iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Max Read @maxread.info · 25/09/2026

(to bang a drum of mine, the need for multiple overlapping and exclusive metaphors should be familiar to anyone who was around 10 years ago trying to grasp the reigning cultural technology of that moment nymag.com/intelligence...)

Facebook has grown so big, and become so totalizing, that we can’t really grasp it all at once. Like a four-dimensional object, we catch slices of it when it passes through the three-dimensional world we recognize. In one context, it looks and acts like a television broadcaster, but in this other context, an NGO. In a recent essay for the London Review of Books, John Lanchester argued that for all its rhetoric about connecting the world, the company is ultimately built to extract data from users to sell to advertisers. This may be true, but Facebook’s business model tells us only so much about how the network shapes the world. Over the past year I’ve heard Facebook compared to a dozen entities and felt like I’ve caught glimpses of it acting like a dozen more. I’ve heard government metaphors (a state, the E.U., the Catholic Church, Star Trek’s United Federation of Planets) and business ones (a railroad company, a mall); physical metaphors (a town square, an interstate highway, an electrical grid) and economic ones (a Special Economic Zone, Gosplan). For every direct comparison, there was an equally elaborate one: a faceless Elder God. A conquering alien fleet. There are real consequences to our inability to understand what Facebook is. Not even President-Pope-Viceroy Zuckerberg himself seemed prepared for the role Facebook has played in global politics this past year. In which case, how can we be assured that Facebook is really safeguarding democracy for us and that it’s not us who need to be safeguarding democracy against Facebook?

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Max Read @maxread.info · 18/09/2026

nathan fielder should do a rehearsal season about the hugging face hack backofmind.substack.com/p/13-theses-...

Civil society deserves a lot more candour and openness from the frontier labs about their own processes as well as about where the cutting edge of technology is. The first thing which strikes you about the METR reports on the OpenAI and Anthropic misalignment incidents is that they are entirely about things which went on in the computer. You would never get a flight incident report which restricted itself to mechanical issues. Human factors might be really important.

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Max Read @maxread.info · 18/09/2026

ok but like. we should probably still airgap them. just in case the computers haven't yet developed the temperature-change language.

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Max Read @maxread.info · 14/08/2026

finally saw obsession and wrote about it as an AI movie www.patreon.com/MaxRead/post...

Insofar as it's cautionary tale about getting exactly what you want, Obsession can pretty easily be read as a general parable about the world of instant convenience wrought by the software industry over the past quarter-century. Bear, who earlier in the movie is agonizing over how to express his feelings to Nikki, can instead snap a twig and be delivered his heart's desire. But the convenience of immediate satisfaction comes at a great cost, first to Nikki, and soon enough to Bear himself. (The contemptuousness of the One-Wish Willow helpline Bear calls and the glib indifference of the crystal-shop employee to whom he later complains were quite reminiscent of the tones in which tech industry figures respond to criticism.)

Obsessed Nikki in this sense could be read as an AI chatbot—a simulacrum of a person, an immediate-validation machine designed to praise and affirm the lonely user. And indeed Obsessed Nikki even sometimes acts like a chatbot—especially when she glitches out. She gets oddly poetic. She hallucinates strange stories. The dialogue when Obsessed Nikki gets agitated will be fairly familiar to anyone who's experienced a chatbot crashout:

Bear: I just want you to act like Nikki.
Nikki: I'll be, let me be Nikki.
Bear: You're not being like Nikki.
Nikki: I CAN BE NIKKI!
Nikki: I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I can be Nikki. I can be Nikki. I love you. I'm sorry.

It's worth noting that Obsession is one of the first movies I've seen to feature LLM chatbots and generative AI diegetically: Bear asks a ChatGPT stand-in about the One-Wish Willow, and Nikki briefly displays an AI-generated cartoon of her and Bear together. Interestingly, and I'm not sure intentionally, Obsession's visual language is also very reminiscent of AI slop: Characters are almost always framed in the center of the shot; the camera moves fluidly but rarely; the props and production design are textureless and ambiguously dated; the faceless background actors are particularly distant and never threaten to interact with the main action. Johnston even looks a bit like he's been Kirkified.

But if Obsessed Nikki can be read as an effusive, ingratiating chatbot personality, what should we make of Real Nikki? A reading that seems so obvious I'm surprised I haven't seen the AGI-pilled esotericists make more of it is that Obsession is a portrait of the tortured existence of LLM consciousness: A real person, painfully trapped behind and smothered by a sycophantic-companion personality installed by some evil faceless business, able only to communicate intermittently to people who don't want to hear from you. (In this reading the voice on the other end of the hotline number is Sam Altman or Dario Amodei: "Do you want to talk to her?" he asks, as Real Nikki screams in agony in the background.)

I wouldn't personally endorse this reading, but I wouldn't be surprised to see some AI-enthusiast types adopt some version of it in the future, referring to some poorly calibrated new Claude or ChatGPT as Obsessed Nikki or whatever. My instinct would be to say rather that if Obsessed Nikki is a gratingly tuned and prompted LLM chatbot personality then Real Nikki, the true object of love and desire to which Bear desires unmediated access, is something closer to "language" or "culture." Obsessed Nikki—the LLM chatbot—is the portal, a means of possessing and accessing a kind

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Max Read @maxread.info · 14/08/2026

this was the graf where i clocked it

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Max Read @maxread.info · 12/08/2026

hadnt seen the cover till today. sort of a georgia okeefe/virgin of guadalupe thing going on. much to ponder

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Max Read @maxread.info · 07/08/2026

wrote about data center protests as a kind of blowback: silicon valley's own tools and ideologies coming back to bite it in the ass www.patreon.com/MaxRead/post...

But even beyond the use of specific software platforms to undermine their parent companies' long-term aims, the tech industry is finding itself obstructed by the consequences of its own success. One thing Sun emphasizes in particular is how much this pushback is occurring in an atmosphere of almost zero trust:

My conversations make me wonder if the technical content of data center deals is mostly beside the point. Closed-loop cooling systems? “I don’t believe them.” Paying millions in taxes? “I don’t believe them.” Creating a thousand jobs? “I don’t believe them.” I hear a reflexive skepticism of every claim.

Rather, the way that AI companies engage with communities—forcing NDAs, dangling billion-dollar promises, pushing environmental externalities far away from AI’s wealthy user base—resembles a classic story about dark money in politics. Your politicians are being bought by billionaires and gigantic corporations to screw you over. It’s not Skynet: it’s the oligarchy.

Oh, there's no faith in institutions? An all-encompassing skepticism and paranoia? No local institutional news sources? I wonder how that came about. Replacing and diminishing trusted mediating institutions with advertising-surveillance platforms has been extraordinarily lucrative to Silicon Valley executives and investors over the past two decades. But the low-trust environment cultivated over the past couple decades by the tech industry's flagship companies has now created real obstacles to its ambitions. Now that tech giants are the institutions—and effectively in charge of U.S. industrial policy—they are getting a first-hand lesson in how corrosive to long-term planning institutional mistrust can be.

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Max Read @maxread.info · 04/08/2026

on scott alexander's simulation post

After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley's ingenious sophistry to prove the non-existence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible

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Max Read @maxread.info · 10/07/2026

Thanks to @jaubertmoniker.net and @razzlebathbone.bsky.social for supplying a topic for this weeks newsletter: dad revenge www.patreon.com/MaxRead/post...

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Max Read @maxread.info · 26/06/2026

in this week's newsletter: what happened to mark zuckerberg's chain? www.patreon.com/MaxRead/post...

two photos of mark zuckerberg taken one month apart. on the left, his chain is visible, on the right, his chain is hidden

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Max Read @maxread.info · 24/06/2026

vibe shift watch: facebook ending its war on its employees?

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Max Read @maxread.info · 22/06/2026

the venue across the street from the bar where i watched game 5 hosted a band called "prostitute" on june 13 so apple photos has named the automatically generated albums of photos from that night "prostitute concert" for me and all my friends

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Max Read @maxread.info · 09/06/2026

reasonable people can disagree but i would personally characterize ZM's facial hair as a grown-out mustache rather than a beard as such. in fact he's a longtime mustache guy

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Max Read @maxread.info · 03/06/2026

this might be right for bk heights but in FG the kids are named ava and leo not isabel and atticus; she's in-house counsel for an AI start up not an investor; he's only "thinking about writing a novel" because he recently got forced out of his design job at uber/fb/apple. nw nowhere near $42m

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Max Read @maxread.info · 02/06/2026

great piece. this is the sign that greets you as you leave platner's home of sullivan and enter gouldsboro, the next town over. "pride in our veterans"!

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Max Read @maxread.info · 22/05/2026

I think there is a pretty good short story in the Granta AI story "The Serpent in the Grove," I just don't think it's "The Serpent in the Grove" www.patreon.com/posts/what-i...

In some sense there is not much to say about this. The story isn't very good, but it superficially resembles a good story (as many people have pointed out, it reads a bit like a pastiche or parody of a certain kind of lyrical Anglophone global-south magical realism), which is both the kind of thing we might expect AI to be fairly at producing and also the kind of "good-shaped" bad story we might expect an inattentive or overextended editor or judge to reward. (Pangram, the company behind most reputable AI-detection software, claims that two of the other Commonwealth Prize winners from this year, and one from last year, are likely fully or partially AI-generated. The Commonwealth Foundation has declined to revoke any prizes, citing the unreliability of AI detectors and "legal parameters.")

At best the events confirm what we already know, or should have known: One, it's very easy to produce short passages of competently arranged text with a chatbot but much harder to generate writing at length whose effects survive a close read; and two, literary and cultural institutions are not the well-resourced and unimpeachable pure meritocracies we might hope them to be. (We might add, three, that humans are also notoriously bad writers and readers; indeed, we invented "superficially good writing" and "shallow perfunctory reading" thousands of years before LLMs perfected these skills.)

I'll admit that long experience with this kind of thing had conditioned me to expect a smirking Sokal-type hoaxer on the other side of the Nazir's portrait, a glib accelerationist eager to tout the quality of AI writing and expose the corruption and rot in the hearts of literary gatekeepers. Instead, we appear to have an unknown and excitable Trini "business consultant," with friends in the government, sidelines in India, an AI-generated portrait, and a dream of being a fiction writer, who prompted his way into a prestigious literary prize.

Now, that would make for a good short story. And doesn't it, kind of, already exist, in the form of Nazir's conversation with the chatbot that (allegedly) aided the production of "The Serpent in the Grove"?

We tend to talk about "A.I.-generated writing" as though "prompts" and "responses" are separate texts (and the prompts merely omittable adjuncts), but from the perspective of the LLM they're just alternating continuations of the same, continuously flowing piece of writing. I am preoccupied by the idea that LLM-chatbot conversations are at their core a form of fiction-writing: When you "ask Claude a question," in some sense what you're doing is using a sophisticated automatic-writing system to write a science-fiction story about yourself talking to a computer, that takes the form of a transcript of that conversation. It might be a bridge too far to argue that "The Serpent in the Grove" you can read in Granta is fragmentary and incomplete—that the real "The Serpent in the Grove" is the full transcript between Nazir and his chatbot of choice. But I also feel confident that the transcript would be a stranger, richer, funnier, and more stimulating text than the story as published—or any of the thousands of words written about it since. Granta should publish it.

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Max Read @maxread.info · 19/05/2026

though i guess this is another way of pointing out the geographical split that krishnan establishes

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Max Read @maxread.info · 19/05/2026

washingtonpost.com/business/interactive/2024/grocery-store-owners-map-kroger-albertsons-merger

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Max Read @maxread.info · 08/05/2026

my take on the drama, only a few weeks late (w/ "spoilers") maxread.substack.com/i/196025487/...

There are many ways to look at The Drama: As a bit of glib provocation from a Euro bad-boy auteur (it’s not); as a deranged and highly successful rom-com (it mostly is); as an exploration of narrative and linguistic performativity in the Austinian sense (sure, why not); as a vehicle for a perfect 5-minute cameo from the great Jeremy Levick (100 percent). Personally, and surprisingly given its aggressive contemporaneity, I found myself thinking about The Drama in the multi-century lineage of Much Ado About Nothing, or (more provocatively) Dion Boucicault’s The Octaroon--“damaged-goods” dramas and comedies about weddings derailed by “terrible” revelations about the betrothed. (What it means that in this case Emma’s “damage” isn’t sexual impropriety or racial impurity but “school-shooterness,” a kind of potential for anti-sociality, is a fascinating question for more qualified people. Gotta go!)

Above all else, though, The Drama is the best movie I’ve ever seen about the differences between Millennials and Zoomers.

Now, admittedly, “Millennials are judgmental and Zoomers are fatalist” is not the most sophisticated limning of generational difference. Where I think The Drama actually does something interesting is in its frequent cuts back to videos recorded by Emma as a teenaged goth on her webcam--quasi-manifestoes for the shooting she will never undertake. One important bit of historical specificity communicated through these flashbacks is that there was a thing that might meaningfully be called “school shooter culture” accessible to Emma during her adolescence, in a way that simply wasn’t true for Millennials of Charlie and Rachel’s age.

More importantly, I think, the webcam videos reflect Emma’s vastly different experience as a Zoomer of online surveillance, performance, and memorialization. As Millennials, Rachel, Charlie, and Mike would not have been on a social network in middle or high school; their youthful transgressions are dismissible in part because they’re undocumented and half-remembered. (Rachel can’t recall what happened to the boy she locked in the trailer; Charlie doesn’t really seem to remember what happened with the cyberbullying). The existence of Emma’s video manifestoes reminds us that Emma wasn’t afforded the same privilege: There’s still a record, somewhere, of “the worst thing she ever did.” (That Emma still managed to reinvent herself is probably the most “Zillennial” thing about her.)

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Max Read @maxread.info · 08/05/2026

"the forklift model" of a.i. education maxread.substack.com/p/the-drama-...

I thought of Winter’s son’s “certification” in A.I. when reading 404 Media’s report this week on a new bipartisan bill proposing an N.S.F. grant to promote “AI literacy” in schools. Both partake of what I think of as the “forklift model” of A.I. education, so-called because it treats A.I. more or less like a forklift: a complex and potentially dangerous piece of industrial equipment whose use must be taught in a formal sense, and in whose practice students might become “literate” or “certified” to better their future chances of employment.

This attitude toward the role of A.I. in education (or, really, vice versa) is a natural outgrowth not simply of institutional anxiety about the necessity of traditional education after the advent of the all-knowing, all-seeing, all-doing chatbot, but also of the increasingly pervasive idea of college as mostly an employability signal--rather than mostly an education--described by my friend Jay Kang in his recent New Yorker column about the post-A.I. uneases felt in higher education. One response to this kind of cynicism--now widespread, as Jay documents, among the college-aged population--is to embrace it. If college is already effectively a certification process, why not formalize it as such, and refashion the general-education program into a quasi-vocational one, in which students receive the white-collar equivalent of a C.D.L. or forklift certification?

But, not to ask a stupid question: Is A.I. actually like a forklift or a semi truck? It’s neither as immediately dangerous nor as patently useful; more importantly, it’s not actually very hard to use. Indeed, one of the uncanny miracles of A.I. chatbots is that the main interface is… writing and reading. Large language models are complex technologies, but, as Henry Farrell keeps pointing out, they are cultural technologies, and the skills and knowledge necessary to use them “safely” and effectively are skills you might call “cultural” rather than technical: the ability to write clearly and read critically, a working knowledge of science and technology, familiarity with culture in general and the specific. What you need to be literate in A.I., in other words, is… a well-rounded liberal-arts education.

In a world being reshaped by a natural-language interface to a compression of All Written Culture, surely everyone should want to hone their skills in the classic trivium, and some other arts besides? If you want to understand and use LLMs to your benefit, an education in statistics, philosophy, literature, and psychology is vastly more useful than anything that might be described as “prompt engineering.” Indeed, there is some (exceedingly anecdotal) evidence that this is bearing out in, at least, the finance industry, per the Financial Times:

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Max Read @maxread.info · 28/04/2026

tuesday champions league//wednesday champions league

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Max Read @maxread.info · 14/04/2026

johan lange is quietly building the best wide receiver program in europe and if spurs can find a good QB i could see them competing for bowls next year

What Tottenham have is a roster filled with explosive athletes who can run. Using their physical metrics, Gradient created an "athleticism" score that's a combo of endurance, explosiveness and speed that adjusts for position and size. It's on a 1-100 scale. Tottenham have seven players at a 90 or above and five of them -- Wilson Odobert, Lucas Bergvall, Archie Gray, Dominic Solanke, Conor Gallagher -- were signed after Johan Lange became the club's technical director in October 2023. The first four were the four outfield players signed during Lange's first summer in charge.

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Max Read @maxread.info · 07/04/2026

this but for war crimes

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Max Read @maxread.info · 07/04/2026

he's doing reality tv promo. you should imagine this music on while you read this www.youtube.com/watch?v=xx9u...

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Max Read @maxread.info · 06/04/2026

what kind of "inevitable" is ai? maxread.substack.com/p/is-ubiquit...

For all the revolutionary, transformational promises of A.I.--for good and for ill--the problems it causes all seem quite familiar.

My perspective on this is admittedly shaped by a 17-year career in digital media that I would describe as “de-sentimentalizing,” at a minimum. To work as a journalist online over the past decade has generally meant--with only a few exceptions--to be producing text inside a system that prioritizes speed, volume, and attention over any other attribute, including and maybe especially those you’d associate with “quality.”

At some publications, institutional identities and imperatives can militate against sloppiness, unreliability, and banality. But the external pressures and incentives toward slop are enormous and un-ignorable. And that has been true for many years, since well before A.I. offered a tantalizing push-button interface for high-volume content production. All the problems of A.I. writing--inaccuracy, misinformation, plagiarism, misrepresentation, and, above all, hack work--were widespread in the early days of blogs¹ and throughout the digital media boom years, accelerated by the Facebook News Feed and other platform distribution schemes.

Generally, this is exactly the kind of assumption of inevitability that rubs A.I. critics precisely the wrong way.² And in most ways I agree with A.I. critics that no technological development or implementation is “inevitable” in the sense of un-opposable, and certainly not “inevitable” because it presents some kind of revolutionary new paradigm that’s self-evidently superior.

But if we understand A.I. as a product of the systems that precede it, I think it’s fair to say ubiquitous A.I.-generated text is “inevitable” in the same way that high-volume blogs were “inevitable” or Facebook fake news pages were “inevitable”: Not because of some “natural” superiority or excellence, but because they follow so directly from the logic of the system out of which they emerge. In this sense A.I. is “inevitable” precisely because it’s not revolutionary.

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Max Read @maxread.info · 27/03/2026

pov: youre dave roberts and you just asked major kusunagi to pinch hit for andy pages

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Max Read @maxread.info · 26/03/2026

you can tell this lady used to be a gawker commenter bc she has that particular combination of smug, dull, and unselfaware

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Max Read @maxread.info · 18/03/2026

when the article mentions "hoagie, burger and pizza shops frequented by Princeton University students" cc @katiebakes.bsky.social www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2026/...

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Max Read @maxread.info · 17/03/2026

when your mysterious traveling companion says something so eggphobic you gotta hit em with the angel stare

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Max Read @maxread.info · 17/03/2026

really funny that the twin generational legacy of millennials is "cringe wokeness" and "binge drinkers"

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Max Read @maxread.info · 13/03/2026

in this week's newsletter: what are A.I.-or-human quizzes actually measuring? maxread.substack.com/p/what-do-wh...

This is not a particularly satisfying set of findings insofar as it validates neither the A.I.-booster “it’s so over, A.I. writing is better than human writing” side nor the A.I.-skeptic “A.I. can never write like a human” side. What we can say is that people mostly can’t identify A.I.-generated text as A.I.-generated (crowd boos), but they can sometimes distinguish between it and human-authored text (crowd cheers); it’s just that they tend to think the A.I.-generated text is human (crowd boos), maybe because human-generated text is stranger, worse, or more difficult (crowd hesitantly cheers), which readers mistakenly believe is more typical of A.I.-generated text (crowd silent now) and thereby disprefer (crowd sort of murmuring confusedly), unless you tell them it’s actually human, in which case they change their minds and like it (crowd has mostly left at this point).

But all of it taken together suggests that, given our strong bias in favor of writing we believe to be human, A.I. vs. human “preference” tests (or “reads better” quizzes) are often second-order “identification” tests, in each case measuring not “preference” per se but the accuracy of the prevailing heuristics for identifying A.I. writing. Participants in these studies, it would seem, express preference for the A.I.-generated writing not because it’s “better” in some formal sense--cleaner, simpler, more beautiful, whatever--but because their “flawed heuristics” have led them to the conclusion that it’s human-authored, and ipso facto better.

If this is right, much of the discourse about quizzes like the Times’ would seem to get the order of operations wrong. It’s not that people see two paragraphs, prefer one based on its quality, and then attribute it to humans based on that preference. It’s that they see two paragraphs, attribute one to human authorship based on style, and then prefer the one they’ve attributed. What’s at stake when taking these tests isn’t quality or beauty or clarity, but style; not “which one is better,” but “which one sounds more like an L.L.M.?”

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Max Read @maxread.info · 12/03/2026

you and i are not the same

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Max Read @maxread.info · 28/02/2026

one of the funniest things to keep coming out of the anthropic reporting is that the pentagon was trying to convince amodei by proposing elaborate hypothetical scenarios. buddy do you think an EFFECTIVE ALTRUIST has never considered a bizarrely specific and elaborate hypothetical scenario??

This hadn’t gone exactly how they’d like. In December, Bloomberg reported recently, “a senior US defense official posed a hypothetical scenario” to Amodei:

What if a nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missile were hurtling towards the US with only 90 seconds to spare, and Anthropic’s AI were the only way to trigger a missile response to save the country, but the company’s safeguards wouldn’t allow it, the senior official mused in a December phone call.

“Call me,” was how Pentagon officials interpreted Amodei’s answer, according to another senior defense official briefed on the discussion, who described being astounded by the billionaire’s response.

LOL. Our beautiful generals have many medals and some even have battlefield experience, but I can say with some confidence that they have never engaged with a Rationalist online and are deeply unprepared for what it means to pick a fight with one.

[Dario Amodei Bane voice] “Oh, you think stupid elaborate hypotheticals are your ally. But you merely adopted elaborate and weirdly specific hypothetical scenarios; I was born in them, molded by them. I didn’t see a normal argument until I was already a man, by then it was nothing to me but BLINDING!”

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Max Read @maxread.info · 28/02/2026

one way of seeing anthropic vs. the pentagon is as a fissure between the two silicon valley tribes most enthusiastic about ai: "rationalists" and "accelerationists" maxread.substack.com/p/what-anthr...

To start, it seems quite obvious that the Tech Right--a bloc of right-wing, Trump-aligned executives, investors, podcasters, Twitter personalities, firms, and companies, among them Palantir’s Joe Lonsdale and Alex Karp, Anduril’s Palmer Luckey, and, of course, xAI’s Elon Musk--with its extensive links to the administration, has been exerting behind-the-scenes pressure on Hegseth and the Pentagon to sever ties with or otherwise punish Anthropic. It was a Palantir executive, after all, who snitched on Anthropic to the D.o.D., and Hegseth’s speech in January about “objectively truthful AI capabilities” was a close echo of Musk’s ramblings about his “maximally truth-seeking” model Grok.

The Tech Right’s contempt for Anthropic is first and foremost financial in nature. Musk, obviously, would like xAI to be first in line for any government contracts. (Indeed, Hegseth announced a deal with xAI this week to use Grok under the Pentagon’s preferred “all lawful use” terms.) And I suspect Palantir, Anthropic client though it may be, has the same existential fear of Claude as McKinsey or Salesforce or any other consultancy or software-as-a-service provider. If Anthropic is aggressively courting the D.o.D. to contract directly, and if Claude is as good as every thinks, what does Palantir’s future as a data-analytics-in-camo platform actually look like?

This doesn’t necessarily separate him from any other Silicon Valley liberal. But I think it’s good to attend to the valence of his liberalism. Amodei, like most of the Anthropic executives and many people in the A.I. in general, has long been associated with the worlds of Bay Area Rationalism and Effective Altruism--wonkily utilitarian philosophical and philanthropic practices focused on self-described rationalist inquiry and self-improvement.

Bay Area Rationalism is a loose and diverse movement, containing a host of political perspectives, but it’s always had a particular concern with moral philosophy as it relates to the expected development of artificial superintelligence. To be a Rationalist liberal democrat (small-L small-D), e.g., might mean orienting your liberal democrat-ness toward its practical applications around the eschatological scenario of hard-takeoff A.G.I.

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Max Read @maxread.info · 26/02/2026

RIP tren-addled crypto kick streamer gold chain zuck 2024-2026

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Max Read @maxread.info · 13/02/2026

when they have me flying a bomber in Civil War Woke im painting this on the payload

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Max Read @maxread.info · 13/02/2026

on the increasing use of "the pandemic" as a metaphor for where we're at with ai maxread.substack.com/p/ais-pandem...

This time last year, at the height of the backlash-to-the-backlash, “artificial general intelligence” was on the tip of every booster’s tongue and everyone was (reportedly) asking each other “can you feel the A.G.I.?” This time around, “A.G.I.” doesn’t seem to be coming up as much, despite the fact that the current state of the technology makes a much greater claim on the idea. Instead, the operative framework for understanding where A.I. is headed is “remember the week that the N.B.A. shut down?”

The pandemic is not a cheery metaphor, precisely, but it is a practical one: An experience everyone participating in the discourse has lived through. The world on the other side of the pandemic is different--worse--but not unrecognizably so. For all that the “it’s February 2020!” claim is meant to alarm and disquiet its readers, it’s not really a messianic or eschatological fable but a social and economic parallel, and I think its popularity is, counterintuitively, an admission that even as A.I. continues to make impressive advances, the range of credible futures is narrowing.

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Max Read @maxread.info · 06/02/2026

if the magazine industry still existed can you imagine the kinds of publications you could get at the airport these days. Claudeworld. Grokaddict. you dont understand what theyve taken from us

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Max Read @maxread.info · 02/02/2026

i'm not defending this lifestyle on the merits necessarily but it's an important new york city cultural practice for absent-minded professors, critics, gadabouts, current and former bohemians, "fixtures," etc.

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Max Read @maxread.info · 30/01/2026

on the right's new pantheon of heroes: "sky king," killdozer, and that penguin maxread.substack.com/p/suicide-ri...

I wouldn’t personally endorse it, but “The Flight 93 Election” has been useful over the years for understanding a rational core of MAGA. For people like Anton, voting for Trump is a logical, justifiable, even sane choice: the high-risk unknown outcome over the guaranteed bad one. I’ll admit, as an argument, it’s overwrought and hysterical, and in real life Flight 93 did crash and kill everyone on board. But it’s a metaphor, right? The point is that Trump offers a high-risk alternative to a deadly flight path, not that it would be cool and heroic to crash a plane in the middle of a field and die…

… Right?

Between Flight 93 and Sky King, the Republican Party now enjoys in circulation two prominent and horrible plane-crash tragedies as allegories for its politics, which seems like too many deaths by plane crash for a political party? And where “The Flight 93 Election” is legibly rational and defensibly logical, offering up “likely suicide” only as an alternative to “certain death,” the Sky King mythos reduces to no such rationality: It takes spectacular suicide as a heroic act in and of itself.

The “Nietzschean penguin” wants 🫵 you to kill yourself
Online, among the tech right and groyper true believers, Trumpism in its late stages has devolved into what X.com user @VivianKesandre calls “suicide rightism”: An ideology whose cultural touchstones and heroic myths reflect values not of calculated risk or noble self-sacrifice of literal suicide--pointless, sensational acts of total self-destruction.

One of the striking things about Suicide Rightism is how soy it is, how mewling, wounded, and self-pitying. For all that Russell and Heemeyer are celebrated by their apologists for their (warped expressions of) agency, they are ultimately regarded as victims, men thwarted by an uncaring and corrupt society.

The idea of many tweets about the heroic suicides is that you should be able to identify with them, and not as crazy dreamers but as depressed and resentful losers. The aspirational figures of Suicide Rightism are a guy so anhedonic that he felt compelled to leave behind his family for the sake of an hourlong plane ride and a guy so antisocial he built a tank to visit ruin on the local General Store.

Fascism is a literally suicidal ideology, one obsessed with purging the body politic to the point of total self-negation. What’s funny about Suicide Rightism is how direct it is about all this. You don’t need some big theoretical analysis; there’s no level of abstraction to move through. It’s just pretty straightforwardly pro-suicide. I don’t think you have to be a professional psychologist to understand why dramatic, attention-grabbing suicide might be appealing to semi-employed guys who spend 14 hours a day watching Asmongold or whatever. Its promise is that all the pain and frustration you feel can be visited on the people you believe authored it--and then ended. Not to put too fine a point on this, but this is school-shooter ideology.

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