I spent some time last week at LACMA with Christian Marclay’s The Clock—which I’ll write more about after tonight when I spend as much time as possible at the 24-hour screening—and was consistently annoyed by how many people felt perfectly fine to maintain ongoing conversations or take their phones out to text someone in the theater. But, much like most third spaces these days, art museums are not immune to the degrading notion of the social contract.

Since movie theaters re-opened after Covid-19 restrictions were lifted, I’d say about one-third of the films I see have had someone take out a phone for one reason or another during the show. (I will say most of these happen at AMC chain theaters.) This ranges from taking a photo of the screen (mostly the title card) to texting to scrolling a dating app or Instagram. I’ll always react in some ways—a glance to asking politely to saying, Turn your phone off aloud. The responses I get have varied from being ignored to having people tell me to fuck off.

(I was at the AMC Burbank 16 for a movie once and the guy next to me asked a woman in front of him who had been texting for five minutes straight to please put her phone away and she turned around and replied, “You talked all during the previews so why don’t you kiss my ass.” Absolutely bonkers response.)

These aren’t limited to corporate screenings, though. While it’s far less frequent than what happens at a chain like AMC, I’ve seen phones out at screenings for American Cinematheque or even Tarantino’s notoriously anti-phone theaters (the New Beverly and Vista). These people risk being kicked out, or even banned, from theaters just to check their Twitter feed.

Now, part of this could be just screen addiction and the fact humanity seems to have been consumed by an inability to leave the digital world for any meaningful amount of time. But I think one of the consequences of how Covid was both handled and politicized is that the country became divided on whether or not it really gave a shit about anyone else at an individual level. (We know now that any excuses about masks were bullshit as we see ICE agents and cops masked up all the time for their thuggish actions and that the entire conservative and fascist side of the population doesn’t have any central ideology other than to ‘win’ at whatever talking points are dominating the news at any given time.)

The increasing individualism that has been chipping away at how we treat others in social spaces, whatever the root causes may be, are reflective of a growing resentment toward one another while the country we share continues to decay in a storm of corruption, greed, and outright lies by those in positions of power. This is all by design, and sometimes I just want to escape the madness by going to the movies, and now there’s a constant reminder of what is happening in society as a whole.

We’re having a mayoral election in LA this year and like most of the political world right now, it’s incredibly stupid. It’s another of those popular races that take up the news these days—a progressive democratic socialist, Nithya Raman, against an establishment liberal incumbent, Karen Bass. The establishment does not like this (surprise, surprise). Meanwhile, every time there’s news about this thing, I want to slam my head into the wall in disbelief that Raman isn’t running away with it.

Just today, Bass came out in favor of the potential merger between Paramount and Warner Brothers, even though just yesterday it was reported that the merger would cost Los Angeles over 10,000 total jobs between entertainment and the businesses it supports—around $2.8 billion in the local economy, gone. The Writers Guild immediately issued a statement tearing Bass apart.

There was also a kind of insane warehouse fire in Boyle Heights this year that saw no city declarations for evacuation—only Bass, who spent the first two days of the fire out of the city, telling residents the air was not dangerous. (That ‘safe’ air caused hundreds to suffer health affects directly from exposure.)

Of course, this is all after Bass botched her oversight of the wildfires that burned the Palisades and Altadena to the ground in January of 2025. Los Angeles has also seen cuts to city service budgets in order to give the LAPD more cash. (The LAPD already had an annual budget of over three billion dollars.)

While the criticism could continue, the point is this: All over the United States, in governments local and national alike, establishment democrats are being called out for their decades of stalled policy, lack of ambition, and corporate interests being prioritized over serving the public. What makes me crazy is that the general public is somewhere between fearful of and hateful toward the label of socialism, even if policies like upgrading infrastructure or improving conditions for schools are wildly popular.

Red Scare tactics have proven very successful in the United States, where even ‘liberal’ cities like LA have a substantial population that doesn’t want to lean too far to the left. (What that political ideology actually looks like is beyond me—but I’m pretty sure it’s more in alignment with fascism than humanism.) As conditions continue to rapidly decay while wealth consolidates in the hands of a few, I wonder at what point people will come around to the idea of listening to voices from the left—or if by that time there’ll be anything left to actually govern.

There’s an interesting parallel between the rise of guys like Elon Musk, the Trump presidency, and the simultaneous adoption of and enthusiasm behind AI—it’s the dawn of a new era of the con.

Whether it was Lee or Bernays who created modern day public relations doesn’t matter so much as the effect they’ve had on the world because of it. Advertising is one thing, but the idea of PR and manipulating social dialogues around everything—as opposed to just products or investments—has brought us all to this era of un-reality in the west.

Taking a look at Musk, for all who laud him, he has not actually built anything. He doesn’t know anything about cars or rockets, he purchased the assets that have built his wealth (or built them on government subsidies while being ‘anti-socialism’). He’s no inventor, shows no capacity for innovation or vision for the future. He’s just a shrewd capitalist (and a pretty big fucking idiot). Trump may have made some real estate dealings in the past but is notorious for fucking over workers (as well as lying about, well, more than I can link to). These are men who keep their heads above water because of how American culture has adopted public relations on the thoroughfare of public debate.

Yet these men are lauded by many for their ‘leadership.’ Wealth supersedes any questions in relation to morality, justice, equality, or even legality. It’s repugnant.

Drawing Lines

Somewhere along the line, the idea of what you make of yourself became less important than how what you make of yourself represents the capitalist ideal. Social intangibles like respect and dignity and honor have long evaporated from the air we now collectively breathe, and everything is about money and power. Being a shitty person has a proportional relationship to how much money you have at your disposal to ride out any negative news cycle that might carry your name with it. Do we really think Mark Zuckerberg will be affected by the fact his superyacht didn’t help a boat in need?

And so a new age of deceit is upon us. It’s no wonder that the people largely associated with these ideas also adopt AI so completely—to them, cutting corners for financial reasons is more important than any natural, human process. Art does not matter to these people—creation is an inconvenient step in the process of financial viability. Existence, and its potential, are secondary concerns to capital gains.

The MBA idea that everything is business has overwhelmed our relationship with inspiration. Labor is no longer about meaning something, it’s about cost-effectiveness. These people have adopted the idea that financial equations are more important than human endeavors, and so aesthetic (or any constructed) results that suit any need of production are more important than creative processes.

Losing It

This is a cancer upon humanity. I’m not saying that every use of AI is bad, or that every statement to the media is a lie, or that every businessman is a crook. But we have entered an era where the potential truth of the internet has been consumed by the dishonest nature of advertising—and along with it, those who profit are becoming shells of human beings who are only icons of wealth, shedding all other traits in regards to empathy, kindness, dignity, respect, or honor. They are the scum of the earth infecting growing swaths of the population with this grotesque self-centered outlook that defeats the purpose of our collective existence.

Capitalism is beyond an economic crime, it is the death knell of what makes people a part of the natural world. With the technological advancements we’re developing now, if it remains as influential as it has been over the past couple centuries, we are certainly doomed to lose a majority of our civilization to completely inhuman ways of being.

Oil companies pocketed $93 billion while the government is repaying hundreds of billions in tariffs deemed to be illegal by the Supreme Court—mostly to corporations, even though it was consumers who paid the bill.

The United States is a business, it’s completely profit-driven, and until the people are willing to utilize economic strikes to keep from being completely swindled by literally anyone in power—be it the state or private corporation—we’re just totally fucked, transferring money from employers to landlords and businesses.

Chris Hedges said it best:

The final stages of capitalism, Karl Marx wrote, will be marked by developments that are intimately familiar. Unable to expand and generate profits at past levels, the capitalist system will begin to consume the structures that sustain it. It will prey upon, in the name of austerity and government efficiency, the working class and the poor, driving them ever deeper into debt and poverty and diminishing the capacity of the state to serve the needs of ordinary citizens.

As time marches forward, we’ll see less and less of a government and more and more subscription-based business models with tech companies intervening into increasingly necessary, and formerly public, services. Just a couple years ago here in LA during the wildfires, billionaire developer Rick Caruso hired private firefighters to protect his home and his mall. Meanwhile, the entire Pacific Palisades burned around these structures. This is the future we can expect, especially with the climate crisis fast approaching.

The new Polaroid anti-AI, pro-real-life-interactions ad campaign is pretty great. While advertising in general is a menace of a media system, any dialogue we’re having in public about AI—or digital addictions in general—is important to keep front-and-center, as we seem too eager to stray from the idea of our basic humanity being at stake. (It is interesting how some responses to the campaign discuss the ‘low-hanging fruit’ of data centers and how any corporate dialogue against AI is hypocritical, which is understandable but I feel on the wrong side of the subject.)

The AI debate as a whole kind of annoys me, but I do find value in dialogues centered around our collective humanity and what that means, because I think it should be the central focus of all this. The potential impact of AI (or advanced LLMs, whatever you want to call them) could touch on just about every aspect of modern civilization—but there’s no way I’m gonna trust those who could profit from this saying it’ll all be, ‘for the better.’

On the industrial side, it’s not that automation is usually a bad thing in regards to pushing civilization forward, but when it comes to economics, it can create turmoil if the system society exists within doesn’t look out for its people. If computers run the show and we still live under a capitalist system, how do the economics work out as jobs could disappear from media to healthcare to shipping? Silicon Valley openly jokes about a permanent underclass, but that’s a very real possibility if the current economic model remains as all resources are funneled into technological development as opposed to human services.

Creatively speaking the whole thing is a fucking joke. The outright theft of the collective cultural history of humanity in order to create heartless visuals and sounds is criminal—both in the law of the land and the law of nature. Anthropic destroying rare books because it’s the easiest way to scan them to train AI models is so on-the-nose evil it wouldn’t make the script of a blockbuster movie. The things that make us human—the tangled relationships between ideas, labor, production, and objects—are being completely disregarded for this idea of creating a future that embraces a new era of subjugation and control instead of growing into a state of egalitarianism.

I think that’s the most enraging part of all of this. Regardless of what part of the AI debate is being scrutinized, the human benefits are largely abstracted and obfuscated—there are quips about the end of money or a complete reformation on how we work, but no dialogue about how those processes might actually work to benefit people. No one can convince me that those who are fully invested in AI as the future aren’t some of the most evil people to have ever lived, looking out only for their own stake in a hyper-violent, automated future and willing to dispose of not only everything we’ve collectively created since the dawn of time but also a majority of the lives on earth for the sake of a few dollars.