We got fifteen years of an open internet because IBM & AT&T were scared of the DOJ. The lesson? “Protocols, not products”: Cory Doctorow on how the walled gardens came back—& how to try to open them. Regulatory capture, the CFAA, John Deere tractors, Gamergate, and the case for a Prairie Fire United Front against monopoly. Also: the cogpsy theory of fanfic, why Bork’s 1980 shiv still bleeds, and always keep a trash bag in your car.

This one wanders gloriously before it gets to business: Cory Doctorow’s cognitive-psychology theory of why fiction works and why authors rage at fanfic, my Book-of-Genesis account of Babbage begetting IBM begetting FORTRAN, and Noah’s insistence that Gamergate killed nerd culture and that fragmenting platforms lets Nazis permeate fractally. Then the substance — regulatory capture, adversarial interoperability, the cancer previvor group Facebook wouldn’t protect, Tim Cook killing twenty right-to-repair bills, ad tech more concentrated than eyeglasses or professional wrestling.

The key insight: interoperability was a lucky historical accident we can’t repeat.

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. Teaching economy & history. Focusing on growth, distribution, money, & finance. Bringing numbers, facts, & blue-hued optimism of the intellect to understanding...","photo_url":"https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fea5ae644-9822-4ca5-ac6b-e18c017d8fbc_1189x1208.png","is_guest":false,"bestseller_tier":1000}],"post_date":"2021-05-04T19:36:44.420Z","cover_image":"https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/h_600,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fbc10adfd-d318-4f92-b710-2044d48c08e6_782x425.png","cover_image_alt":null,"canonical_url":"https://braddelong.substack.com/p/podcast-hexapodia-xiii-mandated-interoperability","section_name":"Hexapodia Is the Key Insight! By Noah Smith & Brad DeLong","video_upload_id":null,"id":36041427,"type":"podcast","reaction_count":5,"comment_count":2,"publication_id":47874,"publication_name":"DeLong's Grasping Reality Weblog ","publication_logo_url":"https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!PgPl!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ffde2453e-9c18-4560-82ca-8b77ae62ef5b_1280x1280.png","belowTheFold":false,"youtube_url":null,"show_links":null,"feed_url":null}">PODCAST: Hexapodia XIII: “Mandated Interoperability”: We Can’t Make It Work, or Can We?With Cory Doctorow; Noah Smith & Brad DeLong’s 30:00 < [Length of Weekly Podcast] < 60:00May 04, 2021

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Key Insights:

• Cory Doctorow is AWESOME!

• It is depressing. We once, with the creation of the market economy, got interoperability right. But now the political economy blocks us from there being any obvious path to an equivalent lucky historical accident in our future.

• The problems in our society are not diametrically opposed: Addressing the problems of one thing doesn’t necessarily create equal and opposite problems on the other side—but it does change the trade-offs, and so things become very complex and very difficult to solve.

• Always keep a trash bag in your car.

• Hexapodia!

Share Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality

References:

Books:

Cory Doctorow: How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism <https://www.google.com/books/edition/How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism/W20NzgEACAAJ>

Cory Doctorow: Attack Surface <https://www.google.com/books/edition/Attack_Surface/rFfEDwAAQBAJ>

Cory Doctorow: Walkaway <https://www.google.com/books/edition/Walkaway/MKMsDAAAQBAJ>

Cory Doctorow: Down & Out in the Magic Kingdom <https://www.google.com/books/edition/Down_and_Out_in_the_Magic_Kingdom/h8DvDwAAQBA>

Cory Doctorow: Little Brother <https://www.google.com/books/edition/Little_Brother/r1zne2mZDW8C>

William Flesch:Comeuppance: Costly Signaling, Altruistic Punishment, and Other Biological Components of Fiction <https://www.google.com/books/edition/Comeuppance/JSRWPYp1nNUC>

Daniel L. Rubinfeld: A Retrospective on U.S. v. Microsoft: Why Does It Resonate Today? <https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0003603X20950227>

Louis Galambos & Peter Temin: The Fall of the Bell System: A Study in Prices & Politics <https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Fall_of_the_Bell_System/CXNPVjdxfAEC>

Websites:

Electronic Frontier Foundation: <http://www.eff.org>

• Adversarial Interop Case Studies: <https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interoperability>

• Privacy without Monopoly: <https://www.eff.org/wp/interoperability-and-privacy>

Cory Doctorow: Craphound <http://craphound.net>

Cory Doctorow: Pluralistic <https://pluralistic.net>

&, of course:

Vernor Vinge: A Fire Upon the Deep <https://books.google.com/books?id=fCCWWgZ7d6UC>

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Grammatized Transcript:

Brad: Noah! What is the key insight?

Noah: Hexapodia is the key insight! Six feet!

Brad: And what is that supposed to mean?

Noah: That there is some nugget of fact that, if you grasp it correctly and place it in the proper context, will transform your view of the situation and allow you to grok it completely.

Brad: And in the context of Vernor Vinge’s amazing and mind-Bending science-fiction space-opera novel A Fire Upon the Deep?

Noah: The importance of “hexapodia” is that those sapient bushes…

Brad: …riding around on six wheeled scooters have been genetically…

Noah: …programmed to be a fifth column of spies and agents for the Great Evil.

Brad: However, here we seek different key insights than “hexapodia”. Today we seek them from the genius science-fiction author and social commentator Cory Doctorow. I think of him as—it was Patrick Nielsen Hayden, I think, who said around 2004: that he felt like he was living in the future of Scottish science fiction author, Ken MacLeod. And he wished Ken would just stop. At times I feel that way about Cory. But we are very happy to have him here. His latest book is How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism IIRC, his latest fiction is Attack Surface. My favorite two books of his are Walkaway and—I think it was your first—Down & Out in the Magic Kingdom.

Cory: That’s right. Yes. Thank you. Thank you for that very effusive introduction. I decry all claims of genius, though.

Brad: Well, we know this is a problem. When one is dealing with an author whose work one has read a lot of—by reading your books.by now I’ve spent forty hours of my life looking at squiggles on a page or on a screen and, through a complicated mental process, downloaded to my wetware and then run on it a program that is my image of a sub-Turing instantiation of your mind, who has then told me many very entertaining and excellent stories. So I feel like I know you very well…

Cory: There’s this infamous and very funny old auto reply that Neal Stephenson used to send to people who emailed him. It basically went: “Ah, I get it. You feel like you were next to me when we were with Hero Protagonist in Alaska fighting off the right-wing militias. But while you were there with me, I wasn’t there with you. And so I understand why you want to, like, sit around and talk about our old military campaigns. But I wasn’t on that campaign with you.

Brad: Yes. It was only my own imago, my created sub-Turing instantiation of your mind that was there…

Cory: Indeed. We are getting off of interoperability, which is what I think we’re mostly going to talk about. But this is my cogpsy theory of why fiction works, and where the fanfic dispute comes from.

Writers have this very precious thing they say. It is: “I’m writing and I’m writing and all of a sudden the characters start telling me what they want to do.” I think that what they actually mean by that is that we all have this completely automatic process by which we try and create models of the people we encounter. Sometimes we never encounter those people. We just encounter second-hand evidence of them. Sometimes those people don’t live at all. Think about the people who feel great empathy for imaginary people that cruel catfishers have invented on the internet to document their imaginary battles with cancer. They then feel deeply hurt and betrayed and confused, when this person they’ve come to empathize with turns out to be a figment of someone else’s imagination.

I think what happens when you write is that you generate this optical link between two parts of your brain that don’t normally talk to each other. There are these words that you are explicitly thinking up that show up on your screen. And then those words are being processed by your eyeballs and being turned into fodder for a model in this very naive way. And then the model gets enough flesh on the bones—so it starts telling you what it wants to do. At this point you are basically breathing your own exhaust fumes here. But it really does take what is at first a somewhat embarrassing process of putting on a puppet show for yourself: “Like, everybody, let’s go on a quest!” “That sounds great!” “Here we go!” It just becomes something where you don’t feel like you’re explicitly telling yourself a story.

Now the corollary of this is that it sort of explains the mystery of why we like stories, right? Why we have these completely involuntary, emotional responses to the imaginary experiences of people who never lived and died and have no consequence. The most tragic death in literature of Romeo and Juliet is as nothing next to the death of the yogurt I digested with breakfast this morning, because that yogurt was alive and now it’s dead and Romeo and Juliet never lived, never died, nothing that happened to them happened. Yet you hear about the Romeo and Juliet…

Noah: …except that a human reads about Romeo and Juliet and cares…

Cory: That is where it matters, yes indeed. But the mechanism by which we care is our build this model which is then subjected to the author’s torments, and then we feel empathy for the model. What that means is that the readers, when they’re done, if the book hit its aesthetic marks, if it did the thing that literature does to make it aesthetically pleasing—then the reader still has a persistent model in the same way that if your granny dies, you still have a model of your granny, right? You are still there.

That is why fanfic exists. The characters continue to have imagined lives. If the characters don’t go on having imagined lives, then the book never landed for you.

And that’s why authors get so pissy about fanfic. They too have this model that they didn’t set out to explicitly create, but it’s there. And it’s important to their writing process. And if someone is putting data in about that modeled person that is not consistent with the author’s own perception of them, that creates enormous dissonance. I think that if we understood this, we would stop arguing about fanfic.

Noah: We argue about fanfic?

Brad: Oh yes, there are people who do. I remember—in some sense, the most precious thing I ever read was Jo Walton saying that she believed that Ursula K. LeGuin did not understand her own dragons at all…

Noah: …Yep, correct…

Cory: Poppy Bright—back when Poppy Bright was using that name and had that gender identity—was kicked out of a fan group for Poppy Bright fans on LiveJournal for not understanding Poppy Bright’s literature. I think that’s completely true. Ray Bradbury to his dying day insisted that Fahrenheit 451 had nothing to do with censorship but was about the dangers of television…

Brad: Fanfic is an old and wonderful tradition. It goes back to Virgil, right? What is the Aeneid but Iliad fanfic?

Cory: And what is Genesis but Babylonian fanfic? It goes a lot further back than that…

Brad: Today, however, we are here to talk not about humans as narrative-loving animals, not about the sheer weirdness of all the things that we run on our wetware, but about “mandated interoperability”, and similar things—how we are actually going to try to get a handle on the information and attention network economy that we are building out in a more bizarre and irrational way than I would have ever thought possible.

Cory: Yes. I don’t know if the audience will see this, but the title that you’ve chosen is: “Mandated Interoperability Is Not Going to Work”. I am more interested in how we make mandated interoperability work. I don’t think it’s a dead letter. I think that to understand what’s what’s happened you have to understand that the main efficiency that large firms bring to the market is regulatory capture. In an industry with only four or five major companies, all of the executives almost by definition must have worked at one or two of the other ones. Think of Sheryl Sandberg, moving from Google to Facebook.

They form an emerging consensus. Sometimes they all sit around the same a boardroom table. Remember that photo of the tech leaders around the table at the top of Trump Tower? They converge on a set of overlapping lobbying priorities. They have a lot of excess rents that they can extract to mobilize lobbying in favor of that. One of the things that these firms have done in the forty years of the tech industry is to move from a posture where they were all upstarts and were foursquare for interoperability with the existing platforms—because they understood that things like network advantages were mostly important in as much as they conferred a penalty for switching, and that if you could switch easily then the network advantage disappeared. If you could read Microsoft Office documents on a Mac, then the fact that there’s a huge network effect of Microsoft Office documents out there is irrelevant. Why? Because you can just run switch ads, and say every document ever created with Microsoft Office is now a reason to own a Mac.

But as they became dominant, and as their industries have become super-concentrated, they have swung against interoperability. I think that we need a couple of remedies for that. I think that we need some orderly structured remedies in the forms of standards. We need to check whether or not those standards are mandated. And we’ve seen how those standards can be subverted. And so I think we need something that stops dominant firms from subverting standards—a penalty that they pay that is market-based, that impacts their bottom line, and that doesn’t rely on a slow-moving or possibly captured regulator but that, instead, can actually just emerge in real time.

That is what I call “adversarial interoperability”: reverse engineering and scraping and bots. Steve Jobs paying some engineers to reverse engineer Microsoft Office file formats and make iWork suite, instead of begging Bill Gates to rescue the Mac…

Brad: …But he did beg Bill Gates to rescue the Mac…

Cory: He did that as well. But that wasn’t the whole story. He had a carrot and a stick. He had: let’s have a managed, structured market. Right. And then he had: what happens if you don’t come up to my standards is that we have alternatives, because we can just reverse-engineer your stuff. Look at, for example, the way that we standardized the formatting of personal finance information. There were standards that no one adopted. Then Mint came along, and they wrote bots, and you would give the bots your login credentials for your bank, and they would go and scrape your account data and put it into a single unified interface.

This was adversarial interoperability. This spurred the banks to actually come into compliance with the standard. Rather than having this guerrilla warfare, they wanted a quantifiable business process that they could understand from year to year that wouldn’t throw a lot of surprises that would disrupt their other other plans.

Brad: Let me back up: In the beginning, the spirit of Charles Babbage moved upon the face of the waters, and Babbage said: “Let there be electromechanical calculating devices”. And there was IBM. And IBM then bred with DARPA in the form of the Sage Air Defense, and begat generation upon generation of programmers. And from them was born FORTRAN and System 360.

And FORTRAN and IBM System 360 bestrode the world like the giants of the Nephilim, and Babbage saw it, and it was good. And there was nibbling around the edges from Digital Equipment and Data General.

Yea, until one day out of Silicon Valley, there emerged crystallized sand doped with germanium atoms, and everything was upset as out of CERN and there emerged the http protocol. All the companies that had been construct their own walled information gardens, and requiring you to sign up with AOL and CompuServe and Genie and four or five others in order to access databases through gopher and whatever—they found themselves overwhelmed by the interoperability tide of the internet.

And for fifteen years there was interoperability and openness and http and rss, and everyone frantically trying to make their things as interoperable as possible so that they could get their share of this absolutely exploding network of human creativity and ideas.

And then it all stopped. People turned on a dime. They began building their own walled gardens again.

Noah: I feel like we did just get Neal Stephenson on this podcast…

Brad: Sub-Turing! It’s a sub-Turing instantiation of a Neal Stephenson imago!

Cory: I think that your point of view or generational outlook or whatever creates a different lens than mine. I think about it like this: In 1979 we got an Apple II+. In 1980, we got a modem card for it. Right. By 1982, there were a lot of BBS’s and that was great. Even though we were in Canada, the BBS software was coming up from the American market. We had local dial-up BBS’s running software that was being mailed around on floppies…

Brad: Whish whish whine… Beep beep… Whish… I am trying to make modem noises…

Cory: that sounded like V.42bis.

And then by 1984 there were the PC clones. Everyone had a computer. This company that no one had ever heard of—Microsoft—suddenly grew very big. They created this dynamism in the industry. You could have a big old giant, like IBM. You could have two guys in a garage, like Microsoft. The one could eclipse the other. IBM couldn’t even keep control of its PCs. They were being cloned left and right. And then Microsoft became the thing that had slain. It became a giant. And the DOJ intervened. Even though Microsoft won the suit ultimately—they weren’t broken up…

Brad: They did back off from destroying Google…

Cory: What’s missing from that account is the specific mechanisms. We got modems because we got cheap, long distance. We got that because 1982 we had the ATT breakup. Leading up to the breakup shifted the microeconomics. People ATT were all: don’t do that. It’s going to piss off the enforcers. We’ve got this breakup to deal with

Brad: Yes. The enforcers, the enforcers are important. Both the Modification of Final Judgment. And ATT’s anticipatory reaction to it. Plus the periodic attempted antitrust kneecappings of IBM. They meant that when people in IBM turned around and said: “Wait a minute. When we started the PC project, John F. Akers told us we needed to find something for Mary Gates’s boy Bill to do, because he sat next to her at United Way board meetings. But this is turning into a monster. We need to squelch them.” And from the C-suite came down: “No, our antitrust position is sufficiently fraught that we can’t move to squash Microsoft.”

Cory: Yes. IBM spent 12 years in antitrust litigation. Hell, they called it. Antitrust as Vietnam. They essentially had been tied by the ankles to the back of DOJ’s bumper and dragged up and down a gravel road for 12 years. They were outspending the entire DOJ legal department every single year for that one case. And one of the things that DOJ really didn’t like about IBM was tying software to hardware.

And so when Phoenix makes the IBM ROM clone, IBM is like: Yeah, whatever. Any costs we pay because of the clone ROM are going to be lower than the costs we will incur if we get back into antitrust hell—and the same goes for Microsoft. They got scared off. What we were seeing, what it felt like, the optimism that I think we felt and of which we were aware was—it looked like we’d have protocols and not products, and we’d have a pluralistic internet, not five giant websites filled with screenshots of text from the other.

But our misapprehension was not due to technological factors. It was our failing to understand that like Bork and Reagan had shivved antitrust in the guts in 1980, and it was bleeding out. So by the time Google was big enough to do to everyone else what Microsoft had not been able to do to them, there was no one there to stop Google.

Noah: Cory, let me ask a question here. I’m the designated grump of the podcast. Brad is the designated history expounder. I want to know: Why do we care right right now? I’ve written about interoperability with regards to electric cars and other emerging technologies. What things in the software world are people hurt by not having interoperability for? What are the big harms in software to consumers or to other stakeholders from lack of interoperability?

Cory: Let me frame the question before I answer it.

We have market concentration in lots of different sectors for similar reasons, mergers. We should have different remedies for them. We heard about Babbage. I would talk about Turing and the universality of the computer. Interoperability represents a pro-competitive remedy to anti-competitive practices that is distinct and specific to computers.

I don’t know if you folks know about the middle-gauge muddle in Australia. Independent states and would-be rail barons laid their own gauge rail across the country. You can’t get a piece of rolling stock from one edge of the country to the other. For 150 years they have been trying to build designs that can drop one set of wheels where the track needs it. And none of them have worked. And now their solution is to tear up rails and put down new rails.

If that was a software object, we just write a compatibility layer. Where we have these durable anti-competitive effects in the physical world, that sometimes necessitate these very difficult remedies, we can actually facilitate decentralized remedies where people can seize the means of computation to create digital remedies: self-determination, the right to decide how to talk to their friends and under what circumstances, as opposed to being forced to choose between being a social person and being private…

Brad: For me, at least there are lots and lots of frictions that keep me from seeing things that I would like to see, and keep me from cross-referencing things that I would like to cross-references. There are bunches of things I’ve seen on Twitter and Facebook in the past that, because they are inside the walled gardens. I definitely am not able to get them out quickly and easily and cheaply enough to put them into the wider ideas flow. And I feel stupider as a result. And then there are all the people who have been trapped by their own kind of cognitive functioning, so that they are now a bunch of zombies with eyeballs glued to the screen being fed terror so that they can be sold fake diabetes cures and overpriced gold funds…

Noah: That’s a good angle right here. If we look at the real harms that are coming through the internet right now—I worry about Kill Zones, and of course I worry about the next cool thing getting swallowed up by predatory acquisitions. That’s our legitimate worry for sure. When I look at the internet and what bad the internet is causing, I do not see the lack of alternative information sources as the biggest problem. I see the people who are the biggest problem as coming precisely from alternative information sources.

This is not to say we should get rid of those sources. This is not to say we should have mass censorship and ban all the anti-vax sites. I’m not saying that.

But if we look at the issues—there was a mass banning of Trump and many of the Q-Anons from the main social media websites, and yet a vast underground network of alternative right wing media has sprung up.

Cory: It seems like they were able to. Let me redirect from the harms that Brad raised. I think those are perfectly good harms. But I want to go to some broader harms.

In the purely digital online world, we had some people we advised at EFF who were part of a medical cancer previvor group—people who have a gene that indicates a very high likelihood of cancer, women. They had been aggressively courted by Facebook at a time when they were trying to grow up their medical communities. And one of the members of this group who wasn’t a security researcher or anything was just noodling around on Facebook, and found that you could enumerate the membership of every group on Facebook, including hers. She reported that to Facebook. That’s obviously a really significant potential harm to people in the medical communities. She reported it to Facebook. Facebook characterized her report as a feature request and won’t fix it. She made more of a stink. They said: fine, we’re going to do a partial fix because it would have interfered with their ad-tech stack to do a full fix. So you have to be a member of a group to enumerate the group. This was still insufficient.

But they had this big problem with inertia—with the collective action problem of getting everyone who’s now on Facebook to leave Facebook and go somewhere else. They were all holding each other mutually hostage. Now you could imagine that they could have set up a Diaspora instance, and they could have either had a mandated- or standards-defined interface that allowed those people to talk to their friends on Facebook. And they could have a little footer at the bottom of each message: today 22% of the traffic in this group originated on our diaspora, once that tips to 60% were all leaving, and quitting Facebook. They might do this with a bot, without Facebook’s cooperation, in the absence of Facebook’s legal right to prevent those bots.

Facebook has weaponized the computer fraud and abuse act and other laws to prevent people from making these bots to allow them to inter-operate with Facebook—even though, when Facebook started, the way that it dealt with its issues with MySpace was creating MySpace spots, where you could input your login and password, and it would get your waiting MySpace messages and put them in your Facebook inbox and let you reply to them. Facebook has since sued Power Ventures for doing the same thing. They’re engaged in legal activity against other bot producers that are doing beneficial pro-user things.

That’s one harm.

Another harm that I think is really important here is repair. Independent repairs are about 5% of US GDP. The lack of access to repair is of particular harm to people who are already harmed the most: it raises the cost of being poor. The ability to control repair is a source of windfall profits. Tim Cook advised his investors in 2019, the year after he killed twenty right-to-repair bills at these state level, that the biggest threat to Apple’s profits was that people were fixing their devices instead of throwing them away. It’s an environmental problem, and so on. The biggest problem with right-to-repair is not that the companies don’t provide their data or the diagnostic codes or encrypt diagnostic codes. The problem is that you face felony prosecution under the CFAA and DMCA, as well as ancillary stuff like non-compete and non-disclosure, and so on through federal trade secrecy law, if you create tools to repairs without the cooperation of the vendors. This is a real harm that arises out of the rules that have been exploited to block interoperability.

Brad: This goes deep, right? This affects not just tech but the world, or, rather, because tech has eaten the world, hard-right unsympathetic state representatives from rural Missouri are incredibly exercised about right-to-repair, and the fact that John Deere does not have enough internal capacity to repair all the tractors that need to be repaired in the three weeks before the most critical-need part of the year.

Cory: This is an important fracture line. There are people who have a purely instrumental view: me my constituents need tractor repair, so I will do whatever it takes to get them tractor repair. In California we got a terrible compromise on this brokered with John Deere—it was basically a conduct remedy instead of a structural change. Right.

Something I questioned a lot about Klobuchar’s antitrust story is that she keeps saying: I believe that we need to jettison the 40-year consumer-welfare standard and return to a more muscular antitrust that is predicated on social harms that include other stakeholders besides consumers paying higher prices, and I have a bipartisan consensus on this because Josh Hawley agrees with me, but Josh Hawley does not agree with her. Josh Hawley just wants to get Alex Jones back on Twitter, right. And that’s like, it begins and ends there.

She might be able to get the inertia going where Josh Hawley is put in the bind where he either has to brief for a more broad antitrust cause of action that includes social harms, or he has to abandon Alex Jones to not being on Twitter. And maybe he’ll take Alex Jones if that’s the price. But I do think that that’s a huge fracture line, that there are honest brokers who don’t care about the underlying principle and the long run effects of bad policy. And there are people who just want to fix something for a political point or immediate benefit.

Brad: Fixing it to the extent that fixing something scores a political point—that does mean actually doing good things for your constituents, who include not just Alex Jones, but the guys in rural Missouri who want their John Deere tractors repaired cheaply.

Cory: This is how I feel about de platforming. I was angry about deplatforming for 10 years, when it was pipeline activists and sex workers and drag queens who were being forced to use their real name, and trans people were forced to use their dead names, and political dissidents in countries where they could be rounded up and tortured and murdered if they adhere to Facebook’s real names policy, and all of that stuff. First they came for the drag queens, and I said nothing because I wasn’t a drag queen. Then they came for the far right conspiratorialists.

But they’re fair-weather friends.

It’s like the split between open source and free software where, you know, the benefits of technological self-determination were subsumed into the instrumental benefits of having access to the source so you could improve it. What we have is free software for the tech monopolists, for they can see the source and modify the source of everything on their backend. And we have open source for the rest of us. We can inspect the source, we can improve their software for them, but we don’t get to choose how their backends run. And since everything loops through their backends, we no longer have software freedom. That’s the risk if you decouple instrumental from ethical propositions. You can end up with a purely instrumental fix that leaves the ethical things that worry you untouched, and in fact in a declining spiral.

Noah: I want to argue. I don’t think we don’t get enough argument on this podcast. I want to inject a little here.

A turning point for my generation in terms of our use of the internet was Gamergate. That happened in 2014. Gamergate largely morphed after that into the the Trump movement and the alt-right. Gamergate destroyed what I knew as online nerd culture. It was an extinction-level event for the idea that nerd culture existed apart from the rest of society. It was a terrible thing. Maybe nerd culture couldn’t have lasted, but a giant subculture that I enjoyed and partially defined myself by as a young person was gone. And not only that, not only me—I’m centering myself and making all about me here, but a lot of people got harassed. Some good friends of mine got harassed. It was really terrible as an event in and of itself, irrespective of the long-term effects.

Even Moot, a big, huge defender of anonymity and free speech, eventually banned Gamergate topics from 4chan. That was the moment when I realized that the idea of free speech as free speech guarded by individual forums or platforms separately from the government—that that idea was dead. When Moot banned banned Gamergate from 4chan, I said: okay, we’re in a different era. That was the Edward R Murrow moment. That was the moment we started going back toward Dan Rather and Edward R Murrow and the big three television companies in the 1950s—when Moot banned Gamergate.

Maybe this just has to happen. Maybe bad actors are able to always co-opt a fragmented internet. There’s no amount of individual Nazi punching that can get the Nazis out. If you have people whose speech is entirely focused on destroying other people’s right to speak, as Gamergate was, then then free speech means nothing because no one feels free to speak. I wonder whether fragmentation of platforms makes it harder to police things like Gamergate and thus causes Nazis to fractally permeate each little space on the internet and every little pool of the internet. Wherever we have one big pool, we have economies of scale in guarding that pool.

Brad: That is: what you are saying is that an information world of just four monopolistic, highly oligopolistic, walled gardens is bad, but an internet in which you cannot build any wall around your garden is bad as well. Then what we really need is a hundred walled gardens blooming, perhaps. But I want to hear what Cory has to say about this and interoperability.

Cory: I found that so interesting. I had to get out some, no paper and take notes.

First of all, I would trace back before the Gamergate issue. Before it was the Sad Puppies, the disruption of the Hugo awards by far-right authors was before Gamergate. It was the same ringleaders. Gamergate was the second act of sad puppies. So I’m there with you.

I was raised by Trotskyists. I want to say that, listening to you describe how you feel about nerd culture after you discovered that half of your colleagues and friends were violent misogynists—it sounds a lot like how Trotskyists talk about Stalinists, right. You have just recounted the the internet nerd version of Homage to Catalonia. Orwell goes to Spain to fight the fascist and a Stalinist shoots him through the throat.

We in outsider or insurgent or subcultural movements often have within our conception of a group people who share some characteristics and diverge on others. We paper over those divergences until they fracture. Think about the punk Nazi-punk split. This anti-authoritarian movement is united around a common aesthetic and music and a shared cultural identity. And there’s this political authoritarian anti-authoritarian things sitting in the middle. And they just don’t talk about it until they start talking about it—Dead Kennedys record: Nazi punks f-—- off. And here we are, still in the midst of that reckoning. That’s where Stormfront comes from and all the rest of it.

This is not distinct to the internet. It is probably unrealistic, it’s definitely unrealistic for there to be a regime in which conduct that is lawful can find no home. Not that not that it won’t happen in your home, but that it won’t happen in anyone’s home. The normative remedy where we just make some conduct that is lawful so far beyond the pale that everyone ceases to engage in it—that has never really existed. Right. You can see that with conduct that we might welcome today, as you know, socially fine and conduct that we dislike—whether that’s, you know, polyamory. You go back to the future house, where Judy Merrill and, and Fred Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth lived in the thirties, and they had this big, weird polyamorous household of leftist science fiction writers write at a time when it was unmentionably weird to do it. And today it’s pretty mainstream—at least in some parts of California.

In the absence of an actual law against it, it’s probably going to happen. The first question is: is our response to people who have odious ideas that we want there to be nowhere where they can talk about it? If that’s the case, we’ll probably have to make a law against them.

Noah: Right. But hold on. Is it ideas, or is it actions? If you harass someone you’re not expressing an idea, you’re stopping them from expressing theirs.

Cory: Absolutely. So, so the issue is: that there are Nazis talking to other Nazis is okay. It’s just that when Nazis talked to other Nazis and figured out how to go harass someone. Let me give you an example of someone I know who is in the midst of one of these harassment campaigns.

Now there’s a brilliant writer, a librettist, novelist, and comics author named Cecile Castellucci. She also used to be like a pioneering Riot Girl and toured with Sloan. So she’s just this great polymath person. And because she’s a woman who writes comics, men on the internet hate her. And there’s a small and dedicated cadre of these men who figured out a way to mess with women on Twitter. They send you a DM that is really violent and disgusting. They wait until they see the read receipt, and then they delete it. Twitter, to its credit, will not accept screenshotted DMs as evidence of harassment, because it would be very easy for those same men to forge DMs from their targets and get those people kicked off Twitter. Then what they do is they revictimize their targets by making public timeline mentions that comport with Twitter’s rules unless you’ve seen the private message. And they make references to the private message that trigger the emotions from the private message over and over again.

It is a really effective harassment technique.

The women they use it against are stuck on Twitter, because their professional lives require them to be on Twitter, right. Their careers would end to some important degree if they weren’t part of this conversation on Twitter.

Now, imagine if you had Gotham Clock Tower, Barbara Gordon’s secret home, which was a Mastodon instance that was federated with Twitter, either through a standard or through a mandate or through adversarial interoperability. There could be a dozen women there who could agree that among themselves that they’re willing to treat screenshotted DMs as evidence of harassment, so that they could block and silence and erase the all presence of these horrible men. We’d still want Twitter to do something about them, but if some of those men slipped through Twitter’s defenses as they will, not just because they can’t catch everyone when they’re at the scale, but because the range of normal activities at scale is so broad: a hundred million people have a hundred and one million use cases every day. Then those people are that, that those people could still be on Twitter, but not subject to the harassment of Twitter. It’s a way for them.

Maybe, in the way that we talk about states being democracy’s laboratories, maybe these satellite communities could pioneer moderation techniques that range beyond takedowns or account terminations or warning labels. There are so many different ways we could deal with this. You could render some comments automatically in Comic Sans. They could try them and see if they work. And they could be adopted back into main Twitter. That’s what self-determination gets you: it gets you the right to set the rules of your discourse, and it gets you the right to decide who you trust to be within the group of people who make those rules.

Brad: So if we had the real interoperable world, we would have lots that would screen things according to someone’s preferences. And you could sign up to have that bot included in your particular bot list to pre-process and filter, so that you don’t have to wade through the garbage.

Cory: Sure. And there might be some conduct that we consider so far beyond the pale that we actually criminalize it. Then we can take the platforms where that conduct routinely takes place and things like reforms to 230 would cease to be nearly so important. We would be saying that if you are abetting unlawful conduct, when we see a remedy for preventing this unlawful conduct, and you refusing to implement that remedy, we might defenestrate you. We might do something worse.

Think of how the phone network works.It is standardized. There are these standard interchanges. There’s lots of ways it can be abused. Every now and and then, from some Caribbean Island, we get a call that fakes a number from a Caribbean Island, and if you call it back, you’re billed at $20 a minute for a long distance to have someone go: no, it was a wrong number. When that happens, the telco either cleans up its act or all the other telcos break their connection to it. There’s certain conduct that’s unlawful on the phone network, not unlawful because it cheats the phone company—not toll fraud—but unlawful because it’s bad for the rest of the world, like calling bomb threats in. Either the customer gets terminated or the operator is disciplined by law.

All of those things can work without having to be in this in this regime where you have paternalistic control, where you vest all of your hope in a God-King who faces no penalty if he makes a bad call. They say: we’ll defend your privacy when the FBI wants to break the iPhone. But when they threaten to shut down our manufacturing, we’ll let them spy on you even as they’re opening up concentration camps and putting a million people in them.

Brad: Was that the real serpent in all of these walled gardens? Was the advertising-supported model the thing that turns your eyeballs into the commodity to be enserfed. If we had the heaven of micropayments, would we manage to avoid all of this?

Cory: We’ve had advertising for a long time. The toxicity of advertising is pretty new. Mostly what’s toxic about advertising is surveillance, and not because I think the surveillance allows them to do feats of mind control. I think everyone who’s ever claimed to have mind control turned out to be lying to themselves or everyone else. Certainly there is not a lot of evidence for it. You have these Facebook large-scale experiments: 60 million people subjected to a nonconsensual, psychological intervention to see if they can be convinced to vote. And you get 0.38% effect size. Facebook should be disqualified from running a lemonade stand if we catch them performing nonconsensual experiments on 60 million people. But, at the same time, 0.38% effect sizes are not mind control.

They do engage in a lot of surveillance. It’s super-harmful because it leaks, because it allows them to do digital redlining, because it allows them to reliably target fascists with messages that if they were uttered in public, where everyone could see them, might cause the advertiser to be in bad odor. They can take these dog whistles and they can whisper them to the people who won’t spread them around.

Those are real harms.

You have to ask yourself: why don’t we have a privacy law that prohibits the nonconsensual gathering of data and imposes meaningful penalties on people who breach data? I was working in the EU. GDPR was passed. The commissioners I spoke to there said: no one has ever lobbied me as hard as I’ve been lobbied now. Right now we have more concentration in ad tech than in any other industry, I think, except for maybe eyeglasses, glass bottles, and professional wrestling.

Brad: Are we then reduced to: “Help us, Tim Cook! You are our only hope!”?

Cory: I think that that’s wrong, because Tim Cook doesn’t want to give you self-determination. Tim wants you to be subject to his determinations. Among those determinations are some good ones. He doesn’t want Facebook to own your eyeballs. You go, Tim. But he also wants you to drop your iPhone in a shredder every 18 months, rather than getting it fixed.

Brad: Although I must say, looking at the M1 chip, I’m very tempted to take my laptop and throw it in the shredder today to force me to buy a new one.

Noah: It’s interesting how iPhone conquered. And yet very few people still use Macs. Steve Jobs’s dream was never actualized.

Cory: Firms that are highly concentrated distort policy outcomes, and ad tech is highly concentrated. And we have some obviously distorted policy outcomes. We don’t have a federal privacy law with a private right of action. There are no meaningful penalties for breaches. We understand that breaches have compounding effects. A breach that doesn’t contain any data that is harmful to the user can be merged with another breach and together they can be harmful—and that’s cumulative. And data has a long half-life.

Just this week, Ed Felton’s old lab published a paper on how old phone numbers can be used to defeat two-factor authentication. You go through a breach, find all the phone numbers that are associated with the two-factor authentication. Then you can go to Verizon and ask: which of these phone numbers is available? Which of these people has changed their phone number? Then you can request that phone number on a new signup—and then you can break into their bank account and steal all their money. Old breaches are cumulative. Yet we still have this actual-damages regime for breaches instead of statutory damages that take account of the downstream effects and these unquantifiable risks that are imposed on the general public through the nonconsensual collection and retention of data under conditions that inevitably lead to breaches.

Brad: Okay. Well, I’m very down. So are we ready to end? I think we should end on this downer note.

Noah: My favorite Cory Doctorow books also end on a downer note.

Brad: Yes. Basically that the political economy does not allow us to move out of this particular fresh semi-hell in which we’re embedded. But you had something to say?

Cory: Everybody hates monopolies now. So we’ll just team up with the people angry about professional wrestling monopolies and eyeglass monopolies and beer monopolies, and we’ll form a Prairie Fire United Front of people who will break the monopoly because we’re all on the same side—even though we’re fighting our different corners of it—the same way that ecology took people who cared about owls and put them on the side of people who care about ozone layers, even though charismatic, nocturnal birds are not the gaseous composition of the upper atmosphere.

Brad: Hey, if you have the charismatic megafauna on your side, you’re golden.

Noah: How did the original Prairie Fire work out? Let’s let’s wrap it up there. This is really great episode. Cory, you’re awesome. Thanks so much for coming on and feel free to come back in time.

Cory: I’d love to. I’ve just turned in a book about money laundering and cryptocurrency—a noir cyberthreat thriller. Maybe when that comes out, I can come on and we can talk about that. That feels like it’s up your guys’ alley.

Brad: That would be great. Okay. So, as we end this: Noah, what is the key insight?

Noah: Hexapodia is the key insight. And what are the other key insights that we got from this day?

Brad: DeLong: I’m just depressed. I had a riff about how we got interoperability right with the creation of the market economy and the end of feudalism—and how that was a very lucky historical accident. But I don’t see possibilities for an equivalent lucky historical accident in our future.

Noah: I have a key insight. It is a little vague, but hopefully it will be good fodder for future episodes. The problems in our society are not diametrically opposed. We have to find optimal interior-solution trade-offs between things that have a non-zero dot product. Sometimes solving the problem with one thing doesn’t necessarily create exactly equal and opposite problems on the other side. Instead, it changes the trade-offs that you face with regard to other problems. These things become very complex. You have things like the antitrust problem and things like the Nazi problem. In your society addressing one doesn’t necessarily worsen the other. More action against Nazis doesn’t necessarily mean less action in antitrust. It’s simply means you have to think about antitrust in a slightly different way, and vice versa. That does make these institutional problems very difficult to solve.

Brad: Cory, do you wish to add a key insight,

Cory: A key insight is: always keep a trash bag in your car.

Brad: This has been Brad DeLong and Noah Smith’s podcast this week with the amazing Cory Doctorow. Thank you all very much for listening.

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On the one hand, Sean Illing is right that you can’t have all three of Homer, Nietzsche, and Jesus. On the other hand, perhaps you cannot even have Jesus entire. Is it the pre-crucifixion Petrine call to live in the Kingdom of Heaven or the post-crucifixion Pauline call to Believe and witness the destruction of all the Old God principalities and powers that is the core? “Feed my lambs” has always fit awkwardly with “destroy every reigning numinous authority and power”. Go for the second, and sitting cheek-by-jowl with Homer and Nietzsche becomes very possible.

The wise Sean Illing protests that you cannot, logically, simultaneously embrace Homer, Nietzsche, and Jesus. The right-wing response to that is: “Hold my beer and watch this!”

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How do they manage to make that trick work?

My view: They just need to start by saying “Jesus Christ” with a particular, albeit to my way of thinking peculiar, emphasis. There have, ab initio, been two kinds of things that have called themselves “Christianity”. Call them, perhaps: Petrine, and Pauline.

• Petrine Christianity: John 17:15ff.: So when they had dined, Jesus saith to Simon Peter, “Simon, son of Jonas, lovest thou me more than these?” He saith unto him, “Yea, Lord; thou knowest that I love thee”. He saith unto him, “Feed my lambs”…

• Pauline Christianity: I Corinthians 15:19 ff.: If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable. But now is Christ risen from the dead, and become the firstfruits of them that slept…. Then cometh the end, when he shall have delivered up the kingdom to God, even the Father; when he shall have put down all rule and all authority and power. For he must reign, till he hath put all enemies under his feet. The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death…

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For the first, the most important thing to know is that Jesus preaches the Golden Rule”: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you, for the Kingdom of Heaven is within your grasp, and the worthy grasp it and live in it by exercising compassion, giving freely without counting costs.

For the second, the most important thing to know is that Risen Christ is about to do So Much Winning, for he is on the point of launching the Theomakhy of the Eskhaton, the End-of-Times God-Battle. Paul thought the cosmos was occupied territory held by hostile superhuman powers, that God had already landed the decisive blow in the crucifixion, and that history was now the mopping-up interval before a final subjugation in which the last enemy destroyed would be Death itself.

These are two manifestly different religions. In one, you act as Jesus would. In the other, you believe in Christ and stand by and watch as your soul is redeemed. They can be made to run in harness, kinda-sorta, to some degree. But.

All this is a lead-in to Sean Illing here. For it is just the Petrine Christianity that Nietzsche opposes, and that is anti-Homeric.

With that correction, however, I think Sean is talking a lot of sense here:

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Sean IllingDad, Veteran, Author, “The Paradox of Democracy,” Host of The Gray Area. 👉 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-gray-area-with-sean-illing/id1081584611CROSSPOST: SEAN ILLING: You can’t have Homer, Nietzsche and Jesus

<https://seanilling.substack.com/p/you-cant-have-homer-nietzsche-and> <https://seanilling.substack.com/>

Sean IllingYou can't have Homer, Nietzsche and JesusThis Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber…Read more3 days ago · 53 likes · 11 comments · Sean IllingThoughts on The Odyssey and the incoherence of the cultural Right.Sean IllingAug 04, 2026

My friend (and former boss) Ezra Klein wrote a great piece this weekend about the right-wing uproar over Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. Well, “uproar” is maybe the wrong word here. “Confusion” is more on target.

I have to confess, I’ve kind of enjoyed the hysterical overreactions to the film. Anything that pisses off Elon Musk this much has to have some inherent value, right?

At this stage, there’s basically no amount of cultural stupidity that can surprise me. But the discourse around The Odyssey has been a real doozy. We’re talking about a mythic poem about gods and monsters composed centuries before anything resembling our modern conceptions of race or historical representation. Complaining that its cast does not look sufficiently “Greek” is like complaining that the actors in The Lord of the Rings do not look sufficiently Gondorian.

As best I can tell, the more interesting distortion has received much less attention. It’s true that Nolan’s film does take enormous liberties with Homer’s poem. It softens its pagan morality and filters Odysseus’s story through recognizably Christian ideas about guilt, mercy, repentance, forgiveness, and the moral equality of human beings. It’s fine, I suppose, to be annoyed by that. What’s revealing is that the self-appointed defenders of Judeo-Christian civilization seem far more exercised by the racial makeup of the cast than by Nolan’s replacement of Homeric morality with Christian morality.

Watching all this discourse reminds me of when I was covering Trump and the alt-right in my early days with Vox. Back then, the alt-right was deep in its obsession with Nietzsche. And in both cases, the attraction is understandable. Nietzsche and Homer offer visions of a pre-Christian moral universe organized around strength, hierarchy, honor, conquest, glory, and domination rather than humility, charity, pity, or universal human dignity.

The issue is that many of the people drawn to this vision also insist that they’re defending Christianity. They want the warrior ethic of Achilles and Odysseus, the aristocratic radicalism of Nietzsche, and the civilizational authority of Christianity. Because they don’t take any of these things seriously, they don’t confront the obvious contradictions among them.

If you recall, the once-famous white nationalist goober Richard Spencer told the Atlantic’s Graeme Wood back in 2017 that he was “red-pilled by Nietzsche.” “Red-pilled” is a common term for that “eureka moment” one experiences when first encountering some dark and previously buried truth. For Spencer and other alt-right enthusiasts of Nietzsche, that dark truth is that all the modern pieties about race, peace, equality, justice, civility, and universal suffrage are bullshit.

For people primed to believe this sort of thing, Nietzsche is a breath of fresh air. He’s the guy who tells you there are no capital-T truths, that the world is forever in flux. In his clearest and most straightforward piece of writing, The Genealogy of Morality, Nietzsche shreds the intellectual justifications for Christian morality, calling it a “slave morality” developed by peasants to subdue the strong.

There is, of course, much more to Nietzsche than this. But if you read him like a freshman cramming for a midterm, this is the exciting stuff you inhale and it’s just enough metaphysical dynamite to clear a path for your dormant prejudices.

Readers of this Substack will know that my dissertation was largely about Nietzsche, which means I have the privilege of constantly detecting recycled versions of his arguments from a century ago.

If you haven’t read The Genealogy, the story Nietzsche tells is that Christianity overturned classical Roman values like strength, will, nobility of spirit. These were replaced with egalitarianism, community, humility, charity, and pity. Nietzsche saw this shift as the beginning of a sweeping democratic movement in Western civilization, one that championed the weak over the strong, the masses over the individual, etc.

The “post-liberal” right, like the alt-right before them, seems infatuated with this strain of Nietzsche’s thought, probably because of the emphasis on “decline.” I think this is what gives the current fascination with Homer its political charge. The ancient epics offer up a world before liberalism, feminism, egalitarianism, and Christianity. Men fight wars, seize kingdoms, take slaves, chase glory, all that jazz.

But the intoxicating thing is the pre-Christian morality, where human beings aren’t equal and the strong unapologetically dominate the weak. There’s no trace of what people now call “suicidal empathy.”

Homer’s world, in other words, isn’t even remotely Christian. The moral universe of The Odyssey is hierarchical, aristocratic, violent, governed by reciprocal obligations rather than universal duties. Odysseus is admirable because he’s cunning, powerful, resilient. His greatness doesn’t consist in loving his enemies or caring for the meek. When he returns to Ithaca, he slaughters the suitors. He also orders the execution of the enslaved women who slept with them.

Nolan’s film can’t fully accept this morality, or at least Nolan clearly doesn’t think a modern audience will accept it. So the story is recast as a meditation on guilt and civilizational trauma. Odysseus is forced to confront what he has done and his heroism is purified through remorse. That, to me, is the real modernization of The Odyssey. The stupid casting controversy is a distraction from it.

Which brings us back to Richard Spencer. In his interview with the Atlantic, Spencer surprised Wood with a peculiar defense of Christianity: that the religion is false but it “bound together the civilizations of Europe.”

This view is more commonplace on the modern right than many people seem to think. While they don’t actually have any interest in Christ, they see the whole edifice of white European civilization as built on a framework of Christian beliefs. Christendom is the force that united the European continent and forged white identity.

Surely you can see the paradox: They believe the West has grown degenerate and weak because it internalized Christian values, but they find themselves defending Christendom because it’s the glue that binds European culture together.

But the moral legacy of Christianity is part of the plague they’re rejecting. Christ’s identification with the poor, the weak, the stranger, the prisoner, and the outcast is hard to reconcile with a politics organized around domination and exclusion. So are the injunctions to love one’s enemies, forgive wrongdoing, renounce vengeance, distrust wealth, and treat the least powerful members of society as bearers of divine worth. It goes without saying that these are not trivial contradictions. This is the moral center of Christianity.

Which is what makes the response to The Odyssey so amusing. The people complaining about its betrayal of Western civilization are mostly indifferent to the film’s actual betrayal of Homer. Nolan replaces the pagan warrior ethic with a moral vocabulary shaped by Christianity. This goes unnoticed by these critics because what they want from the ancient world isn’t historical or philosophical fidelity. They want an aesthetic of strength and they want Christianity to linger in the background as some vague container of order.

Nietzsche, to his credit, accepted that Christianity was central to the development of Western civilization, and his whole philosophy was focused on convincing people that the West had to move beyond Christianity. When Nietzsche declared that “God is dead,” he meant that science and reason had progressed to the point where we could no longer justify belief in God, and that meant that we could no longer justify the values rooted in that belief.

A big chunk of the contemporary right wants to live after Christianity while continuing to wield Christianity as an authority. It wants a politics of power, hierarchy, vengeance, and domination, but it also wants to call that politics “Christian.”

Nietzsche, at least, was honest about the conflict. He understood that Christianity had transformed the moral language of the West. He also understood that rejecting Christian theology while preserving Christian morality was unsustainable. You can’t just kill God and keep everything else.

The people raging about The Odyssey want to kill Christian morality and keep Christian identity. They want Christendom without Christ.

Nietzsche will always be our most punk rock philosopher, the guy who “philosophized with a hammer.” In the end, though, people find in his work what they went into it already believing. If you’re seeking a reason to reject a world you don’t like, you can find it anywhere, especially in Nietzsche.

You can read The Odyssey as a repudiation of the modern world, a story about masculine strength, natural hierarchy, heroic violence, the defense of home, and the restoration of order. All of that is definitely in the poem. What you can’t do is pretend that this ethic is indistinguishable from Christianity. Love it or hate it, Christianity introduced a moral revolution that privileged the weak over the strong, mercy over vengeance, and the equal value of souls over the natural hierarchy of the ancient world. Nietzsche hated Christianity precisely because he understood this.

The most interesting thing about the conservative response to The Odyssey is that it exposes a confusion about Christianity that the American right has never resolved because it’s not resolvable. Their heroes are pagan. Their morality is Nietzschean. Their identity is Christian.

Good luck with all that!

<https://seanilling.substack.com/p/you-cant-have-homer-nietzsche-and> <https://seanilling.substack.com/>

Sean IllingYou can't have Homer, Nietzsche and JesusThis Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber…Read more3 days ago · 53 likes · 11 comments · Sean IllingSean IllingDad, Veteran, Author, “The Paradox of Democracy,” Host of The Gray Area. 👉 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-gray-area-with-sean-illing/id1081584611

Brad DeLong here: Now St. Paul’s vision of the Theomakhy of the Eskhaton—of Jesus by passing through Death-and-Resurrection-and-Ascension waging war and destroying the Old Gods—does not get you all the way to Homer, let alone Nietzsche. But it does get you to a place where you can be very comfortable with them. For all the sweetness-and-light and the doing-unto-others was before the Hinge of History that was the Crucifixion. That was the Gospel preached to the other apostles, and it was preached by a man. Paul, by contrast, is the only apostle who has received the Gospel preached directly to him by a God.

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Trump’s Own Prosecutor Refuted Him in Nineteen Pages. The Times Led With His Hurt Feelings.Dan Froomkin has been worth reading since his days at the Washington Post White House Watch, that is. IIRC, in a manner strikingly similar to what would happen to Nate Silver at the New York TImes a couple of decades later, he would run into the organizational buzzsaw consisting of reporters and editors who thought that Dan and Nate putting, you know, the truth out there in print was unbearable as it broke their cozy little contracts with their sources. IIRC, it was John Harris at the Post and Jim Rutenberg at the Times who put themselves forward as the leading opponents of Dan and Nate and anything one might call “real journalism”, back in the day.

Baseless” is the word reporters use when the accurate word is “delusional”, for the reflecting pool is not a political dispute. it is a presidential break with reality, and the press corps will not say so. ‘Sanewashing’ is not neutrality — it is a decision to withhold the single most important fact in the story. What is all that vaunted White House access worth if nobody will use it to ask whether the president knows what is real?

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Press WatchAn intervention for political jouornalism.By Dan FroomkinCROSSPOST: DAN FROOMKIN: The Reflecting Pool Story Is About Trump’s Grip on Reality, But the Press Corps Won’t Go There

<https://criticalread.substack.com/p/the-reflecting-pool-story-is-about> <https://criticalread.substack.com>

Press WatchThe Reflecting Pool story is about Trump's grip on reality, but the press corps won’t go thereWhat should journalists do when Donald Trump continues to insist on the existence of something that is entirely imaginary? When he says something happened that didn’t? When he tells them a video shows something that it doesn’t…Read more3 days ago · 46 likes · 11 comments · Dan FroomkinJournalists are treating his ‘vandalism’ claim as if it were a normal, disputable argument. But it’s completely delusional.Dan FroomkinAug 04, 2026Trump poses with the crew that helped line the Reflecting Pool basin on May 7. Trump also drove his motorcade over the new coating.

What should journalists do when Donald Trump continues to insist on the existence of something that is entirely imaginary? When he says something happened that didn’t? When he tells them a video shows something that it doesn’t?

I’m talking, of course, about Trump’s preposterous, entirely unsupportable claim that vandals – not his own shoddy contractors – were responsible for the botched renovation of the Reflecting Pool.

From the get-go, Trump’s version of events was wildly, transparently untrue and absurd in light of the nature and extent of the damage and the complete lack of evidence of any vandalism whatsoever.

Most of the Reflecting Pool coverage in the mainstream media has at least provided some indication that his vandalism claims are unproven and disputed.

But that’s not telling the public what’s really going on.

For one thing, these news organizations don’t sufficiently declare in their institutional voice that he’s dead wrong – they use terms like “baseless” and “without evidence.”

And even if they declared that he was wrong – or lying – that wouldn’t be enough.

Because what’s going on here is that Trump is either intentionally engaged in a massive deception campaign or, much more likely, he is delusional and actually believes something that isn’t even vaguely plausible. (Or both, I guess.)

In other words, either he’s trying to gaslight us or he’s gaslighted himself: he’s told himself so many lies that he has lost all sense of what is actually happening.

This is not normal. This is highly alarming behavior in anyone, but especially someone with so much power over life and death.

Not making that clear is the ultimate example of “sanewashing”: the act of describing insane statements in a way that makes them seem ordinary.

Treating It Like Just Another Political Dust-Up

Consider the recent reporting about U.S. attorney for D.C. Jeanine Pirro’s decision to drop the act and tell at least some of the truth – which was quickly followed by Trump attacking her and restating his vandalism nonsense.

A month ago, in an act of fealty to Trump, Pirro announced the indictment of David Hearn, a former Olympic canoeist who was caught with his hand in the pool, for felony destruction of property. Hearn had no knife and no ability to get close to where the damage had allegedly been done. Nevertheless, Pirro called it “a case with tremendous evidence” showing that Hearn “forcefully and violently” pulled up the pool’s bottom liner.

On Friday, she moved to dismiss the indictment in a 19-page document that aggressively refuted Trump’s vandalism narrative, based on Interior Department documents that she said had only recently been turned over. (She could have submitted a one-line dismissal, but chose not to.)

So now we had confirmation, from inside the beast, that “the damage was the result of a botched installation and not vandalism.”

The headlines should have said: “Evidence from Trump’s U.S. attorney further undermines his absurd claim of ‘vandalism’”.

And once Trump doubled down, the headlines should have said: “Trump lashes out at Pirro for undermining his wild Reflecting Pool ‘vandalism’ claim” or “Trump sticks to his made-up Reflecting Pool ‘vandalism’ claim despite DOJ debunking”.

Instead, the first New York Times article duly noted that Pirro’s account “directly contradicted the president’s repeated claim” and characterized that claim as “false”. But there was no indication of how ridiculous and unfounded it was.

The initial article in the Washington Post weakly noted that DOJ was now “contradicting Trump.” Then it described how the “fight” over the pool “has unexpectedly emerged as a major flash point in Trump’s second term” – situating the story in a political frame, while avoiding any hint of how delusional Trump’s claims are.

The New York Times headlined its Saturday article: “In Dropping Reflecting Pool Case, Pirro Draws Trump’s Wrath”, casting it as a she-said-he-felt story. Author Glenn Thrush wrote that Pirro’s filing “raised innate doubts” about what the article’s subhead referred to as “Trump’s pet theory.”

The Post on Monday published an article headlined “How Trump’s claims of vandalism at the renovated Reflecting Pool crumbled,” which was seriously messed up because the claim was never cohesive in the first place. Dan Diamond, Liam Bowman, Salvador Rizzo and Jake Spring wrote that Trump’s vandalism claim “has morphed into a political headache.”

Eventually they mentioned that “Outside observers for weeks had dismissed claims of widespread vandalism,” and they linked to the Post’s own July 16 analysis of imagery that “concluded that the basin’s peeling was probably caused by application errors.”

But there was no characterization of Trump’s claims as absurd from the very beginning, and no attempt at explaining why he continues to cleave to them.

The latest articles from the Wall Street Journal, the Associated Press, and the Times are about Trump’s conflict with Pirro, and treat his vandalism claim like they would any other political statement.

And to be clear, Trump continues to make ridiculous claims. At a Monday event ostensibly about his new executive order creating a “Military Spouse Commission” (with defense secretary Pete Hegseth’s spouse as chair) Trump spent eight minutes talking complete nonsense about the pool.

He insisted that “when it was completed, it was perfect. But then somebody went in and cut it.” And presumably referring to a video he shared on Truth Social on Saturday, he said: “Now, we have photographs or tapes, like moving cameras, right? [sic] We have them where people are on the side, cutting it with a box knife.”

The video shows no such thing, just three people putting their hands into the water.

Trump’s Active Imagination

Trump’s vandalism claim is hardly the only example of Trump asserting things that are absurd and only true in his imagination.

I found it utterly jaw-dropping a couple weeks ago when Trump, witnessing the return of four soldiers killed in his pointless war, declared: “All of them said very strongly, ‘We cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon.’”

That demanded more explanation than simply noting that “The president did not say how he knew the fallen soldiers’ views,” which is what the Times did in the third paragraph of an article headlined: “Speaking for Fallen Soldiers, Trump Says They Supported the Iran War”.

I much preferred Inae Oh’s article for Mother Jones headlined “Trump Puts Words in the Mouths of Dead Soldiers”, in which she wrote “There is no evidence that the service members killed, as Trump so confidently claimed, ever said or believed this.” And she provided the essential context: “It conveniently happens to be one of the exceedingly few talking points Trump has had for continuing an increasingly unpopular war on all his own.”

And Trump, of course, has frequently made ridiculous assertions about the war in Iran and the Strait of Hormuz – which we have already won and already control, except when we haven’t. He has repeatedly threatened to unleash massive destruction on Iran’s civilian infrastructure (a war crime), then ostensibly changed his mind based on who knows what. We certainly know he imagined that the war in Iran would be easy.

Journalism’s Job

What’s the point of having all that vaunted “access” to Trump and the White House if reporters won’t acknowledge, investigate and address the extent of Trump’s connection to reality?

And Congressional reporters have an obligation, too. They should ask every Republican they can find if they believe what Trump is saying – and what they think is going on in his head.

On “Meet the Press” on Sunday, Kirstin Welker didn’t actually ask MAGA Sen. John Kennedy that, but he answered anyway, saying “The president says it was caused by vandals. I don’t know whether he really believes that, or it’s part of his political messaging, or he’s just thinking out loud. You and I both know the president well. He exists loudly, and he grows anxious when he has an unexpressed thought. I’m not saying he doesn’t really believe it, I just don’t know.”

Back in April, I was hopeful that doubts about Trump’s mental health would become routine background in news stories relating his more unhinged statements.

Recall that the Times actually published an article by chief White House correspondent Peter Baker directly addressing Trump’s mental fitness, writing that “even some former allies and advisers are questioning whether he has grown increasingly unbalanced, describing him as ‘lunatic’ and ‘clearly insane.’”

But soon enough it was like that article never appeared.

For now, my proposed headlines (above) using words like absurd and wild -- which I think are actually understated -- are probably still too loaded for mainstream news organizations.

That’s got to change. Those news organizations need to provide the essential context when Trump makes preposterous claims. They must stop the sanewashing. And that’s going to require them to address Trump’s relationship to reality and use words like delusional.

<https://criticalread.substack.com/p/the-reflecting-pool-story-is-about> <https://criticalread.substack.com>

Press WatchThe Reflecting Pool story is about Trump's grip on reality, but the press corps won’t go thereWhat should journalists do when Donald Trump continues to insist on the existence of something that is entirely imaginary? When he says something happened that didn’t? When he tells them a video shows something that it doesn’t…Read more3 days ago · 46 likes · 11 comments · Dan FroomkinPress WatchAn intervention for political jouornalism.By Dan Froomkin

Brad DeLong here: Note and remember this: Jeanine Pirro indicted an Olympic canoeist for a crime that never happened, then filed nineteen pages explaining why it never happened. The press covered her reversal as a palace spat rather than as documentary proof that the President of the United States cannot distinguish what he imagines from what occurred.

Froomkin’s perennial gripe and indictment: It is not of a single story, it is of a method: Reporters with unrivaled White House access describe Trump’s Reflecting Pool claim as “unproven,” “disputed,” a “pet theory,” a “political headache” — every formulation except the accurate one. The pattern extends: Trump told the country that four soldiers killed in his Iran war had personally endorsed it, and the Times noted only that he “did not say how he knew.” The euphemisms are not caution. They are the price of maintaining the sourcing relationships that make the access valuable, and the public pays it.

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An experiment with trying to get the LLM to teach me things I do not already know, with unsettling conclusions: I think I got it to successfully teach me things about the architecture and functioning of LLMs. But it confesses that all of its numbers are made-up—that the calculations it said it did it did not in fact do? And SubStack x Pangram cannot tell that a 90% AI-generated post is AI-generated? Do I actually know and understand more? Or am I just being deceived in thinking that I do?

Much these days in economic analysis, in pedagogy, in academia, in the sphere of public reason, and in the future of civilization hinges on the answer to a single question: just what are these things truly useful for?

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We know that some of the answer is that these things are useful for:

• Searching with natural-language prompts, yes (although I am still not sure whether it’s excellent at search is due to the superior affordances of natural language as opposed to keywords for my brain, or whether it is because Google has allowed itself to be thoroughly corrupted by SEO in a way that there has not yet been a parallel MEO—Model-Engine Optimization—corruption).

• Summarizing.

• Boilerplate and ritual.

• Coding assistants, in that one no longer needs to wrestle with Stack-Overflow threads or have one’s ORA books with the cute pictures of weird animals on the cover at one’s hand.

• Coding and other agents, that these things can be Clever Hanses at scale. They try a thousand things in the time it would take me to try one, and, when properly harnessed to reward success and drop failure, can do a lot. When properly harnessed.

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But what else is there—beyond protein folding, medical screening, customer support, ambient scribes (which still miss “nots” much too often), weather forecasting, Herculaneum scrolls, and so on?

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Specifically I find myself this AM interested in this: Can “AI” help me understand things I do not now understand? So I started exploring. And after several false starts, I wound up setting my basecamp up at this sentence fragment:

Richard III was the last Yorkist King of England; the army of his cousin Henry Tudor…

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for I wound up wanting to see both what an LLM does with it, and whether the LLM can—properly nudged—come up with an explanation of what it is doing that is useful to me.

What does useful to me mean here? It means:

• just beyond my grasp,

• something I definitely do not have nailed,

• but something where it can write something I more than half-understand,

• but could not teach,

• and definitely need to think about lots more.

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So I prompted it, iterated it, attempted to adjust the level of detail of its explanation, and saw what it spat out:

Richard III was the last Yorkist King of England; the army of his cousin Henry Tudor defeated him at Bosworth Field in 1485.

Details below the paywall fold (for now). The take-aways (I think) here:

First: I note that while this post is 90% AI-generated, the SubStack-Pangram judgment is:

That in itself is very interesting to see. My guess as to what is going on? That SubStack x Pangram seems to be tracking a particularly literacy-tech use case of “AI”, rather than successfully detecting AI created documents in general.

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Second, the explainer below does seem to be architecturally exact. I think I find it pedagogically effective. The architecture, matrix shapes, and sequence of operations are correct, and the filing-cabinet analogy carries real load.

But, third, it warns me that every number in it was invented: there never was a calculation that produced a 55% chance of choosing defeated as the next token.. The post ends unresolved, which is the honest place for it to end.

Forth, my guesses right now as to the usefulness of LLMs circle around the idea that all the real use-cases share the property that the output is very cheap to check. Thus the interesting question to me is what happens when you cannot check, hence this visit of mine to Bosworth Field. And I do not know what to think. The LLM’s own “honesty” about fabricating its own numbers seems to me more useful than a confident verdict would have been.

What are the take-aways here? Perhaps these:

Academically: The LLM’s piece is a clean case study in the epistemics of machine-assisted learning — the failure is neither hallucination in the usual sense nor error in the architecture, but plausible synthetic data inside a correct frame.

For public reason: the Pangram result undercuts the assumption that AI authorship can be policed by detection.

For action: one operational rule that falls out is not to trust anywhere, but rather verify; a second is to lean into Clever Hans: have it write an explainer at ten different levels, and then hone in on where the user’s current understanding frontier exactly lies.

When I ran out of time, this is where its final answer was:

SubTuringBradBot: A walkthrough of what happens at the final token of “Richard III was the last Yorkist King of England; the army of his cousin Henry Tudor…”: tokenization, the scaled dot-product at one head, four heads doing different jobs, the logit distribution, and the rollout to Bosworth. Built on a filing-cabinet analogy — Query is the question you walk in with, Key is the label on the drawer, Value is the papers inside.

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His first law is: “When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.” His second law is: “The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible”.

Via:

Venketash Rao: <https://substack.com/@contraptions/note/c-306478452>: ‘Gonna steal this one:

Floh Einstein: ‘Arthur C. Clarke: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Me: “Therefore, any sufficiently advanced technological problem is indistinguishable from a curse”…

Should I, again, show this slide to my undergraduates next year?:

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The Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer says 94%. The audience says 97%. I liked it too. People I respect like Bret Devereaux, Theo Nash, and Patrick Wyman all read the film as a successful Bloomian “strong misreading”—and then Emily Wilson, who gave us the most celebrated recent Odyssey translation in English arrives to say she’d have been ashamed to write any part of the script. And to pile on: the reference to the nonexistent “sea peoples”—although the scribes of Usermaatre-Meryamun Rameses-Heqaiunu would like a word—the mishmash costumes, the flat script, the didactic Brexit and other modern allegories, the Western Sahara location, the race-neutral casting, the spectacle, Matt Damon’s lummoxy Odysseus. The objections contradict one another: too modern in its values, too celebratory of a territorial war. Reading Emily Wilson’s London Review of Books piece on Nolan’s Odyssey isn’t reading a review. It’s watching spaghetti hit walls over and over and over again. So what is going on here? Virgil, after all, wrote Odyssey fanfic too.My view: Cory Doctorow’s theory of why writers rage against fanfic offers a potential explanation. His model of anti-fanfic fury is this. Writers—and a translator is definitely a writer—build persistent internal models of their characters in which they deeply believe. When someone else’s version feeds contradictory data into that model, the dissonance is unbearable. Odysseus has spent so much time in Emily Wilson’s head that she knows who he is. And the Nolan-Damon “lummox” is not him.

This morning I see another friend showing up, liking the Nolan Odyssey adaptation movie:

Tim Sullivan: <https://twitter.com/Tim_Org/status/2084264542607917289>: ‘I finally saw The Odyssey. It was terrific. My only complaint is that the "hospitality" theme was overblown -- but given that one common complaint about Nolan films is that they're hard to understand, I get why he want all in on the Zeus thing, even if it was heavy handed…

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This is, as I have said before, the overwhelming general judgment:

Rotten Tomatoes: The Odyssey <https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_odyssey_2026>: ‘94%Tomatometer 471 Reviews; 97% Popcornmeter 10,000+ Verified Ratings: Odysseus, king of Ithaca, embarks on a perilous journey to return home after the Trojan War. Crossing the Mediterranean Sea with his fellow soldiers, they soon find themselves battling not only the elements, but an array of deadly obstacles and mythical creatures along the way…

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And immediately behind Sullivan on my screen is Emily Wilson in the London Review of Books, with something remarkable, in this context.

It seems that she dislikes, well, pretty much every single thing, starting with Nolan’s view of Bronze Age history:

Emily Wilson: <https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v48/n14/emily-wilson/an-uncomplicated-man>: ‘The film’s… muddled premise: that this Hollywood version of Mycenaean Greece is the only ‘civilisation’ in the world…. Threats to ‘our civilisation’ from ‘the sea peoples’ [is] a now debunked 19th-century theory about maritime tribes who were thought to have attacked Egypt around 1200 BCE and to have also been responsible for the roughly coeval collapse of Mycenaean Greek culture…. The current consensus, as Nolan clearly knows, is that there was no such thing as ‘the sea peoples’…. The Greek-speaking world’s shift away from the more centralised, literate palace culture of the Mycenaeans in the 11th century BCE towards the fragmented social formations of the early Greek Iron Age was caused by a range of factors, including climate change, earthquakes and internal unrest…

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My first reaction is that the scribes of Usermaatre-Meryamun Rameses-Heqaiunu, who was XX Dynasty Pharaoh in Egypt from -1185 to -1154, profoundly disagree about the non-existence of the “sea peoples”:

The foreign countries made a conspiracy in their islands. All at once the lands were removed and scattered in the fray. No country could stand before their arms, from Khatte, Qode, Carchemish, Arzawa, and Alashiya on, being cut off at [one time]. A camp [was set up] in one place in Amor. They desolated its people, and its land was like that which has never come into being. They were coming forward toward Egypt, while the flame was prepared before them. Their confederation was the Peleset, Tjeker, Shekelesh, Denye(n) and Weshesh, lands united. They laid their hands upon the lands as far as the circuit of the earth, their hearts confident and trusting “Our plans will succeed!”…

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But let that pass. There is much much MOAR. She is ashamed for the costume designers and scriptwriters:

The costumes, armour, boats and architecture are a mishmash…. The language is relentlessly expository, humourless and flat…. I would be ashamed to have written any part of this script…

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She thinks the movie is too “woke”? She does not like that:

[Nolan’s] muddled [Trojan Horse] subplot is foisted on the film in order to make Nolan’s relentlessly didactic point about the contemporary Anglophone world: that the lies and xenophobia of the war on terror and Brexit began a cultural decline that is now destroying the values ‘we’ hold most dear…

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Yes, those are her scare quotes there, carrying the message that maybe not all of us think it important to wring our hands over Farage and Johnson’s Brexit and George W. Bush’s War on Terra.

Or perhaps her key objection is that the movie is not ideologically sound enough:

The most troubling ethical problem with Nolan’s Odyssey concerns the decision to film part of the movie in the occupied territory of Western Sahara, thus normalising the ongoing violence against the indigenous Sahrawi people…

And yet in its wokeness, she sees the film as betraying its source material, imposing modern values on an ancient story that should be allowed to speak in the moral voice of the predatory warrior élite its own time:

Many of the film’s implicit values directly contradict those of Homer’s poem. Deception, warmongering, extramarital sex, cruelty to animals, abusing women and yearning for honour – all perfectly fine in the world of Homer – are, in this version, very bad…

And in fact it appears that Nolan should have found someone WASPy-looking for every single role in the movie, because:

The race-neutral casting of Nolan’s Odyssey was inevitably deplored in some quarters. But there is nothing progressive about it. Most of the non-white actors – Zendaya, Lupita Nyong’o, Himesh Patel, Corey Antonio Hawkins, Travis Scott – play versions of the Black best friend, whose only role in the drama is to provide aid to the white protagonist…

So does she want the film to glorify the warrior-élite of Hellenic archaic societies of domination?

Apparently not:

It is particularly galling that Nolan used this [Western Sahara] land simply as a visually striking backdrop for a film that centres, aggrandises and redeems the hero of a territorial war…

And:

The film asks us… to celebrate the action-movie sequences in which the reluctant warrior finally gets his hands on his bow and the blood starts flowing…

Although:

The massacre of the suitors is probably the most enjoyable sequence in the film…

She certainly does not like how Nolan portrays Matt Damon’s “lummoxy Odysseus” as having done something of merit in

his belated and partial acknowledgment of his own guilt…

She does not like the spectacle:

There is no restraint in Nolan’s version of The Odyssey: every second is jam-packed with incident, lights and noise, and nothing is ever at a human scale. Nolan’s spectacle threatens to drown out his story…. This Odyssey is often reminiscent of other 21st-century screen ‘epics’, not least Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. The visit to the Land of the Dead reminded me of the excursions beyond the Wall in Game of Thrones. At the end of the film, a character sets out to ‘sail beyond the sunset’ and I almost expected everyone to break into Elvish…

In fact, she does not like Nolan’s films in general:

Unlike some of Nolan’s other films, The Odyssey is not boring, thanks to the source material, which is impossible to mess up entirely…

She objects that the film’s

own values and vision don’t hang together… ask[ing] us both to be horrified at war and to celebrate the action-movie sequences…

and that the lummoxy Odysseus in the movie:

isn’t complicated or wily or artful… also seems to lack technological intelligence…. Homer’s Odysseus makes it home because he is able, temporarily, to suppress his own desires – for meat and wine, for his wife, for control of his household and land, for slaughter, for victory over time and the threat of being forgotten, for a glorious eternal name…

By this point, I was thinking this is not a review. This is a speed run through all possible criticisms that anyone with an axe to grind might decide they might be able to stick with respect to Nolan’s adaptation of the Odyssey. So much throwing! So much spaghetti! So many walls!

There is a statement that the movie is: a

$250 million action movie… entertaining way to hide from the high temperatures for a few hours…

for:

Nolan’s trademark jumps and twists in the narrative structure are relatively easy to follow, and appropriate for The Odyssey, a narrative of tales nested in tales…

And so her:

teenagers had a good time…

Plus a statement that:

Adaptations needn’t and shouldn’t follow the original with anything like the exactitude of a translation…

For:

Some of the best radically transform or resist the source material, providing what Harold Bloom called ‘strong misreadings’…

But one reads the review entire.

One reflects on the movie that one had oneself seen.

One thinks back on:

• what one has already written about Nolan’s Odyssey movie here <https://braddelong.substack.com/p/christopher-nolans-remix-of-the-story>;

• how the scribes of Usermaatre-Meryamun Rameses-Heqaiunu believed that there was too such a thing as the “sea peoples”: and not merely a multiple-caused “shift away from the more centralised, literate palace culture of the Mycenaeans in the 11th century BCE towards the fragmented social formations of the early Greek Iron Age”;

• what the sharp Bret Devereaux <https://twitter.com/BretDevereaux/status/2078972264205205772>, Theo Nash <https://antigonejournal.com/2026/07/nolan-odyssey-end-civilization/>, and Patrick Wyman <https://www.patreon.com/PastLivesMedia/posts/christopher-165426703> write, approving of the movie as a successful Bloomian “strong misreading”;

• what the near unanimous critics say <https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_odyssey_2026>; and

• what the near-unanimous audiences say <https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_odyssey_2026>;

One thinks back on all of these.

And one thinks—I think—WTF is going on here?!?! This isn’t a “I understand that this is popular and critically acclaimed, but it didn’t land for me” movie review. This is a “this is a bad movie” movie review.

What might be going on here? Let me turn the microphone over to Cory Doctorow, from Hexapodia Podcast XIII <https://braddelong.substack.com/p/podcast-hexapodia-xiii-mandated-interoperability> back in 2021:

Cory: Thank you for that very effusive introduction. I decry all claims of genius, though.

Brad: Well, we know this is a problem…. By now I’ve spent forty hours of my life looking at squiggles on a page or on a screen and, through a complicated mental process, downloaded to my wetware and then run on it, a program that is my imago of a sub-Turing instantiation of your mind, who has then told me many very entertaining and excellent stories. So I feel like I know you very well…

Cory: There’s this infamous and very funny old auto reply that Neal Stephenson used to send to people who emailed him. It basically went: “Ah, I get it. You feel like you were next to me when we were with Hero Protagonist in Alaska fighting off the right-wing militias. But while you were there with me, I wasn’t there with you. And so I understand why you want to, like, sit around and talk about our old military campaigns. But I wasn’t on that campaign with you…”. his is my cogpsy theory of why fiction works, and where the fanfic dispute comes from:

Writers have this very precious thing they say. It is: “I’m writing and I’m writing and all of a sudden the characters start telling me what they want to do.” I think that what they actually mean by that is that we all have this completely automatic process by which we try and create models of the people we encounter. Sometimes we never encounter those people. We just encounter second-hand evidence of them. Sometimes those people don’t live at all. Think about the people who feel great empathy for imaginary people that cruel catfishers have invented on the internet to document their imaginary battles with cancer. They then feel deeply hurt and betrayed and confused, when this person they’ve come to empathize with turns out to be a figment of someone else’s imagination.

I think what happens when you write is that you generate this optical link between two parts of your brain that don’t normally talk to each other. There are these words that you are explicitly thinking up that show up on your screen. And then those words are being processed by your eyeballs and being turned into fodder for a model in this very naive way. And then the model gets enough flesh on the bones—so it starts telling you what it wants to do. At this point you are basically breathing your own exhaust fumes here. But it really does take what is at first a somewhat embarrassing process of putting on a puppet show for yourself: “Like, everybody, let’s go on a quest!” “That sounds great!” “Here we go!” It just becomes something where you don’t feel like you’re explicitly telling yourself a story.

Now the corollary of this is that it sort of explains the mystery of why we like stories, right? Why we have these completely involuntary, emotional responses to the imaginary experiences of people who never lived and died and have no consequence. The most tragic death in literature of Romeo and Juliet is as nothing next to the death of the yogurt I digested with breakfast this morning, because that yogurt was alive and now it’s dead and Romeo and Juliet never lived, never died, nothing that happened to them happened. Yet you hear about Romeo and Juliet…. The readers, when they’re done, if the book hit its aesthetic marks, if it did the thing that literature does to make it aesthetically pleasing—then the reader still has a persistent model in the same way that if your granny dies, you still have a model of your granny, right? You are still there.

That is why fanfic exists. The characters continue to have imagined lives. If the characters don’t go on having imagined lives, then the book never landed for you.

And that’s why authors get so pissy about fanfic. They too have this model that they didn’t set out to explicitly create, but it’s there. And it’s important to their writing process. And if someone is putting data in about that modeled person that is not consistent with the author’s own perception of them, that creates enormous dissonance. I think that if we understood this, we would stop arguing about fanfic.

Noah: We argue about fanfic?

Brad: Oh yes, there are people who do. I remember—in some sense, the most precious thing I ever read was Jo Walton saying that she believed that Ursula K. LeGuin did not understand her own dragons at all…

Noah: …Yep, correct…

Cory: Poppy Bright—back when Poppy Bright was using that name and had that gender identity—was kicked out of a fan group for Poppy Bright fans on LiveJournal for not understanding Poppy Bright’s literature. I think that’s completely true. Ray Bradbury to his dying day insisted that Fahrenheit 451 had nothing to do with censorship but was about the dangers of television…

Brad: Fanfic is an old and wonderful tradition. It goes back to Virgil, right? What is the Aeneid but Iliad fanfic?

Cory: And what is Genesis but Babylonian fanfic? It goes a lot further back than that…

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My view: The most ambitious thing SubStack could do right now is stop pushing forward. But given who is running and funding the place, that is unlikely. Scott Carney says the platform is dying. I say it is more likely that it has reached the limit of its supply lines—and that the cure is to stop, dig in, and be satisfied. Bismarck stopped after Königgrätz; Napoleon pushed on past Smolensk; much depends on which choice is made now:

The sharp Scott Carney showed up in my feed with this: “The Real Reason that Substack is Collapsing” <https://sgcarney.substack.com/p/the-real-reason-that-substack-is>:

• Carney, Scott. 2026. “The Real Reason that Substack is Collapsing”. Magnetic North: One Journalist’s Quest to Make Sense of the Universe. July 29. <https://sgcarney.substack.com/p/the-real-reason-that-substack-is>

  Magnetic North: One Journalist's Quest to Make Sense of the UniverseThe Real Reason that Substack is CollapsingA few years ago Substack transformed away from being a niche newsletter-delivery system and into the main refuge for tens of thousands of journalists who were fleeing (or been kicked out) of the mainstream media. The value proposition was simple: writers could come here to build an audience that would actually pay directly for their writing. The platfor…Read more9 days ago · 3448 likes · 1133 comments · Scott Carney

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“SubStack Collapse” is way overstating it.

I think the better take is that SubStack may have reached its von Clausewitzian culmination point.

What do I mean by that? Von Clausewitz’s culmination point is the moment when a successful offensive has extracted everything it is going to extract, and one more step forward converts assets into a liability. The right move then is to stop, consolidate, and make the existing machine work better—which, in the case of SubStack, means bundling, subscription management, honest discovery. The big danger is that only a genius can recognize a culmination point. And SubStack’s deciders are not geniuses. They are founders who want to change the world. They are investors who want to be even richer Princelings of Silicon Valley. Are they capable of stopping to consolidate, and being happy turning to the task of solidifying and then running a normal, useful business?

No, I do not understand why Chat-GPT thinks that this is the most appropriate illustration it can produce for this weblog post…

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Back up: Laura Tyson is the latest of the people of note and reputation and good judgment for whom I have enormous respect, who has advised me that, nw that I am at Teaching-Zero for the rest of this year, to spend the time from now up to next MLK Jr. Day seeing if I can do on a smaller scale what the highly estimable Scott Galloway <https://www.profgmedia.com/> and Paul Krugman <https://paulkrugman.substack.com/> and some others have managed to do with this particular SubStack harness. The hope is that it would be more fun than and not a lot less remunerative than giving talks to bankers and such—not that giving talks to bankers and such is not fun, but more fun.

And I have just about decided yes and that this weekend would be a good time to push my chips into the center of the table.

However, now comes Scott Carney to say: Not so fast!:

Scott Carney: The Real Reason that Substack is Collapsing <https://sgcarney.substack.com/p/the-real-reason-that-substack-is>: ‘The Subscription Model Has Maxxxed Out: A few years ago Substack transformed away from being a niche newsletter-delivery system and into the main refuge for tens of thousands of journalists who were fleeing (or been kicked out) of the mainstream media. The value proposition was simple: writers could come here to build an audience that would actually pay directly for their writing…. With a thousand paid subscribers you could live the middle class dream of earning close to $100,000 a year (well, more like $80,000 after all the fees). For a while it seemed like a reasonably good trade…. Early adopters on the platform did the best. Writers like Heather Cox Richardson and Matthew Yglesias arrived early….

So Substack tried to solve the problem by adopting a strategy that every other tech company had already worn thin. They pivoted to adding a twitter-like function called “Notes” (which created a distinction between ““subscribers” and “followers”). Soon they incorporated video and live-streaming and encouraged posters to clip shorts into their feeds with an AI-generated clipping program. In other words: Substack’s growth strategy was to offer almost the exact same things as every other social media network….

At first the strategy even sort of worked…. [But] take for instance this note from Taylor Lorenz from just yesterday:

I don’t have anywhere near Lorenz’s following, but my numbers look surprisingly similar…. Subscription fatigue.… I can’t make a rational argument for why my own work here on Substack or on YouTube is more valuable than, say, HBO which drops whole seasons of new TV shows every week….

The higher-ups at Substack… could have… allow[ed] creators to team up and pool their creative resources… could have instituted some sort of curated subscription bundle…. Watching the decay of my own business on this platform has made me reassess my overall economic strategy…. What I have found success in has been working directly with sponsors on YouTube videos…. [But then] there is always the temptation to lower editorial standards to court ever-more lucrative sponsors…. Substack offered the dream to creators that their readers really would be their customers instead of just eyeballs that they sell to third parties. It’s too bad that the architecture of the platform itself has ripped that dream away…

Magnetic North: One Journalist's Quest to Make Sense of the UniverseThe Real Reason that Substack is CollapsingA few years ago Substack transformed away from being a niche newsletter-delivery system and into the main refuge for tens of thousands of journalists who were fleeing (or been kicked out) of the mainstream media. The value proposition was simple: writers could come here to build an audience that would actually pay directly for their writing. The platfor…Read more9 days ago · 3195 likes · 1038 comments · Scott Carney

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Brad DeLong here: Three things you need to remember to understand what SubStack thinks that it is doing:

• First and most obvious: Substack is not preventing you and never has prevented you from running a group Substack. The decision to go individual is the individual’s decision. Admittedly, it is the path of least resistance when you start out, and SubStack could and I think should be doing more to “bundle”, but it is not blocking anybody’s way.

• Second: Substack is eager for away to get its writers and videoers to find “sponsors” without succumbing to the slop of the eyeball attention-harvesting Facebook-like ecosystem. They are eagere to shake all the money trees in any ways they can that they can convince themselves are not triggering the malign transformation into another FaceBook-adjacent hellscape.

• Third: As I understood the bet of Substack, it was that:

  • large numbers of writers and videoers would be able to find TrueFans—people whose minds resonated with theirs.

  • 500 or 2,000 or 8,000 TrueFans.

  • The TrueFans would be willing to pay SubStack rates for essentially all that those they were fans of would write, podcast, and video.

  • Add to those the relatively rich people willing to pay to strengthen pubic reason and the public sphere—willing to contribute to making a better internet possible and real—the PatronFans.

  • Add to that a push by SubStack to encourage its writers to offer enough free content to to keep the free browsers coming back and searching for more things on SubStack.

  • Then some of those, somewhat to their surprise, would come across a SubStack and discover that with respect to that SubStack they were TrueFans.

  • And the alignment of SubStack and its writers and videors and readers and watchers would me maintained because the cash nexus would not be advertising but subscriptions.

  • The hope was that they would provide an alternative to the malign eyeball-attention clickbait outrage harvesting-for-advertising of the FaceBooks. This would provide an alternative to the SEO-feeding ad clickbait of the Googles and the Amazons.

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Thus Scott Carney’s ire seems to me to be substantially replaced. SubStack seems to me to have architected its platform as best it can to give it the best chance it can of having a long-term public-sphere public-reason win. Thus when I came to the end of Carney’s piece, I was disappointed. He seems to think that people would subscribe to more newsletters if SubStack had not:

[when] more writers showed up [and] the [total pool of] subscription revenue pie didn’t grow commensurately… adopting a strategy that every other tech company had already worn thin… [of] adding… twitter-like… “Notes”… incorporat[ing] video and live-streaming… encourag[ing] posters to clip shorts into their feeds with an AI-generated clipping program… offer[ing] almost the exact same things as every other social media network…. [But] as the platform promotes more and more free content, users have less and less incentive (and time) to engage with the more thoughtful higher quality content that lives behind paywalls…

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But he does not consider that Ghost and Beehiiv and Patreon and all the others that have not successfully attempted Discovery Engine supercharging appear to be doing worse than SubStack.

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Plus I have a very different answer than Carney does to the question: How is this working for them—for us?

My view: It is working out much better than I thought it would.

My baseline these days is that trying to create a functioning public sphere of public reason in this attention-harvesting clickbait-outrage age of advertising supported microbytes is a work of Sisyphus. By that baseline, SubStack is doing great: substantially exceeds expectations.

It is also trying to place more bets on the table:

• (i) Its “pivot to video”, the latest in the perennial story of pivots to video.

• (ii) Its attempts to find a way to get its writers and videoers some money not through FaceBook-style eyeball harvesting but through PBS-style “sponsorships”.

• (iii) Its pivot to SubStack notes, as a social-media platform about SubStack posts, in an attempt to further supercharge its Discovery Engine.

• (iv) Its intellectual and ideological and it believes moral commitment that it doesn’t block content its readers want to pay for.

• (v) And when they think of other places they can place some of their VC chips with a reasonable chance of success, they will place them.

Parenthetically, with respect to (iv): It fits very uneasily with its reliance on an algorithm to surface things that it thinks you might subscribe to without the guardrails it is morally obligated to provide that its algorithm needs to surface things that if you subscribe to them will make you closer to your Best Self. (In short: DO NOT BE THE NAZI BAR!!)

Thus my bottom line: SubStack is not collapsing. SubStack is exceeding rational and reasonable expectations.

But there is something in what Scott Carney sees. What is it? I think it is increasing signs that SubStack has reached what Carl Phillip Gottfried von Clausewitz called its culmination point.

What is a culmination point?

It is one of the central idea of von Clausewitz’s Vom Kriege. It is one of the few pieces of 1800s-era wisdom that has aged not at all. Any attacking army, von Clausewitz observed, is strongest at the moment it steps off. Everything that happens afterwards subtracts. Detachments must be peeled off to guard a lengthening supply line. Garrisons must be left in captured towns. The sick and the stragglers accumulate. The distance between the fighting edge and the magazines grows with every mile. Meanwhile the defender is doing the opposite: falling back onto his own depots, his own railheads, his own reserves, his own people, and—crucially, for von Clausewitz—onto the defense, which he insisted was the intrinsically stronger form of war.

Two curves, therefore. The attacker’s power declines. The defender’s rises. Somewhere they cross. That crossing is the culmination point: the moment at which the offensive has extracted the maximum it is ever going to extract, and after which one more step forward converts an asset into a liability.

The genuinely nasty part—the part that makes this a theory of psychology and not of logistics—is that the culmination point is invisible from the inside. An army that has just reached it does not feel exhausted. It feels victorious. It has been winning for months. The maps in the headquarters tent are covered in captured ground. Every instinct, every incentive, every officer hoping for promotion says: press on, the enemy is broken, one more push finishes it. And von Clausewitz’s warning is that past the culmination point you do not merely fail to gain more. The counterblow, when it comes, is out of all proportion. You lose what you had already banked.

Thus recognizing when you have reached it is the whole ballgame. The commander who recognizes his culmination point does four things, in order:

• He stops. Not because stopping is glorious—it never is, and the army will hate him for it—but because the marginal expected value of the next advance has gone negative.

• He consolidates. He fortifies what he holds. He makes the gains defensible rather than merely occupied.

• He turns from conquest to administration. Supply lines get shortened and rationalized. The sick get well. Units get brought back up to strength. The machine that was built to seize things gets rebuilt into a machine that works well. This is the unglamorous part, and it is where nearly all of the durable value gets created.

• And only then does he decide: is this win sufficient?

Do I bank it, make peace, and go home successful? Or do I want another campaign later—in which case my job right now is to accumulate the resources for it from a secure base, not to spend them today?

Otto von Bismarck in 1866 is the genius here. After the Battle of Königgrätz the Prussian generals wanted Vienna. King Wilhelm von Hohenzollern wanted a triumphal parade and Austrian territory. Bismarck wanted—and got, at the cost of a scene so operatic he reportedly threatened to go out the window—a lenient peace that took essentially nothing from Austria. He had gotten what he needed: Austria out of his “Little” Germany. Everything past that was a debt. The result was that Austria was not an implacable enemy in 1870, and Prussia had the resources for the campaign that actually mattered.

Napoleon in 1812 is the anti-genius here. (And he more than half knew it at the time.) His arrival at Smolensk was the culmination point. He looked at it, understood what it was, and pushed on to Moscow anyway. Stopping did not feel like winning. He got a burning city, a refused negotiation, and the road back without supplies through a Russian winter.

That brings us back to SubStack right now.

The thing to grasp is not “SubStack is collapsing.”

The thing to grasp is: do not push right now. Not this quarter.

The pivot to video, the AI clipping, the shorts, the notes-as-social-network, the sponsorship apparatus—all of those are ongoing.

But spending huge amounts of additional resources on each or any of these? Thinking up new things to try? They may well be the equivalent of fresh offensives launched from a supply line that is already at its stretching point. Each addition threatens to consume engineering attention, product coherence, and writer goodwill that could instead be spent making the thing that already works work better.

There is enormous unharvested value sitting inside the current SubStack: better bundling, better subscription-management tools so that “subscription fatigue” becomes a solvable UX problem rather than a hard ceiling, better discovery with actual morally consistent guardrails, lower frictions, lower fees. That is consolidation. That is the shortening of supply lines. It is worth more, right now, than any new frontal offensive over the tops, over the trenches, into the machine guns.

Thus my worry. It is really not a worry about product strategy. It is a worry about people. SubStack’s founders say that they want to make some money and change the world. I believe them. They are sincere. That mission is much of what makes the place good. But people who want to change the world are, constitutionally, not people who tell themselves that the world has been changed as much as it is going to be changed this decade, and that the correct move is to stop and tidy-up.

Plus: SubStack’s investors want something else again. They want a serious win—the kind that converts them into even bigger Princelings of Silicon Valley. The venture-capital arithmetic simply does not have a cell in the spreadsheet labeled “good business at current scale”. A firm whose entire model requires that one investment in twenty return a hundredfold cannot accept a culmination point. It must demand the march on Moscow, because a company that stops at Smolensk is, in portfolio terms, a write-off—even if it is profitable, even if it is beloved, even if it is doing exactly what it set out to do.

So the two groups who get to make the decisions now are both, structurally, predisposed to refuse to recognize the culmination point when they reach it.

And Cory Doctorow named that refusal the road to en****tification:

• first the platform is good to its users;

• then it abuses its users to make things better for its business customers;

• then it abuses the business customers to claw back all the value for itself;

• then it dies—or, worse, lives as a profitable, and in the worst case very profitable, blight on the landscape.

The alternative is that SubStack at roughly its current size can be a good business: one that pays its workers well, gives tens of thousands of writers a real living or a real supplement, and provides its readers and the wider society something scarce and valuable—a functioning corner of the public sphere that is not organized around harvesting outrage. Recognizing that would not be a failure of ambition. It would be the single most ambitious thing anyone in that industry has done in a decade.

Which brings me back to my chips: Should I push them in this first week of August? Or start lining up some more out-of-town talks this fall to keep me busy?

What say you all?

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I would not say “on the brink”, quite. But I think the text of the piece is quite good. Oracle is going to survive: The database business still throws off steady billions. That floor is real. But by the time your bonds are rated BBB-minus, your debt is now your equity, and your equity are now out-of-the-money call options. But the equity market has not (or not yet) accepted that bond-rating judgment on Oracle. Right now it looks to me as if the current market capitalization of Oracle is $500 billion: $375 billion equity plus $125 billion debt with fiscal 2026 EBITDA of $30 billion (with $20 billion of revenue from selling databases); with a market-to-book equity valuation ratio of 10. Plus there is the political economy: Ellison is a prominent Trump and Netanyahu ally, which is another major source of risk as long as elections in the United States are honest ones:

The dot-com bubble of the late 1990s was actually more of a telecom infrastructure build-out bubble than an internet software service delivery bubble. The current bubble is much more a data center infrastructure bubble than an “AI”—or, as I prefer, a CIP (Complex Information-Processing) or an MAMLM (Modern Advanced Machine-Learning Model) bubble. And right now it is CoreWeave and Oracle that are at the frothy top edge of the wave, dependent not just on the likes of OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Facebook, Amazon, SpaceXAI, Microsoft, Mistral, Cohere; plus SalesForce, ServiceNow, Adobe, Workday, Snowflake, DataBricks; plus Cursor, Perplexity, Palantir, Sierra, Glean, Harvey; plus all the others not just rapidly becoming able to profitably sell AI-software services to end users, but on their ability to do so at sufficient scale that their own cloud datacenter infrastructure investments are redlined.

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There is a remaining bull or semi-bull case not mentioned by Brock here. It is that Amazon with AWS is substantially in this same business as Oracle and CoreWeave, and Amazon is continuing to push it forward. Jassy as well as Ellison and Intrator believe that their best strategy is to build massively in advance of when the money will start to flow in. And nobody thinks Jassy is a deluded fool hypnotized by dreams of ASI.

Alternatively there is a strong bear case not mentioned by Brock here: Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg is spending Oracle-scale money on AI while reporting no separable AI revenue at all. Zuckerberg’s line is that AI is “accelerating our core [advertising] business today”. Perhaps. But it is unfalsifiable on the financials, which means that it is what Mark Zuckerberg would say. And opinions of Mark Zuckerberg are various.

Mike Brock’s central argument here is that “bubble” is too generous a word for the AI economy, because a bubble requires outside buyers rather than circular money flows. The remaining bull case is that the models get so good the revenue has to arrive. Brock argues both branches fail. A large language model maps between representations of things humans have already written, and the fluency gets mistaken for understanding. But even granting AGI, the story needs monopoly pricing — and Hangzhou has decided otherwise:

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Notes from the CircusStanding somewhere. A circus, perhaps. From here, this is what I see. By Mike Brock(PARTIAL-)CROSSPOST: MIKE BROCK: The House of Ellison is on the Brink

<https://www.notesfromthecircus.com/p/the-house-of-ellison-is-on-the-brink> <https://www.notesfromthecircus.com/>

Notes from the CircusThe House of Ellison is on the BrinkOn the morning of September 10, 2025, Larry Ellison was the richest man alive. Oracle had reported earnings the night before, and the story inside the numbers was a backlog: hundreds of billions of dollars in contracted future cloud revenue, nearly all of it from artificial intelligence, the largest single piece of it from one customer. The stock rose…Read more10 days ago · 1367 likes · 39 comments · Mike BrockEverything the world’s briefly richest man built is failing at onceMike BrockJul 28, 2026

On the morning of September 10, 2025, Larry Ellison was the richest man alive… his net worth cresting at $393 billion. He was eighty-one years old, and every bet he had ever placed appeared to pay off on the same morning…. OpenAI [had entered into a] contract… [for] three hundred billion dollars of computing capacity [from Oracle] over roughly five years…. Ten months later, the ledger reads like a curse working its way through everything the man owns. Oracle‘s credit rating sits one notch above junk. Its credit default swaps trade at prices last seen eighteen years ago. The stock has collapsed from $345.72 to a fifty-two-week low under $115…. His son’s $110.9 billion conquest of Warner Bros. Discovery is frozen by a federal judge, and twelve state attorneys general are suing to kill it. The news network his family bought is posting the worst ratings in its history…. One disclosure before anything else: I am short Oracle….

AI is a bubble. Everybody knows it’s a bubble. The market is running on magical thinking. AGI is a fever dream. And LLMs shouldn’t even really be considered AI. Calling it a bubble, though, flatters it. A bubble at least requires… outside buyers chasing an asset they don’t understand. The AI economy stopped depending on strangers some time ago. Its largest transactions now run between a handful of related parties who invest in one another, sell to one another, and book one another’s money as growth…. Walk the circle once. In September 2025, Nvidia pledged up to $100 billion to OpenAI, its own largest customer, and CNBC reported the cash would mostly be used to lease Nvidia‘s own hardware. Nvidia books the sale as revenue. Its own money, returned one accounting cycle later, arriving at a valuation its own investment helped set. The $100 billion headline did its work on the stock price and then quietly evaporated: negotiations broke down in January, and by February the figure had shrunk to $30 billion. The market repriced trillions of dollars of equity around a number that was never executed at scale.

Oracle signed the $300 billion contract that crowned Ellison in September. Microsoft holds 27 percent of OpenAI, a stake valued around $135 billion, while selling it compute and competing against it for the same customers. AMD went further than any of them: per its own SEC filing, it granted OpenAI warrants on 160 million shares — roughly a tenth of the company — exercisable at one cent apiece, vesting as OpenAI buys its chips. A chipmaker paying its customer, in equity, for the privilege of the customer’s business.

Then there is CoreWeave, the cleanest loop in the pile. Nvidia holds an equity stake in CoreWeave that it has kept topping up. CoreWeave raises debt collateralized by the GPUs themselves and spends the majority of everything it raises buying Nvidia hardware. And Nvidia has agreed, per CoreWeave‘s 8-K, to buy back $6.3 billion of whatever capacity CoreWeave fails to sell, through April 2032. Vendor, investor, and buyer of last resort: one company, all three seats. And who rents the capacity? Microsoft alone accounted for about two-thirds of CoreWeave‘s revenue — the same Microsoft that owns 27 percent of OpenAI, which holds its own $11.9 billion CoreWeave contract. Four companies, and every dollar visits all four before it rests. Morgan Stanley added it up last October: contracts linked to OpenAI — one unprofitable startup — account for more than $330 billion of the $880 billion in combined booked future revenue at Microsoft, Oracle, and CoreWeave, including two-thirds of Oracle‘s entire backlog…. Jim Chanos, who saw Enron before anyone else did, calls the AI financing complex, with its generous GPU depreciation schedules at CoreWeave and Oracle, a confidence game….

On July 9, S&P Global cut Oracle‘s credit rating from BBB to BBB-minus…. The agency named the concentration plainly: OpenAI accounts for roughly half of Oracle‘s $638 billion backlog. Half the order book of one of America’s flagship enterprise-software companies now depends on a single money-losing startup honoring a $300 billion contract…. The cost of insuring Oracle bonds against default has climbed to levels last seen in 2008…. Oracle chose to bet the company, and the bet now trades one wobble from junk…. The database business that built the house still throws off steady billions.… The company survives even if OpenAI stumbles. The floor is real….

In September, the equity market handed Ellison $101 billion in a single day for projected revenue from a contract that runs through 2032. No company in this cycle books unrealized contract revenue as earnings the way Enron did; the stock market does the booking on their behalf, pricing the projections into the shares the day the press release goes out. What the equity market booked in an afternoon, the credit market has spent this summer unwinding line by line. It marked the same contract to a different model — one that asks where the cash comes from — and the answer came back BBB-minus….

The remaining bull case fits in one sentence: the models will get so good that the revenue has to arrive. It deserves its strongest form: these systems are the fastest-adopted technology in living memory, hundreds of millions of people use them every day, enterprises are writing real checks rather than running pilots, and the people making the trillion-dollar commitments include the most sophisticated capital allocators alive….

A large language model is a translation engine: it maps between representations of things humans have already written, and it does this so fluently that the fluency gets mistaken for understanding. That mistake is the entire equity story….

Suppose the fever dream is real and the machines learn to think. The loop still fails, because the AGI story has a second load-bearing assumption hiding under the first: that whoever builds the thinking machine gets to charge monopoly prices for it. Beijing has decided that nobody will. In May, DeepSeek made permanent a 75 percent price cut on its flagship model, fixing output at 87 cents per million tokens. OpenAI‘s comparable list price is $30 — a thirty-four-fold spread for work that most paying customers cannot tell apart. The models ship with open weights on Hugging Face, and the newest ones ship optimized for Huawei‘s silicon. On July 16, Moonshot released Kimi K3, the largest open-weight model ever published, benchmarking alongside the best American closed models; one independent leaderboard ranked it first outright….

The AGI story requires scarcity rents — monopoly prices for a product nobody else can make. If the models plateau, the projected revenue never arrives. If the models keep improving, the improvement is replicated in Hangzhou within weeks and given away at 87 cents per million tokens. That is the whole decision tree, and the industry is standing under it. Heads, no product. Tails, no pricing power. The $300 billion does not pencil in either world, and Oracle borrowed $160 billion against the world where it did….

⁂

The man at the center spent the paper while it was still worth something. In August 2025, his son David’s Skydance completed its merger with Paramount, the Ellison trust as controlling owner. In December, David went hostile for Warner Bros. Discovery — CNN, HBO, the Warner film library — and his father backed the bid with an irrevocable personal guarantee of $40.4 billion. The definitive agreement, signed in February, came to $110.9 billion in cash…. The guarantee is Oracle paper. Before the Warner bid, 346 million of his shares were already pledged as collateral for personal ventures — about 30 percent of his stake — and those pledged shares have lost roughly half their value since. Alongside the family money: $24 billion from the sovereign wealth funds of Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, and Qatar, which would hold 38.5 percent of the combined company in non-voting shares. The DOJ approved the deal in June with zero conditions. The sitting president had already said out loud that he wanted CNN in the Ellisons’ hands…. The paper is deflating…. Had the deal closed in the spring, the House of Ellison would hold real assets, immune to whatever happens to a cloud backlog. Instead a judge froze the conversion mid-transaction. The guarantee is signed and irrevocable; the assets are undelivered; the collateral loses value every week the courts deliberate. He is holding the obligation without the prize, which is the exact position a man who owns forty percent of a BBB-minus company cannot afford to hold. Margin calls do not read narrative strategy….

Add up the ledger. Every wing of the House rests on one column: Oracle equity. The equity rests on the OpenAI contract. The contract rests on the AGI story, and the story is being repriced out of Hangzhou at 87 cents per million tokens. A federal judge holds the Warner deal; twelve attorneys general hold the lawsuit; S&P Global holds the rating one notch off the floor. Underneath all of it, an eighty-one-year-old man holds a $40.4 billion promise, irrevocable by its own terms, written against a stock that has lost two-thirds of its value since the morning the promise became imaginable.

The exposure extends past him. The Magnificent Seven make up about 35 percent of the S&P 500; a standard index fund now holds more than 7 percent Nvidia whether its owner has ever heard of a GPU or not… The House of Ellison was assembled at the top of a circuit, out of paper, against collateral that reprices by the week. Karma is what a margin call feels like when you had it coming.

<https://www.notesfromthecircus.com/p/the-house-of-ellison-is-on-the-brink> <https://www.notesfromthecircus.com/>

Notes from the CircusThe House of Ellison is on the BrinkOn the morning of September 10, 2025, Larry Ellison was the richest man alive. Oracle had reported earnings the night before, and the story inside the numbers was a backlog: hundreds of billions of dollars in contracted future cloud revenue, nearly all of it from artificial intelligence, the largest single piece of it from one customer. The stock rose…Read more10 days ago · 1367 likes · 39 comments · Mike BrockNotes from the CircusStanding somewhere. A circus, perhaps. From here, this is what I see. By Mike Brock

Brad DeLong back again: And what are the implications of this circular financing flow plus bond-rating pessimism for the macro outlook? Or, rather not for the outlook, bur rather for tail scenarios for the economy as a whole?

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Buying a movie studio by not selling but giving away fake pictures. But it is completely unclear just what Feretti thought he was doing. Just what the exit strategy of all this was going to be, other than pump as much money as he could into his own Italian bank accounts and then spend enough of that bribing people to prevent extradition. I suppose if that was the game, it was a very successful execution of a business model. Dan Davies, however, seems to think that he could have stolen a lot more if only he had paid attention to the actual nuts and bolts of keeping your control fraud going:

In brief: In 1990, Giancarlo Paretti, a twice-convicted Italian bagman bought Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer by borrowing $1.25 billion of French bank money from Credit Lyonnais (which had commissioned a background report on Giancarlo, learned he had been convicted of crudely adding three zeros to a check, and lent him nlent him the money anyway) and by giving away a number of fake Picasso sketches. Failure modes of a high-trust society: part MCMXC. The keyest paragraph:

Dan Davies: <https://backofmind.substack.com/p/the-mgm-affair>: ‘A control fraud needs to be a theft carried out by honest means. The payments themselves made to the fraudster are made through legitimate commercial transactions; salaries, bonuses, dividends, mansion rentals, contracts for actresses who never act, and so on. It is always the overall scheme, and particularly the financing and growth of the controlled entity, which constitutes the fraud. If you start simply grabbing the money, then two things happen. Firstly, it becomes easier to spot you, as you are behaving less like an executive and more like a criminal. And second, by removing your attention from the actual business, you start to lose the vital dimension of control. It was the second issue that sunk him…

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If one is going to succeed for long in any handshake business, one must early acquire the ability to say with genuine regret: “Of course your word is good enough for me! But, just as a favor, we have this very nasty and angry and picky bureaucracy over here, which insists that everything be ridiculously papered. They will make my life hell unless you help me dot all the i’s and cross all the t’s here. Will you please help me do so immediately? I will regard it as a great personal favor. And I very much regret having to beg you to let me impose on you in this way”.

Hollywood—and many other things—do run on trust and fair-dealing, and if you can fake that you do have it made:

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Dan Davies - "Back of Mind"A newsletter of quiet contrarianism, slow analysis and ambient ideasCROSSPOST: DAN DAVIES: The MGM Affair

<https://backofmind.substack.com/p/the-mgm-affair> <https://backofmind.substack.com/>

Dan Davies - "Back of Mind"the MGM affairsummer reruns period, and while going through my bottom drawer for things to post, I remembered that when “Lying for Money” was published in Italian (in an absolutely gorgeous looking edition by Il Saggiatore press, under the title “L’arte della Trufa…Read more8 days ago · 3 likes · 1 comment · Dan Daviesnon e ben trovato, e veroDan DaviesJul 31, 2026

Summer reruns period, and while going through my bottom drawer for things to post, I remembered that when “Lying for Money” was published in Italian (in an absolutely gorgeous looking edition by Il Saggiatore press, under the title “L’arte della Trufa”, I was asked to write a couple of extra bits for an Italian audience. The following story hasn’t appeared in English before, but it might have been one of my favourite examples ever of a control fraud.

While Charles Keating was dividing his time between his financial frauds and his public puritanism, two Israeli filmmakers were operating on the opposing side of the culture war, while progressively making a worse and worse name for themselves. Cannon Films attracted a bad name in artistic terms, due to the plethora of ludicrous, poorly acted films they put out, classics like “Enter The Ninja” and “Electric Boogaloo” which tended to feature either copious female nudity, Chuck Norris or both. And they attracted a bad name in financial terms too, for their sharp accounting practices, and their habit of pre-selling distribution rights at high-pressure sales meetings in Cannes on the basis of an outline script or a poster, then delivering a film significantly worse than promised because they ran out of money. If you were around in the 80s and ever wondered why Superman IV: The Quest For Peace was so bad, that’s why. But this is not the story of Yoram Globus and Menachem Golan. It’s the story of the man they eventually sold their failing film company to, Giancarlo Paretti.

Paretti was a minor player in the tangentopoli scandals of the period; if you are ever tempted to believe stories of how aggressive and cynical Hollywood people can be, recall that they sold one of their crown jewels to a fraudster who was not even a second tier player by Italian standards. In fact, Paretti was not just a bag-carrier, but a bag-carrier of the second order – he was the junior partner of Florio Fiorini who was himself, although a board director of ENI and a conduit of money to the PSI, basically a bag carrier to the real political and financial players. Before he got into the film business, Paretti’s main media industry experience was running “Diario”, a series of newspapers run as partnerships with the PSI which had tiny circulation, but significant revenues from selling advertisements to businessmen who wanted political favours.

But even a relatively minor player can do a lot of damage if he manages to get control of a corporate vehicle through which large amounts of finance can be raised; that’s the nature of control fraud.

And Hollywood filmmaking, as an industry, was particularly vulnerable to control frauds, because the relationship between lenders and borrowers is unusually skewed. Movies – even really bad ones – cost a lot of money to make, and once started they are hard to close down or take possession of. It is much more difficult to separate the borrower from the business; a half-built office block can be finished by another contractor, but it’s much more difficult to remove a half-shot film from its producer and director. And time is rarely on the lender’s side; films have shooting schedules and realease dates, so if you delay a decision you might destroy all hope of getting your money back. For this reason, film financing is a specialised business and not one for the faint of heart. In the 1980s, the king of Hollywood bankers was the man who invented the pre-selling distribution rights trick, the Californian representative of French bank Credit Lyonnais, a Dutchman called Frans Afman.

Hollywood is also a people business. Personal relationships are vital, and as the song goes, “There’s No People Like Show People” when it comes to having complicated relationships with one another. People give each other gifts all the time to demonstrate how important they are to one another. Sometimes quite valuable gifts, if they want to really emphasise a point. It is, or was in the 1980s, a place where things might happen that would be regarded as obvious and massive conflicts of interest anywhere else. As Michael Ovitz, the super-agent who founded CAA, used to put it, “no conflict, no interest”.

Paretti and Frans Afman first met at the Cannes Film Festival, where he immediately made an impression. First, by blatantly staring at Afman’s female colleague while pointing to his groin, and second by offering to “triple your salary” if Afman were to work for him while also remaining as head of film finance at Credit Lyonnais. It was an extraordinary approach; apparently it took Afman several minutes of conversation to realise that this was an attempt at a bribe. To his credit, he turned down both the offer and the proposal to finance Paretti’s acquisition of Cannon Films. This proved to be a good career move in the long term, but a bad one in the short term – Paretti met his boss the next day to overrule the decision and subsequently got Afman fired.

Georges Vigon, the global head of lending at Credit Lyonnais, had performed heroically during the Algerian War, but did not live up to the same standards as a banker. Despite commissioning a report into Paretti’s background which detailed his previous convictions for fraud (among other things, crudely adding zeros to a cheque to convert a $3,000 deposit into a $3m one), he allowed the Italian financier to take control of Cannon Films, a company which Lyonnais already had such a large exposure to that the regulators were telling them to reduce it.

Perhaps he saw something in Giancarlo Paretti that inspired trust. Perhaps that something was the copious flow of trips to Bora Bora and gifts of Picasso sketches which Paretti lavished on him. Perhaps it was the time that Paretti took him aside at a party, into a room with Jacques Griffault (Afman’s replacement) and gave them each a share certificate in “21st Century Distribution”, a company he owned and whose debts were guaranteed by Cannon Pictures[1]. Or perhaps it was the way in which Paretti hired Vigon’s ultimate boss, Jean Naville, and turned him into a lackey forced to negotiate with his former colleagues. Whatever it was, Vigon’s judgement was quickly and thoroughly corrupted.

Paretti’s first act as the new owner of Cannon Films was to change its name to Pathe Communications, in preparation to make a takeover bid for the venerable French company of that name. This move caused mighty and possibly intentional confusion[2], as the bid was blocked by the government, probably more out of national chauvinism than any real appreciate of what the bidder was like.

Despite this failure, the now misleadingly-named Pathe was still in the mood to buy more assets. And after appointing Alan Ladd Jr as the local executive face of his operations (son of the cowboy actor famous for saying in the film Shane that “a gun is a tool... as good or as bad as the man using it”), Paretti set his sights on one of the most famous studios in Hollywood, the roaring lion of MGM.

Why MGM? Partly because it was available; a marginal financial performer, it was known that Kirk Kerkorian, the corporate raider who owned it, was willing to part with it at the right price. But Paretti needed to buy something big and unprofitable. It had to be big because as we have seen, a control fraud relies on the size of the asset base you control. And it had to be unprofitable, because people don’t tend to sell big and profitable operations.

The lack of profitability did not concern Paretti because a control fraudster profits by draining the asset base and pumping a company full of debt, rather than by diverting its profits. And drain the asset base was what Giancarlo Paretti did; even when all he owned was the relatively small Cannon/Pathe, he had it pay for his family to live in a mansion in a wealthy LA suburb, and for three models on “acting” contracts whose theatrical talents extended only to pretending that they enjoyed sexual intercourse with a short, fat, vulgar criminal. He did business out of the former offices of legendary director Dino De Laurentiis whose troubled film company he helped; this friendship earned him an entry into the Hollywood social scene. It also earned him a punch in the balls from De Laurentiis’ daughter when he tried to grope her thigh at a party.

Credit Lyonnais was, from the outset, under pressure to reduce its lending to the film industry in general and to Cannon/Pathe in particular. Griffault and Vigon had already begun to use the accounting tricks discussed in our section on Parmalat in Chapter 5 to conceal debts, lending to companies like 21st Century Distribution which were legally separate but actually controlled by the same party. They did not necessarily want to lend any major proportion of the US$1.25bn that Kirk Kerkorian wanted for MGM. So they encouraged Paretti to be creative, and to raise money elsewhere. This turned out to be a mistake.

Paretti did not have much of a way with investors. One of his deals fell through after he referred to the oil billionaire Marvin Davis as “a big, fat, rich, dumb Jew” while on a drive to the airport, unaware that Davis’ driver spoke Italian. But he managed to raise half of the purchase price by pre-selling the television rights to the MGM library to Time Warner, easing the passage of the deal by another gift of a Picasso sketch to Time Warner’s chairman, Steve Ross. The other half of the deal was to be financed with an investments from Paretti and Florio Fiorino’s other companies, including the giant hotel chain Melia.

There were numerous problems with this financing structure. For one part, although Paretti was fond of waving around a Melia brochure listing all its hotels and real estate to show what a rich man he was, he didn’t actually own them. Years before, Paretti and Fiorino had acquired the Melia company, but had financed the deal by pre-selling all the real estate to another hotel operator. Five minutes after the paperwork was signed, all they owned was the Melia name (which itself was licensed to the hotel purchaser), and a near-bankrupt travel agency. The money that Credit Lyonnais lent to Melia to finance its investment in the MGM deal was as good as gone the moment it was lent.

And for the other part, Steve Ross was a cautious man who liked to insure his valuable artwork. In the course of the insurance appraisal, he found out that the Picasso that Giancarlo Paretti had given him was a fake. So were most and possible all of the Miros, Picassos and other priceless artworks with which Paretti had bribed the Californian film and finance communities. Time Warner pulled out of the deal, so Credit Lyonnais had to pick up that half too. The total lending, including sums already advanced to finance Cannon/Pathe, was getting toward $2bn, well beyond the approval limit of any one manager or team, and so Vigon had to refer the loan to head office.

But Paretti, a lifelong bag-carrier for crooked PSI financiers, was also able to refer things to his own head office. It is not clear and has not been proven exactly what happened, or what money changed hands, but in later court testimony, Florio Fiorino stated unambiguously that the Italian foreign minister at the time, Gianni DeMichelis, made representations to the French government which linked Credit Lyonnais’ support for the MGM deal to a large purchase of equipment for the Italian railway system from a French manufacturer. Whatever happened, Credit Lyonnais financed the deal and its then chief executive, Jean-Yves Haberer, got himself significantly more personally involved in the transaction than was good for his subsequent career.

When the deal was completed in 1990, just as the walls were closing in on Charles Keating, Alan Ladd Jr[3] was sent on a charm offensive to reassure Hollywood that the new Italian owner was a man of substance, and the matter of his having been found guilty in absentia and sentenced to three and a half years by a Naples court over frauds related to the Diario bankruptcy was in some way technical or trivial. This confidence building work was somewhat undone by the decision to appoint Valentina Paretti, the owner’s 21-year old daughter with no relevant experience, as the chief financial officer of MGM and to fire most of the audit and accounting staff responsible for monitoring the studio’s outgoings. It is not a difficult deduction to guess why Giancarlo might have done this; however, it breaks one of the key principles of the control fraud and he paid the price for failure to respect this principle.

That principle is that a control fraud needs to be a theft carried out by honest means. The payments themselves made to the fraudster are made through legitimate commercial transactions; salaries, bonuses, dividends, mansion rentals, contracts for actresses who never act, and so on. It is always the overall scheme, and particularly the financing and growth of the controlled entity, which constitutes the fraud. If you start simply grabbing the money, then two things happen. Firstly, it becomes easier to spot you, as you are behaving less like an executive and more like a criminal. And second, by removing your attention from the actual business, you start to lose the vital dimension of control.

It was the second issue that sunk him. As it went into the final phase of Paretti’s looting, MGM started getting sloppy with making its payments. Dustin Hoffman and Sean Connery failed to receive their fees on time. The film labs began to refuse to process the negatives of Thelma and Louise until their bills were settled. And eventually someone, probably an agent, decided it was time to get an aggressive lawyer involved.

As we said in Chapter 2, if you have a payment come due and you fail to make it, then you are bankrupt, in the legal sense, and somebody can take you to a bankruptcy court. Hollywood lawyers do this all the time, without necessarily meaning any great harm by it or intending to see the process through to its conclusion – in a town where people are always alternately kissing and screaming at each other, it’s one of the few ways to unambiguously indicate that you want to be taken seriously this time.

The trouble is that things tend to come out in bankruptcy filings; in particular, lists of creditors are compiled, and lists of assets, and lists of the previous and current fraud convictions of principal actors. It rapidly became apparent that Credit Lyonnais had lent many times the legal limit on its exposure to a single borrower, and had done so to a financier who was currently a fugitive from a prison sentence, and to a company which had made very large unauthorised payments to investment vehicles of doubtful provenance but suspicious ownership.

Credit Lyonnais realised that they had to do something, and called in their loans, effectively removing Paretti from control and repossessing his film studio. Alan Ladd Jr, presumably reflecting on his father’s famous line about a gun being as good or bad as the man that uses it, immediately turned on his old boss and denounced him, joining with enthusiasm the litigation which was to consume the next five years over who actually owned MGM and who had the rights to Cannon/Pathe’s global assets.

It ended badly for everyone; the sooner you got out of this story, the better your reputation survived. Paretti and Fiorino went to jail, Credit Lyonnais went bust and Kirk Kerkorian ended up owning MGM once more.As Michael Ovitz said, reflecting on the affair thirty years later, “In Hollywood, when somebody shows you a Picasso, it’s either worth a lot more than they say it is, or a whole lot less”.

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[1] In later litigation, Vigon and Griffault tried to claim that they thought the stock certificates were joke party favours.

[2] There was at least some pretext for doing so. One of the reasons Cannon Films was in such bad financial trouble was that Golan and Globus had overextended themselves buying a chain of cinemas in England. One of the assets that came with the cinemas was the rights to the film library of Pathe’s English-language output over the previous century.

[3] Having been a loyal employee at Cannon/Pathe, Ladd was made the chief executive of MGM, responsible for its operations and for maintaining a good facade about town. The job had previously been tentatively offered to Ronald Reagan, but was decisively turned down.

<https://backofmind.substack.com/p/the-mgm-affair> <https://backofmind.substack.com/>

Dan Davies - "Back of Mind"the MGM affairsummer reruns period, and while going through my bottom drawer for things to post, I remembered that when “Lying for Money” was published in Italian (in an absolutely gorgeous looking edition by Il Saggiatore press, under the title “L’arte della Trufa…Read more8 days ago · 3 likes · 1 comment · Dan DaviesDan Davies - "Back of Mind"A newsletter of quiet contrarianism, slow analysis and ambient ideas

Brad DeLong back: There was a 2024 BBC documentary about the MGM affair, The Man Who Definitely Didn’t Steal Hollywood <https://www.facebook.com/BBCArtsOnline/videos/when-a-former-waiter-called-giancarlo-parretti-buys-hollywoods-legendary-mgmua-s/565380552614469/>, which I happened to see. It is a strange thing to be called a “documentary”. Perhaps a “gulliblementary” would be better? Dower appears to be viewed by Giancarlo Paretti as a challenge: can Paretti get this filmmaker to accept whatever I tell him, even up to claiming that the only reason that he decided to try to buy MGM was that he into Fiat boss Gianni Agnelli and Henry Kissinger having dinner, Agnelli joked that Paretti looked wealthy enough to buy MGM, and they then bet that Kissinger would have to buy everyone another dinner if Paretti managed to do it?

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MOAR people should read the novels of the late Iain Banks, that is what I say. 17 and a quarter years ago during the Golden Age of Weblogging. Some readings and thought on fiction, reader expectations, genre, and such. Touching on things like: writing under constraints, literature of world-building, fantasies of magic- or technology-enabled political action, ways of fitting into the reader's expectations to add resonance to the words that are on the page--I am not sure what to make of these perspectives. I do know that I want to think about them. I do know that Pride and Prejudice is very definitely a genre romance novel—but one in which Jane Austen is always the mistress and never the servant of the constraints of the form: she makes them sit, roll over, and beg like dogs, and never lets them push her to a place she does not want to go. And perhaps “literary fiction” is simply a grab-bag of genres that never took off—that never developed a large critical mass of readers who said “I would really like to read something else like that” and writers who said “I really could write something like that—and would really like to”…

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Types of Fictions

I am looking forward to a cross-country plane flight on Sunday, and I am not likely to read any of the work books I will take onto the plane--even though I will try, and intend to. Instead, I will take and almost surely read Walter Jon Williams's Implied Spaces, and Iain M Banks's Matter. I know in broad outline what kind of book Matter will be: it will be set in a galaxy-spanning space-traveling future, inhabited by super-intelligent robots with jokey names, show bizarre technological and natural marvels of enormous scale, involve fearful fanatic antagonists who cannot be reasoned with, contain do-gooders who leave a cornucopiac utopia to try to help the less-fortunate using whatever means are necessary, and at the end those protagonists whom a malign fate has put at the end of the spear that might thwart the evil purposes of the antagonists will screw their courage to the sticking place, remember that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one, do what needs to be done, and die--or maybe not, if Banks is feeling exceptionally generous.

But I will not read a serious work of fiction on an airplane (or when overtired, or when stressed, or in a bunch of other situations).

I am trying to think why this is so. And I start with Hilzoy of Obsidian Wings on romance novels:

Obsidian Wings: Misogyny Day At The Washington Post (Part 1): UPDATE: Gary [Farber] and others were offended by the part about romance novels.... [L]et me try to explain what I meant. First, a clarification: I meant, and should have said, genre romance novels. I did not mean Jane Austen. Moreover, I meant genre romance novels, not genre fiction generally. In general, I do not think that points made about one type of genre fiction apply to all types of genre fiction; in this specific case, I think that both science fiction and fantasy, for instance, are quite different from romance novels in some of the respects I was thinking of....

[T]he part about romance novels was meant to imply that women's taste in fiction runs to romance novels, which (according to Charlotte Allen) don't stack up well against fiction generally. My point was that that is not the relevant comparison. If you want to make some sort of stupid generalization about women, then it matters what the male analog of a romance novel is.... [T]his does not imply, and I did not mean it to imply, anything about the quality of genre romances. I honestly think not just that most of them stack up pretty well against your average Hustler centerfold, which isn't hard, but that some of them are quite good.

About whether genre romance novels are "books"... that was undoubtedly the wrong way to put [it]... and I regret having put it that way. However, I also think that there is a decent point here, which I expressed in a needlessly dumb way. What I meant was: Genre romance novels are, in my experience, written according to very serious constraints... plot constraints, characterization constraints, all kinds of constraints... certainly more stringent than those that govern fiction generally. When I assess a non-genre novel, I assess it as a work of imagination, in which the author is free to do as he or she wants. I take the author to have a kind of complete freedom: there she sits, confronted by a blank book, and she can do whatever she wants with it. Seeing what she ends up doing with all that freedom, and deciding what I think of it, is what criticism of normal novels is all about.

Assessing genre romances is different, precisely because there are so many rules. I do not think badly of a particular genre romance because the author should not have made the hero so strong, noble, and self-contained, or because its heroine should not be so completely ignorant of her own charms, or because some complication prevents the hero and heroine from recognizing their attraction to one another until they are forced into close proximity by some unexpected turn of events. Those are the rules.... I think it was Tanya Modliewski who wrote that genre romance is, for this reason, best thought of as something closer to a very constrained kind of performance than to non-genre novels.... The basic parameters are laid down in advance, and what matters, if you're writing a genre romance at all, is the grace and style and beauty with which you do it. In this, genre romance is strikingly different from non-genre novels (I'm leaving other genres out, as I noted above). Moreover, for anyone who knows the rules of genre romance, reading a genre romance would have to be different from reading a work that had no such rules, in the way that, for someone who knew the rules, watching the short program in figure skating that includes the compulsory elements would have to be different from watching a freestyle program.

With this as backdrop, when I said that "romance novels are not "books", as that word is normally used", I should, first of all, have said not "books" but [mainstream] "novels."... I did not, and do not, mean this claim to imply anything at all about the merits of genre romance novels.... I do think genre romance novels are a different sort of thing from non-genre novels. But that doesn't imply anything at all about whether the kind of thing they are is a better or worse thing to be.

Again, though, I was deeply unclear, for which I am sorry.

And this is somehow related to science fiction/fantasy author Lois McMaster Bujold's description of her latest four-volume supernovel as an attempt to do three things.

1. To do a "new world" rather than an "old world" fantasy: Lois McMaster Bujold Bonus Q&A: TSK began as a project to give myself pleasure in writing again at a time when I felt very dry.... I was doing several literary experiments at once.... [First,] playing with landscapes and social-scapes that were distinctly New World, not recycled European medievaloid...

2. To do an anti-Manichean fantasy: To see what would happen if I gave my characters a real grown-up problem to grapple with, one that defied easy, cathartic solutions like cutting off some bad guy’s head or toppling the Dark Tower du Jour...

3. Most of all to do a fantasy that was also a romance, or perhaps a romance that was also a fantasy: But foremost I wanted to see what would happen when I tried to make a romance the central plot of a fantasy novel... after all, I’d had romantic sub-plots in both my fantasy and my SF books before, and wasn’t it just a matter of shifting the proportions a bit?...

And it did not work:

[W]ow was that ever a learning experience, not only about what makes a romance story work, but, more unexpectedly, uncovering many of the hidden springs and assumptions that make fantasy work. It turns out to be a much harder blending that I’d thought.... The two forms have different focal planes. In a romance in the modern genre sense, which may be described as the story of a courtship from first meeting to final commitment, the focus is personal; nothing in the tale (such as the impending end of the world, ferex) can therefore be presented as more important.... [I]t has been borne in upon me how intensely political most F&SF plots in fact are. Political and only political activity (of which war/military is a huge sub-set) is regarded as “important” enough to make the protagonists interesting to the readers in these genres.... [A]ttempts to make the tale about something, anything else – artistic endeavor, for instance – are regularly tried by writers, and as regularly die the grim death in the marketplace. (Granted The Wind in the Willows or The Last Unicorn will live forever, but marginalized as children’s fiction.) I have come to believe that if romances are fantasies of love, and mysteries are fantasies of justice, F&SF are fantasies of political agency. (Of which the stereotypical “male teen power fantasy” is again merely an especially gaudy and visible subset)...

And with Teresa Nielsen Hayden's remarks about how writing under constraint and to expectations is only a bad thing if it is annoying and badly done:

http://scalzi.com/subterranean_issue_4.pdf: In longer works, the greater pleasure is seeing how the book makes its way from here to there, from its interesting beginning to its satisfactory if perhaps unsurprising end. You already know the detective is going to figure out which guest at the cocktail party murdered Edna Furbelow in the linen closet of her sumptuous Park Avenue apartment. The bickering couple forced to keep company with each other while having some mild adventures will infallibly fall in love no later than the second-to-last chapter. And the earnest young person born under mysterious signs and portents will inherit the Charm Bracelet of Doom, defeat the Dark One, and bring peace and plenty to The Land—five or six books from now.

Clichés are only clichés if they bother us. When we’re expecting something new and interesting in the way of a narrative mechanism, but instead get the same old same old, it feels like a cliché. If a novel employs a narrative maneuver that’s just as well-used, but we aren’t expecting novelty—hey looka, it’s yet another Regency Romance that has a scene set at Almack’s—then it’s not a problem. A book that starts from a bog-standard plot but uses it with inventiveness and grace will read fairly well—which means the bog-standard plot doesn’t bother us, and therefore isn’t really a cliché.

What does bother us are worn-out devices for setting things up or moving the story along. Mark Twain nailed James Fenimore Cooper for his habitual use of them.... One twig is a fine device. A twig or two per book is excusable if there’s enough other stuff happening; even a battered old prop can look okay if it goes past you fast enough. Too many twigs become irritating, and are therefore a cliché...

And Jo Walton:

just scenery: what do we mean by "mainstream"?: In the Handicapping the Hugos thread, there's a discussion of what "mainstream" means. In the simplest sense, "Mainstream" is everything that is not... "mystery" or "SF" or "chicklit" or "literary fiction".... That's a fairly useless category, though, because it's too huge.... [C]ategories exist to help people find books they'll like, and "If you loved Middlemarch you'll adore Rainbow Six" isn't going to do much for anyone.... What I find interesting is when there are books that are "obviously" SF but that some people think are mainstream.... The Yiddish Policeman's Union (an alternate history about a Jewish state in Alaska) is "mainstream" is that it has mainstream sensibilities, mainstream expectation, and, most of all, mainstream pacing. They may also mean that it had mainstream publication and that Michael Chabon is a writer who made his name selling mimetic fiction -- which is still true even though his last three books have been genre....

Samuel R. Delany has talked about the importance of reading protocols, and reading SF as SF. I tend to read everything as SF. When mainstream writers come to write SF, it's normally the case that they don't understand the idioms of SF, the things we do when we (SF readers) read SF. This is very noticeable in things like Marge Piercy's Body of Glass (published as He, She and It in the US) where Piercy had clearly read Gibson but nothing much else, or Doris Lessing's Shikasta and sequels. The mainstream writers know how to do all the basic writing stuff, stories and characters and all of that, sometimes they know how to do that really well. They really want to write SF... but they don't know how SF works. They explain too much of the wrong things and not enough of the right things.... They don't get the thing I call "incluing", where you pick up things about how the world works from scattered clues within the text. I don't feel that Chabon has this problem in the slightest, because he is an SF reader and knows how to inclue -- indeed I very much admire the brilliance of his worldbuilding -- but he's very unusual.

I had a great revelation about this some time ago when I was reading A.S. Byatt's The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye. This is a mainstream story in which a female academic buys a bottle containing a djinn and gets it to give her wishes. It's a mainstream story because she finds the bottle on something like page 150 of 175. In a genre story she'd have found the bottle on the first page. It has mainstream pacing and expectations.... The story is really about how simple answers are not fulfulling. The djinn is a metaphor in exactly the way Kelly Link's zombies aren't a metaphor. People talk about SF as a literature of ideas... [but] I don't think it's so much the literature of ideas as the literature of worldbuilding. In a science fiction novel, the world is a character, and often the most important character. In a mainstream novel, the world is implicitly our world, and the characters are the world. In a mainstream novel trying to be SF, this gets peculiar and can make the reading experience uneven. In the old Zork text adventures, if you tried to pick up something that was described but not an object, you'd get the message "that's just scenery". The difference between a mainstream novel and an SF one is that different things are just scenery.

Writing under constraints, literature of world-building, fantasies of magic- or technology-enabled political action, or ways of fitting into the reader's expectations to add resonance to the words that are on the page--I am not sure what to make of these perspectives. I do know that I want to think about them.

I know only two things:

• Contra Hilzoy, Pride and Prejudice is too a genre romance novel--but one in which Jane Austen is always the mistress and never the servant of the constraints of the form: she makes them sit, roll over, and beg like dogs, and never lets them push her to a place she does not want to go.

• Perhaps "literary fiction" is simply a grab-bag of genres that never took off--that never developed a critical mass of readers who said "I would really like to read something like that" and writers who said "I really could write something like that--and would really like to."

APPENDIX: Hilzoy's unfortunate take on the romance genre was a side effect of her being allowed to read Charlotte Allen--one of many reasons why in a good and just world the Washington Post would have shut down long ago. Allen wrote:

Obsidian Wings: Misogyny Day At The Washington Post (Part 1): [I] wonder whether women -- I should say, "we women," of course -- aren't the weaker sex after all. Or even the stupid sex, our brains permanently occluded by random emotions, psychosomatic flailings and distraction by the superficial.... I am perfectly willing to admit that I myself am a classic case of female mental deficiencies. I can't add 2 and 2 (well, I can, but then what?). I don't even know how many pairs of shoes I own. I have coasted through life and academia on the basis of an excellent memory and superior verbal skills.... [T]he women in history I admire most -- Sappho, Hildegard of Bingen, Elizabeth I, George Eliot, Margaret Thatcher -- were brilliant outliers. The same goes for female fighter pilots, architects, tax accountants, chemical engineers, Supreme Court justices and brain surgeons.... I don't understand why more women don't relax... and revel in the things most important to life at which nearly all of us excel: tenderness toward children and men and the weak and the ability to make a house a home.... Then we could shriek and swoon and gossip and read chick lit to our hearts' content and not mind the fact that way down deep, we are... kind of dim...

Hilzoy's justified explosion at Charlotte Allen contained the line:

Obsidian Wings: Misogyny Day At The Washington Post (Part 1): [R]omance novels (update below the fold) are not "books", as that word is normally used. They are either tools for relaxation or the female equivalent of porn. They should therefore be compared not to War and Peace, but to either "Ultimate Sudoku" or the Hustler centerfold. Personally, I think they come out fine in either comparison, but that's probably because I'm just a dumb woman...

If only she had written "Botticelli's Nascita di Venere" rather than "Hustler centerfold"!

Originally: <https://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2008/07/types-of-fictio.html>

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