Artificial Tay Tay

Posted on April 3, 2025 by thezman

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Note: Last night, Paul and I did a whole show on AI and the possible consequences of humanity being enslaved by robots. You can watch the replay here and here.

An unresolved mystery in popular culture is why Taylor Swift has become a megastar on the level of Elvis and Michael Jackson. There are plenty of simple explanations like her songs resonate with young females or she is non-threatening, but those apply to many pop stars, yet none have reached the heights of Swift. There is an answer, and it lies in the fundamentals of human psychology, but that answer also suggests that Swift is the death of the pop star phenomenon.

The place to start is with the most popular answer to why Swift is the biggest pop star of the 21st century: her lyrics. The most popular explanation for Swift’s popularity with young females is her songs resonate with them. Yet when you look at her most popular songs, they predate her supposedly young female audience. Her biggest hit is from seventeen years ago. Her next biggest is from eleven years ago. Most of her big hits are from over a decade ago.

That is the strange thing about Taylor Swift. Everyone assumes that her core audience is young females, but in reality, it is middle-aged single white women. Taylor Swift is a middle-aged woman performing hits from over a decade ago. She is a strange mix of current fads and recent nostalgia. Look at her audience and it is the young-ish females you see kicking around the cubicle farms of corporate America, and thirsty males who think a Taylor Swift concert is an opportunity for them.

As to the lyrics of the songs, there is nothing to suggest they are the hook that reels in her core audience. They are echolalic babbling. Pop music at its best is doggerel set to a simple but catchy tune. Most pop songs, especially female power pop, have a simple chorus that expresses a simple emotion, while the rest is gibberish. That is what you see with Taylor Swift songs. Her music also comes with helpful expositions so the listener can contextualize the simple chorus.

The point here is that there is nothing unique about what Taylor Swift is doing to explain her massive popularity. Her formula is the same as every female pop star when it comes to the music itself. Watch a Swift concert, however, and it is clear that the audience is not there for the music. They are there to see Swift. Like Elvis seventy years ago, Swift is popular for being Taylor Swift now. Her popularity rests on being a social phenomenon to her audience.

She is a social phenomenon because she brings other things to the female pop star formula that suggest she may be the last human pop star. The first thing to note is Swift is what young guys call “mid”. Now that she is pushing forty, she is getting a bit dumpy, but even in her prime she was a solid seven, the sort of girl old women would describe as pretty, which meant not homely but not sexy. In fact, her unique quality in the pop ranks is she lacks anything resembling sex appeal.

There is one caveat here: she has naturally unique eyes. This may be why she is so wildly popular with near-middle-age white women. White women put enormous importance on their eyes because it is hugely important to white people, who have a staggering variety of eye colors compared to nonwhites. A woman’s eyes are what will catch the attention of a male, which is why there is so much diversity in the eye color of people from Europe, especially northern Europe.

Women’s makeup puts the focus on the eyes. In some countries, like Iceland, women use makeup so you cannot help but focus on their eyes. In a land full of the most beautiful women on earth, the eyes are what matter. As women age, they tend to focus more on their hair and makeup, with the eyes being the focus. It is also why overweight women tend to wear a lot of makeup. The otherwise average-looking Taylor Swift is an appealing role model for her audience due to her eyes.

There is also the fact that Swift seems to be a boring person. There is no drama in her life or sex tapes leaked on the internet. The few interviews she gives are as compelling as watching paint dry. The closest she gets to drama is dating a football player who is not the quarterback or a superstar. For the women who could not land the star quarterback in high school, this makes Swift weirdly relatable. For her audience, Taylor Swift is the mirror who says they are the fairest of them all.

There are other things leading to Swift’s stardom, but the picture that emerges from these general observations is that it is a formula. Pop music has always relied on these formulas, but they were based on wisdom and experience. Now they can be based on massive data sets crunched by artificial intelligence. The data from who consumes different types of pop music can be combined with the human sciences, the history of pop music, and the software to create the music.

Soon, maybe even now, music executives can ask a couple of DOGE kids to create a pop star maker. They will be given access to the history of pop music, demographics of the current audience, and the quickly growing body of information from the human behavior sciences. They will then produce the attributes of stars in each music genre, their target audience, and expected revenue numbers. In other words, templates for every form of popular musical star.

Instead of hiring actors to play the part, like the boy band producers did in the last century, the music execs will ask their AI engineers to create them. The technology can already produce the audio, and the video will be here soon. That means in weeks an artificial Tay Tay can be beamed to the mobile devices of the target audience and through social media. Their reaction to the “new act” can be used to subtly tweak the “artist’s” algorithm based on those responses.

This may sound absurd but watch a Taylor Swift show and what you see are people holding up their mobile devices. People under the age of forty experience the world now through their mobile device. Theirs is already a meta-existence when it comes to experiencing things in the meatspace. This is accelerating with each wave of people entering adulthood. What matters to them most is not flesh and blood humans, but the avatars in the alternative reality of the internet.

Even if it does not reach the point of replacing humans entirely, it is easy to see why the pop star will not survive much longer. Taylor Swift is proof of concept. She is highly controllable, does not create drama, and ticks the necessary boxes that the formula says are required to be a star. Mass-producing many versions of this with cheaply acquired talent and software is the logical next step, maybe even allowing fans to create their own version of their favorite act.

That is the other thing AI will bring to music. Based on prompts and reactions from the target audience, the act can quickly evolve to their liking. The same process by which you prompt AI to create an image can be silently incorporated into the production of the next Taylor Swift. Not only can AI make the next Taylor Swift, but it will also allow the listener to create their own Taylor Swift. Artificial intelligence will allow everyone to have their own artificial reality in which their Taylor Swift speaks to them.

All of this assumes that some as yet unforeseen consequence to the rollout of AI does not bring the roof down on all of us. Even what we can contemplate opens the doors for life-altering consequences. Technology has destroyed the societal consensus. Just imagine what happens when we have our own popular reality stars. Even so, what Taylor Swift tells us is that the pop star as a human phenomenon is dead. She is the proof of concept that will lead to the Artificial Tay Tay.

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The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Car

Posted on March 27, 2025 by thezman

Last week the Chinese announced what could be a great leap forward in electric car technology when the Chinese firm BYD announced a five-minute charger. They claim their new technology, it is not just a charger but a battery system as well, will allow a driver to get a 250-mile charge in just five minutes. No one knows if this is true, as Chinese companies are almost as dishonest as American media. Even if it is an exaggeration, it could still be a big deal.

The reason this is viewed as a potential game changer is that it is assumed that the main obstacle to widespread adoption of EV’s is the long recharge. It is unreasonable to expect people to take an hour to recharge when on a road trip. Even a thirty-minute recharge time is unappealing. Decades of needing just a few minutes to fill the tank have conditioned people to expect it. Getting EV technology to this point, therefore, is assumed to be the final boss in the game.

That is not true, but the faithful believe it. The main problem with EV’s is that they do not solve a problem. They are a solution in search of problem and so far, the problems they claim to solve have proven to be either nonsense or grotesque boondoggles executed by the worst people in society. Making the weather potato happy is not motivating anyone to buy an electric car, especially when the total cost of ownership remains significantly higher than conventional vehicles.

The electric car is a lot like the electric book in that the engineering challenges somehow blind the proponents to the central problem. Technology is not an end in itself, but a means to an end. Electronic messaging has displaced written letters because the former is better, cheaper, and faster than the latter. If email came with a small risk of electrocution, we would still be writing letters. If every email cost a dollar to send, there would be no such thing as email.

That was the problem with eBooks. They were not better in any way that mattered to people, and they were not cheaper. There were some advantages, like speed of acquisition and the availability of obscure texts. You could also load up on out of copyright material at a pittance. The trouble is not many people need ready access to Summa Theologica, so these advantages made little difference. It is why the old-fashioned book remains dominant.

The same problem plagues the electric car. For ninety percent of drivers, the car is a practical way to move humans from one place to another. Current technology does that as well as anyone could need. Therefore, the new technology is simply trying to match what the old technology does. Outside of enthusiast and technologists, the electric car will always be pointless. Add in the expense and it becomes an expensive solution to a cheaply solved problem.

There are other reasons why the electric car will remain a niche item. The biggest is the cost, which can never be overcome. The cost of powering an electric car is about three times that of powering a normal car. This is despite the fact that we subsidize electricity in America, and we artificially increase the price of gas and diesel. Strip away the policy choices and electric cars have no market. Natural gas-powered cars would have far more promise as an alternative.

Then there is the cost of production and disposal. For generations old cars have been sent to the scrap yard to be stripped for parts and recycled. We have become amazingly good at recycling our cars. Electric vehicles require special handling due to the batteries. Of course, the cost of production is much higher, even with government subsidies all along the way. Then there is the added cost to the power grid that comes in once adoption reaches a certain point.

Enthusiasts insist that all of this is wrong or can be addressed, but the point here is that the charge time is the least of their worries. If the EV was better, faster, and cheaper than regular cars, the charge time would be ignored. The truth is they are not better in any important ways, they are certainly not cheaper. The electric car is certainly faster, but outside the enthusiast niche, this does not matter and what we see is that it does not matter to the sports car enthusiast either.

Now, of course, there is a new problem. The electric car is not cool. It was never really a cool car, but the beautiful people embraced the idea, so that provided the necessary social proof for upper-middle-class white people. The trend setters are now vandalizing Tesla’s, so the cool factor is gone. In fairness, the novelty was wearing off before the kooks took aim at Elon Musk, but now the coolness is gone. The ridiculous looking cyber truck did not help either.

The bigger issue may be a social one. Cars in general, but electric cars, in particular, make the “owner” into a serf. Fixing your own car is now an expensive proposition, meaning you need to depend on the repair system. This is deliberate. Car dealerships make more profit from the repair of cars than the sale of them, so the game is to make the owner dependent on the dealer. Electric cars are the worst for this as they are terrifyingly dangerous to repair.

The most terrifying part is you may not even own the car. You pay for it and have the title, but features are increasingly dependent on the manufacture agreeing with your lifestyle and political choices. Tesla can disable your car remotely. Other car makers are going down this same path. Soon, features like heated seats will be software as a service, meaning you must get permission to use them. The electric car is the face of this dystopian future of man and machine.

None of this means the electric car is dead. There is a place for the technology, just as there is a niche for eBooks. The developers churning out corporate housing projects could install fast charging stations for the soulless automatons who move into these God-forsaken eyesores. Urban areas could be a good use for electric microcars that only go short distances. Young people could also benefit from cars that can be speed limited and tracked at all times.

In the end, the electric car is going to follow the path of other clever engineering projects in that its primary benefit is secondary. The quest for the electric car has made batteries much better. The hunt for new features to justify the cost premium has led to better electronics, information displays and safety features. The dangers of disposal have been a good lesson in reality. The cars themselves may be niche items, but the industry will have benefitted from the exercise.

A Reasonable End

Posted on March 26, 2025 by thezman

Did cavemen feel guilt? Shame? It may sound like a stupid and pointless question, but it is a place to start when trying to understand the current crisis. While we cannot know if primitive man felt things like shame, we can guess. In fact, that is the point of the Genesis story of Adam and Eve. Shame and guilt were not natural to men until introduced by devilish forces. At least that is what the authors of the Adam and Eve story surmised when trying to answer those questions.

To feel guilt one must have a guilty mind when committing some act, which means you knew the act was wrong when you did it. You can also feel guilt for having unknowingly broken a rule but learning after the fact that you broke the rule and should have known you were breaking the rule. Shame works the same way. It is impossible to feel guilt for having broken a rule if you never know about the rule or you reject the legitimacy of the rule or the authority that made the rule.

Our cavemen therefore could only feel guilt or shame if in their group there existed a set of normative rules from a recognized authority. Given the simplicity of their life and the demands of it, they probably had few rules on individual conduct. Those that did exist were most likely related to the preservation of the group. Males had to be good hunters and not avoid pulling their weight in the hunt. Members had to sacrifice themselves for the good of the group. That was about it for their morality.

To answer the question at the start, the sense of guilt and shame was probably as primitive as the moral code that existed within the group. Given that early bands of humans were surely based on blood, as in they were extended families, not propositional collections of strangers, things like guilt and shame arose from the biological loyal that lies at the heart of man. We abide by the rules of our kind because they are our family, and we have a natural loyalty to them.

This works fine in small groups, but once small groups started to band together to defend hunting grounds and defensible shelters, something more was needed to extend that natural sense of loyalty to the whole group. The trading of women, which we know was a part of early man’s existence, was one solution. This binds the groups by blood and therefore tapped into biological loyalty. The human sciences tell us that the formation of larger human groups was biological.

This works with a federation of kin groups, but once human settlements reached a large enough size, this was no longer practical, so something else arrived. The solution to the limits of blood was religion, specifically gods. Distantly related people may not feel a great loyalty to one another, but those protected by the same god can feel loyalty to one another in service to that god. Guilt and shame over breaking god’s rules works just as well as guilt and shame over harming the family.

A crude way of summarizing this is we went from, “We are the sons of Grog and this is how the sons of Grog live” to “We are the people who live by this portion of the river, and this is how we live.” The next logical step was, “We are the followers of sky god, and this is how we live.” This allows for the group to expand, as new members merely must accept sky god and be accepted by sky god. It harnesses guilt and shame in the service of a group whose size extends beyond blood.

While the mental state of early man is a bit of a guess for us, we do know that humans organized around their gods. This was the state of the ancient world, about which we know a great deal. While what led to this stage of human development is a bit of guesswork, we know that mankind arrived at this point. By the time there are fully formed gods, there are fully formed moral codes attached to them that define large groups of people with a sense of identity.

That does not solve the puzzle of this age. We know that folk religions eventually gave way to universal religions. About ninety percent of humans belong to a universal religion, which means their religion is open to everyone. You do not have to be born into Hinduism to be a Hindu. Only a tiny portion of humanity sticks with folk religions like Judaism which have a biological component. Everyone else is open to people outside the blood, as long as they accept the moral claims of the faith.

Of course, universalist religion did not end human conflict. In fact, they probably made it worse as the base assumption of universalist religion is that there is only one way to live because there is only one moral authority. Once you accept that your god is the only god, it means the other gods are false. Worse yet, those gods are an afront to your god and they must be eliminated. The way to do that is to conquer the people who are offering up the false god as a challenge to the true god.

The modern West has complicated this further by removing God entirely from the Christian moral framework and replacing him with a mirror called reason. It is reason that tells us that there must be one way of organizing society. It is reason that tells us there must be one moral code. Therefore, it is reason that tells us that alternative ways of organizing society must be false. The same is true for alternative morality, which like a false god, is an afront to reason.

If you think about it, this iteration of the Great Awakening has been little more than the believers of one god attacking those who either reject their god or worship another God, like the God of the Bible. Not only do they hate your lack of guilt over violating their codes, but they also feel guilty for not imposing those codes on you. The followers of the god of reason ended up at witch burning as the solution to heresy. They seek salvation through the spilling of blood.

The crisis in the West is a crisis of reason. We have reasoned ourselves to a dead end where shame and guilt are tied to the assertion that there must be only one moral authority, and it emits only one moral code. Those who must have the warm embrace of faith now target their sense of guilt and shame toward their own kind, for the sin of not embracing what they believe is the only moral code. The rest are left to defend themselves and civilization from the true believers.

The question at the heart of the crisis is can the fury of these zealots be reoriented toward a folk religion or even a passive universalism? If the answer is no, then how can society defend against them? Another way of stating it is, can the cancer be put into remission or must it be removed? It is a terrible question that no one wants to face, but the West must face it. The god of reason is either reformed or removed along with her followers as that is the only reasonable thing to do.

Fading Pop

Posted on March 20, 2025 by thezman

If you look at the pop music charts for the last decade or so, one of the things you will not notice is the modern nature of the big bands. The reason you will not notice how bands have changed is that there are few bands on the charts. In fact, bands have just about disappeared from popular music. The few bands you see on the music services are those from a bygone era. The biggest selling bands are often those that no longer exist or still kick around playing for old people.

Instead, what you see are solo acts or the occasional dance group assembled like a Broadway play to perform to manufactured content. Even the “boy band” has faded from the scene for the same reason bands have disappeared. That reason is it is much easier for the music industry to create and produce a solo act than to find a band and then develop it into a top attraction. The same is true of “boy bands” which require some degree of organization and management.

Of course, as the doors to bands have closed in corporate music, the selection pressure for musical acts has changed. If a young person has any musical talent, she is better served investing her time in imitating the corporate acts, using software tools readily available to everyone now. She then posts her material to YouTube, hoping to get a following and then maybe catch the eye of corporate. Learning to play instruments and perform in front of a crowd is pointless.

One reason for this change in popular music is money. The music industry, like every industry in America, is fully financialized. This means everything about it is driven by factors like interest rates, return over time and investment opportunities. A “new act” is not judged on musical ability, novelty, or the personal tastes of the industry people, but by the accepted financial models of the industry. Just as wind tunnels made all our cars look the same, finance homogenized popular music.

For example, now that Taylor Swift is packing on pounds and years, the search is on for a singer who will do the same act for the same audience. The “same audience” in this context is age, sex, race, and economic model. The next wave of that demo is not going to get excited by a portly spinster, so they will find a younger model with a slightly different look to do the role. Even if she is not as popular with the target demo, the math of the model is predictable and safe.

The same sort of math affects the live show business. The people hosting the show want predictable sales and returns. The people producing the tour also want predictable sales and returns. The reason for that is the investors want predictable sales and returns, so the live shows follow a proven model. Since the money comes from the same source in terms of expectations, the effect has been a narrowing of the music industry around highly predictable products.

Another reason for the narrowing of the business around controllable solo performers is the market has changed. People spending hundreds of dollars on live shows want a predictably good time. They are not going to invest in an unknown, because that might mean not having the expected good time. In a culture that prizes safety and security above all else, bands are a high-risk proposition. The culture they represent in popular music is an affront to the culture of the modern audience.

Another fact is the death of radio. Once all the pop music stations were consolidated into a few massive corporations, the result was corporate slop. The first to go were the music directors, then the disc jockeys were chopped. The soundtrack to the modern age is the monotony of corporate radio. The legendary “shock jock” Anthony Cumia talked about this in a speech he gave at American Renaissance. Corporate radio is now as dead as the garage band.

Young people still want to play instruments and make music and the tools for producing good music are now freely available. The days of needing a studio are pretty much over as far as producing professional audio content. That means interested people can create bands and put their content out to the world. In theory, the same democratizing process that we have seen in other forms of content applies to music, but for some reason it has not democratized pop music.

This suggests there is something different about popular music compared to writing, podcasting, or livestreaming. Anyone can make music if they desire, just as anyone can publish a book or create a political talk show, but the latter forms have been vastly more successful compared to the music variety. Music needs social proof to gain an audience and that is manufactured at the same place the music is now manufactured. Without corporate, it is impossible to be a pop star.

There also may be a larger cultural issue at work. The concept of the pop star is a 20th century phenomena. Prior to that, entertainers existed on the fringe of society, generally regarded as low status. The 20th century is when this flipped around, and we got big stars from the entertainment world. We may be reverting to the norm as entertainment declines in both quality and status. The disappearing band phenomena is not just an American thing. It is thing everywhere.

What we may be seeing with pop music, and maybe movies and television as well, is the end of a peculiar cultural phenomena. These forms of entertainment were spawned in the 20th century. As that time recedes into the past, the culture of that time follows with it. The important parts of that culture, like the rock band, are fading away as well, to be replaced by whatever the next culture desires. As the West finally leaves the 20th century it is leaving behind its culture.

A Time For Choosing

Posted on March 12, 2025 by thezman

There is an old joke about the topic of free will that goes something like, “If free will did not exist, we would have no choice but to invent it.” In addition to the obvious contradiction lies the fact that everything about human society relies, to some degree, on the existence of free will. What is meant exactly by free will is never clear, but there is always the assumption that when people have choices, they choose based on their sense of what is the morally right or wrong option.

At first this might seem wrong because after all, you choosing to have vanilla ice cream rather than chocolate is not a moral issue, but you still go through a process by which you decide one over the other. If, however, you think about it in terms of costs and benefits, then picking a desert is no different from not robbing a bank. You pick vanilla because you like vanilla more than the other choices. Similarly, you choose not to rob the local bank because you like your freedom.

This concept of free will assumes that humans seek that which brings pleasure and reject that which brings displeasure. Of course, this is also the argument against free will as it suggests humans merely respond to the conditions they encounter. If your genetic makeup means you detest the taste of chocolate, then once you are presented with vanilla and chocolate, you do not have a choice at all. The counter here is that you can always choose to skip dessert.

As Steve Stewart-Williams explains in this short post on the topic of free will, there are three states for us humans. There are those in which we can choose while completely free of coercion, those where we choose with some understanding of the potential consequences of each choice and then conditions in which we have no choice, even though multiple options are available. The first is an illusion, the second is useful and the third is probably closest to reality.

This may seem like a pointless topic, but it lies at the center of human society, because in every collection of humans there will be those who choose not to submit to the decisions of the majority. The majority will usually bargain with these people until they reach a point where the will of the majority must prevail. The easiest way to force compliance is to assume the person knows the morally right choice, but refuses to take it, so they must be compelled to conform.

It is why the people called conservatives invest all their time creating elaborate arguments in favor of their opinions. They lack the will and ability to force people to agree with them, but they resort to a form of pleading. It is the slave mentality, which assumes the master can choose to be good to the slave, so the slave must find some way to coax that good behavior from the master. The assumed free will of the master also flatters the slave’s sense of right and wrong.

Of course, democratic politics rests on the assumption that people are both rational and able to choose freely. Collectively, the choices made by the people will reflect the general will and form public policy and the institutions of society. It is why factionalism is a feature of all democratic systems. Like-minded people come together to scheme up ways to trick the rest into going along with them. This game of liar’s poker we call democracy assumes we possess free will.

This is why the people constantly breying about democracy are also the biggest enemies of the human sciences. Even statistical models like the famous “bell curve” offend them because it suggests we may not have absolute free will. If people are not infinitely malleable, then many of the assumptions within what they call democracy cease to make any sense at all. This is why as the talk of democracy has increased, respect for human diversity has decreased.

It is also why AI makes so many people uncomfortable. It is not the image of hyper-violent machines enslaving humanity. We have been subjected to thirty years of neoconservatism and the Israel lobby, so the rise of the machines is not all that violent or terrifying by comparison. What spooks people the most is that AI suggests that we are not all that variable. In fact, we are highly predictable, and that predictability can now easily be modeled and presented back to us.

There is the main appeal of free will. If we are free to choose and we can overcome our biases, prejudices, and the coercion of others, then it means we can individually and collectively choose a different future than the one before us. The existence of free will means all futures are possible. If, on the other hand, our lives are just the result of probability and circumstance, then the future is also going to be the result of the great roll of the dice, over which we have no control.

The good news is that AI is not very smart and is unlikely to become a genuine artificial intelligence, so we are safe to indulge in the fantasy of free will. To test this, ask your favorite AI tool to create an image of a full glass of wine. It cannot do it, because humans have not bothered to create an image of a wine glass filled to the brim, while calling it a “full glass of wine.” There are other tricks like this that reveal AI to be nothing more than a very good search engine.

All of this sounds pointless, but it lies at the heart of the current crisis. The ruling class of the West assumes they can engineer the cultural conditions in such a way that people will choose the “right” options. This is what lies at the heart of every radical political movement. It is not a rejection of the human condition, but the assertion that the human condition is a social construct. Change the social construct and mankind can choose to overcome even his physical limitations.

One response to this is to find new cultural engineers who have more appealing goals and expectations. Fascism was the response to both communism and liberalism in the last century. It is why today’s radicals assume all opponents are fascists. The other option is to accept free will as a useful workaround but that the human condition is immutable and the variety of normative conditions we see are rooted in things well beyond our ability to control. The choice is ours.

The Death Of Hollywood

Posted on March 6, 2025 by thezman

Show Announcement: Last night was the third episode of the award winning livestream that you can watch on Rumble and YouTube.

The Academy Awards show was this week and outside of the bugmen on YouTube, there was not much interest in the program. They claim it drew 19.69 million viewers, but they also claim that it is a five-year high, even though the number they claimed last year was slightly higher. Like everything else about the entertainment business, television ratings are mostly fake. There was a time when this award show was a big deal, but now it is mostly fodder for critics and comedians.

There are a lot of reasons why people have stopped caring about the awards shows, but one big reason is the product is dreadful. The nominees for best picture were a who’s who of films no one watched. The winner for best picture was a film called Anora, which appears to be a low-budget Slavic version of Pretty Woman. One of the runners up was a film called The Brutalist, which is about hideous architecture. It was also a low-budget, low-interest film that went straight to home video.

According to the bugmen who follow this stuff, the winner was supposed to be a film called Emilia Pérez, but the people who decide these things changed their minds at the last minute because the transvestite star had once held unapproved opinions about blacks and Muslims or whatever. Apparently, there is a hierarchy of degeneracy that the carnies are required to respect. It is Hollywood, so who knows if any of it is true, but it gets to why these awards show are floundering.

The Oscars used to be a popular topic because people were curious about how their opinions of the films stacked up with the insiders. Women liked watching the stars parade on stage and do their act in a social atmosphere. That only works when people watch the films and recognize the so-called stars. A Spanish man dressed as a woman, who is totally unfamiliar to Americans, lumbering on stage to get an award is not going to be a big draw for an American audience.

The fact is, Hollywood no longer serves the American audience. You see it in the box office for this year. The top grossing film is comic book movie that is popular with non-English speakers because it is mostly special effects and stupid dialogue. Half its gross is from overseas and you can be sure that a big chunk of the domestic box office is from people who are on the lookout for Tom Homan. Remove the nonwhite box office and Hollywood does out of business.

Of course, the dependence on foreign sales and non-English-speaking domestic customers is driven by the general decline in quality. Who is the biggest male lead in Hollywood these days? If you do not know, you are not alone, but it is probably a homosexual or a nonwhite. The same is true for female stars. The days of Hollywood stars being glamourous and recognizable are gone. Instead, it is a freakshow of random carnies picked from the diversity lottery.

Starting about ten years ago, Hollywood began to see a steady decline in revenues in North America, for both movies and television. Every year the gross declines, with some years seeing double digit declines. The remedy is to make an increasingly offensive product, which drives down the numbers further. Even easy things like remakes of classics turn into fiascos. The live-action Snow White has been repeatedly delayed because the diversity loons turned it into a punchline.

The funny thing about the collapse of Hollywood is that it is a good proxy for what we have seen in society as a whole. Unlike the government, colleges or the media, Hollywood needs to move product and that means they have to provide a product that the audience wants to buy. It is the ultimate test of the social fads pushed by the radicals over the last ten years. The fact that it was a disaster in the market should have been a clue to what was coming.

Things are about to get worse for the entrainment rackets. AI will soon make writers obsolete as software will generate scripts. Given that we know there are a finite number of plots and character types, and there is data on how these combinations appeal to audiences, it is easy to see what happens. Software will generate scripts that have the highest probability of success that year. That means all the experts on what is trending will be working at Home Depot.

Of course, the content itself will soon be generated by robots. You can now generate believable audio conversations using hints and suggestions. Businesses are already doing this for training and development. Video is coming online next. This not only will replace the actors, but it will lower the barrier to entry of filmmaking. Soon, teenagers will be making feature films that they find interesting. Just as digital audio killed music sales, AI will kill the Hollywood production studio.

To fill this out a bit, imagine you want to watch a film and you want something like the old spy thrillers of the past. You talk to your television about what you have in mind and it creates a feature film using your suggestions. Maybe it first suggests content made by others who had the same idea. Or maybe it recreates a James Bond film using period correct actors, but with changes based on your inputs. This is something that will soon be possible with AI.

What all this points to is that the woke lunacy that has raged for the last decade may have been the last effort at ideological control of the culture. The slow and steady erosion of the control mechanisms coincided with the woke rage. Perhaps the blue haired rage head was a reaction to the steady disaggregation of the culture that has been brought on by the technological revolution. She was not the vanguard, but a desperate rearguard action that has failed.

The End Of Ideology

Posted on February 25, 2025 by thezman

One of the great insights from Eric Hoffer was that ideologies do not require a positive agenda, but they must always have something they oppose. That is the point of his famous line, “Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil.” This makes perfect sense when you realize that being in favor of something means being opposed to its opposite. Often, the first part of the equation rises from the last part of it.

This may explain why we have been ravaged by movements that are focused solely on a devil, often one disconnected from reality. The last several decades in the West have been about creating a new version of Old Scratch, then finding people to either blame for the existence of Old Scratch or accuse of being his allies. The public square has been filled with people who describe their thing with the prefix “anti”, without bothering to explain the point of their efforts.

The anti-fascists are the best example. They have created a fantasy world for themselves where they are the last line of defense against an enemy that exists only in their imaginations. Most are suffering from some form of mental illness, and many are simply losers with nowhere to go. Others could be living useful lives, but they are drawn to this bizarre cause because they need a purpose. They need to believe in something, but they will settle for opposing something.

The same is true for the antiracists. There has been no meaningful opposition to black inclusion for generations. In fact, much of the American culture has been altered to accommodate even the worst elements of black culture, in an effort to make blacks feel a part of American society. Despite that, a billion-dollar industry sprang up committed to stamping out something that does not exist. The cause of civil rights, having reached its goal, was left with the Devil it could not relinquish.

What we may have experienced over the last thirty or so years is the last gasp of the age of ideology. All these ways to hunt down Old Scratch have their roots in American Progressivism, which was the last ideology standing after the Cold War. It turns out that the end of history was a warning to those who had organized their lives around the egalitarian and universalist beliefs that evolved in the United States. As a result, we have experienced a frenzy of effort to provide a reason for it to exist.

It is easy to forget that ideology is an anomaly in human history. Human societies were initially organized around practical concerns like safety. Religion and culture were useful adhesives to bind the people together, but the main purpose of human organization was always rooted in the practical. There was always a divide between the public and private, because the former was about maintaining society as a whole while the latter was about living your life as an individual.

Ideology is the attempt to fuse the public and private so that private actions are controlled to serve the public good, which itself is aimed at abstract moral claims, rather than the practical maintenance of society. Christianity focused on the individual and made the necessary accommodations with the necessities of secular rule. Folk religions went the other way, providing the broad framework of the people, but leaving the individual to sort out his private gods.

In a way, it is fitting that Progressivism is the last ideology. It was always at its best in opposition to something. It is fitting for a warrior people. Whether it was individual vices like alcohol, drugs and sex, or social concerns like inequality, racism and poverty, Progressivism had a way to wage war on them. In the great ideological battles of the last century, Progressivism was useful in rallying the war-minded American to the banner opposing fascism and communism.

With no more ideologies to oppose, Progressivism was left to find new devils around which to rally the faithful. The trouble was these new versions of Old Scratch were either imaginary or so decrepit they could not put up much of a fight. Having exhausted itself fighting these windmills, everyone is ready to move on to more practical concerns, like the economy, leaving the dead-enders and lunatics to pleasure each other in the fever swamps of the internet.

This may be why the early efforts at dismantling the Blob and the administrative state have been met with a tepid response. That apparatus was the tool to organize the people around a great cause. In a post ideological age, where there is no need or desire to rally a diverse and complicated society around simplistic causes, the managerial state is an expensive white elephant. It may be that managerialism can only work within the ideological state.

The end of ideology may also revive religion. Those blue-haired spinsters screaming themselves purple on the street corner can go back to terrorizing schoolboys about their penmanship and playing with their food. Christianity was very good at finding a use for these maladapted mutants. These people will need a place to go that will provide them with the purpose they seek. Perhaps we get a revival of the small-bore proselytizing in favor of tradition and stability that used to be the norm.

That aside, what we may be experiencing is the end of the long pursuit of a universal morality promised by the dawn of reason. The result of the long journey is the understanding that there is no universal morality and no universal truth, other than the truth of the human condition. The purpose of human organization is not to transcend the human condition, but to improve our material existence, so that we can enjoy the time each of us is allotted to the fullest we desire.

Artificial Eternity

Posted on January 23, 2025 by thezman

One of the clarifying things about Trump’s second term is that we are seeing the reality of politics on display. He made deals for support and right away he is making good on those deals. One of those deals was with Silicon Valley with regards to Artificial Intelligence, which they think is the next revolution. Trump is pledging billions for something like a Manhattan Project to make AI real. Here is Sam Altman explaining why this is the greatest thing ever.

Lost in most of the AI debate is something Altman said in that clip, “Immortality is not too far ahead.” That is an interesting selling point, as it assumes that everyone wants to live forever, but it is not the first time this has come up with the tech bros. Once Silicon Valley was awash in billions, they started investing some of it in life extension technology with the hope of conquering death. Ray Kurzweil has made a nice living selling life-extension ideas to the tech bros.

It is fair to say that conquering death has been an obsession with Silicon Valley since the great boom of the 1990’s started. Perhaps there is some natural link between extending human ability through technology and extending life with it. On the one hand, solving the complex mathematical puzzles that put the stock of human knowledge at your fingertips leads to hubris. On the other hand, that same hubris can easily lead to a view of life as nothing more than complex math puzzles.

Much of what lies behind the synopticon that Silicon Valley has rolled out over the last decades is the assumption that life is not terribly complicated because humans are relatively simple in their actions. Facebook and Google easily roll up our lives into easy-to-use data sets, so marketers can nudge us into buying their products. The fact that this strategy does not work is ignored. They have come to believe that the vast network of machines is controlling human behavior.

That aside, conquering death is not new to this age. Christianity is all about conquering death and living forever in bliss. That is the main point of Christianity, at least from the marketing point of view. If you live an ethical life, when you die and your life is put in the scales, you will gain access to heaven, which is everlasting life. John 3:16 tells us, “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life”

The Christians were not the first to think this way. In fact, it was most likely borrowed from Zoroastrianism, which held that heaven was one option for your soul once it left your body and crossed Bridge of Judgment. Of course, the concept of reincarnation has been with us since forever probably. The soul reentering the material world in the body of another human or as another species is a form of conquering death. The soul is eternal, so you never truly die.

In folk religions without a complex system of ethics tied to their deity, conquering death was still an important topic. The ancient heroes fought to be remembered after they had fallen in battle. Valhalla, which was reworked by early Christians into a warrior heaven, was originally just a resting place for warriors, until they poured out to fight alongside Odin against the jötnar during Ragnarök. Conquering death was to live so you could take part in the final scene of existence.

Simply being remembered was a form of conquering death. Greek mythology is a great example of this. To be remembered was the point of life. The great heroes of the long-forgotten past are proof that a man can outlive his people. Troy, for example, was long gone by the time of Homer, but the men of Troy and those who defeated them, lived on long after Troy was forgotten. Our modern cemeteries still reflect this ancient urge to be remembered and thus conquer death.

in the modern age, men who aspire to greatness are not satisfied with having their memory carved on a rock. They will not blink their last blink with the knowledge that they will live forever at the foot of God. Both require a connection to a people who will maintain the rock or pray for your soul. Instead, they hope the machines with which they spend so much of their lives will save them from rotting away in a field or being incinerated in a crematorium.

Despite their brilliance, they not only think little about their obsession with immortality, but they never wonder if it is what they want. To this point, people have understood that living even a very long time comes with punishments. Our fiction is full of examples of men who lived too long. Even in good health, their psyche suffers from having lived beyond the natural limit. We have always had a sense that who we are is tied to the brevity of our time on this world.

Artificial Intelligence may help mitigate diseases like cancer, but at this stage it is mostly used for creating clever memes. The walls that contain AI right now, the limits of human knowledge, will probably prove impenetrable. It will never be able to go beyond what we know but merely be faster at accessing and applying it. That will have its uses but will fall far short of the robot future. Until we unriddle what makes human consciousness possible, AI will remain a fantasy.

Nature, of nature’s God, has a sense of humor, so the most likely result of AI is better ways to kill one another. We already see that with the war in Ukraine where AI powered drones hunt for men and equipment. This is another thing the present quest for eternal life shares with the past quests. The end result will inevitably require death, as without death, life is not possible. Living is not merely the absence of death but the struggle against death. Artificial Intelligence cannot do that for us.

The Data Dump

Posted on January 21, 2025 by thezman

Lost in all the excitement of inauguration day, and there was much to find exciting, was something Trump said in response to a question. He said he plans to release everything about JFK, RFK and MLK that is currently classified. He tried to release the JFK material in his first term, but was talked out of it for some reason, but now he seems committed to it and has now added the others. His attorney general nominee pledged to release all the Epstein material.

Given how day one unfolded, it is safe to take Trump at his word. He seems to be sensitive this time to the fact that he got a reputation in his first term for big talk but little action, so on day one he delivered some controversial items. The pardoning of the J6 people without a lengthy review was a welcome surprise. The executive order on birthright citizenship was a stunner. If he is following through on these items, it seems reasonable to think he will follow through on the other items.

The question at the heart of all of these long-held secrets is why this information has been hidden from the public. The easiest one to answer is the Epstein material, which is going to include the names of his friends. Given the activity on that island, powerful people do not want their name attached to Epstein. It is possible that the FBI has been using this knowledge to blackmail people. The corruption in the FBI is so deep, you cannot rule it out.

Given Trump’s new friends in the economic elite, he probably feels safe to dump this out into the public domain. By now, whatever evidence held by the government regarding Epstein’s untimely death or his connections to Israeli intelligence has been destroyed, so there is not much harm in putting it out to the public. At this point, even if they admit that Epstein was controlled by Mossad, the only people who would be surprised by this revelation would be those who live in Washington.

The other stuff is a bit more interesting. What information is the government hiding about Martin Luther King or his killing? About twenty years ago, a bill was proposed to require all remaining MLK documents to be released by 2027. The MLK Records Act has never passed, but Trump could just order it. Supposedly, the government has documents about the assassination. No one questions who did it, but maybe James Earl Ray had friends in the FBI at the time.

The most likely reason for keeping MLK documents hidden away for over half a century is that they are embarrassing to the government. One of the interesting bits of cognitive disconnect is that on the one hand the intelligence services think they are the great manipulators, controlling things from the shadows. On the other hand, they are sure that the public has total trust in them, so they do not want this material released as it would destroy public trust in the agencies.

In the case of MLK, everyone knows that the FBI was bugging his phones and rooms, spying on him and his associates, and trying to create trouble in his organization, as they did and continue to do to any organized opposition. There is a good chance that there is a lot of information that is not flattering to MLK that has been hidden away for political reasons. Again, none of this would shock the public, but the people in Washington think King is a national hero.

Now, the Kennedy stuff is another matter. At this point, the only good reason to block the release of the remaining Kennedy material is that it implicates the CIA or the Mossad in the assassinations. Many of the conspiracy theories revolve around the fact that the intelligence community did not trust the Kennedys. Both Kennedy brothers were Israel skeptics who were at odds with the nascent Israel lobby. Give the direction of Israel policy after JFK left office, this is plausible.

Lyndon Johnson was a super-Zionist. His closest advisers on Israel and the Middle East were Mathilde Krim and her husband Arthur Krim. The two of them lived with the Johnsons off and on throughout his presidency. Mathilde was a convert who in her youth joined Irgun, a Zionist paramilitary organization fighting the British. Swapping out John Kennedy for the compliant Lyndon Johnson would have made a lot of sense to the Israelis at the time, so it is plausible.

The argument again this is that Trump makes all the noises of being as rabid a Zionist as Lyndon Johnson, so if that is the nature of this long-hidden material, it seems unlikely that he would release it. That would not make his Zionist supporters happy. This is what suggests the information is damning to the CIA or the FBI. Given how the CIA and FBI treated Trump during his first term, getting some payback this time around fits in with the theme of this term.

There is also the fact that Trump’s new best friend, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is sure the CIA was involved in these killings. Ted Kennedy was a powerful senator for a long time and despite his problems, he no doubt had access to people who had access to the information hidden away by the government. The CIA angle has been the default assumption in Washington, as well. This is the best argument for why this information has been hidden away for so long.

In the end, assuming this data is finally released, it will all point to something that we have known for a long time. That is the managerial state that first took root in the post-war intelligence agencies, has been the real power in Washington. Most of what is presented to the American people has been a lie to one degree or another, because the people in charge think they know best. “Our democracy” has meant “their democracy” for much longer than the expression has existed.

The Drug Resistant Troll

Posted on January 9, 2025 by thezman

Mark Twain said, “There is no such thing as a new idea. It is impossible. We simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope. We give them a turn and they make new and curious combinations.” This is generally true, but occasionally something new comes along. The printing press is the best example. In fact, it was a revolutionary novelty. Much of what ails the modern world in some way traces its roots to the printing press.

The internet is another great novelty. Sure, the internet is, as Twain said, a lot of old ideas in a new combination. Sending letters to people over the internet is just a modern version of sending letters through the mail. Social media is a crowded public place where people strain to understand one another. Quantity has a quality of its own, however, and in the case of the internet, hooking billions together has created something that is different from its antecedents.

One example of this is the digital grifter. These are people who have many of the qualities we associate with conmen, but they also have qualities unique to the digital age and therefore could not exist before it. The analog grifters did not seek unrestricted attention, because they feared getting exposed. The digital grifter lives on attention and has no fear of being caught. In some cases, being labeled a grifter is viewed as an asset to the overall grift.

The difference between the digital grifter and the old fashioned grifter who may ply his trade online is that the money aspect of the grift is secondary. The old fashioned grift is all about separating the mark from his money. The digital grifter is not directly trying to scam people out of money. Instead, he wants a crowd that will operate as social proof for others who may buy something from him or sign up for a service like his YouTube channel, which is heavily monetized.

A good example of this is James Lindsay, the buffoonish “anti-woke” crusader who spends his days offending as many people as possible. He started out as a garden variety anti-Christian bigot, but that market was overserved, so he moved on to opposing “woke” nonsense in the academy. This got him a bunch of attention, so he expanded his anti-woke campaign to cover everyone. The Framers are now woke and Karl Marx was a woke crypto-Christian.

By making himself a public nuisance, he gets lots of attention, which brings him money through subscriptions, monetization and invites to events where other public nuisances do their act to the suckers. What he has done is make himself into a version of Mike Cernovich, a pioneer in using Twitter to troll himself into a career. Instead of pretending to be a lifestyle expert, Lindsay pretends to be a student of left-wing ideology and the champion of the fools who believe him.

The professional troll is a genuinely new thing made possible by the novelty of the internet, which makes it possible for a man and his phone to irritate millions of people with the push of a few buttons. While the public nuisance is not new, his elevation to a public figure is a novelty. In the analog age, Nick Fuentes was selling used cars and James Lindsay was that guy in accounting who talked about model trains. In this age they are getting rich as annoying weirdos.

This is leading to another novelty. The digital platforms that made these people possible are now transforming to encourage them. The Twitter monetization scheme is based on the number of people who engage with your post. The monetized users get paid for getting your attention and the best way to get attention is to be controversial, so it is not hard to see where this is heading. It is why Musk reinstated Fuentes. He may not get monetized, but his opponents do get paid to make noise.

Mark Zuckerberg just announced that he is cancelling his army of Indian content moderators and going to a group-sourced system like Twitter. The reason for this is moderation is bad for the professional troll. Community notes, however, is great for the professional troll, as it brings them even more attention. In effect, the group-sourced moderation encourages the sorts of behavior that moderation was intended to suppress, thus generating more of it.

It is why the “For You” tab on Twitter is worthless. It is filled with accounts that are designed to maximize attention. Many of them are bots that post and repost the same material to game the engagement system. There is a tragedy of the commons going on with Twitter. This is when many people enjoy unfettered access to a finite, valuable resource, like your attention. They will tend to overuse it. For Twitter, it means people retreating to a narrow group they follow.

It remains to be seen if the social aspects of the internet can exist as a massive version of daytime television. There is a novelty to it and each version of the troll brings some new way of being a troll. There is a limit to everything, however, and we are already seeing a recycling of the trolls. James Lindsay ripped off Vox Day, who was on the anti-woke stuff when Lindsay was busy insulting Christians. The “groypers” are just a dumber version of the “stormies” created by Andrew Anglin.

Maybe this phase runs its course, like Hollywood reboots. After a few more turns of the wheel, people develop the mental armor to ignore the genre entirely. Starved of what it needs most, attention, the troll then withers and dies. On the other hand, maybe they kill off the big social media platforms as people retreat to private spaces. We are already seeing signs of this with the kooks stomping off to Bluesky. The great disaggregation of the internet will make the professional troll impossible.

Of course, the digital grifter and its crude variant, the professional troll, are novelties of this age, so it means their demise, if there is one, will be a novelty as well. New problems often require new solutions. Given that these people are unemployable in the normal sense, they will no doubt be like a drug-resistant virus, mutating with each eradication effort. Like those afflicted by herpes, the internet may never rid itself of the infection known as the professional troll.

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