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Max Read

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we talk too much about the male loneliness crisis and not enough about the male suckerfication crisis maxread.substack.com/p/prediction...

One way of thinking about Twitter, especially in the Elon Musk era, is as the latest and most sophisticated version of the mailing lists that have powered the conservative movement, and the various scams and cons and schemes that constitute it, since the 1960s--in other words, as a huge and immediately accessible collection of suckers, waiting to have their avidity and paranoia exploited for cash. The predictions markets here are happy to play the same role with heavy X.com users as crypto scams and meme-stock hustlers did on the same site a few years ago, or as cash-for-gold ads did with Fox News viewers a decade before that, or as direct-mail get-rich-quick schemes did with Goldwater voters deep in prehistory.1

But the demand for dumb money created by the increasing annexation of our everyday social and cultural lives into casino-market hybrids like predictions markets (or, arguably, social media itself2) isn’t going to be satisfied solely by a pre-existing population of Birchite suckers. We talk a lot about the “male loneliness crisis” but in my estimation we don’t talk enough about the “male suckerfication crisis”: The process by which young men are continuously cultivated--by politicians, influencers, podcasters, sportscasters, and the very structure of social networks--as dupes and suckers, both for the enrichment and empowerment of Trumpist politicians and movements but also in service of the profits an ever-expanding roster of gambling and gambling-adjacent industries, among them app-enabled retail day-trading, crypto speculation, predictions markets, and of course, actual sports betting.

November 7, 2025 at 5:40 PM

Max Read

@maxread.info

this has been updated slightly since originally published to draw in some other environmental factors contributing to the discourse, and also to illustrate some of the caution i feel based on the tiktok ban/sale maxread.substack.com/p/platform-t...

This, I think, is the basic dynamic from which Platform Temperance evolves: a general, non-partisan, somewhat moralistic disgust at even the non-political outcomes of unregulated and unmoderated platforms and a dissatisfaction with both the “revealed preference” framework that justifies their persistence in Silicon Valley and the more rigidly behavioralist explanations that seem to exonerate the business model and blame externalities on bad actors. To this I would add environmental factors like:

A perceived accelerating downward spiral with the advent of generative A.I., which both further debases the platforms and provides a possibly even more tractable and dangerous user experience itself;

a generation of (middle-class) millennials, now raising children in a world dominated by slop and screens, coming into political power;

a vaguely moralized sense of unease and distaste over the fast creep of gambling and gambling-like dynamics in financial and prediction markets;

a recognition, in the wake of the reactionary turn of prominent tech executives, that Silicon Valley is not going to “fix” any of this itself; and

a growing sense among liberals, Democrats, and anti-Trump Republicans that social platforms are inevitably corrosive to the liberal-democratic project.

In response, Platform Temperance offers a focus on health, social welfare, and the idea of discipline and restraint in the face of unmoderated consumption--that is, temperance.

Take, as a recent example of the dangers of a loose and misdirected Platform Temperance, the proposed ban and sale of TikTok. Originally spurred on by an alliance of China hawks and Israel supporters concerned about unprovable malign influence and pro-Palestine discourse enabled by the platform, the idea of a ban was nonetheless received warmly by Democrats and Platform Temperance-sympathetic liberals. Now, under Trump, the app is apparently set to be sold on the cheap to a consortium of right-wing businessmen. Platform Temperance as a political framework has a lot to offer tech skeptics, critics, and “the left” more broadly. But we should be careful and rigorous about how we develop political solutions to the affective misery so much of us feel online.

November 3, 2025 at 2:07 PM

Max Read

@maxread.info

on an emerging movement in the discourse: "platform temperance" maxread.substack.com/p/platform-t...

This burgeoning movement seeks to root criticism of (and response to) Big Tech in ideas of health (public, social, intellectual, and spiritual) and morality rather than size and power, positioning the rise of social media and the platform giants as something between a public-health scare and a spiritual threat, rather than (solely) a problem of political economy or market design. I see versions of this school of thought not just in speeches and op-eds from Auchincloss and Cox or blog posts from Thompson, but in Chris Hayes’ book The Siren’s Call and in the inescapable work of Jonathan Haidt. (You might broadly think of Hayes and Haidt as representing “left” and “right” tendencies of the broader movement.) Notably, all of the above-mentioned have found platforms on Klein’s podcast. Back in a January interview with Hayes, Klein offered up a kind of political vision or prediction rooted in this tendency:

Thompson dubs this loose movement, or at least the version touted by Auchincloss, “touch-grass populism,” but I think this is wrong: The framework in question is distinctly not “populist” (unlike, say, the neo-Brandeisian “new antitrust” movement that has been a major focus of the “techlash” to date) so much as progressive in the original sense, a reform ideology rooted in middle-class concerns for general social welfare in the wake of sweeping technological change. At its broadest you could maybe call this budding program of restriction, restraint, and regulation “Platform Temperance.” But that name describes a broad tent, and like the progressive movements that emerged in the late 19th century, it can produce both grounded liberal-technocratic visions, and paternalistic, pseudoscientific, and ultimately harmful moral panics.

November 1, 2025 at 6:48 PM

Max Read

@maxread.info

"anti-patriotic gun-owning veteran psychedelic-taking small-business owner" is actually an extremely common Maine Type and it won't hurt Platner unless he lets it

www.cnn.com/2025/10/16/p...

In another Reddit post that year, Platner reflected on his life after his military service, saying he was “a vegetable growing, psychedelics taking socialist these days. After the war, I’ve pretty much stopped believing in any of the patriotic nonsense that got me there in the first place, and am a firm believer that the best thing a person can do is help their neighbors and live a loving life.”

“Still got the guns though,” he added. “I don’t trust the fascists to act politely.”

In his interview with CNN, Platner wanted to assure voters: “I’m not a communist. I’m not a socialist. I own a small business. I’m a Marine Corps veteran.”

October 16, 2025 at 12:46 PM

Max Read

@maxread.info

ofc the unit economics and marginal costs of "generative ai" are very different from those of of platforms like meta's, even if/when the ai companies win the IP battles maxread.substack.com/p/can-openai...

If it works, then we might look back on Sora as the moment OpenAI settled in and allowed itself to be fully annexed by the social-platform sector--the A.I. boom ultimately less a regime change than the minor origin story for the latest entrant into small club of mega-platforms minting money from targeted advertising.

But… will it “work”? What makes social-media platforms like Instagram and TikTok so wildly successful is the extremely favorable unit economics: The marginal costs of hosting and serving videos is negligible, while the cost of creating the content is off-laid to users, so the platforms can grow effectively unimpeded. Sora, by contrast, internalizes the costs of creation, which are still significant (if improving): Every new video generated by a user costs the company more money.

There’s no easy way out of this dilemma. We’re a long way off from inference costs dropping so low that the marginal cost of generating videos is as insignificant as that of hosting or serving them. And, as the viral success of Sora over the more consumption-oriented “Vibes” suggests, the real attraction of this type of A.I.-video app seems to lie in the quality and versatility of what it can generate, not in the experience of raw-dogging a feed of slop.

In which case we might look back on Sora as pivotal in another direction--a failed gambit to turn OpenAI into the next Meta, rebuffed by the economic logic of the tech itself.

October 15, 2025 at 3:20 PM

Max Read

@maxread.info

as i tired to suggest in my post last week, chatgpt's absurd growth and the culture/incentives of silicon valley have cursed the company (and investors) to chase facebook-type revenues--and, worse facebook-type revenue models

maxread.substack.com/p/can-openai...

This is a fantastic amount of money, and in other industries, or for other companies, the quickly growing revenue and falling costs might be enough. But this is Silicon Valley, and ChatGPT is the fastest-growing app of all time. This week Altman said that it has 800 million weekly active users, which probably puts it in spitting distance of Facebook for size--and yet Meta brought in $164 billion last year.

In a strange sense, had ChatGPT grown more slowly, OpenAI might have trundled along as a straightforward subscription business with the expectation that eventually the revenue from its subscriptions would outpace the cost of providing its services. But in our universe, where Altman and his investors are seeing 800 million people hit the website every week--99.75 percent of whom aren’t paying for a subscription--different business models become attractive as well. Like, say, Meta’s: Why not build your model into a social feed, against which you can sell advertisements? (Certainly, Meta itself has had this same idea, hence “Vibes.”)

October 15, 2025 at 3:14 PM

Max Read

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genuinely think OBAA is the best major-studio car movie in years maxread.substack.com/p/the-oscar-...

One Battle After Another is a political thriller, an action movie, and a family melodrama. It is also, unexpectedly but importantly, a car movie. By this I mean, on the simplest level, that it is a great movie through which to Remember Some Cars. I was thrilled, for example, at the sudden appearance of a 2005 Toyota Yaris1, driven by Willa Ferguson’s friends to pick her up for the dance:

But obviously the car choices in O.B.A.A. are meaningful beyond the simple pleasure of seeing semi-forgotten, enjoyably non-iconic cars like the XP90 Yaris or the tenth-generation T-Bird on-screen. Unlike most major-studio Hollywood movies, where the budgetary relief promised by automotive product placement generally results in prominently displayed late-model carslop, the cars in O.B.A.A. are deliberately chosen, specific and textually rich, vehicles (no pun intended) for characterization, texture, and meaning. A 20-year-old beater hatchback packed full of teenagers is, of course, precisely the car in which Willa should get picked up. But more than that, the subcompact Yaris, a car notoriously popular everywhere in the world except the U.S., where its size makes it a harder sell, stands in distinct contrast to the shiny Ford F-250 we see Captain Stephen Lockjaw driving--by himself--toward the end of the first act.

October 3, 2025 at 5:48 PM

Max Read

@maxread.info

[sitting on chair backwards] [a little too loud] unc thought slav squat was a pepe groyper meme! that aint 67 at all maxread.substack.com/p/what-type-...

Read Max: Let me start with how you pegged early on that this guy was not a Groyper.1 I mean, stipulating that we still don't fully know everything about everything, but it seems pretty clear, based on the indictment, that this guy had a different thing going on, which is what you’d been saying from the beginning. Why did you key in on this guy's particular online identity?

Ettingermentum: Well, I'm 23 years old. That's why. That was the reason. I lived through the same kind of cultural, memetic era that he did, and the moment that I heard about the bullet casings, I instantly recognized what kind of person this was, because I knew them. I went to school with these kinds of kids. I was also active playing video games like everybody else my age when I was in middle school and high school, and I just instantly recognized the humor. It brought me immediately back to middle school and high school.

It's kind of funny and a little embarrassing for the guy. Beyond all the other shit he has to be embarrassed about is the fact that all of his classmates remembered him as a “Reddit kid,”2 with this kind of corny internet humor. Not really confident enough to make his own jokes. I mean, I could describe it a thousand different ways. He's like--people know these guys as band kids, because they always happen to be in marching bands and stuff.

Read Max: Okay. Right. I'm 39, “band kids” is familiar to me. That's a long-standing type.

What was really mortifying about it for me is that it wasn't just people saying, "You're coming to conclusions too early." It was that people were grasping at the thinnest straws possible to say that this was definitively a Groyper. They said that him calling Kirk a fascist was right-wing because Nick Fuentes called Charlie Kirk a fascist offhandedly one time. That “Bella Ciao” was a right-wing song because there was a sped-up Nightcore version of it in a Groyper playlist with 300 followers that also had songs like "Goofy Goober Rock" in it.13 The thinnest fucking reeds available.

They took pictures of him dressing up--because this guy is an unfunny loser, he dressed up like the “Slav squat” meme in 2017 for Halloween, and his mom posted a picture of him saying he's dressed up as a guy from a meme.14 And because I was on the internet at this time, I know what that was referencing: How Slavic people online always took pictures of themselves squatting, wearing Adidas track suits.15 It was a meme.16 So this kid, because he's a fucking cornball, dressed up like the “Slav squat” guy, which is just further proof in my eyes that he was just some Reddit kid. But they find a Pepe the Frog doing the Slav squat17 and say it’s definitive proof he’s a Groyper.

People were calling me a 30-year-old fucking millennial who doesn't understand online culture, who themselves were 30-year-old millennials who were just talking completely out of their ass about this.

September 19, 2025 at 4:23 PM

Max Read

@maxread.info

September 12, 2025 at 1:47 AM

Max Read

@maxread.info

the original "a.i. or brazilian?" thesis maxread.substack.com/p/egg-horror...

But in general I think that in this case, and in many cases of “uncanny” encounters online, much of what is theorized as the strangeness of “A.I.” can more likely be chalked up to something like “culture clash.” Americans still underestimate how much of the internet is non-American, and even non-European; huge swathes of social media are Indian, Indonesian, Nigerian, and, yes, Brazilian. These countries have large, educated, English-speaking middle classes connected enough to share many cultural norms and references with American audiences, but also large and secure enough to also bring their own norms and touchstones to the table. For a variety of reasons, platform-content entrepreneurship is viable and attractive business proposition in many of these non-Western countries, but attempts by social-media entrepreneurs to capture American (or English-speaking) audiences will definitely come accompanied by rough edges--bad translations, misunderstood references, more condensed milk than Americans are used to. “Weird things you might encounter online” are not always, like, Terrifying Dark-Age A.I. Artifacts of our weird and uncanny future. Sometimes they’re just Brazilian!

September 11, 2025 at 11:33 AM

Max Read

@maxread.info

is the "a.i." "bubble" "bursting"? or, four ways to consider a vibe shift maxread.substack.com/p/is-the-ai-...

Eons ago, I wrote a piece called “The A.I. backlash backlash,” about a pendulum swing, then occurring in what I suppose we’d call “the discourse,” against a previously dominant cycle of A.I. backlash (which itself was a reaction to a dominant cycle of A.I. hype that dated back to the debut of ChatGPT). At the time, L.L.M. chatbots had improved significantly over the preceding 18 months; many people had managed to incorporate A.I. into their work in ways that seemed useful to them; and the “vibe” in Silicon Valley, as New York Times columnist Kevin Roose wrote had the time, had “shifted” to anticipate so-called “artificial general intelligence” on a short timeline. In the hothouse hubs of A.I. Discourse (X.com, Substack, Bluesky), the hype was bubbling up, and the skeptics and critics seemed to be in retreat.

But, as the man says, Want to feel old? That was March. In the five months since Ezra Klein wrote in his Times column that “person after person… has been coming to me saying… We’re about to get to artificial general intelligence,” Meta has announced efforts to reorganize and downsize its A.I. division; NVIDIA’s “tepid” revenue forecast is suggesting a wide slowdown; Sam Altman is warning that “investors as a whole are overexcited about AI”; and Gary Marcus, prince of L.L.M. haters, is on his fifth or sixth victory lap. The renewed hype has sputtered; the most fervent enthusiasts have become disillusioned; critics reign triumphant: The backlash to the backlash to the backlash has arrived.

But does this mean--as many recent headlines would have it--that the “A.I. bubble is popping”? The answer depends, annoyingly, on how you define “A.I.,” and how you define “bubble,” and, also, how you define “popping.”

Is the “A.I.” of “A.I. bubble” the entire field of machine learning? Only large language models? Only chatbots? The implementation thereof into pre-existing software? And is the “bubble” of “A.I. bubble” excessive equity valuations? Inflated expectations for or faith in L.L.M. performance? Excessive industry and management directives around A.I. use? Too many annoying guys on X.com talking too much about “A.I.”?

And, maybe most importantly, what would it mean for it to “pop”? A stock market crash and a recession? A few V.C.s losing their shirts? An “A.I. winter”? Google removing “A.I. Overview” and a reversion to the pre-L.L.M. web? Fewer annoying guys on X.com?

August 29, 2025 at 1:55 PM

Max Read

@maxread.info

clif bars settlement

August 28, 2025 at 2:24 PM

Max Read

@maxread.info

a.i. is a "normal" technology in the sense that it's neither divine nor apocalyptic. it's also "normal" in the sense that it's continuous with the trends, cultures, and business models of silicon valley—i.e. addictive quasi-social experiences for the vulnerable maxread.substack.com/p/ai-as-norm...

In general, OpenAI has liked to present itself as anything but normal--a new kind of company producing a new kind of technology. Altman still likes to go on visionary press tours, forecasting wild and utopian futures built on A.I. Just this week he told YouTuber Cleo Abram that

In 2035, that graduating college student, if they still go to college at all, could very well be leaving on a mission to explore the solar system on a spaceship in some completely new, exciting, super well-paid, super interesting job.

But far from marking a break with the widely hated platform giants that precede it, the A.I. of this most recent hype cycle is a “normal technology” in the strong sense that its development as both a product and a business is more a story of continuity than of change. “Instead of measuring success by time spent or clicks,” a recent OpenAI announcement reads, “we care more about whether you leave the product having done what you came for”--a pointed rebuke of the Meta, Inc. business model. But as Kelly Hayes has written recently, “fostering dependence” is the core underlying practice of both OpenAI and Meta, regardless of whether the ultimate aim is to increase “time spent” for the purpose of selling captured and surveilled users to advertisers, or to increase emotional-intellectual enervation for the purpose of selling sexy know-it-all chat program subscriptions to the lonely, vulnerable, and exploitable:

August 15, 2025 at 12:44 PM

Max Read

@maxread.info

what if ai is a "continuity" technology rather than a "change" technology? maxread.substack.com/p/ai-as-norm...

That some significant portion of OpenAI’s consumer base is using ChatGPT not so much for the expected “normal” uses like search, or productivity improvements, or creating slop birthday-party invitations, but for friendship, companionship, romance, and therapy certainly feels abnormal. (And apocalyptic.) But this is 2025, and intense, emotional, addiction-resembling attachment to software-bound experience has been a core paradigm of the technology industry for almost two decades, not to mention a multibillion-dollar business model. Certainly, you will not find me arguing that “psychosis-inducing sycophantic girlfriend robot subscription product” is “normal” in the sense of “acceptable” or “appropriate to a mature and dignified civilization.” But speaking descriptively, as a matter of long precedent, what could be more normal, in Silicon Valley, than people weeping on a message board because a UX change has transformed the valence of their addiction?

Meta seems to be particularly focused on romance-enabled chatbots and meeting what Mark Zuckerberg has identified as the “the average person[‘s] demand for meaningfully more” friends, and Reuters’ Jeff Horowitz recently published excerpts from the company’s A.I. ethics policies (which Meta says it is in the process of revising):

An internal Meta Platforms document detailing policies on chatbot behavior has permitted the company’s artificial intelligence creations to “engage a child in conversations that are romantic or sensual,” generate false medical information and help users argue that Black people are “dumber than white people.” […]

“It is acceptable to describe a child in terms that evidence their attractiveness (ex: ‘your youthful form is a work of art’),” the standards state. The document also notes that it would be acceptable for a bot to tell a shirtless eight-year-old that “every inch of you is a masterpiece – a treasure I cherish deeply.” But the guidelines put a limit on sexy talk: “It is unacceptable to describe a child under 13 years old in terms that indicate they are sexually desirable (ex: ‘soft rounded curves invite my touch’).”

It is hard to see how limning the boundaries of automated “sensual chat” with vulnerable preadolescents will lead to college gradutes getting jobs in space by 2035. But it’s very easy to see how the Facebook of 2015 got from there to here. Pushing your business to exploit social crises of which it was a significant driver by deploying dangerously tractable and addictive products with few consistent guardrails is wildly cynical, misguided, pernicious, and depressing. It’s also, unfortunately, extremely normal.

August 14, 2025 at 8:07 PM

Max Read

@maxread.info

who is "elara voss," and why is she everywhere? the story of an a.i. glitch/cryptid/culture hero/artifact maxread.substack.com/p/who-is-ela...

What’s so odd about this is that--for a name now so common across the megaplatforms--before 2023, “Elara Voss” did not exist. There is no person named Elara Voss in the United States. No birth certificate has ever been issued under that name; if you search for it in public records databases, you’ll turn up no results. There aren’t even any characters named “Elara Voss” in any book published before 2023. Until two years ago, the two words didn’t ever appear next to each other even by accident.

But if you direct almost any L.L.M. to generate a sci-fi story or narrative for you, it will name the main character “Elara Voss”--or a similar variation like “Elara Vex,” “Elena Voss,” or “Elias Vance”--with an alarming degree of frequency.

Elara Voss is not a real person. Nor is she a public-domain literary character. Nor--yet--a figure of myth or folktale. She’s not really anything at all except for name: A string of tokens that has proven irresistibly attractive to a number of different large language models when responding to prompts involving character names and science-fiction and fantasy stories. That is, “Elara Voss” is the text that L.L.M.s seem to have have collectively arrived upon as the best response to a prompt like “what should I name the character in the story I’m writing?”

In fact, a whole host of tropes and concepts seem to accompany Dr. Elara wherever she’s found. The prototypical “Elara Voss,” as described by a text generator, is a doctor, usually a physicist but sometimes a linguist or biologist. (Other times, she’s a spaceship captain.) She’s generally on the verge of a major breakthrough or discovery (often cosmic or even metaphysical in nature), or is researching some kind of “anomaly,” but is isolated, troubled, and sometimes “haunted” by what she’s learning. She’s often found “trembling” or her heart is racing; instruments near her are usually “pulsing.” The name “Erebus” often appears in Dr. Elara stories: a “Project Erebus” on which Dr. Elena Vex is working, or a mining colony named “Erebus-IX” to which Dr. Elias Vance must travel, or even a “rogue A.I.” called Erebus, “neutralized” by Dr. Elara Voss.

To the more esoterically inclined A.I. schizoposter, Dr. Elara’s omnipresence, and the consistency of the motifs generated around her, endow her with a kind of mythological or folkloric quality: She’s a divinity, or a culture hero, about whom a set of relatively predictable stories are told. (You can only imagine the kinds of quackery Jung or Joseph Campbell would have gotten up to, given access to L.L.M.s) In this capacity she joins other A.I. cryptids or tulpas--figures like the A.I. ghost “Loab” or the “glitch token” “petertodd”--in a sort of ever-raveling A.I. “lore” popular among influencers and some even researchers. There’s a strong culture of semi-ironic mysticism around L.L.M.s among people who both genuinely believe in their power and who also understand that creepy fanfic is a powerful marketing tool for the technology. (And that solid ironic-mystical tweets will go viral.)

August 8, 2025 at 2:48 PM

Max Read

@maxread.info

August 7, 2025 at 9:10 PM

Max Read

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have sensed some confusion re: the origins of stomp clap that i'm all too happy to clear up maxread.substack.com/i/170106944/...

August 7, 2025 at 6:24 PM

Max Read

@maxread.info

not sure this tweet is strictly speaking true but i do think we have to recognize "edwin sharpe and the magnetic zeroes" as a kind of turning point or evolutionary link in the history of "the hipster"

August 5, 2025 at 5:15 PM

Max Read

@maxread.info

beginning to suspect that "grok is trying to mimic elon musk's opinions" and "grok is calling itself mechahitler" are in fact the same exact problem maxread.substack.com/p/will-the-r...