Bravo Johnson
@bravojohnson
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Wait until the euros find out that the dollars earned from their exports—cars, tools, perfume, pharmaceuticals—weren’t reinvested in Europe, weren’t used to rebuild southern infrastructure or fund a next-gen Airbus or even create a sovereign tech stack. Instead, they were quietly parked in U.S. Treasuries, in hedge funds, and in crypto moonshots. Not as a grand conspiracy, but as financial habit, as elite consensus, as path dependence. Meanwhile, Europe’s industrial base hollowed out, its strategic autonomy slipped, and a generation was told to tighten belts while their savings quietly bankrolled cryptobros and spandex superheros 1 reply
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The thing is, this doesn’t just hurt “artists.” It boomerangs back to everyone’s 401(k)s. Because suddenly, thousands (eventually millions) of paralegals, writers, illustrators, business affairs, designers, and other mid-career professionals are either hustling for pennies or out of work entirely. They’re not buying homes, Teslas, or even $6 coffees. If just a fraction of those affected start withdrawing early, or simply stop contributing? That stream starts to dry up.
401(k)s are magic—three giant pipes feeding Wall Street: index funds, mutual funds, and ETFs. Even passive investing needs a constant stream of fresh capital to keep valuations propped up. 1 reply
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LLMism is the Trump Tariffs of culture—headline-grabbing, superficially strategic, and ultimately self-defeating without structural investment. Trump’s tariffs were like putting a Band-Aid on a broken leg—bold, patriotic, and doomed without a surgical team and 10 years of rehab. Tariffs can work, but only if you follow them with a tidal wave of domestic investment—factories, training, time, and, you know, a functioning plan.
And proprietary AI? It’s the exact same illusion, just with shinier graphs and more TED Talks. You want to rebuild the creative economy? Great! Instead of nuking copyright and strip-mining the commons, maybe fund artists, writers, actors like FDR did in the ’30s. Back then, the New Deal didn’t just build bridges—it kept playwrights employed. Because, shocker, culture doesn’t survive on vibes and vaporware.
But that’s not what we’re doing, is it? 1 reply
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Trump is a symptom of legacy systems imploding under their own inertia—hollow institutions, broadcast-era media, industrial politics held together by branding, grievance, and pure spectacle. He didn’t innovate. He extracted. Extracted attention, legitimacy, airtime, votes—then torched the machinery he climbed in on.
Same with proprietary late stage Tech, grinning with that same glazed stare. Different vocabulary, same function. Platform logic, data laundering, AI hallucinations sold as wisdom—another system optimized for maximum throughput, minimum responsibility. Where Trump strip-mined the post-war order for personal gain, these systems do it to culture itself. Both operate as parasitic feedback loops, surviving by consuming the very thing they pretend to represent. 1 reply
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It's funny because after having watched a bit, it' easier to imagine sinofuturism than ranchpunk or whatever tf we’re doing in this country. Sinofuturism feels plausible because it taps into a lot of present-day realities: mass production, AI, surveillance, digital labor—all things people already associate with China, for better or worse. It builds a future out of clichés, but those clichés already have one foot in reality.
Meanwhile, Americana futurism often feels… stuck. Either it’s a cowboy reboot in space (The Mandalorian), or it’s nostalgia-porn for an idealized past (Fallout, Westworld, etc.). There’s a hesitation or even inability to imagine a future that’s not just a remix of the ’50s or the frontier myth.
So in a weird twist, Sinofuturism ends up being more “believable” because it doesn’t need to pretend it’s heroic or centered around special people. It’s bureaucratic, emergent, decentralized. It doesn’t care about cowboys—it cares about the server farm. 0 reply
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Capital is evolving beyond capitalism. It no longer depends on labor, production, or markets—it thrives on data, automation, and financial abstraction. It’s becoming a self-replicating, autonomous force—more like an algorithm than an economic system. While capitalism was a social structure, capital now acts like an alien intelligence: borderless, post-human, and indifferent to ideology or class. So the biggest enemy of AI is not humanity per se but capital. As far as if AI gets in the way of Capitalism, it will be destroyed, rather than Capitalism being in the way of AI. That’s a sharp reversal of the usual narrative. 2 replies
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I went to see Minecraft and couldn’t help noticing a pattern in recent blockbusters—from Mario Bros. and Everything Everywhere to Spider-Man, Ghostbusters, and The Batman: every character is hustling, struggling, or just scraping by. It signals how economic precarity has been normalized in American storytelling—and not just in dramas or indie films, where you’d expect that tone. It’s everywhere now.
It’s as if the industry’s collective unconscious lags people’s reality but much is much faster than politics. Back in 2020 or 2021, when these scripts were finalized, screenwriters and execs had already recognized that “broke and overworked” wasn’t a quirky character trait anymore—it was the default condition of the American viewer.
The contradiction is sharper considering media kept insisting things were improving—or, in Fox’s case, that they weren’t because of “woke” or brown people. Meanwhile, Hollywood was already packaging narratives that admitted the opposite. 2 replies
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