The real issue here isn’t one model’s mistake—it’s how easily we’re encouraged to trust automation with irreversible tasks.
Confident tone without guardrails is a design problem, not just a user error.
That’s the conversation worth having.

Exactly. We’ve trained ourselves to mistake spectacle for progress. The work that actually changes outcomes now looks dull because it’s incremental, procedural, and refuses catharsis. But that boredom is the signal—it’s what hasn’t been commodified yet.

That’s the trick of it—the rhythm disarms you, the words do the damage. Pop surface, structural critique underneath. Floyd were very good at that.

I think that’s exactly the trap Marcuse was naming: not that change is impossible, but that it’s been stripped of drama. What remains is incremental, procedural, and deeply unsexy—so it gets dismissed as failure rather than recognized as the only form of resistance that hasn’t already been absorbed.

That run is absurdly strong. Moondance is the moment where the mysticism learns how to swing—joyful, grounded, still strange. You can hear an artist realizing he can do anything and choosing groove instead of grandeur.

So well deserved. I love how this reframes opera not as elite spectacle but as lived, shared experience—emotion circulating across class, time, and taste. That sense of joy as evidence feels like the book’s quiet masterstroke.

Marcuse feels eerily current here. What struck me is how he anticipates the absence of a viable agent for change—and how easily dissent gets absorbed, neutralized, or redirected while authoritarianism hardens. It’s not just prophecy; it’s a diagnostic that still hasn’t been answered.

What jumps out is how unvetted this all is. An FBI 302 isn’t truth—it’s a record of what someone claimed, filtered through informants, incentives, and gaps. Still, the sheer volume of “alleged” ties, intermediaries, and foreign contacts is the story itself. Even the smoke is alarming.

The Return isn’t a continuation—it’s a correction. It shows how incomplete our understanding was. That ending haunts because it refuses closure. Lynch doesn’t resolve the dream; he wakes you up and turns the lights off.