michael-dean-k/

Has there ever existed a cartoon that is structured like a play?—meaning, the entire 30 minutes is contained in a single cut, on a fixed cartoon stage, with characters going in and out. This is the antithesis of the one-second rapid cuts you find in Disney kids shows, and is even much slower than the “slow” 10-30 second cuts in a show like Arthur. Psychologically, this might be the best kind of TV for kids; it would fall into the same category of “face time with relatives,” which is safe because it’s a fixed object in a fixed frame. What’s funny is that early cinema was exactly this, because we were totally fixed in the paradigm of the prior medium; but now that we’ve moved past it, we’ve completely moved past it—to the point that it barely exists in film anymore, and was never once attempted in a cartoon. We’ve ignored it, when returning to it might be especially useful, especially for kids, especially in this moment where early age TV addiction seems to be stunting development.

Screens are unfairly tainted. I'd love to write a post about how screens are underrated, a glorious technology that would be marveled at by basically any other generation in history. Screens are the scapegoat because they are the point-of-contact, the portal through which bad or selfish actors bend your pixels to their whims. I know people lament over "blue light" and the physical strain from staring at something for many hours, and of course that is real at excessive doses, but might that then be an software or psychology issue?

The main reason I started writing this was to riff on screen-time with kids. There is a revealing nuance in the advice, "no screen time for kids below 2 years old, but FaceTime with relatives is fine." Why is that? It's not the screen, but the nature of what's on them. FaceTime is fine because there is a fixed and unchanging frame which features a fixed and unchanging person moving within. There is stability and coherence. We take this for granted, but infants haven't modeled this yet! They might not even have object permanence (ie: if they disappear from the frame, are they gone forever?). So by this logic, any piece of media with a stable frame is potentially infant safe; beyond FaceTime that includes single-shot lectures, text editors, etc. Obviously an infant will not be in gDocs, but the point is, if they see you using a static interface, there is little harm, it's simply another object in their environment.

By contrast, cartoons and commercials are the real issue. To explain this to my mother-in-law, I counted out loud the camera cuts in an ad, and it's less than once per second. There is a whole psychology on why they do this, which I can guess, but should probably look into. TLDR you are being addled. But when an infant sees this, I imagine the frame resets are alluring, but disorienting. If the frame changes every second, they're locked trying to make sense of this self-evolving landscape, an experience novel and atypical from every other thing they've seen. It has no continuity.

By this logic, it also explains why feeds are worse than personal websites. You just stream past 100 things per second and have no steady frame. Even though my site is feedish now, it's all from a single person, so at least that's a constant. I'd feel okay with my daughter at 5-years old reading personal websites and having her own, but I wouldn't want her to be using algorithmic social media feeds even at age 15.

Why am I so engaged with the news these days? I think it’s part of a deeper desire to update my world model. There is no doubt, massive change. Geopolitical, economic, technological. And as abstract as those things usually are, it feels like some sort of shift that, in 2-3 years time, wil have an effect on my life. Of course, for many people in the world, it’s hitting them now. But similar to how COVID spared no one, it feels like your model of where things are going will directly effect your preparedness.

But this feels more existential; safety/security are actually on the line. And so that’s an anxious kind of thought, that the tectonic plates under your reality are shifting, and it’s not some recreational yearning to re-skill and recalibrate, but a mandatory thing.

And so to make sense, what do you do, go on X? That’s a total cesspool. New media is worse than the old gatekept media. And so, where I think I want to take this, is to build my own systems to sift through and aggregate information, and to build my own UI to do this. Even a simple Claude prompt, “what happened in Iran in the last 4 hours” is so much better than X. It’s stripped of sensationalism, and reading is just a less triggering medium. Bias aside, it’s at least free from people who are intentionally trying to deceive you for virality. There is a clout-chasing incentive, paired with actually turbulent times, which makes algorithmic news something like a schizophrenia filter.

And so what are these questions, these underlying uncertainties that are triggering a model change? How will anyone make income with the rise of AGI-3 and eventually ASI? How do I exist online and avoid hyper-surveillance and cyber-sabotage? Where in the world can I live to build a better future for my daughter, one where colleges doesn’t exist, jobs don’t exist, and where quality of life actually depends on nationalized social systems? A weird future. And weird to consider the fall of America, a kind of reverse migration, where, because of a confluence events, it might not be a place to raise a family in 1-2 generations down the line.

And so practically, this is resulting in things like: (a) applying for EU citizenship, (b) setting up AI agents for my business, and (c) considering cybersecurity, new ways to protect, share, and collaborate on writing (ie: how do you build an audience if the commons are polluted?). This is all very disorienting; it's hard to continue with business as usual when you become open to this scale of change.

I haven't shared with you my latest political views, but I’m exploring this idea of Radical Centrism, meaning, it might be okay to justify a centralized state-controlled media platform if that technologically and systematically guarantees a sane/just information environment. Obviously, this is hard, if not impossible, to do right.

It’s whole goal would be to invent an architecture that make it impossible for polarization or propaganda to occur. The key UI invention is that every news event would be presented as an atomic unit, with a mosaic of interpretations surrounding (not just left/right, but dozens of angles). Anyone who hits a certain POV too much would get de-ranked, so both Charlie Kirk and Jimmy Kimmel would be equally penalized because they predictably align with a faction. It would have to be structurally impossible for governments, media, money, or power to use their resources to promote a message above the system. Any media company who does not comply will be taxed into oblivion.

Of course everyone should have the right to say/think whatever they want without consequence, but the real issue isn't free speech, but in frame control.

The freedom to speak is irrelevant if no one takes seriously the imperative to think. I don’t care about Kimmel or Carlson or any pundit who gets cancelled. They are, mostly, automatons with predictable views, warped by the incentives and mind viruses of some political body. When someone gets cancelled, it’s not that we’re preventing open thought, it’s just a casualty of a two-sided ideological war. If you care about the freedom to speak and think, you should be grieving the fact that the American spirit has been dead for a century, or more accurately, it's never truly existed in mass media, never perpetuated through a democracy, only paraded around by propagandists, grieving that independent parties and voices have been systematically throttled to have no mainstream influence.

I'd like to better articulate my impressions on the New Yorker over the last year. First, it’s too political to trust. I want to read great cultural writing from them, not politics. It feels like part of an agenda, and makes me wonder if the whole magazine is compromised: a propaganda vehicle rather than a place for essays and opinions. Even the “mail bag” feels strategically curated to generate uncritical dissent; they want me to mimic their dissent, but I’d rather derive it independently.

Separate from that, I’ve found the non-political essays (if you can call them essays) to be boring. Why? The New Yorker is a “product” that taps into a particular urban aesthetic, meaning it’s more about rehashing a predictable and consistent tone than publishing original, interesting, or rogue acts of thought (surely, this is what happens in cities more than anywhere else).

I scored the latest essay I read of theirs a 2.85. It excelled in paragraph form and vocabulary. To basically any reader, this would be flagged in their mind as “great writing.” In a way, it is. But as an essay, a specific genre, it lacks. There’s no authorial perspective (it’s more of a profile); there’s no real debate (it’s one sided); it’s missing a cohesive thesis; and the tone is … what is their tone? Erudite, dry, witty, understated irony. It seeks authority through a false conversationality. It is “cultural” and gives specifics, but has no imagination. The essays are mosey-like: lazy, unhurried, with no tension or spine, as if you have many hours to read through their ambles. There are snobby asides with little uncertainty. There is limited register of emotion, rarely rage or ecstasy, even in topics that would warrant it. They are occasionally cheeky, but never sly, slapstick, bawdy, or archaic. It is metropolitan, coastal, a business-class professional style of writing that takes no risk. Of course, writers vary, but this is my take of their overall editorial stance.

In the end, The New Yorker is tonal product: they’re known for a house style, and they bet on the fact that through locking into a particular tone, a good amount of readers will buy into it and get high off reading it each week. It is less about expanding your thinking, and more about helping one gain status by training themselves in an ethos of haughtiness. Good essay tone is dynamic, evolving many times from beginning to end; The New Yorker’s tone has been static for a hundred years.

The covers are great though, I keep them in my apartment as decorations.

08:10 AM – Some notes on recent politics (pulled from texts to a friend):

1. The fact that Trump can appeal to racists in the middle of the country to gain power is a flaw of democracy. Obviously there’s nuance there. But I don’t think “Thiel is anti-democracy” is an immediate disqualifier (also not a defense). It’s just that the word “democracy” has an emotional charge, and it’s basically propaganda (ie: how regime change is always framed as “spreading democracy”). Personally, I feel like some people’s votes should count 100x more than others (while OFC everyone has the right to earn/advance).
2. My sense is that Trump is exposing the gaps in the structure of our government that both democrats and republicans and corporations have exploited for decades, if not a century. “Big beautiful bills” have been a systematic bi-partisan problem with the structure of our government for a long time, but Trump is branding it in a way so that everyone recognize it and hate it. It seems like Trump is 100x corruption, but I’d say it’s more like 2-3x corruption. The reason it feels so different is that Trump is so outward and careless about it.
3. Before Trump, I think we were spiraling towards a disaster course, and Trump is accelerating that and making it visible, and I guess I’m arguing that I’d rather have open chaos then shadow chaos because at least we can see it and maybe the right people can regain control and debug.
4. I think I’d call myself a Constitutionalist who is willing to throw away the Constitution to rebuild from Constitutional principles that adopt for our times—the separation of powers (as conceived 250 years ago) is nowhere near robust enough create a functional, legible, sane, principled, transparent government. The question that matters is how do you actually create an architecture that curbs the abuses of power in the complexity of our modern circumstance? I think that’s the core of the American spirit.
5. Re: Trump’s alligator jokes around prisoners trying to escape the new detention camp in Florida. I said it was ‘weird’ and my friend said ‘not sick?’ and I said, “It’s sick if I take it literally and if people are actually dying in that camp, and weird if I try to understand how he manipulates media for outrage.”
6. FWIW I think the whole deportation thing is sad and ridiculous. A far better compromise would be to just grant amnesty, close the borders, and unfuck the legal immigration process (which is terrible). The sensible solution would not solve his political goals though. I just am very careful to not take the rage bait and get mad about Trump. We gain almost nothing from it. ICE is bad, but there’s also mass-scale child trafficking, organized murder, pointless wars, etc. I have limited emotional bandwidth, and American politics deserves close to 0% IMO. I can only change how I react to what I can’t control, and take courageous action on what I can, and hope that someday I’ll be able to do something about any of the bad in the world in some small, hard-to-calculate way, but I don’t think I’ll get in that position if I’m mad everyday over absurd alligator jokes. Basically, I’m trying to operate in a non-grief state about Trump. Would recommend.

My expectations for realism aren't that high for Mission Impossible movies. In the name is a bid for permission to chain highly improbable events in a never-ending sequence. If you scoff at the fact that Ethan Hunt can ride a motorcycle off a cliff, and then land his parachute not just into a runaway train that’s a mile away, but to break into the exact right window at the exact right time, then you probably just don’t understand the terms of the title. It’s impossible.

That’s not an excuse for sloppy writing. The villain in MI:8 was “The Entity,” a rogue super-intelligence that has taken control of the world’s nuclear arsenals (not exactly a new premise, but perhaps the first time this AI doomsday scenario shows up in a spy movie). I’m by no means an expert in how ASI will go rogue, but at the least I’ve read the 2027 paper, and can imagine the basics, and it seems like no one on their staff did. As my mother-in-law said, technical realism would go over 99% of people’s heads, but what is there to lose by setting good constraints?

While MI:8 was a fine closer for the series, the climax was a bust because: (1) they didn’t seem to care to explore the unique possibilities of an AI villain, and, (2) instead, Tom has had a vision for 20-years to do some real-life impossible propeller plane stunts. So basically, the ego of a stuntman/actor got in the way of a sensible writing.

Here’s the gist of how they set up the AI. Tom (and his sidekick Luther), built a “poison pill” (malware), and stole (impossibly, BTW) the “source code” from a sunken submarine. The idea is by plugging the “pill” into an external hard drive, it will confuse the ASI—it will think that it’s retreating into an underground base in Africa before setting off all the nukes, but actually it’s retreating into a “5D” optical drive, and it’s being disconnected right before it can launch anything. So many questions arise:

Is it not a distributed entity? Meaning, if it’s a superintelligent hive mind, then wouldn’t it see it as an extreme risk to relocate all versions of itself to a single location? The climax of the movie is Tom falling from a broken plane, seemingly trying to plug a USB-A dongle into a hard drive, and he just can’t get the direction right—and how exactly does an offline, analog, disconnected device instantly propagate through all it’s instances?

What’s impossible to me is that a film with a $400 million budget couldn’t do some basic research to understand its final boss. Feels like they picked AI because it’s the hype of the 2020s, and didn’t bother to really look into it. Instead, they scoped it’s destruction to plugging in a USB drive (remotely), and paired the ASI with a human agent—Gabriel, who wasn’t that compelling, but by embodying the villain in a human form, it let them make the climax a plane chase with cool stunts.

I would’ve rather seen Tom directly battle a digital entity. Perhaps the most unique dimension was when Tom went into a coffin with what seemed like a VR experience where he could talk to the entity himself. That only happened once, but it could’ve played a role in the climax—ie: imagine Tom in an inception-like world of illusions, where The Entity convinces him Rebecca Ferguson is still alive, but by him realizing it’s a simulation, he kills her and gets some piece of information that’s vital to protect the world.

Ultimately, the challenge is that there’s no real way to stop or kill a ASI, short of, destroying all digital system and rebuilding from scratch, which is it’s own kind of devastation.

I really disliked S7 E1 of Black Mirror, not because it was depressing, but because it’s terrible science fiction. I never expected BM to be hard sci-fi (where it gets into all the technical and nerdy specifics)—that would alienate its Netflix audience. But at the very least, it should be believable.

There’s probably a middle ground where SOMEONE on the team thinks through the realistic development of technology, so that the writers have some constraints around character and plot development. But this whole episode was simplified to the point of being cheeky.

Of course, companies will use deceptive tactics to push you to upgrade. But it's ridiculous watching Rashida Jones' mind get paused to spew ads without her realizing. Really? They mapped Verizon salesperson antics onto something as invasive as a BCI, which would never be so explicit.

To be clear, I’m (somewhat) a fan of the show. The premise is original/timely (and lends to some memorable scenes/situations), the acting is good, and the set/cinematography should maybe win something. But towards the end of S2 I noticed myself thinking several times, “this feels written by AI.”

Slop doesn’t mean “low quality.” Severance is extremely high-quality in some dimensions, so we need to get specific. Slop, literally, is the food farmers feed pigs; it’s a random assembly of leftovers. So slop is work that is arbitrarily assembled in a context where quality doesn’t really matter. If you’re invested in the premise, and are already paying $9.99 per month for Apple TV, then whether the writing is great, good, or bad, it doesn’t really matter, you still watch. I did. Vibes and star power only earn so much goodwill and patience though; if the form is hollow, the viewers will eventually buckle in frustration.

A few different qualities emerge from AI slop—amnesia, hallucinations, disorientation—all of which are hallmark features of the show. (Minor spoilers ahead).

Severance is a mystery that opens loops with no regards for ever closing them. Every episode opens 3-5 loops, but then they’re quickly forgotten, as if it’s written by a transformer with limited bandwidth. The show violates the principle of “Chekov’s Gun” (if you plant a gun on stage, someone has to get shot). Over two seasons they’ve placed dozens of “guns” and have barely used any. It’s as if an LLM was prompted, “add suspenseful cliffhangers aligned with the high concept,” and now it’s carelessly barreling into the unknown at 400 WPM.

A good mystery will resolve minor loops to help open major ones. In Severance, both major and minor loops are ignored. Mark’s “integration” (the fusion of his innie and outie) is critical to the premise; it was a key theme all season, but it played zero role in the finale. Instead, the plot is steered by cinematic porn and the bizarre. One episode we stumble into a room with baby goats. One episode we wake up in a forrest without ever learning why. In S2E10 recap, the show’s creator said, effectively, “We needed another Lumon-sanctioned celebration, and we didn’t want to do the waffle party again, and somebody suggested, ‘what if we bring in a marching band?’” It’s like they’re prompting an endless cascade of irrelevant hallucinations. “No, crazier!”

The result is 60 minute episodes of slow-paced hi-fi disorientation. I guess it’s properly meta: the viewers are as confused as the characters. But for 20 hours? Right idea, wrong execution.Once the vibe wears off, you realize a Severance episode is 50-90% bloat. There is sometimes only 5 minutes of meaningful development per episode, surrounded by spooky moments, stunning imagery, dream sequences, and staring contests. I’m not saying the show should be fast-paced or linear. It should be slow and surreal, but it should also be strategically fusing together the different elements within the premise. Instead, it maxes out on art vibes. Each episode’s plot feels like it’s constructed by an LLM that can’t quite distinguish content from style, and so it just randomly arranges material that fits the aesthetic.

Could be pushing it here, but Severance might be the peak example of high-production streaming slop, and a preview of the future of AI entertainment: a user prompts a clever premise, they’re augmented with stunning visuals/vibes, but nothing is coherently composed. Maybe I’m just angry from the finale, but I think the writing is unforgivable, especially given the potential, and especially since it costs $20 million to produce an episode that is mostly shot in all-white rooms.

I need to write out a post on why movies are culturally/psychologically better than shows, and how you should be extremely careful about the shows you welcome into your life. Unlike movies, shows focus on small dramas between characters, and are unresolved episode to episode—they have a constant pull on your attention, and are too uneventful to stay in your memory.