AI can't hear me scream but you can 😭👾

On the rise of "objects" as a human expression and AI as a hall of mirrors.

• 🦿HIP REPLACEMENT🦿 is back!!!!!! Ben Ulansey of The Gen Z Report where we talked about a lack of 2025's song of the summer (and the general weirdness of the charts), generational conflicts at the office, and the deluge of incoming crises based in AI (specifically Veo 3). Hop on in with Ben Dietz, Ben, and I on Spotify and YouTube.

• PEOPLE OF LONDON!!! Me and Bobby Aaron Solomon will be in town for a little over a week — and we’re having drinks a week from today: see you June 15 at 5PM at Llama Inn in Shoreditch. Here’s a calendar invite with details too!

ICE raids across LA spark backlash
Trump deploys California National Guard
”the community is facing the Sheriff”
”government running over a citizen”
”our bravest troops”
”this guy rocks”
Huge developing story, of Angelenos versus ICE. It’s shaping up to be a huge example of what resistance looks like now, as cravings to fight back are evolving into physically defending your community and your beliefs. Watch this space — and be careful out there and at today’s march, Angelenos <3

Reasons Musk attacked Trump's "beautiful bill"
“Trump says he's 'very disappointed' with Elon”
Timeline of Elon Musk and Trump's Fight
Who’s surprised? No one should be! I am surprised it happened “this early.” They will kiss and make up (especially given his deleting of the Tweets) but, for now, the memes and posts and jokes and takes have been great. But the best? AOC giving us a new classic.

Nationalist Wins Poland’s Presidency, Setback for EU
Yet another tight vote, yet another figure in the Trump cinematic universe claiming power. Granted: Poland has had these issues for some time and is likely the most realistic surrogate of what the US could trend toward.

Korea’s New President Will Face Divisions, Trump
Baerbock elected as UN General Assembly head
Dutch government collapses
Some recent political developments, which is a good excuse to say we hebben een serieus probleem.

Troop Casualties in Ukraine War Near 1.4 Million
In three years, with nearly a million being Russian. Depressing and sad, all deaths carried out in the name of someone else’s power. As if this were unique!

Palantir to Compile Data on Americans
I will find a time machine, go back fifteen years, seduce Peter Thiel, then convince him to take a private submarine ride to see the Titanic in June of 2024. Anyway.

CO attack amid record antisemitic, Islamophobic hate crimes
There’s an upcoming interview you’ll be reading soon where we talk about how so many things are misdirects, not that these don’t represent real hate but that such “little” incidents overlook the real frustrations gone unheard, simplified and rebranded to fit into larger narratives.

David faces lawsuit after acquiring Epogee
“This ingredient has been around”
The protein trend is an exhausting expression of our pursuits of sexless, goody-two-shoes vanity, which is to say David and the surrounding culture is so boring. But what isn’t boring? People claiming monopoly as David bought the maker of a key ingredient in the lower fat space.

In these technocultural times, it seems like we’re always reaching to touch grass only to have something else forced into our hands.

Labubus and Sonny Angels and Smiskis and Jellycats drip from our bags, creeping over our phones, accessories for our accessories for our accessories. Fidget toys and slime fill our anxious hands as we go birding and fishing, cooking and cleaning. The new V&A allows you to look at old objects in boxes, a new vampire movie was made on film, people put little pouches of tobacco in their mouth to keep their teeth chittering. A soap made from bathwater selling out in seconds. “The concept of pure unadulterated American summer love,” someone says of cars and beer and the Twin Towers. “The nostalgia hits me in the chest and it makes me almost black out,” someone says of holiday decorations from decades before, all analogue, nothing digital, nothing synthetic. As we've discussed, objects now fight for their lives as we do: art cannot simply be art. A sculpture has to be a light too, old bottles have to become sculptures, literal paint has to be used to crochet: every object in this age is forced to become an army knife, a weapon used to defend itself. A toy that’s also a keychain. A museum that’s also a storage facility. Side-hustle as existence.

Something we’re experiencing in parallel is how such objecture in and of itself is an expression of life, that the physical is proof we are alive. Tariffs and coal are a rebuke of the modern intangible, of the need to make real things by real people, as solar power and wind energy just like immigrants and the undocumented are unseen, impossible to visualize which makes them easy to villanize. The cloud is unseen, wifi cannot be grasped, large language models are lips that cannot be kissed: we long for the corporal in a landscape governed by hypotheticals that may or may not evolve into literals. Hence, the weaponizing of the object as a salve to modern problems. Pasting a very long dog over transphobic advertisements in the United Kingdom, fighting to keep the coqui alive in Puerto Rico as an act of keeping a culture alive. As Ukraine fights for their culture and their lives against the totalitarian Russian state and their high-tech mega-drones and loitering munitions, it’s unsurprising that Ukrainian forces are getting creative with “dumb” technology, resorting to biker gangs with guns and trucks carrying bomb-wearing micro-drones, taking inspiration from spiderwebs for their attacks. A robotic dog marches around with a cow’s face, begging you to connect the dots between the real and the unreal, how your casual unseen choices create real harm for the living. (Then there’s the opposite: the real creating unseen harm, tapping into the intangible to extend tangible disaster. Consider artists pulling out of London’s SXSW as a rejection of including Tony Blair to discuss government and AI. Consider more than 50 artists withdrawing from Sónar due to the festival’s ownership having ties to illegal occupations in Palestine. Culture as weapon of mass destruction.)

The AI of it all makes this obvious, where objects directly confront these intangibles. See the trend of college professors using blue books for tests to prevent students from coasting by on ChatGPT and other digital assistants. See the success of the Japanese Otona no Yaruki Pen, an adaptation of a kid’s pen that was designed to encourage and log handwriting, which is seeing success as it’s correlated with adults upskilling and studying to solve the issues of a floundering job markets. And why would such upskilling be necessary? Why would we need paper-and-pens-as-swords? The object is proof of the human, of life, a pre-wabi sabi mentality that only human hands can touch, only our bodies can fully grasp such things. As real people are plunged into precarity in favor of constantly humming machines, all to supply more money to unseen executives, it’s not hard to understand why we turn to analogue objects to enact physical action. As we saw with Klarna and Duolingo’s failed pivots to AI, a rift is forming as people are forced to use AI despite their disagreement and dislike of it which aligns with larger cultural feelings on the subject, all underscored by human editors being replaced by automation, government assistance replaced by bots, spam calls replaced by robots, not to mention precious waters being drained out of sight and mind: we’re creeping closer to the moment when people fully log off, not because there wasn’t value online or from technology but because the human — the physical — was removed, life replaced with slop. No one wants to speak with a machine when trying to tell the government or a service provider that a relative has died and, yet, that’s exactly what has happened. “AI makes it easier” and yet everything is harder, more tedious, less fulfilling, less lucrative, all divorced of nuance, of the human.

A break is coming in both senses of the word: we will be freed from the steel arms of industry as more are reluctant to dehumanize their lives, as they log off and live life — and because these items are bound to break down as so many pursue “quick wins” when we know the winners will be few. We will never be able to go back in time, no, but we can walk back a few steps, as a movement to slow down emerges in this over-optimized century, much of which has gotten us little as far as cultural, political, and capital advancement. A Labubu is silly dopamine capitalism — but its success and existence, its lack of “utility” or high-tech whirr, is precisely why it's popular. From tobacco pouches to pickles to protein popcorn, there’s a reason why we’re seeing a success in objects and not AI pins and neo-Soylent: it’s human to long for life, to feed the senses, to be reminded that you like me are alive. We crave others and always will, which is precisely why technology is being forced to play the role of friend, of confidant, of therapist, cheapening the human while ultimately bringing us back to ourselves.

Hegseth: Strip Name of Harvey Milk
World Boxing apologizes to Imane Khelif
"the homophobic killing of Jonathan Joss"
“This was a hate crime”
“they burned down his house”
Not to bum you out but a few concerning items happening during Pride, per what we discussed last week. It’s only going to get worse, I fear, which is a reminder to keep the queer joy coming.

“Bigoted Capitalism”
"The past is a different country"
“9 anniversary to Popstar”
“It’s a little too quiet”
”STRAIGHT BUT NOT”
To the reality of June 2025: a trend of people reflecting on how things have changed from just years ago. I’ve said it before but the 2010s were our Roaring Twenties. It was the best of times — and we took it for granted!

Diddy Ex: 90% of Sex Involved Men
Also: happy Pride to this maniac, I guess, which is a big anti-queer gift to propagandists (especially biphobes). At least we have Tamar and TS counter balancing this, in a way.

“custom look for Chappell Roan”
“We made a custom look”
If you didn’t see Chappell Roan’s Warsaw outfit, please do because the process behind it is a highlight of the year. It’s art! (See also: Myah Hasbany winning the Central Saint Martin’s final show.)

Tesla Crash Shows Limits of Full Self-Driving
Like AI, “self-driving cars” is propaganda I ain’t falling for. Nice try, richies. This reminds: I am so close to buying something from this Armedangels x Wikipedia collab which feels both quaint and transgressive in these AI times. It brings the idea of the first essay home!

We can rid the world of mosquitoes. Should we?
Call me heartless but I think we should — but then I read a comment about how they are food for so many other bugs. Maybe we just kill some of them?

The writer who told the truth about work in China
One of the best reads of recent weeks, about former courier Hu Anyan and his writing about what real life in China is actually like.

‘Ma 2’ in Development
SUICIDE POSTPONED!!!!!!!!! THANK YOU FOR THE MEMES!!!!

Read while listening to.

Somewhere, someone screams. But a mirror cannot hear the scream because it doesn’t exist in a space of sound. Instead it reflects the image, the idea, a symbol of pain or pleasure without the depth to understand the texture that comes with feeling. The mirrored scream exists in the same flatland as the square. We, spherical as we are, understand the context, can tell when the scream is in fact a sign of deep hurt versus a more superficial signal. In the hall of mirrors, what good is a scream? In the hall of mirrors, a scream is technically a sound but it’s more an image multiplied and multiplied and multiplied and multiplied. There is no addition but perhaps there is subtraction as the angles where mirrors meet refract and reshape the image. Is that a laugh? It could be a laugh. Yes. Yes, it’s a laugh. The echo isn’t heard but seen in the evolution, the shapeshifting. The scream is now a giggle. Yes. We’re all laughing, aren’t we? What fun we’re having in the hall of mirrors. How we smile here.

“Man getting bit by an alligator and he screams,” the director says. “Okay, quiet, quiet,” a crew member says, as hushing and shushing draw out silence. Sheb Wooley screams, sharply, then screams again, weaker. “The first one you did up here was much better,” the director says. Sheb screams again it’s much shorter, more truncated. “No, no,” the director interrupts. “Not an ‘ow.’ A real scream, of pain.” He screams again, the pain palpable, anguished, followed by another that sounds like the scream immediately before it but more drawn out. Then a final, weaker scream, as speaking fades. That was in 1951 — but it took two more years for him to be named Wilhelm. Since then, he has gone to space, has fought Nazis, has existed amongst dwarves. “I don't know about my dreams,” someone will sing about him, about falling and falling and falling, all to the words of his father, whose name he shares but whose sound he defies, all of which will get refashioned in years to come, turned into new genres, taken to new continents. “Too scared to go to sleep cause most times I often doubt my dreams,” someone will rap over the beat. “I don’t know about my dreams,” someone will say in response, in the distance, over screams.

“Give me some clever whale pun names for these appetizers,” a woman asks, the camera on her glasses focuses on cucumbers made to look like whales. “Humpback hummus,” a voice replies. “not a fucking pun its just alliteration,” someone notes, adding, “this dogshit can't do anything right” “hallucinating meetings for me to go an hour away and sending helpful reminders that I should leave in a few minutes to get to a place that doesn't exist,” someone says, bringing findings to life as a calendar reflects a calendar reflects a calendar. “When folks are turning to these things for companionship,” a Dartmouth professor in psychiatry wonders, “do folks actually further withdraw and replace what would be otherwise human relationships with these parasocial relationships with these chatbots?" If everyone is using a machine that is referencing information about everyone, what does that make the help that it feeds us? At what point does this idea of the idea of help turn into madness, confirmation and positivity biases that inch you further and further from original intention and into echoes and grotesque sketches of desire? The machine can write, the machine can make videos, but nothing it makes is new: it is a reflection of a reflection of a reflection, finding someone’s hard work somewhere in time to offer you, collapsing our history of life into a novelty praised for its scrubbing out humanity. It’s all an illusion of thinking that is packaged as the future when the reality is the hall of mirrors we’ve been stuck in has undergone a renovation, where more mirrors were added to reflect pre-established ideas and art and knowledge, all in the hopes that you will never find the exit you’ve been searching for.

Remember the screaming. There was a point in the 2000s when television shifted to more non-fiction (“reality”) media to skirt economic and industry issues. A deal was made to produce the idea of drama without a script, without direction, only the idea of ideas defined by decades and decades of much better entertainment before it. The shows felt the same but are outlines of the past. Everything felt real but wasn’t. “The Kardashians were close enough to celebrity to seem bathed in its aura and rich enough to satisfy a prurient desire to see wealth up close, but normal enough to feel accessible, at least at first,” Sophie Gilbert writes in Girl on Girl. “The family has been critiqued from the very beginning for being famous for no good reason, and yet these women's defining skill, I'd argue, is salesmanship.” Consumption not as defect but as feature: echo, echo, echo. The industry hasn’t been the same since as the whole world has become a Hollywood, thanks to technology. But, when faced with similar economic and industry issues, Hollywood has opted to lose itself, eroded by this promise of a promise of a promise of salvation. We’re witnessing a similar negotiation, one that is arguably the last time such a negotiation will be made, which is also happening in almost every other industry: use a technology that takes advantage of us, that phases out so many of us, in the name of saving just a little money — or continue to work a little harder, to profit less, while championing originality and craft? “One significant issue was that nearly every AI model capable of generating video had been trained on vast troves of copyrighted material scraped from the internet without permission or compensation”: the scream is so loud it cannot be heard anymore.

A day is coming when all the pictures we look will be inspired by pictures taken of real places that once existed. There will be paintings of plants inspired by research on a real plant that has long gone extinct. There will be songs inspired by parts of other songs, references to past genres and rhythms, all derived from long lost hymns. What is history when everything is a reflection? What is a memory when all that is remembered is the memory of something else? A scream from a near-century ago turns to an ever widening smile, the reference distorted with every reflection, all to present you with the imagined idea of what you need to survive: another mirror in the hall, another misdirect from taking you further in the maze.

“OBASHATA”
“30 feet away from me”
“Of course you do”
“MY NON-BINARY BABY”
“Who can sound the straightest”
“Pedro wanting it”
“The person who actually”
“transphobic but cooking”
“Aphex Twin”
Pride posts, so you can rub it in some conservative’s face.

“Mexican moms”
"I'm cackling"
This abuela who makes matching shirts for her chihuahua is goals.

"this is how tweeting feels"
Which is also how writing this newsletter feels sometimes, especially when you ask about taking surveys lol

“unrelatable content”
Have met this person roughly seven million times in the past five years.

“you give yourself side quests”
I think we all have the same mental health issues, right? Can any mental health professional reading this explain the “why” behind these (clearly a coping mechanism) self-bets?

“read this thread”
Easily a post of the year.

“Are the birds gonna eat us mommy?”
Best movie-music-Sesame Street experience you’ll watch all weekend.

“hit the start button”
Perhaps the craziest, most chaotic way to wake yourself up. If you do this…please explain in the comments because this would stress me tf out for so many reasons.

And, finally, how people act when my face is literally just existing.

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