First, a mail call: As longtime subscribers know, we like to intermittently solicit questions and recommendations from readers in a mailbag column. What’s on your mind? Discussion topics are up to you: I’m looking for burning questions, incisive comments, great recommendations, and truly worthwhile shitposts. In the past we’ve discussed Facebook, fatherhood, Gene Wolfe, cyberpunk, among other things. Please leave your queries and complaints below, or respond directly to this email, and I’ll respond or reply in a column later this week.
Second, as we prepare our third annual “Year in Weird and Stupid Futures” newsletter, I want to solicit from readers their favorite stories this year that reflect how strange, funny, fraudulent, shoddy, unexpected, and weird the future is. For examples of the kind of stories I mean, here’s the feature for 2022 and the one for 2021. As above, leave your links in the comments below or email them to me at your leisure!
And thank you, as always, for your continued support of my worst instincts and stupidest ideas.
I don’t know exactly how to write this without it being a total bummer but I am surprised there is not more Read Max climate-related coverage. There is a whole scammy, weird world of climate tech, green finance people. Plus, you have COP being hosted in a country that runs on fossil fuels and money laundering, it’s almost too on the nose as far as feeling like an ‘80s sci-fi evil corporation thriller. All that said, I love the newsletter!
Most of my HS students have fully shifted to group chats and/or discord as their ways of communicating both with each other and with the world at large. While they obviously still use Instagram (often in DMs, essentially a messaging app) and TikTok, they are using them less as a means to socially interact and more as a passive stream of content. As Twitter and Facebook continue to die off, it seems like this is a return to a more fragmented web of the aughts. How will this impact both the nature of the web as a thing and culture at large? Is it even fair to create this periodization to begin with? And what server or groupchat will spawn this Internet's goatse?
The auto industry - the Cruise shutdown (including withholding footage from the regulators), the Tesla explosions and 'recalls', the UAW wins. Maybe also the writer's strike and then the actor's strike? Organized labor in general, perhaps successful in part due to the downfall of Twitter??
I'm wondering about the trend toward cashlessness (lol). Obviously since the pandemic the increase in the number of businesses going cashless has accelerated, but going cashless doesn't ultimately seem to benefit anyone directly involved in the transaction (e.g. card transaction fees for businesses, no cash tips for workers, no ability for someone without a card to purchase anything). So I'm wondering 1) is there a concerted push toward a *fully* cashless future (in the U.S., anyway)? If so, are people like... talking about it? Is it contentious? Should it be? 2) I can't think about anything aside from cybersecurity when I imagine a fully cashless world — would that be a big concern? On the whole, is cybersecurity technology outpacing the ability and/or resources of hackers, or vice versa? Is that even the right question? I don't know! But I am very curious.
It would be great if you could explore the hypocrisy of mainstream media coverage of anything remotely political and the need to “both sides” any narrative so nobody has to feel any hurt feelings or guilt about how rich people’s grapes get peeled. Do you have any special insights on the editorial process and how interesting and sharp/critical news information becomes mushy “some say” material? Also, Joe Biden is old.
Do you have any recommendations for movies with extremely long run-times? I'm taking this winter break as an opportunity to summit Jacques Rivette's 13-hour OUT 1 (currently streaming on Mubi). The similarly gargantuan LA ROUE was recently added to Criterion Channel. Are ludicrously long films having a moment? Where do we go from here?
My wife and I recently watched the film BELLY on Criterion and found it to be a very fun watch. The top letterboxd review called it "The Suspiria of 90s Hood movies" and I find it to be an apt comparison. The acting is terrible (Nas is especially horrible) and the dialogue/story is B-movie level but the visuals and soundtrack are mesmerizing. The film feels like an extended music video which is no surprise given the background of the director. But it got us wondering, what are some other music video-like films where the combination of both music and visuals overpower terrible, badly dubbed, or otherwise unremarkable acting/storytelling?
Besides BELLY and SUSPIRA (1977), films that came to our minds were HOUSE, WHITE ROCK, and TRON LEGACY.
At this point in the game do any of the Twitter replacements/clones got the juice? Bluesky feels maybe the closest to me, but I’ve only ever seen one or two main characters of the day on there which feels like a prerequisite for a truly degenerate social network.
Also what's up with the whole openAI board thing. Looks like some of the EA leaning members being shifted around have some tenuous intelligence community connections. A ruse to privatize the nonprofit... or something more sinister?
My father-in-law only watches capital-A Action movies, heavy on explosions and aggrievement, light on dialogue. He affectionately refers to them in the household as "boom-booms." Things like your Bourne Identities, your Missions Impossible, Luc Besson joints, John Wicks, Matrices, etc. The problem is that he's seen damn near all of them and won't re-watch anything, even if he last saw it 30 years ago. Do you have any obscure Boom Boom Recommendations?
Years ago, I read "The Traitor Baru Cormorant" by Seth Dickinson after you mentioned it on one social media feed or another, and I loved it. Wondering if you ever read Dickinson's followups, "Monster" and "Tyrant," and what you thought about the change in style, pacing, structure, etc.
I've recently started reading Neal Asher's Polity books, and though the tone is very different, the setting has made me start doing a compare-and-contrast with Iain Banks' Culture books. (It has also of course further emphasized the vast chasm between SFnal "AIs" and the currently fashionable LLMs/GPTs.) I'm not sure if there was a question in there?
Oh, also! LinkedIn, the only social platform I'm still on, has become even more aggressively algorithmic and of increasingly less utility to me in keeping tabs on my industry, though of marginally more utility in keeping tabs on hucksters selling courses. Enshittification rolls on!
Do you think it’s inevitable that our future will include authentic relationships between humans and bots? What moral or ethical questions does that possibility bring up for you? How do we prepare?
I don’t know exactly how to write this without it being a total bummer but I am surprised there is not more Read Max climate-related coverage. There is a whole scammy, weird world of climate tech, green finance people. Plus, you have COP being hosted in a country that runs on fossil fuels and money laundering, it’s almost too on the nose as far as feeling like an ‘80s sci-fi evil corporation thriller. All that said, I love the newsletter!
What are some of the weirdest Kickstarter campaigns you have ever followed?
Most of my HS students have fully shifted to group chats and/or discord as their ways of communicating both with each other and with the world at large. While they obviously still use Instagram (often in DMs, essentially a messaging app) and TikTok, they are using them less as a means to socially interact and more as a passive stream of content. As Twitter and Facebook continue to die off, it seems like this is a return to a more fragmented web of the aughts. How will this impact both the nature of the web as a thing and culture at large? Is it even fair to create this periodization to begin with? And what server or groupchat will spawn this Internet's goatse?
The auto industry - the Cruise shutdown (including withholding footage from the regulators), the Tesla explosions and 'recalls', the UAW wins. Maybe also the writer's strike and then the actor's strike? Organized labor in general, perhaps successful in part due to the downfall of Twitter??
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkBmexuiSUY&ab_channel=ManCarryingThing
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pj18fFDUu4E&ab_channel=ManCarryingThing
I'm wondering about the trend toward cashlessness (lol). Obviously since the pandemic the increase in the number of businesses going cashless has accelerated, but going cashless doesn't ultimately seem to benefit anyone directly involved in the transaction (e.g. card transaction fees for businesses, no cash tips for workers, no ability for someone without a card to purchase anything). So I'm wondering 1) is there a concerted push toward a *fully* cashless future (in the U.S., anyway)? If so, are people like... talking about it? Is it contentious? Should it be? 2) I can't think about anything aside from cybersecurity when I imagine a fully cashless world — would that be a big concern? On the whole, is cybersecurity technology outpacing the ability and/or resources of hackers, or vice versa? Is that even the right question? I don't know! But I am very curious.
It would be great if you could explore the hypocrisy of mainstream media coverage of anything remotely political and the need to “both sides” any narrative so nobody has to feel any hurt feelings or guilt about how rich people’s grapes get peeled. Do you have any special insights on the editorial process and how interesting and sharp/critical news information becomes mushy “some say” material? Also, Joe Biden is old.
Do you have any recommendations for movies with extremely long run-times? I'm taking this winter break as an opportunity to summit Jacques Rivette's 13-hour OUT 1 (currently streaming on Mubi). The similarly gargantuan LA ROUE was recently added to Criterion Channel. Are ludicrously long films having a moment? Where do we go from here?
My wife and I recently watched the film BELLY on Criterion and found it to be a very fun watch. The top letterboxd review called it "The Suspiria of 90s Hood movies" and I find it to be an apt comparison. The acting is terrible (Nas is especially horrible) and the dialogue/story is B-movie level but the visuals and soundtrack are mesmerizing. The film feels like an extended music video which is no surprise given the background of the director. But it got us wondering, what are some other music video-like films where the combination of both music and visuals overpower terrible, badly dubbed, or otherwise unremarkable acting/storytelling?
Besides BELLY and SUSPIRA (1977), films that came to our minds were HOUSE, WHITE ROCK, and TRON LEGACY.
At this point in the game do any of the Twitter replacements/clones got the juice? Bluesky feels maybe the closest to me, but I’ve only ever seen one or two main characters of the day on there which feels like a prerequisite for a truly degenerate social network.
For weird futures, I propose the guy who is grew a brain organoid to play Doom: https://www.pcgamer.com/mad-scientist-youtuber-grows-a-rat-brain-that-is-learning-to-play-doom/#:~:text=The%20guy's%20got%20a%20bunch,online%2C%20what%20a%20world).
Also what's up with the whole openAI board thing. Looks like some of the EA leaning members being shifted around have some tenuous intelligence community connections. A ruse to privatize the nonprofit... or something more sinister?
What is up with the "effective acclerationism" movement?
Dear Max,
My father-in-law only watches capital-A Action movies, heavy on explosions and aggrievement, light on dialogue. He affectionately refers to them in the household as "boom-booms." Things like your Bourne Identities, your Missions Impossible, Luc Besson joints, John Wicks, Matrices, etc. The problem is that he's seen damn near all of them and won't re-watch anything, even if he last saw it 30 years ago. Do you have any obscure Boom Boom Recommendations?
Years ago, I read "The Traitor Baru Cormorant" by Seth Dickinson after you mentioned it on one social media feed or another, and I loved it. Wondering if you ever read Dickinson's followups, "Monster" and "Tyrant," and what you thought about the change in style, pacing, structure, etc.
I've recently started reading Neal Asher's Polity books, and though the tone is very different, the setting has made me start doing a compare-and-contrast with Iain Banks' Culture books. (It has also of course further emphasized the vast chasm between SFnal "AIs" and the currently fashionable LLMs/GPTs.) I'm not sure if there was a question in there?
Oh, also! LinkedIn, the only social platform I'm still on, has become even more aggressively algorithmic and of increasingly less utility to me in keeping tabs on my industry, though of marginally more utility in keeping tabs on hucksters selling courses. Enshittification rolls on!
Do you think it’s inevitable that our future will include authentic relationships between humans and bots? What moral or ethical questions does that possibility bring up for you? How do we prepare?
Are you into tabletop games? I am talking board, RPG, etc. Any new favorites or classics you think are absolute must haves?