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.

3quarksdaily.com

The Uncommon Enemy

The West's Cold War propaganda focused on decrying Communist totalitarianism and championing democratic freedoms, but the United States and its closest allies were mostly concerned with preserving their largest businesses' access to capitalistic markets and resources.

ai-supremacy.com

The Geopolitical Chokepoints of Artificial Intelligence

For much of the past decade, the rise of artificial intelligence appeared to be governed by inputs that diffuse quickly. Advances in architectures, algorithms, training techniques, and data practices spread rapidly through academic papers, open-source code, and global talent markets. Because these inputs were highly replicable and only weakly tied to geography, it was natural to assume that AI capability would spread broadly across countries and firms. That assumption no longer matches reality.

profgalloway.com

The Epstein Tax

The superwealthy have amassed vast fortunes without fear of mobs arriving with pitchforks. U.S. policies, turbo-charged by a 2010 Supreme Court ruling that opened the gates to unlimited spending on elections, have widened the gap between the haves and the have-nots. As wealth concentrates, billionaire political spending rises higher, securing policy outcomes that further concentrate wealth.

3quarksdaily.com

How Reform Fails

Redistricting has been mostly a wonkish, back-burner issue, briefly irritating to the public from time to time, but never before commanding the intensity of concern it does now. Right now—with huge amounts of money, political power, and public outrage all focused on gerrymandering—now is when reform can succeed.

noahpinion.blog

China is quietly looking weaker

At the time, though, with Japan at its zenith, it was easy to make Vogel-like predictions of continued domination, and it was out of vogue to be a contrarian like Emmott. The same is true of China today.

upstartsmedia.com

Star Catcher’s Andrew Rush: Harnessing The Sun To Build The First Energy Grid In Space

Our daily lives are based on and enriched by space, regardless of who we are. So providing more power ultimately enriches humanity.

whyisthisinteresting

The Monday Media Diet with Karim Mohamed

Working in Africa often means operating within ecosystems shaped by decades of entrenched thinking. Some of it is rooted in ignorance, others in racism, and most in systems historically designed to extract from the continent rather than build within it. Challenging those assumptions is rarely comfortable, but it is often necessary.

dwarkesh.com

I’m glad the Anthropic fight is happening now

Once the technical capacity for mass surveillance and political suppression exists, the only thing standing between us and an authoritarian surveillance state is the political expectation that this is not something we do here.

dwarkesh.com

The Library of Alexandria isn’t where most ancient knowledge was lost

the authorities and censors are always worried about the exact wrong things given 20/20 hindsight.

profgalloway.com

The Epstein Tax

As wealth concentrates, billionaire political spending rises higher, securing policy outcomes that further concentrate wealth. The chaser is inflation, which transfers still more wealth from earners, whose purchasing power erodes, to owners, who are insulated.