Matt Pearce

@mattdpearce

May the forces of evil become confused on the way to your house. Opinions are my own (but they are correct)

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Matt Pearce@mattdpearce· 5h

Okay.

The Dissent isn't just screaming into the content void - it's getting noticed by the communities it's covering. In late July, Vallejo Public Information Officer Robert Briseño reached out to a Dissent reporter asking for a correction. The agent replied politely and made the correction.
Briseño said he had no idea he was interacting with a bot: "Their website certainly does not convey this.

Matt Pearce@mattdpearce· 3d

I got curious and checked “Last of the Mohicans,” and while it’s true that the prose is starchy, this opening paragraph is a banger and you should not deny yourself the pleasure of the effort.

T was a feature peculiar to the colonial wars of North America, that the toils and dangers of the wilderness were to be encountered, before the adverse hosts could meet. A wide, and, apparently, an impervious boundary of forests, severed the possessions of the hostile provinces of France and England. The hardy colonist, and the trained European who fought at his side, frequently expended months in struggling against the rapids of the streams, or in effecting the rugged passes of the mountains, in quest of an opportunity to exhibit their courage in a more martial conflict. But, emulating the patience and self-denial of the practised native warriors, they learned to overcome every difficulty; and it would seem, that in time, there was no recess of the woods so dark, nor any secret place so lovely, that it might claim exemption from the inroads of those who had pledged their blood to satiate their vengeance, or to uphold the cold and selfish policy of the distant monarchs of Europe.

Matt Pearce@mattdpearce· 3d

Unfortunately this tweet was my first reaction.

cici
@cicington
Omg you people cant do anything
ely kreimendahl @ElyKreimendahl • 2d
we don't talk enough about how stressful Halloween costumes are for the ADHD community

Matt Pearce@mattdpearce· 3d

I’m learning that the people who gamified paragraphs are having trouble reading books. www.axios.com/2026/08/11/r...

AXIOS

Al has become my reading buddy as I've plowed through my summer book list, helping me keep track of plots and characters, unpack themes, and make sense of wordy, old prose.
• Why it matters: The way many of us actually read books - a few pages before bed, a chapter at the beach, another on a plane - makes it easy to lose the thread. Al can help you pick it back up without starting over.
Ш I really got into using Al while reading James Fenimore Cooper's "The Last of the Mohicans." The text was far too dense for casual vacation reading. My first prompt asked:
• "T'd like a guide as I read The Last of the Mohicans who can help me understand what I've read and where the story is, without giving spoilers or getting ahead of my progress. Can you do this, chapter by chapter?"
• The robot agreed: "Cooper's sentences are long and his diction is archaic."

Matt Pearce@mattdpearce· 3d

mattdpearce.substack.com/p/the-labor-...

"Calling bullshit" is the phrase we use for the dialectic that too much bullshit creates. For example: The boss says sales are down and there isn't enough money for raises this year. Well, is that true? The problem isn't that the workers didn't hear the boss' perspective but that they didn't believe it. The workers unionize, point to executives' pay and that big stock buyback, and conclude there's plenty of money; they demand raises. Then comes management's turn to accuse the workers of being delusional and irrational and so on.
In the end, every negotiation is a bullshit resolution session. So is every journalist's reporting and fact-checking process.

Matt Pearce@mattdpearce· 4d

What is bullshit? Bullshit is when the hotel says you can skip housekeeping to help save the environment, when it's really better at saving the hotel on housekeeper wages. Bullshit is when the prediction market advertisement says you can win! betting on major world events, while knowing that attracting money-losing suckers like you is the only thing keeping the whole casino in business.
Bullshit is self-interest disguising itself as something greater, a part that mistakes its interests for the interests of the whole.

Matt Pearce@mattdpearce· 7d

Shaking my head while reading Paul Fussell’s “The Great War and Modern Memory” so that people know I think World War I was bad.

A copy of Paul Fussell’s book “The Great War and Modern Memory,” which features a sepia-tone picture of a slouching World War I soldier on the cover.

Matt Pearce@mattdpearce· 9d

Just sped through Volume I, it was good, but is it “five more volumes of this” good?

A copy of Solvej Balle’s “On the Calculation of Volume I”

Matt Pearce@mattdpearce· 10d

Cover of the book “Trade Wars Are Class Wars” by Matthew C. Klein and Michael Pettis

Matt Pearce@mattdpearce· 10d

While visiting friends in Portland, Ore., this weekend, I picked up a
copy of Ursula K. Le Guin's essay collection "Words Are My Matter." Le Guin writes of community:

“Home isn't where they have to let you in. It's not a place at all. Home is imaginary.
Home, imagined, comes to be. It is real, realer than any other place, but you can't get to it unless your people show you how to imagine it - whoever your people are. They may not be your relatives. They may never have spoken your language. They may have been dead for a thousand years. They may be nothing but words printed on paper, ghosts of voices, shadows of minds. But they can guide you home. They are your human community.
All of us have to learn how to invent our lives, make them up, imagine them.

Matt Pearce@mattdpearce· 18d

Nolan’s Odysseus is very English. mattdpearce.substack.com/p/the-surviv...

In the ancient poem, Homer's Odysseus' only has self-discipline when it comes to telling bigger and more ambitious lies; he otherwise exuberantly butchers every suiter and hangs every disloyal maid and aggrieves every powerful suitor's family on Ithaca until finally the goddess Athena has to intervene to stop a civil war. "Must you have battle in your heart forever?" Athena asks Odysseus in the translation by Robert Fitzgerald, already knowing the answer.
For the ancients, it was Atlas holding the world up on his shoulders; in Christopher Nolan movies, that burden falls on father figures. Nolan's self-restraining Odysseus stops short of a full palace massacre and then flees his own country, doing only what duty, not passion, demands. This is the cinema of stiff upper lips.

Matt Pearce@mattdpearce· 18d

Sunday newsletter: The Freudian Odysseus. mattdpearce.substack.com/p/the-surviv...

The director Christopher Nolan's major innovation in the new "Odyssey" film is to make tricksy, bloody, victorious Odysseus a repressed neurotic. This Odysseus is calm on the outside but all fucked up in the head from winning the great war, at the cost of losing not just a generation of men but the whole empire. (Very British.) He lands on Calypso's island, and instead of being delayed because of a goddess' seven-year sex spell, he medicates on anti-depressants until Calypso guides him out of self-exile through the restorative power of talk therapy.

Matt Pearce@mattdpearce· 26d

galaxy brain meme with a brain getting increasingly explodey across four categories, starting with deontology, virtue ethics, utilitarianism, ending with a tweet from Liam Bright: “Adding a single principle to utilitarianism (‘ok, but no galaxy brain stuff, alright?’) and thereby perfecting moral philosophy.”

Matt Pearce@mattdpearce· 26d

EXCUSE me? www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

But the sheer pace of growth in Al means that, once we produce the first artificial moral patients, we will soon after have enor nous quantities of them. After a few years, so many morally significant Al systems could exist that their collective interests would outweigh those of all humans on Earth combined.,

Matt Pearce@mattdpearce· 29d

It’s Strauss week over here.

Leo Strauss’ “Natural Right and History” and Francis Fukuyama’s memoir “In the Realm of the Last Man” on a table next to each other

Saul Bellow’s novel “Ravelstein” on a table next to sunglasses and a coffee cup

Matt Pearce@mattdpearce· Jul 14

www.online-literature.com/gustave-flau...

M. Dambreuse's grave was close to the graves of Manuel and Benjamin Constant. The soil in this place slopes with an abrupt decline. One has under his feet there the tops of green trees, further down the chimneys of steam-pumps, then the entire great city.
Frederick found an opportunity of admiring the scene while the various addresses were being delivered.
The first was in the name of the Chamber of Deputies, the second in the name of the General Council of the Aube, the third in the name of the coal-mining company of Saone-et-Loire, the fourth in the name of the Agricultural Society of the Yonne, and there was another in the name of a Philanthropic Society. Finally, just as everyone was going away, a stranger began reading a sixth address, in the name of the Amiens Society of Antiquaries.
And thereupon they all took advantage of the occasion to denounce Socialism, of which M. Dambreuse had died a victim. It was the effect produced on his mind by the exhibitions of anarchic violence, together with his devotion to order, that had shortened his days.
They praised his intellectual powers, his integrity, his generosity, and even his silence as a representative of the people, "for, if he was not an orator, he possessed instead those solid qualities a thousand times more useful," etc., with all the requisite phrases-"Premature end; eternal regrets; the better land; farewell, or rather no, au revoir!"
The clay, mingled with stones, fell on the coffin, and he would never again be a subject for discussion in society.

Matt Pearce@mattdpearce· Jul 10

I’m going in!

A copy of Leo Strauss’ “Natural Right and History” on a table next to a disposable coffee cup.

Matt Pearce@mattdpearce· Jul 8

Martin van Buren, America’s first party animal: Gordon S. Wood, “The Radicalism of the American Revolution”

Martin Van Buren represented just this sort of new breed of American, at ease in the chaos of the early Republic and confident of the future. He thrived in a democratic political world that was very different from that of the founding fathers. He believed in political parties and in running for office. He was the first modern professional politician to win the presidency. As the ambitious son of a tavernkeeper, he prided himself on having risen to office "without the aid of powerful family connexions. Before his elevation to the highest office in the land, Van Buren had no fame, no fortune and no reputation for great achievement. He had won no battles, had written no great treatises, had made no memorable speeches. He had no public charisma and was barely known throughout the United States. But what this "little magician" did do was build the best and most organized political party the country had ever seen.
The new parties of professional politicians like Van Buren were designed for the modern democratic society. They brought together large numbers of ordinary people in order to counter the family influence and personal connections of Federalist gentry and older aristocratic Republicans such as De Witt Clinton of New York. Parties, like other voluntary associations of these years, combined otherwise isolated individuals into meaningful communities. People have joined the New York Republican party, declared its leaders in 1820, not for personal benefit or profit, "but have spontaneously and voluntarily identified their political fortunes with ours, and thereby entitled themselves to full community with us.'' Parties, in fact, became a modern means by which something akin to the self-subsuming virtue of classical politics could be practiced. "Individual partialities and local attachments," declared the leaders of the New York Democratic-Republican party in 1823, "are secondary and quite unimportant compared...with the INTERESTS AND PERMANENCY OF THE REPUBLICAN PARTY”

Matt Pearce@mattdpearce· Jul 7

www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Hungary's state media went dark after its new leadership said it was ending years of propaganda that had propped up former leader Viktor Orban until his downfall in watershed elections earlier this year.
The main channel and website of Hungary's state broadcaster cut to a blank screen on Tuesday, showing a written apology to viewers for the years when it had been a mouthpiece for the previous government.
"Public media must not lie," read the text, white on a black screen, that went live after the new management team delegated by Prime Minister Peter Magyar's government took over. "We apologize for having nonetheless done so for many years!"

Matt Pearce@mattdpearce· Jul 6

Almost all of my ancestors immigrated the
U.S. in the 19th century seeking a better life, mostly found it, and many fought for it. Most of the military-aged men in my family enlisted with the Union during the Civil War, though a few chose the confederacy (and saw their wars end in ignominy). One of my Unionist ancestors who was too old to fight, George Gewinner, who immigrated from Bavaria in 1848, became a bandmaster in Lincoln's armies instead and claimed to have played at Robert E. Lee's surrender at Appomattox. Old George wasn't a natural-born killer but a natural-born music teacher, and his immigrant contribution to American freedom was to teach the slavers what defeat sounded like. May he rest in honored glory.

Matt Pearce@mattdpearce· Jun 30

mattdpearce.substack.com/p/its-not-jo...

But a world without publishers and journalists has problems even beyond information production. News providers don't just produce knowledge but also community, serving as collectors of what Alexis de Tocqueville called the
"wandering spirits" of democracy. * Al, by comparison, is practically inherently anti-community technology. $ Much how freedom and equality are the binding agents for liberal democracy, so too do knowledge and community work together to create the learning society.

Matt Pearce@mattdpearce· Jun 29

As reality sets in, and the most egregious propaganda of recent years gets exposed by increments to have been so much bullshit, it's clear that artificial intelligence as of 2026 is just a normal technology.
Al causes disruptions much like any other innovation. Its impacts, while real, are not fantastic or mysterious. The jobpocalypse
- mass human unemployment caused by Al - is obviously not coming soon, nor is robot superintelligence. Like all other machines fashioned by human genius, Al is not conscious. The familiar drives of human nature and capitalism have not been fundamentally changed by Al's arrival. People, companies and societies will use Al for logical and illogical purposes; these uses will have benefits and harms.
This is because Al is a normal technology.

Matt Pearce@mattdpearce· Jun 20

Four years deep into a grinding war against a greater power and Ukrainian drones are now knocking the Russian oil industry offline. Wild. www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

A Bloomberg line chart showing the last seven years of oil production in Russia, with a green line for 2026 plummeting significantly below normal production levels for 2020-2026.

Matt Pearce@mattdpearce· Jun 19

maybe they should have hired the blue water company

The connection of Greenwater Services - also known as Green Water Solutions - to Mr. Cafaro is being reported first by The
New York Times.

Matt Pearce@mattdpearce· Jun 17

Reminds me of this recent paper - “If LLMs Have Human-Like Attributes, Then So Does Age of Empires Il” arxiv.org/abs/2605.31514

[Submitted on 29 May 2026 (v1), last revised 11 Jun 2026 (this version, v3)]| If LLMs Have Human-Like Attributes, Then So Does Age of Empires Il
Adrian de Wynter
View PDF
Much research has been carried out on large language models (LLMs) and LLM-powered agentic workflows.
However, many works within the field state emergence of, ascribe to, or assume, generalised anthropomorphic attributes to them (e.g., morality or understanding of natural language). Our goal is not to argue in favour or against the existence of these attributes, but to point out that these conclusions could be incorrect. For this we build and train a simple neural network on the videogame Age of Empires II, and note that any entity in a sufficiently-powerful substrate, such as LEGO or the Greater Boston Area, could also present such attributes. Hence, the purported anthropomorphic attributes of LLMs are empirically non-unique: although some properties (e.g., responses to prompts) could remain invariant, others, such as the interpretation of their perceived behaviour, might change with the substrate. Thus, any empirically-grounded discussion on these attributes requires explicit measurement criteria; otherwise the interpretation is left to the representation. We then show that assuming that these attributes exist or not in a system, independent of the substrate and in a generalised way, leads to either circular or uninformative conclusions. This is regardless of the experimenter's viewpoint on the subject, or whether the outcome shows existence or non-existence. Finally we propose a 'null' assumption, where one assumes LLM non-uniqueness instead of assuming anthropomorphic attributes to set up an experiment, along with examples of it. We also discuss potential objections to our work, briefly survey the field, and prove that Age of Empires Il is functionally- and Turing-complete.

Matt Pearce@mattdpearce· Jun 17

TIL people were getting duped by the humanness of chatbots as early as the 1960s. AI psychosis was old before it was new! We haven’t learned anything. mattdpearce.substack.com/p/what-we-ca...

ELIZA could hold basic "conversations," including playing the role of a psychotherapist with real human users. An example of ELIZA's responses to one woman are shown in capital letters:

Men are all alike.
IN WHAT WAY
They're always bugging us about something or other.
CAN YOU THINK OF A SPECIFIC EXAMPLE
Well, my boyfriend made me come here.
YOUR BOYFRIEND MADE YOU COME HERE
He says I'm depressed much of the time.
I AM SORRY TO HEAR YOU ARE DEPRESSED

Excerpt from Joseph Weizenbaum's 1976 book "Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to
Calculation."

Anybody with a cursory awareness of recent headlines about Al romances and AI psychosis already knows where this is going. ELIZA's human interlocuters in the 1960s, despite talking to a clunky machine they knew had been programmed by Weizenbaum, refused to believe that they were talking to a mere machine. His secretary, having watched him build the contraption over several months, after just a few exchanges with ELIZA, asked Weizenbaum to leave the room so she could have some privacy.
Weizenbaum, exhibiting a bit of Freudian sangfroid about all this, was not surprised to see people form emotional attachments with inanimate objects. He'd already seen people get attached to their cars or guitars or computers. But "what I had not realized is that extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people," Weizenbaum wrote in his 1976 book "Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation."

Matt Pearce@mattdpearce· Jun 15

mattdpearce.substack.com/p/what-we-ca...

Neil Postman's biggest criticisms weren't of technology itself, exactly, though he was an adept of Marshall McLuhan's influential formulation that "the medium is the message" - meaning that the form of communication dictates what is capable of being said. Postman was harsher on the instrumentalist view of technology that puts humans second. This instrumentalist view happens to be the organizing principle of a culture that has just made Elon Musk our first trillionaire while he used his social media network to help coment the race hate in Northern Ireland. 1 When someone like Musk is both medium and message, there's no point expecting a rotting pipe to do anything but spew its bilge all over everything.

Matt Pearce@mattdpearce· Jun 15

Consider this passage from Postman's
"Technopoly":

“In a technocracy, tools play a central role in the thought-world of the culture.
Everything must give way, in some degree, to their development. The social and symbolic worlds become increasingly subject to the requirements of that development. Tools are not integrated into the culture; they attack the culture. They bid to become the culture. As a consequence, tradition, social mores, myth, politics, ritual, and religion have to fight for their lives.”

Technology, attacking and taking over the culture? Bending society to its own imperative for advancement? In my United States of America? Postman (most famous for writing "Amusing Ourselves to Death") thought the U.S. was the world's first
"Technopoly," a society marked by "the submission of all forms of cultural life to the sovereignty of technique and technology," where information itself has become a form of pollution.

Matt Pearce@mattdpearce· Jun 9

I’m summiting Gravity’s Rainbow but having that experience where it feels like this is the only book I’ve been reading this year (it’s been two weeks) and I’m still not to the halfway point.

A copy of Thomas Pychon’s “Gravity’s Rainbow” opened on a table to pages 282-283, and you can see more terrible song lyrics Pynchon insists inserting as often as possible

Matt Pearce@mattdpearce· Jun 9