BREAKDOWN ROUNDUP 2.10.26

Flying soup, death threats, getting shot in the throat and more

Last week I wrote about the new reality of AI-generated, photorealistic death videos. But searching the phrase “AI death threats” brings up far, far more stories about AI content creators receiving death threats. Apparently, that’s a thing now too. It reminds me of the attacks on works of art in the 2020s. Just in the last five years, climate activists have vandalized, defaced, hurled soup at, or glued themselves to Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring, Munch’s The Scream, and Van Gogh’s Fifteen Sunflowers. If ‘raising awareness’ is compatible with ‘enraging everyone,’ then: mission accomplished?

Both types of art—iconic paintings forged over lives of toil and disposable JPEGs made by typing literally any sentence—present targets in a world that sorely lacks targets. The 2020s are, among many other things, an age of post-human accountability. Even middle management has successfully insulated itself from consumer wrath; we can only interact with the powerless lowest rung of any given company. Baristas and cashiers can no longer control the music or temperature in their own store. On the phone, robots mock human attempts to solve captchas and reach even the voicemail of any other human people, real people, people with souls and families. Online, humans vent their fear and anger over all the many compounded extractive sins of ‘frontier’ AI, so that when AI creators try to hype their handiwork—sometimes with disastrous obtuseness—they present clear and actionable targets. Likewise, curated fine art presents one of the last remaining ways average citizens can interact with top tier wealth. None of us can fling tomato soup in a billionaire’s face. Museums are open to all.

Memes, ha ha!!

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Ten years ago, Talos Books published my novel Exploded View. The book is set in 2050, in a world where on-demand synthetic media—soft content— is a settled fact. Up until last year, I kept track of every advancement in the development of this coming world. But it’s gotten to the point where I can’t keep up. Just in the last week, content creators have started engaging the real world in third person, video game-style. AI ads have performed as well as human-made ads, and photography has been freed from camera angle. And because video is no longer reliable, I really have no fixed idea which new tech miracles are real and which are funny business. Presumably anyone reading this in 2026 is in the same boat.

In the heady optimism of the early 2010s, driverless cars were assumed to be the breakout tech of the 2020s. Instead, generative AI was the runaway development. The story of OpenAI is the story of ‘impossible’ benchmarks repeatedly breezed through. In contrast, we’re still a decade out from the mainstreaming of autonomous vehicles (presumably to be greatly aided by the seismic leaps in AI).

But there’s another huge technological switch coming. Every 10-15 years, new tech platforms emerge and quickly proliferate. In the 1960s and 1970s it was mainframes. The 1980s had PCs, the 1990s had the Internet, the 2000s-2010s had smartphones. It’s logical to think of generative AI as the latest step in this process, but personally I don’t think that’s it. Augmented Reality—glasses that show the online world overlaid onto the real world—will be, must be, the next paradigm-shifting technology. Picture this overlay powered by real-time, photorealistic generative AI and you get an idea of what’s coming: the ability to see anything at any time, as real as any other element of actual reality.

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This administration’s dismantling of “corrosive ideology” is still accelerating. Just in the last month, The National Park Service has removed an exhibit on slavery in Philadelphia and the Pride flag removed from New York’s Stonewall memorial. When I was writing Exploded View, I was concerned about erasure of the past through soft content, through the endless proliferation of manufactured photos and videos overwhelming historical archives. It never occurred to me that the very next president would attempt the same thing through clumsy authoritarianism.

Despite the political and technological developments of the last few years, I feel slightly optimistic on the survival of the past. Historians are tenacious in their collective capacity. In the flood of public rage following last month’s double homicide by ICE in Minneapolis, and the official spin on two videos clearly showing homicides, one quote from George Orwell’s 1984 spent a week bouncing from post to post:

The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.

Lately I’ve had a different, longer Orwell quote in mind. A decade before writing 1984, Orwell travelled to Spain to fight in the Spanish Civil War. He simply wanted to kill fascists. He chose his regiment, the POUM, without knowing much of the complex intraparty feuds on the Spanish left. After getting shot in the throat, he found himself caught in direct factional conflict with the Soviet-backed PSUC. He became a fugitive, sleeping in the woods at night and blending in at cafes during the day. He and his wife were able to escape to France, but the incident profoundly affected him for the rest of his life. In 1938’s Homage to Catalonia, he wrote,

It would be impossible for me, for instance, to debate the rights and wrongs of the Barcelona fighting with a communist party member, because no communist— that is to say, no ‘good’ communist— could admit that I have given a truthful account of the fact. If he followed his party ‘line’ dutifully he would have to declare that I am lying or, at best, that I am hopelessly misled… It is as though in the middle of a chess tournament one competitor should suddenly begin screaming that the other is guilty of arson or bigamy.

A bit further, he lamented,

It will never be possible to get a completely accurate and unbiased account of the Barcelona fighting, because the necessary records do not exist. Future historians will have nothing to go upon except a mass of accusations and party propaganda.

On this score, the great man got one wrong. Some of what we know about the fighting in Barcelona comes from his own writing, but he also underestimated the tenacity of historians. And he would have had marveled at the primal force of crowdsourced human attention.