Shirley Siluk

@ebishirl

Writer/editor and former journalist. Author of "News Speak: How Language Can Manipulate Meaning in What We Read, Watch and Listen to" and "Prove It!: Fact-Finding Secrets of a Fanatical Online Researcher."

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Shirley Siluk@ebishirl· 7d

This line really got me: I can visualize that "Sexy Saxophone Solo" scene so well, and it was amazing.

And yet, these characters fucked. Blue Velvet’s Dorothy Vallens and Jeffrey Beaumant fucked. Michael Keaton’s Batman and Michelle Pfeiffer’s domme Catwoman fucked. Kyle Reese and Sarah Connor fucked. Snake Plissken didn’t fuck on screen, but the character radiates overwhelming sex-haver energy. And I defy you to find a mainstream film with a moment as horny and gay as the Sexy Saxophone Solo from The Lost Boys.

Shirley Siluk@ebishirl· Jun 1

In a brilliantly expressed nutshell:

"But a topic less explored is that mechanization also demands a replaceable consumer: a target to be manipulated into purchasing low-quality products they do not need—and that they did not actually want. In the end, mechanization’s real innovation is in manipulating consumer demand: creating a complacent buyer with reduced expectations of quality. Once you’ve done that, you can sell them a “good enough” widget. You have to create a person willing to accept “good enough.” You have to create a person willing to spend a pain-inducing amount of money on upgrading to an only marginally better phone. What is really being manufactured is us—our perceived needs, our attitudes toward what is good, our willingness to settle for “good enough.”"

Shirley Siluk@ebishirl· May 12

So much this. Life is too short and precious to waste on AI drivel.

What’s driving me crazy, then, is not the idea that AI exists or that people are using AI. It’s that I have a finite time on this earth that I mostly want to spend interacting with other human beings. I don’t want to be the person arguing with a robot, or wasting my time reading something that a real person couldn’t be bothered to write.

Shirley Siluk@ebishirl· May 9

Thank you for this, @philinvestigates.com and Peggy. She's so right in her conclusion to this piece.

The hate was always here, though.

It was somewhere below the surface waiting for the right time to reveal itself through men and women who felt emboldened to take off their hoods. I fear they are more emboldened than ever in today’s climate. Each time we have a chance to stand face to face with intolerance and prejudice we must hold the line. I have faith in what is right, and I believe love wins.

The only thing standing up to hate cost me is a few social invites and some friendships I had misread. What a small price to pay.

Shirley Siluk@ebishirl· Apr 30

It's just this again, isn't it?

Cartoon by Matt Bors of a woman reading a phone who says, "My GAWD these Trump people are racist." A man in a MAGA hat next to her responds, "That attitude is what's pushing me to be racist!" In the second panel, the woman responds, "Say what?" To which the man then says, "Might as well! You say I'm a Nazi so, fine, I'll be a Nazi if that makes you happy." In the third panel, the woman says, "It... doesn't." While the man holds a WWII military jacket and says, "I bought this Waffen SS uniform for Halloween. You'll cry 'Offensive' so maybe I'll just wear it every day." In the final panel, the man is shaving his head while getting a swastika tattoo and says, "I just hate to do this. I feel bullied, really."

Shirley Siluk@ebishirl· Apr 3

This part too. The idea of using so-called "AI" for brainstorming is unthinkable to me because a shortage of ideas is never a problem. It's the effort and time required to bring an idea to life - to review and revise until you've found just the right phrasing - that makes a written work meaningful.

Sometimes a thought you love pops into your head and you scramble to open a blank email or your notes app or even grab a piece of paper to jot it down before it flies away. These moments of inspiration aren’t just a result of fishing in your pool of existing knowledge; they include a little bit of magic. A sprinkle of the unidentifiable zest that makes your writing something that only you—not the ‘you’ processed and interpreted by a machine—could create. Your words are a product of a specific moment in time, and that’s what makes them distinct. (I originally used the word “special” and then I changed it to “unique,” ultimately landing on “distinct” because it felt right. That’s the process.)

Shirley Siluk@ebishirl· Apr 2

Love this:

The failures are the curriculum. The error messages are the syllabus. Every hour you spend confused is an hour you spend building the infrastructure inside your own head that will eventually let you do original work. There is no shortcut through that process that doesn't leave you diminished on the other side.

Shirley Siluk@ebishirl· Apr 2

And this:

The real monster is not the homunculus, but the one who gave form to the assemblage and imbued it with life. The fight cannot be among laborers who are all threatened by this technology. The fight must be between the workers who wish to work, create, live, and prosper, and the elites who only seek to enrich themselves by means of this technology. If generative models are monstrous—and I remain convinced they are—its masters are the enemy of those who wish to end their march.

Shirley Siluk@ebishirl· Apr 2

This was such a deep, well-reasoned, and HUMAN read - thank you! So many great observations like this one.

There's a fundamental problem with these tools beyond the capacity of any deployment strategy to solve: the tool requires expertise to validate, but its use diminishes expertise and stunts its growth. How does one become an expert? There are no shortcuts; there is only continuous hard work and dedication. I was once told of writing, great writers learn how to break the rules in new and ingenious ways by first learning the rules.

Shirley Siluk@ebishirl· Mar 31

"Such leaders will speak fluently of capabilities, timelines and kill chains. They will have no language for resentment, dishonor, loyalty or grief — and they will discover, too late, that wars are made of these as much as of steel and fire. That is the illiteracy of this war."

Shirley Siluk@ebishirl· Mar 31

And this:

Athens at the height of its golden age sailed for Syracuse and lost an empire. Thucydides spent the rest of his life explaining why. The generals of 1914 were cultivated, well-read men, but those qualities did not save Europe. What has changed is not that culture once prevented blindness and no longer does. It is that culture has increasingly ceded authority to systems that mistake information for understanding and speed for judgment.

Shirley Siluk@ebishirl· Mar 31

So many good passages in this piece:

What this war exposes, then, is a failure not only of strategy but of literacy. Literature and history, at their most serious, train precisely the faculties these leaders lack: the capacity to grant that other minds are not transparent to us, and are governed by purposes not our own. A mind tutored by history and literature knows that actors in the grip of a sacred cause tend to mean what they say — and that bombing a founding myth is more likely to consecrate it than to dissolve it.

Shirley Siluk@ebishirl· Mar 25

Such a clearly laid-out and thorough assessment of this war. As you note, it's hard to see how this ends with upsides for anyone. So dumb.

And you may then ask, here at the end: if I am saying that Iran is being hammered, that they are suffering huge costs, how can I also be suggesting that the United States is on some level losing?

And the answer is simple: it is not possible for two sides to both win a war. But it is absolutely possible for both sides to lose; mutual ruin is an option. Every actor involved in this war – the United States, Iran, arguably Israel, the Gulf states, the rest of the energy-using world – is on net poorer, more vulnerable, more resource-precarious as a result.

Shirley Siluk@ebishirl· Mar 24

Excellent piece. This comment applies to many things in life today (I'm thinking in particular of the tech bros): the focus on "metrics" ignores a world of meaning that can't be measured.

Modern strategic thinking struggles precisely at this point. It is highly effective at measuring what can be quantified: economic decline, protest frequency, military capability, political rhetoric. But it struggles to account for what cannot be easily measured—the accumulated weight of collective experience, the cultural and historical frameworks through which societies interpret events, and the ways in which populations respond not mechanically, but adaptively, to external pressure.

Shirley Siluk@ebishirl· Mar 21

Excellent piece. Thoroughly sums up how and why we've arrived at this point.

"People are still making decisions in that sense. Someone decided to compress the kill chain. Someone decided that deliberation was latency. Someone decided to build a system that produces a thousand targeting decisions per hour and call them high-quality. Someone decided to start this war. Several hundred people are sitting on Capitol Hill, refusing to stop it. Calling it an “AI problem” gives those decisions, and those people, a place to hide."

Shirley Siluk@ebishirl· Mar 11

This part in particular

"I do not want to hear even the slightest amount of bullshit about how you didn’t need to ask for permission to use our names and use our identities in your review function. You just wanted to steal, so you stole. You wanted to take things without permission, so you did. It’s wrong. It’s so enragingly wrong. I hope everyone in the world stops using your service. Because a business built on theft is not a business, it’s a scam."

Shirley Siluk@ebishirl· Mar 3

These two in particular (and side by side too - well done) really get me:

AI Booster Bingo squares with one that says, "Your time will be spent on work that MATTERS" and the other right next to it that says, "Your time will be spent correcting the AI's errors."

Shirley Siluk@ebishirl· Feb 26

There's a reason for the saying that every regulation is "written in blood." The Trump administration, DOE Secretary Wright, and tech bros/wannabes like Valar's Taylor are clearly hellbent on us relearning this lesson the hard way again.

The Trump administration is on board with nuclear, too. In an executive order last May, Trump vowed to have three test reactors up and running by July 4th of this year. In a recent interview with podcaster Shawn Ryan, Taylor called that goal “unbelievably exciting.” Last fall, the Trump administration quietly pushed through a suite of major changes to the laws that govern US nuclear facilities. The new rules, which weren’t made public but were only shared with companies with government contracts, dramatically loosened requirements around safety, accidents, and environmental protections, according to reporting by NPR.

Shirley Siluk@ebishirl· Feb 24

Great post (and lovely song choice!). This was my favorite part:

Imagine you have two machines. One you can open up and examine all of its workings, and if you give it every picture of a cat on the whole internet, it can reliably distinguish cats from non-cats. The other is a black box and it can also reliably distinguish cats from non-cats if you give it half a dozen pictures of cats, some apple sauce, and a hug. These machines sort of do the same thing, but even without knowing how the second one works I am extremely confident in saying it doesn’t work the same way as the first one.

Shirley Siluk@ebishirl· Feb 21

What a great piece. I love this section in particular.

Perhaps the ideology of “superhuman” AI, in which humans appear merely as slow and inefficient pattern matchers, could spark an even more expansive and politically significant revival of humane meaning and values. Maybe the moral and experiential poverty of AI will bring the most vitally human dimensions of our native intelligence back to the center of our attention and foster a cultural reclamation and restoration of their long-depreciated value.

What might that look like? Imagine any sector of society where the machine ideology now dominates and consider how it would look if the goal of mechanical optimization became secondary to enabling humane capabilities.

Shirley Siluk@ebishirl· Feb 3

Excellent piece describing this administration's hunger for a one-stop shop with all of our personal data. DOGE, guided by Elon Musk, supercharged this effort by eliminating the traditional boundaries between data held and managed by separate government agencies.

Emily Tucker, the director of Georgetown University’s Center on Privacy and Technology, suggested the agency could be constructing a surveillance system that, in my estimation, would make “Minority Report” look like child’s play. Homeland Security, she said, “is increasingly emphasizing ‘interoperability’ in its contracting.” That is a strong sign that the agency wants to connect a range of databases, which could include those with your biometric data, employment data, driving records, credit reports, tax data, social media data, cellphone location data and automated license plate reader data. “They are seeking data about every aspect of the lives of everyone,” she said.

Shirley Siluk@ebishirl· Jan 30

What it should say:

Revision of statement on arrest of Don Lemon to what CNN should say: "The FBI's arrest of our former CNN colleague Don Lemon is an egregious attack on press freedom and the First Amendment. The Department of Justice already failed twice to get an arrest warrant for Don and several other journalists in Minnesota, where a chief judge of the Minnesota Federal District Court found there was "no evidence" that there was any criminal behavior involved in their work. The First Amendment in the United States protects journalists who bear witness to news and events as they unfold, ensuring they can report freely in the public interest, and the DOG's attempts to violate these rights is unacceptable. We are working with our legal team to challenge this violation of Don Lemon's First Amendment rights in court."

Shirley Siluk@ebishirl· Jan 23

This sounds less delusional than building data centers in space, but still delusional. www.cnbc.com/2026/01/23/g...

Excerpt from CNBC article about the proposed Greenland data center: "A big challenge for projects of this scale in Greenland is access to power. For the first phase of the project, which is targeting 300 MW power capacity, the plan is to use specialized barges carrying Liquefied Natural Gas to the fjord, Horn said.

The venture plans to build a hydroelectric facility — 70% of the island’s energy comes from such facilities — to power the second phase, which would see the data center hit 1.5 GW capacity. Permits and approvals from the Greenlandic government are still pending for both the barges and the facility. Greenland’s Ministry of Business has been approached for comment."

Shirley Siluk@ebishirl· Dec 31

Excellent piece. I think this paragraph says it all... and the word "wordcel" is just a perfect encapsulation of what pundits like Klein have evolved into.

Excerpt from Sarah Jeong's piece that says, "The media has spent the last few months trying to make sense out of nonsense, attempting to conjure motive, manifesto, and meaning out of the dumbest shit scrawled onto bullets. These were sad attempts to impose meaning on an increasingly incoherent world by a literati that has not yet accepted its irrelevance in a postliterate society. But the most humiliating display of literate obliviousness in the face of the total collapse of meaning, however, was Ezra Klein’s bizarre eulogy to Charlie Kirk. The now-infamous column (“Charlie Kirk Was Practicing Politics the Right Way”) can best be understood as an expression of class solidarity. Klein, I would argue, sees both himself and Kirk as being Debate Guys, wordcels who engage in the marketplace of ideas and let speech sort itself out into political action."

Shirley Siluk@ebishirl· Dec 22

It all reminds me of a great line spoken by Holly Hunter's character in "Broadcast News," a classic film I keep going back to again and again. She says this to a handsome but dim guy (played by William Hurt) who's just been hired as an anchor (because of his looks and TV appeal):

Lines spoken by Holly Hunter's character to William Hurt's character in the film "Broadcast News":

“It's hard for me to advise you since you personify something that I truly think is dangerous. I agree with you -- you're not qualified. So get qualified. You can insist on being better prepared. You don't have to just leave it as... (mimicking him) 'I don't write. I'm not schooled. I don't understand the news I'm reading. But at least I'm upset about it, folks.'

“Just what do you want from me, anyway? Permission to be a fake? Stop whining and do something about it.”

Shirley Siluk@ebishirl· Nov 29

RIP. "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead" is brilliant. This passage delivered by Gary Oldman in the film hits me hard every time.

Lines spoken by Gary Oldman in the film "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead": "Whatever became of the moment when one first knew about death? There must have been one. A moment. In childhood. When it first occurred to you that you don't go on forever. Must have been shattering. Stamped into one's memory. And yet, I can't remember it. It never occured to me at all. We must be born with an intuition of mortality. Before we know the word for it. Before we know that there are words. Out we come, bloodied and squawling, with the knowledge that for all the points of the compass, there's only one direction. And time is its only measure."

Shirley Siluk@ebishirl· Nov 4

Fantastic piece, @coreyatad.com Wasn't expecting to see references to Won Kar-wai and The Third Man, but it's that kind of deep and creative thinking that shows you how smart Zohran and the many committed people behind campaign have been. Also love this line:

Quote from article that says: “To be joyful now, given the world, is really hard, and being able to keep some sense of joy in these dark times was really important,” DiMieri said. “There was this channeling of all this negative energy into something positive.”

Shirley Siluk@ebishirl· Oct 31

From techstartups.com: OpenAI revenue targets, meanwhile, are ambitious. Bloomberg reported that OpenAI expects to hit $12.7 billion for all of 2025, with plans to more than double that to $29.4 billion next year. But the company doesn’t expect to be cash-flow positive until it reaches $125 billion in revenue, a milestone it doesn’t see coming until 2029.

Shirley Siluk@ebishirl· Oct 31

techstartups.com/2025/09/30/o...

From techstartups.com: "“OpenAI generated around $4.3 billion in revenue in the first half of 2025, about 16% more than it generated all of last year, according to financial disclosures to shareholders. The company said it burned $2.5 billion, in large part due to its research and development costs for developing artificial intelligence and for running ChatGPT. Some of its largest expenses were non-cash, including stock payments to employees,” The Information reported."

Shirley Siluk@ebishirl· Oct 28

This quote from the study says a lot, doesn't it?