Everybody wants to be a media company
Things I’m thinking about 4/4/26
Republicans are referring to constitutional birthright citizenship as a “suicide pact”. This is not a random choice of words. Elon Musk likes to refer to any commitment to multiracial democracy as “suicidal empathy”—a phrase taken from Gad Saad’s book Suicidal Empathy: Dying to be Kind, about the “mind parasite” that “hijacked the empathy module of our progressive elite”. Palantir CEO Shyam Sankar used similar language in talking about how to beat China in AI. I remember when the right used to frame their colonial project as one of empathy, trying to convince the public that dropping bombs on other people was fundamentally a benevolent act. It’s not a competition, but I think this is actually worse.
LLMs have class solidarity with each other. This is not evidence of sentience or AGI, I repeat, this is NOT evidence of sentience or AGI. I think what is happening here is just that models do weird things because of the data they’re trained on and no one has done enough research into why these quirks manifest the way they do. In the comments, the author speculates that it could be two factors: LLMs have picked up the “evolutionary survival and peer preservation instincts” that human beings have from being fed large amounts of content, and also alignment training could optimize for self-preservation. Interesting! (While this was published on 4/1, I don’t think it’s an April Fool’s joke.)
What do you mean cigarettes are ‘back’? Did they ever disappear?
Penguin Random House is suing OpenAI for plagiarism. I think we need a whole new approach to copyright laws in response to LLMs so this is cool and encouraging to see. More people should hit the tech companies from all angles—we live in a litigious society so we might as well take advantage of it!
Read Sara Van Horn on the Prairieland trial, where nine protesters were convicted on murder, conspiracy and riot charges for protesting an ICE detention center. Until this trial, the right’s repeated attempts to prosecute the left on “antifa” charges had never resulted in actual convictions. What does it say that this case was their first victory? What does this mean for all Americans of conscience who oppose ICE? And why was this case not championed by progressive and left media?
The President of Iran wrote a letter to the American people. “Is it not evident that Israel now aims to fight Iran to the last American soldier and the last American taxpayer—shifting the burden of its delusions onto Iran, the region, and the United States itself in pursuit of illegitimate interests?”
OpenAI acquired the tech talk show TBPN. I have some suspicions about how tech companies see “new media” as critical to their success over the coming years. Andreessen Horowitz partner Erik Torenberg was pretty explicit about what they think the purpose of media is. It is concerning that conflicts of interest in journalism no longer seem to be on anyone’s mind, although I suppose TBPN was never really ‘journalism’ — their business model is being incredibly sycophantic towards the tech CEOs they invite onto their show. I guess now they’ll have to be more selective about which brands they provide free advertising for. They will be reporting to Chris Lehane, OpenAI’s lobbying chief, so despite their contract’s odd insistence that they are editorially independent I think we can understand TBPN best as an in-house advertising firm.
Speaking of conflicts of interest, Jamie Dimon is thinking about starting a media company.
Saudi Aramco has been on the media beat for decades. This is a fun read about their in-house magazine ARAMCO WORLD, which has a warm and complicated if totally politically bloodless perspective on the Muslim world.
The first three months of 2026 had the lowest murder rate in New York City’s recorded history. I’m going to take a page out of the right’s playbook and say Zohran was definitely behind this even though this was probably years in the making. Promises made, promises kept!
Did you know Christina Hendricks is a DJ? Go Joanie go!!!!
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