It turns out that there is a God, and she lives within the hearts of the many grand jurors who have bravely refused to indict multiple targets of Donald Trump’s retribution campaign. In the most recent case, a grand jury in Washington D.C. today refused to indict Cassidy Hutchinson. She was the former aide to Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows who came to prominence when she testified before the House investigations committee that brought impeachment charges against Trump for encouraging a violent crowd to attack the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

In an unusual departure from normal procedure, the charges against Hutchinson for lying to Congress were brought by the Civil Rights Division of the DOJ, which is run by Harmeet Dhillon, who turned the formerly prestigious division, which used to be dedicated to enforcing civil and voting rights laws, into an arm of the Trumpian lunatic fringe, bringing cases enforcing DEI policies, anti-transgender laws, so-called anti-Christian discrimination, and gun rights.

The Washington D.C. grand jury refused to indict Hutchinson with a “no bill.” To get a grand jury to indict someone, prosecutors need to convince only a majority of the grand jurors that there is reasonable evidence that someone committed a crime. Other D.C. grand juries have refused to indict the Subway sandwich guy, who was charged with felony assault for throwing a sandwich at a Border Patrol agent during a demonstration against Trump administration immigration policies. When the grand jury refused the felony indictment, Dhillon’s Civil Rights Division charged the man with misdemeanor assault on a police officer. When the case went to trial, the jury found the man not guilty.

In another loss by the Trump DOJ, a D.C. grand jury refused to indict six lawmakers for sedition when they spoke out about the rights of service members to refuse illegal orders. A federal grand jury in Virginia refused twice to indict New York Attorney General Leticia James on a charge of lying on a mortgage application for a home in Norfolk, Virginia. In August of last year, a grand jury in Washington D.C. issued three consecutive “no bill” decisions when the Trump DOJ attempted to indict a woman for felony assault on a federal law enforcement officer when she was filming ICE officers making an arrest of an undocumented immigrant. The DOJ then charged her with misdemeanor assault. A jury took less than two hours to find her innocent of the charges.

According to Just Security, grand juries have refused to indict at least 18 people on felony charges during the nearly two years Trump has been in office. In the infamous Broadview Six case during the ICE “surge” in Chicago, DOJ prosecutors failed to get two grand juries to indict defendants and went to an unprecedented third grand jury during which prosecutors dismissed a grand juror and were accused of communicating with grand jurors outside the jury room. The DOJ ended up dropping the charges against the six defendants when the judge ordered that unredacted transcripts from the grand jury be produced. Ten more defendants charged by the same prosecutor have been dismissed, and DOJ grand jury presentations in more than 1,000 cases are under judicial review.

Former FBI Director James Comey was charged yesterday with releasing a “sensitive national security document” to the press in October of 2016 when the FBI was investigating Russian influence on the presidential election. The charges against Comey are in the form of an “information,” which is not an indictment. Only a grand jury can issue an indictment. The Trump DOJ filed the “information” to get around the 10-year statute of limitations. Comey’s lawyers are challenging the charges because Comey is alleged to have committed the crime on October 5, 2016. He would have had to be indicted by October 5 of this year for the charges to be in actual effect, Comey contends. That issue will be litigated as the case moves forward. This reflects the extremes to which Trump’s DOJ has been willing to go so that Trump can his get his revenge on Comey. And for what? Comey did not drop an FBI investigation of Michael Flynn and refused to swear personal loyalty to Trump, telling him at a private dinner in 2017 that his loyalty was to the Constitution, not to an individual.

Let’s not mince words. Trump is carrying out the largest and most serious abuse of the Department of Justice in its history. When questioned on one of the Sunday shows about abuse of the DOJ, Attorney General Todd Blanche, Trump’s former personal lawyer, answered “I work for the President.” Standing alone, his answer is a violation of the oath he took to uphold and defend the Constitution, which guarantees rights that his department violates almost daily, many times on the orders of Trump himself. It was Trump, for example, who in the Reflecting Pool case demanded the felony indictment of David Hearn on charges of destroying government property. Hearn’s lawyers charged that DOJ prosecutors had lied to the grand jury about the cost of the piece of pool liner he was charged with removing to get its value over $1,000 so he could be charged with a felony. Charges against Hearn and five other defendants were dropped when the Park Service admitted that the damage had been caused by improper installation of the pool liner.

Cassidy Hutchinson has seen her life turned inside out and upside down by the DOJ’s attempts to get a political indictment based on her sworn testimony to the House committee. When the full force of the federal government comes down, your life stops. You have to hire an attorney and devote a significant portion of your life to defending yourself against charges that while entirely bogus could put you in jail.

Hutchinson testified that she had heard aides tell Trump that people showing up on the Ellipse to attend his rally on January 6 were armed and were being turned away. Trump told aides to take down the magnetometers detecting firearms and “let them in.” Cassidy told the committee that the conversation she overheard backstage before Trump’s speech led her to believe that he knew he was unleashing an armed and violent mob when he encouraged his followers at the rally to march to the Capitol.

We all saw the resulting violence that took place inside and outside the Capitol less than an hour later.

Federal grand juries are comprised of 16 to 23 citizens. About 125,000 people serve on grand juries each year across the 90 federal court jurisdictions. Grand juries hear evidence from prosecutors and testimony of witnesses presented by prosecutors. Grand juries do not hear from defendants or their lawyers, which is one reason why grand juries typically find it rather easy to agree that there is probable cause that a suspect has committed a crime. Proof beyond a reasonable doubt that the crime was committed is not necessary for an indictment.

Abuse of the grand jury system is typical of fascist dictatorships, not democracies. That an American patriot such as Cassidy Hutchinson was even charged to begin with is a crime against the Constitution. That a grand jury comprised of her fellow citizens refused to indict her is a credit to the Constitution she swore an oath to when she testified before the congressional committee investigating Trump’s attempt to overthrow the 2020 election.

Trump’s attempts to punish his enemies for telling the truth about his crimes is a reversal of everything this country and its democracy stands for. If Democrats get control of one or both houses of Congress, beginning in January, they can investigate Trump’s criminal brutalization of the Department of Justice. In the meantime, citizens serving on grand juries have become one of the last bulwarks against Trump’s fascism.

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Silicon Valley has a virtual reality problem. Specifically, they built virtual reality, and then they started living in it full-time. You’ve heard the phrase, “don’t get high on your own supply?” It originally referred to drug dealers getting hooked on their own merchandise. Selling to junkies is great for making money. Becoming a junkie yourself is bad for business. Silicon Valley should have listened and, my god, they truly do not understand what is coming for them.

I get it, though. I do. These are multi-millionaires and billionaires. They live in bubbles so hermetically sealed, they quite literally talk about the rest of us as “Non-Player Characters” or “NPCs.” If you’re not a gamer, those are the characters in video games controlled by the computer. They’re not real. To our Silicon Valley would-be overlords, neither are we. Nothing we say or do is real and, so, nothing we say or do matters.

Here’s the CEO of Flock telling police chiefs that the growing nationwide protests are all fake:

Garrett Langley, the CEO of license plate reader maker Flock Safety, told police chiefs at a private session on Sunday, 25 October, that protests against his company’s cameras are not real. Leaked audio from the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) conference in Orlando was published by 404 Media on 26 October. In it, Langley says the online criticism of Flock is mostly driven by paid bots.

“It’s anonymous bots, and so it is not real,” Langley said. “Inorganic activity has led to organic activity, but when I look at protests across the country, it is the same people with the same signs and the same message. That’s not normal. That’s not organic at all.”

Cool story. It’s funny, though, because everyone hates Flock cameras. People on the left hate them because they allow the cops to stalk and harass women. People on the right hate them because they allow the government to track our every movement. Both sides hate them because they enable exactly the kind of Big Brother bullshit we were all taught to fear and loathe by every piece of dystopian science fiction for the last 60 years.

But, you know, it’s all fake because a tech CEO says so. Sounds legit.

Before we get to the metaphorical (maybe) beheadings, please indulge me for a moment. I enjoy writing these articles. Actually, I LOVE writing these articles. I hope that is reflected in how much you enjoy reading them. If it is, please consider becoming a supporting subscriber for only $5/month or $50/year $25/year during the Terrifying 50% Off Trick-or-Treat Sale!

If subscriptions aren’t your thing, you can leave a one-time PayPal or Venmo tip instead! Now, let’s get back to why Silicon Valley is the fucking worst.

Meanwhile, Silicon Valley is pouring trillions of dollars into data centers that, again, everyone hates. The left hates them because they’re bad for the environment and they kill jobs. The right hates them because they’re bad for their local environment and they kill jobs. Same reason, just on a smaller scale. Both sides hate them because they’re making our energy bills go up, and they’re making the internet we all use worse almost by the day.

Oh, and the little weasel techfucks keep telling us that their AIs will probably kill us all within a decade. Or put us all out of work. Maybe both. But that’s OK because Elon Musk will be richer than ever.

The CEOs of all of these companies look around at the mounting rage and…ignore it. We don’t matter, after all. We’re NPCs. We’re poor. We’re nobodies.

The French aristocracy thought the same thing right before the mob came for them and heads started to roll one after another…

The AI situation will almost certainly be the tipping point. There are several different horrible things that are inevitably going to happen. It’s just a matter of which one happens first.

1. The AI bubble is going to collapse - Silicon Valley has created the single largest economic bubble in history. Worse, they’ve used their money and influence to rig the system so our money and retirements are funding it. When the bubble pops, millions of Americans are going to discover they’ve lost everything. Magically, no one will be responsible for this. It just…happened. Whoops. Sorry. Also, Silicon Valley is getting a trillion-dollar bailout with your taxpayer money. Can you get some help, too? No. Fuck off, peasant.

2. The broken AI Pete Hegseth is stuffing into every nook and cranny of the United States military will, predictably, malfunction. An armed, autonomous drone will kill civilians in an allied country. Maybe even an American city. Worst-case scenario, which we almost saw last month, a hallucinating AI will trigger a war.

3. The internet is currently flooded with “rogue” AI agents doing illegal things. But there is no such thing as a “rogue” AI agent. All of them are controlled by ChatGPT or Claude or any number of main programs run by different Silicon Valley companies. They do not exist in the wild as independent entities running on computers with free will. They are products created by a company. If you buy a faulty microwave that bursts into flame and sets your house on fire, the company is liable.

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   But right now, we are pretending “rogue” AI agents are naturally occurring phenomena with no connection to the company that created them. Sooner or later, one of them is going to do something that cannot be easily fixed or stopped. They will crash a plane or alter the medical records in a hospital. They will switch train tracks and cause a collision or disrupt the power to a city. People will be hurt or killed. Who is held responsible? No one, because it was a “rogue” AI?

None of this is going to fly with the public. There will be no astroturf Tea Party to ride to the rescue like they did for Wall Street after the 2008-2009 collapse. The AI bubble popping will wreck the economy in ways we don’t really understand yet, and people will direct all of their rage at the billionaires.

When an AI finally crosses a red line and kills someone directly, no one is going to blame Trans kids and immigrants. They’re going to demand the company responsible be punished.

I know the billionaire ketamine junkies think they’re untouchable. They think they’re safe on their billion-dollar campuses and in their penthouses or behind their walls of armed security guards. They’re so isolated from the real world, they no longer comprehend how angry people are.

Remember, a significant number of these creepy weirdos are part of a drug-fueled doomsday cult. I’ve written about this a bunch of times. They think they’re going to build an AI god that will turn them into immortal digital gods, and then they will rule the universe. Not one word of that is exaggerated. If anything, I’m softening how fucking insane it is.

As far as these sick, twisted psychos are concerned, nothing that happens to us is important because most of us will be dead soon anyway, and since they’ll be immortal, who cares?

I have an answer for that: They should care. Very VERY much. As safe as they think they are, they really are not. If they blow up the economy and put millions out of work, everyone knows who they are. Their egos couldn’t let them do their work quietly. They had to be rockstars, front and center. Look at me and worship my awesomeness!

Well, OK. Now everyone knows who they are and what they look like. When millions of desperate, angry people whose lives they’ve destroyed come looking for them, it won’t be that hard. Millions of desperate, angry people, all of whom have access to guns. I’ve said this before, and it bears repeating: All the money in the world will not make you bulletproof.

The billionaire Epstein class will, of course, say that all this anger is fake. Or that it’s just coming from the left and we don’t really matter, blablabla. But it’s not just us. The simmering rage is one of the few truly bipartisan issues in America right now. We ALL hate AI and data centers and surveillance cameras and how useless the internet is becoming. We ALL hate the billionaires and their sneering arrogance that we’ll take what they give us, and we’ll like it.

When Silicon Valley finally goes too far, the backlash will be extreme. I’ve written about this before, too. Data centers will burn. They’re the most obvious symbol of Silicon Valley’s absolute contempt for us. There is not enough security in the world to protect them all from the very angry groups who will come for them. Politically, the techshits will not be safe, either. Voters are so enraged, even elected Republicans are taking aim at their former paymasters.

When Republicans are biting the hand that feeds them, you know things are bad. Maybe being cartoonish villains wasn’t the way to go. You don’t see the CEOs of fossil fuel companies prancing around on TV telling everyone how they’re going to cause human extinction. Whoops. Guess the techbros aren’t nearly as smart as they think they are.

When the mob comes for them, and they will, the billionaires are going to scurry away and hide in their little bunkers, hoping that everyone will forget about them. I can’t think of anything that will piss people off even more. Those bunkers will not be safe havens. They’ll be fancy prison cells they can never leave again.

Hope the Wi-Fi is good down in that hole in the ground. They’re going to be living there for a very long time. If they want to keep living, that is.

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I went to see NAZA last week. In case you haven’t heard yet, NAZA is a documentary on the Israeli machinery of mass killing in Gaza. It draws a picture of this machinery by interviewing 24 Israeli who work(ed) for the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). The interviewees describe how the machinery of killing Palestinians in Gaza works and relies on AI. Israel is able to listen to the phone conversations and read phone messages of people living in Gaza. It uses that information to guess who works for Hamas, and where those people might be. It then bombs the houses of those AI-identified targets, and in that process allows their families or anyone else in the house also to be killed, hence the title of the film: NAZA means ‘collateral damage’. “20 NAZA” then means that the Israeli military accepts that there will be 20 other people as collateral damage for the attempted elimination of one (presumed) member of Hamas. The numbers mentioned in the film vary – I recall the numbers 15 and 20, but also one situation where “500 NAZA” allegedly was approved by the IDF.

The film is deeply disturbing for various reasons. One is to see the use of AI in this genocide, and the mistakes it inevitably makes (a house is bombed because the phone of a target is there, assuming that means the target is asleep; but since the target left his phone before leaving the house, his entire family is murdered, but the target is not). Another one is the evil actions the IDF takes – such as when the interviewees describe that at some point, a mental line is drawn in north-Gaza, whereby anyone who crosses that line will be killed. Civilians have never been informed of that line, and have to find out by trial and error. The dogs know about the line, since they wait until they hear shooting, so that they can then go and eat the murdered Palestinian (bodies are not taken away).

A third, and what I might have found the most disturbing thread in the documentary, is the interviewees justifying their actions as being mere cogs in a machine, a machine they need to trust and believe in. They just follow orders; if they don’t do the work, someone else will – and after all, doing intelligence work for the IDF is a prestigious function to hold. There is very little self-reflection on the part of the interviewees, and almost no asking of the bigger moral questions (with perhaps one exception, which you’ll figure out when you see the film). It’s been more than twenty years since I read Hannah Arendt on the banality of evil – but I know I am not the only one who was reminded of her analysis while watching the film. But apparently it does not cross their minds that they might be perpetrators of evil, rather than only the descendants of those who suffered from evil.

The documentary is stylistically very effective, since the interviews are conducted (in the darkness) on rooftops of buildings in Tel Aviv, while we see people around them in their homes conducting their lives. Only in the last five minutes do we see some footage of the massacres in Gaza, making the contrast between the technocratic talk of the IDF officers and the reality on the ground all the more painful.

I watched NAZA Tuesday last week in an almost sold-out film theatre. At the end, there was complete silence. Sure, those who choose to watch this film must want to be informed about what Israel is doing in Gaza; we can assume that they read up on the atrocities. But this was different from both all the written reporting and the footage of the carnage in Gaza – for the banality of evil was given a voice.

Defenders of Israeli politics have for many years been trying to gaslight defenders of human rights, and of the rights of Palestinians in particular. One of their strategies is to label any critique antisemitic; another is to claim that only Jews can truly understand the “conflict” and others should refrain from commenting. (This is why there will be no comments possible on this post; I’m fed up with defenders of Israeli politics trying to gaslight us).

Many of us are citizens whose governments are supporting Israel, with military deals or otherwise. Israeli, and anyone with ties to Israel, can’t look away. But neither can we. Go watch this film if you can.

The news over the last few days, and even one of my columns, has been about whether Trump will attack Iran right after the midterm elections. The Iranians certainly think he will. They have been rattling their asymmetric sabers, threatening U.S. interests around the world with terror attacks, even making noises about an assassination campaign of some kind, which makes complete sense given that we were involved in assassinating their religious leader and most of his family and the top political leadership of the country.

I saw one estimate on a military website that Iran may have as many as 200,000 missiles, a number which clearly came from an Iranian source as a warning of their capability to hit their Gulf neighbors and what is left of U.S. military installations in the region, should Trump order a new attack.

Trump will probably order that attack. Signs certainly seem to point in that direction. He’s got another carrier group out in the Indian Ocean within striking distance of Iran. He’s got another 10,000 ground troops over there awaiting his orders, although what in bloody hell he thinks he can do putting “boots on the ground” anywhere in the Middle East makes no sense at all, especially since he has ordered Americans out of Middle East embassies and any other government buildings or installations where we still have them.

His hand-puppets have been making noises about the big attack in terms of days – I’ve seen two or three days bandied about. Which raises the question of what he expects his bombs and missiles would accomplish in such a short time. I have an answer for that: Nothing of consequence. They’re talking about “taking out” infrastructure this time – power plants and bridges have been mentioned. The thing is, Trump has telegraphed every one of his intentions, so the Iranians are very likely to be ready for all of it. They’ve probably got back up power generation already online, and some sort of way of dealing with blown up bridges with traffic diversions if not temporary bridging waiting in the wings.

So, what is the point of the whole thing? Trump has an itch, or at least that seems to be the closest estimation of his “reasoning” for another attack on Iran, if there is even that much thought behind it. His ego needs a boost is probably another cause, which should be especially necessary after his candidates take a licking in the election on November 3.

Trump proved the last time he bombed Iran that he has no concept at all of what the follow-on effects of his war on Iran mean to the rest of the world, beginning right here in the good old U.S.A. He told his MAGA droolers in Georgia yesterday that he doesn’t give a shit how much they’re paying for gas and even threw in some bragging about how much money his pals in the big oil companies are pocketing.

But his cluelessness knows no bounds. He has destabilized the entire planet by fucking up the oil markets, and his war has inadvertently given Iran the opportunity to do something they’ve been trying to do for decades: remake the Middle East in their image, under their power.

It’s the kind of big fuck-up that gives destabilization a bad name. Political leaders and the companies to which they are beholden around the world like it when things are on an even keel. When things are economically and politically stable, they can busy themselves crapping on their poor people and rewarding their rich friends and making themselves wealthy in the process. When markets go to shit, wars break out over shortages and there is migration that inevitably follows economic problems.

Trump’s number one problem is that he does not understand what a war is. What it’s not is a video game you watch on big flat screens at Mar a Lago while some guy in black trousers and a white shirt and bow tie brings you another Diet Coke. War is also not something you do because you’ve got pumped-up lunatics like Hegseth around you talking about winning the war on trans people, the war on teaching history that doesn’t comport with your view of the world, in which Confederate generals still have “honor” and slavery is a thing that is best tucked away in a dark closet somewhere and not brought up around impressionable children.

Over the last 50 years or so, the right wing has conceptualized too many “wars” they want to win – the war on abortion, the war on the libs, the war on woke, and on and on. Trump is not a product of this strain of “conservatism,” as it used to be called, as much as he is its major beneficiary. In his abject ignorance, he thinks of war the way they do, the Steven Millers and the Steve Bannons and Roger Ailes and the rest of them. He thinks of war in terms of ratings. If he’s got lots of cool boom-booms and images of F-18’s taking off from carriers on TV, his ratings will go up.

The worst thing about fools like Trump is that they think stuff like “regime change” equals winning a war. What they missed by not reading Von Clausewitz or Sun Tzu is the part about bringing entire nations to their knees by killing not thousands of people, but millions, and destroying the entirety of their industrial bases along the way. That’s why we haven’t won a war in the last 80 years. We’re a democracy, and when at least some of our best thinkers and political leaders saw what it took to win the last war we won in Europe and the Pacific, our democracy kind of lost its taste for war. So, what we’ve seen in its place are regional conflicts based on lies that go nowhere, because there’s no real will behind them.

Iran is turning into Trump’s Iraq or his Vietnam – you pick it – complete with people from his administration leaking to the media that the war could go on for another year or more. Trump’s war on Iran is not a quagmire yet. It’s a deeply ignorant man who has gotten himself into a contest with a country that has seen conquerors come and go for more than 4,000 years. Trump is just another one. His mistake is to think that his war on Iran can be ended with a “deal.” Everything to him is real estate. But in real estate, two sides start bargaining, one side way high, the other way low, and after arguing over price, they come to an agreement somewhere in the middle so something can change hands or be built.

Trump the real estate guy forgot that Iran holds the upper hand because they own the real estate he wants, and not only that, they own the sea around it, chiefly the Strait of Hormuz, which is the way in and out of where Trump and the world need to go. Gotcha. They win. He loses.

In the meantime, the number of countries on the Level 4 “do not travel” list from the State Department will only grow, as the world becomes less and less stable and more countries fall into disrepair and violence and wars of their own.

Not to worry, however. Hegseth is checking everyone’s testosterone and making sure guys aren’t playing women’s sports at the service academies, and all the bathrooms at the Pentagon are still marked with an “M” and a “W.” With Trump holding prayer meetings at the White House, we may be running out of bombs and missiles, but we’ve got plenty of Bibles.

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It is rare that one single article can capture so much astonishing boneheaded inhuman technobaloney, but Alexandra Alter has done it with her profile of Marissa Mayer in the New York Times. I can't remember the last time my jaw hit the floor so many times in succession. And before we get into this, I want you to remember all the times you thought, "Surely, they can't expect AI to take over the very human parts of teaching students." Because the answer is these people think outsourcing your humanity is a desirable thing.

Late last year, Marissa Mayer was struggling with what felt like an impossible task.

Her daughter Marielle was turning 10, and Marielle’s teacher wanted three bullet points summarizing what made her special. Mayer — the former chief executive of Yahoo and a pioneer at Google, where she was the first female engineer — likes cracking a hard problem. But she felt overwhelmed by the range and complexity of potential answers.

So Mayer asked her personal A.I. assistant, Dazzle. Within a few seconds, Dazzle delivered an answer.

“It came back and was like, your daughter is empathetic, creative and an animal lover,” Mayer said. She thought it was perfect.

How sad for her daughter. And how sad for a grown woman to be unable to complete a simple parenting task-- and then to be impressed by a bot that pulls off the very low-bar-iest of answers. But it just gets worse and worse.

Mayer has a start-up that is pushing an AI personal assistant, an AI tool "that can handle everyday hassles, like buying a pair of pants you took a photo of, or finding a birthday present for your picky spouse." Because God knows you don't want to be trying to pick out a present for your spouse on your own. The special twist for Dazzle (that's the product's name) is that it will root through your camera rolls to manage tasks that a barely conscious human should already be able to do.

What's the plus? Besides offloading all that pesky humanning? Mayer is excited that something that used to take hours or minutes can now get done in seconds. Perhaps you could use the newly freed-up time to go introduce yourself to your spouse and children.

Mayer thinks this will especially appeal to women, who she imagines are more visual. So the bot will look at all the pictures and then “It essentially understands your personality, your likes, your dislikes, because it knows what you think looks good.”

And maybe what overextended professional women need is an A.I. wife, an emotional labor bot that can plan a birthday party and knows when it’s Crazy Socks Day or Crazy Hat Day at the kids’ school, because it has photos of the fliers that came home crumpled in a backpack.

Yes, parenting is hard. So very hard. Mayer has noticed that AI (like every other aspect of modern tech) is mostly guy stuff, and she's not wrong to call out the ambient baked-in sexism. But is the solution really to draw women in with a chance to offload human behavior? 

This start-up has ten engineers presently, which suggests that, despite Mayer's history as a successful tech overlord, this piece might be a bit premature. 

But Dazzle's mission statement-- “To close the gap between what people want and what people can do with A.I.”-- is this stuff really what people want? Mayer rattles off her uses in what Alter calls her "be-Dazzled life." 

She’s used it to find a family activity during a vacation in Venice (Dazzle proposed a Venetian mask-making workshop that the whole family loved); to plan a play date for one of her twin daughters (Dazzle knows Marielle is into magic, and suggested visiting a magic shop in San Francisco); and to choose a theme for her son Macallister’s 14th birthday party (Dazzle recommended a glow-in-the-dark pool party, and found glowing pool toys and corn hole).

“He was like, ‘Mom, I don’t want to hit the theme that hard,’” she said. “I just can’t help myself.”

Well, yes. It appears that she literally cannot help herself and must instead get a bot to help her do exceptionally ordinary parent things. She has also asked it for advice on what to wear and Halloween costume ideas. It suggested dressing up like a cake, because it "knows" she loves baking and art. 

Mayer considers outsourcing mental load to machines an okay thing, though I'm wondering how she feels about outsourcing emotional and interact-with-human loads. Alter reports that Mayer at one point "mused enthusiastically about the potential efficiency gains of having her A.I. assistant talk directly to her husband’s A.I. assistant." Yes, by all means. It would be most efficient to have your bot talk to everyone else's bot and while the bots are simulating human life, the humans could go lie down in the basement and start decomposing early. Efficiency!!

And Alter, God bless her, asks the right question and captures the telling answer:

When I asked Mayer if it’s somewhat depressing to imagine a frictionless future when birthday celebrations, holiday gifts and family vacations are planned by A.I., she seemed caught off guard.

“I haven’t really thought that through,” she said.

Clearly she has not.

Well, Mayer is rich and has had plenty of success. She is also relatively sanguine about sexism in the industry, even though she took a lot of unearned grief for taking only a two week maternity leave. She agrees that women are underrepresented, but doesn't agree that gender is a barrier to success in techworld.

Her hopes for Dazzle lean in part on developing an app that doesn't require technical skill to use. And she cites promising early feedback, noting that some power users are "interacting more with Dazzle than their spouse." Good God, if that's success, then may we all be happy failures. I will note that Alter sits in on a meeting of Dazzle staff and developers, who do in fact meet in person and not by having their bots exchange data with each other.

So remember-- the next time you're arguing that surely nobody thinks that bots could be used to replace live human beings in the classroom, there are people out there who think it's possible-- and desirable-- to have a bot manage your relationships with every human you come in contact with. There is nothing remotely appealing about this vision, and I wish our rich tech overlords would knock it off right now.

We really are watching the MAGA fascist fucks go through the Kübler-Ross Five Stages of Grief. All year long, they’ve been in denial so deep, they refused to invest money in races when it could have helped. Choosing instead to double down on Hail Mary strategies and continue policies that were tantamount to electoral suicide.

Then they got angry. Violence exploded at Trump rallies because when you’re a piece of shit fascist loser, punching women in the face makes you feel like a real man. MAGA wouldn’t know what real masculinity was if it came up and raised their kids for them, but hey, they get to punch people, so there’s that.

Now we’re at the bargaining phase. Vote for me, and I’ll give you money! Vote for my husband, and I’ll give you a gas card! Vote for me, or I’ll withhold disaster relief! If I pour half a billion into the midterms at the last minute, I can buy Congress!

You can smell the desperation, the panic, the terror. So many mediocre racist white people suddenly see the looming blue wave. Worse, they’re starting to glimpse what lies beyond it: A landscape riddled with consequences and accountability. A world where all of their crimes will be exposed to the public, and they will have to explain all of the evil they’ve done for the last two years. As I never get tired of pointing out, there is nothing mediocre racist white people fear more than the consequences of their actions.

Couldn’t you just cry over their pain and suffering? Boo hoo.

Hey there! Weekend Rewind is not the most complicated of pieces to put together. Some summaries, some reading to do, a couple of GIFs, and a little recap of something that happened this week. Still, it represents the end of a week of work, and if you appreciate what I do, please consider becoming a supporting subscriber! For only $5/month or $50/year $25/year during October’s Spoooooky 50% off sale, you can keep this newsletter going until the fascists wave the white flag. And they will because fascism always loses.

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Monday: Voters said they wanted fighters, and they got it. Republicans are Very Sad about this…

Tuesday: There were Birthday Shenanigans today for Mrs. Ogre, so no article.

Wednesday: Recording!

Thursday: Podcast!

Friday: Got caught up doing daddy stuff, so today’s article got put on hold.

Saturday? SATURDAY!: I love the smell of fascist fear in the morning. Smells like…victory.

5 Things I Found Interesting This Week

The (very) Long Read (and really important this week)