Quotulatiousness

June 30, 2026

Leading the grassroots revolt against AI … Homer Simpson

Filed under: Business, Media, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Ted Gioia posted this a couple of days back, but if you haven’t read it it’ll still be new to you:

Last November I suggested that 2026 would witness a tech backlash of unprecedented intensity. And it’s now happening with a vengeance. Silicon Valley is getting skewered everywhere, and to a degree inconceivable just a short while ago.

Just yesterday, The Economist finally grasped how rapidly tech antipathy is mounting — and made AI backlash its cover story.

The latest survey numbers are devastating. Every demographic group is now opposed to AI—especially young people, previously the most enthusiastic supporters of new tech.

[…]

Not every pushback to encroaching tech is quite so gentle.

Consider the case of “Mr. Daniels,” a 25-year-old man from England. He knows that AI will rob every music file on the web for training — so he decided to poison the data.

How did he do it? According to Tuned Into Tech, it happens like this:

    He took his entire music library of 2,000 records, stripped out the original vocals, and replaced every single one of them with the voice of Homer Simpson. Then he uploaded all of them to Soulseek. He didn’t change the metadata, the file names, the artist tags, the album information. They all stayed exactly the same.

A listener might not notice at first. Some of these songs have long intros, and those are unchanged. But as soon as the singing begins, Homer Simpson takes over. When AI tries to steal this for training, it gets fooled—and contaminates its own data set.

    So somewhere deep in a training algorithm’s data set is the audio of Homer Simpson which the AI will assume sounds like [for example] Madonna, Rihanna, or maybe even Sean Paul. The model doesn’t know the difference. It just ingests the data and treats that like the truth.

    And that is exactly what Mr. Daniels is hoping for.

He wants “to introduce noise, chaos” into the bots that are putting human musicians out of work.

“Mr. Daniels” is not an isolated example. Musician Benn Jordan has also been “poison-pilling” music files in hopes of disrupting AI.

In recent months, he has watched in horror as “tech companies started raising millions of venture capital dollars and scraping my music without my consent”. They now use his own work to generate “shittier music with it that is inadvertently associated with my name — and then attempting to resell that in the same economy in which I make money from my music”.

As a result, he has stopped releasing music. But he hasn’t walked away from the battle — instead Jordan has developed “a type of encoding that not only makes a music file more or less untrainable by generative AI companies, but actually has the ability to decrease the quality and efficiency of their entire data set”.

“Unethical generative AI companies have made artists feel incredibly powerless for quite some time now”, he adds, “but all of that is about to change”.

A World Cup “first” – no new stadiums built just for WC matches

Filed under: Cancon, Soccer, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The 2026 World Cup broke new ground in several different ways, not least of which was that none of the venues for matches were built just for the tournament:

The 2026 World Cup is one for the books, a tournament of firsts. The first to be hosted by three different countries—United States, Mexico, and Canada. The first to feature 48 teams. The first time a single country, Mexico, has hosted the World Cup three times. The first time one stadium, the Azteca, opens a World Cup for the third time. The first time the final will stage a halftime show. And the first time since USA 1994 that no stadiums were built exclusively for the occasion. And while many stories are worth covering with the World Cup, let’s talk about stadiums.

World Cups, like many major competitions, face backlash for their heavy government funding, because once the fans leave, the citizens are stuck footing the bill. For most of these international tournaments, the model is first to build stadiums for the sole purpose of hosting, and then to figure out what to do with them afterward—that’s where most of the funding goes. South Africa built Cape Town Stadium from scratch in 2010, and it barely survives today as a rugby and concert venue, rebranded DHL Stadium. Brazil, the 2014 host, spent more than $3 billion on 12 stadiums, with its priciest venue, the Mané Garrincha in Brasília, a city with no major club, ending up as a parking lot for buses. While 2026 seems to have broken the pattern, at least for now, 2030 and 2034 already have preparations underway and are, in fact, building stadiums. But this time, not one venue was built for the occasion. Every stadium already existed: NFL stadiums in the United States, soccer grounds in Mexico, multi-use venues in Canada. It almost seems like the responsible version.

Almost, because even when you don’t build a stadium, hosting still sends a bill. Take Monterrey, where the stadium is privately owned and was renovated by FEMSA. Public money went elsewhere. Governor Samuel García’s administration poured billions of pesos into the city’s metro — 25 billion pesos — for three new lines to carry fans from the airport to the stadium, but it won’t be finished until 2027, a year after the fans have gone home. And in the weeks before kickoff, the government raised walls along the avenues tourists would travel, in order to hide the poor neighborhoods. Regios called them the walls of shame. It is the whole logic of the tournament in miniature: cover what you would rather the world not see. This isn’t new; hiding the poor before the international crowds arrive is an old Olympic habit.

Most of the stadiums today carry a corporate name, and because of that, most assume that the money behind them was private, too, but it wasn’t. Most US venues for the World Cup are publicly owned, all three Mexican stadiums are private, and both Canadian venues are public. Of the 30 stadiums that normally host NFL teams, only three were built entirely with private money. The rest took public subsidies, even as the name on the façade says otherwise. This wasn’t always the model.

Through much of the last century, private money built and ran arenas, and public funding for them was almost unthinkable. The shift is fairly recent. As historian Frank Andre Guridy tells it in his book The Stadium, grounds that once carried the names of places and local stories became corporate billboards. This modern wave is usually traced to 1985, when Sacramento developer Gregg Lukenbill sold the naming rights to the Kings’ new home to the Atlantic Richfield Company, and ARCO Arena was born. Naming rights themselves go back further, to Rich Stadium in Buffalo in 1973, but it was only after ARCO that the practice became the rule. Today, nearly every arena in the country answers to a sponsor.

Sparta vs Athens 2(d): Athenian Freedom – Drama, Free Speech, Trade, and the Economy

Filed under: Greece, History — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

seangabb
Published 8 Feb 2026

Greece: A Brief History, c.700 BC – 500 AD

This final segment links culture to economics and asks what Athenian “freedom” actually looked like in practice. Drama was not a private pastime. It was a civic institution performed before the citizen body. Comedy could be brutally obscene and politically personal, naming living leaders on stage — evidence of a public culture far less timid about speech than most modern states.

From there I move to Athens as a maritime power: trade, grain dependence, Piraeus, coinage, state pay, and the economic dynamism that supported participation in Assembly and law courts. The images on the slides matter here: artefacts and “industrial art” show what Athens valued in daily life.

I end by returning to Sparta’s deliberately restrictive economy — iron currency, limited trade, enforced uniformity — and why that system could produce discipline but not lasting intellectual fertility.

This is also where I state plainly what we owe to Athens.

QotD: Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

Filed under: Books, Economics, History, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The founders of communism, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, were just two of many radical critics of the industrial society. But it was their achievement to devise the first internally consistent blueprint for an alternative social order. A mixture of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s philosophy, which represented the historical process as dialectical, and the political economy of David Ricardo, which posited diminishing returns for capital and an “iron” law of wages, Marxism took Carlyle’s revulsion against the industrial economy and substituted a utopia for nostalgia.

Marx himself was an odious individual. An unkempt scrounger and a savage polemicist, he liked to boast that his wife was “née Baroness von Westphalen” but was not above siring an illegitimate son by their maidservant. On the sole occasion when he applied for a job (as a railway clerk) he was rejected because his handwriting was so atrocious. He sought to play the stock market but was hopeless at it. For most of his life he therefore depended on handouts from Engels, for whom socialism was an evening hobby, along with foxhunting and womanizing; his day job was running one of his father’s cotton factories in Manchester (the patent product of which was known as Diamond Thread). No man in history has bitten the hand that fed him with greater gusto than Marx bit the hand of King Cotton.

The essence of Marxism was the belief that the industrial economy was doomed to produce an intolerably unequal society divided between the bourgeoisie, the owners of capital, and a property-less proletariat. Capitalism inexorably demanded the concentration of capital in ever fewer hands and the reduction of everyone else to wage slavery, which meant being paid only “that quantum of the means of subsistence which is absolutely requisite to keep the laborer in bare existence as a laborer”. In chapter 32 of the first tome of Capital (1867), Marx prophesied the inevitable denouement:

    Along with the constant decrease of the number of capitalist magnates, who usurp and monopolize all the advantages of this process of transformation, the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation and exploitation grows; but with this there also grows the revolt of the working class …

    The centralization of the means of production and the socialization of labor reach a point at which they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.

It is no coincidence that this passage has a Wagnerian quality, part Götterdämmerung, part Parsifal. But by the time the book was published the great composer had left the spirit of 1848 far behind. Instead it was Eugene Pottier’s song “The Internationale” that became the anthem of Marxism. Set to music by Pierre De Geyter, it urged the “servile masses” to put aside their religious “superstitions” and national allegiances and to make war on the “thieves” and their accomplices, the tyrants, the generals, princes and peers.

Niall Ferguson, “Capitalism, Socialism and Nationalism: Lessons from History”, 2020-02.

Powered by WordPress