Alice Dubiel 🔬💉🦠😷🌬☮️Jul 5, 2025
So many good ideas in this conversation between John Ganz and Max Read about libertarian ideas, Italian futurism, cosmopolitanism, urbanism and politics. Genial, witty, recommended commentary on Peter Thiel, who was interviewed by Ross Douthat, and Zohran Mamdani who won the Democratic primary for mayor of New York.
#JohnGanz #MaxRead #Thiel #steelmaning #ZohranMamdani #urbanism
https://open.substack.com/pub/johnganz/p/talking-thiel-and-zohran-with-max?r=ct3l&utm_medium=ios
Talking Thiel and Zohran with Max Read

Another Podcast

Unpopular Front
Steve Randy WaldmanSep 25, 2024
"'Dead Internet' is not an inevitable outcome of the various technologies in question--generative A.I. among them--but a condition brought about by the particular arrangement of money and business models." #MaxRead https://maxread.substack.com/p/were-in-our-slop-era
We're in our slop era

A new magazine piece by me! Plus: A.I. licensing deals and writers

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Steve Randy WaldmanApr 9, 2023
“the real reason I pony up is for a quality beyond straightforward ‘utility,’ a quality I usually refer to as ‘Doesn’t Make Me Wish I Was Dead.’” #MaxRead https://maxread.substack.com/p/why-would-anyone-subscribe-to-a-social
Why would anyone subscribe to a social media platform?

The lost quality of "Doesn't Make Me Wish I Was Dead"

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Steve Randy WaldmanMar 23, 2023

I'm late to this, but a very good round-up on l'affaire SVB by @maxbsawicky https://maxread.substack.com/p/lessons-from-the-silicon-valley-bank

EDIT: OMG did I get this wrong! This is not by @maxbsawicky but by a person named Max Read (which I think used to be the name of Max Sawicky's blog!)

I so apologize to the real Max Read! #MaxRead

Lessons from the Silicon Valley Bank bailout

V.C. group chats are a threat to the global economy

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Justin (koavf)🌻🍉🇪🇭🌿Jul 3, 2022

If you get a weird txt or call, just ignore it every time: https://maxread.substack.com/p/whats-the-deal-with-all-those-weird

You stand nothing to gain and will very likely empower weirdo scammers.

#scams #substack #scammers #maxread #cryptocurrency #crime #crypto

What's the deal with weird wrong-number texts?

Digging into the world of "pig-butchering" scams

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bs2May 5, 2022
> .. less than 60 percent of web traffic is human.. some years.. a.. majority of it is #bot. For a period of time in 2013, the Times reported this year, a full half of YouTube traffic was “bots masquerading as people,” .. employees feared an inflection point after which #YouTube’s systems for detecting #fFaudulentTraffic would begin to regard bot traffic as real and human traffic as fake. They called this hypothetical event “the #Inversion.”
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/12/how-much-of-the-internet-is-fake.html
#IT #MaxRead #NetScam
Show threadStrypeyMay 4, 2022

"Ultimately, the targeted use of disinformation as a political tactic will be to destroy public trust at scale, as voters are confronted again and again with campaigns refracted through social media platforms awash with sketchy news sources and fake accounts (and a legacy media apparatus unfortunately beholden to those same platforms)."

- #MaxRead, 2019

StrypeyMay 4, 2022

"The story ... follows an election for the hospital board in the central-California town of Tulare ... To ensure Kumar’s victory, Benzeevi engaged Psy-Group, a private intelligence company based out of Tel Aviv, staffed by ex-Mossad agents, and specializing in 'covertly spreading messages to influence what people believed and how they behaved'."

- #MaxRead, 2019

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/02/what-and-who-should-we-be-afraid-of-on-social-media.html

#SocialMedia #PsyGroup

StrypeyMay 4, 2022

Pick one Max, it can't be both.

"Platforms can be powerful democratizing tools, but the processes by which decisions are (or aren’t) made are on every level intentionally opaque."

- #MaxRead, 2018

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/12/why-pewdiepies-anti-semitic-youtube-jokes-dont-hurt-him.html

#SocialMedia

Show threadStrypeyMay 4, 2022

"An animated video of Spider-Man and Elsa from Frozen riding tractors is not, you know, not real: Some poor soul animated it and gave voice to its actors, and I have no doubt that some number ... of kids have sat and watched it and found some mystifying, occult enjoyment in it. But it’s certainly not “official,” and it’s hard, watching it onscreen as an adult, to understand where it came from and what it means that the view count beneath it is continually ticking up."

- #MaxRead, 2018