Tommy Craggs

What people were actually witnessing as they watched a particular product get worse—enshittify, to use Cory Doctorow’s coinage—was not the slow approach of some inexorable fate, as many believed. It was, as the tech writer put it to me, “evidence of a company doing very well by being very bad.” A lot of sharp people still don’t see it, in part because of a faith, not yet exhausted, in some kind of self-correcting market mechanism: A costly and degraded product would be punished somehow. It simply had to be. Forget generative AI. That faith is the biggest bubble of all.

Ouch. www.wired.com/story/ai-pr-...

Ed Zitron Gets Paid to Love AI. He Also Gets Paid to Hate AI He’s one of the loudest voices of the AI haters—even as he does PR for AI companies. Either way, Ed Zitron has your attention.

Nice piece of writing. Love the shout out to David Noble’s 1984 classic, Forces of Production: “Men behaving like machines paved the way for machines without men.”

And this observation from @tcraggs22.bsky.social is exquisite:

“The computer has never been innocent of the world that made it.”

A very 1980s tableau in which a little kid in a Superman shirt is standing on the lawn of a small house he could never dream of affording as an adult, next to a woman in a cream-colored knee-length dress, belted with cap sleeves, who will never tire of asking him when he's finally going to write a book. They appear happy.

The mom in question:

Full podcast is here! pod.link/1055903427/e...

I talked about "Kpop Demon Hunters," the Eighth Army's occupation of Korea & the origins of Kpop, the only person more driven by resentment than Michael Jordan (my mom), rooting for pretty (again), and the greatest natural athlete the world has ever known (Kim Jong-Il)

Only If You Get Caught History Podcast · Updated Weekly · Only If You Get Caught is about how we can better understand sports and culture by appreciating the ways humans cheat in ways big and small.  Hosted by Patrick Redfo...

Regardless of how you feel about the above takes, do subscribe to the podcast. It's from @redford.bsky.social and @alexlaughs.bsky.social and @defector.com, and they make cool things: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/o...

Also, I got to talk about the early-aughts Sacramento Kings and my iron rule of sports fandom: always root for pretty.

Riding my hobbyhorse into the sunset, via @redford.bsky.social's rad new podcast: Sports conspiracy theories are how fans do structural analysis.

🥲 I have a new piece out today with ORB! Would love for you to read it. Truly a labor of care on everyone’s part & I’m grateful for that & the insistence that off kilter, slightly dark work Around Books fits & is in fact, the point. ORB forever! Messy girls with mental health challenges forever!!

"The Oakland Review of Books is coming!" it says on our website, and if you haven't noticed, we've started publishing ever-so-slightly-more ambitious things as we ramp up towards really cutting loose.

If you'd like to follow along, for the low price of $0 (American), you can get it in your inbox:

Are We Playing It All Wrong? | Defector At some point in the thick of the pandemic, I became briefly obsessed with a silly-seeming online controversy over what is known as the double-beat theory. The argument concerns classical music, which...

There's an excellent crank theory that insists we're playing a lot of old music at least twice as fast as was originally intended, and I wrote about it (and about the collapse of the Western order) for Defector's music week: defector.com/are-we-playi...

Good time to revisit @tcraggs22.bsky.social on this very topic at @flaminghydra.com

flaminghydra.com/who-made-cai...

All hands Like any movie in the Squad Assembles genre, "Sinners" is secretly about full employment

This is truly wonderful. It's about Sinners, yes, but it's about this moment, the power of the squad.
www.oaklandreviewofbooks.org/all-hands-si...

I think this is a good read on the movie, but I would push it even further. What do the movie’s vampires represent, anyway, beyond the dream of a squad permanently assembled--a eternal general strike against mortality, a perpetual mobilization against death? Smoke and Stack, the ex-gangster twins played by Michael B. Jordan, assemble a small and termporary communitarian escape from drudgery and oppression. But Remmick, the Irish vampire who chances upon the juke house, offers not so much an temporary escape as an entirely new settlement: “This world already left you for dead,” he tells Smoke. “Won't let you build. Won't let you fellowship. We will do just that. Together. Forever.” Huh. If we follow Tommy in focusing on Sinners’ historical setting we might note that promises like Remmick’s--a new fellowship, built together across racial lines, in pursuit of dignity, pleasure, and freedom--were relatively common in the South of this period: Robin D.G. Kelley documents in his great Hammer and Hoe the outsize role played by the Alabama Communist Party, among other communist parties, throughout the interwar civil-rights struggle. I’m not saying the Sinners vampires are communists, exactly--the movie is too dense and expansive to function as a simple allegory--but I’m not saying they’re not communists. Remmick is, after all, a materialist, in a vulgar-Spinozist sense: “We are Earth and beast and God,” he lectures. “We are woman and man. We are connected, you and I, to everything.”

in this week's newsletter, a plea for robin d.g. kelley to write about sinners maxread.substack.com/p/who-are-th...

As the world burns, a few of us are making an Oakland Review of Books. We don’t have money, but why not? We’re moving slowly. We're trying not to break things.

But we’re trying to imagine: what if Oakland were enough and we cared enough to look? www.oaklandreviewofbooks.org

Get together / Play a show Tommy Craggs on foxhole solidarity, and Rax King at the Dew Drop Inn

TODAY: @tcraggs22.bsky.social on the Squads Assemble school of cinema, and the social context that makes them so seductive. "They are a dream of everyone fits somewhere, costarring Ludacris." flaminghydra.com/r/442ea64e?m...

A screenshot from the article that reads: "The idea of full employment has been too long in the hands of the technocrats for any of the old cultural feeling to endure. White paper by white paper, the country’s Poindexters have defined full employment down to the point that it is now understood as a statistical benchmark of acceptable immiseration, some unemployment being necessary, so they say, to the long, twilight struggle against inflation. But true full employment always meant just that: no involuntary unemployment. Everyone has a job, and there is a job for everyone. And the Squad Assembles movies, even the bad ones, are some of the last remaining cultural expressions of that ideal. They are a dream of ~everyone fits somewhere~, costarring Ludacris."

FYI, these movies include "The Guns of Navarone," "The Dirty Dozen," "The Great Escape," "The Sting," any of the "Ocean’s" movies, the "Fast & Furious" series, etc.

All Hands The first hour or so of Ryan Coogler’s Sinners is a classic of that unnamed but easily recognized film genre which we’ll call “the Squad Assembles.” We follow the Moore twins, both played by Michael B...

Like all movies in the Squad Assembles genre, "Sinners" is a film about full employment. flaminghydra.com/issue-338/#a...

“Cletus safaris,” Ben

Even more ashamed than usual of the alma mater. You can support Steven here: forms.gle/Rn9Rmq5fQUhq...

"It’d be a mistake to dismiss the conspiracy business altogether. Since we’re all so freely handing out theories these days, here’s one for you: Far from the misfiring of irrational minds, the conspiracy thinking of sports fans is serious stuff, even rational. It’s a kind of layperson’s structural analysis—an earnest effort by regular folks to grasp the ever more recondite workings of the leagues they love to watch. They may not always be right in the particulars, but neither are they wrong, exactly."

The call on the field is that the totality was incompletely grasped before hitting the ground

The Reason Why This Super Bowl Has So Many Conspiracy Theories These days even routine NFL decisions can send fans down a rabbit hole. What’s going on?

There's wisdom in Super Bowl conspiracy theories if you know where to look: www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

The Reason Why This Super Bowl Has So Many Conspiracy Theories These days even routine NFL decisions can send fans down a rabbit hole. What’s going on?

Gotta read @tcraggs22.bsky.social on Super Bowl conspiracy theories:

"Just the other day, the comedian Bill Burr went on The Rich Eisen Show and started talking like Hal Holbrook in a parking garage."

www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

What's the matter with cultural politics? It's not just the economy, stupid.

That's from a thing I wrote in 2020, back when you couldn't swing the corpse of Claire McCaskill's career without hitting someone urging Democrats to forswear "cultural" issues in favor of "pocketbook" issues www.motherjones.com/politics/202...

In re the social death of trans people being reckoned a "distraction" from meat-and-potatoes economic issues:

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