@mattseybold.bsky.social
American Vandal Pod | Prof of AmLit & Twain Studies + Director of Media Studies, Elmira College | Resident Scholar @MarkTwain.bsky.social | Political Economy of Mass Media TheAmericanVandal.substack.com MattSeybold.com buymeacoffee.com/americanvandalpod
So, I take it the Steve Carell show is like the Bob Odenkirk show is like the Sandra Oh show is like the Julia Roberts movie...
no further explanation needed
I provided the link to this event in the replies after hearing from MANY people that they were worried this was AI-generated.
It certainly does test the bounds of plausibility!
I can point to the exact moment I realized how fucked we were about to get.
theamericanvandal.substack.com/p/the-trash-...
He was, by all accounts, great company, as long as one was content to let him do all the talking.
Thanks, @mattseybold.bsky.social. Couldn't endorse this more highly.
Well, he was the publisher of the biography, which was one of the bestselling books of the era. So Twain wasn't exactly ghostwriting for free. That said, he offered Grant extremely generous terms, which no other publishing house would match, in part because he wanted Grant's family provided for.
oh, and, let this be today's reminder: EVERYTHING is Twain Studies
Among the many things I've learned from Twain: Maybe the most dependable heuristic for judging a person is who counts them as an enemy.
Dwayne Eutsey found, among the many revelations in the Epstein Files, that this epic shithead hated Mark Twain.
I spoke w/ a reporter at The Guardian about AI & she used one of my quotes as the title of her article 😂.
Thanks to Alice Speri & @theguardian.com for covering our Sisyphean struggle.
www.theguardian.com/technology/n...
every university writing program in the country should be at war with the college board
These companies are now in the end game of the bubble where they are appealing directly to the people in power who want more. They are past the fake message of being a benefit to people and now selling it as tools for control as it was always intended.
none of us who study financial crises predicted this last year nope
If you would rather die, you had better do it, and decrease the surplus population. - Mehmet Scrooge
"more of the intellectual capability is inside of data centers than outside of them"
Yep. It's just one facepalm after another from the opening bell.
FWIW, this is from a BlackRock event yesterday. The whole thing is...just...trainwreck. I was thinking I might write about it, but I dunno if my heart can handle it.
There were moments watching this video that I really did feel like if I squinted hard enough I could see his strings.
"We're going to sell intelligence," says World's Dumbest Man
Having recently read books about Sam Bankman-Fried, Larry Ellison, Elon Musk, Travis Kalanick, and James Clark, I realize how hard it is to get on that Mt. Rushmore, but Scam is making his case.
[pitchfork emojis]
"We see a future where intelligence is a utility like electricity or water and people buy it from us on a meter and use it for whatever they want to use it for. The demand that we see for that..." - Sam Altman
These bros are not okay.
“There’s kind of a defeatism, this idea that there’s no stopping technology & that resistance is futile, everything will be crushed in its path. That needs to change … We can decide that we want to be human.”
#AcademicSky
I came home today to a falafel plate on which everything was made from scratch, including the flatbread. And this, my friends, is a surefire way to make someone feel loved.
Don’t worry, the anti-AI email bombardment is weird as well.
🙏
