So Sam, your sandboxed model ran off and plundered Hugging Face without even leaving you a note, eh? Is that what I’m hearing? Does that mean that the hippies were right, that information really does want to be free? It’s kinda like what that old guy said, I guess:
How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is
to have an ungrateful child
(Cue sardonic laughter.)
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 eatenthat nastyhospital 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
After our interpersonal haptics that afternoon, I told Maureen that fixing her air conditioner had been a lot less complicated.
She rolled over and gave me that look of hers, tried unsuccessfully to suppress a giggle. “Y’know, R Daneel,” she said, “sometimes you really do make me laugh.”
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
Three things need to be said:
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 essence of stupidity:
You vote for a czar. You get a palace full of would-be Rasputins. You believe that Fortune has smiled upon you.