A start on an index of useful articles:
A lively and accessible introduction to the Bostrom-ish argument that artificial superintelligence is plausible, and why the prospect is scarier than it might first appear.
An argument that the Bostrom-ish vision of superintelligence is a seductive mirage.
To support my index of resources about neoreaction and adjacent far right movements which overlap with “tech” culture, I have taken the liberty of capturing commentaries from other people tucked into Xitter & Facebook. These are not quite the same as my reading, but both are illuminating in exploring how “tech” executive culture itself understands the shift. Emphasis in quotes are the authors’, not mine.
Why are they doing this? What’s motiving the techno-feudalists (Musk, Thiel, Vance, Andreessen and their minions) to wreck our country and tank the economy?
I’ve subjected myself to hours of YouTube interviews and dozens of screeds by the tech overlords and their high priests. They have made no effort to hide their motivations. This is my attempt at a basic synthesis of how they explain their shift from neo-liberals to Trumpists:
(Edited: As Mike Puma and Frits Abell have commented, the over-arching motivation is to make the state a profit center for themselves through privatization, subsidies and contracts, just like the post-Soviet oligarchical takeover in Russia.)
A couple of supporting links from JK:
- Blockchain in 10 minutes — my no-math primer on the tech behind cryptocurrencies
- The Twin Insurgency — my single favorite examination of What Is Going On, addressing that final point about the plutocrats & criminals trying to hollow out and exploit state capacity
Here’s a 4-part grand theory of the tech right.
First, there is a unique “tech disposition”. David E. Broockman and Neil Malhotra surveyed 700 founders:
First, technology entrepreneurs are far from monolithically conservative; rather, they overwhelmingly support Democrats. This is not an artifact of our survey sample: campaign contributions from technology industry employees and ultra-wealthy technology entrepreneurs to Democrats have long exceeded those to Republicans. Although it is not surprising that individual wealthy Democrats exist, we show that the wealthy in an entire industry support the party pushing for higher taxes, deviating from the norm among the wealthy at large.
However, our findings are not so simple as that most technology entrepreneurs are liberals. Our second group of findings is that most technology entrepreneurs share a particular set of views across policy domains; that this set is conservative on many issues; and that this set is distinctive to technology entrepreneurs, being rare among other wealthy individuals, other Democrats, and other wealthy Democrats. In particular, on issues related to economic redistribution, globalization, and social issues, technology entrepreneurs are typically as or more liberal than Democratic citizens, Democratic wealthy individuals, and Democratic donors; they are also more liberal on all these issues than millionaires in the mass public. For example, 82% of technology entrepreneurs indicate support for universal healthcare even if it means raising taxes. However, technology entrepreneurs are very skeptical of government regulation. Indeed, technology entrepreneurs’ views on regulation closely resemble those of Republican donors, and are more conservative from those of other millionaires in the mass public, Democratic citizens, and wealthy Democrats. For example, 82% of technology entrepreneurs also think the government should make it easier to fire workers. These large differences persist even between technology entrepreneurs who identify as Democrats and other Democratic constituencies.
This finding is surprising in light of popular accounts that describe technology entrepreneurs as falling within categories familiar in American politics: as typically liberal, typically conservative, or typically libertarian. However, we show that most technology entrepreneurs have a pattern of views that does not fit in any of these categories, has not been seen elsewhere, and is not predicted by prior work: a majority of technology entrepreneurs explicitly describe their views as supporting redistribution of wealth but opposing regulation of business, approximately double the share as in any other group of citizens, donors, or wealthy individuals we surveyed.
[ Sun’s thread includes screencaps from what appears to be a slightly different version of the linked paper; I have quoted the corresponding section of the paper I have access to — JK ]Our third set of findings concerns suggestive evidence for the theoretical mechanisms we posit for why technology entrepreneurs have this unique pattern of views. Our theoretical argument, elaborated below, is that the wealthy from a particular industry may have a unique set of political views because of the distinctive set of political predispositions of the individuals who select into each industry, and further, the experiences they will tend to have working in it. Consistent with this argument, we show that technology entrepreneurs share a distinct pattern of values and predispositions that correspond with their views in related policy domains. For example, with a series of pre-registered comparisons and survey experiments, we show that it appears technology entrepreneurs’ opposition to government regulation can be traced to positive predispositions towards markets and entrepreneurship. We also cast doubt on alternative explanations for their views related to demographics, geography, and pure self-interest.
Mark Andreessen’s recent [New York Times] interview with Ross Douhat is very illuminating. Andreessen describes this exact disposition: “pay taxes, support gay rights, get praised” was the implicit deal of the Clinton-Gore era:
As a result of that, the most natural thing in the world for somebody like me was, “Oh, of course, I’m a normie Democrat. I’ll be a normie Democrat forever.”
Normie Democrat is what I call the Deal, with a capital D. Nobody ever wrote this down; it was just something everybody understood: You’re me, you show up, you’re an entrepreneur, you’re a capitalist, you start a company, you grow a company, and if it works, you make a lot of money. And then the company itself is good because it’s bringing new technology to the world that makes the world a better place, but then you make a lot of money, and you give the money away. Through that, you absolve yourself of all of your sins.
Then in your obituary, it talks about what an incredible person you were, both in your business career and in your philanthropic career. And by the way, you’re a Democrat, you’re pro–gay rights, you’re pro-abortion, you’re pro all the fashionable and appropriate social causes of the time. There are no trade-offs. This is the Deal.
Then, of course, everybody knows Republicans are just knuckle-dragging racists. It was taken as given that there was going to be this great relationship. And of course, it worked so well for the Democratic Party. Clinton and Gore sailed to a re-election in ’96. And the Valley was locked in for 100 years to come to be straight-up conventional blue Democrat.
Yes, 100 percent. I would say even more than that. We all voluntarily live in California. We not only have the federal dimension of what you’re saying; we also live in these very high-tax cities — San Francisco, Palo Alto. And I think by paying higher taxes and not objecting to them, you prove you’re a good person. For that generation of enlightened centrist liberals, it was: Of course you pay higher taxes, because we’re the Democratic Party. As an agent of positive social change, of course you want to have a bigger safety net. Of course you want to fund all these programs, and you want to fund all these activist campaigns. Of course you want that.
The term “Camelot” was never used, but there was a Camelot feeling to it at the time that people must have felt in the early ’60s in the same way. Like, wow, yes, it’s all happening, and it’s all going to happen, and it’s going to be great. Yeah, they’re going to tax us, but it’s going to pay off. That was like a full-fledged part of the Deal.
Look, quite honestly, I am trying in none of this to claim moral high ground or moral sheen or anything, just to kind of take the edge off that, if that’s what I’ve come across.
Quite honestly, the tax rates didn’t really matter because when an internet company worked, it grew so fast and got so valuable that if you worked another three years, say, you’d make another 10X. Another 5 percent higher tax rate washed out in the numbers. So we weren’t forced to really think that hard about it. It just seemed like this was the formula that would result in everything working.
Second, social justice fused with labor, nonprofits, & the state — fueling a wave of employee activism and speech / DEI / climate requirements. Structural issues demanded process solutions. Tech’s hatred of bureaucracy trumped their support for social justice.
See again the Douhat interview with Andreessen:
Andreessen
By 2013, the median newly arrived Harvard kid was like: “[expletive] it. We’re burning the system down. You are all evil. White people are evil. All men are evil. Capitalism is evil. Tech is evil.”
Douthat
But they’re working for you. These are people who are working for you.
Andreessen
Of course. So I had this moment with a senior executive, who I won’t name, but he said to me with a sense of dawning horror, “I think some of these kids are joining the company not with the intent of doing things for us but destroying us.”
They’re professional activists in their own minds, first and foremost. And it just turns out the way to exercise professional activism right now, most effectively, is to go and destroy a company from the inside. All-hands meetings started to get very contentious. Where you’d get berated at an all-hands meeting as a C.E.O., where you’d have these extremely angry employees show up and they were just completely furious about how there’s way too many white men on the management team. “Why are we a for-profit corporation? Don’t you know all the downstream horrible effects that this technology is having? We need to spend unlimited money in order to make sure that we’re not emitting any carbon.”
See comments from Paul Graham:
For the press there was money in wokeness. But they weren’t the only ones. That was one of the biggest differences between the two waves of political correctness: the first was driven almost entirely by amateurs, but the second was often driven by professionals. For some it was their whole job. By 2010 a new class of administrators had arisen whose job was basically to enforce wokeness. They played a role similar to that of the political commissars who got attached to military and industrial organizations in the USSR: they weren't directly in the flow of the organization’s work, but watched from the side to ensure that nothing improper happened in the doing of it. These new administrators could often be recognized by the word “inclusion” in their titles. Within institutions this was the preferred euphemism for wokeness; a new list of banned words, for example, would usually be called an “inclusive language guide.”
This new class of bureaucrats pursued a woke agenda as if their jobs depended on it, because they did. If you hire people to keep watch for a particular type of problem, they’re going to find it, because otherwise there’s no justification for their existence. But these bureaucrats also represented a second and possibly even greater danger. Many were involved in hiring, and when possible they tried to ensure their employers hired only people who shared their political beliefs. The most egregious cases were the new “DEI statements” that some universities started to require from faculty candidates, proving their commitment to wokeness. Some universities used these statements as the initial filter and only even considered candidates who scored high enough on them. You’re not hiring Einstein that way; imagine what you get instead.
Third, Dems started to pivot away from key Clintonite ideas:
Henry Farrell calls this the collapse of both the “neoliberal” and “Palo Alto consensus”:
If that has changed, it is not simply because progressives have moved away from Silicon Valley. It is because both the neoliberal consensus and the Palo Alto consensus have collapsed, leading the political economies of Washington DC and Silicon Valley to move in very different directions.
A lot of attention has been paid to the intellectual and political collapse of neoliberalism. This really got going thanks to Trump, but it transformed the organizing ideas of the Democratic coalition too. During the Trump era, card-carrying Clintonites like Jake Sullivan became convinced that old ideas about minimally regulated markets and trade didn’t make much sense any more. Domestically, they believed that the “China shock” had hollowed out America’s industrial heartland, opening the way for Trump style populism. Reviving U.S. manufacturing and construction might be facilitated through a “Green New Deal” that would both allow the U.S. to respond effectively to climate change, and revive the physical economy. Internationally, they believed that China was a direct threat to U.S. national security, as it caught up with the U.S. on technology, industrial capacity and ability to project military force. Finally, they believed that U.S. elites had become much too supine about economic power, allowing the U.S. economy to become dominated by powerful monopolies. New approaches to antitrust were needed to restrain platform companies which had gotten out of control. Unions would be Democrats’ most crucial ally in bringing back the working class.
Now they don’t. Authoritarian governments have turned out to be quite adept for the time being, not just at suppressing dissidence but at using these technologies for their own purposes. Platforms like Facebook have been used to mobilize ethnic violence around the world, with minimal pushback from the platform’s moderation systems, which were built on the cheap and not designed to deal with a complex world where people could do horrible things in hundreds of languages. And there are now a lot of people who think that Silicon Valley platforms are bad for stability in places like the U.S. and Western Europe where democracy was supposed to be consolidated.
My surmise is that this shift in beliefs has undermined the core ideas that held the Silicon Valley coalition together. Specifically, it has broken the previously ‘obvious’ intimate relationship between innovation and liberalism.
I don’t see anyone arguing that Silicon Valley innovation is the best way of spreading liberal democratic awesome around the world any more, or for keeping it up and running at home. Instead, I see a variety of arguments for the unbridled benefits of innovation, regardless of its benefits for democratic liberalism. I see a lot of arguments that AI innovation in particular is about to propel us into an incredible new world of human possibilities, provided that it isn’t restrained by DEI, ESG and other such nonsense. Others (or the same people) argue that we need to innovate, innovate, innovate because we are caught in a technological arms race with China, and if we lose, we’re toast. Others (sotto or brutto voce; again, sometimes the same people) - contend innovation isn’t really possible in a world of democratic restraint, and we need new forms of corporate authoritarianism with a side helping of exit, to allow the kinds of advances we really need to transform the world.
The Biden admin was far more pro-unions, tech regulation & antitrust. Dems probably needed to adjust (neoliberalism isn’t popular), but this broke the tech / liberal coalition — they were seen as abandoning business to back the activist class.
Douhat
So what, in concrete terms, does that mean? What are the policies that shocked or surprised you about the Biden administration?
Andreessen
They came for business in a very broad-based way. Everything that I’m going to describe also, it turns out, I found out later, it happened in the energy industry. And I think it happened in a bunch of other industries, but the C.E.O.s felt like they couldn’t talk about it.
The problem is the raw application of the power of the administrative state, the raw application of regulation and then the raw arbitrary enforcement and promulgation of regulation. It was increasing insertion into basic staffing. Government-mandated enforcement of D.E.I. in very destructive ways. Some of these agencies have their own in-house courts, which is bananas. Also just straight-up threats and bullying.
Mark Zuckerberg just talked about this on “Rogan.” Direct phone calls from senior members of the administration. Screaming executives ordering them to do things. Just full-on “[Expletive] you. We own you. We control you. You’re going to do what we want or we’re going to destroy you.”
Then they just came after crypto. Absolutely tried to kill us.
As President Trump begins his second term, he has the support of many business leaders, especially the entrepreneurs and founders who make up the ascendant ‘tech right.’ Why did this faction emerge and rally behind the president? Some point to policy issues such as regulation, taxation, government contracting, and antitrust. Others note that self-interest and perhaps self-preservation motivate its members as much as principle or policy.
But sincere converts to the tech right share at least one thing in common: a belief in founders — change agents capable of upending stale industries — taking on Goliaths, and reaching into the future to unite it to the present. The tech right sees founders, and the qualities they embody and inspire in others, as the key to company success. Conversely, founder-less institutions don’t work, like a body without a head — or perhaps, without a soul.
With its support of Trump, the tech right is just applying this model to politics, the ultimate stale industry, and Washington, D.C., the ultimate Goliath. In Donald Trump, the tech right and the American people see a leader. More to the point, we see a founder.
There were other contributing factors: post-2016 techlash, defense money, mean journalists, COVID, plain old opportunism in the new Trump admin. Vocal Trump support from Andreessen, Sacks, Musk ignited a preference cascade.
But I maintain that SV elites’ deepest commitment is not right or left, but to unfettered innovation (& the wealth / growth that results). It’s the spirit of “get out of my way & let me cook” — they’ll align with whichever party makes that possible.
My overall thought on the sort of cultural versus material debate is like, the left liberal camp still underrates the cultural stuff. I think you're right that considering the counterfactual, would Zuckerberg be being like, “Meta is too feminine now” if Kamala won — obviously no. At the same time, when I read PG’s essay, I was like, oh, this is a complaint about bureaucracy as much as it’s a complaint about politics.
It's this cultural thing of builders in, prigs out. There are all these memes like “high agency” or “founder mode” or “live players” or “you can just do things.” My friend Clara, who edits Asterisk Magazine, was telling me about some conference where someone called it “Robert Moses libertarianism.” What does that even mean? And I think this is incoherent, except for that Moses was really going founder mode. He was a high agency guy. He’s very effective, right? And there is some disposition where tech, because it is the industry of innovators and disruptors, is just like: Anybody who’s super effective and hacks the system, whether it's from the inside or the outside, whether it's in tech or in politics, they get that respect.
That relates to why I see progress as like the primary coalition rather than like left or right. Or as Lonsdale calls it, the “builder class.” There is economic self-interest, obviously, but it’s also an aesthetic preference.
Another consequence is that this is causing real rifts between maga right and tech right — most notably over H1-B, but IMO that’s a sign of more fights to come.
The more traditional conservatives — not Hanania, that is — go on to express skepticism about the “Tech Right”’s lack of a moral compass (of the Christian sort); its willingness to endure short-term social harms for long-term economic gains; and its overall bias toward disruption — whatever chaos may come. They’re suspicious of tech’s talk about “human capital” and its flirtations with fascism. The essays read like a warning to fellow reactionaries: Can the tech titans be trusted to preserve American values? Or are they riding the Trump train on the way to a robot-ruled transhumanist utopia? Take slogans like Accelerate or die! — there’s nothing “conservative” about it.
My friend Zed Lopez has bravely attempted to create a clarified introduction to Steve Jackson’s tabletop roleplaying game GURPS — “the generic universal roleplaying system”. (Cue joke based on Voltaire’s famous snarky comment about the Holy Roman Empire.)
This is a tutorial for GURPS 4th edition. If you have basic familiarity with tabletop RPGs but are new to GURPS, this is for you. I hope it will provide the basic GURPS literacy [⋯] to convey GURPS’ concepts, but ultimately won’t present a playable game. [⋯]
We’ll begin with an extremely barebone set of rules and then add things a few at a time. In service of simplicity, I’ll say a few things I’ll take back or qualify later. A lot of things I’ll qualify later, but I’ll keep to a minimum the things I take back altogether.
Lengthy, carefully-considered, and headings are nicely witty where opportunity presents.
Over on Bluesky, my internet friendquaintance Dr. Damien P. Williams snarked a reference to the TV series The Good Place:
Current position on the Chidi Anagonye Anxiety Brain Scale:
“The Sound that a Fork Makes in the Garbage Disposal”
It inspired me to make a silly meme image:
I am proud of my little creation. Assembling it and seeing the two ends of the scale gave me an unnervingly useful realization.
If you don’t know the show, it is one of the best TV series ever made.
It is hard for me to speak to what it may be like to come to Buffy The Vampire Slayer for the first time now. Both its themes and its craft were breakthroughs in its time, but may seem less inspired now that so many later works have learned from it. I recommend it anyway.
Thematically, Buffy successfully realizes immense ambitions: a meditation on adolescence and feminist understandings of culture, intentionally crafted to create a cultural phenomenon among teenagers. The feminism is awkward in places — it was addressing a different moment, could not learn from its own flaws and failings, and has some conceptual problems — but is legit. Even at its weakest, it is pretty darned good, and at its best it can be breathtaking.
The craft has several strengths, many of which were breakthroughs at the time which may be hard to see given so many later works which learned from its moves. It very directly draws from a broad range of genre sources — mostly horror and fantasy — to explore allegorical questions. To make that work without feeling forced, it artfully mixes tones of humor, horror, action, drama, and melodrama. And it was the first series on broadcast television to exercise the format to at once tell self-contained episodic stories and use the big canvas of the season arc to tell a more sophisticated story and use the huge canvas of the whole series to explore its big themes.
So when David Simon cheekily says that Buffy ranks above his masterpiece The Wire, I believe he is largely talking about its place in the history of TV. I am not sure that I can agree with him that it is the best TV series ever made, but I cannot think of another series which advanced the art so dramatically.
I have been through the whole series a few times — it is comfort viewing for me — and every time I watch an episode I see new things.
If you don’t mind mild spoilers and want to try before you buy, watch these episodes:
A friend of mine, a cis woman I admire, posted this meme image.
With all due respect, its caption is a crock of shit.
Forgive me for sounding harsh. But … c’mon.
Men are rewarded, not punished, for violating gendered behavior norms? Really?
All men could do what a handsome movie star with professional-grade dance training & talent did? Really?
I live my life joyfully violating “traditional” masculinity in numerous ways. I strongly advocate other fellas doing the same, both for the world’s sake and their own. But that has had costs. I have experienced how belief in dogma is far from the only thing holding men back. I have experienced how that dogma itself is far from fragile.
My friend knows she lacks direct lived experience of how people assigned male at birth experience The Patriarchy, but I know for a fact that she has significant indirect experience of how vigorously The Patriarchy enforces gendered norms on us. I think that if she had reflected for a moment, she would have realized that the meme was saying something absurd. But feminist-informed social justice advocacy culture is irresponsibly sloppy in the way we talk about this stuff.
(I say “we” because I myself am guilty of this all too often.)
When we say these kinds of things to men, all too often this discredits our entire movements. Consider how commentary like that meme lands for the very men we should most try to address, fellas chafing against the masculine norms projected by The Patriarchy without language to describe their frustrations. Not only don’t we know what the heck we are talking about, our misunderstanding is so perversely wrong that we implicitly cast blame on individual men for responding to the pressures of The Patriarchy. We assert that men are delusional about those pressures!
It is doubly galling for women to make these claims about mens’ experiences and conditions. Feminist women should know better than to make that mistake.
We must keep in mind that men bear moral responsibility to overthrow The Patriarchy without women having to lift a finger. But pragmatically, we know that men need help. Too often feminist culture does the opposite. Fergawdsake let’s stop shooting ourselves in the foot.
And let’s not deny Mr. Holland credit for doing something gutsy and difficult.
I have heard it suggested that Tom Cotton might be the next charismatic Republican leader, and I think y’all have some serious misunderstandings about the aesthetics of fascism.
It’s gonna be Josh Hawley. He always looks like he’s about to bust out into a chorus of “Tomorrow Belongs To Me.”
Guys no.
The fascist aesthetic is not “interchangeable scrawny white guy in a suit.” Where’s the perversity in your appeal?
Do I have to spell out the aesthetic? The fash strongman has to embody masculinity, but not in a way that offers an unobtainable ideal. So: not too pretty/athletic. Maybe once in his prime, but if so, definitely gone to pasture a bit. Can’t quite be a dweeb, which is why Carlson had to put on weight before he could play the part and why Ted Cruz needs to lose that ridiculous Roger Delgado beard. You want manly, but not actually attractive. Slightly unkempt is good for this.
Again, what’s important is a perverse appeal. Fugly, as the kids used to say. A charisma that stubbornly defies observable reality.
This [Dan Crenshaw] is a damn fascist strongman.
Tucker [Carlson] absolutely has the it. You’d have crowds of angry screaming men wearing bowties. Matt Smith would be the new Pepe. Genuinely nightmarish.
Women have a hard time with the fash aesthetic, which is too misogynistic for them to thrive at the top. [Sarah] Palin came closest because, again, perversity.
Dan Bongino is probably the one figure that i’d be most alarmed to hear was mounting an exploratory committee.
Dark horse, but … Yeah, that’s the look.
Re: Trump Jr, nah. Can’t make lightning strike twice.
Peter Theil or Elon Musk?
Good lord no.
the Hillbilly Elegy guy [JD Vance]
Maaaaybe. But I doubt it. Too much “it’s ok, sometimes puberty is just really late” energy. (As distinct from Carlson, which is “look, puberty doesn’t work out for everyone and that’s OK.” Which works. Fascist masculinity is a subtle beast.)
Oh Well, no Carl of Swindon candidate on the cards then. What about The Rock though? He’s known as a republican right? I couldn’t see him as fash himself but maybe as an easy backdoor useful idiot for a fash establishment?
This overcorrects into “too attractive.” Men need to idolize but also plausibly aspire to.
The “completely made up set of medals” thing is 💯💯💯 — [Sheriff David] Clarke has the exact right fragile masculinity for fascism, which is to say one that is utterly oblivious to its fragility.
Someone said Matt Walsh, and guys, you cannot simply beard your way out of dweebhood.
Ben Sasse … I see where you’re going but I don’t think you’re quite there.
Weev demonstrates that there is such a thing as overdoing it.
I am seduced by hype for James Gunn’s forthcoming Superman film and want to capture a thought about the music.
If you have seen any of Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy movies, you know that he is shameless and effective in using music.
This week, to hype the movie, first they released a “motion poster”, which is ordinarily a hokey marketing thing.
I was among the nerds surprised to have feelings about it, because of something very cunning going on the music. Moviebob, my favorite pop-geekculture media commentator, said earnestly:
This particular filmmaker understands what he’s been handed with this character at this moment, to do something very special and transcendent and important.
For a slightly-animated image with one minute of music?
Well, the music starts with the barest hint of Hans Zimmer’s Superman theme from Zach Snyder’s Superman films, featuring Henry Cavill as Superman.
Snyder’s films have some charms — that score among them — but I am among those who deeply hate them as misunderstanding what Superman is about. They even got Superman’s hair wrong, which sounds like a small thing but I think it is actually important. Snyder give us a “gritty”, pessimistic Superman, which is just plain wrong.
So I heard a Message from Gunn in how after that whisper of Zimmer, it turns to a new arrangement of John Williams’ Superman March from the films featuring Christopher Reeve as Superman.
Hope. Joy. Fun. Sunshine.
That’s what hooked me, and Moviebob, and plenty of other nerds.
And then, because everything is marketing decadence, the following day there was … not a proper trailer, not even a teaser trailer, but a teaser for the teaser trailer. It did the same thing with the music again! And the theme sure as heck was hope, with the tagline “look up”.
I am a sentimental nerd and I watched this a lot of times. And I noticed a second thing about the music, which reminded me of another John Williams theme dear to my nerdy heart: the Force theme from Williams’ opera cycle Star Wars, which I think is the best work of Williams’ amazing career as a film composer.
I think that part of the secret of the Force theme is that Williams never completes it. It always just drifts off, unresolved, producing a feeling of longing, most apparent in its use with young Luke gazing into Tattooine’s binary sunset in the original Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope.
The music for both the Superman poster and the teaser-teaser did that same thing, not quite finishing the Superman March.
So I made a prediction. We know that Gunn’s movie will not just re-use Williams’ score and themes; Gunn has described his excitement at the original score that composer John Murphy has created. But I think the use of Williams’ theme is not just for this marketing material. I expect the score for the new film to sprinkle it in at key places … and every time it will tug at our heartstrings by not completing it. After the teaser-teaser, I imagined that Gunn might even defer completing the Williams’ “Superman March” to a later film.
But then we got the full teaser trailer, including yet another new arrangement of Williams’ theme.
And I am a sentimental nerd and watched that a lot of times. If you want to see a bunch of nerdy adults feeling like kids again, YouTube is full of people recording themselves watching it. Music is not the only thing hooking us — there is a lot going on in two almost-wordless minutes — but it plays a big part.
It seems at first that this trailer completes the Williams theme, but it actually stops just short of that, hiding what it is doing under a crescendo echoing Superman whistling in the middle of the trailer. Given the context, that delivers all the warmth and hope one could ask for. But. It is not quite the same thing as closing the theme.
This makes me pretty sure that I was right about the forthcoming film toying with us by using Williams’ March without completing it.
I’m going to place a marker on an even more specific prediction. We will finally get the March completed over the last shot of Gunn’s film, when the story has earned it. Then the closing titles will start, and just as the 1978 Superman film opened with a proper overture over the titles, turning from the horns of the March to strings and such playing out all of the musical leitmotifs (starting at 2:15 in this capture of those titles), so too the closing titles of Gunn’s 2025 Superman will transition smoothly to all that film’s themes. I bet there will even be a bit more of Williams in there.
I also predict that Gunn’s Superman is going to make me cry like a baby. He understands the assignment.
Capturing a long-running Twitter thread about weird flags flown by the far right in the US.
This started when I needed a flag image for another long thread of mine about American fascist iconography more broadly —
We should not pretend that we do not know what these signify.
This flag started my quest, because I had seen it obliquely in photos of a pro-Trump street action. What, precisely, do Trump and police “keep America safe” from? Fascism promises to rescue the nation from corrupting influences. Followers don’t need to say who.
The personality cult of Trump inclines toward fascism. He is the nation.
A fantasy of Trump as hyper-masculine hyper-violent warlord, in defiance of democratic institutions.
Trump as a Totenkopf symbol of a literal supervillain, representing ruthless vigilante violence against those he sees as corrupting society. This is also, perversely, reflective of support for police violence, as police have embraced the Punisher skull.
The anti-democratic impulse laid bare. Note that the rifle-bearing knights which flank King Trump evoke the Crusades, an image favored by the far right to reflect the need for war for “Western values” …
To much of the far right, the truth behind the nation is revealed to be Christianity, as manifested specifically with American Evangelical imagery. The claim that the fundamental truth of the nation is Christianity is fascist Christian Nationalism.
The Hospitallers’ Cross reflects the far right’s fascination with symbols of the Crusades, hunger to “defend” with violence “the West” against foreign corruption encroaching on what they claim to be their territory. Para-fascist sentiments again.
It is tempting to laugh at a variation on that theme like this and dismiss it, but it is important to recognize a pattern here. Not all kitsch is fascist, but one should recognize how the fascist sensibility is attracted to kitschy & schmaltzy over-sentimental imagery, and they enjoy how the leftish intellectuals they hate dislike it.
A lot of these flags include a reference to the Thin Blue Line flag, representing “support for police” in opposition to the Black Lives Matter movement.
Jacob said the flag was not a direct reaction to the first Black Lives Matter protests — an idea suggested by a previous origin story in Harper’s — but he allows he may have first seen the thin blue line image after those protests spurred the circulation of pro-police imagery online. “That’s maybe why it came to my eyes,” he said.
As Jacob built the company, a “Blue Lives Matter” movement was growing in the wake of news stories of multiple officers shot to death in Baton Rouge, Louisiana; Brooklyn, New York; and Dallas, Texas. Meanwhile, Donald Trump, as a presidential candidate, called police “the force between civilization and total chaos.”
Harper’s has a (paywalled) article about the developing symbolism of the Thin Blue flag from the indispensible Jeff Sharlet. Antifascist leftist Gwen Snyder wrote a Twitter thread outlining the cultural politics well:
So the blue line has always been a combination of funereal and problematic.
It’s Friday night and I’m going off memory and a little wikipedia for this, so don’t take this thread as high-level research, but here’s the deal in broad strokes.
To understand why the thin blue line is problematic, you kinda have to grok why American policing is problematic.
American police forces essentially have their roots in a combination of slave patrols and, to a lesser extent, strikebreaking forces.
Policing was an institution designed to violently enforce inequity on behalf of capital. As #blm made clear again, that dynamic that persists.
The imagery of the blue line comes from a 1911 poem praising the blue-uniformed police as holding down a “thin blue line” between order and chaos.
An awful lot of the “chaos” the police were suppressing in 1911 had to do with black folks resisting lynching & demanding dignity.
An awful lot of the “chaos” police forces were used to surpress right then were black folks who, ahem, “didn’t know their place” and also pesky workers who kept insisting that they shouldn’t be locked into firetraps and perish in sweatshop infernos.
It wasn’t a high point.
Still, the blue line became a go-to verbal and visual symbol for police in general, and that symbol entered police mourning culture, as epitomized by the blue line armband.
So the blue line came to represent two things simultaneously: the broad and deeply problematic institution of modern American policing, but also — quite viscerally for the families & colleagues of fallen officers — the loss of a loved one.
So, there’s always been a tension.
When #BlackLivesMatter hit, right wing opportunists who didn’t give a fuck about anything except maintaining class division responded with “all lives matter,” pretending as though saying that black lives matter implied that white lives didn’t.
“All lives matter” was a white kneejerk response to “black lives matter.”
This is my favorite cartoon on the subject. Black kids were getting shot over bags of skittles and their community was like, our kids’ lives aren’t worthless.
What #blm means is, “our lives matter, too“
All houses matter, but you emergency-address the one on fire.
And black lives were being burned on the pyre of white supremacy.
As they always have been in America.
A sub-category of the “all lives matter” reactionary response to #blm was, “blue lives matter.” The right wing media-promoted premise was, well, if we’re talking about people getting killed, cops get killed a lot, too. Why aren’t we talking about that?
And a few hardcore folks might disagree with me here, but I think even on the kinda far left, consensus tends to be, no one wants anyone to die, including cops.
But, becoming a cop means deliberately assuming a certain amount of risk voluntarily and getting compensated for it.
Black folks don’t voluntarily assume the extremely heightened risk of getting murdered by paid agents of the government (cops) for being black. They can’t opt out. They don’t get a middle class, family sustaining wage for it, or a pension.
They just get to die.
The reactionary “blue lives matter” movement adopted the thin blue line, and the blue line flag, as their symbol.
And, it also continued to represent individual officers’ loss of life outside the “all lives matter”/”black lives matter”/”blue lives matter” discursive battles.
So there are folks who see and understand the blue line flag as specifically a solemn reminder of lost loved ones. But in the wake of #blm especially, it was also a symbol externally (and, let’s be real, internally) leveraged against black communities’ demands for basic respect.
American fascism often presents superficially as anti-authoritarian, but the embrace of a police state is telling.
Here we get our themes combined: nation defined by guns for vigilante violence, support of the state’s agents of violence, Maximum Leader. Which opens another theme …
The naming of weapons as central to the soul of the nation is enthusiasm for violence.
Far right use of “We the People” bends the democratic sentiment to hint that they are the only true American people. The nation is white conservatives and their instruments of violence. A para-fascist sentiment.
This flag brings our themes together to tell us that the True American People are defined by their adherence to true religion plus their enthusiasm for violence, which is necessary because they face unnamed threats. This is a fascist sentiment.
This flag combines far right symbols with only a hint of the US flag remaining. The “III” is a reference to Three Percenters, far right paramilitary gun nuts who say that only 3% of Americans who took up arms for the Revolution against England.
This variant is not simply a claim of popular support. It is a threat.
This inversion of normal US flag symbolizes the sovereign citizen movement, a far right conspiracy theory which holds that the US government is illegitimate. If you have ever had someone rant about gold fringe on a US flag and admiralty law, you have encountered them.
This is the “no quarter” flag symbolizing a fascist desire to mass murder their political enemies.
This flag from the Whiskey Rebellion — y’know, the one that was put down when President Washington personally rode to Pennsylvania at the head of an army — has been turning up a bit, reflecting a sentiment of violently rebelling against the Federal government in rejection of its legitimate right to tax citizens.
Two symbols for the same thing appear on this flag. The “Hawai’ian” floral print evokes a “big luau”, which rhymes with both “big igloo” and “boogaloo”, reflecting the far right militias eager to fight in “Civil War II: Electric Boogaloo”.
I eventually need to capture this post’s sister thread on Twitter. For now, I’ll just add the single best thing in it, a link to Nate Powell’s sophisticated meditation on American masculinity and far right aesthetics, About Face.
And I’ll end with this flag, which has it all. If you don’t recognize the Greek, it means “come and take them”, a reference to the right’s fantasy that the Government Will Come Take Our Guns.
This is sort-of a spoiler, but really you need to know the things already to recognize them.
A while back I saw a terrific little movie scene in which a character who has been set up as extraordinary only in his decency ends up on the phone with the Action Heroes as they walk him through defusing a nuke.
Absurd thriller stuff, but well-executed in a way that was legitimately moving.
As things of course go wrong, the Action Heroes look increasingly worried but put on a brave face — er, voice — over the phone to Ordinary Guy. “You’re doing great. Here’s what we are going to do next.”
When time runs out Ordinary Guy has to reach in and just pull out the nuke’s core. The Action Heroes know that they are telling him to expose himself to a lethal dose of radiation. Ordinary Guy has no idea.
I was very impressed that the filmmakers trusted the actors to communicate to us how this would kill him without putting it in As You Know Bob dialogue.
The actors delivered the goods. The scene is poignant, and the story puts a button on it when the Action Heroes finally get to the Ordinary Guy.
“Did I do okay?”
“Yeah. You did … great.”
I’m not crying. You’re crying.
This story worked. The Action Heroes had to make a hard, ugly choice. The Ordinary Guy’s quiet heroism, demonstrated earlier, turns into these melodramatic heroics.
But. I felt it failed to pay off the work it had already done establishing that Ordinary Guy would not hesitate to commit his life to protecting other people. I wonder whether someone in the writers’ room wanted a different version:
We see the bomb’s LEDs counting down …
3:20 Ordinary Guy:
“Whoa. That sphere is the part that explodes, right?”3:03 Action Hero:
“Yes, that’s plutonium. Now remove the casing over the bundle of wires.”2:41 Ordinary Guy:
“It’s sitting right there. Can’t I just … pull it out?”2:28 Action Hero:
“That would work, but with direct contact, radiation from the core will kill you. Tell me when you have the detonator exposed.”2:04 Ordinary Guy:
“We’re running out of time.”1:57 Action Hero:
“Relax. You’re doing fine.”1:48 Ordinary Guy
[pulls out the core]
The friend who turned me on to this story says:
ugh, yes. you know it would have played out like this. (this is now canon for me)
I was so sure it was going to show us how this was actually an easy choice for him.
“You didn’t have to do that, D.”
“M, you know that I did.”
Partly this is just me being a dead sucker for Horatius At The Bridge. Romantic bullshit that gets me every time.
Partly I think of how Heinlein did a version of that in “The Long Watch”. The internet tells me that in his novel Space Cadet, a would-be Space Patrolman argues that the protagonist of “The Long Watch” was wrong to disobey orders … but another cadet responds with a regulation, saying “the responsibility of determining the legality of the order rests on the person ordered as well as on the person giving the order”. Dude’s politics were twisty.
Partly I wonder whether American popular media is too enthusiastic about characters refusing to compromise, too enthusiastic about making characters sweat tough decisions, too rarely giving us characters demonstrating who they are when they do not hesitate to accept a hard sacrifice.
I do research-driven system design. In the early 2000s I did a project for a major US health insurance company who wanted to know what they could do to make their plan members hate them less.
So I interviewed dozens of people with “good” employer-sponsored health insurance about their encounters with their insurers. I handed over a big thick research report and talked the executives through the highlights, the way you do.
One of the key findings was “People Are Frustrated That They Cannot See The Costs Of Their Choices”.
A high-ranking executive vigorously objected. “The last thing people care about with their health is what it costs!”
(It would later emerge that we had a miscommunication. He thought I was saying that patients were concerned with what it would cost their insurer, rather than themselves. That this seemed to him like the obvious reading of what I meant is itself a lesson in where his head was.)
So I said, “I’ll tell you a particular story from the research.”
One couple we spoke to were prosperous and had good insurance. They did not need the honorarium we paid them for participating in the study, but they were eager to talk to us because they wanted to tell their story.
They had a kid who was born deaf and was a good candidate for a cochlear implant. It’s a procedure that costs about $10,000 if you pay out of pocket. In the kid’s case it had about a 50/50 chance of working.
Their insurance paid for it. It didn’t work. But for the kid’s condition, it was possible to just try it again; they could in principle attempt the proceedure repeatedly with the same odds each time. They were wary of pressing against bad luck and ending up putting their kid through surgery several times, but taking a second bite at the apple seemed like it might be sensible. As they were thinking about it, they called an agent at their insurer to see if they would cover another attempt.
The same logic which had them hesitant to put their child through repeated surgeries had them sympathetic to the possibility that the insurer would refuse; it seemed fair to them that their insurance policy would have to draw a line somewhere. And they were close to deciding that they would just pay for it out of pocket if the insurer said No.
Their insurance rep confidently told them that a second surgery would be covered the same as the first. The couple asked if there was a pre-authorization they could get in writing, but the agent said that it did not work that way. But not to worry, it was definitely covered!
Of course you can guess what happened.
They had to pay a big bill, which they would have done with a smile had the insurer just not jerked them around. As a result of this misadventure, they became obsessed with hating that insurer, and talked about how they look for every possible opportunity to tell their story, which is how they wound up talking to me.
The executive looked sincerely mortified by this example. He said, “That’s horrible. Who was their insurer?”
And I smiled. Because I got to tell him, “Oh, that was you. Your company screwed those people.”
(When I tell this story, people usually ask me who the client was. Having already bent my NDA enough, I will not reveal it. Plus — and this is important — it does not matter. This is characteristic of how all US insurers operate.)
“Understand,” I added, “we talked to people with much worse experiences than that. We talked to people hit with financial impacts they could not afford. We talked to people whose insurers’ decisions had awful, lasting medical impacts.”
In the course of that project — since I was looking at systems design — I learned why this happens. It does not come from trying to screw insurance plan members, it comes from trying to screw doctors and hospitals.
Insurance companies write deliberately obfuscated contracts with healthcare providers: Rule 122.7.14b combined with Rule 37.4.9 combined with Rule 71.16a/7 mean that the doctor only gets paid for part of Proceedure X. This creates such complexity in evaluating how a healthcare provider will get reïmbursed for what they do, so many dependencies on super-specific particulars, that the insurer cannot run the hypothetical on what their own systems will do! The machine simply cannnot produce an answer.
That does not make this inability to make commitments innocent. These are design choices. Insurers have smart people working hard all day every day to figure out inventive ways to screw doctors and hospitals. They prioritize doing that over enabling patients to make clear decisions.
I think of this whenever defenders of the private insurance system in the US talk about stuff like the virtues of copayments, the small fees patients make when getting a proceedure or medication which their insurer does cover. This is meant to create incentives which prevent patients from making frivolous use of medical services, as part of giving patients “skin in the game” in managing costs, in making trade-offs about when it matters to them to get resource-intensive care. But even if that design reasoning made sense — and I do not think it does — the capriciousness of costs which the insured actually experience makes it entirely useless.
There is no fixing this class of problem in private insurance. It is inherent in the incentives insurers face.
This is one among many reasons why there is no fixing private insurance. I advocate for single payer public healthcare — best known by the slogan “Medicare For All” — because there is no legitimate argument against it.
