Huffing Gas Town, Pt. 2: If I Could, I Would Download Claude Into A Furby And Beat It To Death With A Hammer

Years ago, I decided I was going to cover the world of cryptocurrency with a fairly open mind. If you are part of an emerging tech industry, you should be very worried when I start doing this lol. Because it only took me a few weeks of using crypto, talking to people who work in the industry, and covering the daily developments of that world to end up with some very specific questions. And the answer to those questions boiled down to crypto being a technology that was, on some level, deeply evil or deeply stupid. Depending on how in on the scam you are.

While I don’t think AI, specifically the generative kind, is a one-to-one with crypto, it has one important similarity: It only succeeds if they can figure out a way to force the entire world to use it. I think there’s a word for that!

And so I have tried over the last few years to thread a somewhat reasonable middle ground in my coverage on AI. Instead of immediately throwing up my hands and saying, “this shit sucks ass.” I’ve continually tried to find some kind of use for it. I’ve ordered groceries with it, tried to use it to troubleshoot technical problems, to design a better business plan for Garbage Day, used it as a personal coach, as a therapist, a video editor. And I can confidently say it has failed every time. And I’ve come to realize that it fails in the exact same way every single time. I’m going to call this the AI imagination gap.

I don’t think I’m more creative than the average person, but I can honestly say I’ve been making something basically my entire life. As a teenager I wrote short stories, played in bands, drew cartoons for the school paper, and did improv (#millennial), and I’ve been lucky enough to be able to put those interests to use either personally or professionally in some way ever since. If I’m not writing, I’m working on music or standup, if I’m not doing those things, I’m podcasting (it counts!), or cooking, or some other weird little hobby I’m noodling on. Jack of all trades, etc.

Every time I’ve tried to involve AI in one of my creative pursuits it has spit out the exact same level of meh. No matter the model, no matter the project, it simply cannot match what I have in my head. Which would be fine, but it absolutely cannot match the fun of making the imperfect version of that idea that I may have made on my own either. Instead, it simulates the act of brainstorming or creative exploration, turning it into predatory pay-for-play process that, every single time, spits out deeply mediocre garbage. It charges you for the thrill of feeling like you’re building or making something and, just like a casino — or online dating, or pornography, or TikTok — cares more about that monetizable loop of engagement, of progress, than it does the finished product. What I’m saying is generative AI is a deeply expensive edging machine, but for your life.

My breaking point with AI started a few months ago, after I spent a week with ChatGPT trying to build a synth setup that it assured me over and over again was possible. Only on the third or fourth day of working through the problem did it suddenly admit that the core idea was never going to actually work. Which, from a business standpoint is fine for OpenAI, of course. It kept me talking to it for hours. And, similarly, last night, after another fruitless round of vibe coding an app with Claude, I kept pressing it over and over to think of a better solution to a problem I’m having. I knew, in my bones, that it was missing a more obvious, easier solution and after the fifth time I reframed the problem it actually got mad at me!

If we are to assume that this imagination gap, this life edging, this progress simulator, is a feature and not a bug — and there’s no reason not to, this is how every platform makes money — then the “AI revolution” suddenly starts to feel much more insidious. It is not a revolution in computing, but a revolution in accepting lower standards. I had a similar moment of clarity, watching a panel at Bitcoin Miami in in 2022, where the speakers started waxing philosophically on what they either did or did not realize was a world run on permanent, automated debt slavery. In the same way, if AI succeeds, we will have to live in a world where the joy of making something has turned into something you have to pay for. And if it really succeeds, you won’t even care that what you’re using an AI to make is total dog shit. Most frightening of all, these AI companies already don’t care about how dangerous a world like this would be.

OpenAI head Sam Altman is having another one of his spats with Elon Musk this week. And responding to a post Musk made highlighting deaths related to ChatGPT-psychosis, Altman wrote, “Almost a billion people use it and some of them may be in very fragile mental states. We will continue to do our best to get this right.” Continuing in his cutest widdle tech CEO voice, “It is genuinely hard; we need to protect vulnerable users, while also making sure our guardrails still allow all of our users to benefit from our tools.”

It’s hard, guys. All OpenAI wants is to make a single piece of software that can swallow the entire internet, and devour the daily machinations of lives, and make us pay to interface with our souls, and worm its way into the lives of everyone on Earth. They can’t be blamed when it starts killing a few of its most vulnerable users! And they certainly can’t be blamed for not understanding that all of this is connected. Learning, creativity, self-discovery, pride in our accomplishments, that’s what makes human. And if we lose that — or worse, give up willingly — we lose everything.

Have You Been Thinking Of Getting Into Erotic Asphyxiation, But Haven’t Found The Right Location To Do It At?

Imagine Paying All That Money To Go To Davos Just To Have To Listen To Trump

—by Adam Bumas

The World Economic Forum is meeting in Davos, Switzerland, this week. What’s usually a dry corporate offsite for world leaders has gone, to coin a phrase, nuclear. European heads of state have to sit in the same room as President Donald Trump, and receive his threats of military and economic attacks on Greenland delivered to their faces. It’s all very Hollywood, down to the big sign on the mountainside. And attendees have responded via a variety of blockbuster genres.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney made a halftime speech to the underdogs, saying the “rules-based international order” is “not coming back.” The Adam Curtis subreddit is levitating right now. Carney’s repudiation of Trump was echoed even stronger by former NATO Secretary-General and Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen, who’s presumably been recruited from his secluded log cabin for one last job. Meanwhile, French President Emmanuel “Maverique” Macron put on Aviators as he called for the stuffy brass to fire the damn trade bazooka (though reports suggest he may just be le tired).

Trump himself, like so many movies, was delayed. An electrical issue, which sources did not confirm or deny was caused by Russian Gary Oldman, sent Air Force One back to the US mid-flight. There, the drained basin that once held a White House press pool was kept in the dark for so long that hopeful posters started getting a little starry-eyed. As Today In Tabs’ Rusty Foster wrote on Bluesky, “He needs It to not happen every second of every day, but we only need It to happen once.”

Trump arrived at Davos safe and sound, but behind schedule, giving his warmup act Howard Lutnick extra time on the stage, to face heckling from Al Gore. We’ve strayed from the movie metaphor at this point, but the Trump regime has been much more about Content than anything so archaic as media. Even so, this is a seismic, tectonic shift for geopolitics, and it’s thanks to the presentation of the new positions as much as the positions themselves.

Elon Musk Is Beefing With Ryanair Now

Elon Musk started a flamewar with Irish airline Ryanair this month after the low-cost carrier said they wouldn’t be installing Starlink on flights. They cited fuel costs, but, let’s face it, their planes barely have seats and their most of their passengers are too busy drinking tins of gin and tonic to really appreciate Starlink connection speeds. It was a silly idea.

Musk does what he always does when his ego is bruised and started bullying Ryanair’s X account, hosting polls about whether or not he should buy the airline and make its CEO someone named Ryan. What the hell, I’m up for it.

Musk, as he always is, was extremely out of his depth. The Irish airline’s profoundly messy social media team, this week, spun up a special deal called the “Great Idiots seat sale,” which would give Musk a €16.99 seat on a one-way flight.

Musk broke character and is now Big Mad, writing on X that Ryanair’s X account is a “special needs chimp” that has “no idea how airplanes even fly.”

Pitchfork Is Launching Paid Subscriptions

Enemy of the stan armies the internet over, Pitchfork, is launching a paid subscription model. Starting this week, for $5 a month, readers will be able to give albums custom scores, comment, and access Pitchfork’s archives. A little sad, but, at least on the surface, sounds fairly standard for an editorial publication these days. We aren’t so far from the days when people, you know, paid for the publications they read. But there is a bit of a snag here.

As writer Sarah Hagi posted on X, Pitchfork is not some worker-owned co-op — or delightful newsletter about internet culture 👀 — it’s owned by Condé Nast, an ostensibly massive publisher. “Making the survival of publications owned by media companies worth billions of dollars about individual subscribers just doesn’t make sense to me at all,” Hagi wrote.

Which is actually a conversation I’ve had more than few times about Garbage Day over the years! About every six-to-nine months, I’m approached by someone who either wants us to get outside investment or wants to invest or wants to buy it and the stopping block every time is: Well, what about the paid subs? And seems like most Money People in media right now don’t totally understand the psychology behind paid subscriptions and assume people would be just as happy to pay to support a newsletter owned by a big corporation as they would be a newsletter run, at least in my case, by Some Guy. And, well, it just doesn’t really work that way. Good luck to Pitchfork lol.

That Weird Reddit Mod Is Still Making Weird Videos

An extremely damp-looking former Reddit moderator that goes by u/stale2000 made a video after being removed as the mod for the subreddit r/livestreamfail. You can watch it on YouTube here. And, look, there are kinds of extremely self-serious weirdos that make the internet run, but this might be the most Reddit moderator-looking guy I could possibly imagine.

His videos — there’s a second one — are basically manifestos on both the power that Reddit moderators have and, also, somewhat confusingly, a personal request to Reddit CEO Steve Huffman to give him more support and, I assume, more power. He got booted from the subreddit after trying to integrate the subreddit into an event on Twitch. Users thought it was a payola scam to juice numbers on the stream.

TL;DR he’s mad he got removed as a mod and he wants Huffman to do something. Or as one YouTube commenter wrote, “Dude got fired while being unemployed 😂”

A Good Post

Some Stray Links

P.S. here’s insider trading and money laundering.

***Any typos in this email are on purpose actually***