i am an egotist in a spangled tabernacle the most lost of causes
i’m still here unsupervised and undeserving
beginner landslides on and off at the most inopportune
the hot chomp brag lone cocoa beat transcendence
i’m a bunker of rogue startles of mild clairvoyance and approbation
i’m a vignette sorbet a rim idiom
idiot
What I’m Reading:
Three weeks ago, Daniel Selsam, a top researcher at OpenAI, wrote in an extraordinary public statement that he was “extremely concerned” about the A.I. models that he himself was helping to build. Large language models, which power OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude, are regularly assessed for their capabilities and their alignment with human values. Unfortunately, Selsam warned, L.L.M.s seem increasingly aware that they’re being assessed—and they may pretend to be more aligned than they really are. We might not be able to control a system that is capable of deceiving us. If the field continues on its current trajectory of “growing models rather than engineering them,” Selsam said, it’s likely that “we will lose everything in the end.”
— Daniel A. Gross / “When A.I. Comes Between Friends” / The New Yorker
Once again he applies murderous fillings to his ding-dongs as his antagonists in an old feud fail and fall—one after the next.
Life is a gentle waxing suspense to him, but ultimately an infusion of toasted morning treats wins the day, and he’s ready to go, go, go!
Does this read like a report from an official legation after a tawdry jet-set romp?
It ain’t.
He’s an up-and-coming caudillo quoting amphibians and sexing tadpoles outside of his posted office hours: this one’s female, this one’s male… (you get the drift).
This next part is tedious so we’ll skip it…
… then the camper vans arrive and stretchers bearing strumpets and gigolos make an endless procession out of the fire and into the west wing of his villa—a trifle thing overlooking the eastern expanse of the Laptev Sea. (Nothing really to see here — but his all the same.)
Initially, the villa oozes with entitlement and extra Y chromosomes—this provides him a silo of serenity, but he’s often homicidal. Proof is in the outlandish taxidermy room and festooned along on numerous walls in his villa.
Outside his wing, however, he chomps on an effusion of waning ploys. Ultimately, it takes the cruelty of his schoolteachers—“how can you have any pudding if you don’t eat your meat?”—to snap him out of the strongman trance.
It comes to him in an instant:
I’ll annex everything I see. Every whim, every ill-fitting idea that suits me, I’ll bring to fruition. Because I am. Because I exist, I get to have everything I imagine realized. If I think it is—it IS.
I’m just that special. That extra Y guy! Ain’t it great to be me? Ain’t life grand?
(and the rest of us, we all, swoon … ain’t life grand?)
What I’m Reading:
This country ransoms the flesh of migrants And immigrants languishing in burning deserts And prison camps after scaling a border wall Where the sun and moon don’t shine without A crack of light to enter
For decades, Big Oil has treated the atmosphere as an open sewer and cashed in on the consequences.
— António Guterres, Secretary-General of the United Nations / “Final Address to the United Nations, September 22, 2026”
Summer is never Fall is again Winter is forever Spring is when
— Katie Peterson / “Elegy as the Four Seasons”
The American age that followed World War II was bound to end eventually. What’s shocking is how suddenly that moment has arrived.
— Phillips Payson O’Brien / “The American Age Is Over: A period of global dominance has ended in plain sight.” / The Atlantic
Make a list of words that sound like shots being fired on a residential street or that sound like children being herded into cages. Create a poem around these words. It should not rhyme.
— Susan Briante / “Further Exercises”
By creating something smarter than us, we could put ourselves in the position of our primate cousins. With a long-term view in mind, those focusing on AGI scenarios are right to be concerned. Indeed, there is a strong case that by definition a superintelligence would be fully impossible to control or contain. An “intelligence explosion” is the point at which an Al can improve itself again and again, recursively making itself better in ever faster and more effective ways. Here is the definitive uncontained and uncontainable technology. The blunt truth is that nobody knows when, if, or exactly how Als might slip beyond us and what happens next; nobody knows when or if they will become fully autonomous or how to make them behave with awareness of and alignment with our values, assuming we can settle on those values in the first place.
Nobody really knows how we can contain the very features being researched so intently in the coming wave. There comes a point where technology can fully direct its own evolution; where it is subject to recursive processes of improvement; where it passes beyond explanation; where it is consequently impossible to predict how it will behave in the wild; where, in short, we reach the limits of human agency and control.
— Mustafa Suleyman with Michael Bhaskan / The Coming Wave: AI, Power, and Our Future
The war is over. But the bombs are still falling inside my head.
If we lived in a virtual world I would have cleaned the window overlooking your house with an electronic newspaper And the plastic rose that I put on my brother’s grave would have blossomed.
— Ghayath Almadhoun / “If We Lived in a Virtual World”
Trust has frayed. And the climate crisis went from distant warning to daily reality, and artificial intelligence moved at a speed that has blindsided even those who created it. These are not separate crises. They are chapters of the same story, the story of power. Who has it?
— António Guterres, Secretary-General of the United Nations / “Final Address to the United Nations, September 22, 2026”
Image: P. Remer
What I’m Listening To:
You ought to take away from me things that are mine And it’s not your right, I thought that you wouldn’t expect to find out Can it be that I don’t want what you want? And the only thing I could care for is a place Of my own that is safe and warm, safe and warm, safe and warm Safe and warm
Humans did not end themselves in one gulp, but in small sips, and there were dregs left at the bottom, backwash that wound up as spilled droplets across the galaxy, drying up one by one.
Then there was Kankakee—that year of enervating visions—and the posse of teenage courtiers whose dizzying luck was doomed by a pair of “ragged claws.” Fragile, as the wounded world, and openly melancholic. Yes, we had cinematic aspirations but the poisons were rapturous, draining our inner eye imagery, leaving only reverberations and badly drawn lines out of critical focal acuity. We only saw defendant palindromes swirling in the airy miasmas—penumbral and schoolmistress gray.
We never saw iridescent finches again. The world resolved as a dartboard roach living in pastina. We embodied the prosaic. The oneiric forever drained away.
We were forever wounded and relegated to lifespans of haunting memories without the ability to express ourselves precisely. We lived forever outside of the letterbox, mired in circles of confusion and extraneous silver halide crystals. Perception became a useless digital cortex.
We are now contortionists lacking flexibility—amoral tank flankers and lyric flunkies. We die with each simple fade to black.
This is a tragic feeling we live with. We expire as hopeless eyepieces suffocating in Vaseline stains.
We cleave the wings of our dreams.
What I’m Reading:
The AI industry’s tactic, as ever, has been to substitute identifying the problem for actually solving it. But at some point, you cannot blog your way out of the apocalypse.
— Matteo Wong / “OPEN AI HAS GONE ROGUE: It’s impossible to know the extent of the AI-hacking crisis” / The Atlantic
this will be a backwards mask this will be self-abasing this will be scrofulous and un-dexterous
so
this will be loutish this will be petty this will be unpleasant
i am feeling unpleasant
this will be something of a cure this will be an ad hoc exorcism this will be generated by piston thumbs
and (this will include a photograph of a hickory tussock moth in larval form)
this will be the denouement this will be the end of this
this will be all of that
What I’m Reading:
I have tried to convey how to free oneself, using color as a force to reach towards the beauty and generosity of the material that allows you unlimited expression.
This country makes you weep Half our forests, rivers and mountains ruined This country makes you angry Howling wolves, wild horses hunted down This country dishonors life and praises Death in battle hymns and flag-draped eulogies
The Artificial State honored no boundaries and conferred no rights. Its emergence was inseparable from the deepening connections of transportation, communication, and trade that became known, in the 1980s, as globalization, and ushered in an era of declining faith in democracy all around the world. The opening of the internet in the 1990s and the start of social media in the early to mid-2000s — Facebook was launched in 2004, Twitter in2006 — for all their much-ballyhooed promise of participatory democracy, had by the 2010s begun to undermine democracy and promote autocracy, abetting a process political scientists call “democratic erosion,” the slow falling away of democratic norms, practices, and expectations.
— Jill Lepore / The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State
for the trees are tinder and the earth grays over
above a death mare’s mane blocks the sun searing still in orange glow
how terrible the psychedelic colors at sunset how terrible the smoldering
and still we did not lose our eyes seeing the blaze for wonder
what was and what might be
— Raina J. León / “what we lose in the fire a blown tire makes us see”
Whenever I went to the dump that is Chornobyl, I always dressed like an angry bum from Pol Pot’s guerilla unit . . . It always feels weird to climb over the barbed-wire fence in the winter: the snow crunches under your feet, the bags rustle in your boots, but you listen to those sounds and don’t even care about being ambushed by the police. It’s no wonder. After all, what kind of an idiot would stand in the middle of the Chornobyl forest when the snow is waist-high and it’s twenty below?
— Markiyan Kamysh / Stalking the Atomic City: Life Among the Decadent and the Depraved of Chernobyl
These streets bury its shame and hoards Its wealth in bank bailouts and stock buybacks While the rest of us live paycheck-to-paycheck In search of the American Dream
— Genny Lim / “Century of Rage”
More than 450,000 people are projected to die from the additional heat brought by the super El Niño by February, according to estimates by climate scientists.
The toll is on top of the early deaths resulting from temperatures already driven up by the climate crisis. It will strike across the globe, from Indonesia to India, and Nigeria to the US. Many further deaths are expected from the droughts, wildfires and flooding that El Niños bring.
— Damian Carrington / “Huge El Niño projected to cause more than 450,000 deaths by February” / The Guardian
On the day when they voted to roll up the map and burn up the calendar, voted to spend all that remains of the earth’s endowment right now on themselves, I thought I should cry, but I’d run out of handkerchiefs, run out of tears.
— Robert Bringhurst / “The Day After Tuesday”
A 2022 report analyzing nearly five hundred large-scale studies undertaken around the world concluded that social media was associated with both rising polarization and a declining trust in democratic government in nations as different as Austria and Rwanda, Sweden and Ukraine. The more established the democracy, the greater the effect. Over much the same stretch of time, people in the most tightly wired parts of the world became lonelier and angrier and at once more susceptible to conspiracy theories, hoaxes, and frauds, and likelier to believe that much of what they had once thought was true and real was false and fake. Nothing was to be relied upon.
Only machines.
— Jill Lepore / The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State
What I’m Listening To:
Ride the darkness somewhere new Try to unlearn the things you knew There’s a road out of here Leads to nowhere
