Silicon Valley’s delusion machine

The AI Super Bowl — And Everything Else

I was watching the 2022 Super Bowl with family back in Massachusetts when an ad starring Tom Brady came on. Which obviously caused quite a stir. It was for the crypto trading platform FTX and it inspired my mom to finally ask me what cryptocurrency is. I tried my best to explain and even drew out on a napkin a rough approximation of how a blockchain worked. After a beat of silence she just said, “I don’t think I get it, but that’s nice.”

I felt echoes of the 2022 crypto Super Bowl while watching the deluge of ads last night for artificial intelligence from companies like OpenAI, Google, Meta, and Salesforce. The marketing — and the product — is slightly clearer this time around. It doesn’t require a literal diagram to explain how to use a chatbot, but the result was the same: Here is something Silicon Valley has decided you need and you’re going to have to use it. And it can be hard to remember that up until around 2020, Silicon Valley did not typically operate this way.

Most of the big tech companies that are now shoving AI down our throats got as big as they did, not because they sold us a revolutionary new product they dreamed up out of nothing, but because they found, oftentimes, insidious ways to solve a digital infrastructure problem with a private business. Google figured out how to help us find content we were already looking for, Facebook figured out how to help us find people we already knew, Amazon, physical products we already wanted, etc. Yes, these companies would eventually flood the airwaves with ad campaigns, but Google was already a multi-billion-dollar tech company and Chrome had over 100 million active users when they dropped their first Super Bowl commercial, “Parisian Love,” in 2010. That still-very clever ad told a story about someone one falling in love through the mundane Google searches everyone makes every day. Google’s Super Bowl ad last night, “Dream Job,” depicted a dad getting ready for a job interview by talking out loud in his kitchen to an AI voice assistant, something I am very confident no one has done ever. But that doesn’t matter because Silicon Valley believes they are big enough now to create the future, rather than scale up to meet it.

But this isn’t just about tech companies being out of touch with how actual human beings use their products. If it was, Google could have chosen to advertise how someone uses Gemini with an ad that featured employees at a Vietnamese content farm generating millions of AI images of amputee veterans praying to crab Jesus or something.

This would all be simply annoying and kind of embarrassing if November's election had gone differently. Thanks to apps like TikTok, Shein, Temu, and, most recently, DeepSeek, we know that China has caught up to the US and its tech industry has figured out how to innovate in ways ours can't or won’t. You might not like machine-learning-based short-form video apps or gamified social shopping platforms, but they are genuinely new ways of interacting with the web. And US regulators can’t actually stop the tide from turning — at best, the US will become an island surrounded by a global internet run by Chinese software. But what elevates this from lame to genuinely dangerous is that this delusion that Silicon Valley can now decide how the future should look has infiltrated the highest levels of the US government. And AI is the technology powering this delusion.

As we speak, Elon Musk’s DOGE team is reportedly planning to use xAI to “streamline” federal contracts and OpenAI is talking to the White House about using their AI for nuclear weapon security. And OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank are partnering on a new company called Stargate, funded by a massive investment in AI thanks to President Donald Trump. Journalist Maximillian Alvarez recently described the current AI invasion as an attempt to take over “government and ensure we have no more choice in the matter.” And if they succeed, it won’t just be Super Bowl commercials that no long reflect reality. The entire country will be running on Silicon Valley’s delusion machine. And whatever the future of computing is that was supposed to arrive, never will.

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Silence Your Spam Calls Today

The election is finally here, Garbage Day readers. And you've probably definitely noticed an uptick in spam calls and texts, right? Have you ever wondered how they get ahold of your info? Well, it's data brokers. They sell your address, phone number, Social Security Number, family contacts, and more, to anyone willing to pay. And, yes, it's totally legal. On the bright side, you can always opt out of these sites yourself and stop the spam. BUT... doing all that on your own is frustrating and can take hours.

That's why you should use Incogni instead. They'll remove all your data from over 200 data brokerages and people-search sites automatically, so you can kiss spam goodbye.

Better yet, they're giving our readers 55% off with code DAYDEAL, which you can use by clicking here. Never worry about being tracked on the web again. Here's that link one more time!

Good Song About The Coup

Trump Is Still Popular, Unfortunately

One of the hardest pills to swallow about our current constitutional crisis is that a majority, though slim, of the country voted for it. And, sure, there are a million stories emerging right now about Trumpists realizing that, yes, the leopards will eat their face too. But the managerial class, on both sides of the political spectrum, that truly believed in atomic age neoliberalism is really struggling to make sense of the general glee felt around the country as President Donald Trump destroys the institutions that, well, make America, America. The hope, it seems, is that eventually Trump’s team will sever something in the system that will truly infuriate and activate voters. Never mind that that’s literally not how most coups play out. Boiled frogs and so on.

CBS News partnered with YouGov on a poll out this week showing that the majority of Americans are still all in on Trump. More than half of responders believe Trump is “tough,” “energetic” (lol), and “focused” (lmao). And the majority of those polled approve of what he’s doing, overall. Now, there’s some quibbling over on Bluesky about how serious to take this poll, but I think that’s a lot of cope tbh. Similarly, I saw reports on social media that Trump was booed at the Super Bowl last night, but based on what I’ve read, Taylor Swift got the majority of the boos last night, not the president.

Here’s the thing, though. None of this actually matters. All kinds of stupid, awful, ugly shit is popular. That doesn’t mean we have to accept it as inevitable. And, most importantly, it doesn’t make it above the law. Hopefully, someone can forward this email to Democratic Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries. Might help him brainstorm some better ideas for wrestling back some power in 2026.

The Bluesky Coalition Did Not Last Very Long

—by Adam Bumas

As Democratic Party leaders like Jeffries and Chuck Schumer continue the outward messaging that they’re just little birthday boys, there’s been a pretty wide desire for more direct political organizing that can effectively resist the subversion of the federal government. So far there’s been a few successes, but over the weekend, we saw a big failure on Bluesky of sorts.

On Saturday, journalist and Western Kabuki host Juniper tried to build an Axis of Posting with Will Stancil, the longtime Twitter warrior and wannabe establishment Democrat. Juniper called for Stancil to “heal the divide between the far left and liberals online,” and create a united front of political messaging on the internet. Stancil was initially positive about the idea, but in less than an hour Stancil had started getting into it with Juniper’s followers, and once the replies and quote-tweets got four or five deep, the idea of the coalition had completely been forgotten.

There’s a lesson here! Both Juniper and Stancil clearly agree on quite a lot about politics. It would definitely be good for both to agree on simple and succinct messaging that’s easy to internalize for people who aren’t posting about politics all day. But there are probably better places to figure that out than on the Misinterpreting Your Post App.

Talk Tuah, Leaked

An unreleased episode of Haliey Welch’s podcast, Talk Tuah, leaked last week. In the episode, Welch starts crying at one point, as the co-host of the episode, FaZe Media CEO Ricky Banks, tried to explain what happened with the disastrous launch of the $HAWK coin back in December. Welch has not made any public comments since the coin was pumped and dumped at the end of the year. Welch and her team are now facing a class action lawsuit over the coin.

The TL;DR of what happened, according to Welch in the leaked episode, is that a “friend of a friend” was running $HAWK and though things felt “a little weird” as it was launching, she was unaware of how much of a rug pull it would end up becoming. She also said that she was only interested in doing a memecoin because she wanted to donate half of the money to her animal rescue charity Paws Across America.

Reading between the lines here a bit, it seems fairly clear that Welch fell for all the standard crypto BS uninitiated investors get told at the outset of these kinds of projects. The tell here is Welch’s mention of how she was told the project would be “positive” and “community-based” which is the same kind of multilevel marketing speak I’ve heard at countless crypto events over the years.

Look, here’s a good rule. If a 30-something man with flavored-vape vocal fry dressed like a professional snowboarder tells you that crypto is good a way to make friends, you need to run as fast as possible in the opposite direction. You are a mark.

Reddit Is Obsessed With The New York Times Beans

—By Adam Bumas

The New York Times Cooking app is popular enough it’s had its share of viral moments over the years — most infamously, Alison Roman’s shallot pasta back in 2020. More recently, r/NYTCooking has become a hub for this beautiful little outgrowth of the social web.

For the past month or so, users on the subreddit have been making and posting pictures of this recipe for “Creamy, Spicy Tomato Beans and Greens”. The subreddit was so overwhelmed by posts about the beans (here are some of the highlights) that, on request from the community, the mods started a Beans Megathread. And today, the Times’ official Reddit account will be hosting an AMA with Alexa Weibel, who created the recipe.

Congratulations to everyone involved, and especially to the top commenter on the beans recipe, who says “Loved it! I substituted everything with a Taco Bell burrito supreme. It was a hit!”

Crucial Updates From The Philly Police Scanner Last Night

You can — and should — click the link above and read the whole thread. It rips. Go birds (unless they’re playing against New England).

Some Stray Links

• “A Tent City Is Rising at Guantánamo Bay”

• “MAGA: Make Apartheid Great Again”

• “In Relationships, Am I the Asshole?” (Adam wrote this one!)

P.S. here’s a hidden stoat.

***Any typos in this email are on purpose actually***