The artificial intelligence bubble is bound to burst—but not before it has trashed the environment, distorted our reality beyond recognition, and made some of the worst men on earth even wealthier.
Coders worried about their continued job security in an AI-dominated Silicon Valley still have time to protect themselves. All they must do is heed the tech industry’s exhortation to be “more agentic,”a modern refresh of the bootstrapper’s creed that James Vincent considers on our site this week. But that advice won’t work everywhere, as Nick Rommel finds narrating last call at Zoxx Social Club, a bar that survived the closure of a nearby GM factory only to be forced to shut down to potentially make way for a data center.
Speaking of real estate: new fiction from Blake Butler reveals a man gone mad in a cost-efficient, eco-plastic retirement community. Sammy Feldblum reads conversations between two old radicals. And in our latest issue, Adrian Nathan West writes on Philly drill, social media beefs, and the death of rapper YBC Dul.
“By demolishing Zoxx, Janesville will erase the last spot of life on the GM site, one created not by the prospect of financial gain but by the initiative of its own citizens.”
“No one on God’s green Earth can be expected to predict the laws of the future, and even granted hindsight, it’s impossible to correlate cause and effect in the blind.”
“The conversations are most touching when exploring questions of how to live, which Chomsky and Mujica tether to, though never fully reduce to, the political.”
“Drill has given new life to a long-standing and asinine debate about whether rap music is a cause of violence or merely reflects the violence in society.”
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