Some of What I Enjoyed in 2025

Commentary, music, movies, television, books

Hello friends and enemies, here is a little overview of stuff I enjoyed last year starting with my own writing and moving on to things I watched/read/listened to. I have a bit of backlog for essays I need to write, but I’m shifting gears for 2026 to try and keep up with the evolution of our ongoing bubble and its various frontiers—consider this a newsletter reboot. Nonetheless, thank you always to everyone who has read and subscribed and shared and commented and argued and glazed, I’ve deeply appreciated it all and it’s been more helpful than you know.

To start, here is a roundup of some of my writing over the past year on here:

Some Stuff I Wrote This (Last) Year

Trapped In The Maw of a Stillborn God (January)

An honest look at Palo Alto’s past (eugenics, environmental ruin, and surveillance) and present (“less a fascism of blood and soil than a nihilistic capitalism of the bottom line” as Quinn Slobodian puts it) suggests the world we’re racing towards will be dominated by bantustans, though I’m sure the Riverians won’t have much qualms about putting casinos inside of them. The sooner we free ourselves of delusions about Silicon Valley’s supposed right-wing turn, the sooner we can articulate the futures we do or don’t want (and the technologies involved in both) and speak a bit more bravely about the gap between the stakes and our willingness to act. Quickly approaching is the day when we will see the embrace of a genocidal telos (“exterminism”) that’ll seek to sacrifice the environment, genetically and socially engineer humanity, and liquidate the uncooperative elements. All of the ingredients are already there. Now we wait for the Great Work that will bring together the brigands laying waste to our world for one last orgy of violence. Will it be those that seek to purify capitalism of its democratic flaw and colored defects? Or those that promise us it will give birth to yet another stillborn god?

The Silicon Valley Consensus & AI Capex Part 1 (March)

The first part looked at AI as a vector for revitalizing eugenics and shock therapy, which has become more apparent as the world’s richest man uses the pretense of algorithmic efficiency to finish the job Obama, Clinton, Reagan, and Carter couldn’t quite manage: burning away what little remains of the New Deal.

The second part examined the impact of the British Empire’s attempts to make factories resemble plantations on the birth of modern computation, the influence all this had on what we call artificial intelligence, and the weakness of popular frameworks for understanding Silicon Valley (surveillance capitalism, techno-feudalism, techno-authoritarianism, etc).

Part Three is about the Silicon Valley Consensus, a first stab at concretizing the constellation that links computational infrastructure, energy firms (from fossil fuel extractors to energy providers), and various financiers to help explain why various bullshit tech products are foisted upon us. My goal is to help explain how the scramble to build up infrastructure for artificial intelligence is part of a consistent but fragile pattern where new technologies and developments are backstopped by ongoing bids to bolster existing asset classes, synthesize new ones, and turn speculative gains into real wealth. SVC isn’t just about capital expenditures tacked onto the generative AI hype bubble, though this is certainly a major frontier of the froth—which is the subject of the first stab. SVC is ultimately about a now-familiar process that has come to dominate much of the economy and our daily lives: a bunch of independent profit-seeking actors have converged on sustaining a certain technology through a frenzy of overbuilding, overvaluing, and overinvesting in order to realize excessive gains that can be translated into political power aimed at restructuring society.

AI, Indulgences, and the false promise of salvation (May)

If artificial intelligence is contributing to mass illiteracy and cheating, it is because you dragged your feet on adopting it (or adapting to it) in the classroom. Close your eyes and fork over some cash to fix this with artificial intelligence.

If artificial intelligence is contributing to an information environment saturated by nonconsensual porn, child sexual abuse material, scams and fraud that utilize realtime deepfakes generated by AI deep learning, or an abundance of AI-generated slop, it is because you dragged your feet on adopting it (or adapting to it) in your information environment. Close your eyes and fork over some cash to fix this with artificial intelligence.

If artificial intelligence is threatening the livelihood of your creative workers, it is because you dragged your feet on adopting it (or adapting to it) in cultural production. Close your eyes and fork over some cash to fix this with artificial intelligence.

If artificial intelligence is threatening to bolster the fossil fuel industry at the precise moment that sector must be put down for the sake of humanity’s survival, if there is an unimaginable amount of opacity around how much energy infrastructure artificial intelligence will actually need, if data centers are sucking up water everywhere they can manage from deserts to areas gripped by high levels of water stress, it is because you dragged your feet on adopting it (or adapting to it) in energy policy. Close your eyes and fork over some cash to fix this with artificial intelligence.

And so on, and so on.

This Silicon Valley Stuff Will Get You Killed (July)

Some believe sacrifices will restore some semblance of a natural order we’ve lost sight of. The future of human flourishing, they insist, isn’t going to be found in the past few centuries of flirtations with democracy and liberalism, but in a recommitment to Biological Hierarchies that reimpose caste, eugenics, apartheid, terror, and the like. We must administer a harsh treatment for a harsher disease that will cause a great deal of pain and misery in the short-term, but leave us better off in the long-run. That these reactionary ideologies are proving increasingly fundamental to the worldview of the most powerful people in the world and their sycophants, at the same time as this desperate search for capitalist (re)legitimacy, does not bode well for any of us.

These and more horrific exterminist forces are firmly in the driver’s seat, enjoying victory after victory, accumulating greater and greater resources to remake the world into a form more hospitable to their political project(s), and in the course of this self-annihilation they are likely closing the doors on various futures forever—though it will be a long time before we learn which options are lost to us forever.

This unholy alliance—far-right oligarch-ideologues who think democracy and capitalism are incompatible, tech firms with laboratories innovating the armament of fascism, financiers eager to transform speculation into wealth into power, and a host of other demoniacs—is relatively insulated from the public, its concerns, its pressures, its frustrations, and the few levers connected to those that could effect a change. And as a result, it enjoys relatively unimpeded power in building, expanding and legitimizing a police state in this country—a country that has, for a long time now, committed itself to surveillance, social control, force, projection, arbitrary violence, and terror.

It is increasingly unclear to me what, if anything, can be done about this.

Ride-sharing apps are bad, actually (August)

I want to emphasize this is only one prong of what is wrong with Uber but it is a large part of it. If I could sum up everything we’ve covered and a few other key points for you, it would go as follows:

• Uber is an enterprise that regularly uses accounting tricks to obscure its failure to realize profits through innovation. It has taken advantage of superficial coverage in the business press and crafted an aggressively deceptive PR campaign built on older taxi deregulation lobbying playbooks as well as company-sponsored academic research.

• Uber has realized stupendous growth by using capital as a weapon (investor subsidies), breaking the law then rewriting it (regulatory arbitrage), embracing anti-competitive business practices, and deploying incredibly successful political operations in the United States and worldwide that have codified its arbitrage efforts.

• Uber has realized profits largely through predatory behavior such as algorithmic wage discrimination and perpetual fare hikes. Expansions into other lines of business have benefited from its years of experimentation here (namely food delivery).

• Uber has offered a roadmap for other firms interested in immiserating their workers, growing via the misallocation of public subsidies. The metastasis of the so-called “gig economy” will continue unabated as Uber’s bastards proliferate.

• It is bad when a firm uses investor subsidies to distort markets such that it can realize profits through predatory behavior, even worse when it does so with public subsidies, and even worse when this allows the firm to rewrite laws to realize profits locked behind activities made illegal because they are against the public interest, and creates a model for other firms to do so. That Yglesias cannot understand this suggests he is an idiot or operating in a different moral universe.

The Silicon Valley Consensus & The AI Economy (September)

To wrap this up, it’s not clear to me what merits the techno-optimist outlook on whatever constitutes the “AI economy.” It ignores the financials: overlooks the gap between revenues and capex, waves away the question of how it will generate profits, engages in revisionist historical accounts to justify these bad economics, and whistles past the debt land mines that fuel growth. It ignores technology: there’s no interest in market structure, scale of cost, or product roadmaps. It ignores the reality of adoption: gloms onto hype, falls for simplistic narratives, repeats corporate talking points, and reproduces shaky assumptions. We’re left with a picture of reality that leaves us unable to explain why things are the way they are and what to do about it. The “AI economy” as talked about within mainstream and optimist circles presents a vision unmoored from reality that is frothy enough to drown out skeptics, juice speculation, and provide cover for entrenched interests looking to enrich themselves at everyone else’s expense.

On the Origins of Dune’s Butlerian Jihad (September)

In one of the essays in my AI series, I argued that Luther’s critique of indulgences in the medieval era could be applied to today’s Silicon Valley Consensus. Luther was not opposed to indulgences so much as their abuse, which cheapened repentance and undermined attempts to compel good works or genuine attempts to right wrongs. The idea that salvation could be realized through a transaction convinced many they’d obviated the need for the hard work of being a better person. Indulgences also centralized and codified unjustified power grabs by the Church, which claimed new authorities over souls in Purgatory and introduced perverse incentives to prioritize activities that had nothing to do with Christendom.

In some ways, I think of Luddism (and Butlerianism) similarly. My concern is not technology in of itself (though there are multiple technologies we would do better off without). Technology, however, is downstream of politics and economics and history and social relations. We aren’t saying destroy the clocks before they become killer drones, but we are saying the killer drones are already here and we should figure out how to destroy them. Clearly, technological dependence obscures the political and economic decisions about what sort of technologies should be developed, how they should be financed, who should finance their development and reap their rewards and bear their costs, and how society should be organized around the facts of those arrangements.

Is the solution more or less democratic control over technological development and deployment? Do we trust today’s major players in this space to truly prioritize anything other than profits and returns? Are we going to be able to realize or experiment with other values, arrangements, and models that prioritize anything else within today’s authoritarian technological system or within a democratic system? If we realize that certain paths or arrangements or products or models go against human flourishing or the public good or our ecological niche or the mental health of the general public (realizations we have already made), will we be able to do anything about it?

Book reviewers (on Youtube)

These three have read far and wide, are familiar with the SFF genre (which is my favorite) and its history and its authors and movements and milieus and intended audiences (as well as other genres), have very very particular taste and are loud about the limits of their interest, their blindspots, what does and doesn’t work for them, as well as when any of these things shift (revisiting work, new interests, outside events in the news, etc.)

Bookpilled

One of my favorite book reviewers on Youtube right now is Matt via bookpilled, with a separate equally impressive (and inactive) channel on thrifting (Thrift A Life).

He does a variety of free content: book hauls, small batch reviews, large group reviews and rankings, book challenges that feature videos honing in on one particular book, as well as videos honing in on certain authors. He’s also got a Patreon featuring longform reviews of every book he reads.

A quick slice of his stuff: A reflection on the work of Barry Malzberg, five books he hated reading in 2024, looking over a 98 rare/vintage book haul, and his baffling dislike for Book of the New Sun.

Outlaw Bookseller

Going along with bookpilled is Outlaw Bookseller, a Welsh bookseller who has an amazing grasp and familiarity with science-fiction and fantasy. I’ve talked about both of them in previous recommendation posts and like them for similar reasons (they’re both incredibly knowledgeable and well read in the genre)—I will say that Outlaw focuses much more on video essays and most of his videos are tight argumentative pieces or in-depth dives into some aspect of the literature. He’s also got some interviews, something I don’t think Bookpilled has ever dipped into.

A quick slice of his stuff: why Science Fiction isn’t fundamentally woke, on the intellectual and historical origins of genre SF, and his own take on Book of the New Sun.

Cultural Logic

And to round out this section, I really have enjoyed Jeet Heer’s Cultural Logic. I’ve been reading Jeet for a long time at The Nation, where he’s got a weekly podcast (The Time of Monsters) and a monthly column (Morbid Symptoms), but this Youtube channel features some of my favorite work of his. Each of the videos are broadly 20 to 30 minute videos building on written work of his, reviews of recently released media, or deep dives into specific individuals, there’s less of it than the two previous writers but that just means you have that much more to look out for in the next year.

A quick slice of his stuff: Why you should watch Avatar, reflections on forgotten masters like Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore, fascinating looks at Thomas Pynchon’s V and Gravity’s Rainbow and Vineland, and more.

Music

Despite the best efforts of my roommates and the larger Brooklyn community, I did not get much into Geese. I did, however, spend much of the year hopping around from old songs and music videos I last heard eons ago to persistent favorites across the past few years to new discoveries that have become favorites.

The Old Ones

One old favorite I rediscovered this year was Panic! at the Disco’s “Build God, Then We’ll Talk” though I can’t really remember when I first saw the video. It’s the final song on the band’s debut album A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out came out in September 2005 but two decades ago videos and singles were released a bit more slowly (or maybe it’s better to say over longer periods of time).

“I Write Sins Not Tragedies” is a song I’ve remembered for years and remember watching the video in elementary school (it came out around January 2006) while Build God’s video came out the following year (February 2007). Still, I vaguely recall seeing both on MTV around the same time. Either way, I love the song/video and it actually inspired an essay on artificial intelligence that I’m working on. There are two levels that play off each other well:

1. The video follows The Pornomime, a man who mimes all sorts of sexual acts, as a woman in the audience falls in love with him, marries him, and eventually cheats on him (mimes sex) because he won’t stop having sex (miming) with other people. It ends with him storming home to find her in bed with no one, so he grabs no one and beats them up before storming out. Were they actually in a relationship, were they actually intimate, or was it “a wonderful caricature of intimacy”?

2. The song itself follows a virgin paid for sex by a lawyer at a firm she’s getting a job with, as well as a constable/cop that propositions the woman after the virgin leaves. PRE-WOKE in that it mocks the sex work and resulting pregnancy as caricatures of intimacy.

There’s a lot there to play with for artificial intelligence, for me at least, specifically around the fact that so much of the consumer demand for generative artificial intelligence seems to be companion bots, nonconsensual porn, erotica, and gooning material of various sorts. When it’s not sexual or romantic, it’s still masturbatory—wow, this is the most brilliant idea anyone has ever had, User! If it proves workable you’ll read more about it in the coming year.

Back to the song: it’s nice, I like Panic! I like the bridge that riffs off My Favorite Things, the cello solo, the way some of the lines are sung sounding like they’re racing to catch up or shush the flow, highly recommended!

One song I always wished there was a music video for was Nas’ “I Want to Talk to You”—this would be the second thing I did with a small fortune, right after burning most of it on trying to get an adaptation of GOD EMPEROR OF DUNE off the ground. Over the years Nas has had a tendency to try and make explicitly political songs, but they almost always fall short of the story telling itself. This song kind of waffles between them but it does a lot of things I really like:

• It conjures up a funny image. The premise of the song is Nas storms into the White House with a g-pack and forcing the President at the time (Bill Clinton) to listen to his ranting, shifting between direct address and spacy rambling directed at us

• There’s a good bit of High Hotep talk in here: “Niggas thought that we slept/But the architect of the Pentagon’s from Egypt/government secret, the 99 to 2-G computer shutdown, what now?/Extinction on Earth, human cutdown/Niggas play with PlayStations, they buildin’ space stations/On Mars, plottin’ civilizations”

• Again, just imagining a video that brings to mind The Negotiator (1998) or maybe John Q (2002)? Maybe at some point it evolves to them both sharing some reefer during Verse 2 and then swerves away to a conflict in Verse 3.

• Features one of my favorite lines from 90s era Nas: “Niggas tryin’ to get with the computers, man, y’know I’m saying? We ain’t John Henry banging down a fuckin’ cave fighting against the machine nigga.”

The last one you should really just listen to the entire album. Have you ever listened to a rap album that doubles as a space opera? Introducing DELTRON 3030:

New Crate Finds

I wish I remembered how I found this song, but it really opened up punk music for me this year and I’ve been listening to more post-hardcore/progressive ever since. Just don’t listen too closely to the lyrics (but do a little!)

Another one for the life of me I cannot find but has been welcome.

I haven’t listened to much Steely Dan besides what a close friend plays when driving us around the city and the needle drop in One Battle After Another. I loved this song, which is one of the dumbest songs I’ve ever heard but such a fun groovy time.

Books

I read a lot of epistolaries last year because I’m toying with using the device for part of my sci-fi novel—unsure if I eventually will use the device. It led me to Augustus by John Williams, however, which was my favorite novel of that sort. A historical fiction that invents most of the documents used to (re)create the story of how Gaius Octavius Thurinus becomes Rome’s first emperor, then his struggles trying to plan for succession as his family and various forces conspire to tear things apart.

Karen Hao’s Empire of AI book is a great look at OpenAI, yes, but also about the sort of power firms like it are accruing. It is imperial power in a true sense: resembling the evolution of colonial enterprises that were soaked in blood, deeply exploitative and extractive, rationalized via civilizing missions that adorn the guns with roses and wreaths. It will not look exactly like the imperial power of old or even relatively recently because the world has changed, but not so much because those imperial regimes still exist as do the relationships they carved into the world. What will AI look like as it successfully grafts itself onto governments, their police authorities, and militaries? What will its development look like as our grand old republic tries to forge a new imperial strategy that will sustain/regenerate global primacy?

Never thought I’d read a Pynchon novel with a Nas reference (Bleeding Edge) or Crash (by J.G. Ballard) with a partner (or more accurately, the first few pages because they were so repulsed by it that I had to reread it myself). Bleeding Edge will probably end up being one of my favorite Pynchon novels (still have to finish Shadow Ticket/Mason & Dixon/Inherent Vice) for the horrible and amazing jokes, for the strange plot (who was responsible for 9/11 and who was responsible for its aftermath), for the concern about what happens next, for bits of red meat for me specifically (the tech bubble, Jay/Nas beef, etc.), and so much more. Crash, well I’ll let you read that for yourself. If you are unfamiliar, it is about a bunch of people who develop a new sexuality connected to car crashes. It is one of my favorite novels, but it is also easily one of the most grotesque things (maybe the most) you’ll ever read so steel yourself.

Movies

I saw Lust, Caution at Metrograph with a close friend who’s taken to calling herself my movie domme—an amazing movie based in Hong Kong following Chinese university students who try to honey trap and assassinate a traitor collaborating with the Empire of Japan’s puppet regime in east China. It has such a mindnumbingly depressing ending that we stumbled out of the theater in a haze before remembering (with dread) that it was the night of the Democratic primary. What a pleasant night that was, leaving that horrible movie then learning we were about to witness a three-piece combo.

Saw The Shrouds, Videodrome, and The Fly within three or four days (then rewatched Crash a week later). One of my favorite stretches of movie watching this year. The Shrouds follows a grieving businessman who creates technology that lets you monitor the decomposition of your late loved ones and the vast conspiracy behind the ransacking of multiple graves using this technology. Videodrome prefigures Infinite Jest’s Entertainment, following a CEO who discovers a broadcast of snuff films and gets pulled into a vast conspiracy that consumes and transforms more and more of his life. The Fly is a bit more deceptively simple: a scientist creates teleportation and as he tests it on himself a fly sneaks in and he accidentally fuses with the creature.

None of these descriptions are doing the films justice. David Cronenberg is one of the only filmmakers with anything interesting to say about what technology is as well as what it does to human relations, is a huge romantic to boot, and keen on making movies that break my heart & make me squirm in equal measure. You will get none of that unless you watch them!

Bound and Jade were two of my favorite erotic thrillers I watched this year—the former is such a sleek sexy film, I can’t believe this was the Wachowski sisters first film. Bound is about a lesbian ex-con seduced by a wife next door who hatches up a brilliant scheme: lets steal from my husband, a piece of shit mafia money launderer, pin it all on him, and run away together. What could go wrong? Jade is an erotic thriller that people say is not erotic or a thriller, these people are idiots. They will buzz in your ear about how this means it is a bad movie, about how it wasted the talents of Linda Fiorentino. It is a great movie, she is amazing in it, and it is so clearly a deconstruction of the genre that I want to hit them over the head. The plot follows a DA’s attempt to unravel a conspiracy involving sex, political corruption, and MURDER that goes up to the highest levels. It features what is one of my favorite car chases in any movie, honestly right behind One Battle After Another’s chase, it is full of so many dead ends and wispy mirages that never become anything. As it probably would be in real life.

The Last Seduction was another erotic thriller I watched in this stretch, also starring Fiorentino who I kind of became obsessed with after seeing this movie (and learned that the idiotic reception to Jade eventually sank her career). This film is from the perspective of a femme fatale played by Fiorentino, who steals $700,000 from her husband and fucks off to a small town (Buffalo) where she gets a new name, a new job, and a new mark. She is one step ahead of everyone at every single point of the movie and it is a sight to behold. Anything more would be a spoiler, watch this and all the others as soon as you can!

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Next up, you’ll be getting pt 2 of my AI Bubble in 2026 essays. I’ve also been inspired by Brian Merchant posting more speculative fiction here (he just shared Busy by Omar El Akkad, from a short story anthology he published at TERRAFORM that I blurbed). I am sitting on a few dozen short stories, I only write them for readings I’m asked to do—I like to write a new story for each one and use that as an experiment for something I’m thinking about doing in my actual novel. Sometimes I am trying to ape a certain author’s voice or play with one specific part of it or outright steal an image they use, sometimes I’m testing out a character in an intrusive scene that I think might help me understand them, sometimes I’m just tending to the garden and seeing what’s growing, you know how it goes!

To everyone who read and subscribed last year: thank you for supporting my work, with your money or your attention! I hope to be a bit more consistent and ambitious with this newsletter in the new year, here’s to 2026!