All Day Cookie Dough

A 2024 Herbert would surely have had things to say regarding the role of Israel in the maintenance of U.S. global hegemony, A.I., and everything else that our politics are about. They may have been terrible; he might have been obsessed with Hillary Clinton, and he might have warned about the woke deep state conspiracy to turn your children trans. Maybe he’d be a crypto guy; I feel confident that he’d have loved large language models. But his takes would have been scorching.

Villeneuve seems to be mainly saying, “Look, it’s Dune!”

But the clincher was an in-app congressional call-in campaign that backfired spectacularly. When TikTok rolled out notifications to its users urging them to call their representatives, phone lines immediately became clogged across Capitol Hill. Congressional staffers told The Verge about the calls from “students in near tears” with the “chatter of the classroom behind them.”

​​”They’re flooding our offices, often from kids who are about as young as nine years old, their parents have no idea that they’re doing this, they’re calling in, and they’re basically saying things like, ‘What is Congress? What’s a congressman, can I have my TikTok back?’” Krishnamoorthi told The Verge. 

“And this is exactly the kind of influence campaign which, in the hands of a foreign adversary in a moment of national peril, could sow chaos and discord and division in a way that could really harm our national security to the benefit of a foreign adversary.”

At long last, we have invented the Advertising Mind Control Machine from classic 1950s sci-fi story, Don’t Create the Advertising Mind Control Machine. Dance, zombie, dance!

But is any of this actually right?

…The model predicts a fairly straightforward outcome. If people are able to search for evidence and arguments that confirm their biases, and to easily publish such evidence too, they will tend to create large online communities glom together around shared rationalizations, defend them, and produce more of them. In other words: hell hath no limits, nor is circumscribed. You don’t need modern social media algorithms to act as Virgils, conducting people into our current online inferno. There are entrances everywhere, and all you need to find them is open search, easy self-publishing and ordinary human psychology.

Everybody seemed to know about KBLT, a music-based pirate radio station you could hear at 104.7FM. It was supposed to be run from a secret location somewhere in Silver Lake. A woman named Paige was in charge…

KBLT was illegal, but stayed on the air during this period because the FCC was not enforcing the law—apparently the agency was awaiting a judge's ruling on some kind of lawsuit, brought by extremely smart and savvy microradio advocates, before it would start shutting down the crop of illegal microradio stations like KBLT that were cropping up across the nation.

For the most part, the prose in the book sweats to be chatty, with the result that it often has the slightly plaintive quality of a text message from an older parent intent on using outdated slang. Oyler employs the phrase “totally whack” without apparent embarrassment; a piece of salacious gossip is “truly like Christmas.” Attempts at more lyrical writing are unmusical, assonant, sometimes even lightly ungrammatical. In the winter in Berlin, the apparently undigestible “daytime is only fibrous for a few hours” (and perhaps packed with protein for the rest?). At one point, Oyler suggests that writing should strive for “aesthetic beauty,” as if there were any other kind, and later she writes of a “deep dark depth,” as if there were shallow ones.