On political violence, domestic & foreign AI, climate change, music, web novels, movies, and more recommendations
Tech Bubble Consumer Dispatch #7: What I’ve been reading, watching, and listening to (9/14/25).
Welcome back, valued Tech Bubble consumer. This is for paid subscribers, where I'll talk a bit about what I've been reading and watching and listening to. If you enjoy my writing and would like to support me so that I can keep doing it, then consider subscribing for $7 a month (the cost of a box of Kenyan tea my father enjoys) or $70 a year (a few ill-advised drinks at the last reading you were dragged to).
This week’s round-up will include essays on Charlie Kirk’s assassination, our ongoing AI bubble and the ongoing data center overbuild, Google’s antitrust trial, Trump crypto riches and Silicon Valley lobbying, AI chatbots & companions, socialist economics, and more; book reviews touching on climate change as well as reflections on US-China political economy; Chinese web novels, and some incredibly bad horny/horror books.
No music or movie recommendations because of how goddamn long this recommendation newsletter is, but I hope you enjoy!
Kirk’s shooting, liberal eulogies, and political violence
One of the more loathsome takes came from Ezra Klein’s op-ed “Charlie Kirk Was Practicing Politics the Right Way”, which I think is transparently a wrong-headed attempt to “cool” the temperature while also reaching across the aisle by saying “look I disagreed with Kirk but he had a right to say everything he did and I kinda admire him for doing it so well!” We don’t really have to waste much time even engaging with that, a plethora of great responses have emerged from 404 Media, The Nation, Mother Jones, The Guardian, and so on. I encourage reading the comments, I found a subscriber link which should let you do it—I was a bit surprised and encouraged by how strong the pushback to his argument was.
One response I particularly liked was made by Osita Nwanevu on Twitter, though he’s since deactivated his account. On the platform, he asked whether anyone would’ve said Kirk was doing politics “exactly the right way” a week before he was killed. In a thread, he went on to ask if someone could seriously imagine Klein doing the same for someone on the left if they were killed similarly. The answer, obviously, is no.
One argument Nwanevu has been making, correctly, over the past few years is that if you care about liberalism and democracy then the greatest threat to those project is the GOP. Recognizing the GOP’s threat and conspiring to end it should be a major concern, but our liberals (and progressives) seem fundamentally incapable of doing so. Instead, they go out of their way to make common cause with phrenologists, white nationalists, and other reactionaries who pitch tents imagining a future where apartheid is reimposed on our society again. This doesn’t inspire confidence, it reeks of cynicism, and makes sense given we are seeing liberals try to recalibrate into a form that accommodates increasingly reactionary but ascendant sectors of America’s political elite (e.g. tech capitalists).
Separate from essays about Kirk, I really enjoyed a few others that I’ll share with you.