The AI bubble demands infrastructure. The big techs can’t build data centers fast enough. These also need power plants and networking.

Where does the money come from? Investment bankers and private lenders who see a glorious new opportunity!

All this planned infrastructure needs $1 trillion to $2 trillion of funding over the next five years. [Bloomberg, archive; Moody’s, audio]

JPMorgan Chase, Deutsche Bank, and others have set up dedicated infrastructure teams. BlackRock and Microsoft plan to raise $120 billion of debt for data centers. One banker said his firm has so many data center deals that they don’t have enough staff for the workload.

Hedge funds also want in. Risky leveraged loans are backed by the data centers themselves — or the Nvidia cards in them. We’re sure phrases like “novel types of debt structures” won’t give you flashbacks to the 2008 financial crisis.

Remember that nobody has yet worked out how to make an actual profit from AI. So what if — God forbid — number stops going up?

There’s a plan for that: large data center holders will go public as soon as possible and dump on retail investors, who will be left holding the bag when the bubble deflates.

A bursting AI bubble will take down the Nasdaq and large swathes of the tech sector, not to mention systemic levels of losses and possible bank failures.

When, though? We think there’s at least a year or two of money left. Enough time to build a really big bomb.

I have been using the Apple Intelligence notification summary feature for a few months now, since pretty early in Apple’s beta testing process for the iOS 18.1 and macOS 15.1 updates.

If you don’t know what that is—and the vast majority of iPhones won’t get Apple Intelligence, which only works on the iPhone 16 series and iPhone 15 Pro—these notification summaries attempt to read a stack of missed notifications from any given app and give you the gist of what they’re saying.

Summaries are denoted with a small icon, and when tapped, the summary notification expands into the stack of notifications you missed in the first place. They also work on iPadOS and macOS, where they're available on anything with an M1 chip or newer.

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This week, longtime 65 comrade and graphic artist Caspar Newbolt wrote a short thing about the artwork he made for my Telex From MIDI City album last year.^[1]

As Caspar points out, this was all pulled together during lockdown in Berlin. Caspar and I would habitually meet at Volkspark Hasenheide, walking in socially-distanced loops, drinking coffee and chatting about our various projects and, eventually, the Telex artwork.

One of the things about Volkspark Hasenheide, indeed one of the things about all of Berlin (and I guess many other cities), is that essentially every signpost, every street light—pretty much every piece of well-placed public infrastructure—is covered in stickers.

I like to think of these stickers as evidence of another city hiding just under the surface. Like a mycorrhizal network under a forest, the stickers are the tips of this vast, rhizomatic mesh of ideas, not necessarily aware of each other, but with a broadly shared intent.^[2] Proclamations, provocations, agitations. Anti-fascist actions, trans-rights, free Palestine, musicians, techno parties, artists, food pop-ups, smash the AfD, demands to address the climate emergency... A fluttering of life and scrambled hope. On any journey through the city or loop around one of the many volksparks, thousands of these tiny communiques quietly jostle not for my attention exactly, but for absorption into my subconscious.

Back in Sheffield in the early 00s, at the dawn of 65days, parsing the landscape of a city through its stickers was a language I was fluent in. Walking through Sheffield, its various happenings could be read through the ebb and flow of this no-budget, guerilla approach to communication. They'd never last long, usually falling victim to either rain or just more stickers. 65days and our burgeoning Dustpunk collective and friends would regularly contribute our own little calls to action. It was possible to chart the rise and fall of punk shows, drum'n'bass parties, zines, short-lived but enthusiastic local record labels, club nights and so on through the sticker-riddled telephone street cabinets and postboxes on the blearly-eyed walk to work.

Reading about the Telex artwork reminded me of these walks-and-talks with Caspar, which reminded me of the endless serenade of stickers that accompanies me when walking anywhere in Berlin. And as I idly started to write about this, it slowly dawned on me how the stickers and my album were so obviously connected, I just hadn't noticed. And this realisation dragged up memories of when 65 were grappling with the making of replicr, 2019.

The period of 65days pulling this album together in the studio was full of conversations about meaning, intent and, inevitably, Walter Benjamin's Angel of History:

The Angel of History must look just so. His face is turned towards the past. Where we see the appearance of a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble and hurls it before his feet...a storm is blowing from Paradise, it has caught itself up in his wings and is so strong that the Angel can no longer close them. The storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the rubble-heap before him grows sky-high. That which we call progress, is this storm.

There we all were, our backs to the future, trying to discern/construct meaning in what we had done by examining the ruins of the past. If you follow the confused and noisy plight of 65days then you already know that all this led to the Wreckage Systems project. But during replicr, 2019, the crux of our conversations was about the struggle of figuring out what it was we had made. We knew we had made something. Even if we couldn't nail down the specifics of 65's quality control thresholds, we knew that this collection of songs had passed our tests. We weren't painting by numbers, we weren't churning out content to sell records. We'd made something we were proud of and wanted to share. But also we didn't know what exactly it was we had made or why.

All we could do was examine it now that it existed, name it, speculate and reverse-engineer meaning and intention. This meaning was 'made up' and yet also became true and so somehow was always-already the case. Or to put it another way, we decided that just because we didn't know what we were doing at the time, it didn't mean the intention we assigned to it afterwards wasn't real. The making of the record wasn't just capturing the songs — the work was a rolling ball of confusion, an ongoing practise of self-reflexivity, and that included us trying to decode the mystery of what we had done, and tentatively offering that up in the form of the album title, song titles, and the overall presentation of those songs.

If 65 still exists in a decade's time, and from that distance we figure out that replicr, 2019 was actually about something else entirely, then that too will have always-already been true. It will have just taken us a while to have realised it.

But just because the meaning of an album (or anything) might not be static and is rather a nebulous, fuzzy notion that can be interpreted in many different ways, I don't think it means it has to be a free for all. Doesn't mean that it is all arbitrary and anything can mean anything. As China Mieville neatly put it when discussing the manifesto form, even though all texts are to some degree polysemic:

This is not licence for epistemological anarchy, according to which anything, any reading, always goes. But it is to acknowledge that no text, whatever its authors (or reader's) intent, can have a simple, singular meaning. Every text will generate something like a tangle of meanings and connotations, more or less concentrated around a core, and more or less protean or stable, according to political, social and linguistic context. As one playful formulation has it, rather than being straightforwardly 'about' something in particular, every text is inevitably surrounded by a 'vibrating aboutness cluster'. The context, content and range of that cluster must be accounted for as part of an analysis.

All of this is to say: making meaning is slow and confusing and it doesn't necessarily happen at the same time as making the thing that the meaning is applied to. But! Even though things are always going to be open to interpretation, grappling with it enough, even if it takes a while, makes it sometimes possible to pull reliable patterns out of the debris left in its wake.

And so only now I have achieved this distance from lockdown in Berlin both temporally and geographically (I'm not living there right now), do I realise the degree to which Telex From MIDI City's stubborn utopian imagining was informed by the secrets of Sticker City. That on some level of awareness, not just during mine and Caspar's lockdown loops, but through my everyday moving through the streets of Berlin, I was being bolstered by the knowledge that this other reality was layered right next to mine, and I could experience it vicariously through this haphazard, endlessly mutating scattering of sticky art and sloganeering.

My Berlin is/was the daytime Berlin. It was cycling to libraries and bakeries, sitting in parks, bougie filter coffee and falafel. (ICH BIN GENTRIFICATION.) I wasn't partying at Berghain. I wasn't living off of Club Mate and dancing to techno all weekend, wasn't organising protests from a squat. But like another China Mieville text The City and The City, my world and this other world I could catch a glimpse of through the stickers were still inhabiting the same place at the same time, and it was an invigorating feeling. I took not only solace but joy from knowing it was out there.

And I guess perhaps that is what I was going for with Telex From MIDI City? A way of telling myself and whoever else might be interested that by making something and putting it into the world—whether that is music or writing or even something as tiny and disposable as a sticker—it can contribute in some small way to this chorus of tiny ruptures, this messy utopian impulse, this chaotic, decentralised desire of wanting things to be different. To take part in a collective imagining of better futures.

Since the U.S. election, the Twitter-like platform Bluesky has been the beneficiary of millions of users deciding that they had finally had enough of serving time on and adding value to a platform owned by a egomaniacal charlatan increasingly devoted to promoting right-wing propaganda. (Why did those users wait so long? Haven’t they heard of the sunk-cost fallacy?) After a few years of being a relatively quiet internet backwater, Bluesky has suddenly gained traction, launching an attention gold rush in which established users are gaining thousands of followers a day and the stakes of frequent posting are beginning to come into sharper focus. The familiar species of clout chasers, thirst trappers, and controversialists are sure to rise in salience as the notification jackpots increase. The chain-letter-like, engagement-for-engagement’s-sake participatory posts are already becoming inescapable. Let’s get an inane personal question to trend! But there is also suddenly more in the way of useful links and other things to read, more useful commentary from unanticipated sources, more of what could plausibly be identified as “the discourse” becoming legible there.

Tech writers are now writing their obligatory columns (like this one) about Bluesky, many offering the carefully hedged hope that this time it will be different, this social media platform will become and really remain informative and “fun” instead of eventually taking the customary ad-supported and algorithmically propelled nosedive into the content cesspool. These writers tend to assess the overall “vibe” of a platform as if it could ever be known from an individual user’s perspective, and then extend the wish that it will improve in some arbitrary way and be less for the early adopters (typically characterized as dorks who were earnest and clueless enough to post to a platform when there was no “juice” to it) and more for the savvy pro posters who are only now deciding to stop adding to Elon Musk’s power.

On the surface, these sorts of takes tend to ask “Where are all the cool memes?” as if that were the ultimate test of significance. That means assessing new platforms only in terms of how big and all-encompassing they might become, how viral they can make the most heterogeneous of things, and how individual users might make money or amass cultural capital through them. This usually looks like Twitter nostalgia: People are posting like its 2009! Context collapse is hilarious, actually! And though Bluesky has a few idiosyncratic features — like the “starter packs” that allow users to mass-follow thematically grouped accounts — it is essentially a clone of Twitter in its functionality. Yet the evocation of old Twitter, as if all the new Bluesky users want nothing more than to go through the same motions that made “the bird site” into “the hell site” long before it devolved into X.com, “enshittifies” any new platforms in advance, assuming that for them to succeed, they will have to scale and accommodate business models that turn people into metrics-chasing self-entrepreneurs (like me!).

Likening Bluesky to some golden age of Twitter that never existed limits the collective imagination of what it could become. As Nathan Jurgenson asks (on Bluesky), could Bluesky be for anything else than Twitter redux? What functions did Twitter actually serve for pluralities of its users, and what were they contingent upon? I always thought of being on Twitter as part of my job, when I had one. For better or worse, I used it to gauge what the audiences relevant to what I was doing might be interested in, which takes were tired, and what sorts of writing was already out there. I would post a thread now and then if something I was reading — a tweet or something someone linked to — triggered an idea, and I would try to recruit writers when they posted something that could be construed as a pitch.

In the 2020s, none of that seems applicable anymore. There is not much paying work left in creating and shaping texts for readers, because, as lots of commentators are eager to point out, fewer and fewer people bother to read text and society is purportedly becoming increasingly “post-literate.” (This was a theme in some election postmortems: that a significant portion of the U.S. electorate lacks the critical thinking skills that come from better reading habits and are thus readily susceptible to demagoguery.) Passive consumption of video is the algorithmically enforced norm on most platforms, which have become more or less indistinguishable from conventional television, with a rationalized, rigidly formatted flow of content and ads. (Most of what Raymond Williams wrote about TV in 1974 applies equally well to social media today.) A recent post from Katherine Dee speculates that “social media basically brought us to something like an oral culture,” encapsulating some of the points theorists like Marshall McLuhan and Walter Ong had put forward in the late 20th century with respect to “secondary orality” and “global villages.” (It reminded me too of this Real Life essay from 2019 by L.M. Sacasas and this one from Britney Gil, which both took up the “return of oral culture” idea.)

But what seemed like secondary orality during the rise of Twitter might look differently on Bluesky. If Twitter once served to make text seem more immediate and speech-like relative to the dominant form of print media, Bluesky could be seen as a place where alienated textualists are gathering to try to help something like print culture survive. (Bluesky has no video sharing yet, though that probably is more a technical limitation than a deliberate design choice.) Ryan Broderick describes himself as “fretting over ‘the literacy wall,’ a moment at some point in the future where enough people who grew up on a text-based web have died off and taken with them any memory of enjoying reading and writing posts online” and wonders if Bluesky is “something that can survive against the tide of 90-second video clips.”

I’m not ready to break out The Gutenberg Elegies and start moaning about the “crisis of meaning” and the loss of “inwardness needed for serious reading” and that sort of thing. But it does seem that all these new Bluesky users must at some level still believe in text, still want to read, even if it is only in disjointed snatches of a few sentences at a time. They might even think it’s worthwhile to try to compose their own thoughts in a compressed, aphoristic textual style, in sentences that reward rereading, in ambiguous or multivalent sentences that hold open room for interpretation or internal contradiction. They might believe that style as it manifests in text is singular, inimitable in any other medium, exceeding the mere informational content of the writing.

It’s a rare moment when those sorts of investments are treated as potentially popular, even implicitly, but the flight to Bluesky, even though it is still dwarfed by the other big platforms, seems like such a moment. It almost seems credible that there is a broad constituency for a public sphere that is struggling to be born that is shaped fundamentally by the pleasures of the text and not video. It would be great to make the most of it before the mirage dissipates.

Greetings from Read Max HQ! In this issue:

• An examination of Bluesky’s recent surge in popularity, and the test it needs to pass to truly replace Twitter; and

• exploring the two primary intellectual values of YouTube, and what it can tell us about politics.

A reminder: This newsletter is my main and full-time job, and I’m able to spend most of my week reading, thinking, and writing because of the support of paying subscribers. If you appreciate what I do, and have found it even a little bit useful (or just entertaining)--and if you’d like to get an additional, second newsletter of book, movie, and article recommendations--please consider signing up for the low price of $5/month or $50/year. Ask yourself: Would I buy Max one beer a month in exchange for him writing 15,000-20,000 words?

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Does Bluesky have the juice?

In the same manner by which DSA now experiences membership surges immediately following Republican election victories, the semi-decentralized Twitter clone Bluesky is having a “post-election moment”: It surpassed 15 million users on Wednesday, a million of whom joined the site over the past week, and six million of whom have joined since September. Many of these users are presumably former users of “X.com” who’ve been driven away its increasingly broken and intolerable website as well as its owner’s new role as the Donald Trump’s personal Bez/Bosstone.

The millions of people who have arrived on Bluesky’s shores over the last few weeks (not to mention the many users who’ve re-activated dormant accounts to greet a larger user base) have been hoping fervently that Bluesky can recreate pre-Musk Twitter, or at least a close facsimile. And I will say, for the first time since I’ve started intermittently checking the website, it feels reasonably well-populated, if still not reaching the level of endless cascade that Twitter offers.

But can Bluesky actually replace Twitter? Does it have the juice? In absolute terms, 15 million is not really very many users--for context, Threads has 275 million and Twitter claims to have 600 million. But, as was the case on Twitter, demographics matter. From what I can tell, the users who’ve been joining Bluesky en masse recently are members of the big blob of liberal-to-left-wing journalists, academics, lawyers, and tech workers--politically engaged email-job types--who were early Twitter adopters and whose compulsive use of the site over the years was an important force in shaping its culture and norms. (Some of those users have been on the site for a while, valiantly attempting to change Bluesky’s culture from “toxically wack” to “tolerably wack.”)

I don’t want to understate the importance of this group’s defection to Bluesky. These are people with an absolute, almost pathological commitment to producing free content for short-form posting websites; they make up a significant portion of the legendary “Tweeting Tenth”--the 10 percent of Twitter users who at one point created 90 percent of the site’s activity--and their ability to generate mordant quote-tweets at scale is unmatched, even if the mordant quote-tweets are only funny, like, two times out of seven.

But are they enough? I would submit Bluesky to what I think of as the “Gatsby Party Test”: Could Bluesky, given its current size and demographic makeup, produce the following tweet?

It’s not that I think this is a “good tweet,” though I suppose it is. It’s that I think a good Twitter replacement should be able to produce posts like this--i.e. utterly anodyne and yet at the same time bafflingly alien to the journalists who think of themselves as the platform’s main characters--as a matter of course. It should have teenagers, and normies (or “locals,” in Twitter parlance), and millions of other people who are completely uninterested in the preoccupations of the Politically Engaged Email Job Blob, and yet who are fearlessly posting their own bullshit alongside them, every single day. What made Twitter Twitter wasn’t merely the presence of the celebrities and op-ed columnists and political staffers and television writers and adjunct professors, but the presence of “Karter Machen,” and the millions of other people implied by the existence of Karter Machen, flanking (and mostly ignoring) the elite underclass that gave the site an outsize importance.1

Absent Gatsby Party tweets, Bluesky acts more like a particularly large Discord server--a place to socialize, bullshit, banter, and kill time--than it does like a proper Twitter replacement. For many people I think this is fine; I’m not sure how much the world needs a “Twitter replacement” anyway. But the distinction is still important. Part of what’s made Twitter so attractive to journalists is that it’s relatively easy to convince yourself that it’s a map of the world. Bluesky, smaller and more homogenous, is harder to mistake as a scrolling representation of the national or global psyche--which makes it much healthier for media junkies, but also much less attractive.

The intellectual values of YouTube

I thought this paragraph in John Ganz’s post-mortem of the election, published today in The Nation, was worth flagging:

A closer look at media dynamics reveals the futility of this strategy: The Democrats don’t need to program differently—they need to think differently. The main feature tying together the shows that young right-leaning men watch and listen to now is curiosity: They include discussions and debates; their hosts might not be particularly knowledgeable and they are open about it, so they ask what might seem like dumb questions without shame. Even when the discussion veers into pure propaganda, it comes wrapped in the appearance of open inquiry. If liberals want more organic intellectuals like the GOP seems to have, they need to be willing to be more organic—to actually hang and talk, not just hector from above. They need to reject their allergy to “debate bros” and learn how to argue and debate again; indeed, they need to recover the central challenge of politics—to persuade people.

Ganz here spotlights what are effectively the two intellectual values of YouTube as a culture, by which I mean the two virtues you have to display if you want to be taken seriously by the YouTube audience: (1) curiosity, of the kind demonstrated (or performed) by people like Joe Rogan and Theo Von, and (2) intellectual domination, of the kind sought by the “debate bros” Ganz references (among them, e.g., Destiny).

I mentioned the idea of curiosity in this weekend’s paywalled links roundup, in the context of Ian Williams’ excellent piece about the politics of his college students:

The second is that they really, really like podcasts. All of them listen to podcasts because they’re endlessly busy. Reading takes time and attention they don’t have. Or they don’t think they do. And when we discussed the appeal of podcasts, the performance of authenticity and truth-telling seemed to matter a lot more than the actuality. Joe Rogan may be a gigantic dumbass, but he performs that he’s curious, interested, and engaged. And, here’s the thing, he probably actually is those things. […] Rogan is some version of curious, but he performs as even more curious than he actually is. And that’s what matters to people.

Within the culture of YouTube and streamers, of you can’t, or don’t want to, display curiosity or pursue (the performance of) open intellectual inquiry, your other option is to pursue intellectual domination through open (“open”) debate. Kyndall Cunningham has a nice overview of the increasingly popular culture of “debate” at Vox:

It seems as though the country has been engaged in one long screaming match since 2016. Go on YouTube or scroll through X and that feeling gets a face. Videos claiming that someone “silenced” or “destroyed” another party in a discussion about politics abound on social media. There are now nearly unavoidable clips of conservative personalities like Charlie Kirk and Ben Shapiro arguing with college students at liberal universities or leftist commentators on their social platforms. Meanwhile, videos of random folks with polar-opposite political views sitting in a dark room arguing over hot-button issues — and often saying wildly offensive or misinformed things — are on the rise.

At the end of September, a YouTube video titled, “Can 1 Woke Teen Survive 25 Trump Supporters” went viral, drawing attention for its absurd, Battle Royale-like premise. In two weeks, it had accumulated 9.6 million views. The video sees 19-year-old liberal TikTok pundit Dean Withers (a.k.a. the “woke teen”) thrown into a lion’s den of young, zealous Trumpers eager to prove him wrong. One by one, he argues with his opponents across a table about reproductive rights and Kamala Harris’s bona fides. One clip where he appears to stump a woman during a discussion about abortion and IUDs garnered millions of views on X.

Why do people love earnest, curious dumbass podcasters and theatrical, confrontational streamers yelling at each other? I think the extent to which the largely young, largely male audience of these videos approaches YouTube or Twitch for the purpose of (self-)education (rather than as “mere” entertainment or even identity-formation) is probably underrated by those of us who think it’s all nonsense. These debates and podcast interviews are often (though not always) intellectually impoverished exercises, but they provide frameworks for political and social thinking that their audience clearly feels they’re not getting elsewhere.

To some extent, this should be cause for optimism. For reasons that I suspect are obvious to anyone reading this Substack I really hate “debate culture,” and don’t personally find theatrical fact-recitation to be an effective mode of persuasion. Nor, for that matter, am I particularly impressed with “curiosity” that lacks any intellectual resources to shape and direct the “open inquiry” it drives. But the popularity of these formats suggests that there’s a large audience of people with appetite for education, looking for new and more sophisticated ways to explain the world around them.2 It’s possible, even likely, that many of those people are reactionaries by inclination and intuition, and merely seeking justification for views they already hold. But it seems like a failure of imagination for anyone who believes in democracy to write off a population of would-be autodidacts rather than attempting to marshal resources to help them, even if it means meeting them where they are.