth Is Out There

Increasing mainstream media coverage, several Congressional hearings, and decades of first-hand accounts from experiencers: something is going on.

What is the Phenomenon?

• UFOs are “A Soft Sci-Fi Genre.” UFOs are probably fake, says :

… first contact is likely to be solely observational, which in turn means being inconclusive and probabilistic. A reasonable first contact would be if we accrue evidence of distant alien civilizations from very far away, but then the quality and nature of that evidence is poor and uncertain, accompanied by a great deal of scientific debate.

• UFO is Mythologized “Progress.” Writes :

The idea that these aerial vessels could come either from another planet or from a secret project of a foreign power assumes that, either way, scientific progress anywhere in the universe would follow roughly the same trajectory, and that any such unexplainable marvel must ultimately be the result of science.

• UFOs Are the Voice of Conscience. Building on the work of another philosopher, Bernardo Kastrup, says:

[UFOs are] a manifestation of the collective unconsciousness, which may stretch beyond the hive mind of the human species to encompass something like a cosmic consciousness … The occasion of these eruptions from mind-at-large into our local psychic spaces is the imbalance brought on by our modern egoistic sense of self …

• UFOs Test the Limits of Modern Science. In a brilliant essay, outlines a taxonomy of UFO theorists:

  • “Explorers” believe UFOs are extraterrestrial technology;

  • “Esotericists” believe they are supernatural entities;

  • “Disinformation-non-enjoyers” believe it’s all a hoax.

• Paradigm Shift. Coffey argues that UFOs test the limits of modern science:

By anointing science as more than a legitimate form of inquiry into the visible world, as the inquiry whose methods both fully reveal and define the extent of its reality, we have as a culture perhaps bought ourselves a unique sense of stability and permanence in our collective representations. … The disinformation-non-enjoyer, usually someone invested in stability, authority, education … responds to the rumor of the UFO not as an oddity, but as a threat.

Another Perspective

From the Crowd

Readers write about the possible US-Venezuela war and political theory in the age of mass migration.

• Yanqui Go Home! Author on how the US hurt Venezuela:

There was indeed widespread extreme poverty in Venezuela ten years ago. What would a sane and humane superpower have done: 1) offer aid and trade, coordinated with other regional governments; or 2) institute illegal sanctions, now elevated into a total embargo, attempt to organize a coup, and finally threaten invasion?

• “Omertà.” Author thinks is missing part of the story:

… In a sense the question is a circular one: “why do mainstream political theorists not discuss topics that result in expulsion from the mainstream?” Well, either they don’t want expulsion or they’ve been expelled. Either way, it’s arguably less a gap in the theory than an omertà.

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Welcome to CrowdSource, your weekly guided tour of the latest intellectual disputes, ideological disagreements and national debates that piqued our interest (or inflamed our passions). This week: qualified support, and strong opposition to, US intervention in Venezuela.

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Venezuela’s External and Internal Conflicts

A gathering storm:

• “The US is Preparing for War in Venezuela,” reports the Atlantic:

The U.S. hasn’t sent this many ships to the Caribbean since the Cuban missile crisis. There are already roughly 6,500 Marines and sailors in the region, operating from eight Navy vessels, as well as 3,500 troops nearby. Once the Ford arrives, the U.S. will have roughly as many ships in the Caribbean as it used to defend Israel from Iranian missile strikes this summer. The carrier strike group also provides far more firepower than is necessary for the occasional attack on narco-trafficking targets. But the ships could be ideal for launching a steady stream of air strikes inside Venezuela.

• “Difficult to Deny.” This crisis is happening in the wake of fraudulent presidential elections in July 2024; as journalist describes it:

This situation is unprecedented. In 25 years of Chavismo, Venezuela has seen the regime employ an array of electoral tricks to tilt the playing field in its favor. The list of abuses is extensive and includes vote suppression, assisted voting, banning candidates, restricting media access, coopting opposition parties, and using massive public funds for campaigning. Maduro did many of these things this year too. Yet this is the first time the regime has ever stolen a presidential election that it had been expected to lose badly, fabricating numbers out of thin air without any supporting evidence. The fraud has never been so large, conspicuous, and difficult to deny.

Trump’s casus belli has to do with drug trafficking and oil, not the restoration of Venezuelan democracy. But Venezuelan opposition to Maduro’s regime is a crucial piece to this brewing war.

Give Regime Change a Chance

Many in the Venezuelan opposition support regime change:

• Data. A recent poll conducted by the London-based firm Panterra indicates that most Venezuelans want Maduro out.

• Peace Through Strength. Earlier this month, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Maria Corina Machado, a Venezuelan opposition leader who supports US-led efforts to oust Maduro — though she has not said she supports military action.

• Not Pro-Trump, But Anti-Maduro. New York-based Venezuelan activist and novelist explains the pro-military action perspective:

Or, as he puts it in writing:

Nobody wants innocent bloodshed … but if an extraction akin to what happened with Manuel Noriega in 1989 were to occur — an act the Panamanian population thought was overwhelmingly positive at the time — the world can be certain that no matter the consequences, many Venezuelans would celebrate having Maduro out of office.

• Progressives Should Support Machado. Another Venezuelan writer, Alejandro Daly, while not calling for regime change, laments the lack of progressive support for Maria Corina Machado:

Right now, massive human rights violations are being committed in Venezuela. Crimes against humanity are being perpetrated. Activists, journalists, families, and even children are persecuted, kidnapped, and tortured. Meanwhile, progressive leaders around the globe are silent on these crises, or worse, they’re taking photos with Maduro.

War Is a Bad Idea

Three arguments against war with Venezuela.

• “Regime Change in Venezuela is Bad for America.” opposes war for several reasons, including that it would not do much for Trump’s war on drugs:

… production of lethal drugs in [Venezuela] is virtually nonexistent. It acts largely as a transit country for 13 percent of Colombian cocaine at most. Trump has claimed that each of the boats bombed in the Caribbean is responsible for the deaths of 25,000 Americans. But virtually all overdoses in the United States are from fentanyl, which neither Venezuela nor Colombia produce. Even if they did, so long as many Americans remain addicted to an inelastic product like lethal drugs, no military actions will make a meaningful difference in reducing the number of overdoses.

• Quagmire In the Making. argues that the US might fail in Venezuela:

American military power is in a state of decline that will require a decade or more to reverse. … In Washington, DC, there is never a shortage of sycophantic, blowhard generals and admirals whose own experience with real war is at best at a cocktail level of familiarity. […] Before President Trump and his cabinet decide to begin a new conflict with Venezuela, the deficit Trump should worry most about is intellectual, not fiscal.

• “Venezuela Will Be No Panama.” Against the argument that a Venezuelan intervention would be quick and easy, as the 1989 Panamanian one is said to have been, historian Dennis M. Hogan writes:

Venezuela is a sprawling, geographically diverse country with a population of nearly 30 million. The United States maintains no military installations there, and it is not home to a strategic asset like the Panama Canal, unless you include oil reserves. Venezuela’s neighbors Colombia and Brazil have been at odds with the Trump administration. As policy analysts across the political spectrum have argued, the likeliest outcome of a U.S. invasion that topples Mr. Maduro is a surge in regional instability, and, according to a recent report by the Stimson Center, a worsening of the conditions leading to drug trafficking, conflict and migration.

Turning Points in Latin America

Elsewhere in Latin America:

• How Freedom Dies. on how democracies fall apart without a dictator:

The recent history of Peru and several other Latin American democracies including Brazil, Colombia and Mexico shows there is another, even more insidious way freedom can die for large parts of society: when the state is unable or unwilling to constrain predatory private powers — narco-traffickers, illegal gold miners, human smugglers, corruption rackets — and the officials and politicians who go into business with them.

• Latino USA. on why the US should be considered a Latin American country:

Eventually, even the most loyal Hispanic Trump voter (and there are many of them; Trump almost won the Hispanic vote) will see that Trump’s tough-on-immigration stance, however justifiable in their eyes, is fuelled by an ideology that ignores the Hispanic roots of the United States. It is an ideology that sees the US as a nation state like Greece or Ireland, rather than a polyglot entity like Belgium or Canada, or the raucous, world-straddling empire that it really is.

• Culture War Exports. Writer reports on Peruvian Charlie Kirk fans:

Local memes and national algorithmic bubbles — these are the exceptions that confirm the rule: you could spend your whole life online without ever once learning about the social mores of the Latin American internet, but good luck escaping the next J.D. Vance controversy or the latest Taylor Swift release. So America’s culture war seeps into the water and reappears, slightly mutated, down south.

From the Crowd

’s piece, “Assisted Suicide is Barbaric,” inspired a lot of responses. It’s a personal and painful topic, and all of the responses are worth reading. Here’s a few:

• “Enlightened Social Policy.” From the handle , a New Mexico lawmaker who sponsored a pro-assisted suicide bill:

I was a NM State Rep who carried the bill allowing Medical Aid In Dying in our state. I was passionately for it then and remain a strong supporter. You can read about the process, my own story, and the stories of other involved, here.

I say that to say this: You say that the process is “barbaric.” I would counter that making people live in pain, knowing that they are at the end of their life, is worse than barbaric. It is torture and having the option to end your life peacefully and surrounded by loved ones is a more civilized pathway for an enlightened community. Furthermore, at the end of the day, if I get into a situation like the ones in law, this should be my call. No government or church should have the ability to say no should I make the decision for my own life. Again, that is barbarism, not enlightened social policy.

• “A Dangerous Premise.” Wisdom of Crowds contributor wrote a searching response on his own Substack:

[…] Discussing assisted suicide may therefore be helpful. It may enable societies to have a genuine discussion over the purpose of life. The common phrase ‘living my best life’ is so routinely said that it has been stripped of all meaning. If we want to really limit access to assisted suicide, we should interrogate deeply why that is, beyond the mere boundaries of the sacral, but into something much more human.

• Experience. shares a personal story:

I, and my brother and our wives, said goodbye to my mother a month ago. She had for years been consistent that when a good life was no longer possible and the end was near, she wanted to skip the pain and confusion and look to whatever came next with clear eyes. […]

• A Prediction, from :

Within fifteen years it will be unlawful to keep anyone alive if they have certain defined medical conditions, killing them will be mandatory because of the risk that they will impose undue financial costs on the machine.

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Welcome to CrowdSource, your weekly guided tour of the latest intellectual disputes, ideological disagreements and national debates that piqued our interest (or inflamed our passions). This week: physician-assisted suicide.

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The Global March of Physician-Assisted Suicide

CrowdSource covered assisted suicide last year (“Varieties of State-Sponsored Death”). The topic is still relevant:

• Canada. In 2023, one in twenty of all deaths in Canada were from physician-assisted suicide. Around four percent of those deaths were of people without a prognosis of imminent death.

• Uruguay legalized euthanasia last week, the first South American nation to do so.

• Australia. The state of Victoria expanded its existing euthanasia law this year.

• Slovenia will have a referendum on assisted suicide next year.

• The United Kingdom. A law legalizing “assisted death” is winding its way through the British system.

• The United States. Euthanasia campaigns are advancing in Oregon and New York City. Annette Bening and George Clooney are making a movie about assisted suicide.

Later this week, we will publish a new essay about assisted suicide, by .

For and Against

Two defenses of assisted suicide:

• “My Mom — And the Case for Assisted Death.” A poignant essay by : “The only saving grace in my mother’s case was that she died somewhat sooner, and less painfully, than she otherwise would have …”

• “I Absolutely Also Claim My Right To Say, ‘Enough.’” So says British actor Greg Wise in ’s podcast, The Sacred.

Two arguments against it:

• Dying Well — and Hospice Care — Are Good. Assisted Dying Is Bad. Prognosis is always uncertain. Pain can almost always be managed. No one is fully autonomous. So argues Columbia University physician .

• Assisted Suicide Is a Fig Leaf for Cruelty. French novelist Michel Houellebecq, from an essay in : “… the moment of farewell — a last chance to see certain people, to tell them what you may never have said before, and to hear what they may have to say to you. To cut short these death throes is both impious (for those who believe) and immoral (for anyone).”

Disability Activists Speak

Last November, Diane Coleman, a longtime activist against the legalization of physician assisted suicide, died at age 71.

• “Assisted Suicide and Disability.” Born with muscular spinal atrophy, Coleman argued that assisted suicide would create perverse incentives for medical insurance companies. As she puts it in “Assisted Suicide and Disability” (2009):

Assisted suicide has been marketed to the American public as a step toward increasing individual freedom, but choice is an empty slogan in a world full of pressures on people with chronic illnesses and disabilities.

• “The Perverse Economics of Assisted Suicide.” Last July, updated Coleman’s argument:

There is a very clear problem with assisted suicide in its new guise: The state, with its almighty power, is tasked with both paying for the support of the old and disabled and regulating their dying. Encouraging citizens to accept a Quietus may seem like a cost-saving measure at a time when the financial burden of their care has never been greater.

Socialists Reassess

Dovetailing with Coleman’s core insight — and because of the success (?) of the Canadian Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) law, which accounts for ~5% of all deaths in Canada — a few left-wing writers have become increasingly critical of physician-assisted suicide. This despite a long tradition of Left support for its legalization.

These writers eschew abstract ethical reasoning for structural analysis.

• “The Canadian State Is Euthanizing Its Poor and Disabled,” says :

Disability and other advocates have been warning us for years that [physician-assisted suicide] puts people at risk. They warned that the risk of people choosing death — because it’s easier than fighting to survive in a system that impoverishes people, and disproportionately does so to those who are disabled — is real. Underinvestment in medical care will push people up to and beyond the brink, which means some will choose to die instead of “burden” their loved ones or society at large. They were right.

• “Assisted Suicide Isn’t Freedom,” writes :

Assisted dying is the quintessential policy of our times. It is a policy that reflects the fatalistic mindset of those who rule over us, leaders who can no longer promise a good life so instead offer a “good death.” Opponents of assisted dying in Canada and elsewhere have asked how a society can maintain a commitment to preventing suicide with one hand while enabling it with the other. The answer is that our society doesn’t actually value human life and so doesn’t oppose suicide. What it opposes is the lack of a bureaucratic process that oversees, controls, and administers suicide.

• “Canada’s Assisted Suicide Program Has Become a Nightmare,” writes

  : “… it is beginning to look like a dystopian end run around the cost of providing long-term care.”

• , founder of Jacobin and president of The Nation:

From the Crowd

Is right about the United Kingdom? Is right about AI and jobs?

• Something Rotten in the British Isles. Wisdom of Crowds contributor takes issue with something said about the UK in our latest podcast:

… As a Brit, I found that section quite interesting. I both agreed with Tyler that something is rotten in the UK, and there is a general feeling of stagnation and breakage that is pervading the population. I do also think there is something in the idea that politicians should take a more Burkean approach of leading their population as opposed to following them. But, I think Tyler here was arguably wrong on two counts. The first, I think, was proclaiming the usefulness of our elected representatives. Unfortunately, for some of the reasons discussed by Tyler (poor pay and an over-reliance upon communication), we currently have a significant talent gap in our politics. This is not helped by how candidates are selected by their parties tbh. Second, the very mechanics of elections and the self-serving nature of some of our representatives limit the ability to enact bolder change. They want to be re-elected, and this limits the steps they are willing to take. , but that question, specifically on liberalism. […]

• Ditch-Diggers, Typesetters and You. Responding to last week’s CrowdSource, loyal Wisdom of Crowds commenter suggests that might be overestimating the scale of the AI revolution:

AI is just another step in a centuries old process called the Industrial Revolution.

How many thousands of ditch-diggers have lost their jobs to backhoes? Easily, hundreds of thousands. But it happened decades ago, and we’ve all forgotten about it (if we ever even thought about it).

How many stagecoach drivers lost their jobs to trains? How many bookkeepers have lost their jobs to computers? How many airline reservation clerks have lost their jobs to do-it-yourself online booking?

How many typesetters have lost their jobs? ALL of them. Nobody sets type anymore.

AI is just another step, not some revolutionary game changer. Perhaps it gets greater attention because it is affecting people who report on such things. THEY are losing their jobs this time.

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Welcome to CrowdSource, your weekly guided tour of the latest intellectual disputes, ideological disagreements and national debates that piqued our interest (or inflamed our passions). This week: the future of work.

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The Coming Jobs Collapse

AI, automation and robotics could replace nearly 100 million jobs in America over the next decade, including 40% of registered nurses, 47% of truck drivers, 64% of accountants, 65% of teaching assistants and 89% of fast food workers, among many other occupations.

So writes Senator Bernie Sanders, summarizing a Senate report released last week.

… Or Not

Other recent studies about the impact of automation on labor are more ambivalent.

• The Jobs Collapse Isn’t Happening. At least, not yet. So concludes a study, released this month, conducted by the Budget Lab, a policy research center in Yale. “… our metrics indicate that the broader labor market has not experienced a discernible disruption since ChatGPT’s release 33 months ago … Historically, widespread technological disruption in workplaces tends to occur over decades …”

• Fewer Jobs but Higher Wages, or Lower Wages but More Jobs. The optimistic upshot of a June 2025 study by MIT’s David Autor and Neil Thompson: “… automation that decreases expertise requirements reduces wages but permits the entry of less expert workers; automation that raises requirements raises wages but reduces the set of qualified workers.”

• Automating Routine Tasks v. Non-Routine Tasks. Indian scholars Arvind Upreti and V. Sridhar ran simulations in December 2024: “automation of routine tasks increases wage inequality, whereas automation of non-routine tasks reduces it.”

• Wages Affect Automation Innovation. So concludes this February 2025 report from the University of Zurich: “higher minimum wages for low-skill jobs drive firms to develop automation technologies. Rising wages for high-skill labor, in contrast, can hamper this effect.”

• AI Can Help Recruit Blue-Collar Workers. A report from August by Dasha Shunina about an AI-driven recruitment company: “… Laborup’s core innovation: an agentic, voice-first AI that sources, interviews, verifies, and routes under-networked machinists, welders, and technicians in days, not weeks.”

  • According to Shunina, “As of early 2025, more than 450,000 manufacturing jobs remain unfilled, with projections that 2.1 million roles could go vacant by 2030.”

A Response from the Left

Last month, Santiago Vidal Calvo, of the right-leaning Manhattan Institute, argued that socialist Zohran Mamdani’s plan to raise New York City’s minimum wage will accelerate job loss:

… a dramatically increased wage floor would likely supercharge the adoption of automation and AI … When the cost of labor increases, machines become a reliable, cheaper alternative.

So, how should the Left think about automation?

• Automation Ideology. In his 2022 book, Labor’s End: How the Promise of Automation Degraded Work, Jason Resnikoff argues that employers have used utopian stories about automation to curb workers’ rights.

• The Human Factor. Predictions about the effects of automation on labor, Chris Tilly argues in a 2022 review of Resnikoff’s book, “assume the robots are marching forward regardless of what we do, whereas in fact human actors are the ones controlling what technologies get developed, which of them are used, and how.”

• Human Beings Are Still On the Hook. The real task, argues Resnikoff, lies in reconciling work and freedom. From a 2023 essay:

A misplaced faith in technological process left both unions and revolutionaries intellectually disarmed. It absolved them of the admittedly difficult task of imagining how to reconcile work and freedom. This remains the task of the Left today, which like the rest of the culture has (understandably) become increasingly dystopian. Technological dystopianism, like technological utopianism, is a kind of fetish and a distraction. It treats capital like a capitalist would — as the decisive force in history.

• What Must Be Done? In his video, Sanders lays out several concrete policy proposals, including allowing workers to elect 45% of their boards of directors.

• Horseshoe Theory. From a 2025 piece in the right-leaning American Compass: agrees that automation per se is not the problem, but rather workers’ rights.

Where workers have power, the companies developing new technologies will also have a much stronger incentive to consider how a product will serve the people using it. If technology were for improving worker productivity and job quality, rather than merely for increasing profit, developers would make very different decisions about the tools and applications they created and marketed.

However, Cass breaks with the current Left on immigration.

Our Post-Work Future

Senator Sanders waxes philosophical: “Work, whether being a janitor or a brain surgeon, is an integral part of being a human being. The vast majority of people want to be productive members of society and contribute to their communities.”

If jobs become obsolete, will humans suffer?

• Specific Types of Work Give Life Meaning. In After Virtue, the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre describes the kinds of work that give life meaning:

… any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realized in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially definitive of, that form of activity … Tic-tac-toe is not an example of a practice in this sense, nor is throwing a football with skill; but the game of football is, and so is chess. Bricklaying is not a practice; architecture is. Planting turnips is not a practice; farming is. So are the enquiries of physics, chemistry and biology, and so is the work of the historian, and so are painting and music.

• “What To Do When There’s Nothing To Do.” In his 2024 book, Deep Utopia: Life and Meaning in a Solved World, philosopher Nick Bostrom says that, in order to thrive in a post-work world, we need a culture that places “a premium on fun … on practices conducive to health and spiritual growth,” such as:

Building sand castles, going to the gym, reading in bed, […] playing with LEGOs, wine tasting, having a massage, learning about history, doing a silent retreat, taking drugs, getting your nails done, attending a religious ritual, keeping up with current events, interacting on social media, exploring virtual reality environments, kayaking, learning to fly a sports plane, gambling, pouring a martini, celebrating a holiday, researching your family tree, participating in a neighborhood clean-up, singing in a choir, meditating, carving pump-kins, [...] The list goes on.

• “Useless Bums.” In his 2018 book, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, historian Yuval Harari has predicts a shift from a “homo-centric” to a “data-centric” world, where human beings become superfluous:

… People must do something, or they go crazy. What will they do all day? One answer might be drugs and computer games.

Unnecessary people might spend increasing amounts of time within 3D virtual-reality worlds that would provide them with far more excitement and emotional engagement than the drab reality outside. Yet such a development would deal a mortal blow to the liberal belief in the sacredness of human life and of human experiences. What’s so sacred about useless bums who pass their days devouring artificial experiences in La La Land?

• First Principle. Still relevant is philosopher Frantz Fanon’s core political belief: “That the tool never possess the man.”

From the Crowd

The Crowd writes about Taylor Swift and Donald Trump.

• Swifties are Not Poptimists. Critic (read his excellent book reviews here) responds to last week’s CrowdSource about poptimism and Taylor Swift:

But Paglia likes pop culture. One of pre-conditions of poptimism is popular culture becoming the object of academic interest which allows college educated people to treat it half seriously, half ironically. And “Against Interpretation” can hardly presage poptimism. Poptimism is supported by an incessant interpretation of popular culture (in the case of music, the lyrics) that leads Swift eventually to start turning her music into a commentary on her self and career.

• You Had to Be There. A cheeky response from Wisdom of Crowds contributor :

I think Sanneh’s essay persuaded me to look into plaid-wearing indie rockers whose shows’ tickets ran to ten or twelve dollars — or maybe it just made me doubly glad that I did.

• Being and Time. adds to ’s recent piece about Trump’s and “the infinite present”:

This column is consistent with Dan McAdams’ personality analysis of Trump in both his biography of Trump and his Atlantic piece from 2016. Trump lacks a narrative identity — a life story that connects his past with his present and his imagined future. From McAdams’ perspective, Trump lives in the ever-present now. His political actions are aimed at bringing all of us into that non-narrative, chaotic present NOW!

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Welcome to CrowdSource, your weekly guided tour of the latest intellectual disputes, ideological disagreements and national debates that piqued our interest (or inflamed our passions). This week: poptimism, rockism and sloptimism.

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Poptimism, Rockism and Taylor Swift

Taylor Swift has released The Life of a Showgirl to great fanfare. Poptimism still reigns as the dominant sensibility in music criticism.

What is “Poptimism”?

• Poptimism is Anti-Rockism. Poptimism is “a more inclusive sensibility that critics might adopt instead [of rockism],” writes Kelefa Sanneh in an essay from August. It is “earnestly concerned with justice and representation.” It focuses on praise, rather than negative critique:

The idea of poptimism sometimes bled into a broader belief that it was bad manners to criticize any cultural product that people liked, whether it be a pop song or a superhero movie or a romance novel.

• What is “Rockism”? From “The Rap Against Rockism,” Sanneh’s seminal 2004 essay:

A rockist is someone who reduces rock ‘n’ roll to a caricature, then uses that caricature as a weapon. Rockism means idolizing the authentic old legend (or underground hero) while mocking the latest pop star; lionizing punk while barely tolerating disco; loving the live show and hating the music video; extolling the growling performer while hating the lip-syncher.

• Briefly: a rockist will laud Dark Side of the Moon, Exile on Main St., and Led Zeppelin II. A poptimist will say that “Billie Jean,” Lemonade and Taylor Swift are just as good.

What Does All This Have to Do With Taylor Swift?

• “Poptimism really came of age in 2014, led by the unlikely figure of Taylor Swift,” wrote ten years ago. “Making the transition out of Nashville, Swift’s latest album, 1989, is a poptimistic curve ball that ignores the dance-urban trend and replaces it with something more ambitious.”

• Poptimism Demolished Rockism. writes: “Taylor Swift had won a flawless victory, an unqualified victory, long before she decided to start re-recording albums. ‘Indie rock’ would have signaled an unconditional surrender but there was no one left around to do so.”

• Holdout. Scholar Camille Paglia wrote a big essay criticizing Taylor Swift’s music — back in 2015.

• Rolling Stone gave Life of a Showgirl five stars.

Why Did Poptimism Triumph?

A recent debate.

• The Medium is the Message. discusses the structural reasons behind the triumph of poptimism:

The logic of the ad-supported web inverted this. […] Critics were now incentivized to write articles about the things that people already knew they wanted to read about. […] Readers wanted positive, respectful, validating coverage of the most popular acts in music, and so such coverage started rising to the fore.

• “Type of Guy” Anxiety. responds that Yglesias ignores the social dynamics behind poptimism’s triumph:

… poptimism’s core tactic [is that] if you like Radiohead or jazz or think music should have any ambitions other than momentary dopamine release, you must be an aging white man, a reviled figure in 2010s Twitter discourse. The fact that so many people invoking this particular syllogism were themselves aging white men proves the point: there is nothing more terrifying, to many, than the shock of self-recognition.

• What Good Music Is. Also responding to Yglesias, of worries that poptimism means the end of aesthetic judgment:

… it’s not like rockism didn’t have reactionary tendencies. … But even if we right those wrongs … this does not necessarily stand as an endorsement for axing discussions of ‘what good music is’ at large.

A Matter of Taste

At the heart of poptimism is ambivalence about taste and aesthetic judgement.

• “Humorless Standard Bearer.” “Rockism actually does a disservice to rock as well as pop,” Sanneh explained in a 2015 interview, “by turning rock into this humorless standard bearer for all other genres.”

• “Against Interpretation.” Susan Sontag’s famous 1964 essay presages the poptimist turn. Sontag argues that too much high-minded “interpretation” gets in the way of enjoyment: “By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, conformable.”

• Phony Distinctions. Sanneh echoes Sontag’s attack on aesthetic hierarchies: “Are you really pondering the phony distinction between ‘great art’ and a ‘guilty pleasure’ when you’re humming along to the radio?”

• Phony Position. DeBoer, in another anti-poptimism essay: “The biggest lie poptimists have told has always been that they’re not dictating taste. But there is no difference between making the kind of value distinctions Sanneh makes and dictating taste. They are one and the same.”

• Cultural Decadence. In his book about decadence, should have considered the possibility that “poptimism has had a corrupting influence on all those who acquiesce to it,” suggested in his 2020 review.

Our Sloptimistic Future

Sanneh’s original essay is relatively … optimistic about the corporate interests driving the music industry: “… most memorable music is created despite multimillion-dollar deals and spur-of-the-moment collaborations and murky commercial forces. In fact, a lot of great music is created because of those things.”

But today’s corporations — Meta and OpenAI — produce slop. “Sloptimism” is a new term for a sensibility that few people seem to have.

• Skeptical of Sloptimism. To defend slop, writes , is a fool’s errand: “Just as American capital works tirelessly to find the cheapest dopamine hit that produces the most monetary value, there will always be another large contingent of people who care about what they consume.” Those people will need discernment and taste.

• “But Did I Have to Choose?” Looking back at “Against Interpretation” thirty years later, Sontag wrote: “I was — I am — for a pluralistic, polymorphous culture. No hierarchy, then? Certainly there’s a hierarchy. If I’d had to choose between the Doors and Dostoyevsky, then — of course — I’d have chosen Dostoyevsky. But did I have to choose?”

From the Crowd

responds to ’ article, “The Shallow Future is Already Here”:

All praise the hockey stick chart!

Reading ’s article, when he dismissed Romanticists who “knock over the edifice of industrial society intentionally, in order to kick against the seeming shallowness of modern life — to return humanity to a world of toil and struggle, in order to ennoble us” as VILLAINS ... I almost laughed out loud. It’s EVERY sci-fi novel’s trope that the uneducated pagan is set against “progress” and it’s up to the protagonist to overcome ignorance. The only problem is usually the protagonist is ignorant of any value deeper than “freedom” or “science” or “progress” and, apart from a good story, these principles hold little value at all. His only footnote is a video game so that just proves my point.

Noah’s argument also leaves room for little of value in our lived experience. Apparently pro-creation is the point of our ascent? For why? So our genetic heirs can live more peaceful lives? If there’s one thing easily observed today, it’s that spoiled children handed everything on silver platters are not ennobled, their lives are wasted.

Anyone thoughtfully raising children or versed in the basics of human development knows: the point of child-rearing is to instill resilience. Noah seems to imagine a world where resilience isn’t necessary, I could humor him on his take of humanity. But in basic biology, he is absolutely wrong.

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Welcome to CrowdSource, your weekly guided tour of the latest intellectual disputes, ideological disagreements and national debates that piqued our interest (or inflamed our passions). This week: the limits of AI.

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Against the Machine

AI skeptics are having a moment.

• Underwhelming. ChatGPT-5 received mixed reviews (at best). Everyone is wondering if there’s an AI bubble.

• Worrisome. The ultimate AI doomer book, If Anyone Build It, Everybody Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All, by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares, was published this month.

• Ineradicable. Also published this month, a paper by OpenAI scientists concludes that while LLM hallucinations can be minimized, they will never be eradicated — they arise from “natural statistical pressures.”

• Mythical. Finally, Tuesday saw the release of the much-anticipated, hyper-tech-skeptical book, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity, by :

The Limits of AI

Three recent AI-skeptical pieces, one from an unexpected source:

• Scaling Doesn’t Work. , founder of two AI companies, argues the industry is working with a flawed plan for achieving superintelligence:

… tech leaders and investors had put far too much faith into a speculative and unproven hypothesis called scaling: the idea that training A.I. models on ever more data using ever more hardware would eventually lead to A.G.I., or even a “superintelligence” that surpasses humans. […] To build A.I. that we can genuinely trust and to have a shot at A.G.I., we must move on from the trappings of scaling.

• Induction v. Deduction. Journalist appeals to the thought of an obscure genius named Peter Putnam to explain the difference between an LLM and the human mind:

The job of artificial intelligence is to produce answers through the deductive process of computing. The job of induction is to create new questions, so that one question can lead to another and another in a process of repetition without answer. That is what “thought” is. It’s not conclusion. It is questing. Induction involves constantly reaching out. Deduction involves constantly taking in, which is why all those data centers are so enormous.

• Don’t Ignore the Substrate. Doubts about AI consciousness from , Google DeepMind AGI Development Lead:

Even if one believes models are conscious, it’s a whole other argument to claim that their consciousness implies similar reactions/phenomenology/experience as biological conscious beings. Why assume pain has the same relevance/salience to a model’s experience than it does to a human’s experience? Why assume a model saying I’m hungry has any weight? Why ignore the question of substrate?

Symbols Are Not Meanings

Yesterday, the American philosopher John Searle died. AI skeptics still invoke his so-called “Chinese Room” argument, which says that while computers can manipulate symbols, they cannot understand them.

Or, as Searle put it: “Symbols are not meanings.”

• “Minds, Brains, and Programs.” A key passage from Searle’s famous 1980 paper:

… the formal symbol manipulations by themselves don’t have any intentionality; they are quite meaningless; they aren’t even symbol manipulations, since the symbols don’t symbolize anything. In the linguistic jargon, they have only a syntax but no semantics.

• “The Chinese Room.” Here’s a minute-long explanation of the argument:

Does the Chinese Room Argument Still Work?

Recent reflections on the Chinese Room argument in the age of AI:

• Yes, LLMs Can Understand the Words They Use. Last year, argued the Chinese Room problem has been defeated: LLMs have a rudimentary form of understanding, even if they are not conscious.

• Maybe LLMs Are Different From Other Machines. In July, Tatiana Orlova wrote: “LLMs … operate on a scale and depth that complicates Searle’s analysis. These models are built from simple statistical operations, but through their vast parameter space and recursive architecture, something unexpected occurs: the emergence of new qualities that cannot be found in any single component.”

• No, LLMs Cannot Understand the Words They Use. From a 2024 paper by Emma Borg: “we should deny that LLMs are in the business of asserting the content expressed by the sentences they produce. LLMs are not sensitive to truth in the way that would be required for them to count as genuine conversational partners or as asserting or making claims.”

From the Crowd

Book recommendations and a debate about right wing violence.

• What to Read, Continued. Readers responded to our request for recommendations for novels to read:

  • writes: “I am currently reading M: Son of the Century by Antonio Scurati, and I don’t think that I’ve ever seen this format before in historical novels. It’s a mix of fictional, contemporary documents, shifting perspectives, short chapters but spanning over 700 pages!”

  • writes: “How about adding When We Cease To Understand The World, the 2021 non-fiction novel (new genre?) by Chilean writer Benjamin Labatut, to the reading list?”

  • suggests we look into the fiction list of .

• Right Wing Violence. Political theory professor wrote an interesting response to last week’s podcast about assassinations, reacting to and ’s comments about Right wing violence as being “defensive”:

[…] I also think that when we think of violence on the ‘right’ (whatever that term means in this conversation) as a mere defence is simply wrong as well. European Colonialism wasn’t a defence of traditional values; it was an active attempt to foster economic and geopolitical supremacy, which is why we saw conflicts between colonial powers from the 18th century onwards. If we’re using Foucault in the conversation, we cannot ignore the power of those institutions, which not only defend specific values but are also highly successful in exporting them. […]

responded here. Read the whole thread.

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