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istewart

istewart@awful.systems
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I think one thing to understand is that most of his casual audience very likely engages through watching clips, not sitting through whole interviews. The reasonable, mainstreamable stuff gets clipped out and perhaps you run across it sarching for something else, or it’s algorithmically fed to you because of your interest in an adjacent topic. Clips of the weirder, creepier manosphere/Alex Jones/Art Bell guests don’t get surfaced as readily, at least until you’re down the rabbit hole, so Rogan himself ends up having a veneer of reasonability and respectability that he doesn’t really deserve.

Same goes for Trump rallies, or probably almost any major political speech now. There’s a front line of people who will watch the whole thing, but then they recirculate specific clips based on how they want to portray the subject.

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Come now, he was always about consing chodes into lists… Given his excessive self-seriousness, I doubt he’s taken the time to pick up the skill of juggling them in the years since

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If you step back and think about it, it is rather absurd that a time-sharing multi-user OS essentially took over for personal devices

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alas, there is no honor or glory to be had from winning the meme race

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I can’t help but feel like for Ellison in particular, he must have given himself no choice but to believe this stuff is more capable than it is. He’s 80 years old now, and if building towards honest-to-god “real AI” wasn’t what his whole career was about, then what was the point? The twilight of the older generations of tech executives is going to be its own special kind of pathology.

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Not sure where this came from, but it can’t be all bad if it chaos-dunks on Yudkowsky like this. Was relayed to me via Ed Zitron’s Discord, hopefully the Q isn’t for Quillete or Qanon

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Forgive me but how is lightcone different from conebros???

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I feel like before Redbox went under, it was also a dumping ground for this sort of thing. For instance, that mid-budget Western “Rust” where Alec Baldwin killed the camerawoman on set felt like it was destined for this sort of distribution strategy. Who’s clamoring to go out to the theater to see a Western with Alec Baldwin these days? But it might stand out among all the other slop when you’re looking to turn your brain off on a Saturday night.

See also the rise of the “geezer-teasers,” where a random 80s/90s action star signs up to appear in the first and last 10 minutes of a generic action movie filmed someplace inexpensive, most likely eastern Europe or southeast Asia. There were a lot of those. Perhaps my favorite, that I still want to watch someday, was Danny Trejo and Danny Glover in “Bad-Ass 2: Bad-Asses.”

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I’m guessing these people were JAQing off hard enough that they got kicked out of their local Oxford-style debate org and had to start their own.

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