Five Things: Vicemaxxing, Mediocracy and Dictatorship, Vibecoding, Roadside Attractions, AI Slop
It's Sunday. Read this now.
Hello and welcome back to Five Things!
It’s Pentecost Sunday and we all enjoy a long weekend as Jesus or somebody else must have done something really grand on Monday as well as on Sunday. We all don’t mind, even though we don’t know what this church holiday is actually about and we do not bother to look it up. While less and less people go to church or belong to a church, we sure as hell like their holidays.
Anyhow, it’s finally something like pre-summer here in Northern Germany and the city feels so different as people shift their activities to the outdoors. The Alster, Hamburg’s inner-city lake that is actually a river, was packed with people on SUP boards, boats and anything else that floats.
For those who want to know more: Pentecost actually happens 50 days after Easter and marks the end of Easter time, which is the biggest Christian holiday, even though people get presents on Christmas and just chocolate eggs and bunnies on Easter. Sadly, no candy is involved in Pentecost, not even a special meal. The only ritual is a long weekend and time for barbecue.
Can America Escape the Cycle of Vicemaxxing?
After years of conservatives criticizing the left for “virtue signaling”—that is, cravenly performing a version of virtue for public approval—we now have something even worse than its opposite. The president and his allies are not merely vice-signaling. By empowering a figure who is oblivious to virtue and choosing to ignore his crescendoing depravity, we are creating a mode of politics that openly celebrates the death of morality.
This is the age of vicemaxxing. The question is whether this is our new normal—or, I hope, the sort of cultural overreach that shocks our collective conscience and sets the stage for a more decent politics.
I have been waiting for the backlash and while it happened in Hungary, I do not see it happen anytime soon in the USA. And Germany is headed in the same direction with the far right AfD who do as they please and somehow people just shrug it of when they break campaign finance rules or hire family members.
Actually, Democracy Dies in H.R.
“Making a Career in Dictatorship,” a new book by two German political scientists, Adam Scharpf and Christian Glassel, reads like what you might get if you crossed Hannah Arendt’s ideas about the “banality of evil” with a business school guide on how to get the most out of low performers.
Their in-depth study of Argentina’s military during that country’s era of coups and forced disappearances found that low performers — whom they refer to as “career-pressured” individuals — filled the ranks of the secret police. That service allowed them to “detour” around the ordinary military hierarchy, the book shows, achieving promotions and career success they could never have managed otherwise.
It turns out that would-be authoritarians don’t need to staff their regimes with ideological true believers, offer extreme enticements or impose draconian punishments in order to make successful power grabs. They just need to figure out how to target their ideal labor pool: the frustrated and mediocre.
I am not the least bit surprised. So let’s please invest much more into education across the board.
I’m a Normie. Can Normies Really Vibe Code?
The idea that the internet might redistribute power in a meaningful way has been giving cover to Big Tech and its enablers since forever, and I have no illusions that a blast of amateur coding will claw back our time and agency from the purveyors of sludge. Nevertheless, my blast of amateur coding is now live on Netlify. For all I know it will crash tomorrow. But it undeniably exists—a shared civic ledger where once there was only frustration. Sludge thrives on exhausting us in the dark and the assumption that our individual wasted hours don’t add up to anything. They do. I’ve got a janky database to prove it.
I really think everybody should try to build a website. More than a decade ago I advocated for Javascript being taught as the second foreign language in school. While I know that not everyone is really interesting in coding, I think it helps tremendously to understand just a tiny bit about how these interwebs work and what one can do with it. It can be very empowering when you figure out what the possibilities are. Obviously, you won’t be able to just say “build me a better facebook!”, lean back and five minutes later you are done and humanity has been saved. But vibecoding can help unleashing your creativity. Remember to push back whenever Claude or ChatGPT or Gemini tell you that your idea is amazing and not yet done. Make it do its research. And then do yours.
Roadside Attraction
According to the Texas State Historical Association, the lights were first spotted in 1883, long before there were headlights out in West Texas. A young cowhand named Robert Reed Ellison saw a faraway flicker of light while he was driving cattle between Marfa and the neighboring town of Alpine. He thought it may have been an Apache campfire in the distance. He spoke about this with other settlers, and it turned out many of them had spotted the distant shimmer too, but when they had investigated, there was no campsite to be found.
There are other myths that lean more towards the supernatural: the lights are the spirits of Apache warriors killed by white settlers, delivered back to their beloved land in the afterlife. Or, in line with other Southwestern tales of atomic testing, the lights might be remnants of laser fusion weapons experiments gone awry—tests which knocked holes into space. They say the holes attract the lost—people who have disappeared in the area are thought to have fallen through them into some liminal zone, floating forever in another dimension.
I still remember my road trip I did through the South West some 30 years ago and I really want to go back.But my family has instituted a travel ban to the USA until Trump and his MAGA croonies are finally gone and done.
The Prehistory of A.I. Slop
The idea of mechanically produced prose or poetry is not especially new. Eighteenth-century letter-writing manuals provided fill-in-the-blank templates, because many types of correspondence are set forms: letters of condolence, say, or letters of recommendation. Anxiety about machines replacing humans as writers, and replacing good writing with bad, is also older than you might think. Mid-nineteenth-century commentators, overwhelmed by the era’s flood of cheap printed material, especially periodicals and novels, imagined a “New Magazine Machine” that could spit out cheap pulps, and a “Book-Making Machine,” a literary successor to Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine.
Actually, I think that AI Slop will be something of the past real soon now. First of all, machines will get better at writing. And we get more accustomed to it. Also, when we ask AI on advise to write better, we will incorporate its style. I invested in a company over 10 years ago that created articles from data and newsrooms were appalled. Now they all use these kind of tools.
That’s it. Have a great Sunday! If you missed last Sunday’s edition of Five Things, have a look here:
— Nico