Read Max

Greetings from Read Max HQ! This week’s newsletter is a podcast episode with John Ganz of Unpopular Front and Henry Farrell of Programmable Mutter. We talk about Henry’s recent Bloomberg article about “the tech industry’s reading list” and whether or not my four-year-old will ever encounter a Tootsie Roll pop advertisement, or indeed any advertising campaign at all.

Greetings from Read Max HQ! A bonus newsletter this week containing a podcast with John Ganz of Unpopular Front and Quinn Slobodian, Professor of International History at Boston University and author of the forthcoming Hayek’s B******s: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right. Among the topics discussed: Elon Musk, Donald Trump, Mark Zuckerberg, cryptocurrency, Las Vegas, and Jensen Huang’s leather jacket.

A reminder: Read Max is funded almost wholly by paying subscribers. I’m able to spend reading, thinking, researching, and yapping with John and Quinn thanks to the generosity of people who find this newsletter and its intermittent podcast component compelling enough to cough up $5/month or $50/year. If you find Read Max at all enlightening or entertaining--if you borrow some of these riffs and opinions to impress potential employers or romantic/sexual partners, say--please consider supporting my work for the price of about one beer a month.

Links

* Quinn’s piece on Musk can be found here.

* His book Hayek’s B******s: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right can be preordered here.

* I also recommend his previous books, Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism, and Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy.

* John’s newsletter Unpopular Front.

* John’s book When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s, recently nominated for a National Book Critics Circle award, can be found here.

* Ryan S. Jeffery’s piece on Jensen Huang and leather, discussed in the podcast, is at Do Not Research.

**Note that if you buy or pre-order any books through the Bookshop links found on this page I will receive a small payment.

Greetings from Read Max HQ! Today, to round out December before our annual year-end post, a podcast with John Ganz on the ascension of Elon Musk to shadow-president-via-shitposting.

On this episode we talk about the following books:

* Rated Agency: Investee Politics in a Speculative Age by Michael Feher (this is the one whose title we couldn’t remember)

* Speculative Communities: Living with Uncertainty in a Financialized World by Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou

* Immediacy: Or, the Style of Too Late Capitalism by Anna Kornbluh

Greetings from Read Max HQ! Ongoing request alert: I’m still looking for stories and examples of A.I. slop, wherever you encounter it: On platforms! In your workplace! On the subway! In the library! In the background of movies! I will take any and all anecdotes and samples of weird, shoddy, uncanny, annoying A.I. crap in your day to day life. If you have any good leads or stories, email me: [email protected]. I have gotten a bunch of good images and stories already and am eager for more! (And if you’ve sent something in I haven’t responded to your email to thank you--sorry!)

This week’s newsletter has two parts: First, a new collaborative episode of the Read Max Experimental Audio Product: a “crossover event” with (literal!) bestselling author John Ganz of Unpopular Front. Like me, Ganz is fascinated and repelled by the “tech right,” and has written some excellent pieces about its fascoid tendencies, and like me, Ganz has been engrossed by Trump’s selection of J.D. Vance as his running mate. We talked on Thursday afternoon about, among other things, “the vibe shift,” the different fractions of capital in the Valley, the presence-in-absence of Peter Thiel, and what’s going on with David Sacks and Marc Andreessen. You can listen above, or on any of the fine platforms where you find your podcasts.

Second, below you can read a short few paragraphs following up (triumphantly) on last week’s newsletter about Tyler Cowen’s “vibe shift” anti-cope.

A reminder: Read Max is almost fully funded by paying subscribers, who recognize and fairly compensate the mechanical and psychic labor it involves to read so many things about repellent people like J.D. Vance. If you like Read Max, which produces eight newsletters and between 15,000 and 20,000 words a month, about the same as you like “one cold beer at your local bar,” please consider becoming a paying subscriber, for the low, beer-like price of $5/month or $50/year.

The vibe shifted, again

Last week I wrote about the economist-blogger Tyler Cowen’s analysis of what at the time--in the wake of the assassination attempt on former president Trump and in the midst of the Republican National Convention at which Ohio Senator J.D. Vance was nominated as Trump’s running mate--appeared to be a major “vibe shift” in favor of Trump and an ascendant Silicon Valley right. Cowen elaborated 19 more-or-less structural reasons or causes for this vibe shift, among them “10. The Woke gambit has proven deeply unpopular.” and “6. The ongoing feminization of society has driven more and more men, including black and Latino men, into the Republican camp. The Democratic Party became too much the party of unmarried women.”

As I wrote at the time, Cowen’s list seemed too dependent on a reading of Twitter sentiment, rather than on a broader and more diverse survey of American public opinion(s), and as a consequence it sounded like

a kind of “anti-cope”--an attempt to rationalize and explain good news that might have been arbitrarily delivered and ultimately transient. Where “cope” is how you convince yourself it’s not actually so over, anti-cope is how you convince yourself that we’re so back for good this time, that we’re not just suffering another vibes volatility cycle, that there’s something more going on to success than “old guy + higher prices.” (Another word for cope and anti-cope is: Ideology.)

I wish a bit I’d held back and saved the topic for this week, since “the vibes” have unquestionably shifted yet again, happily proving my point, in the aftermath of President Biden’s resignation announcement and Vice President Kamala Harris’ assumption of the Democratic nomination: Democrats immediately raised a record-breaking amount of money, polls showed her in a dead heat with Trump, and Republicans began to anonymously complain about Vance.

Now, I could come up with a long, Cowen-like list explaining how and why the Twitter vibes have suddenly shifted (“1. Americans deeply dislike juiceless Silicon Valley podcast reactionaries of the kind that keep appearing at the RNC”). But this would just be making the same mistake: backfilling Twitter sentiment volatility with whatever structural or statistical (or simply “sounds-right”) rationalization I can lay my hands on. Have the vibes changed because “The Woke gambit” has now proven deeply popular, suddenly? Or were the vibes not really related to these broader structural shifts in ideology the first place and connected more superficially to candidate perception? Or were the vibes just doing what “vibes on Twitter” do, which is change, constantly?

Like I wrote last week: “It is the most volatile social network more or less by design and function”; all the optimism Democrats are feeling right now will be replaced by a sensation of doom and chaos at least once, and probably several times, between now and election day. (Just wait till Harris announces Josh Shapiro as her running mate!) You will not catch me attempting to account for those vibe shifts with anything but the most superficial analysis.

Greetings from Read Max HQ! Today’s Read Max Experimental Audio Product is a reading of this week’s newsletter, covering:

* Who is “Leopold Aschenbrenner,” and why is he suddenly a top A.I. influencer?; and

* A short history of the anti-woke finance grift, starring Bill Ackman and Vivek Ramaswamy.

A reminder: The Read Max Experimental Audio Product is supported entirely by paying readers. I’m able to spend time recording this podcast (and eventually moving it out of the “experimental” designation) because of the generosity of paying subscribers. If you enjoy having the newsletter read aloud every week, and you would price your enjoyment at $5 a month (one draft beer or Big Mac, roughly) or more, please consider signing up as a paid subscriber.

Greetings from Read Max HQ! In today’s experimental audio product:

* The Google “AI Overview” fiasco, why it was so funny/depressing, and what it tells us about Google

* A theory about the “All Eyes on Rafah” A.I.-generated Instagram image and why it (and not others) went viral

* My pick for “most dangerous app”

A reminder! We are still in the midst of a WEEK-LONG SALES EVENT, THE READ MAX PAY FOR MY SON’S SUMMER CAMP SPECIAL, during which Read Max subscriptions are a whopping 20 percent off. This event ends on SUNDAY, which leaves you only a precious few hours to simultaneously save money and also help me obtain childcare for my son for July so I can continue shitposting as a career.

Greetings from Read Max HQ! In today’s Read Max Experimental Audio Product, I’ll be reading from this week’s newsletter on two items:

* A critical exploration of this week’s announcements from OpenAI and Google, and why I think the new Google search stuff sucks.

* Looking at The New Yorker’s Lucy Letby story as a story about media in the U.S. and the U.K.

In addition to the embed above, the podcast can be found on Apple Podcasts here, as well as many other popular podcast platforms. It can also technically be found on Spotify but I recommend you do not find it there.

If you enjoy the Read Max Experimental Audio Product, please consider subscribing to Read Max, a broadly beloved twice-weekly newsletter guide to the future. Read Max’s independent reporting and criticism is funded almost entirely by paying subscribers, whose generosity is matched only by their mental illness.

Greetings from Read Max HQ! In today’s episode of the Read Max Podcast--an experimental audio product in which I read the text of the newsletter for busy and/or illiterate subscribers--we’ll be covering the following:

* What the f**k is up with this weird f*****g recipe video? And what can it tell us about the effect of A.I. on social media?

* Miami watch: Zoomer con-man package-return scam edition

* Celebrating the insane Bitcoin guy who spoke at OSU commencement and made everyone there sing 4 Non Blondes

In addition to the embed above, the podcast can be found on Apple Podcasts here, as well as many other popular podcast platforms. It can also technically be found on Spotify but I recommend you do not find it there.

If you enjoy the Read Max Experimental Audio product please consider subscribing to Read Max, a broadly beloved twice-weekly newsletter guide to the future. Read Max’s independent reporting and criticism is funded almost entirely by paying subscribers, whose generosity is matched only by their mental illness.

Greetings from Read Max HQ, and please, enjoy this, the second episode of the Read Max Experimental Audio Product--a “podcast”-style reading of this week’s newsletter. In addition to the embed above, the podcast can be found on Apple Podcasts here, as well as many other popular podcast platforms. It can also technically be found on Spotify but I recommend you do not find it there. On the podcast, as well as in this newsletter, I am discussing two items drawn from this week’s newsletter:

* A.I.-generated audio: What is it good for? What is it even good at? And in what ways will it make all of our lives worse?

* Marques Brownlee, the last great gadget blogger

The Read Max podcast is free for all readers/listeners. If you enjoy it, or if you enjoy any of the various the Read Max non-audio products, please considering subscribing and helping to fund this unique blend of independent journalism, mediocre jokes, middling ideas, and amateurish execution.

Greetings from Read Max HQ! I’m very pleased to publish this “experimental Read Max audio product,” which is to say a podcast of me reading this week’s newsletter--with some of the classic off-the-cuff riffing you’ve come to associate with the Read Max brand identity 😎.

In addition to the embed above, the podcast can be found on Apple Podcasts here, or Overcast. It can also technically be found on Spotify but I recommend you do not find it there. On the podcast, as well as in this newsletter, I am discussing two items:

* The current crisis in Hollywood, the danger posed to the time-wasting industry, and the 2001 baseball romance Summer Catch.

* The secret origins of Twitter power user and political candidate Will Stancil.

A reminder: Read Max is my main source of income and producing it every week is a full-time job. If you find it informative, entertaining, or even just a halfway decent way to kill time, please consider becoming a paying subscriber, at the astonishingly cheap rate of $5/month or $50/year (roughly the cost of buying me a couple Snickers bars every month). Paying subscribers not only improve their karmic standing and transmit goodwill throughout the world, they also get access to the popular weekly reading roundup and recommendations email, where I spotlight overlooked books, movies, and music that are often but not always concerned with the ideas and themes of this newsletter (i.e., the future, the internet, samurais, etc.)

Greetings from Read Max HQ in rain-soaked Brooklyn, N.Y.! Today, an emergency experiment: a solo podcast. I was prepared to offer a column today on the A.I. provisions of the Writers Guild of America contract, but our downstairs neighbors’ apartment flooded, my son’s after-school has been canceled, and my wife is trapped in Yonkers (??), which means that my ability to gather my notes together and produce the kind of finely wrought, sparklingly witty, fully error-free newsletter to which you have all become so accustomed is limited. So instead, I sat in my closet and recorded myself talking through the notes I already had, producing what I hope is an at least vaguely coherent riff on the subject, since I know many readers (or, in this case, listeners) will RIOT if they don’t get their weekly dose of b******t from me. I’m sorry for the messiness of production and the various trailing lines of thought; there are already a bunch of things I wish I hadn’t said or had said differently, but that’s the charm of the exciting world of audio podcasts! Anyway, if you’re not really a podcast person there should be an automatically produced transcript, which I will try to clean up at some point. Stay dry out there!

Read Max, in its capacity as a newsletter and as a hastily assembled podcast, is an endeavor supported entirely by the generosity of paying readers. Please subscribe!

Greetings from Read Max temporary HQ in Downeast Maine! This week’s newsletter is an experiment: A podcast, featuring my old friend Katie Notopoulos, who was, briefly, the editor-in-chief of Meta, Inc.’s “Threads” product.

Katie Notopoulos is a former Buzzfeed News writer and host of the late lamented Internet Explorer podcast, but for the purposes of this show her most important qualification is that she is one of the finest shitposters to grace the contemporary internet. Katie (as she explains in the episode) now also has the honor of being the first person to ever be “ratioed” on Threads, after she claimed to be the “editor-in-chief” of the Threads platform and was shocked to find that a significant number of people actually believed her.

We discuss that episode, and more, on the podcast. Some selections:

On the Threads celebrity/meme account land grab

I think what’s happening across all the celebrity accounts, all the meme accounts, is that there is, like, intense engagement. It’s a land grab right now. Obviously, like, if you're JLo, and you had -- I mean, I don't even have a sense of scale, of how many hundreds of millions of fans she had on Instagram, [but] a large portion of those will port over, right? But also, because it's only an algorithmic feed right now you have a very good chance of getting in front of anyone's eyeballs if you get enough engagement juice. So there's just tons of this engagement bait stuff going on with like, open ended questions.

On Threads as next hope for celebrities who can’t make it on TikTok

I have this theory that those kinds of celebrities who had quit Twitter long ago, but they're not quite TikTok celebrities -- someone like a JLo, or Paris Hilton, who are kind of stuck in the Instagram era. Those people also skew slightly older, but there are a lot of celebrities who are just not TikTok celebrities, because that's its own special skill set. You have to be, like, funny and weird and really authentic on TikTok in a way that, other than Will Smith, I don't think any mainstream celebrity has really [achieved]. You know, like, the Kardashians aren't really big on TikTok, right? Like, they're very much Instagram celebrities. And I think that those people probably know that Instagram is sort of declining. People who have made a lot of money and are very attuned to these social things can tell that the winds are changing. And so if there's a new platform, especially if it's going to be more tied to their Instagram, even if text is not their, like, best format, they're like, Yeah, let's pump it, let's go, like, gotta cling to this. Like, it's, they're seeing this as sort of like a life raft off of Instagram, or to keep the Instagram juice going. Because otherwise they're gonna fade into irrelevance when TikTok takes over everything.

On making history on Threads

One thing that I found really interesting about the experience was that a key feature that does not exist on Threads is you can repost -- essentially a retweet or quote tweet -- but you don't see that count, and you don't get notifications about it. So when you have something like this post that went viral I could see I was getting a lot of replies to it, but I could not see how it was spreading. And that's a very interesting, weird dynamic when you're trying to figure out a piece of content that's very specifically like this. If you've ever had something that goes weirdly viral on Twitter, and you're like, Huh, what's going on there? Usually, you can kind of figure it out by like, oh, well, I see that this one really big account retweeted it. […] And you can't even totally figure out how successful [it is]. It becomes that likes are the only metric for success, which... I mean, I'd like to give myself the credit here of believing that I am the first person to be ratioed on threads. […] It's a little tricky, because without that retweet count I don't totally know. I do know that I got more replies than I did likes.