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And the challenges of an AI world where everyone is above average
I’ve been an Apple fanboy since the early 1980s. I owned one Windoze computer years ago that was mostly for games my kid wanted to play. Otherwise, I’ve been all Apple for around 40 years. But what the heck is the deal with these ads for Apple Intelligence?
In this ad (the most annoying of the group, IMO), we see a schlub of a guy, Warren, emailing his boss in idiotic/bro-based prose. He pushes the Apple Intelligence feature and boom, his email is transformed into appropriate office prose. The boss reads the prose, is obviously impressed, and the tagline at the end is “write smarter.” Ugh.
Building reliance on Silicon Valley AI companies carries risks, Collin Bjork writes.
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At first, she didn’t think much about the Nicaraguan asylum-seekers who began moving into town a few years ago. Rosa was an immigrant too, one of the many undocumented Mexican immigrants who’d settled nearly 30 years ago in Whitewater, a small university town in southeast Wisconsin.
Some of the Nicaraguans had found housing in Rosa’s neighborhood, a trailer park at the edge of town. They sent their children to the same public schools. And they got jobs in the same factories and food-processing facilities that employed many of Rosa’s friends and relatives.
Then Rosa realized that many of the newcomers with ongoing asylum cases could apply for work permits and driver’s licenses — state and federal privileges that are unavailable to undocumented immigrants. Rosa’s feelings of indifference turned to frustration and resentment.
“It’s not fair,” said Rosa, who works as a janitor. “Those of us who have been here for years get nothing.”
Her anger is largely directed at President Joe Biden and the Democratic Party for failing to produce meaningful reforms to the immigration system that could benefit people like her. In our reporting on the new effects of immigration, ProPublica interviewed dozens of long-established Latino immigrants and their U.S.-born relatives in cities like Denver and Chicago and in small towns along the Texas border. Over and over, they spoke of feeling resentment as they watched the government ease the transition of large numbers of asylum-seekers into the U.S. by giving them access to work permits and IDs, and in some cities spending millions of dollars to provide them with food and shelter.
It’s one of the reasons so many Latino voters chose Donald Trump this election, giving him what appears to be Republicans’ biggest win in a presidential race since exit polls began tracking this data. Latinos’ increased support for Trump — who says he could use the military to execute his plans for mass deportations — defied conventional wisdom, disrupting long-held assumptions about loyalties to the Democratic Party. The shift could give Republicans reason to cater to Latinos to keep them in the party’s fold.
On the campaign trail, Trump singled out Whitewater after the police chief wrote a letter to Biden asking for help responding to the needs of the new Nicaraguan arrivals. While some residents were put off by Trump’s rhetoric about the city being destroyed by immigrants, it resonated with many of the longtime Mexican-immigrant residents we interviewed. They said they think the newcomers have unfairly received benefits that they never got when they arrived illegally decades ago — and that many still don’t have today.
Among those residents is one of Rosa’s friends and neighbors who asked to be identified by one of her surnames, Valadez, because she is undocumented and fears deportation. A single mother who cleans houses and buildings for a living, Valadez makes extra money on the side by driving immigrants who don’t have cars to and from work and to run errands. It’s a risky side hustle, though, because she’s frequently been pulled over and ticketed by police for driving without a license, costing her thousands of dollars in fines.
One day two summers ago, one of her sons found a small purse at a carnival in town. Inside they found a Wisconsin driver’s license, a work permit issued to a Nicaraguan woman and $300 in cash. Seeing the contents filled Valadez with bitterness. She asked her son to turn in the purse to the police but kept the $300. “I have been here for 21 years,” she said. “I have five children who are U.S. citizens. And I can’t get a work permit or a driver’s license.”
When she told that story to Rosa one afternoon this spring, her friend nodded emphatically in approval. Rosa, like Valadez, couldn’t vote. But two of Rosa’s U.S.-born children could, and they cast ballots for Trump. One of Rosa’s sons even drives a car with a bumper sticker that says “Let’s Go Brandon” — a popular anti-Biden slogan.
Rosa said she is glad her children voted for Trump. She’s not too worried about deportation, although she asked to be identified solely by her first name to reduce the risk. She believes Trump wants to deport criminals, not people like her who crossed the border undetected in the 1990s but haven’t gotten in trouble with the law. “They know who has been behaving well and who hasn’t been,” she said.
Immigrants seeking asylum arrive in Philadelphia in December 2022. They had been bused in from Texas, which has sent thousands of immigrants to cities around the country this way during the Biden administration. (Photo by Ryan Collerd/AFP via Getty Images)In the months leading up to the presidential election, numerous polls picked up on the kinds of frustrations felt by Rosa and her family. Those polls indicated that many voters considered immigration one of the most pressing challenges facing the country and that they were disappointed in the Biden administration’s record.
Biden had come into office in 2021 promising a more humane approach to immigration after four years of more restrictive policies during the first Trump administration. But record numbers of immigrants who were apprehended at the U.S.-Mexico border began to overwhelm the system. While the Biden administration avoided talking about the border situation like a crisis, the way Trump and the GOP had, outspoken critics like Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott amplified the message that things at the border were out of control while he arranged to bus thousands of immigrants to Democrat-controlled big cities around the country. In Whitewater, hundreds of Nicaraguans arrived on their own to fill jobs in local factories, and many of them drove to work without licenses, putting a strain on the small local police department with only one Spanish-speaking officer.
While the Biden administration kept a Trump expulsion policy in place for three years, it also created temporary parole programs and an app to allow asylum-seekers to make appointments to cross the border. The result was that hundreds of thousands more immigrants were allowed to come into the country and apply for work permits, but the efforts didn’t assuage the administration’s critics on the right or left. Meanwhile, moves to benefit undocumented workers who were already in the country were less publicized, said Kathleen Bush-Joseph, a policy analyst at the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute.
The White House did not respond to requests for comment.
Conchita Cruz, a co-founder and co-executive director of the Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project, which serves a network of around 1 million asylum-seekers across the country, said that because of either court challenges or processing backlogs, Biden wasn’t able to deliver on many of his promises to make it easier for immigrants who’ve lived in this country for years to regularize their status.
“Policies meant to help immigrants have not always materialized,” she said.
Cruz said that while the administration extended the duration of work permits for some employment categories, backlogs have hampered the quick processing of those extensions. As of September, there were about 1.2 million pending work permit applications, according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services data, with many pending for six months or more. USCIS said the agency has taken steps to reduce backlogs while processing a record number of applications.
Biden’s attempts to push for broad immigration reform in Congress, including a proposal his administration sent on his first day in office, went nowhere. Earlier this year, in an effort to prevent a political win for Biden before the election, Trump pressured Republicans to kill bipartisan legislation that would have increased border security.
Camila Chávez, the executive director of the Dolores Huerta Foundation in Bakersfield, California, said Democrats failed to combat misinformation and turn out Latino voters. She recalled meeting one young Latina Trump supporter while she knocked on voters’ doors with the foundation’s sister political action organization. The woman told her she was concerned that the new immigrant arrivals were bringing crime and cartel activity — and potentially were a threat to her own family’s safety.
“That’s our charge as organizations, to make sure that we are in the community and educating folks on how government works and to not vote against our own self-interests. Which is what’s happening now,” said Chávez, who is the daughter of famed farmworker advocate Dolores Huerta and a niece of Cesar Chávez.
Trump has made clear he intends to deliver on his deportation promises, though the details of how he’ll do it and who will be most affected remain unclear. The last time Trump was elected, he moved quickly to issue an executive order that said no “classes or categories” of people who were in the country illegally could be exempt from enforcement. Tom Homan, who Trump has picked to serve as his “border czar,” said during a recent interview with Fox & Friends that immigrants who were deemed to be a threat to public safety or national security would be a priority under a new administration. But he said immigrants with outstanding deportation orders will also be possible targets and that there will be raids at workplaces with large numbers of undocumented workers.
The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
Mike Madrid, a Republican strategist, said it’s wishful thinking to believe Trump will give any special treatment to undocumented immigrants who have been living and working in the U.S. for a long time. But he’s heard that sentiment among Latino voters in focus groups.
“They believe that they are playing by the rules and that they will be rewarded for it,” Madrid said. “Republicans have never been serious about legal migration, let alone illegal migration. They’re allowing themselves to believe that for no good reason.”
Sergio Garza Castillo, who owns a gas station and convenience store in Del Rio, Texas, had long voted for Democrats. But his frustration with border policy led him to vote for Trump this year. (Gerardo del Valle/ProPublica)The Republican Party’s growing appeal to Latino voters was especially noticeable in places like Del Rio, a Texas border town. As ProPublica previously reported, Trump flipped the county where Del Rio sits from blue to red in 2020 and won it this year with 63% of the vote.
Sergio Garza Castillo, a Mexican immigrant who owns a gas station and convenience store in Del Rio, illustrates that political shift. Garza Castillo said he came to the U.S. legally as a teenager in the 1980s after his father, a U.S. citizen, petitioned and waited for more than a decade to bring his family across the border.
Ever since Garza Castillo became a U.S. citizen in 2000, he has tended to vote for Democrats, believing in their promise of immigration reform that could lead to more pathways to citizenship for long-established undocumented immigrants, including many of his friends and acquaintances.
But the Democrats “promised and they never delivered,” Garza Castillo said. “They didn’t normalize the status of the people who were already here, but instead they let in many migrants who didn’t come in the correct way.” He believes asylum-seekers should have to wait outside the country like he did.
He said he began to turn away from the Democrats in September 2021, when nearly 20,000 mostly Haitian immigrants seeking asylum waded across the Rio Grande from Mexico and camped out under the city’s international bridge near Garza Castillo’s gas station. Federal authorities had instructed the immigrants to wait there to be processed; some remained there for weeks, sleeping under tarps and blankets with little access to water and food. Garza Castillo said he and other business owners lost money when the federal government shut down the international bridge, an economic engine for Del Rio.
Some of the Haitian migrants were eventually deported; others were allowed into the U.S. to pursue asylum claims and given notices to appear in court in a backlogged immigration system that can take years to resolve a case. “That to me is offensive for those who have been living here for more than 10 years and haven’t been able to adjust their status,” Garza Castillo said.
He hopes Trump seizes on the opportunity to expand support from Latino voters by creating a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants who’ve been here for years. “If he does that,” he said, “I think the Republican Party will be strong here for a long time.”
Anjeanette Damon, Nicole Foy, Perla Trevizo and Gerardo del Valle contributed reporting.
The bipartisan US-China Economic and Security Review Commission (USCC) has proposed a “Manhattan Project” — in the style of the World War II project to develop the atomic bomb, presumably with similarly unlimited funding — to develop artificial general intelligence, so China doesn’t get there first. [USCC, PDF]
The USCC makes a point of recommending public-private partnerships for this AI “Manhattan Project.” This sort of long-running government funding just happens to be what the AI industry has been desperately seeking for some time.
The report contains extensive sections on the state of AI in China — though it’s a bit sloppy, such as discussing the nonexistent product “ChatGPT-3.” And there’s nothing in the report to back up Commissioner Jacob Helberg’s claim to Reuters that “China is racing towards AGI.” [Reuters]
The USCC presents no plan for the project except to give private companies as much money as they want to create an AGI. The proposal reads like it was pasted into the report to see if they can get the idea into serious discussion.
Helberg just happens to be a senior advisor to the CEO of Palantir and a close friend of Sam Altman at OpenAI. In fact, Altman officiated at Helberg’s 2019 wedding to Keith Rabois of the PayPal Mafia.
The USCC is also worried about China’s work in quantum computing, but stopped short of recommending unlimited funding to private companies (that is to say, IBM) for that one.
Los Angeles Unified School District was thrilled in March to announce its new student chatbot Ed, built by AI edtech AllHere Education of Boston. Sadly, AllHere shut down on June 14 — apparently broke, despite $3 million in payments from LAUSD — and Ed was shut down with it. [LA Times, archive]
AllHere declared bankruptcy in August. In September, the Southern District of New York sent a grand jury subpoena to AllHere’s bankruptcy trustee. [Bankruptcy docket; The 74]
AllHere CEO Joanna Smith-Griffin was arrested on Tuesday, charged with defrauding investors of $10 million by inflating the company’s revenue and customer base. [Raleigh News & Observer, archive]
Smith-Griffin allegedly told investors that AllHere took in $3.7 million in revenue in 2020 and had $2.5 million cash on hand. In reality, it only took in $11,000 and had $494,000 cash. She falsely claimed the New York City Department of Education and Atlanta Public Schools were customers. She was caught when AllHere’s accountant sent the company’s true financials directly to an investor. [DOJ; indictment, PDF]
LAUSD superintendent Alberto Carvalho announced he would form a task force to determine how all this could have happened. [LA Times]
It’s surely just coincidence that Carvalho happened to be an old friend of Debra Kerr, the AllHere saleswoman who landed the deal, which was pitched by Kerr’s son Richard.
Smith-Griffin was a “featured honoree” on Forbes’ 30 Under 30 list for 2021, joining such 30 Under 30 alumni as Elizabeth Holmes and Sam Bankman-Fried. She was also on Inc’s 2024 Female Founders 250 list. [Forbes, 2020; Inc]
Since the U.S. election, the Twitter-like platform Bluesky has been the beneficiary of millions of users deciding that they had finally had enough of serving time on and adding value to a platform owned by a egomaniacal charlatan increasingly devoted to promoting right-wing propaganda. (Why did those users wait so long? Haven’t they heard of the sunk-cost fallacy?) After a few years of being a relatively quiet internet backwater, Bluesky has suddenly gained traction, launching an attention gold rush in which established users are gaining thousands of followers a day and the stakes of frequent posting are beginning to come into sharper focus. The familiar species of clout chasers, thirst trappers, and controversialists are sure to rise in salience as the notification jackpots increase. The chain-letter-like, engagement-for-engagement’s-sake participatory posts are already becoming inescapable. Let’s get an inane personal question to trend! But there is also suddenly more in the way of useful links and other things to read, more useful commentary from unanticipated sources, more of what could plausibly be identified as “the discourse” becoming legible there.
Tech writers are now writing their obligatory columns (like this one) about Bluesky, many offering the carefully hedged hope that this time it will be different, this social media platform will become and really remain informative and “fun” instead of eventually taking the customary ad-supported and algorithmically propelled nosedive into the content cesspool. These writers tend to assess the overall “vibe” of a platform as if it could ever be known from an individual user’s perspective, and then extend the wish that it will improve in some arbitrary way and be less for the early adopters (typically characterized as dorks who were earnest and clueless enough to post to a platform when there was no “juice” to it) and more for the savvy pro posters who are only now deciding to stop adding to Elon Musk’s power.
On the surface, these sorts of takes tend to ask “Where are all the cool memes?” as if that were the ultimate test of significance. That means assessing new platforms only in terms of how big and all-encompassing they might become, how viral they can make the most heterogeneous of things, and how individual users might make money or amass cultural capital through them. This usually looks like Twitter nostalgia: People are posting like its 2009! Context collapse is hilarious, actually! And though Bluesky has a few idiosyncratic features — like the “starter packs” that allow users to mass-follow thematically grouped accounts — it is essentially a clone of Twitter in its functionality. Yet the evocation of old Twitter, as if all the new Bluesky users want nothing more than to go through the same motions that made “the bird site” into “the hell site” long before it devolved into X.com, “enshittifies” any new platforms in advance, assuming that for them to succeed, they will have to scale and accommodate business models that turn people into metrics-chasing self-entrepreneurs (like me!).
Likening Bluesky to some golden age of Twitter that never existed limits the collective imagination of what it could become. As Nathan Jurgenson asks (on Bluesky), could Bluesky be for anything else than Twitter redux? What functions did Twitter actually serve for pluralities of its users, and what were they contingent upon? I always thought of being on Twitter as part of my job, when I had one. For better or worse, I used it to gauge what the audiences relevant to what I was doing might be interested in, which takes were tired, and what sorts of writing was already out there. I would post a thread now and then if something I was reading — a tweet or something someone linked to — triggered an idea, and I would try to recruit writers when they posted something that could be construed as a pitch.
In the 2020s, none of that seems applicable anymore. There is not much paying work left in creating and shaping texts for readers, because, as lots of commentators are eager to point out, fewer and fewer people bother to read text and society is purportedly becoming increasingly “post-literate.” (This was a theme in some election postmortems: that a significant portion of the U.S. electorate lacks the critical thinking skills that come from better reading habits and are thus readily susceptible to demagoguery.) Passive consumption of video is the algorithmically enforced norm on most platforms, which have become more or less indistinguishable from conventional television, with a rationalized, rigidly formatted flow of content and ads. (Most of what Raymond Williams wrote about TV in 1974 applies equally well to social media today.) A recent post from Katherine Dee speculates that “social media basically brought us to something like an oral culture,” encapsulating some of the points theorists like Marshall McLuhan and Walter Ong had put forward in the late 20th century with respect to “secondary orality” and “global villages.” (It reminded me too of this Real Life essay from 2019 by L.M. Sacasas and this one from Britney Gil, which both took up the “return of oral culture” idea.)
But what seemed like secondary orality during the rise of Twitter might look differently on Bluesky. If Twitter once served to make text seem more immediate and speech-like relative to the dominant form of print media, Bluesky could be seen as a place where alienated textualists are gathering to try to help something like print culture survive. (Bluesky has no video sharing yet, though that probably is more a technical limitation than a deliberate design choice.) Ryan Broderick describes himself as “fretting over ‘the literacy wall,’ a moment at some point in the future where enough people who grew up on a text-based web have died off and taken with them any memory of enjoying reading and writing posts online” and wonders if Bluesky is “something that can survive against the tide of 90-second video clips.”
I’m not ready to break out The Gutenberg Elegies and start moaning about the “crisis of meaning” and the loss of “inwardness needed for serious reading” and that sort of thing. But it does seem that all these new Bluesky users must at some level still believe in text, still want to read, even if it is only in disjointed snatches of a few sentences at a time. They might even think it’s worthwhile to try to compose their own thoughts in a compressed, aphoristic textual style, in sentences that reward rereading, in ambiguous or multivalent sentences that hold open room for interpretation or internal contradiction. They might believe that style as it manifests in text is singular, inimitable in any other medium, exceeding the mere informational content of the writing.
It’s a rare moment when those sorts of investments are treated as potentially popular, even implicitly, but the flight to Bluesky, even though it is still dwarfed by the other big platforms, seems like such a moment. It almost seems credible that there is a broad constituency for a public sphere that is struggling to be born that is shaped fundamentally by the pleasures of the text and not video. It would be great to make the most of it before the mirage dissipates.
