Help Us Out Here, America

William TimbermanLeave a comment

One of my favorite rants of all time. Every evening when the din of our ongoing political suicide abates a little, I hear it again as clearly as ever.

I Want a President

I want a dyke for president, I want a person with aids for president and I want a fag for vice president and I want someone with no health insurance and I want someone who grew up in a place where the earth is so saturated with toxic waste that they didn’t have a choice about getting leukemia. I want a president that had an abortion at sixteen and I want a candidate who isn’t the lesser of two evils and I want a president who lost their last lover to aids, who still sees that in their eyes every time they lay down, who held their lover in their arms and knew they were dying. I want a president with no airconditioning, a president who has stood on line at the clinic, at the dmv, at the welfare office and has been unemployed and layed off and sexually harassed and gaybashed and deported. I want someone who has spent the night in the tombs and had a cross burned on their lawn and survived rape. I want someone who has been in love and been hurt, who respects sex, who has made mistakes and learned from them. I want a Black woman for president, I want someone with bad teeth and an attitude, someone who has eaten that nasty hospital food, someone who crossdresses and has done drugs and, been in therapy. I want someone who has committed civil disobedience. And I want to know why this isn’t possible. I want to know why we started learning somewhere down the line that a president is always a clown: always a john and never a hooker. Always a boss and never a worker, always a liar, always a thief and never caught.

—Zoe Leonard, 1992

Surprise, Surprise….

William TimbermanLeave a comment

What of the future that, as William Gibson famously told us, is already here, but is also unevenly distributed?

In a cultural age characterized largely by AI and the revival of fascism, I find any number of pundits feeling out of sight for the ends of literacy, civility, and their own positions at the bottom of the funnel of cultural relevance. Sadly, they remind me that every generation produces more trumpets and sad trombones than geniuses. Here, for those unfamiliar with him, or who have forgotten what he said, is an evaluation of our present distemper by a genuine genius, one who foresaw what we’re now facing forty years before any of our present generation were even born:

Compartmentalizing of human potential by single cultures will soon be as absurd as specialism in subject or discipline has become. It is not likely that our age is more obsessional than any other, but it has become sensitively aware of the conditions and fact of obsession beyond any other age.

Marshal McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy

Balogun

William Timberman18 Comments

Three things need to be said:

  1. Folarin Balogun wanted to play. He’s devoted his young life to the pursuit of excellence in his sport, and shouldn’t be blamed for the corruption of those who govern the tournaments he and the national team participate in.
  2. The foul was serious, but did not appear to have been intentional. He probably shouldn’t have been shown a red card. For better or worse, though, the referee is the referee. That should have been the end of it.
  3. FIFA is, at best, a rickety institution, and Donald Trump could fuck up an anvil. We may not be able to stop him from wrecking things he doesn’t understand, but not even a comic book patriotism requires us to endorse his desecrations.

More Accurate Trump Administration Job Titles

William Timberman4 Comments

MaxiMe: Donald Trump

Toadies-in-Chief: JD Vance, Marco Rubio (NB: In the end, there can be only one)

Secretary of Manly Prancing: Pete Hegseth

Director of National Stupidity: Bill Pulte

Éminence Grise: Stephen Miller

Patient Zero: RFK Jr.

Barely Useful Idiot: Kash Patel

Press Here: Katherine Leavitt

Chief Heddahopperin: Laura Loomer

Not the Wartime Consigliere: Ivanka Trump

Ambassador to the Courts of Lost Causes: Jared Kushner

Cryptonomicanoe and Bagman Too: Elon Musk (ret.)

Vanilla Ice: Markwayne Mullin

The Sin of Pride

William TimbermanLeave a comment

I once owned a raw silk sports jacket
I once owned a pair of cordovan wingtips
I once owned a Meerschaum pipe
More than once
I’ve found myself in places
Where history was being made

Saying this
I’m reminded of a French cartoon
I saw once, while waiting
For something
Momentous to happen

Four panels

In the first three
One stick figure waves a
Triumphant hand
And says to a second stick figure

Ma maison
Ma voiture
Ma femme

In the fourth
The second stick figure
Bends over, points to
His own
Stick figure ass
And says

Mon cul

Yes
That is it exactly

When It Comes To Agentic AI, If Is Still a Very Big Word, Even If When Is Not

William TimbermanLeave a comment

As expected, Apple’s WWDC 2026 keynote yesterday morning debuted a new, generative AI-powered Siri that Apple claims can significantly extend the capabilities of any human being with a late model iPhone in their pocket. We’ve heard this before, of course, most infamously in Apple’s WWDC keynote of two years ago. Should we believe that this time around they can actually deliver on the promises they made then? I think not, not at least until they can explain in reasonably granular detail how they plan to address what I still see as three glaringly obvious failure modes for their new agentic Siri.

First, to be even remotely usable in a real-world context, Siri’s promised conversational and multimodal capabilities must be 100% reliable. If they are not, we may wind up being held hostage by a tool that can collect and assesses complex data, draw conclusions from that data, and act on those conclusions too fast for us to predict or escape the consequences of any cognitive mistakes they make along the way.

Second, to do for us what Apple promises, to carry out complex multimodal tasks on on our behalf without any oversight or guidance from us beyond an initial natural language request, the new agentic Siri requires full access to the personal data stored on our computing devices, and full control of the applications running on them. Having presumably overseen the testing necessary to assure that Siri’s responses to our requests can be trusted, Apple seems confident that it can grant Siri this level of access and control to its own applications. For third-party applications, though, the situation is more complex. If, for example, Siri needs to schedule an appointment for an iPhone user, it already knows how to access the data in Apple’s calendar app, and how to add additional data to it. If a user chooses another calendar app as their default, Siri must rely on a feature of Apple’s operating systems called App Intents, which Apple describes as follows:

With App Intents, you express your app’s actions and data in a structured way that makes them discoverable by Apple Intelligence and provides deeper integration with system features people use frequently.

The problem here is that Apple is imposing a new and potentially expensive burden on third-party developers, Small, independent developers may lack the resources necessary to test and deploy Apple’s new guidelines as soon or as thoroughly as Apple expects, and large corporate developers, those who consider themselves Apple’s peers, may prefer their own cross-platform solutions and ignore Apple’s agentic ambitions for Siri as long as they can. (To be fair, in the continuing absence of any but the most rudimentary cross-platform user-interface standards, this seems likely to be the fate of any platform-specific approach to agentic AI deployment, not just Apple’s.)

These frictions between what Apple expects and what will actually happen may eventually reach some sort of accommodation. At this stage in the large-scale deployment of AI agents, though, an ordinary mortal relying on Siri to schedule a ride to a critical medical appointment in another city, transfer complex documents to multiple clients using different computing platforms, or book a two week travel itinerary to cities on another continent, may find themselves in more trouble than anyone, including Apple, is currently able to predict.

Third, it seems clear that very soon our computing devices will not only know everything about us that can be encompassed by digital databases, but will also be able to act in the world as though they were us without any consent on our part other than the implied consent of activating their agentic functions. What happens if we lose control of such a device? Nothing I’ve heard from Apple or any other company has offered anything to convince me that they’ve fully imagined the consequences of millions of digital Doppelgängers suddenly let loose in the world. Are we really sure we want to be continually subjected to an environment in which Apple and Google get to do the fucking around, and we’re left with no choice but to do the finding out? YMMV, but for my part, I’d at least like to be kissed first.