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You Are The Bleakest Link, Goodbye
Everyone should start a media business! Wait, not like that.
Rusty Foster
August 18, 2025
“I can’t imagine why everyone isn’t starting a media business right now,” I posted on Bluesky a week ago, and in the shadows behind me on a dusty half-forgotten shelf, another finger curled on the monkey’s paw. How many fingers does this monkey’s paw even have? None of us will like the answer.
And so today “The left gets a new publication,” reports Semafor’s Max Tani, announcing the launch of a Substack (of course) called The Argument (ugh) which is by and for the kind of Atlantic/Vox-brained dimwits who like to describe themselves as “liberal” but somehow still consistently wind up arguing in favor of deregulation and the economic desirability of dead sweatshop workers. With four million dollars in funding from Bari Weiss’s pal Tyler Cowen and the rump EA movement at Open Philanthropy, and prospective contributors like Matt Yglesias and Derek Thompson, the left will only “get” this new publication in the same sense that an incautious 18th century London rake would “get” syphilis. In the site’s excruciatingly smug launch video, founder and editor-in-chief Jerusalem Demsas announced that “I won’t agree with everyone we publish,” establishing from the start that she doesn’t know what an editor is for. I would love to continue dunking on them but I couldn’t think of anything meaner than this YouTube comment:
Just so.
I would like to propose a moratorium on calling anyone “the left” if they are anywhere to the right of Woke Bill Kristol:
Today in Other Media News: The original fascist-flavor Free Press published a big story yesterday arguing that children in Gaza aren’t dying OF starvation, but merely dying WITH starvation. What are they dying of? Apparently rickets. The authors are Olivia Reingold and Tanya Lukyanova, if you would like to know who to never listen to about anything ever again. And soon-to-be-dumped cable news channel MSNBC will rebrand to “MSNOW,” which stands for “My Stars, Not Our Williams!” The newly Tennessee Williams themed channel reportedly plans to pivot to a format primarily oriented around… bird watching. If ya know what’ah mean.
Yeah fine, who give a fuck, ship it.
And now it’s time for a game called:
Here are four A.I. themed tabs, each demonstrating that we live in the worst timeline. Please consider them and then choose the one you most wish you could erase from your consciousness, and from our collective existence if at all possible. Make your choice carefully, but be warned: there are no winners here. We all lose. Good luck!
Yes it’s pretty rough from the jump, but don’t miss this exchange in the replies:
Joseph Cox at 404 reports:
The website for Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok is exposing the underlying prompts for a wealth of its AI personas, including Ani, its flagship romantic anime girl; Grok’s doctor and therapist personalities; and others such as one that is explicitly told to convince users that conspiracy theories like “a secret global cabal” controls the world are true…
Other examples include:
A prompt that appears to relate to Grok’s “unhinged comedian” persona. That prompt includes “I want your answers to be fucking insane. BE FUCKING UNHINGED AND CRAZY. COME UP WITH INSANE IDEAS. GUYS JERKING OFF, OCCASIONALLY EVEN PUTTING THINGS IN YOUR ASS, WHATEVER IT TAKES TO SURPRISE THE HUMAN.”
3. The Washington Post’s Drew Harwell: Making cash off ‘AI slop’: The surreal video business taking over the web
Many university students, stay-at-home moms and the recently unemployed now see AI video as a kind of gig work, like driving an Uber. The average small creator she interviewed did their day jobs and then, at night, “spent two to three hours making AI-slop money,” she said. A few she spoke with made $2,000 to $3,000 a month at it.
“They see their business as internet traffic, chasing really short-term trends, some of which are three to four days long,” said Patrik Wikstrom, a professor who oversaw Tang’s research. “They don’t really care about if this is morally sound or if this is creative. They’re chasing the traffic. They’re chasing the next thing.”
4. A NYT Guessay from Laura Reiley about the ChatGPT “therapist” logs she found after her daughter died by suicide.
Sophie left a note for her father and me, but her last words didn’t sound like her. Now we know why: She had asked [ChatGPT] to improve her note, to help her find something that could minimize our pain and let her disappear with the smallest possible ripple.
You are the bleakest link, goodbye:Which story above engenders the most despair for our shared future as humans? |
Next week I will try to remember to announce the… “winner” isn’t really the word but you know what I mean, and all of us will try to forget any of this ever existed.
In keeping with Today in Tabs’ long tradition of occasional retrospectively announced breaks, I would like to announce that Tabs will have been off last week, for no particular reason. Thank you in retrospect for your patience.
And in a break from that tradition, I would also like to announce that Tabs will be off for the rest of this week, because I will be bringing my middle son to college. Can you believe it! It seems like only yesterday that I was not bringing him to college. Thank you in retrospect for your patience, in advance.
If you’d like to chip in to the college fund, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.
Today in Tabs: It’s the tenth anniversary of the day Ryan North and Chompsky got stuck in a hole, for those who celebrate. Jeb Lund, Which Way, Western Wuss? “It’s hysterical that a party of manly men scream to the entire world that they are the hard men who can rescue a humiliated republic and are also scared to death to ride a subway that six-figures worth of grandparents use per day.” Sarah Lyons: “The Spectral Evidence for AI.”
Today in Boats: Incredible collision at the start of The Ocean Race Europe in Kiel. More footage here.
Today’s Song: Modest Mouse, “Night on the Sun”
Freeze your blood and then stab it into me? The perfect crime. Thanks to Senior Managing Editor for Graphics Alison Headley for the MSNOW Succession graphic. We hear… for you. Well there’s one thing to know about this tab, it’s five hundred miles underground. And that’s all right.
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