We’re back with a 2025 edition of the Gang. The last two shows of 2024 remain unpublished, the one just before Election Day and the week following. Now, after several weeks of full-throttle Trump 2.0, I found the discussion a welcome break from what’s going on on mainstream media. Substack has become a haven for retired MSNBC and CNN anchors, but for me Paul Krugman’s move from the New York Times has underlined how hard it is for journalists to absorb the beating they’re taking. It’s not just the TV crowd at risk, but the whole value proposition of opinion and analysis in both old and new media.
It reminds me of the dissolution of music in the wake of the collapse of the Beatles in 1970. Noone thought much of the moment in any but entertainment terms, but behind the scenes of this divorce was the understanding that we were now in a new time of retribution for the coup against Nixon, the onslaught of payback against the drug culture, and the numbing assassination of Lennon a decade later. Today, Trump appears ascendant, Congress irrelevant, and nothing but an empty tank of mediocrity in what passes for the arts. The pandemic has gone from millions dead to everyone permanently cowed, leaving a gigantic hole for incumbents to pick off the survivors before they have a chance to gain some momentum and leadership experience.
In the rubble of this laid-off landscape, the toothless media amplifies the despair. Those of us refugees from the McCarthy purges and the years of keeping our heads down are making little effort to recover. The tech crowd is so busy trying to protect their market gains from the social platforms that they contort themselves vacillating between hard left storytelling and hard right butt kissing. Opinion is not a job description, and pandering to uninterested groups about free speech and its boundaries is not a business model. I am grateful for Substack’s subscription model but not for corporate sidestepping of the success of working from everywhere. As more and more of us get culled from the workplace we’ve fought to 20 years to instantiate, where are the leaders to push back against the fear-mongering of the lower third?
One of my favorite bands, Steely Dan, has a Substack newsletter with occasional free posts, the bulwark as it were of the underlying strength of a free press. Recently an episode highlighted the release of the band’s return to the studio after the heyday of their classic original golden age. Two Against Nature was to me like Beatles resurfacing 25 years after Abbey Road. Leaders retouching the third rail and magnificently failing. Only this Substack episode reveals a surprise: needle drops of many of the tracks embedded in the interview of Becker and Fagen’s promotion of the release in 2000. The tracks shimmer and dance; they are easily the equal of the last of the Golden Age, Gaucho, but in our despair-ridden gloom of surviving the collapse, we just made it a whole lot worse.
Which brings us to AI. Months upon months of extreme bullshit, I finally submitted to Keith Teare’s relentless promotion of the AI moment, tasking myself with understaning what was going on, and tellingly, what good is it for. My job: harnessing all this miracle dust to provide some tools to pull some value from the network’s coursing stream of information and pushback against the Trump 2.0 plague.
To wit: I don’t need generative AI. Yet it has fueled a Golden Age of taking advantage of the power of broadband, social scale, and what is currently called agents. I do need to harness these incredible tools in the era of post-pandemic empowerment, in the same way that Stevie Wonder seized control of the studio, multitracking, synthesizers, and the power of miniaturized software-driven assistants, or interns, or whatever marketing needs to call it. Shame on me for not seizing the bull by the horns, but sometimes the balls will do.
The main thing Keith got through to me was that you could just ask Perplexity or whatever tool is currently best deployed in the Substack model (free to learn.) It’s not simple; you have to speak in a patronizing show of respect for a bot that never learns, and you are encouraged to ask followups in a UI that doesn’t add but rather deflects to a new thread. But by applying this coherent need-to-know structure that never really works, you eventually learn how to ask all the details in a single statement. If it starts lying, you can just start over. Try that with Trump if you have a few spare lifetimes to waste.
Popular music is just that, a bow to what is possible colliding with the demands of family, economy, and common decency. Steely Dan fought their better angels to a draw, then succumbed to the lure of Doing it Again. For years I thought they missed the boat. But tonight I see they beat the odds by keeping their sense of humor in the face of relentless choice. They had the grace to walk the walk they chose to its logical conclusion, the way a great joke transcends the rules of its universe with fuck-it faux disdain. They know they’re fooling no one best of all themselves. The joke’s on them; they’re good with that.
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