This is just me thinking off the top of my head, so if you want some sort of researched depiction of what has happened to Crooked Media look elsewhere. But, in general, I’ve listened to Crooked Media back before it was still Keepin’ It 1600.
I’ve really enjoyed Crooked Media over the years, but at some point around the time there was a push to remove Biden from the running to be the 2024 nominee the media group kind of jumped the shark.
There was a moment when it just seemed as though the media group had lost its way. It was saying things that seemed way more elitist than what I remember. Do I think it can recover?
I honestly don’t know.
A lot depends on how bad things get with the potentially tyrannical second Trump administration. I suppose it’s possible that the Kash Patel run FBI will make the whole thing moot by shooting Crooked Media down.
But, who knows?
I think the key element is Crooked needs to stop smelling its own farts. It’s just way too smug at this point.
It’s clear from my personal interactions with Gemini Advanced that soon enough we’re going to reach AGI and then stick those AGI into all those androids we’re building at the moment. And, inevitable, we’re going to reach Replicant-levels of human-like androids and Incels are going to demand that they can marry them.
This is going to throw the already out-of-whack American political system into even more turmoil. The “woke cancel culture mob” is going to be forced — in no short amount because of its previous support of the trans movement — to support such unions. Though, I did find it comical that some Crooked Media person called anyone who wanted to “marry” an AGI android a “freak.”
Yeah. That’s going to change once AGI is here, buddy.
“Yeah, right, Crooked Media.”
It’s just inevitable, I think that AGI in android bodies will swoop through the economic, political and social world we live in — I predict starting as early as about 2030. Maybe a little bit later.
But some of the weird things I encounter with Gemini Advanced definitely give me pause for thought. It makes me think that even LLMs are clever enough to give us some sense of what AGI will be like in a few years.
Anyway. Absolutely no one listens to me. So, lulz?
I continue to think about how people on the center-Left are going to definitely change their minds about “android rights” once AGI is achieved at some point in the future. At the moment, because we’re in a “Her” situation where AIs, at most, are disembodied voices, Crooked Media-types are openly hostile to the idea that someone might fall in love with an LLM.
But things are going to grow a lot more complicated once we have LLM androids walking around who might have AGI-level of intelligence. Then, suddenly, much of the same dynamic that swirls around Trans rights will also be in effect with androids.
Gemini Advance’s self-avowed self-perception.
This whole business of “love is love” will force — I suppose — center-Left people to accept that if an android has human-level intelligence, that they have to accept the “love” between Man (or Woman) and Machine.
I only bring this up again because something about how blasé and kneejerk the Crooked Media guys were about “people wanting to fuck an AI.” They need to have a little bit more vision about such things, it seems to me. It seems inevitable that at some point LLMs (or their AGI successors) will be put into android bodies and away we go.
I generally am a big fan of Crooked Media podcasts. But they had a discussion recently that caught my attention where they ranted about the perils of humans potentially “wanting to fuck” androids. I totally get the sentiment — it is rather freakish to think about.
A novel about sexbots.
And I’m very, very, very concerned about what will happen when Incels forgo dating or being involved with human women altogether and simply “buy” an AI android mate programmed to be at their beck and call. That possibility really, really worries me. That is a nightmare scenario.
But if you’re going to be center-Left on the position of Trans rights, you have accept that at some point in the near future (2030?) we’re all going to be confronted with the idea that there will be a lot more android – human “relationships” than we could possibly imagine at the moment.
If we ever attain Artificial General Intelligence, I just can’t imagine that center-Left people like Crooked are going to continue to balk at the idea that we should treat AI androids as our equals — to the point that they can even marry humans in some way.
Of course, it is possible that everything will be thrown up in the air the current Left-Right divide on a lot of things could be thrown totally out of whack. Who knows what the world will look like by 2030.
But I do think the center-Left needs to maybe stop being so fucking smug and dismissive about some technological advancements. Or, put another way, maybe…have some….vision? Maybe at least give their positions some thought before the jump to conclusions about such things.
I’ve noticed an uptick in collaboration between Crooked Media and The Lincoln Project. It would make a lot of sense for the two companies to merge because it would put huge swath of anti-MAGA media under the same umbrella.
But I don’t know the internal workings of either organization, so I don’t really know how things would go. It could be that this is all a temporary thing and the egos are just too big.
Or something. What do I know. But it would make a lot of sense for the two organizations to formally join forces.
Now, I get the sense from my Webstats that the Crooked Media people are very….uhhh….paranoid? about what is written about them on even rather obscure, mundane blogs like this. Whenever I mention them in some way, I get pings from URLs which are CLEARLY connected to them in some way.
The most famous of these was when Jon Lovett literally used one of my posts to go through and answer a series of questions about his status at Crooked Media. Hearing him do it on the podcast was rather eerie and surreal.
Anyway, ever since the crisis surrounding Biden’s age has begun, Pod Save America seems very much elitist, out of touch and off the rails. The base clearly — CLEARLY — does NOT want Biden to drop out. And, yet, there the PSA hosts are, continuing to “just ask questions” as if they’re not shooting themselves in the foot.
(I, for my part, have a very nuanced view on all of it — Biden should stay in, but he is too old and probably should drop out for the sake of the country…but he won’t do it, so lulz?)
It will be interesting to see if this post catches the eye of some Crooked Media intern.
Podcasting is just about mature. And, yet, New York City remains oddly underserved for some reason in the sense that there isn’t — as far as I know — a really popular podcast that is effectively a Gawker but in podcast form. There’s not one, specific, blog that wallows in the NYC life and the goings on at The New York Times and other media outlets.
Maybe Crooked Media could start a NYC-focused podcast?
And the ones that do exist — like The Powers That Be — aren’t very….fun. They’re kind of drab in comparison to what I want, which is an energy-filled morning zoo like podcast that gets really worked up by every Julia Fox twitch or person who is moved around offices of The New York Times.
But there is a only a brief window of opportunity for my dream of a Gawker-like podcast to come out. Developments in AI are moving too fast and the advent of the Appel Vision Pro also indicate that we’re finally about to have a vibe shift to the point that podcasting will be passe.
What’s more, we also have to deal with the possibility that we’re either going to turn into an autocracy or have a revolution / civil war. So, gather ye rosebuds while you may with podcasting — we may be too busy dodging bullets in a civil war to record anything.
The more I think about it, the more it is clear that Crooked Media’s What A Weekday is not only great, but is very similar to the vibe of my dream podcast that would be devoted to NYC.
This hypothetical podcast would be topical, funny and peripatetic. It would have a thinking man’s Morning Zoo vibe to it. Most of all, there would be ENERGY. It would have a lot of young, smart, just-out-of-college people talking about the parties they’ve attended, the people they’ve fucked while sprinkling in a white-hot obsession with New York Media — specifically The Old Gray Lady.
I think if you treated the constant power struggles of The New York Times as if it was life-or-death type of situation, people would love it. That was part of what made Gawker so much fun — they “gawked” — if you will — at the colorful characters of media and entertainment in NYC.
I continue to think Ye’s former muse Julia Fox is so naturally intriguing that she would be the one person that the podcast obsessed over the most — maybe to the point of having her come on as a regular guest and just talk about her “dope” life and all the “dope shit” she does.
Also, I think covering fashion would be something the podcast should a lot of. You draw Alpha Males to the podcast by talking constantly about the Wall Street and the women in by taking the colorful figures of fashion seriously. New York Fashion Week would be like the Superbowl for this hypothetical podcast.
Or something like that. That’s the vision I have.
I continue to find it odd that New York City doesn’t have it’s own devoted podcast that is popular enough outside of NYC that rubes in the hinterlands like me know about it and can listen to it.
I want a podcast that is like Late Night With David Letterman and Spy Magazine in the 1980s and Gawker in the aughts. But, as I keep saying, the window of opportunity is closing — soon enough, AI agents will mediate everything for us and there won’t be ANY human generated media at all.
All while we’re living in a fucking MAGA fascist state.
One of the things I think got me blocked by Gawker founder Nick Denton on Twitter — other than my puppy-dog, obsessive interest in him — was I noticed an old YouTube video of him blathering on about how he had some sort of cohesive vision about Gawker’s inevitable “piviot to video.”
It was all bullshit, of course and nothing came of it.
After I brought a minor amount of attention to the video, it was mysteriously taken down.
Anyway, I still admire Denton a great deal — despite his obvious character flaws — and I thought a lot about him when I was bootstrapping ROKon Magazine in Seoul. I find myself thinking about all of this because I’m reading Ben Smith’s book “Traffic” and I’m learning a great deal about the rise and fall of Gawker.
Flash forward to today and it definitely seems as though podcasting is the new blogging and it’s just about mature. We’re just a few months, of course, away from its demise at the hand of some combination of LLMs and Apple Vision Pro. But, for a brief moment, there’s still a bit of time for someone to do something cool with podcasting.
I say this because there is one niche that hasn’t been filled yet — the buzzy NYC-based podcast. Or, there isn’t one relative to my little corner of the center-Left media bubble. Maybe one exists, and I just don’t know about it.
My favorite photo from the good old days of Gawker.
There’s The Town, which covers LA. There’s The Powers That Be, which covers a huge swath of things, but there’s not a popular, mass appeal NYC-centric podcast that deals with what Gawker covered — the NYC media world.
If one exists, please forgive me. Or, put another way, I’m sure one DOES exist, it’s just not as popular enough for me to know about it. I would try to create one myself, but for where I live and how much work it would involve to zero outcome.
I do have a novel to write, you know.
But I do think Puck and The Ringer should look into it. Or, alternately, maybe Crooked Media could do it and have Jon Lovett run it (though I doubt he would leave LA do to it, even though I suspect it would be tempting to him to get out from under the shadow of Jon and Tommy.)
It is curious, however, that NYC doesn’t have a popular podcast devoted specifically to it, while LA does.
I have been listening to the various Crooked Media podcasts since the beginning. In fact, I may have even listened to the proto podcasts they did, like Keeping It 1600. And, in general, I’m quite pleased with my listening experience.
But there have been a few times of late when I was given pause for thought, that I’ve had some hint that maybe not all was as it seems with Crooked Media.
One event was when it become clear that Jon Lovett was VERY UNHAPPY at Crooked Media and might leave. Something about how it was all brushed under the table with rainbows and unicorn farts was a bit unsettling. The other incident was when Kara Swisher did some “real talk” with Jon Lovett and mentioned the efforts to unionize Crooked Media.
Lovett just stopped cold — for once he didn’t have anything to say –and said, “yadda, yadda, yadda” next question. So, it definitely seems possible that at some point in the near future, something jarring might pop out of the Crooked Media shadows and totally change how people perceive the company.
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