Excerpt: People occasionally just flip [me] off or whatever, but nobody’s come up to me and tried to make a statement about anything. Personally, it’s kind of dumb. It’s just a vehicle. So it’s ironic that it would even become a political statement, but nonetheless it is. [Editor’s note: Taylor was arrested and pleaded guilty to conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding in the January 6 attack on the Capitol. He was later pardoned by President Trump.]

Excerpt: Most of us had resolved to go on hunger strike throughout our detention. The only breakfast offered, anyway, was stale bread and sliced tomato. I hadn’t eaten since Tuesday evening, around 36 hours earlier; the toilet water hit my stomach hard. ‘Today,’ I reminded myself, ‘is Wednesday, 9 October.’ The date was a precious thread that I would not be able to pick up again if I dropped it.

Excerpt: I firmly believe the (economic) AI apocalypse is coming. These companies are not profitable. They can’t be profitable. They keep the lights on by soaking up hundreds of billions of dollars in other people’s money and then lighting it on fire. Eventually those other people are going to want to see a return on their investment, and when they don’t get it, they will halt the flow of billions of dollars. Anything that can’t go on forever eventually stops.

This isn’t like the early days of the web, or Amazon, or any of those other big winners that lost money before becoming profitable. Those were all propositions with excellent “unit economics” – they got cheaper with every successive technological generation, and the more customers they added, the more profitable they became. AI companies have – in the memorable phraseology of Ed Zitron – “dogshit unit-economics.” Each generation of AI has been vastly more expensive than the previous one, and each new AI customer makes the AI companies lose more money.

Excerpt: Stephen Miller’s long-standing hunger for using federal force against those he views as domestic opponents now has the perfect vehicle: a president so detached from reality that he can be manipulated into military action by old Fox News clips and whispered lies from advisors who know exactly which buttons to push.

All of this is fucking terrifying. The institutions designed to prevent exactly this kind of abuse—Congress, the Cabinet, the Supreme Court—have either abdicated their responsibilities or actively enabled this moment.