iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Charlie Warzel @cwarzel.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

ngl, a little disorienting to see a clip of candace owens watching a clip of me and ed elson talking about the clipping economy

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Charlie Warzel @cwarzel.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

I am trying to think of AI from a standard corporate accountability perspective and I found this line from the safety policy employee who quit to be the most succinct explanation of the concern. it doesn't need you to buy into any sci-fi narratives. it's all about scale/scope:

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Charlie Warzel @cwarzel.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

For a long time I've wanted a sense of how trump has or hasn't interacted with chatbots (we know he posts a lot of slop sure). And this TIME anecdote about Grok arguably leading Trump into war is just extremely bracing

Since returning to office, Trump has marveled at AI’s capabilities. He is increasingly in thrall to the tech executives courting him. In December 2025, Elon Musk returned to the Oval Office for a clandestine meeting. Trump spent hours asking Grok, Musk’s AI chatbot, questions about his presidency and legacy, according to an official present. At the time, Trump was ordering missile strikes against Venezuelan boats he alleged were smuggling drugs into the U.S. He asked Grok how Venezuelans would react if the U.S. captured Maduro. According to the official present, the chatbot responded that Maduro was a repressive and deeply unpopular dictator and that many Venezuelans would likely celebrate his downfall. After Trump ordered the mission to seize Maduro, the following month, celebrations broke out in the streets. Trump, according to officials, came away thinking Grok was ingenious.

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Charlie Warzel @cwarzel.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

There is a moment at the very very end of Abdul El-Sayed's podcast with Ezra Klein (book recommendation section) where he talks about the idea of "speaking truth to pain" and this will be staying with me for an extremely long time. www.nytimes.com/2026/09/25/o...

But there’s also something about truth to pain. We talk a lot about truth to power, but I think it’s actually a lot harder to speak truth to pain. I say that as someone who went to medical school, realizing that in a lot of our politics right now, we’ve got to get a lot better at speaking truth to pain if we’re going to get through some of these challenges that we have.

What does “truth to pain” mean?

It’s one thing to look power in the eye and say: You’re wrong about this. But there’s a way in which pain is very difficult to reason with. Because when somebody is in their pain, they’re in their trauma. They see that pain, and they may not see what’s causing it.

I remember just very explicitly being in a trauma ward with a gunshot wound patient and watching this big guy with his hand on his gunshot wound. All the folks are trying to pull his hand off his pain, that point of his gunshot wound, this clear vulnerability.

And this emergency room doctor had the presence of mind to be like: Everyone, stop. And she looks him in the eyes, and she’s like: I get that really hurts, and I’m so sorry that you’re here. You don’t want to be here. We don’t want you to be here. But if you don’t let us fix this, you could die. So I’m going to take your hand, and I’m going to move it off, OK? Because I need to get there so that you can live.

She was speaking truth to pain. He understands he’s at the hospital, he needs care, but he also doesn’t want anybody to touch the wound. Which is a natural thing. And I think it is a really great metaphor for how we think about a lot of these challenges we talked about today.

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Charlie Warzel @cwarzel.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

wake up babe the Trump administration chatbot is crashing out again

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Charlie Warzel @cwarzel.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Wrote a column this weekend on the AI safety debate and how one might try to parse all the different factions and take this quite seriously, without buying into every doomer narrative offered without proof (gift link) www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...

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Charlie Warzel @cwarzel.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

The discourse is extremely frustrating to follow!

Late this week, an OpenAI researcher floated a theory about air-gapped machines talking to one another through heat signatures. An industry observer (and a New York Times contributor) responded by saying, “This stuff isn’t even credible even as a bad movie plot.” A second OpenAI researcher, who is also a former White House adviser, weighed in: “The people dismissing this as preposterous are telling on themselves as not having thought about superintelligence seriously.” This whiplash—between the insiders offering supposedly credible concerns and the outsiders who think the industry is high on its own supply—is constant. Depending on the hour of the day, the very same people stridently sitting in one camp can seem as if they’re in the other. Three days after Amodei, Anthropic’s CEO, wrote about being worried about swarms taking over the internet, he was smiling at Salesforce’s annual Dreamforce conference. As one X account pointed out, “If you truly believed in a 10% chance of human extinction in 3 years, you would not be spending your time selling and integrating it into a B2B CRM SaaS platform.”

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Charlie Warzel @cwarzel.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Watching the AI doomer panic the last two weeks and I'm struck by all the strident certainty on display about a subject with little transparency and not very much certainty. I wrote about treating AI as an unexceptional crisis and what that involves. (gift link) www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...

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Charlie Warzel @cwarzel.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

as a thank you: here is a meat vending machine i just stumbled upon in a small german town on the austrian border.

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Charlie Warzel @cwarzel.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

holy crap! the lil pod we make cracked the top 200 of all pods on Spotify! it’s been so fun and gratifying to learn this skill and i love doing it so much. we are only 199 behind joe rogan but *i bet* if some ppl here listened, subbed, or dropped a review we could scare 175 by tomorrow (my birthday)

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Charlie Warzel @cwarzel.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

The language we use here matters. And so much of the language is determined by the AI companies themselves. Lots of sci fi or futuris terms. But what if we didn’t abide by their definitions? What if the singularity is here but it’s not something flattering or even a technological achievement?

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Charlie Warzel @cwarzel.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

At this point, it can feel like no individual person, organization, or government is really steering the technology’s development, not because machines have displaced humans but because so many humans have already chosen to step aside.

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Charlie Warzel @cwarzel.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

As I’ve argued before…the primary effect of this technology seems to be to drive everyone mad

So … do you see it? It’s hard to argue that a defining feature of being alive in the AI boom is the notion that this technology is accelerating, sometimes in its capabilities but almost always in its adoption and colonization of our institutions and culture. The runaway-train feeling of AI evangelism, the ways in which it is weirdening our media, our politics, and our relationships, is significant enough that people have recruited the term psychosis to describe it. And truly, it’s hard to look at the state of things from any vantage point and not feel a bit insane. If you believe that AI agents are banding together for the rise and fall of numerous micro-civilizations inside server racks, you probably feel that the world is spinning off its axis. If you believe that a few thousand technologists have bet the future of the world economy on a quasi-religious belief that an intellectual-property-abuse machine will become sentient and, as a result, future generations of children might grow up illiterate, then you probably also feel quite unmoored.

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Charlie Warzel @cwarzel.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

i'm well aware of what's actually going on here. however, just on its own, written this way, this sounds p funny

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Charlie Warzel @cwarzel.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

was an absolute blast to hang and talk about the lovely lil dystopia we've built for ourselves

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Charlie Warzel @cwarzel.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

You: What's goin on? Me: Oh, nothing much. Just watching Jason Kelce's Liquid Death/Garage Beer PSA about harvesting human urine to power data centers.

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Charlie Warzel @cwarzel.bsky.social · 04/08/2026

haven’t shared this here but 2 years ago i lost a bet playing golf in Ireland where the loser had to get hair extensions and I paid it off last week (back in Ireland) with a mullet. please enjoy.

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Charlie Warzel @cwarzel.bsky.social · 24/07/2026

every day i feel like we're experiencing some kind of societal gas leak

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Charlie Warzel @cwarzel.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

ah well apparently this was a parody account. i think im washed.

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Charlie Warzel @cwarzel.bsky.social · 22/07/2026

when im posting to all of you this is how i imagine our dynamic

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Charlie Warzel @cwarzel.bsky.social · 17/07/2026

In 2020 I wrote about wildfires and the desperation and anxiety a lot of people feel out west feel when the smoke settles in and smothers. Anyhow it led to me going on MSNBC to (animatedly, i guess) talk about it and my friend ended up taking what is the single funniest screen grab of me of all time

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Charlie Warzel @cwarzel.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

who will buy me the chatgpt basketball from the openai store

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Charlie Warzel @cwarzel.bsky.social · 14/07/2026

weirdly my editor still hasn't replied

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Charlie Warzel @cwarzel.bsky.social · 01/07/2026

lifelong senegal fan for last 2 hrs (may only last 6 hrs if usmnt win but just know my support has never wavered)

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Charlie Warzel @cwarzel.bsky.social · 01/07/2026

truly blessed to experience a hydration break in person

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Charlie Warzel @cwarzel.bsky.social · 01/07/2026

genuine work question for anyone who knows. can another person boost or buy an ad on x for another user or did musk have to do this himself?

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Charlie Warzel @cwarzel.bsky.social · 30/06/2026

the brilliant @matteowong.bsky.social lived in a hacker house in SF and the dispatch is about as batshit as you’d expect www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...

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Charlie Warzel @cwarzel.bsky.social · 29/06/2026

some people are still doing the lord's work on the everything app

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Charlie Warzel @cwarzel.bsky.social · 20/06/2026

makes the goldman vampire squid analogy seem almost quaint

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Charlie Warzel @cwarzel.bsky.social · 20/06/2026

…where myth and perception leverage and speculation are more important than fundamentals

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Charlie Warzel @cwarzel.bsky.social · 20/06/2026

In a way, Musk/SpaceX are a perfect encapsulation of the way that financialization logic has overtaken reality

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Charlie Warzel @cwarzel.bsky.social · 20/06/2026

hi from seattle where it’s hard not to be romantic about this day

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Charlie Warzel @cwarzel.bsky.social · 17/06/2026

i would like smart people who understand the economy to explain the SpaceX portion of this graph to me like i am a small child

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Charlie Warzel @cwarzel.bsky.social · 16/06/2026

i'm not sure any tech criticism i could put forward rn would be more effective than the totality of this screenshot

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Charlie Warzel @cwarzel.bsky.social · 10/06/2026

the vibe is: thinks its entire possible audience is stupid

Fox and Cavanaugh include clips of their deposition in Special’s launch video—a loud, 65-second supercut that also features file footage of Musk, Theodore Roosevelt, Caitlin Clark, Kobe Bryant, Trump, Muhammad Ali, Steve Jobs, and Margaret Thatcher, set to a Jay-Z song. In the deposition scene, Cavanaugh is asked if he regrets that the people he helped terminate at DOGE lost important income. “No,” he responds, “I think it was more important to reduce the federal deficit from $2 trillion to close to zero.” Conspicuously absent in the edit is the follow-up question from the attorney deposing Cavanaugh, who asked whether DOGE actually managed to reduce the deficit. “No, we didn’t,” Cavanaugh replied.

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Charlie Warzel @cwarzel.bsky.social · 10/06/2026

i have questions!

$It’s worth pausing here to examine the fundamental premise of Special as DOGE for the private sector. You might have a few questions, including but not limited to: Wait, I thought DOGE was supposed to be about taking private-sector business acumen and bringing it to the bloated public sector? Isn’t the private sector already run like the private sector? How is Special going to run the DOGE playbook inside these companies? Isn’t this essentially just what a consulting firm does? Or private equity? And then, of course: Wasn’t DOGE a deeply unpopular, failed experiment that saved a small fraction of its claimed savings while cutting more than 10,000 government contracts, including lifesaving international aid?$

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Charlie Warzel @cwarzel.bsky.social · 09/06/2026

VERY EXCITED FOR FRIDAY'S PODCAST EP

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Charlie Warzel @cwarzel.bsky.social · 03/06/2026

Looking at some of the data center backlash and wondering if some of what we're seeing is simply the beginnings of a politics that is moving beyond Trump. that some of the salience of this issue is that it is very political but in a tangible way that has nothing to do with a guy everyone's tired of

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Charlie Warzel @cwarzel.bsky.social · 02/06/2026

wild @kait.bsky.social dispatch about how some of the anti-data center stuff online is, itself, weird AI slop www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...

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Charlie Warzel @cwarzel.bsky.social · 01/06/2026

good to know and thank you for this information

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