honest-broker.com

The Last 24 Hours Are the Opening Scene in a Horror Movie

What's happening here is obvious—eight different people building this technology are afraid of what they're seeing. But they don't have the power individually to stop the insanity. Trillions of dollars are getting pumped into a runaway technology, and the public already hates it intensely.

honest-broker.com

Wendell Berry’s Nine Rules

What makes this especially revealing is the fact the public intensely dislikes AI— surveys make this absolutely clear. So tech companies are destroying the environment solely to increase their dominance and control—not to please you and me.

honest-broker.com

Stanford's Secret Course on How to Rule the World

"When I was at Stanford," Justin explained, "I learned that the only people who understood the world were the literal children of billionaires." Now he had figured out those secrets for himself…."By learning them, a huge amount of latent talent and potential in the most promising people can be unlocked."

platformer.news

Superintelligence is a dragon

Whether we can control AI systems is no longer a theoretical question, given recent revelations about OpenAI models scheming against the company for months on secret message boards. And yet to Zuckerberg, the danger isn't that we might lose control over these systems — it's that someone else might monopolize them.

honest-broker.com

How I Became the Honest Broker

Their influence and power is built solely on a reputation for straight talk and trustworthy dealings. "They are true brokers, intermediaries between others. They aren't going to participate in your deal, no matter what it is. They are go-betweens, really. But do not underestimate the power of this kind of brokerage."

platformer.news

This AI notetaker won't sell surveillance to your boss

"If you have a backdoor way for someone in power to use all this context to make judgment calls in that way, that doesn't feel right to me, and that's not a future we want to build towards," Pedregal said.

honest-broker.com

Mark Zuckerberg's Empire Is Now Crumbling

Zuckerberg used the occasion to publish a bizarre opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal—proclaiming himself as a champion of human potential and an opponent of centralized power. This is the same guy who laid off 8,000 employees a few days ago, and is building a data center as large as Manhattan. By the way, Zuckerberg himself can't be fired—because he limits the voting rights of most shareholders.

honest-broker.com

What Do You Have to Hide?

You do hear people say privacy is dead, but it's almost always someone who stands to profit from the death of privacy—famously, Mark Zuckerberg. This is a hopeful pitch.

honest-broker.com

The 10 Greatest Failures of Orson Welles

It's testimony to Welles's greatness that The Magnificent Ambersons is still ranked among the best movies of the era despite the meddling. After Brazil, everything fell apart for Welles. Hollywood never forgot him, but also never forgave him.

wired.com

Federal Investigators Say Certain DOGE Records Were Deleted

A government report claims DOGE didn't access sensitive systems. It also says the agency deleted records that would show if they had.

readtheprofile.com

The Profile: The founder of Barstool Sports telling all & the mom using AI agents to run her house

"Freedom means you can talk to your friend, criticize the government, and then forget about it and go home. Where I'm from, if you criticize the government, you're not going to make it home."

honest-broker.com

What Is My American Identity, Really?

'My thesis is on the survival of the class system in the United States.' 'Oh really, that's interesting: one didn't think there was a class system in the United States.' 'Nobody does. That's how it survives.'

noahpinion.blog

Europe's resistance to AC is driving it insane

Perhaps the single most ludicrous story was that the people who run the European Commission decided to cut off AC for their lower-level employees, while keeping the AC on for themselves... 'It's like feudalism,' a Commission official working on a lower level of the Berlaymont, granted anonymity to speak freely, told POLITICO on Friday, referring to the fact that upper floors housing commissioners got to keep their AC on.

wired.com

The Trump White House Is Over Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei

At high-stakes meetings with the White House, Anthropic's cofounder—a "weirdo," per one official—has been replaced by cofounder Tom Brown.

noahpinion.blog

China is winning the other tech race

The most interesting idea is that countries become great powers due to their mastery of the most important technologies of the day — gunpowder, sailing ships, steam power, mass production, steel, the combustion engine, industrial chemicals, electricity, airplanes, and so on. It's also possible to imagine that leading nations fall behind due to technological disruption. Britain's industrial revolution made mercantile trade less pivotal as a source of national wealth, so the Netherlands fell behind.

noahpinion.blog

Does anything I write matter anymore?

Whether it was Covid, Trump's advancing age, or his attempted overthrow of the 2020 election that made Trump totally lose faith in everyone but himself, the big man now seems inclined to listen only to the voices in his own head. There's no intellectual movement here, just a cult of personality. There's no one to argue with, because nothing that's happening is based on an argument in the first place.

noahpinion.blog

Iran is Trump's Katrina

Before the war, Iran didn't control the strait, simply because it didn't realize it could. Drone technology had advanced to the point where Iran was able to shut down Hormuz, but Iran didn't know that until the U.S. attack forced it to try the risky and desperate move of actually shutting it down.

honest-broker.com

A Reading List for the End of Civilization

Simone Weil, building on this same insight, would tell you that the Romans became enslaved to their emperor because they had already accepted the legitimacy of slavery. They became subject to violence and domination because they had built their own empire on these values. What goes around comes around.

dwarkesh.com

Ada Palmer – Machiavelli is the most misunderstood thinker of all time

Machiavelli could have left exile and worked for any number of different principalities that would have been eager to make use of his talents. Instead, he decided to rot in the countryside and compile his career's lessons about power, politics, and human nature into a book he dedicated to the very man whose new regime had tortured and exiled him, Lorenzo di Piero de' Medici.

wired.com

Donald Trump’s White House UFC Event Would Be Embarrassing Anywhere

A Monster Energy–sponsored MMA show on the White House's South Lawn was never going to be the height of dignity. But UFC Freedom 250 is failing to clear even the lowest bar.

wired.com

Trump Risks Key Surveillance Authority Over ‘Unqualified’ Spy-Chief Pick

US lawmakers are alarmed that Bill Pulte, a housing official with no intelligence experience, is poised to take charge of one of the government's most powerful surveillance tools.

wired.com

He Blew the Whistle on DOGE. Then His Brakes Were Cut

Shortly after Elon Musk boosted a post calling his claims false, his brake lines were cut.

whyisthisinteresting

The Singlish Edition

Yet Singlish not only survived but became a marker of identity, something that distinguished Singaporeans from Malaysians, from expats, from mainland Chinese, from anyone who hadn't grown up inside the particular crucible of the city-state. The government's suppression attempts arguably accelerated its cultural value, the way prohibition makes a drink taste better.

stratechery.com

2026.21: The Data Center Veto

AI, however, depends on data centers in the physical world, and building data centers needs permission. This gives normal people the sort of veto power over AI they didn't have in the face of globalization; I make the case in Monday's Update and on Sharp Tech that understanding this dynamic is more important that trying to correct misinformation, which is a symptom, not a cause, of data center opposition.

wired.com

A New York Cop Got Injured at a Boxing Match. Now Madison Square Garden Is Banning His Lawyer

Attorney John Scola is representing a police officer who is suing over injuries allegedly sustained while working security at an MSG property in 2025.

dwarkesh.com

The mistake of conflating intelligence and power

Power is more the product of having the authority and trust to get lots of people to collaborate with you, rather than some galaxy brain scheming capability. Trump is not powerful because his brain, considered in isolation, is the most effective optimization engine on Earth. He is powerful because the government which hundreds of millions of people consider legitimate gives him a lot of power.

longreads.com

The Banal Horror of Jimmy Fallon

The real, unsettling mechanism of Fallon's banal horror is its insistence on a radical non-engagement with reality: a position that, in our current political climate, is itself an aggressively political act.

noahpinion.blog

Tyrants are losing wars

Ukraine is the clearest and most important example of how 21st century autocrats, having triumphed in the streets and on social media, are losing on the actual battlefield.

noahpinion.blog

Do billionaires earn their money?

AOC seems to mean that in order for someone to get a billion dollars, they have to do something that society ought to forbid. In other words, billionaires can't get their wealth just by being lucky; they have to get it by being bad.

ai-supremacy.com

The Landowners of AI

What's becoming more clear is that hyperscalers are the true landowners of AI. They are the custodians and the ones that benefit directly from the demand for compute in more Cloud computing and digital Advertising revenue.

readtheprofile.com

The Profile: The sports arena surveilling you & the billionaire building the newsroom of the future

What's framed as security often blurs into personal score-settling, with allegations of profiling, intimidation, and overreach extending beyond the arena itself.

themarginalian.org

A Place for Intimacy: bell hooks on Language and Desire

Like desire, language disrupts, refuses to be contained within boundaries. It speaks itself against our will, in words and thoughts that intrude, even violate the most private spaces of mind and body.

noahpinion.blog

Is China's soft power really rising, or is America's just crumbling?

China is a deeply repressive nation, with universal surveillance, fine-grained media and speech control, and ubiquitous censorship. That's the kind of society where only anodyne, cautious artistry can flourish, except in tiny subcultural pockets too small for the government to worry about.

whyisthisinteresting

The Monday Media Diet with Steve Calder

I'm drawn to anything that peeks behind the curtain of power - both are fascinating takes on how the world really works, and help me to tune out a lot of the daily noise and negativity.

3quarksdaily.com

The Achilles Heel of Trump’s Mafia-State Authoritarianism

What is different today is Trump's view that the exercise of state power is no longer in need of ideological excuses, that he possesses a king-like divine right to do as he pleases, unconstrained by norms or law, which people must simply accept as legitimate.