My Sunday roundup of articles and ideas from the past week—re-upping content that might help us figure out what's going on, what comes next, and how to get through it all.
It was, of course, another big week of Trump administration chaos, illegality, and stupidity.
Everything was completely predictable.
But much of it was terrifying and surprising to people who hadn't been paying attention... as well as people who thought they had been paying attention, but had been misled and misinformed by the mainstream media throughout the 2024 presidential campaign.
The New York Times has normalized and covered up for the crimes of Donald Trump, his family, and his nefarious associates for years.
But they've also—conspicuously—neglected to inform us about the most important issues that will transform America and the world in the next few years, most notably in the areas of AI and robotics.
While the concerns of mere newsletter writers have gone unheeded for months, that started to change this week when The Times's Ezra Klein finally put the world on notice that Artificial General Intelligence—AGI—is coming soon.
AGI is something that the corrupt, cognitively diminished Trump will never understand or prepare for.
But AGI is a game changer that will destroy jobs, reshape the economy—and propel us into a future of uncertainty ("doom" say some, "abundance," say others).
It's something the megalomaniacal Elon Musk wants to program and control. Unless Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos or a few other contenders stop him.
"The Government Knows AGI is Coming"
Says Klein in the intro to his latest podcast:
"For the past couple of months, I've been having this strange experience where person after person independent of each other—from AI Labs, from government—has been coming to me and saying it's really about to happen: artificial general intelligence... it's coming inside of 2 to 3 years... inside Donald Trump's second term. And I think they're right and we're not prepared, in part because it's not clear what it would mean to prepare. We don't know how labor markets will respond. We don't know which country is going to get there first. We don't know what it will mean for war. We don't know what it will mean for peace. And as much as there is so much else going on in the world to cover, I do think there's a good chance that when we look back on this era in human history this will have been the thing that matters. This will have been the Event Horizon, the thing that the world before it and the world after it were just different worlds."
Klein talks about it all with Ben Buchanan, a top adviser on A.I. in the Biden White House.
NYT technology columnist Kevin Roose applauded Klein on X for finally addressing the potential calamities that AGI may cause within not many months. When asked why the NYT had done such a shit-poor job of covering the topic up till now, Roose admitted mainstream journalists were fearful of "taking AGI progress seriously" so as not to face, "accusations of shilling, being too credulous, buying into industry hype, etc."
So instead of reporting the reality, journalists played it safe and allowed Musk and the tech fascists to take over before we knew what was happening.
You can watch The Ezra Klein Show while there's still time (maybe) to build your doomsday bunker/Faraday cage:
"So the LA Times replaced me with an AI that defends the KKK"
While we wait for AGI to take our jobs and humanoid robots to evaluate how nice they need to be to humans, "regular AI" is doing a lot of damage all by itself.
Elon Musk is updating the government's IT so that he can use AI to "efficiently" fire millions of federal workers without any human having to get their hands (or conscience) dirty.
Meanwhile, former Los Angeles Times technology columnist Brian Merchant wrote on Substack about how the paper's new MAGA-friendly owner "got into some (more) hot water this week, when its new AI tool came to the defense of, I shit you not, the Ku Klux Klan."
Discussing Insights, the paper's new AI feature, Merchant writes:
Insights... for some reason, designed to evaluate the political orientation of opinion articles and then artificially generate countervailing points for the reader’s consumption... the AI responded to a piece by my former columnist colleague Gustavo Arellano, which argued that his hometown of Anaheim shouldn’t forget the KKK’s reign of terror there. The AI Insight then informed readers that... the Klan may simply have been “responding to societal changes rather than an explicitly hate-driven movement,” which is an objectively insane thing to say about one of history’s most obviously hate-driven movements.
Facing backlash for downplaying the KKK, the paper deactivated the Insights feature for the article in question the next day.
So the LA Times replaced me with an AI that defends the KKK
The LA Times is laying off and buying out staff, while introducing highly dubious AI tools. This is what automation looks like in 2025.
Brian Merchant
"Network State Unveils Push for Corporate Dystopia Cities"
Gil Duran reports that some tech bros aren't waiting to feel the AGI. They want to start building their brave new world order today.
"The Network State cult is actively lobbying Congress to legalize new kinds of corporate-controlled cities where normal laws don’t apply," writes Duran.
Quoting a new report from WIRED by Caroline Haskins and Vittoria Elliott, Duran highlights that:
The goal of these cities would be to have places where anti-aging clinical trials, nuclear reactor startups, and building construction can proceed without having to get prior approval from agencies like the Food and Drug Administration, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and the Environmental Protection Agency.
Noting that Trump embraced the Orwellian concept of "freedom cities" during the 2024 campaign, Duran writes:
Let’s be clear: These cities will be controlled entirely by tech billionaires and corporations, operating outside of U.S. laws.... there is no reason why anyone should accept the Orwellian term “freedom city” to describe zones that will actually be devoid of the laws, rights, freedoms and protections of normal American law.... Fascist Cities would be more accurate.
These tech billionaires have no interest in "Making America Great Again." If they did, they might, for example, try to solve homelessness before trying to colonize Mars.
Read Duran's The Nerd Reich newsletter to better understand the bullshit of the Network state "cult."
Network State Pushes Corporate Dystopia Cities in Congress
Network State figures push “freedom cities”—deregulated tech enclaves free from U.S. laws. A dangerous step toward corporate rule, lost rights.
Gil Duran
The Supreme Court Endorses Water Pollution
The MAGA Supreme Court took another step to poisoning our water this week, striking down E.P.A. rules on the discharge of water pollution.
Justice Amy Coney Barrett joined the dissent, reports One Green Planet, "warning that this ruling undermines the E.P.A.’s ability to address real-world environmental degradation, citing issues like floating waste and discoloration in San Francisco’s waterways."
Supreme Court Ruling Weakens Water Protections, Raising Environmental Concerns
The Supreme Court’s latest ruling limits the E.P.A.’s power to enforce water quality laws, raising concerns over rising pollution levels
Nicholas Vincent
Trump Barrels Ahead With His Plan to Destroy the Planet
On Saturday March 8, The Washington Post reported that Trump had pulled out of two global climate finance programs.
As Dr. Michael Shank wrote on Bluesky:
"We’ve just made vulnerable countries more vulnerable. Ratcheting up global insecurity. And we’re responsible as the world’s biggest historical emitter and now the world’s top oil and gas producer by far."
Meanwhile, The New York Times reports that the nonprofit Climate United is suing the Trump's E.P.A. for illegally withholding nearly $7 billion awarded to it last April. The Times notes that:
The funds are part of a larger pot of money, $20 billion, that have been swept up in controversy after Lee Zeldin, the E.P.A. administrator, called the green financing program a “scheme” that was “purposely designed to obligate all of the money in a rush job with reduced oversight.”
Consider: This administration turned a 19-year-old DOGE hacker known as Big Balls into a "senior adviser" at the State Department's Bureau of Diplomatic Technology. But they want us to believe that funding to help avert a climate disaster we've seen coming for decades was "a rush job with reduced oversight."
We're being blasted by a firehose of bullshit and corruption while the autocratic capture of our government continues apace.
And there are still 202 more weeks to go.
Thanks for reading! While paid subscriptions (billed to TLD Media LLC) and one-time tips are always welcome, all content to this ad-free newsletter is free, so subscribe for $0 and you won’t miss anything. And feel free to share this content knowing there’s never a paywall!
P.S. This really is the time to get off X once and for all. Please find me on Bluesky and these other places.
Subscribe to Unprecedented
Subscribe to the newsletter and unlock access to member-only content.