This small thorn-prick is accompanied, of course, by a package of gestural changes to Meta’s products:

As part of the deal, the company agreed to more safety measures. The growing list of platform changes included stopping teenage users from endless scrolling, and imposing a two-hour daily limit on use of Instagram and Facebook. Meta also said it would limit teen use between midnight and 6 a.m. and silence notifications during school hours of 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. [Source: New York Times, 29 August 2026]

If you think that will do much to stave off either juvenile media addiction or the impending post-print-literacy New Dark Ages, I’ve got a special share of the Brooklyn Bridge available for you.

Meanwhile, you may be wondering what about adults, who are also vulnerable to rage bait and endless trivia-scrolling? What price the grown-ups?

Nuttin’, honey. Of course.

Along with its natural companion, reading, writing is apparently in rapidly growing trouble. Today’s New York Times reports that “between two-thirds and 90 percent of high school and college students are already using A.I. for schoolwork, according to recent surveys, often requesting help with writing assignments.”

Why might this matter?

The same NYT story explains, quoting linguist Naomi Baron: “If you want to think, understand and learn something,” Baron posits, “text really is preferable.”

In other words, in the modern context, mastery of information and perspective requires print literacy. Quite an important hypothesis, no?

And it gets even bigger: both democracy and its own close cousin, collective wisdom, probably both require widespread mastery of modern information and perspective.

The NYT again:

Steve Graham, a writing expert and educational psychologist at Arizona State University…cautioned [that] there is no part of the writing process that can be handed over to A.I. without some cost. Intellectual growth occurs at every stage, from brainstorming to fine-tuning a final draft. If writing is thinking, then any part of the struggle that is outsourced to technology amounts to relinquishing some freedom to perceive. How will students ever know what they really think of anything — whether it’s “The Crucible” or A.I. itself — if they ask a machine to spit out an answer for them?

Hence, quite conceivably, fooling around with print literacy by underfunding schools, fetishizing “STEM,” and allowing computers to automate reading-and-writing tasks may prove to be catastrophic in the Fermian sense.

You might think there’d be some discussion of this possible closing of a crucial cultural and behavioral window.

But, then, that’s market totalitarianism for you, isn’t it? For all our freedom and topical sloshiness, we somehow never quite reach our deepest questions.

“This isn’t about one automaker vs another; it’s about ensuring our country and industry win long-term.”

This breezy equation of “our country” with the welfare of the automotive-industrial complex is now old; from early on, those excited about the especially vast money-making opportunities inherent in horseless carriages have not been shy about asserting the cars = us claim.

Now, on a continent chockablock with established facts-on-the-ground, it takes peculiar effort even to form a contrary thought, let alone covet a full-fledged debate of GM’s self-serving equation. Despite the immediate side effects, the annual loss of 40,000 lives, and other associated concerns.

Such a debate has, of course, never occurred in our national history. The topic is far too important to entrenched privilege to be allowed onto the political stage.

Newer, more fuel-efficient pickup engines, it seems, don’t create the same level of noise pollution as “classic” V8 motors do. Hence, automakers are continuing to sell large numbers of V8s, at a premium, for this very reason. (The idea that smaller engines have inferior reliability is, the WSJ reports, quoting industry executives, “mistaken.”) According the WSJ, “[a]bout 40% of Ram 1500 buyers today pay a premium for the V-8 engine.”

Now, you might wonder: Why on Earth would anybody prefer a louder version of a machine that exists to accomplish intra- and inter-urban locomotion?

Stellantis CEO Antonio Filosa explains the operative reality:

“The engine [in pickups] is not only efficiency and horsepower,” Filosa said in an interview. “It’s also emotions.”

Excessive noise is apparently a source of nostalgia and machismo for a sizable segment of our population:

“It just sounds like what a truck should sound like,” said Brian Ewart, a 39-year-old Kansas dad and Navy veteran who recently spent $80,000 on a Ram with the V-8.

Dodge, of course, actively cultivates this emotionalism. Its extra-noisy pickups even come with an invoiced “Symbol of Protest” badge:

The cultural and material-ecological irrationality, if not sociopathy, of all this fairly boggles the mind, and speaks a volume or two about the unaltered institutional course of our runaway society.

Meanwhile, for those who may be tracking the hypothesis the EVs are actually loss leaders for continuing SUV selling, get a load of this quote:

This year, [Dodge] plans to introduce a new kind of EV: one with a gas generator on board to charge the battery and eliminate drivers’ anxiety about running out of power. The new powertrain starts with Jeep’s Grand Wagoneer SUV and will later be offered on Ram trucks. It’s also planning a second Jeep EV, despite its first one flopping badly.

“They’re not going to be huge volumes,” [Stellantis brand manager Tim] Kuniskis said. “But every one of those is a significant enabler to sell more Hemis.”

The congelation of longstanding Republican Party politics into gender-fascist KnowNothingism, meanwhile, has itself posed the question of whether its leading figures’ blithe toying with debt levels, tariffs, and more oil wars would, by its very recklessness, bring on an economic crash.

That may be quite the opposite of what’s happening now. According to the Wall Street Journal, we are witnessing what is probably a record-high “earnings surprise” among our dominant institutions:

But earnings season is reassuring many that a strong core of corporate profitability underpins the market’s gains.

“These earnings are ridiculous,” said Phil Blancato, chief market strategist at Osaic. “These profit margins are incredible.”

In the coming week, investors will hear from companies including Cisco Systems and Applied Materials, and parse the latest reading of the consumer-price index.

Companies in the S&P 500 have posted a roughly 50% jump in blended earnings growth, according to FactSet data, the most since the stimulus-fueled pandemic recovery in 2021. For energy companies, it has been more than 147%, and around 117% and 92% for communication-services and consumer-discretionary sectors, respectively. For tech, it has been 70%. [WSJ, 9 August 2026]

And it may continue:

Results have been good enough to signal better times ahead. Since the start of the third quarter, the bottom-up consensus estimate for S&P 500 companies’ earnings per share has climbed 1%, with upward revisions to most sectors, according to analysts at Goldman Sachs.

And rising earnings have helped ease some of the most acute worries that the market rally has stretched valuations unsustainably. Companies in the S&P 500 traded this past week at around 28 times their past 12 months of earnings, according to FactSet data. That is down from a recent high of more than 29 times in May, but well above the index’s 10-year average price/earnings ratio of 22.5. [WSJ, 9 August 2026]

So, it seems that political chaos monkeys may be quite compatible with the society of unending elite privilege expansion.

May you live in interesting times, indeed.

Such an event apparently happened this past week, when Ford Motor Company CEO Jim Farley was explaining his organization’s latest efforts to Wall Street interrogators:

"We’re ruthless about where we put our money,” Farley said in a call this week with analysts. “Every dollar must earn durable returns and drive profitable growth.” [source: Wall Street Journal, 31 July 2026]

For those keeping track of the deeply related saga of automobile-selling, one consequence of Farley’s quest at this point is the impending extinction, here in the USA, of the economy car:

1. “Family structure…predicts success in school.”

2. “[W]e can be honest about how family shapes student outcomes.”

Being capitalist ideologues prating in the Wall Street Journal, our would-be truth-tellers then violate their own prescription:

We owe it to the rising generation to study family structure thoroughly and use that information to influence how young people think about family formation and the choices they make for themselves and eventually their own children.

This, of course, reduces the study, appreciation, and reformation of family structure to “the choices they make,” as if the choices people make in this dimension of modern life are somehow the same for everybody, regardless of wealth and other forms of privilege.

That’s simply untrue, and to miss this point is deeply unserious — and also radically immoral.

But, having said all this, let us also say, “Amen!”:

Family structure…predicts success in school [and elsewhere]. [W]e can be honest about how family shapes student outcomes. We owe it to the rising generation to study family structure thoroughly and use that information to influence how [all] people think about family formation and the choices they [face and] make for themselves and eventually their own children.

Among all the managerial functions, marketing is likely to be the one that’s most disrupted by generative AI. Recognizing the technology’s potential, academics and practitioners alike have been investigating new ways to apply it to customer service and content creation for some time now, but recently the business world has started paying attention to the impact it could have on other marketing activities. The most exciting of these is market research, the processes by which firms gather data and generate insights about customers and competitors. [Source]

“Gather data and generate insights.”

A.k.a. observe, analyze, control.

For more about the underlying Taylorian logic, see The Consumer Trap: Big Business Marketing in American Life.

Today’s New York Times reports on one such thing — it facilitates the rapid spread of “A.I.- generated and designed” videos intended “to sell [fraudulent and/or medically harmful] health supplements on social media.”

TikTok says it has been banning accounts that make misleading health claims, and Meta says it labels A.I.-generated content on Facebook and Instagram. But we shared several examples that were still live on these platforms, which the companies later removed. For now, the technology is moving faster than anyone can keep up with. Many of these online-only brands are operated by anonymous L.L.C.s. And there is no federal law limiting the use of synthetic people in advertising. Meanwhile, these fake wellness influencers are multiplying across our social feeds, taking advantage of people who can no longer tell what’s real.

Quaintly, the NYT also says that “[a]ds like these would be illegal on U.S. television.”

Oh, really?

Shortly after the photo in question appeared, Prashad, a lavishly funded propagandist, took to Counterpunch, where he offered a lengthy explanation of his self-embarrassment.

The photo in question was, Prashad (preposterously) asserted, merely a way of showing his enthusiasm for China’s Zero Covid policy! Additionally, Prashad (again preposterously) explained, it was also all just a case of comical technical and interpretive mishaps:

When I took that picture, I was in a hotel room, where I used the stationery and pen provided for me. I had to draw the Z for Zero twice, which made the Z darker. This extra dark Z was taken to mean support for Russia’s war in Ukraine.

But here’s the thing: Prashad’s story in Counterpunch does not include a reproduction of the photograph at issue in this controversy! Why on Earth not? If the disputed photo really does comport with Prashad’s tale of misunderstood mechanical failure and unfair content analysis, why doesn’t he place the image on vivid display? Why, instead, do we get only this stock filler from him and Counterpunch?:

The truth, of course, is that Prashad did indeed post his ghoulish, unprincipled, war-mongering self-revelation, but, once caught, almost certainly deployed his ample resources to have it wiped off the internet — an accomplishment that is no small feat.

MTots mentions all this because, if one asks AI to locate a copy of Prashad’s suppressed photo, AI’s initial, very self-confident report is that no such “Z” photo ever existed!:

Yet, if one then presses AI with certain follow-up questions, here’s what one eventually gets to:

This output is multiply disturbing, as a sign of what AI does and (apparently) cannot do.

Not least among the unsettling dimensions of this robo-confession is its ultimate assertion that Prashad’s venal little net-scrub was done “to stop” rather than “to accomplish” the spread of disinformation.

Brave New Gaslit World, here we come…

Way back here in our own hugely troubled millennium, Groening’s joke remains apt. Meta, perhaps the world’s largest collector of marketing data, is, according to today’s Wall Street Journal, “flooding the market with smartglasses.”

Meta is betting that AI-enabled smartglasses capable of capturing everything you see and hear are the future—and the company is doing all it can to make its fast-evolving devices catch on.

The glasses…are part of Meta’s grand plan to control the next phase of the internet. The company is working to bolster the revenue it earns.

It envisions a future in which consumers still have smartphones, but increasingly use other devices worn on their bodies to talk to AI chatbots, send texts and take pictures or videos. Meta also is experimenting with different AI device form factors, including small devices that users could either wear as a pin, don as jewelry or put in their pockets, according to people familiar with the matter.

This is an almost adequate report on a major societal trend.

The problem, however, is this: As the WSJ certainly knows, Meta’s true aim is not “control of the internet,” but domination of the deeper institutional domain that underlies the mere internet, such as it now is: the marketing-data universe.

As Futurama suggested, the long-run logic of modern money-first living is steady, competitive movement toward the robotization of “consumers.” Left to its own devices, corporate capitalism will press its constituent firms to try to improve their control over the very mechanical roots of our perceptions and experiences, in hopes of goading the targeted bearers of these neuro-social processes into undertaking specific profit-bearing, product-using behaviors.

Thus, the eventual aim is the implantation of managerial devices; for now, the next step in that direction is “wearables.”

If you doubt this, consider the scenario enunciated in Meta’s current patent applications:

Meta also recently filed a patent application for a system that would record a user throughout the day to assess their mood and create customized workout plans for them based on that data, according to a public filing.

To illustrate the concept, the patent application gives examples of what Meta might record.

“User laughs with friend at dinner at 5:15 p.m. Audio is recognized and logged by AI,” the filing says. “User sighs at 9:15 p.m. AI is listening from a smart home device and logs it.” [Wall Street Journal, 14 July 2026]

And, if you doubt this might really matter, take a look at the details in this report by Matilda Davies.

Well, great news! That’s one of the burning epochal problems that our market-totalitarian social order is now clearly and cleverly solving.

Thanks to this emergent wonder of the free market, we now know for (almost) sure that a soccer ball did indeed make improper contact with the hair of a Croatian national team player. Such long-sought certainty has now ensured the pure justice of a recreational game — full of feigned injuries, bent rules, and random bounces — played by genetically lucky multi-millionaires on behalf of corporate sales engineers.

The answers: No, you don’t need to drink electrolytes, and yes, they are a scam — though the Times, of course, can’t quite bring itself to circle back and outright say this latter thing.

And, also “of course,” the paper of record omits from its cost-counting the likely cognitive-cultural price of such scams:

Is There a Downside?

Aside from the cost, experts say there’s little downside to consuming electrolyte drinks.

The Heilbroner Hypothesis, you might recall, is this:

I do not think we pay sufficient heed to the power of advertising in making cynics of us all: at a business forum I was once brash enough to say that I thought the main cultural effect of television advertising was to teach children that grown-ups told lies for money. How strong, deep, or sustaining can be the values [of] a civilization that generates a ceaseless flow of half-truths and careful deceptions, in which it is common knowledge that only a fool is taken in by the charades and messages that supposedly tell us "the facts"?

It is a provocative, testable question, especially here in the Flagship, where we are, all of us, chin-deep in unchecked tides of careful micro-deceptions.

Among the ideas in Hughes’s little codex was this one:

The right has its own form of PC — Patriotic Correctness, if you like — equally designed to veil unwelcome truths. It, too, has a vested interest in keeping America divided, a strategy that bodes worse for the country’s polity than anything the weak, constricted American left can be blamed for.

MTots would go even further than Hughes here.

Patriotic Correctness has been so hugely and thoroughly awash for so long, here in the Flagship, that it still functions quite easily as a major Orwellian thought boundary.

One proof of this, MTots would suggest, is the remarkable unwillingness of American liberals and lefties to face the plain fact that the United States Senate is, by its very nature, a pre-modern affront to democracy and, consequently, an increasing threat to human decency.

Could anything be more obvious and important than this?

Yet, thanks to the weight of Patriotic Correctness, here’s the kind of scrambling technotalk we get in place of elementary realism.

Honda Motor on Thursday reported its first annual loss since becoming a publicly traded company in Japan seven decades ago, as the costly retreat from its ambitious electric-vehicle targets plunged earnings into the red.

The automaker reported a net loss of $2.7 billion for the fiscal year that ended March 31. Earnings were weighed down by more than $9 billion in restructuring charges and write-downs after a retrenchment of its E.V. strategy. It is the first loss that the 77-year-old company has reported since listing on the Tokyo Stock Exchange in 1957. [The New York Times, 25 June 2026]

It’s a remarkable record of institutional effectiveness. And it’s not a one-off.

“[S]cholars have,” McMahon points out, “paid surprisingly little attention to the ways in which ideas of equality have been understood in the past. One eminent historian of political thought [spoiler: it’s Quentin Skinner] even described equality as an idea so varied and amorphous that its history could never be written.”

McMahon ain’t having that, and neither should we.

The great strength of this book is its placement of equality inside an up-to-date view of worldwide human history, going all the way back to our speciation from the apes. Here, hunter-gathering, civilization, and human nature are all considered and made usefully relevant to the possibility of more and better thinking about resource balances in human affairs.

There are, however, three crucial slips.

First, McMahon slides into treating equality as a religious concept. Observing that “equality claims are mental representations,” McMahon argues as follows:

Equality, in other words, is not a primordial fact about the universe, or a truth that can be established by observing the vastly different people of the earth. It is only by appealing to principles that are most often metaphysical in their foundations, rather than empirical, that we can imagine ourselves as possessing some common property or connection that all of us share. [p. 86, emphasis added]

This, I would contend, conflates metaphysics and abstraction. Metaphysics, as I understand it, is a set of hypotheses about the realm of phenomena that remain unobservable yet probably important to us humans; abstraction, meanwhile, is a set of mental skills (not least language itself) that permit heightened recognition, comparison, and insight inside and among us humans.

Just because “equality” is a fairly high-level and hard-won abstraction doesn’t mean that it’s a mere speculative presumption. Why, pray tell, can’t we treat it as a phenomenon that “can be established by observing the vastly different people of the earth”? McMahon doesn’t dispose of this crucial question.

The two other big mistakes I perceived in this otherwise highly valuable tome involve the nature and logic of what remain two of our major — and perhaps still under-elaborated — equality theories: Marxism and Keynesianism.

Citing the words of Marx and other early Marxists, McMahon proposes that because such thinkers professed to be interested in class rather than the “bourgeois” topic of equality, equality, therefore, really and truly isn’t what Marxism is all about. And, while there’s no doubt that this is indeed what Marx and other early Marxists sometimes argued, this remains a rather unreflective view of what’s lastingly valuable within the Marxian tradition. If Marxism is anything other than a pile of early-modern political confusion, it is precisely and exactly a package of hard-won and invaluable lightning bolts pointing us toward careful consideration of the empirical meanings of equality within human collectivities.

Something similar could be said about the other major conceptual framework that, I think, McMahon gets rather badly wrong: Keynesianism.

Keynes’s “legacy,” McMahon asserts, is a “technocratic view” holding that “government had acquired the power and expertise to manage economic life for social and political ends, curbing the swings of the business cycle and mitigating inequalities through social spending and taxation.” [p. 338]

But this is a decidedly stilted and stingy treatment of John Maynard Keynes, who not only worried deeply about things like the length of the work week, the quality (rather than just quantity) of economic output, and the fairness of international wealth distribution, but also hypothesized that “a somewhat comprehensive socialisation of investment will prove the only means” to a decent human future.

It seems a shame for a book that asks, “Is there any doubt our world needs reforming?” [p. 418] to pass so roughly over such potentially fertile ground for rethinking, renewal, and innovation, while also treating its own precious core idea as a mere preference or guess.

On one hand, producing the surpluses needed for large-scale sharing, elaborate labor specialization, and billion-level human populations requires agriculture — which itself requires staying put in specific places to make, protect, and process raw materials.

On the other hand, good roads and high locomotive capacity have also always been at a premium for those of us attempting, wisely or not, to transcend full-time hunting-and-gathering.

So, we aim for sustainable, livable towns connected by optimum facilities for moving from place to place.

The capitalist wager is that advancing technology will end up rescuing automobiles from their own rather obvious thermodynamic and cultural downsides. By some not-too-distant day, this prevailing gamble presumes, both the harvesting and the storage of solar radiation will become so economically and materially cheap as to facilitate endless car-centric living. As this transition comes to fruition, we will also, the reigning paradigm insists, figure out how to live with the experiential atomization, biomechanical deconditioning, and sheer time loss inherent in cars-first transportation.

What, one might wonder, is the other side in this wager?

Here at MTots, we would suggest that there is some possibility that we human beings might — either through anticipation or reaction to a crisis — decide to stop accepting the prevailing bet. We might undertake a Reconstruction toward technologies and urban forms that genuinely optimize our response to the stasis-with-speed paradox we face.

In a place as far down the automotive road as the United States, such a turning would constitute about as great a sea-change as has ever happened among us talking monkeys.

Yet, for all that, such a move wouldn’t be all that complicated, either.

Since 1931, when it stumbled into its decisive embrace of gambling, the place has been a cultural bellwether of a human society dedicated to the acquisition and retention of unlimited personal wealth — of, that is, market totalitarianism.

Today’s Wall Street Journal reports that this trend is alive and well:

Las Vegas usually reflects the American economy—and then some. Now Las Vegas, like the economy more broadly, is increasingly dependent on spending by a smaller group of well-off people who are often invested in the booming stock market.

Meanwhile, the high-end Wynn Resorts, where the average daily rate in Vegas is $592, is thriving as the richest customers spend freely. A measure of profit per-hotel-room there rose from $87 per room in 2019 to $190 in 2025. Executives told investors on the company’s recent earnings calls that they can make more money by charging fewer customers more for hotel rooms. They have said the property is getting a boost from visitors who have made money from the artificial-intelligence boom.

“There’s not that much resistance to price at this point,” Brian Gullbrants, chief operating officer for North America, said on the May call.

Earlier this year, Zachary Hinckley enjoyed the $26 avocado toast at the Wynn’s Terrace Pointe Café with his son and son’s fiancé. Hinckley, 49, who owns a landscaping company in the Salt Lake City area, browsed Rolex watches at the hotel mall afterward, but didn’t find the one that he wanted.

And so it goes.

“If this was going to happen anywhere, it was going to happen in the U.S.,” said Mike Frenkel, a 35-year-old Germany fan. — Wall Street Journal, 14 June 2026

Quite so, Herr Frenkel.

The World Cup happening in the United States has now produced the first new interruptions of play since the sport was systematized. Ostensibly for “hydration,” the new ad breaks permit, of course, additional harvesting of eyeballs and eardrums.

If the process somehow takes further hold, the Flagship may finally become a major power in the sport. Here, you see, we are only permitted to do big new things that first satisfy our runaway wealth owners.

Because, you know — freedom.