Precision Mass

Strike weapons capable of carrying out relatively precise attacks on targets, while being procured at a cheaper individual cost than traditional guided munitions.

| Luke Widenhouse, The Clausewitz Bind: Force Posture in the Age of Precision Mass

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Pretty much every time an American interceptor missile destroyed a Shahed drone, it blew a hole in the U.S. military budget measured in millions of dollars. It blew one in the Iranian budget measured in the tens of thousands. And those were the encounters logged as American successes. When the drones and missiles did get through, they could take out a $500 million American surveillance plane.

Military futurists sometimes like to talk about what they call “hyper war” — conflicts in which autonomous weapons systems might compete at speeds, and according to logic, completely illegible to human observers. The term for where we are now is “precise mass”: precision-guided missiles and munition-laden drones now cheap enough to deploy in large numbers, even for lesser militaries. “It used to be only a small number of states that could launch precision strikes,” Horowitz says. “But now every country around the world and many militant groups can do low-cost strikes at scale.” And those weapons aren’t just getting cheaper, they’re getting smarter. “I think in 10 years, you’re going to see a situation where virtually every country has an army capable of precision mass,” says Michael Boyle of Rutgers, the author of “The Drone Age.” The result, he says, will be the return of wars of attrition, no matter how mismatched the armies may seem on a spreadsheet. In Iran, we seem already to be there.

| David Wallace-Wells, [ Iran Demonstrates the Power of Drones and Cheap Weaponry

Note: Wallace-Wells uses the terms ‘precise mass’ and ‘precision mass’, interchangeably.

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I watched the video of Braylon Mullins’ three-pointer at the end UConn/Duke game this week. Wow.

But the point I want to draw from that is the rule in basketball about a ball in the air when the buzzer goes off, signaling the end of the game, a so-called buzzer beater:

A buzzer beater only counts if it leaves the player's fingers before the shot clock runs out. […] The term is most commonly applied to shots that win or tie the game as the game clock expires.

(via Wikipedia)

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A simple appeal to sports logic carries over to mail-in ballots. It’s the time that the ballot is cast that matters, not when it’s received, just like buzzer-beaters. In US (gridiron) football, play does not stop when the clock runs out, it’s when the play ends.

So, we should not require mail-in ballots to be received on or before election day, because we believe in the underlying fairness of the buzzer beater.

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The new part is at the bottom, System 3, which is, notably, not occurring in the human mind, but within the workings of an artificial intelligence.

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As described by Matt Gaskell, this is a step beyond cognitive offloading:

Cognitive offloading is strategic. You delegate a discrete task to a tool. You’re still in control. You’re still thinking. The calculator does the maths so you can focus on the problem. The spreadsheet shows you the numbers so you can think about them.

Cognitive surrender is different. You adopt the AI’s output, without verification, without critical evaluation. The tool doesn’t assist your reasoning – it replaces it. And you might not even notice it’s happened.

Worst of all, cognitive surrender comes with real costs. It turns out that those more likely to trust AI are more susceptible to surrender, and they are more confident of the outcome even when the AI has hallucinated.

Again, Gaskell:

Every time someone on your team pastes a question into ChatGPT and copies the answer into a document without reading it critically, that’s cognitive surrender. Every time a manager asks AI to write a performance review and sends it unedited, that’s cognitive surrender. Every time a strategist asks AI for a recommendation and presents it to the board as their own analysis, that’s cognitive surrender.

And the uncomfortable part is: they’ll feel more confident doing it.

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This was the fragment of text where I stumbled upon the concept of cognitive surrender, by Ezra Klein, I Saw Something New in San Francisco:

Researchers have drawn a distinction between “cognitive offloading” and “cognitive surrender.” Cognitive offloading comes when you shift a discrete task over to a tool like a calculator; cognitive surrender comes when, as Steven Shaw and Gideon Mave of the University of Pennsylvania put it, “the user relinquishes cognitive control and adopts the A.I.’s judgment as their own.” In practice, I wonder whether this distinction is so clean: My use of calculators has surely atrophied my math skills, as my use of mapping services has allowed my (already poor) sense of direction to diminish further.

But cognitive surrender is clearly real, and with it will come the atrophy of certain skills and capacities, or the absence of their development in the first place. The work I am doing now, struggling through yet another draft of this essay, is the work that deepens my thinking for later.

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Another fun fact I gleaned from Klein.

According to a new NBC News survey, public opinion on A.I. has turned sharply negative; it now polls beneath ICE or Donald Trump (though above the Democratic Party or Iran). There is an A.I. backlash building, and understandably so: Who wants a technology that may take your job and eventually threaten human sovereignty? At the same time, A.I. is everywhere, and being woven into almost everything, and a staggering number of Americans use it daily. Backlash or no, I expect that trend to accelerate, not reverse.

Who wants a technology that untrains your brain?

But we huddle in the shadow of a near-future world where AI is atop the heap, supported by its myrmidons

Under AI, the robot is the true elite and the next layer down are those who adjust its variables, like worshipers tweaking the corpse of a dead god.

| Kyle Chayka, The Revenge of Elitism

And all the rest become NPCs.

There’s no doubt that restaurants, bars, and coffee shops rely on tipping as a wage subsidy, and therefore avoid the issue of fair pay for work. I favor the European model, where service workers are paid a living wage, and the wages are built in to the cost of goods and services. But here in the wild, wild west, service workers are being hit by declining tips while being paid less than minimum wage.

Wikipedia:

Tipflation and tip creep are terms to describe the United States' recent widespread expansion of gratuity to more industries, as opposed to being traditionally only prevalent in full-service restaurants. Tipflation's origins are likely the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2021–2023 inflation surge. Touch-screen digital payment systems run by companies like Clover and Square include gratuity prompts that are often visible to nearby members of the public and the service worker. The social pressure created from such systems is often separately mentioned as guilt-tipping, and tipflation has also been seen as causing tipping fatigue, which is the resentment that American consumers generally feel from tipping culture.

It’s reached Canada, too:

Tax firm H&R Block polled more than 1,500 Angus Reid Forum members in February and found that around two-thirds of respondents think tips should be abolished altogether.

Meanwhile, 93 per cent of respondents said they believe tipping is “out of hand” and is often applied to goods and services that don’t warrant it.

Traditionally, tips were meant to be a reward for quality service. But now the option to leave a tip seems to be everywhere — even when there’s no apparent service provided, such as at self-checkout counters or when you’re just buying a bottle of water at a coffee shop.

Sylvain Charlebois, professor at Dalhousie University’s Agri-Food Analytics Lab, refers to this emerging phenomenon as “tip creep.”

Charlebois says many people started to feel tipping fatigue after the pandemic, when prices began rising.

“During COVID, people felt generous, they wanted to help the (hospitality) sector,” he said. “But after a while people felt there was some abuse going on and a lot of (them) were turned off.”

[…]

The H&R Block survey found that around 40 per cent of Canadians have avoided going to places with tip prompts at cash out, including coffee shops, convenience stores and fast food counters.

A majority of respondents — 89 per cent — also said they think the tipping percentage amounts have become too high, with many feeling comfortable clicking the “no tip” option.

“The percentage is another issue,” said Charlebois of prompts that can begin at 18 per cent and go up to 30 per cent. “But, frankly, a lot of people just felt they were providing not necessarily a reward for good service, but a wage subsidy.”

A reward or wage subsidy?

In 2025, a previous survey by H&R Block found that 88 per cent of Canadians believed that tipping culture lets employers off the hook to pay employees’ adequately.

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Noun

apothegm (plural apothegms)

1. A short, witty, instructive saying; an aphorism or maxim. [from mid-16th c.]

“It is worse than a crime; it is a blunder.” Thus was the response of a prominent French politician to the news that Napoleon had executed an enemy duke in 1804.

An adage of 19th-century power politics, it has regained painful relevance today. Neither the United States nor Israel can proffer a coherent plan for their war on Iran. Something like the Syrian scenario is the best planners can come up with: disintegration of the polity from the skies, without the presence of foreign troops, domestic propaganda campaigns or long-term security planning. Old-style regime change is out. Regime wrecking, at great global cost, is all that is on offer.

The apothegm easily applies to Europe’s leaders, too. Despite being blindsided by the Israeli-American operation in Iran, they have largely declared support for it — if somewhat cagily — and lent military assistance in the form of bases, warships and planes. More structurally, Europeans have foundered in letting themselves be so dependent on the whims of an America commanded by a rogue president. Almost by default, they have colluded in the conditions of their own endangerment.

| Anton Jäger, Europe Is in Great Danger. It Has Itself to Blame.

noun

A type of trendy shoe known for its unique design and comfort. It typically combines elements of sneakers and loafers, offering a stylish yet casual footwear option suitable for various occasions. As a noun, snoafer represents not only a specific style of shoe but also embodies fashion trends and personal preferences in footwear choices.

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Sometimes, as a reporter, you have to admit that you bet on the wrong horse. This is one of those times.

A couple of years ago, I was among the first people to write about snoafers. Snoafers, if you’re new to the term (or simply forgot), are mutant mash-ups of an athletic sneaker and a loafer. New Balance ignited the snoafer discourse when it teased its 1906L model, a slip-on with the soul of an ’80s running shoe, during a runway show by the Japanese designer Junya Watanabe. The shoes were as indelible as they were odd. Many people found them straight up ugly.

Soon came a crush of articles speculating on the Frankenshoe’s appeal. (I wrote not one, but two such pieces.) The industry responded to the buzz, as snoafer siblings arrived at Puma, Hoka, Nike and Converse. Aldo and Skechers even plunked their own snoafer clones onto the market.

But, looking back, sneaker loafers feel like a trend that never really came to pass. I just traveled through Milan, Paris and back to New York for various fashion weeks. Not once do I remember seeing a pair of snoafers. People may have wanted to read about the shoes. Wearing them was another matter.

| Jacob Gallagher, The Bizarre Shoe Trend That Failed to Take Off

That’s before a local guy snowblowed (snowblew?) the sidewalk.

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execration

noun

ex·​e·​cra·​tionˌ ek-sə-ˈkrā-shən

1: the act of cursing or denouncing

also : the curse so uttered

2: an object of curses : something detested

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Addressing a Conservative party audience in Birmingham, in the heart of the soot-stained industrial Midlands where most of Britain's 1 million colored immigrants are concentrated, [Enoch Powell, a former member of Edward Heath’s shadow cabinet] sailed directly into a whirlpool of racialism. In remarks so provocative that Tory leader Edward Heath felt obliged to fire him from the Conservative party Shadow Cabinet, Powell raised the specter of whole areas of white Anglo-Saxon Protestant Britain becoming black if immigration were not stopped immediately and many colored people sent home. In 15 to 20 years, he claimed, if present trends continued, there would be 3.5 million Commonwealth immigrants and their descendants. "Those whom the gods wish to destroy they first make mad. We must be mad,” Powell rasped, “literally mad as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 immigrant dependents. . . . It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre.”

In some areas of the country, he evocatively charged, Britons were already "strangers in their own land.” Their wives, he claimed, were unable to obtain hospital beds in childbirth, their children unable to obtain school places, their homes and neighborhoods changed beyond recognition. At work, they found that employers hesitated to apply to the immigrant worker the standards of discipline and competence required of native-born workers. "They began to hear, as time went by, more and more voices which told them that they were now the unwanted." He spoke of a white woman in his constituency of Wolverhampton, in the Midlands, being followed down the street by taunting “pickaninnies,” and of having "excreta" pushed through her letter box.

“As I look ahead,” he said, "I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to see the River Tiber foaming with much blood." He spoke of his trip to the United States. "That tragic and intractable phenomenon which we watch with horror on the other side of the Atlantic, but which is interwoven with the history and existence of the States itself, is coming upon us here by our own volition and neglect,” he told his audience, “indeed, it has all but come. In numerical terms, it will be of American proportions long before the end of the century."

That this was no sudden emotional outburst but a calculated bid to break the all-party consensus to keep race out of British politics was made abundantly clear by Powell himself: “I can already hear the chorus of execration. How dare I say such a horrible thing? How dare I stir up trouble and inflame feeling? The answer is that I do not have the right not to do so."

The execration came quickly: Nicholas Scott, a young middle-of-the-road Tory M.P., accused Powell of "assuming the mantle of Gov. George Wallace of Alabama.” A former Conservative M.P., Humphry Berkeley, called Powell's talk "the most disgraceful public utterance since the days of Sir Oswald Mosley [Britain's pre-war Fascist leader]." The Times of London described it as “an evil speech."

| Frank Melville, in a New York Times editorial (December 15, 1968)

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..

Let us turn our thoughts today to Martin Luther King
And recognize that there are ties between us
All men and women living on the Earth
Ties of hope and love, sister- and brotherhood

That we are bound together
In our desire to see the world become
A place in which our children
Can grow free and strong

We are bound together
By the task that stands before us
And the road that lies ahead
We are bound and we are bound

There is a feeling like the clenching of a fist
There is a hunger in the center of the chest
There is a passage through the darkness and the mist
And though the body sleeps the heart will never rest

Shed a little light, oh Lord (shed a little light, oh Lord)
So that we can see (oh now)
Just a little light, oh Lord (shed a little light, oh Lord)
I want to stand it on up (stand it on up, oh Lord)
Stand it on up, oh Lord (yeah now)
I want to walk it on down (oh shed a little light)
Shed a little light, oh Lord

Can’t get no light from the dollar bill
Don’t give me no light from a TV screen (no, no, no, no)
When I open my eyes
I wanna drink my fill
From the well on the hill (I know ya know what I mean)

Shed a little light, oh Lord (shed a little light, oh Lord)
So that we can see (ah ah yeah)
Just a little light, oh Lord (shed a little light, oh Lord, oh now)
I want to stand it on up (stand it on up)
Stand it on up, oh Lord (yeah now)
I want to walk it on down (oh shed a little light)
Shed a little light, oh Lord

Shed a little light, o Lord

There is a feeling like the clenching of a fist
There is a hunger in the center of the chest
There is a passage through the darkness and the mist
And though the body sleeps the heart will never rest

Oh, let us turn our thoughts today to Martin Luther King
And recognize that there are ties between us
All men and women living on the Earth
Ties of hope and love, sister- and brotherhood

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…

Once upon this planet earth
Lived a man of humble birth
Preaching love and freedom for his fellow man

He was dreaming of a day
Peace would come to earth to stay
And he spread this message all across the land

Turn the other cheek, he’d plead
Love thy neighbor was his creed
Pain, humiliation, death, he did not dread

With his Bible at his side
From his foes, he did not hide
It’s hard to think that this great man is dead (Oh yes)

Will the murders never cease
Are they men or are they beasts?
What do they ever hope, ever hope to gain?

Will my country fall, stand, or fall?
Is it too late for us all?
And did Martin Luther King just die in vain?

’Cause he’d seen the mountain top
And he knew he could not stop
Always living with the threat of death ahead

Folks, you’d better stop and think
’Cause we’re heading for the brink
What will happen now that he is dead?

He was for equality
For all people, you and me
Full of love and goodwill, hate was not his way

He was not a violent man
Bigotry had sealed his fate
We can all shed tears, but it won’t change a thing

Teach your people, will they ever learn?
Must you always kill with burn and burn with guns
And kill with guns and burn
Don’t you know how we gotta react?
Don’t you know what it will bring?

Well, see, he’d seen the mountaintop
And he knew he could not stop
Always living with the threat of death ahead

Folks, you’d better stop and think
’Cause everybody knows we’re on the brink
What will happen now that the king of love is dead?

’Cause see he’d seen the mountaintop
And he knew he could not stop
Always living with the threat of death ahead

Folks, you’d better stop and think (and feel again)
For we’re headed for the brink
What’s gonna happen now? In all of our cities?

My people are rising; they’re living in lies
Even if they have to die
Even if they have to die at the moment they know what life is

Even at that one moment that ya know what life is
If you have to die, it’s all right
Cause you know what life is
You know what freedom is for one moment of your life
What’s gonna happen now that the King is dead?

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…

From 2023:

“Choiceful” can’t be found in Merriam-Webster Dictionary or on dictionary.com. But the Oxford English Dictionary notes the earliest known use of the word in the late 1500s. The adjective typically appears .002 times per million words in modern written English, making it one of a group of words “which are not part of normal discourse and would be unknown to most people,” according to the OED.

From today’s news:

Consumers can be a finicky bunch. And every quarter, executives at publicly listed companies must find ways to deliver coherent narratives about what they are doing and why.

Lately, as consumer confidence has softened, company leaders have been attributing middling prospects to shoppers’ “choiceful” outlook.

The framing is the latest spin that executives are adopting to justify lackluster shopping, said Sucharita Kodali, a retail analyst at Forrester. “Choiceful is coded language for: Sales or units are down,” she said, meaning consumers are either spending less at retailers or purchasing a smaller overall volume of products.

“Choiceful,” a term that started becoming popular among executives a few years ago, has become even more ubiquitous in recent months. It was mentioned 70 times across 43 earnings calls in 2025, according to a FactSet analysis of S&P 1500 earnings calls. That was up from 36 mentions in 2024 and 27 in 2023.

Maybe consumers are stretched too thin, and the products cost too much.

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banausic

adjective

formal

us /bəˈnɑː.sɪk/

uk /bəˈnɔː.sɪk/

relating to ordinary people or ordinary jobs that need technical skills rather than high levels of education:

They pursue banausic studies like bookkeeping and shopkeeping.

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From the Editor - Local Culture 7.2: Work and Leisure | Jason Peters

Over and against the foregoing is the more insistent view of Berry, who speaks not for philosophy and philosophers, as Pieper did, but for farming and for farmers. In the title-track piece from The Art of Loading Brush Andy Catlett has a hired hand, a boy named Austin, who is a music major. He doesn’t know how to do anything with a mess except make it into a bigger mess (in this case loading brush). Andy tells him to go back to his college professors with the following message:

maybe it’s possible to blow things up and burn things up and tear things down and throw things away and make music all at the same time. Some, it looks like, think you can. But: if you don’t have people, a lot of people, whose hands can make order of whatever they pick up, you’re going to be shit out of luck. And in my opinion, if the art of loading brush dies out, the art of making music finally will die out too. You tell your professors, when you go back, that you met an old provincial man, a leftover, who told you: No high culture without low culture, and when low culture is the scarcest it is the highest. Tell ’em that. And then tell me what they say.

Or, maybe, tell it to Pieper. This is no mere concession to the banausic arts. Here they get their full due.

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Mise en Abyme (or Mise en Abîme)

[French ‘placing into the abyss’]

1. The double-mirroring effect created by placing an image within an image and so on, repeating infinitely (infinite regression): for example, the album cover of Pink Floyd’s Ummagumma (1969). This is also known as Droste effect.

2. A reflexive strategy where the content of a medium is the medium itself: for example, Shakespeare’s Hamlet features a play within a play and Fellini’s 8½ (1963) is a film within a film. See also reflexivity.

3. A formal technique in Western art of placing a small copy of an image inside a larger one.

From: mise-en-abîme in A Dictionary of Media and Communication »

From the newshole:

There have been decades of debate ever since about what it means for a machine to “act” like it’s thinking. In the 1990s, cognitive scientist Stevan Harnad rephrased Turing’s rephrased question as “whether or not machines can do what thinkers like us can do,” but this hardly resolves the ambiguity. The whole point of Turing’s formulation was to sidestep the problem that we have no idea what thinking is. By defining “acting like thinking” as “doing what thinkers do” Harnad still leaves us nowhere.

To be clear, when Harnad writes about the Turing Test he is not trying to unravel the mystery of human consciousness. He aims rather to establish that the Turing Test is “serious . . . business,” not just a trick or deception: “No tricks! The real thing!” This is funny for a theater maker to read, because to us acting is neither a trick nor the real thing, but somehow also both, and often very serious business. When Harnad defends Turing’s honor by insisting that “The Turing Test is Not a Trick,” he falls right into the mise en abyme between doing and imitating.

| Annie Dorsen, The Theater of the Unreal

A friend offered the insight that it’s the Gen Z stare.

I saw it again today from a clothes brand called Leset.

As AI generated slop seeps into everywhere — like social networks, Reddit, and faux articles in national publications — people are adopting the mannerisms of chatbot style. Not surprising, since chatbots developed their ‘voice’ by reading everything scrape-able online, and now what it’s reading is second-generation AI slop.

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Kat Tenbarge wrote about the slop infection on Reddit:

Vibe Shift for the Worse

Ally, a 26-year-old who tutors at a community college in Florida and spoke using her first name only for her privacy, has noticed Reddit “really going downhill” in the past year because of AI. Her feelings are shared by other users in subreddits like r/EntitledPeople, r/simpleliving, and r/self, where posts in the last year have bemoaned the rise of suspected AI. The mere possibility that something could be AI-generated has already eroded trust between users. “AI is turning Reddit into a heap of garbage,” one account wrote in r/AmITheJerk. “Even if a post suspected of being AI isn’t, just the existence of AI is like having a spy in the room. Suspicion itself is an enemy.” Ally used to enjoy reading subreddits like r/AmIOverreacting. But now she doesn’t know if her interactions are real anymore, and she’s spending less time on the platform than in years past.

“AI burns everybody out,” says the r/AITAH moderator. “I see people put an immense amount of effort into finding resources for people, only to get answered back with ‘Ha, you fell for it, this is all a lie.’”

Sam Kriss focuses on the style quicks of AI slop and its seepage into every nook and cranny:

Once, there were many writers, and many different styles. Now, increasingly, one uncredited author turns out essentially everything. It’s widely believed to be writing just about every undergraduate student essay in every university in the world, and there’s no reason to think more-prestigious forms of writing are immune. Last year, a survey by Britain’s Society of Authors found that 20 percent of fiction and 25 percent of nonfiction writers were allowing generative A.I. to do some of their work. Articles full of strange and false material, thought to be A.I.-generated, have been found in Business Insider, Wired and The Chicago Sun-Times, but probably hundreds, if not thousands, more have gone unnoticed.

Before too long, essentially all writing might be A.I. writing. On social media, it’s already happening. Instagram has rolled out an integrated A.I. in its comments system: Instead of leaving your own weird note on a stranger’s selfie, you allow Meta A.I. to render your thoughts in its own language. This can be “funny,” “supportive,” “casual,” “absurd” or “emoji.” In “absurd” mode, instead of saying “Looking good,” I could write “Looking so sharp I just cut myself on your vibe.” Essentially every major email client now offers a similar service. Your rambling message can be instantly translated into fluent A.I.-ese.

If we’re going to turn over essentially all communication to the Omniwriter, it matters what kind of a writer it is. Strangely, A.I. doesn’t seem to know. If you ask ChatGPT what its own writing style is like, it’ll come up with some false modesty about how its prose is sleek and precise but somehow hollow: too clean, too efficient, too neutral, too perfect, without any of the subtle imperfections that make human writing interesting. In fact, this is not even remotely true. A.I. writing is marked by a whole complex of frankly bizarre rhetorical features that make it immediately distinctive to anyone who has ever encountered it. It’s not smooth or neutral at all — it’s weird.

And not weird like weird people. It’s inhuman. Chatbot slop lacks humor, uses highly repetitive structures, and is training people to talk like them, in a similarly fucked up way.

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Kriss, again:

When you spend enough time around A.I.-generated text, you start to develop a novel form of paranoia. At this point, I have a pretty advanced case. Every clunky metaphor sets me off; every waffling blog post has the dead cadence of the machine. This year, I read an article in which a writer complained about A.I. tools cheapening the craft. But I could barely pay attention, because I kept encountering sentences that felt as if they’d been written by A.I. It’s becoming an increasingly wretched life. You can experience it too.

Kriss points out that chatbots have strange obsessions, that sound like high school poetry, with frequent reference to quiet, shadows, and whispers:

Read any amount of A.I.-generated fiction, you’ll instantly notice an entirely different vocabulary. You’ll notice, for instance, that A.I.s are absolutely obsessed with ghosts. In machine-written fiction, everything is spectral. Everything is a shadow, or a memory, or a whisper. They also love quietness. For no obvious reason, and often against the logic of a narrative, they will describe things as being quiet, or softly humming.

This year, OpenAI unveiled a new model of ChatGPT that was, it said, “good at creative writing.” As evidence, the company’s chief executive, Sam Altman, presented a short story it wrote. In his prompt, he asked for a “metafictional literary short story about A.I. and grief.” The story it produced was about 1,100 words long; seven of those words were “quiet,” “hum,” “humming,” “echo” (twice!), “liminal” and “ghosts.” That new model was an early version of ChatGPT-5. When I asked it to write a story about a party, which is a traditionally loud environment, it started describing “the soft hum of distant conversation,” the “trees outside whispering secrets” and a “quiet gap within the noise.” When I asked it to write an evocative and moving essay about pebbles, it said that pebbles “carry the ghosts of the boulders they were” and exist “in a quiet space between the earth and the sea.” Over 759 words, the word “quiet” appeared 10 times. When I asked it to write a science-fiction story, it featured a data-thief protagonist called, inevitably, Kael, who “wasn’t just good—he was a phantom,” alongside a love interest called Echo and a rogue A.I. called the Ghost Code.

Sigh. Until we build some foolproof way to filter out the slop, we are likely to be reading and hearing this bilge everywhere.

In the past, we idealized future robots as ‘machines of loving grace’ as Richard Brautigan styled them:

ALL WATCHED OVER
BY MACHINES OF LOVING GRACE

I like to think (and
the sooner the better!)
of a cybernetic meadow
where mammals and computers
live together in mutually
programming harmony
like pure water
touching clear sky.

I like to think
(right now, please!)
of a cybernetic forest
filled with pines and electronics
where deer stroll peacefully
past computers
as if they were flowers
with spinning blossoms.

I like to think
(it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal
brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace.

But what we have instead is the maniacal typing of thousands of hallucinating non-monkeys, producing paranoia in the human readers, not wonder.

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No smiles, arms at sides, staring straight ahead, hair parted in middle.

Men, too.

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(n.) Online content deliberately designed to elicit anger or outrage by being frustrating, provocative, or offensive, typically posted in order to increase traffic to or engagement with a particular web page or social media account.

…

This led me to this screen capture, where I am cited as the source for hashtag. Yes, hashtag. Although they never picked it as word of the year.

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And, yes the term broetry is in use, as defined here by Hootsuite:

Broetry

Broety is a style of writing, often popular on LinkedIn, that uses line breaks after every sentence to create long posts that tend to drive high views and engagement. These “broems” usually follow a standard formula:

• A clickbait-style “hook.”

• Followed by a somewhat unrealistic conversation.

• Next, tug at some heartstrings.

• Throw in a healthy dose of jargon.

• End with an inspirational life lesson or universal truth.

• Ask your reader to like or comment if they agree.

Broetry can be successful, but it does have negative associations with hustle culture.

Trust me, you will never see broetry here.

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Coverture was a legal doctrine in English common law under which a married woman’s legal existence was considered to be merged with that of her husband. Upon marriage, she had no independent legal existence of her own, in keeping with society’s expectation that her husband was to provide for and protect her. Under coverture a woman became a feme covert, whose legal rights and obligations were mostly subsumed by those of her husband. An unmarried woman, or feme sole, retained the right to own property and make contracts in her own name.

| Wikipedia

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From today’s news hole:

Some of the most visible Trump groupies are members of government: Lauren Boebert, Nancy Mace, Elise Stefanik, Kristi Noem and, of course, Marjorie Taylor Greene. These women brought a certain amount of chutzpah to Trump’s brand, adding their feminine touch to his masculine politics of disruption, grift and sexism so that it looked less like scamminess and more like populism. In exchange, they rode Trump’s ideological coattails to power.

This kind of professional coverture — where women rely on powerful men for their own professional status — can be heady. It’s not hard to imagine the onetime “South Dakota Snow Queen” Noem struggling with professional respect or the G.E.D. holder Boebert having few career options. And for many of them, betting on Trump did pay off. They did not just win elections and gain political appointments. They also became stars.

But history can tell you what happens when a king graces a woman with new powers: When the king tires of her, her reign is over.

| Tressie McMillan Cottom, Has Marjorie Taylor Greene Really Seen the Light?

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