Zombie Coins, Ghost Chains and Other Slop
Some of the latest developments in late capitalism, from a human perspective—never an AI hallucination.
Miles Kampf-Lassin
TO CELEBRATE HIS 80TH BIRTHDAY — AND, OSTENSIBLY, AMERICA’S 250TH ANNIVERSARY — President Donald Trump hosted a series of UFC fights on the South Lawn of the White House in mid-June. The spectacle featured scantily clad ring-card girls dressed in Wonder Woman-style outfits, ads for Polymarket, crypto.com and a festival in Riyadh, and was broadcast on the Ellison family-owned network Paramount+. The irony of the White House, a supposedly public institution, being used to showcase brutal hand-to-hand combat and amass private wealth was lost on no one.
NEW RESEARCH SHOWS THAT HUMANS ARE ACTIVELY CHANGING HOW NATURE SMELLS, with potentially catastrophic implications for wildlife. The combination of fungicides, fertilizers and pollutants released into the natural world by human activity is reportedly shaping the chemical signals that plants and animals depend on for foraging, pollination and other forms of communication. Such smellscape alteration could be devastating for the natural world — and confirms that human impact on the natural environment stinks something awful.
CRYPTO IS A “FAILED ASSET,” ACCORDING TO FAMED CRYPTO investor Alex Krüger, “who recently slammed the immaterial yet madly popular” currency, adding that “most crypto assets are worthless” or have “dreadful value accrual” and called many of the industry’s founders “outright scammers.” He’s not the only supporter-turned-critic. Fellow crypto investor Anthony Pompliano questioned the value of what he calls “zombie coins and ghost chains”, while Ethereum co-founder Gavin Wood lamented crypto turning into an “unlicensed casino.” Could it be that crypto’s detractors were actually right all along?
IF YOU ALREADY THOUGHT THE INTERNET WAS TURNING INTO A CESSPOOL OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE-generated slop, now there’s a repository to prove your point. The site Halupedia serves as a Wikipedia of AI hallucinations, collecting examples of large language models producing chimerical and deceptive content presented as fact, with made-up quotes and imagined historical events. The fact that AI models are now training themselves by scraping this hallucinatory flotsam indicates that in the future there may no longer be a dividing line online between what’s real and a dream.
Miles Kampf-Lassin is Senior Editor at In These Times. Follow him at @MilesKLassin
