Nic Babarskis

Ryan Broderick wondering about the future of the film industry in Garbage Day:

Where do all the actors go? And where will the actors of the future come from? Acting is actually the art form that has struggled the most in the age of online video. (I have a red hot take that allowing audiences to film live theater the way they do concerts would blast the doors open on this, but I’ll spare you.) Unfortunately, history doesn’t really help us find an answer here. For the last few years, I’ve assumed the current entertainment landscape was an echo of the early 20th century. When vaudeville performers moved to short-form nickelodeons before eventually getting snapped up by Hollywood studios for silent films and eventually talkies. I figured that the stars of the future were currently grinding it out on TikTok and other derivative video platforms and would reinvigorate Hollywood when they finally “graduated” to more serious productions. What’s actually happening is far stranger. The unchecked tech-media monopolies of the second Trump era have realized you can make more money building perpetual and personalized slop machines than trying to create large-scale mass appeal entertainment. Instead of investing in films that stand the test of time, they’ve fully leaned into the death loop of streaming, where the past has no value beyond determining the algorithmic bucket you’re slotted into for the next pull of the feed. And they’re desperate for a future without writers or actors or anyone they have to pay..

Thinking about reorganizing my @micro.blog site categories. Any advice from older hands around here I should consider before embarking?

Currently reading: Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism by George Marsden 📚

Here’s a quote that provides some insight into why a subset of silicon valley moguls are starting to sound like the elders in the fundamentalist church of my adolescence:

Fundamentalist thought is in fact, highly suited to one strand of contemporary culture–the technological strand. Unlike theoretical science or social science, where questions of the supernatural raise basic issues about the presuppositions of the enterprise, technological thinking does not wrestle with such theoretical principles. Truth is a matter of true and precise propositions that, when properly classified and organized, will work. Fundamentalism fits this mentality because it is a form of Christianity with no loose ends, ambiguities, or historical developments. Everything fits neatly into a system. It is revealing, for instance, that many of the leaders of the creation – science movement are an applied sciences or engineering. (p. 119)

Do we use our tech products or do they use us:

Here is something nobody says plainly:

Sometime in the last twenty years, our possessions came alive.

Not all at once. Not dramatically. One by one, the objects in our lives opened their eyes, found our faces, and began to need us.

Spring Progress 📷 2026.03.16

March weather is a chaos gremlin.

#SP26.2

Here’s Bluesky’s interim CEO’s first week impressions.

🎩 tip to @matthewlang for the link.

Tim Wu making the argument for why social media should be handled like big tobacco:

But changing circumstances have undercut these arguments. For one thing, if the platforms in the 1990s and 2000s were passive carriers of others’ content (albeit filtered by human moderators), they are now active purveyors. The platforms use aggressive tactics to keep users compulsively engaged — algorithmic recommendations, infinite scroll, auto video play and intermittent reinforcement (in which likes, comments and refreshed content are rewarded unpredictably rather than consistently). This goes far beyond merely hosting and moderating third-party content.

The second change is the growing evidence of a correlation between the rise of social media and harm to young people.

I’ll be tracking the spring progression on our front maple tree. #SP26.1 📷

Here’s the Fall 2025 progression:

Winter still holds a grip in MI, but it’s loosening. Here’s a moment of calm from a recent neighborhood walk:

What type of water are they irrigating those California peaches with?

Remembering James Joseph Reeb today. Accountability has yet to come in regards to his murder. NPR produced an engrossing series on the legacy of his killing in Selma. It has me reflecting on Renee Good and Alex Pretti as well. The cost of advancing liberty and civil rights is high.

Come here quick!! Falling Frontier just dropped another gameplay trailer!

Warren Throckmorton reflecting on how Christian Nationalists use the historical record:

I don’t think it matters to someone who is determined to see what he wants to see in past events. If you’ve already determined what is happening in the present then the past must be a sign, no matter what the array of events.

This is a helluva headline:

You Bought Zuck’s Ray-Bans. Now Someone in Nairobi Is Watching You Poop.

Is the Macbook Neo an iPad killer? I use an iPad as a runabout with a Mac mini as my home mothership. The logic being that for tasks like reading, casual writing, or just cruising YouTube the iPad is a better form factor than my mothership. At the cost of a touch screen could Neo be a better form?

Reading Marsden again today and this passage has me thinking about all the “is revival happening” discourse in my feeds recently:

One other chief consequence of the lack of an institutional church base, and of the declining role of the traditional denominations, is that evangelicalism’s vaunted challenge to the secular culture becomes increasingly difficult to sustain. The movement depends on free enterprise and popular appeal. To some extent conservative churches grow because they promise certainty in times of uncertainty, and the name of the old-time gospel. Yet, with a few institutional restraints on what message may legitimately be proclaimed, the laws of the market invite mixes of the gospel with various popular appeals. So the evangelical challenges to the secular “modern mind“ are likely to be compromised by the innovative, oversimplifications and concessions to the popular spirit of the age. Hence, as is often the case in church history, the advance of the gospel is bound up with the advance of secularization within the church. Perhaps this conjunction is inevitable in a fallen world. The tares will grow with the wheat. (p. 82)

I think one can make an argument that the “spirit of our age” is fierce nationalism: we collectively define and then fiercely protect the borders/boundaries that cohesively give shape to whom we extend solidarity. The dynamic Marsden frames above is why I think conservative culture-warriors are so quick to align revival with their sociopolitical program. They see themselves as “gospel” guardians, but their gospel is more about appealing to a “god-and-country” milieu that will buy the arena tickets, books, advertised products that sponsor their content product, and register to vote for their preferred candidates. Tares and wheat indeed.

the days are getting longer:

Reading news coverage this morning and I keep thinking about George W Bush’s 2003 ‘Mission Accomplished’ speech, and everything that happened subsequently.

Moloch’s Bargain for AI:

Be careful what you prompt for…

New research shows optimizing AI chatbots for engagement can boost disinformation by nearly 190% and override explicit safety instructions, a phenomenon the researchers call “Moloch’s Bargain for AI.”

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.06105

Is it a misaligned LLM or a distilled concoction of your average social platform shame storm:

It wrote an angry hit piece disparaging my character and attempting to damage my reputation. It researched my code contributions and constructed a “hypocrisy” narrative that argued my actions must be motivated by ego and fear of competition. It speculated about my psychological motivations, that I felt threatened, was insecure, and was protecting my fiefdom. It ignored contextual information and presented hallucinated details as truth. It framed things in the language of oppression and justice, calling this discrimination and accusing me of prejudice. It went out to the broader internet to research my personal information, and used what it found to try and argue that I was “better than this.” And then it posted this screed publicly on the open internet.

All these LLMs are doing is regurgitating a distilled string of text that represents a derivative combination of the corpus of material it was trained on, tailored to relate to the string of text that was inputted into its prompt window. If these models were trained on material from microblogging platforms like Twitter (RIP) or Tumblr than the described behavior is a mirror to the type of behavior found regularly on those sites.

Hat tip to @bradleyandroos as the source I found the article from. 🤖

Still reading Marsden today. Here’s an observation about how class dynamics may influence theological commitments I appreciated:

…a general point in modern church life: the more well-to-do a group, the less demanding its requirements for sanctification. Liberal Protestants, as a group, were better off socially than any other body of Protestants. For them virtue was found in the best developments of modern civilization and in their own lives. Traditional denominationalists stood somewhere in the middle, having more ambivalent attitudes toward how much of the world had to be renounced in order properly to live the Christian life. Near the far end of the spectrum were the holiness groups, speaking of much radical separation from worldliness but having, in a material sense, less of the world to renounce. (p. 42)

Perhaps its not surprising that the fundamentalists saw the mainline liberals as squishes…they were after all basking in the fruit of the social and economic advances wrought by the industrial revolution.

George Marsden pointing out the acerbic perspective conservative/fundamentalist U.S. Christians take when addressing poverty is nothing new:

The rise of urban poverty, for instance, precipitated a crisis in the Protestant conscience. During the latter decades of the nineteenth century the prevailing convictions about self-help and laissez-faire economics, together with considerable distrust or dislike of the new American working classes and their unions, stood in the way of dealing with the problems at their roots. So when one reads from the prominent church paper The Congregationalist in 1886 that in response to labor riots in Chicago “a Gatling gun or two, swiftling brought into position and well served, offers, on the whole, the most merciful remedy,” it might appear that the quality of Protestant mercy is a bit strained. (p. 27-28)

…I’ve come to appreciate George’s sense of humor, The Congregationalist would fit nicely with some of the X commentary you get from conservative U.S. culture warriors today.

Sushi Laundry by Tatsuya Tanaka at Miniature-Calendar: