They Are Watching You
Stove Top #2: A crisis in privacy, DeSantis's Asian strategy, and the death of writing as a career.
Welcome back to the Stove Top weekly newsletter. As usual, each edition has a few brief stories and finishes with a mix of interesting links, hot takes, and good reads.
Enjoy.
Tech
They Are Watching You
Besides being fun to watch, science fiction is uncannily good at predicting the future. Sometimes they predict (at least relatively) good things like the iPad. Other times they predict bad things like falling in love with AI. And other other times they predict terrible things that haven’t happened yet like becoming batteries for our robot overlords.
1984 falls somewhere between bad thing already happening and terrible thing that hasn’t yet come true.
I’m sure we all know the story of 1984. Written by smart dude and hater of communism George Orwell, 1984 portrays a futuristic world in which a totalitarian government exerts total control over everything. The job you work. The person you marry. Even the way you talk and think. Everything.
Want to do things your own way? Heads, spikes, walls.
The only reason they could pull off this nightmare is because of a surveillance program that makes the PATRIOT Act look like it was written by a cypherpunk. It was so pervasive that people were convinced that Big Brother was even monitoring their thoughts. Turns out it’s kinda hard to rise up in rebellion when even the thought of rebellion lands you 6 feet under.
It sounds crazy, but the only thing stopping our world from devolving into 1984 is….social norms? The benevolence of the powers to be? Peace and love? Has to be one of the above, because we have more than enough tech to enable 1984:
A set of earbuds can measure your brain’s productivity at work.
AI is nearing being able to literally read your mind.
Thanks to some AI rat bastards, you are in a perpetual police lineup.
Even your DNA isn’t private anymore.
And, in case you forgot, there’s a god damn camera on every block.
The latest travesty in privacy comes from JPMorgan Chase’s “Workplace Activity Data Utility” program, or WADU for short. If you want to peer into what a privacy advocates nightmare looks like, just look at WADU:
Every employee has a WADU profile.
From the second you walk in the door, HD cameras are watching your every move. Everything you type. Every word you say. Every bodily gesture you make. You are always being watched.
WADU then uses AI/ML to analyze this tape in real time. It knows how locked in you are. If you’re productive. If you’re having a bad day. If you’re fucking around. And it uses this information to update your WADU profile, which goes straight to your boss.
Even at home, WADU is watching and listening to you. Sometimes bosses even randomly take photos from your laptop’s front camera in an attempt to catch you doing something you’re not supposed to be doing.
The reward for this surveillance? The opportunity to work for rich dudes till you drop dead.
And, if you think that’s bad, just wait until the CBDCs come out and the government can watch your every financial move.
As usual, crypto fixes this.
Politics
The Asian Strategy
In recent weeks, Ron DeSantis has gone from Republican heir apparent to Scott Walker, 2023. The contributors to his demise are numerous. The MAGA base was galvanized following Trump’s indictment. He lacks a presidential personal touch. His (I think fairly accurate) comments about Ukraine did not go over well. He’s bogged down over stupid culture war battles with Disney and the transgender community. Most of all, his political positions are damn near identical to Trump, and Trump is a better campaigner.
If DeSantis wants to win the nomination and beat Biden, he has to expand his base. The problem is he doesn’t have much room to operate. Trump has the white dude on lock. DeSantis does well with Hispanics, but they still largely vote Democratic. Forget about black voters. So, that leaves a little talked about bloc: Asians.
In many ways, Asians seem ripe for the taking by DeSantis. Only 44% of Asians are card-carrying Democrats. They care more about substantive issues (economy, health care) than culture war bullshit. They have legitimate beef with the Democrats over affirmative action. And, they are the fastest-growing voting bloc in the country and are politically active, but neither side seems to care. 52% report not being contacted by the Democrats in the last year, and 60% report the same for the Republicans. This is a substantial demographic that nobody is fighting for.
And it appears he (or his campaign) might have realized this, as DeSantis signed a bill mandating AAPI history be taught in Florida public schools. That’s a win for Big Ron, right? Not exactly. Instead of enticing Asians to come to his tent, all DeSantis managed to do was piss off everybody:
The right is pissed he is mandating any history at all, and especially using woke terms like AAPI.
The left is pissed because of his past crusades against teaching about systemic racism.
And the Asians are pissed because of the above and because DeSantis literally just signed a bill banning Chinese citizens from buying land in Florida.
As usual, the unhappy voices are louder than the happy ones, so it’s possible there’s a silent majority of Asians secretly praising DeSantis. But, even if that was true, DeSantis is still going about wooing them in the exact wrong way. He needs to ditch the culture war clownery and tell Asians how he’ll improve their lives.
The problem is he can’t, because he doesn’t know. Can anybody reading this confidently say where DeSantis stands on one substantive issue? Probably not, because the man made his name as a culture warrior, first with Covid and now with immigration, race, sexuality, education, and insert cultural issue here. The one time he actually defined where he stood (Ukraine), he had to walk it back 10 minutes later.
That’s a problem with an Asian demographic that cares wayyy more about the bread-and-butter issues than the cultural ones. And, beyond that, it’s a fundamental weakness in DeSantis’s bid to dethrone The Donald. You're not going to out culture war Trump. You need to have better ideas than Trump while simultaneously keeping the world’s eyeballs on you. No Republican has yet been able to balance the two. And unless DeSantis figures out a way to do it, he’ll be just another name in Trump’s Death Note.
Culture
The Demise Of Writing As A Profession
As a writer, I naturally follow what’s happening in the writing industry. And what’s happening right now is a mass extinction event.
I’m on record for believing AI will eventually take your job. Unfortunately, for writers, “eventually” equals right now:
The Pulitzer Prize-winning BuzzFeed News shut down and is now pumping out AI-generated content.
Business Insider laid off 10% of their staff shortly after experimenting with ChatGPT.
AI is majorly fucking with the freelance game, even those who could be considered in the top 1%, a demographic the AI thoughtbois tell us are safe from automation.
The Hollywood Writers Guild is so concerned about AI that a condition for ending their strike is a guarantee by the studios that AI won’t be used in the scriptwriting process. The studios responded with a non-negotiable no. Clearly, they want to at least have the option for AI to replace writers in the future.
Meanwhile, CNET’s journalists are pushing to unionize because of the AI threat. And who can blame them when CNET has been caught spamming poorly written AI articles before?
Writing for a living was already extremely difficult (as it should be). The “exciting” media outlets like BuzzFeed News and Vice paid like shit, and are now going under. Traditional journalism is hard as fuck to break into, pays like shit, and isn’t very conducive to creativity. Freelance writing requires an assortment of skills beyond writing. And good luck getting your book published.
This is all obviously going to become much worse once AI truly takes off.
So, my recommendation for aspiring and current writers is this: start preparing now. If you aren’t actively building your own blog, email list, and brand, then you better start hoarding lottery tickets, because your livelihood is on borrowed time.
Extras
Here are my good reads for the week.
My boy Nick Trimmer nails this on Sam Altman’s congressional appearance. Spoiler: he doesn’t want regulation because he cares about humanity, he wants regulation because it helps OpenAI. Show me the incentive, I’ll show you the outcome.
It’s not going to swing an election but CBDCs should be illegal and DeSantis and RFK JR, for all their faults, are right on it.
The Supreme Court’s penchant for “gifts” should be a bigger story. Maybe more on this next week.
Wemby to the Spurs was the most predictable result of all time.
The Durham Report came out, and as expected, the two sides are interpreting it very differently. The right is calling for the FBI to seppuku, while the left is saying there’s nothing to see here. The truth likely lies somewhere in the middle. (Side note, what are the odds any politician actually read the damn thing?)
The Mormon Church is one of the world’s greatest scams.
A Professor flunked his entire class because he thought ChatGPT wrote their essays. News flash professors, the cat’s out of the bag for AI. Figure out better ways to grade than stupid-ass papers.
61% of Americans are concerned about AI’s effects on humanity. I am one of them.
YouTube’s algorithm shows gun videos to young gamers. My completely unscientific opinion is that it doesn’t really matter. If you’re psycho, you’re psycho. It’s not like one day you’re a normal dude and then after watching a gun video you turn into Eric Harris. But who knows, maybe I’m wrong.
Depression rates are at all-time highs, and it’s probably because of social media.
Americans aren’t moving for a new job. And why would they? It takes a lot of effort to move, and not a whole lot of effort for your boss to fire you.
The US birth rate is in freefall, yet another reason why we need to fire up immigration STAT.
A robot is about to make your Sweetgreen salad.
Has North Carolina found the abortion compromise we’ve been looking for all this time? (Probably not)
Until next time, ✌️
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