When I had hired him over the phone, I had given Billy a cover story — a spiel I made up on the spot about how I was hired by some investors to do property scouting. “It’s confidential business, and I can’t really get into the details, but they’re interested in some parcels in that area for a development project,” I told him. He had made no comment. I doubt he really cared.

Now, as we approached the location, I told Billy not to stop but to drive right past the spot. “I don’t want these guys to know that anyone is out here scouting their property. So just drive by and keep driving, and I’ll decide what we should do once I get a sense of what there is,” I explained. “If anyone’s there, they’ll just think we’re random people passing through.” He nodded. As it turned out, there was no need for decoy maneuvers.

The car skidded to a stop. “Are you sure this is the right place?” Billy asked.

I hesitated. “Yes, this is it. Has to be,” I replied, craning my neck to look through the narrow window slit, now almost completely covered in dust and grime. “I made sure the location and the coordinates were correct before I left.” I checked again. “Yeah, this is the spot that my client gave me.”

Sarah had sent me a photo of the ARK research facility as it was supposed to exist. Misha had texted it to her about a year ago, not long after he had personally come down here to set it up. The photo showed a person fully suited up, hand raised as if waving hello, standing in front of two large dome structures. The buildings were beige or maybe brown in color, and they blended in with the dirt-brown lot on which they stood. The photo had been snapped in the evening with a flash, and the background was all in shadow. In theory, it could have been taken at this spot. But it wasn’t clear. The domes could have been anywhere — on any large dirt lot.

Billy shrugged. “Well, looks like you can report to your client that the land’s empty. So they can come in and do whatever they want with it. I don’t know what their plans are, but I hope they have some pull because they’re going to have to deal with the air force guys down the road,” he said, pointing to the horizon on the left. “They’re the ones in charge here. Nothing happens in the highlands here without their permission.” He must have seen a puzzled look on my face, because he added: “I didn’t mention it to you by phone?”

A shook my head. “What air force?”

“The Air Force,” Billy said.

“The fucking US Air Force,” Tommy added from the back.

“The military’s still here?”

“Yeah, man. They migrated north after the war from their base down the mountain in the high desert,” Billy said. “At least some of them did…the ones who didn’t have family in the area.”

“Bro, it was crazy,” Tommy said from the back. “They stormed the prison complex. Killed everyone there. The guards, the inmates. Made it their base.”

“You can’t really see it right now because it’s right on the horizon there. But at night, you’ll be able to see their lights,” Billy said.

I was surprised. I knew that the military abandoned its last California bases when the fallout dumped on Southern California. The generals had their own escape plans and their own secret nuclear bunkers. But the grunts were offered nothing. They had to fend for themselves. And so they grabbed helicopters, jets, ships, trucks, and whatever weapons and provisions they could carry and ran. Some went to join their families or friends, and others went wherever they thought they could get shelter.

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I found this book while doing research for my novel Radiance, which is set in a post-nuclear war world. But the topic of nuclear technology intersects in a big way with my work on the internet and vampire valley, too. The two technologies — nukes and information systems — were part of the same co-evolving meta-technology. America’s use of nukes in Japan, and the nuclear arms race that this attack helped launch, massively sped up and shaped the development of modern communication systems and surveillance technology, giving it the form that it has today. You could say that our hyper-real information society was built on the back of the nuclear bomb. And it feels that way, doesn’t it? Paranoid, constantly on edge…

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Pistachio gangsters Lynda and Stewart Resnick

The most recent American-Israeli war on Iran has been designed to cripple Iranian society — schools, hospitals, apartment blocks, airports, and pretty much all important economic infrastructure. And last week, this campaign took (for some) an unexpected twist: Israel and America struck pistachio infrastructure in Iran’s Kerman province, the center of the country’s pistachio industry.

Are these US-Israeli strikes on pistachios being done on purpose? To anyone who has read my work or watched our film Pistachio Wars, it wouldn’t be a surprise if they were. The big pistachio lobby in California is just one business interest among many doing its part to keep America’s foreign policy aggressive and murderous.

I’m sure you want to know a bit more about the history of the pistachio industry in America and why it depends on destroying Iran. So I thought I’d repost a chapter from A Journey Through Oligarch Valley, a travel guide I wrote back in 2013 — targeting the misanthropic tourist who wants to explore the toxic dark heart of California, rather than the usual boring sights like the Golden Gate Bridge or Yosemite. This chapter’s about Lynda and Stewart Resnick, the Beverly Hills couple that made California into a global center for pistachio production and made billions in the process…and have been lobbying for war with Iran.

You can buy the full recently reissued book on Amazon — or, if you are in the United States, order a signed copy from our humble little publisher. And of course…watch Pistachio Wars today!

RESNICKS (EXIT 253)

Driving north at NASCAR speed takes me to the home turf of one of Oligarch Valley’s newest and oddest landlords: Beverly Hills agri-billionaires Lynda and Stewart Resnick. You might not recognize the name, but you’ve certainly seen their luxury Fiji Water bottles at your local 7-Eleven, or maybe you’ve seen Palin family dropout Levi Johnston hawking the Resnicks’ Paramount brand pistachio nuts on TV. If nothing else, you’ve eaten their Sunkist oranges.

Fiji Water comes from Fiji, but just about everything else the Resnicks sell comes from Oligarch Valley, where they preside over several hundred square miles of land. A large chunk of their of their empire straddles Highway 33, just north of Taft and right next to the gas station where James Dean stopped for a Coke right before ramming his souped-up Porsche racer head-on into a hapless university student driving a Ford Tudor.

The Resnicks bought this land from Mobil and Chevron decades ago, and transformed the oil-stained desert into lush farmland filled with hundreds of miles of leafy green almond and pistachio orchards. The trees are planted with space-age precision—a perfect grid as far as the eye can see, whose countless rows recede endlessly in the horizon. At the center of it all is a giant factory with rows and rows of gleaming metallic silos where the company preps, packages and distributes its foodstuffs.

The scale of their farm numbs the mind. It’s a small self-sufficient settlement and includes its own small airport—how else do you expect Oligarch Valley farmers to get around? And this piece of farmland is only one small part of a diversified global agribusiness operation that brings in $3 billion in revenue a year.

But here’s the fun part: the continued economic viability of this piece of Oligarch Valley depends on Iran being kept in a state of a permanent economic blockade.

It depends on it so much that the Resnicks have joined forces with raving neocons and hardcore rightwingers, funding think-tanks and lobbyists that hype the Iranian threat and push all out war.

I stumbled onto Stewart and Lynda Resnick almost as soon as I started investigating California’s billionaire dominated public water system. The Oligarch Valley family that had made an easy $74 million selling water to the desert subprime suburb of Victorville was closely connected to the Resnicks. Both families owned shares of the Kern County Water Bank, a natural aquifer at the southernmost edge of the Central Valley that had been converted into a privatized water storage facility.

The water bank was designed by California’s Department of Water Resources to function as an emergency reservoir. In wet years, it would collect excess water shipped down the California Aqueduct from Northern California and hold enough water to keep Los Angeles hydrated nearly two years in case of prolonged drought.

The water bank was supposed to serve as a last-line defense to protect urban users. But in 1995 California water bureaucrats tweaked a couple of arcane water regulations and handed the water bank over to a small clique of Oligarch Valley landlords.

Once water entered the water bank, it stopped being a public resource. From that point, the owner could sell it to the highest bidder. “This means they become middlemen making profits on state-supplied water,” reported Redding’s paper Record Searchlight. “If they choose to, they can dry up vast areas of productive agriculture and ship the water to municipalities south of the Tehachapi range.”

Stewart Resnick masterminded the scheme, and emerged with a majority stake in the new Kern County Water Bank. In fact, the Resnicks dominated and controlled the water bank so thoroughly that it’s become a de facto extension of their private agribusiness. They run it out of one of their corporate offices near Bakersfield, California.

Resnick’s scheme did more than privatize a single piece of public infrastructure. It created a novel legal framework that gave Oligarch Valley famers the power to create nonexistent water out of thin air. Resnick created “paper water.” Like the leveraged subprime-backed securities and exotic debt instruments dreamed up by Wall Street, “paper water” was built on pure fantasy and innovative accounting fraud. The simple fact was that half of California’s “paper water,” water able to be sold, bought and traded on the market, simply does not exist, and never has.

It sounds nuts, but it’s true. And it all has to do with the California State Water Project started by Governor Pat Brown. The project involved a series of dams, aqueducts and massive water pumps to siphon water from Northern California and to send it down through Oligarch Valley and into Southern California. When the system started being built in the 1960s, the state allocated guaranteed water rights to farmers throughout Oligarch Valley. These contractual obligations were not based on reality, but were worked out using the estimated capacity of a fully built-out state water system. And that was the problem: the State Water Project was never fully completed. Attempts to dupe California voters into paying for the final parts of the system have been tried on many occasion, but have yet to succeed. Contractually, the state was obligated to deliver 4 million acre-feet a year. But in reality, the state could only deliver half the water it promised.

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It took us about another hour to climb to the top of Tehachapis. For a time, we had to leave the highway to get around a washed-out section that lasted for miles, backtracking down the hill and doing a big loop. When we finally got back on the highway, Tommy suddenly perked up and swiveled his gun. “Easy there, kid,” Billy said, and let out a few deep honks on his airhorn. The same pattern — short, short, long, short — came back to us from the approaching cars. Tommy relaxed. “It’s a friendly. Probably making a supply run to Bakersfield,” Billy said to me. The caravan passed us going the other way — two big trucks flanked by modded pickups like the one we were in. Still, Tommy kept his hands on the swivel gun at the ready. “We change the codes every few days. But you never know…”

The Jewish incident behind us now, Billy and Tommy got talkative on the way. I found out that Tommy was Billy’s nephew. Their family — their extended clan — had been in California since the Gold Rush. “Story is my great-great grandfather killed a man in Arkansas and fled out west on one of those wagon trains and did some mining but the fucker didn’t have any luck. So he ended up staking claim on a chunk of land in the foothills out by Sacramento, farming and raising cattle,” Billy said. “Rumor’s that we got some Indian in us, too. The old goat worked his way through three or four wives and one of them was a half-breed.”

“I got a little of that ferocious native blood in me. I can feel it,” Tommy added, excitedly.

“Old goat killed bunch of Indians, too,” Billy said, smiling. “I remember grandfather telling me about the scalps they had hanging over the fireplace when he was a kid. They drove those poor bastards up into the mountains to starve them out. So they took to stealing cattle to eat. But that couldn’t be. They had to be punished.”

“Where’d it hang? At the Fresno house,” Tommy said.

“No, the one in Los Banos. The one that burned down.”

Back before the war, when these distinctions mattered, Tommy and Billy would have been considered hicks by the coastal professional class. They talked with an almost southern drawl, barely finished high school, cursed, smoked, dressed in hunting gear. I could imagine these guys with their families back before the war — their rural houses on several acres of land somewhere up in the mountains, a couple of giant trucks, an ATV, and a Harley parked out front. There’d be an RV, too. And boat of some kind parked on a hitch. They’d own a construction business, their uncle would own a car dealership, a cousin would be an ex-Navy Seal meth addict with PTSD who’s in jail for beating up his wife. Coastal types — when they’d run into them at a gas station while on a family holiday to Yosemite or when getting work done on their vacation home in Tahoe — would look down their noses at Billy and Tommy…but they’d also fear them. And envy them, too. Deep inside the mind of the professional class, these specimens were a reminder that there were people out there that had not been fully housebroken…there were people who could still do something autonomously on their own. It was not even true but it didn’t matter. It appeared as true.

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Have a great week. Pray with us that Trump does not nuke the world. Praying is all we got left. 🙏

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For this vamp valley stream, I had Peter Korotaev on to talk about drones and war. Drones, which I see as very much related to the internet, have made big leaps in battlefield adoption in the last few years: first in the Russian-Ukraine war and now in the Israeli-American war on Iran.

The United States pioneered drone technology. In fact, as I mentioned on the stream, the same ARPA program that funded the internet was at the same time funding research into drone technology for use in the Vietnam War…a small helicopter operated by a remote control so big it barely fit on an Army jeep. But even though the U.S. security state has been pumping money into drone technology for more than half a century, it hadn’t explored the use of drone technology to its fullest potential yet. It’s been up to peripheral states like Ukraine and Iran (and also Israel) to take drone warfare to the next level. And what’s happening on the periphery of the empire is going to be coming home soon…there is no doubt about it. Drone tech is just too easy to use, too effective…like smartphones. It makes me think of Philip K. Dick’s wonderful novella, Second Variety, which is about autonomous robotic weapons that were designed to kill people…until they ran out of people and started fighting each other. I’m pretty sure Second Variety inspired Terminator, even though it was never credited.

Anyway, Peter writes the great Events in Ukraine newsletter. I highly recommend reading his stuff. He’s a funny writer and covers the subject with the respect and black humor that it requires.

See you next week!

I’m doing these streams every week, broadcasting against Vampire Valley from within Vampire Valley. All live streams will be available to the public but most recorded streams will be available only to paying subscribers. Influencers are people. We need to eat, too. Reminder: If you donate $100 or more to my Vampire Valley doc, you will automatically get an annual sub. If you’re thinking of giving a larger tax-deductible donation, get in touch with us at vampires@yashalevine.com.

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ZOMBIE LAKE (2026). Directed by Rowan Wernham. Original score by Dan Boeckner.

Rowan and I are screening Zombie Lake, a short disaster zone film we shot as we were wrapping up production of Pistachio Wars. It was our final trip out to the Central Valley to witness a brief moment in time when nature seemed to be healing, when it rained and snowed so much that winter that it seemed no amount of terraforming or geoengineering could hold back the flood of water coming to rewild Tulare Lake, a once beautiful part of California that had been drained and turned into a marscape by a couple of oligarchic families to grow nuts and cotton and other assorted items.

For the first time in many generations, it seemed like Lake Tulare really was in for a come back. A flood of biblical proportions was coming to wipe out all the toxic fields and agri-infastructure that had been festering on the land like a plague…water that would turn the region back into the largest freshwater lake west of the Mississippi that had extended across the heart of California as a region of shifting marshes and wetlands. Or…that was the hope. So Rowan and I went to investigate. This film is about that.

If you’re in the New Year area, come out to watch it with us on Sunday, April 19th at 7 p.m. in Brooklyn. Here’s the info:

Film Noir Cinema
122 Meserole Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11222
$10 suggested donation 

Reserve your spot and buy tickets in advance. It’s a small theater.

The screening will be followed by a short Q&A and drinks at a nearby bar.

First 25 people to buy tickets will get a signed poster.

Photography: Rowan Wernham. Producer: Daniel Grjonko.

There’s been a lot of reporting on the massive data center buildout happening in Northern Virginia — just west of Washington D.C. But none of the coverage has mentioned perhaps the most interesting part: These data centers are being built right in the middle of a military contractor zone. That’s right, the densest data center region in the world — one that uses something like 20 percent of all energy in Virginia and hosts data harvesting and compute services for Amazon, Google, Facebook, OpenAI, Oracle, and all the rest — is interlocked with the biggest private police state contractors out there: Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, BAE…

Here’s me talking about the situation at a historic street corner in Northern Virginia: what used to be AOL’s sprawling headquarters is now being turned into a massive cluster of data centers…and this cluster of data centers has sprouted like mushrooms around Raytheon. It makes sense. The internet was created by America’s police state…and it is still very much a part of the police state today. In fact, if my book Surveillance Valley could be distilled into a single intersection, this is it…

This a snippet of the first Vampire Valley episode — EP 01 — I’m working on right now.

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Mark Fisher first introduced the “vampire castle” metaphor for the internet thirteen years ago. Even if he didn’t elaborate on the structural forces that underpin the internet and drive its toxic culture, he got the metaphor right: the internet as a parasitic place, a place where everything gets drained of its vital energy…a place that’s designed to waste our lives…a place where politics go to die. What do these vampire castles look like in the light?

I got to fly a drone over a few of them this weekend in the police state contractor zone known as Northern Virginia. The press calls it Data Center Ally. It apparently has the densest concentration of internet data harvesting facilities on the planet. And it is a strange place — just north of Dulles Airport, all this data infrastructure sits right in the middle of various privatized spy and military office parks and suburbs housing workers at these office parks. It’s all connected — the data, the clients, the workers. And it used to be farmland not that long ago. I’m working on a little film about it — EP 01 of Vampire Valley — that I hope I’ll have in April. But I’ll be releasing some clips as I go along…

These data harvesting centers — some of them are multistory “hyper-scale” facilities that you can see in the flyover above — are loud and huge and suck power from dozens of states, with just one of these things burning as much as a hundred thousand homes. Some of the ones not plugged into the grid have to run their own extremely noisy gas power plants. If you’re looking for a directed energy technology that gives people the Havana Syndrome, these centers are it.

People are fighting them everywhere because of how shitty it is to live next to one of these — the constant loud hum, the pollution, the fear of getting dosed by the electromagnetic radiation given off by the massive electrical infrastructure, and the fact that they basically make every home surrounding them worthless…robbing people of whatever meager wealth they tried to store in their properties, thinking that they were secure until Amazon and Google and OpenAI came to the neighborhood unannounced.

It’s interesting being out there, talking to people — because it is with these data centers that the internet has been made real for people. For the first time in their lives, they can see what the cloud really is all about. And the internet, as they are finding out, is just another giant factory — a series of polluted and noisy industrial sites…or dark satanic data mills, as the Luddites or that Romantic-adjacent poet might have called them.

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If you or anyone you know has any special info or knowledge about this place that you’d like to share, don’t hesitate to reach out.

Will have more info soon. Have a great weekend.

—Yasha

PS: Thank you to everyone who has generously contributed to my Vampire Valley doc series. It’s the only way I can fund these missions and afford the sophisticated terranean and aerial surveillance equipment that’s required for these sorts of things…

PPS: For your viewing pleasure, here is a short drive showing Northern Virginia’s data center that a reader of this humble newsletter shot. Hard to tell where the bland suburban corporate office ends and the corporate data police state harvester machine begins…

Bill, my driver, picked me up from the motel in downtown Bakersfield at 9am and we headed straight out to the ARK’s research division — to the address Sarah provided.

Actually, it wasn’t just the driver. There was Bill and then there was his assistant, Tommy. We were in Bill’s beefed-up four-door pickup, and Tommy was in the back seat, manning the swivel gun mounted on the roof. “This isn’t your San Francisco or one of the master-planned compounds they’re building out here with dual perimeter walls and their own armed security teams,” Bill had told me by phone when I hired him for this trip. “No law out there up in the mountains. People will murder you for your underwear, if you let them.”

I wasn’t sure if this was just a ploy to pump more money out of me, but I agreed with the terms. Tommy came included with the price we negotiated, but there was a catch: if found ourselves in a situation that required Tommy to fire that giant gun on the room, I’d have to pay for the ammo used. “That’s if we survive, of course. Got no use for money if we’re dead,” Bill had said on the phone, laughing.

As we drove out of the city, past the southern security checkpoint, Bill quizzed Tommy to make sure we had packed all the necessary supplies: extra water, canned rations, boxes of ammo, grenades, an emergency radio…I watched them interact. They spoke in that older California accent that almost had a southern drawl. They both had the same hooded eyes that made them look sleepy and the same bulbous noses, too. So I figured Tommy was a younger relative of Bill’s — a nephew or something like that. Looking at their faces, I could tell right away that they spent a lot of time outside the badlands. They both had the same blotchy yellow skin with the same acne-like texture…inflamed pores, papules, pustules, scarring. Spend too much time outdoors in the dust and you’ll invariably start to look like this. And it’s worse for those with pink Anglo-Saxon complexions — like a monster sunburn on top of a monster sunburn on top of a monster sunburn…until your skin starts to sizzle. These guys will be dead from cancer within the next few years, I thought to myself.

As we drove south, we passed row upon row of warehouses — some rectangular, some dome-like. They were set up like fortresses, surrounded moats, fences, watch towers, guards with guns just out of view. It was mostly chicken and pig farmers out here, according to Bill. “Plenty of water in the aquifers getting recharged off Kern River. So they’re out here for that.”

An hour later, we were at the southern edge of the valley floor — at the junction of two mountain chains. On our left were the foothills to the southern Sierras, which ran north to south. And in front of us, slowly rising to fill our entire view, were the Tehachapi Mountains, a short mountain chain that runs from east to west, separating the Inland Empire from the rest of California. The Tehachapis are a civilizational wall — it was the only thing that kept the fallout that swept into Los Angeles and the rest of the Southlands from moving north and poisoning California’s farmland completely. The Tehachapis, their existence unknown to most Californians before the war, were the divide between life and death.

Out here, beyond the agri-structures, we were the only car on the dirt track. There was nothing around…nothing other than gutted carcasses of cars and trucks and formless junk breaking down in the harsh sun. Something moved off to my right — a herd of tule elk spooked by the sudden roar of our loud engine. I could see their white backsides flashing as they jumped, their antlers bombing up and down like inverted chandeliers. A few of them seemed oversized, near double the height and girth of the others.

“Yeah, the radiation does strange things to animals out here,” Bill said, seeing me tracking the herd as we passed it by. “I’ve seen coyotes as big as bears and bears as big as minivans.”

I nodded and kept peeking out at the majestic animals through the narrow strip of thick plexiglass that functioned as the window slit. With their white bottoms and the antlers spreading out like inverted chandeliers. I had seen plenty of photos of gigantism — cats, dogs, rats — some kind of mutation that causes an enlarged pituitary gland…and it’s the pituitary gland that works to regulate growth hormones. I thought about taking a photo to post on Raddies, but there was no way I could get a clear shot — not with the shaking and the dirty, scratched window.

“We hunt the elk a couple of times a year. Good tough meat,” Bill continued.

“Them and bears and coyotes,” Tommy chimed in from the back.

“You eat the meat?”

“Oh yeah. Why not? Everything is contaminated, anyway, even the warehouse stuff got some rads in it,” Bill replied. “We don’t eat anything that looks too weird but the rest of them—”

“—They’re not even fun to hunt,” Tommy cut in. “Most of them are half-blind with their cataracts and that. If you come up close with a sharp machete and give it a good swing, you can take their head right off. Remember how I did one last month? It was clean…just one beautiful motion. Like that movie…the jungle war one…what’s it called…”

“Apocalypse Now,” Bill added.

“That’s right!”

“We don’t do it often,” Bill said, as he took a left turn along a sandy road running alongside an empty concrete irrigation canal. “You don’t want to overdo it with the radiation. But once a month or two, when we get a hunger for meat.”

“And when you cut off the tumors, you can’t even tell there’s anything wrong with with the meat,” Tommy added from the back again.

“And anyway, a little rad isn’t bad for you,” Bill said. “My cousin worked in the cancer ward at a hospital in Lancaster before the war. They’d dose you with radiation to cure you.”

We were gently snaking into the foothills now — driving on a real wide highway with two lanes going each way. Well, it was wide before the war. Now, heavily used and unmaintained, the road was falling apart. There were sinkholes and washouts everywhere, and sometimes the highway narrowed to a tiny path just big enough for a single car to squeeze into. Bill told Tommy to stop talking and to stay vigilant now. And he told me to make sure my breather and filtration apparatus was at the ready. “If we get ambushed, it’ll be out here — on one of these,” he said, as we navigated another washout.

We drove in silence now. Bill and Tommy got real quiet and craned their necks left and right to peer at the bluffs overlooking the road. Bill was nervously fidgeting with the gun on his hip, turning the safety on and off…on and off…on and off. I wasn’t sure if I was going to be treated to the same road goblin routine I got in Napa to try to extract some extra cash from me. But, no, this time the fear felt real.

After a while, the road widened, and Bill picked up speed. We were getting close to the top of the pass…and I noticed that Bill kept glancing over at me with a strange look on his face.

“What?” I asked after a while, annoyed at the constant side-eye. “Do I have something on my face?”

“Oh, nothing,” he replied. But he kept glancing over.

“What?” I said again.

“Well…just thinking…you’re not…you know…Jewish?” he said, drawing out the last word and scowling a little as if it was some kind of disgusting evil thing.

I looked over at him. “Do you think I am?”

He just shrugged. “A little, yeah. I’d venture, yeah.”

“It’s the nose? Right?” I asked.

“Yeah, the nose…and I don’t know…just the general demeanor…something very kike like about you,” he said. I didn’t turn my head to look to try to remain cool, but I could hear Tommy shifting behind me, moving closer to my seat. An image of him holding the buck knife he had hanging off his belt…bringing it closer to my neck…flashed through my mind. I could feel the inside of the cabin getting smaller and warmer…my mouth began to dry out, tongue scraping against my palate. I was in the middle of nowhere with these guys. I could disappear here very easily, and no one could do anything. No one would do anything. There is no one back home who would care enough.

“Yeah, I get it all the time,” I said as nonchalantly as possible, preparing to roll out a little act that I had pulled off successfully dozens of times in the past. “I’m Armenian, though. From Yerevan. My family came here when I was a little kid.”

He seemed unconvinced, so I continued. “Armenians also have big noses — like mine. So I get the question a lot. It’s been annoying…insulting, actually, to have to be confused with the kikes. The kikes killed everyone I know. Armenia is uninhabitable now, a radioactive zone. Everyone I knew there…my uncles, cousins, aunts…they never made it out.”

My guides still weren’t buying it. “I don’t even know what an Armenia is,” Bill said.

“Yeah, what the hell is an Armenia?” Tommy chimed in from the back. He was so close I could feel his breath on the back of my neck.

“A foreign country, man. Near the Middle East but not the Middle East. Close to Turkey.”

“So…you…you’re a Muslim,” Tommy said behind me.

I shook my head. “Hell no. No, we’re Christians. The original Christians, in fact. The Muslims. The Turks. They tried to genocide us because we’re Christian,” I replied. Then, pointing to the cross dangling off the rearview mirror, I added: “We were the first nation to accept Jesus Christ. We did it before the Romans while all your ancestors were all pagans doing animal human sacrifices. What are you guys? Germans? Scots-Irish? Something like that? We Armenians were Christians hundreds of years before a Christian ever set foot on your land.”

Bill said nothing. He was distracted, navigate a pockmarked section of the highway, with the truck wildly swaying side to side as one side dipped down into a hole and then came back up. “I fucking hate how hard it is to tell those kikes apart,” Tommy blurted out. “I mean they can look like me or you or some Arab or some Mexican asshole. They’re shapeshifters. There is no way to tell—”

“— And we can’t even look at their dicks to see if they’re Jewish like they did in Germany because most of us are cut like they are,” Bill added. “Shit everyone I know is circumcised just like the Jews.” He paused for a while, and then continued. “I asked my pops why he did it to me and he said he didn’t know. He said that he was cut and his dad was cut and everyone he knew was cut. It’s just what you did. It was supposed to be more hygienic or some shit like that. So when the doc asked if they wanted it done, he said, ‘Mom said yeah.’”

“But why? There no Christ or Paul or John telling us to cut our dicks to be holy. So why did we do it?” Tommy said, and I could hear him fall back into his seat behind me. The imagine of the knife at my throat began to fade.

“It’s the Jewish doctors,” said Bill. “The Jewish doctors. The kikes convinced us stupid goys to get our dicks cut like their’s so that they could hide among us…so they could live like wolves among sheep. You see it now?”

“Fuck those evil fucks,” Tommy said. But all the menace in his voice was gone. I knew that now I had them in the palm of my hand. And I was about to deliver the final crushing blow of my “I’m not Jewish routine” from which there was no escape.

“Oh yeah? That’s really fucked up, man,” I said in mock surprise. “They forced Americans to cut their dicks? You know, in Armenia men are never circumcised. My dick is intact. We didn’t have no Jewish doctors telling us what to do.”

“Bullshit. You’re lying,” Tommy said from the back.

“Yeah, I’ve never even seen an uncut dick,” Bill said.

“Well, I got one,” I replied, shrugging and finally relaxing into my seat, the knot in my stomach gone.

“Let’s see it then,” said Bill.

“You serious?” I said.

“Yeah, let’s see it,” said Tommy.

“Come on, guys. You don’t need that. Gimme a break,” I said, squirming in my seat and rubbing my hands together. I wanted to exaggerate my hesitation as much as possible…to make them think that I was lying. If they thought they had me cornered, my whole little act would be even more effective.

“Yeah, show it,” Bill said.

“If you don’t show it, you either a fucking fag or a kike,” Tommy added.

I shrugged. Then I slowly unzipped the thick rubber zipper of my rad suit, fumbled around in my underwear, and stuck my dick out. Peeking out through a layer of clothes and a thick rubber suit, it looked small and shrunken. It was not an organ of power and penetration…but a rubbery flap of vulnerability. I demonstrated the action of the foreskin, pulling it off and on several times, with Tommy leaning forward and looking over my shoulder now.

“That looks gross, man,” he said, retreating to the back seat. Bill said nothing.

We drove on in silence after that.

With AI trying to swallow everything, it’s clearer now more than ever that we are in the middle of another industrial power grab — the attempt to centralize political and economic power in the hands of an even tinier elite. We talked to Joe to make sense of the situation. We talked about AI, the parasitic internet, industrialization’s destruction of democracy, the politics of technology, what it means to be monkeys who think they’re in control of the known universe… Joe thinks there is a tiny glimmer of hope: the AI boom we’re in potentially offers a historic opportunity to transcend our entrenched, stagnant politics: the much-promised automation and the grim reality of a computerized crapification of broad sectors of our society might make the reorganization of politics not just a possibility but a necessity — an opportunity that hasn’t been seen in many generations.

This talk took place on November 23, 2025, in Manhattan at the KGB Bar. This is the first time it is being published on this pacification platform we call the internet.

For those who don’t know, Joe Costello has been on our podcast many times, and I’ve republished his work before. He’s worked in politics all of his life, and he’s one of the most clear thinkers and writers today on politics and on the meaning of democracy in our age of terminal industrialization. Buy his book! And subscribe to his newsletter, Life in the 21st Century. It’s really funny and insightful into the politics of energy — which is really the politics of the modern world, as people are about to discover more than ever with Trump’s attack on Iran.

—Yasha

I’ll be doing these streams every Friday at noon NYC time, broadcasting against Vampire Valley from within Vampire Valley. All live streams will be available to the public but most recorded streams will be available only to paying subscribers. Influencers are people. We need to eat, too.

Reminder: If you donate $100 or more to my Vampire Valley doc, you will automatically get an annual sub. If you’re thinking of giving a larger tax-deductible donation, get in touch with us at vampires@yashalevine.com.

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For this week’s vamp valley stream, I’m joined by Daniel Bessner to talk about how our politics are in the grips of a powerful decadent rationalist illusion: the idea that information is power.

As Daniel points out, despite having all the information in the world whenever we want it, regular people have had no measurable effect on policy. In short: We know everything, but can’t change anything. It is a longstanding problem in nominally democratic US (and Europe) that has been massively exacerbated by internet technology. We’re wrapped up in the spectacle, confusing the consumption of nonstop political content with politics.

You could say that we’re whistleblowing on our own profession here, trying to make people understand that information is not a magic spell…it is not an incantation — just knowing things about the world won’t miraculously lead to change.

—Yasha

Reminder: If you donate $100 or more to my Vampire Valley doc, you will automatically get an annual sub. If you’re thinking of giving a larger tax-deductible donation, get in touch with us at vampires@yashalevine.com.

Some essays that inform our conversation:

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As soon as I got news that the lockdown was being lifted, I started making preparations. I had to find a place to stay out and a driver who’d be willing to take me right up to the edge of the EZ. I also had to stock up on gear — a spare breather, a spare suit and boots, a portable decon tube. I ran the expenses by Sarah and she ok’ed them. I mean, obviously she ok’ed them. How could I do my investigation if I couldn’t go snoop around where her husband vanished — or at least where he said he headed when he vanished?

I was lucky to even get a seat on this train. They run once a day every two or three days and everything’s booked weeks ahead of time. Luckily my neighbor from upstairs knew a guy who knew a guy who knew the conductor who could sell me a seat for triple the price. If it weren’t for him, I would have had to wait weeks to get down there. So…here I am, sitting on what used to be a high-speed train as it moves south at no more than 60 miles per hour.

I look around the cabin. Every little spot is filled with bodies — standing, squatting, sitting cross-legged, stretched out flat in the aisle in pairs, surrounded by their bags and luggage. My car is probably double the capacity of prewar times, and the cooling units can’t keep up with so many bodies. So everyone is sweating, their faces red under their breathers. I have a window seat, but that’s not much of an extra luxury. Sitting quietly and watching the world outside as it serenely slides by…it was always one of my favorite things about taking a train. But that experience is gone now. The windows are permanently welded shut with metal plates to keep out the rads. There is a small monitor hanging above the center aisle provided as consolation. It’s supposed to give us a live video feed of the outside world, but it’s broken — just gray and red static dancing horizontally across its screen. What’s out there? Mostly empty land with patches of flimsy warehouse-type structures. Greenhouses and agricultural settlements growing corn, rice, beans, soy, oats, kale, chickens, pigs… We were on the outskirts of Gilroy, once the garlic capital of the world. Not sure if they still grew garlic, but they sure still produced a lot of produce — all under cover from the rads.

The woman next to me has been sleeping for the last hour, snoring so loudly that the vibration made her breather slip off her nose. She has a stack of papers fanned out on the foldout desk in front of her that she had been annotating — charts, drawings of buildings, and various compounds. I can’t make out the text, but they’re engineering or architectural drawings of some kind…plans for development, I’m guessing. Lots of development is happening out in the Central Valley…even out on the southern edges where I was headed. It’s where the center is now — uncontaminated underground water, food, oil, and gas…it was all here. The valley is truly central…more central than it ever was. Across the aisle is a youngish couple. The woman is also sleeping, and the man has a bubble baby carrier on his lap — all sealed up under a clear dome to keep the dust out. The father’s been tapping the plastic and wiggling his index finger, playing with the infant inside. I’ve been watching him for the half hour, imagining the baby gurgling and laughing and blowing spit bubbles inside his little dome, and wondering about the kind of deformities they might have. You don’t see too many small children these days. Most miscarry and those that don’t usually come out wrong. Organs outside their bodies, malformed hearts and kidneys, leathery skin like a lizard, they don’t survive long with the nonexistent medical system. But maybe this is one of the lucky ones — maybe they’ve beaten the odds. Some do. Watching them, I remember how lucky I am that Eve left California before the war. I was angry and bitter when Jenny left me and took Eve away with her. I felt betrayed and robbed. Now, though, I see it as a divine act. It’s hard not to believe in a higher power when something like that miraculous happens. It’s like sleeping past your alarm and missing your flight only by a few minutes and to find out it crashed.

I have four hours to kill until we get to Bakersfield. I might as well put my thoughts and notes in order…

The day after the raid on Richmond, the city announced that it would be lifting the lockdown in two days’ time. It was great news. Everyone thought we’d be locked down for weeks, but the storm didn’t travel as the models predicted. As it approached the coast, a high-pressure system pushed it north into Oregon and British Columbia and we got spayed with only the outer fringes of the hurricane system. A bit of elevated rads, but nothing out of the ordinary. I didn’t have much to do, being on lockdown as I was, so I was determined to get to the bottom of this 613laws.com forum mystery.

The forum was throwback to an older time — a niche destination, a place where the newly religious could hang out together, chat, interface with lifelong members of the church, get guidance on their transition to the holy life, and generally just kill time while they were sitting in some office job. Its name — 613 laws — derived from the 613 discreet laws that the rabbis of old had extracted from the Hebrew Bible, from the word of the Hebrew god as dictated to Moses on Mt. Sinai. The Bible is famously convoluted and could be difficult to parse for easy lawyerly guidance. The forum had a special page explaining the history of these laws and helpfully listed all the 613 commandments. I scanned the list, and some of them were the usual ones you’d think about — don’t murder, don’t cheat, don’t fuck your dad — but then many seemed rather dated.

For instance, laws like this:

Don’t let Moabite and Ammonite males marry into the Jewish people—Deuteronomy 23:4

Don’t keep a third generation Egyptian convert from marrying into the Jewish people—Deuteronomy 23:8-9

Don’t refrain from marrying a third generation Edomite convert—Deuteronomy 23:8-9

Don’t let a eunuch marry into the Jewish people—Deuteronomy 23:2

The High Priest must not have sexual relations with a widow even outside of marriage—Leviticus 21:14

The High Priest must marry a virgin maiden—Leviticus 21:13

etc, etc, etc…

I tried finding it online, but 613laws.com is no longer active. I’m guessing no one bothered to bring it back after the war. Why would they? Being Jewish on the internet with strangers wasn’t something you did anymore. Being openly Jewish was a liability now. The very last thing you wanted was for people to connect you to a bunch of your Jewish fanatics and the Beards. In fact, some of the laws on that list were explicitly about messiahs and the to wage an eternal crusade against Israel’s eternal enemies: the Amalek, the seven Canaanite nations…

I must say that extracting anything useful on user j__curious2011 out of that mass of threads and comments was not pleasant. Back in the day, I would’ve fed the entire site into my computer and told it to comb through the comments to extract and synthesize whatever info I needed: the user’s biography, their tastes, their political opinions, basic facts about their life… I could’ve had it compare their posts with samples of Misha’s writing to see if there was a match. It would’ve been nice to let a computer automate that for me, but that’s all gone now. Funny to think that all those AI gurus thought they were summoning into being a new god — a super machine intelligence that would operate on such a high level that we mere humans would be left in the dirt. They really thought if their AI machines, living in their massive data centers with their cooling units and their backup gas turbines, were run just right, if they were given all the data humanity had ever produced, then all those exabytes of code, whole mountains of silicon wafers running 1s and 0s, would produce an incantation…a powerful spell that would bring into being a real Machine God…or a series of Machine Gods into being. They, with their fantasies of theurgy, thinking they were working in the realm of magic and angels and demons, didn’t realize how fragile it all was. How their god was a dependent, fragile system. Cheap energy, global supply chains, complex manufacturing — if any one of those links broke down, their god would wink out of existence…their entire corpus of spells would turn into mist. So I had to go through the forum by hand — searching, reading, looking for anything useful and dumping it in a document.

What did I find? Well, I’m now convinced that j__curious2011 is Misha. It’s basically 100 percent. The bits of personal information he divulged, scattered across thousands of his comments, overlapped with his real biography. j__curious2011 identified as male. Check. He said he had three daughters, one of whom became a man. Check. He lived in somewhere in the East Bay. Check. He worked as a programmer. Check. At some point in his career, he made enough money to retire if he wanted. Check. He was born in Azerbaijan. Check. He moved to California with his parents as a child. Check. I could go on and on, but why? This was my man.

As I waded through his output, it quickly became obvious that Misha was very active on the forum. He was there at all hours — sometimes leaving dozens of comments in a single day. The stuff he wrote had a wide range — he’d discuss movies and books, trade kosher recipes, seek advice on various family issues. “My wife’s not taking this seriously. She says I’m into it because I’m bored and have nothing better to do and that I need to come out of my semi-retirement and go back to work. She just thinks this is yet another of my hobbies — like kitesurfing and paragliding,” he wrote shortly after joining the forum. He was anonymous on the forum, but he was surprisingly candid about his life, dropping information about himself and his family that would, to a careful observer, make it easy to reverse engineer his real-world identity. But Misha clearly needed the outlet. He was going through a crisis, and his fellow forum members were his crutch…his support group. He himself understood that he was going through a transformation — “a reorientation in my moral universe,” he called it — and wrote about it often.

“I have a wife and three children. I’ve done everything a father, a husband and a son should do. I have always had an unwavering commitment to providing for my family. I’ve always wanted to ensure their well-being and to secure a prosperous future for my children, and I have. My children don’t have to worry about making a living. They can do whatever they want to pursue their passions. I love my wife and have many friends. We travelled all the time. I’ve long been passionate about sports. I sail, run marathons, and I’ve summited Everest… By all external measures, I should have been content and happy,” he wrote about two years before the war. “And I was happy, or at least I thought I was happy. Everything changed for me when I took my early retirement. I was burned out and just wanted to spend time with my family — to be at home, to cook breakfast, to drive my youngest daughter to school, to read her bedtime stories. You know, just simple things. But something didn’t click…something wasn’t right. I don’t know how to describe it. My family felt like strangers to me. I felt no connection to them. None of my daughters thought that I had anything to say of value. My wife had her own life, her own business, her own girlfriends, her exercise routine, and her personal trainers. I loved them and still do, but there was this gradual realization of emptiness.”

“I started wondering why and thought about my parents and my grandparents and their grandparents and the kinds of lives they led and the kind of values they had,” he wrote in another comment. “Most of my family is from what’s known as Ukraine today. My ancestors had lived in their little shtetls in the region for centuries or even possibly a thousand years, depending on what history you believe. For most of that history, they lived, as they no doubt saw it, with timeless traditions. My great-grandfather lived much the same way that his great-grandfather lived and that his great-grandfather’s grandfather lived. And their values and daily rituals went back even deeper than that, back to right after the Romans destroyed Jerusalem. That’s what? Almost 2,000 years? Now that’s something. My own way of life? This modern way of life that I live as a corporate professional in the Bay Area? For my own family, it began about a hundred years ago, when the Bolsheviks did their revolution and started industrializing and did their anti-religion/anti-tradition thing. We Jews moved to the cities, and because Jews, unlike Russian or Polish or Ukrainian peasants, could read and write, Jews immediately rose through the ranks into various white-collar professions: teachers, engineers, civil servants. Like everyone else in the world, we got torn out of our tradition and into modernity. Most Jews supported it, too. They supported joining modernity. They supported integrating into the undifferentiated modernist mass of humanity. They were tired of being discriminated against. They were tired of being the other. They wanted to be just like everyone else. It happened here and in Europe, too. It happened everywhere. But what did it really mean? What were our new values? What are my values? I’m not sure anymore. I’m an engineer, and I’ve always believed in science and rationality and in efficiency and technological progress. But why did I believe in these things, and what did they really mean? To extend our lifespans by a few years? To make ourselves look younger than we really are? To have cars that drive you around? For what? So I can flatter myself looking in the mirror? So I can be more effortlessly entertained? So that I can spend more time kitesurfing and perfecting my tail flip? ”

He was stuck on this bit — that he had been ripped away from his true identity…that modernity had robbed him of something vital. “I began to think about the kinds of lives that my ancestors led,” Misha continued in another comment. “Their beliefs and their connection to the past and things like that and I realized how much power that gave them. They had these deep roots while mine were barely there. It was like they were an old oak tree in a forest, their roots intermingling with other plants and trees. And I? I felt like I was some tiny potted plant, forever isolated from the world. I realized that I’m the aberration. This secular life of mine is the aberration. My great-grandfather lived like a pious Jew as did his father and his father and his father and his father before him. They were all connected to each other. Their lives had meaning…it was rooted in something bigger than them. And what was I doing? What did I believe? Creating an efficient world managed by computer algorithms? Making sure my daughters went to Harvard so they could work for a Fortune 500 company and make even more money? These aren’t real values. No wonder my daughters didn’t respect me or think I had anything to offer.”

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For this week’s vamp valley stream, I talked to C. Derick Varn about the backstory of Mark Fisher’s controversial (at the time) and influential “Exiting the Vampire Castle” essay on cancel culture and social media…and why it still matters today.

I wrote about Fisher’s essay last summer as part of my attempt to understand the way hyper-connected communication technology is affecting our world — and how structural forces built into internet technology have worked to pacify people and have foreclosed on the possibility of any sort of politics by turning everything into a entertainment…a virtual cage match of endless culture wars where everyone is constantly pitted against each other in an endless fight that involves constantly evolving identity politics, fringe causes, peripheral issues, and perceived slights.

Derick was one of the editors who worked with Mark Fisher to publish the essay in the now-defunct The North Star online magazine. He’s also a sharp critic of the influencer economy and the effect of technology on culture and politics. Check out Derick’s show on YouTube or the podcast version of the show.

Thanks…and see you next week!

Yasha

Want to know more? Read:

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Thank you to Rich Farell and everyone at Carsey-Wolf Center for having us out and being such gracious hosts. Sorry for being such a doomer. But desperate times and all that… Of course watch Pistachio Wars if you haven’t already.

—Yasha

Rowan and I were at UC Santa Barbara last month presenting Pistachio Wars. We had a wonderful Q&A after the screening, which you can see below. Subscribers can listen to it on our usual podcast feed and read a cleaned up transcript below.

Thank you to Rich Farell and everyone at Carsey-Wolf Center for having us out and being such gracious hosts. Sorry for being such a doomer. But desperate times and all that… Of course watch Pistachio Wars if you haven’t already.

—Yasha

RICH FARRELL: Okay. My name is Rich Farrell. I’m a graduate student in the Film and Media Studies Department, and I’m pleased to be joined by the filmmakers of Pistachio Wars, Yasha Levine and Rowan WERNHAM. So a round of applause for you.

YASHA LEVINE: Thank you.

RICH FARRELL: So I just wanted to start the Q&A with some background and beginnings. First to you, Yasha. At the beginning of the film, you say that the story started with a piece that you wrote, “A Journey Through Oligarch Valley,” in 2013, which was published in Not Safe for Work magazine online. Can you tell us a little bit about your background, how you came to work on that story, and then how you decided to adapt this into a documentary?

YASHA LEVINE: Well, I’ll try to keep it brief. Thank you. Thank you everyone for coming.

I had been out of the country and started my journalism career reporting out in Russia, and I kind of missed the whole real estate bubble, the speculative boom that happened here, and the collapse that happened in 2007, 2008. I had been abroad watching it from afar. And when I came back to America, I was really curious about what it was all about. So I moved to LA and I was casting about for the best example of a speculative city that embodied the speculative boom.

I kind of toured California and chose Victorville -- a little suburb in the Mojave Desert, halfway between L.A. and Las Vegas -- because I really wanted to understand the kind of society, the kind of civilization that this boom created. Like what remained when Wall Street crashed and had to be bailed out…

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Here are the bits from the interview where he talks about writing and novels. Just wanted to share it with you:

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Mike opens his book by talking about an Apple ad that came out a few years ago that illustrates this Borg-like monopolize/destroy drive. I’m embedding it below because Apple had scrubbed this ad from the internet, following a backlash.

Compare this Apple ad…

…to the Borg. Who is more honest?

Buy Mike’s book today!

As Evgenia explains, he was a true poet — and a total artist. With his music and videos, he did something that no one else had done yet. He captured on a pure emotional level the feeling of Russia with its failed utopian past and its violent present and all the ideals and the people that got ground up and spit in the two revolutions — the Bolshevik one and the Market Bolshevik one it had in less than a century. Ironically, the last big thing Shortparis made was the soundtrack to Limonov’s biopic, Limonov: The Ballad.

—IBWR

PS: Evgenia recently wrote about Limonov’s prophetic view of Russian politics.

PPS: The song in the intro/outro is Apple Orchard (Яблонный сад).

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I’ve been thinking about this…and obviously it’s hard to make predictions about the future. You never want to be that guy that said the internet is just a passing fad. Still, I’ve been playing around with these new AI tools here and there, and I do have some thoughts and observations. They’re impressive in a lot of ways. And they are clearly useful for tasks that have very specific guidelines. But for creative things? From what I’ve seen, they’ve been very underwhelming. For me, AI might as well be Average Intelligence.

I signed up a few months ago for the cheapest subscription tier of DESCRIPT, an AI platform that can generate videos, voiceovers, write scripts…using a mixture of Google and OpenAI tech. I haven’t used it much, and my credits were about to expire, so I wanted to put the machine to use. I didn’t have any good ideas, so I just asked it to do a short documentary based on something I wrote here last week. I asked it not to change the text but to generate a voiceover from it and to layer images and videos over it in a documentary style. Not surprisingly, Underlord — which is the woke(ish?) name of the DESCRIPT chatbot — ignored my repeated requests to not generate its own interpretation of my text and instead produced a documentary inspired by the text. Over and over, it did something I repeatedly asked it not to do. Still, I was curious. What would it come up with?

Well…here it:

It’s not bad, right? It’s watchable. But pay attention to the images and text and the way that the logic flows — the rhetorical tricks, the cliché spy in a fedora — and it’s all very average. I’d say extremely average, like a pastiche of every cultural area that the LLM has borrowed from.

I’ve noticed it. Lots of other people have noticed it. LLMs have a tendency to produce very average results when some creativity is required. What it spits out is basically cliché. Maybe there is a way to get around this hyper-managing every frame and every detail. I’m guessing that is exactly what people have to do to get anything halfway decent from these machines — do an insane amount of iterative requests until you get something close to what you want. So a director and editor working with AI will spend countless hours and burn whole tracts of Amazon forest worth of energy requesting and requesting and tweaking and begging the chatbot to change all sorts of details in the shots that it pumps out. Sounds like fun! Maybe it’ll work on some level — and it will probably be fine for a lot of mass entertainment. I mean, a lot of what we’re offered on the movie front is already extremely derivative and formulaic — franchises, reboots, and remakes all made by committees overseen by finance guys who use past financial charts to make creative decisions. Just look at what you get on Netflix. It might as well be made by an AI. It’s not just films. A lot of cultural output these days is made by people but crafted according to LLM principles.

Human-made culture can escape this limitation by structuring society in a different way. Hollywood, for instance, can drop its obsession with never taking a risk on anything and only making things that had been financially successful in the past. But with LLM-made culture…the limitation is not so easy to breach. LLMs are, in a sense, built to be average. That’s how these models work. They are average engines.

I have a friend who was involved in Google’s early visual training models. You know, to try to get it to recognize basic things: types of fruit, types of cars. The effort basically involved feeding a billion images of these things to the LLM in order to “train it” to “see.” On the cultural side, it’s the same thing. You feed it millions of paintings, novels, documentaries, songs, films…and it’ll pump out specific things you ask based on this average. It can’t do anything else.

Despite constant attempts to humanize computers, they are not embodied beings that have evolved to live on Earth and in complex human communities. They have no innate feel for images and words and music and emotions. A sunset isn’t beautiful or nostalgic to them. They do not know friendship, loneliness, desire, fear, or curiosity. For an LLM, the expiration of a GPU that’s been a part of it for years produces no emotion whatsoever.

If you ask an LLM to produce a film or painting or a documentary, it cannot produce anything original. All it can give you is something that’s based on something that has already been made — a mixture of many different creations, remixed for the particular need of its user. When you mix all colors, you get a muddy beige. And that’s what AI gives creatively.

Maybe I’m wrong, but it seems like this is a hard limit for computer technology — a limit that LLMs and other forms of AI will never be able to overcome, no matter how far the technology progresses. Computers are disembodied. All they can give us is a representation of a representation, a remix of things that we had already processed for them. Creatively, they will always be one level more removed from reality than we are…one level more abstracted from the real world populated by real beings who feel pain and love and a will to live or die. Because of this disconnection…because of this abstraction…they will always produce derivative creative results. It’s what they are. It’s what we made them to be.

LLMs might work for more technical areas. I don’t know. But I think this tech will always produce average results when some creativity, which is embodied and rooted fundamentally in life, is required.

I guess we’ll see. Darren Aronofsky is all in on AI. He even produced a few short films about the American Revolutionary War. They look? Well…they looks very mid and lifeless. Which is my point exactly.

Is this something you’d pay $50 a month to Netflix stream? Some of you addicts no doubt would.

Just to experiment, I asked DESCRIPT’s Underlord to make another version of a short documentary based on that same article about the internet and MK-ULTRA I mentioned earlier. But this time I asked it to make it not so average somehow. “You are so mid -- you write like a pastiche of all TV documentaries. Do better,” I wrote. It agreed with me, saying it will try.

Here is what it gave me. What do you think? Did it succeed? I…

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