Those crypto boys are at it again, this time proposing a giant, 450-foot-tall statue on of San Francisco Bay’s Alcatraz Island, according to local outlet KRON4. The statue would be of Prometheus, which the promoters call “the symbol of bold transgression in service of human advancement,” according to the promotional website, who “imbued Man with ingeniousness, indefatigable optimism and grit in service of great vision” and “represents the spirit of innovation and courage for the purpose of building.”

The project seems silly at first, but the deeper I looked, the uglier this got. The writing they’re publishing is unapologetically fascistic, and at least one article appears to be written by an alt-right academic. And when members of the Trump administration and Young Republicans have been caught texting pro-Nazi stuff, it’s no surprise the private sector is right there with them. Scratch a MAGA supporter and a fascist bleeds.

This west coast Statue-of-Liberty-but-for-dudes came from a nonprofit run by Ross Calvin, who founded a bitcoin company and the American Colossus Foundation, which is “dedicated to inspiring a cultural renaissance of civilizational power through the virtues of creativity, self-sovereignty and future-thinking.”

The statue represents their dark vision of America’s future, built in San Francisco, “the spearpoint for Western leadership of the technological future,” stepping over the Bay’s radical past to replace it with Silicon Valley. Building over Alcatraz is part of the ideological program too. They call the former prison a “Ceaucescu[sic]-style side-show… it symbolizes bleakness and regression, of what happens to a city and a society when ideological degeneration takes root. A mockery of our people and our ways.” I agree that we need to sweep away America’s carceral excesses, but I suspect I have different reasons.

Alcatraz is also framed in terms of a tired right-wing narrative of American decline: “The jewel in the heart of the most beautiful harbor in the world… purpose-built for glorious optimism… is yet squandered.” I’m not sure what is optimistic about a prison.

The statue will be surrounded by a “Prometheion Museum” on the island, which is vaguely pitched as a right-wing science museum where “visitors will immerse in the psychological, emotional, and mythological experience of creative industrial, technological and artistic breakthrough.” The monument will be backed by a “bitcoin treasury” with a scammy “the more you put in, the more you get out” promise: “The higher the treasury value, the better the perks we’ll be able to offer—turning participation into a enjoyable, real-world reward arrangement.”

Calvin is planning to present his “Colossus of Codes” to the White House in January, with a $450 million dollar price tag and deadline of America’s 250th, next July 4th. It’s logistically far-fetched. Alcatraz’s island would need to be reclassified, and you’d have to get Don Trump and his hogmen to stop trying to reopen the prison. Which would take convincing Trump that The Rock was fictional so, good luck.

This Prometheus project is more than civically minded businessmen proposing public art, but rather deeply tied to some of the ugliest strains of alt-right thinking.

Why a statue of this Greek myth? Prometheus is often seen as the patron saint of innovative risk, but there are some parts of the myth that the tech bros are overlooking. (I’m thinking of having bumper stickers made that say, “Media Literacy: It’s Essential” or maybe “Neglecting Media Literacy? Not Even Once.”)

Popularly, Prometheus has represented striving and the daring mad genius (see Frankenstein’s subtitle), but like most Greek myths, Prometheus pays for his hubris too. There’s always comeuppance and tragedy when treading on the gods’s domain (see Frankenstein’s ending).

The site has a long series of articles and manifestos explaining their reasoning. They’re long and self-important, but also darkly fascistic. They reveal a gauzy capitalist and chauvinist worldview that is part Ayn Rand, part He Man. Phrases like “A lightning rod for the noble destiny of The West” and “The Agora Of American Technological Humanism” are littered about alongside weird AI images.

The site also features long articles titled things like “Woke Women Against the West” and “The Jacksonian Moment,” all of them ugly and stupid ramblings typical of the right-wing’s boy philosophers. In this world, feminism is “a form of retardation diametrically opposed to the promethea or forward-thinking,” the Statue of Liberty has been “misappropriated into an icon of open borders and of an illegal mass migration,” and “The Taliban and Antifa are close cousins.” It would all be silly if they weren’t also full of ominous phrases like “this realm belongs to us” and “the only justification of sovereign power is to secure the liberty of those individuals to pursue their enterprise.”

The manifesto is littered with stuff like this, mixing high-flying rhetoric and references with base culture war blathering. A typical passage:

The Promethean, to which all are deeply called to aspire, has no tolerance for the pseudo moral outrage which demands so-called “social justice” by valorizing disability and resentfully desecrating everything that which memorializes the achievement of those who excelled in their endeavors. The Promethean is a triumphant calling, not a mugger in an underpass.

These essays don’t seem to have bylines, but the article “You Can’t Tear This Down,” includes a reference to “My essay ‘Prisoners of Property and Propriety,’” which led me to this alt-right academic, who has a long history of collaborating with white nationalists like Richard Spencer. Jacobin wrote a long article about his work called “Aliens, Antisemitism, and Academia,” but suffice it to say, his interests in fascism overlap a lot with this statue project.

This Prometheus project is more than civically minded businessmen proposing public art, but rather deeply tied to some of the ugliest strains of alt-right thinking.

In the project’s “manifesto,” Prometheus is “the first freedom fighter,” launching into a long, Randian ramble about the supremacy of will, intention, and forethought. Elsewhere, Prometheus is described as the embodiment of a narrowly defined “Spirit of the West”: “He does not ask permission. He acts. He builds. He suffers for it, yes—but he never apologizes.” Prometheus is the unshackled man who shouldn’t worry about consent or consequence, the very vision of the self-justifying right-wing idiot.

These Prometheans have no vision for collectivity, solidarity, or democracy. They can’t seem to imagine that someone else might have agency, that someone else might be chained to the rock and arbitrarily punished.

The Prometheus story as interpreted in this alt-right, tech bro fantasy isn’t the only reading of the myth, of course. Many telling of the myth make clear that Prometheus only had to steal fire from Zeus because his meddling ruined it for all of us in the first place. The story starts because Prometheus tries to con Zeus by offering the head god a choice of two sacrifices: gross entrails hiding prime cuts of beef or appetizing fat hiding bones. Zeus goes for the more pleasing wrapping and ends up with inedible bones. This trick really pisses Zeus off, and he takes fire away from not just Prometheus, but all of humanity.

This is a lesson I wish the right and tech would think more about: making decisions for the rest of us can have disastrous outcomes. Thinking for yourself is ruinously selfish. This part of the tale feels American in other ways, too: our fondness for advertising and confidence men, our unwillingness to share, and our love of getting one over on the boss.

Prometheus later steals fire back from the gods to right his wrong, but Zeus retaliates again by unleashing Pandora and her trouble-filled jar, making Prometheus indirectly responsible for the opening of Pandora’s box. The tech industry could stand to think more long term and imagine worse case outcomes.

Zeus ultimately punishes Prometheus by chaining him to a rock and sending an eagle to eat his liver every day. The organ grows back by night, and the cycle repeats, forever. In the manifesto, this is seen as tyranny punishing the willful individual:

…the eagle devouring his liver is an expression of the tyrant Zeus seeking to do what tyrants do: degenerate the creative, forward-thinking nature of Man so he may be supplicated, and to appropriate the superior Promethean powers of precognition, projection, and vision for himself. His nightly healing symbolizes the inborn and relentless power of Man for revitalization and regeneration, his inalienable creative capacity.

It’s a narrow, individualistic reading that reaches for grievance and victimhood. The rights of the willful, self-determined man are the only concern, and the punishment reduced to jealousy or fear. It’s close to the “Dual State” system of justice, where the law is bifurcated to protect some and punish others.

These Prometheans have no vision for collectivity, solidarity, or democracy. They can’t seem to imagine that someone else might have agency, that someone else might be chained to the rock and arbitrarily punished. And there is no room to imagine that the authors may themselves be guilty of suppressing the rights of others.

For this techno-Prometheus, they can’t imagine the eagle as just. But we could also imagine the eagle as the invisible hand of the market ripping the guts out of tech’s failures: the metaverse, NFTs, or investors who have lost billions in shady coins. Or more hopefully, the American eagle taxing and regulating an out-of-control industry.

Aeschylus’s telling of the myth includes the detail that Prometheus has a role as a data harvester of sorts, armed with information that helps Zeus and the Titans come to power, but also information about Zeus’s eventual downfall. The ACF sees this as the power of foresight, but we might also imagine Prometheus as patron of whistleblowers who are leaking info on the most powerful.

The story ACF is telling about Prometheus combines the hustle culture hype of a LinkedIn post with the racist and ethnocentric reductionism of alt-right MAGA. The ugliest parts of the manifesto and blogs are their total embrace of Manifest Destiny. The statue is referred to as “The Flame Of Manifest Destiny” and Prometheus’s story is framed as its “mirror.”

In their simplified telling, America’s brutal and exterminating westward expansion is valorized as the taming and civilizing “purpose” of a nation expanding across “untamed continent as a canvas.” As the man who imposes his will on others, Prometheus is

THE American icon… the animating energy within Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, and Thomas Paine, within Jobs, Westinghouse, Wright, Tesla, Fulton and Ford… like them, Prometheus is a culture-builder and the first civilizer.

White guys brought culture and civilization, and that’s the only story worth telling. The right is louder and prouder about their love of America’s racist, segregationist hierarchies, and they’ve come up with a statue to match it.

I’d hoped that as a nation, we’d started to turn the page on bad statues, but leave it to the crypto guys to boldly reinvent a worse version of something that already exists.

Image from www.americancolossus.org

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The post » What the Fascist Tech Bros Get Wrong About Prometheus appeared first on Our Story Insight.

They cheered a completely sentient president who took office promising to enact a bold agenda of tax cuts, deregulation and un-woking college campuses, including Ivy League institutions many of them attended.

Then came the trade war. Trump is not only blowing up the markets (aka their livelihoods), they fear, but the economy and probably his presidency along with GOP control of Congress when the midterms come next year.

He could even be paving the way for the word-salad queen, Kamala Harris to re-emerge in 2028.

I’m not saying I subscribe to this doom and gloom. I hold out hope that The Donald will live up to his wheeler-dealer rep and make sure those very stiff tariffs on every trading partner in the world really are “reciprocal,” as he said they would be when announcing the move this past week.

The hope is they will be modified downward amid a flurry of negotiation with countries that should have as much to lose as we do. Markets will rebound as fast as they’ve been tanking. The economy will solidify around his tax cuts and deregulation.

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But here’s what the naysayers keep reminding me: China could suck it up for a while. They’ve hit us with their own sanctions, hoping to crater our economy while it plays a long game. After all, their “president for life,” Xi Jinping, isn’t exactly ­going anywhere.

Europe might do the same, as could Canada and Mexico. They might think they can get more out of Trump if he has a severely compromised economy to work with.

Even scarier, say these tariffs aren’t a “reciprocal” negotiating tool for Trump to take down our perpetually large trade deficits. He really believes they’re great for the economy.

Rigid adviser

Their nightmare scenario has Trump firmly in the camp of his ideologically rigid economic adviser Peter Navarro, a tariff evangelist, who for years has been predicting how the levies will magically restore all those lost factory jobs and remake the economy of 2025 into one that resembles the 1960s.

He’s totally aligned with Howard Lutnick, his voluble (and increasingly annoying) protectionist commerce secretary. Lutnick is an odd duck; he’s a former brokerage chief who wasn’t on the tariff soap box until he started vying for a job with Team Trump.

Now he’s trying to convince markets how the federal government can somehow plug a $2 trillion budget deficit and grow an economy with tariffs.

It’s not a good look, or the markets wouldn’t be going haywire. How can you plug a budget deficit with tariffs if those tariffs even momentarily weaken economic growth and tax receipts decline? Note to Howie: Simple logic says you can’t.

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Another layer added to their world of worries: They say Trump doesn’t appear to want to listen to Scott Bessent, his erudite treasury secretary. Bessent spent years gauging the intricacies of the global markets as a hedge fund trader. He certainly understands capital flows. He knows what happens when countries stop trading with each other and adjust violently to price shocks in the form of trade barriers: Less money flows into their economies, and you get inflation because foreign goods will immediately cost more.

Last I checked, that’s called “stagflation,” and if you grew up in the 1970s like I did, you know it’s no fun.

Bessent is watching the bond market and how the yield on the 10-year bond is falling below 4%, a sure sign that some smart people think this trade stuff will crush growth. I hear he’s quietly trying to outflank ­Navarro and Lutnick before the price shocks turn into inflation.

Whatever he’s doing obviously isn’t working, the cynics remind me. Bessent is either in the doghouse, or has been reduced to Trump’s in-house lap dog.

Keep in mind the Wall Street crowd misread Trump before so they might not be the best predictor here. They thought he was all bluster on trade; he would leave tariffs for last, maybe when the economy was humming.

He didn’t — as we’re now all so painfully aware.

That’s why I still think Trump will make a deal when he sees many more 1,000-plus-point declines in the Dow (or 2,000-plus drops like on Friday) and companies ramping up layoffs. Going cold turkey on trade will do that. The logical thing to do is negotiate and declare victory, and Trump loves to win.

Pragmatic dealmaker?

A caveat to my optimism was provided by a friend of mine who knows Trump well. This mutual friend recently explained to me that yes, Trump is the ultimate pragmatist and dealmaker, except maybe when it comes to curing our trade deficits. He hates that countries screwed us for so long, and over the years he’s come to believe that tariffs can work economic miracles.

That’s why he didn’t negotiate and instead opted for the tariff sledgehammer last week. He doesn’t see tariffs as a tax on goods that will be passed on to the American people and cause inflation, but a way to make US goods cheaper over time as we produce more here.

He sees the American people being consumers of our own cooking. In other words, he might not be so keen on negotiating trade peace.

God help us if I’m wrong and my pal is right.

The post Trump is shaking up the stock market — and can still prove naysayers wrong appeared first on Our Story Insight.

Welcome to Today in Books, our daily round-up of literary headlines at the intersection of politics, culture, media, and more.

AI search engines cite incorrect news sources at an alarming 60% rate, study says

This study by the Columbia Journalism Review finds that AI search engines not only get it wrong most of the time (to the tune of 60% of the time), they are also pretty confident in the answers they give that turn out to be wrong. This largely matches my own experience using LLMs for search-related things: you just cannot trust it. Now, how wrong are the answers people finding using more traditional search engines is an interesting question I don’t know the answer to, but this study suggests that even regular Google results are worse than they used to be. Not great.

Richard Scarry and the art of children’s literature

Chris Ware (Building Stories) offers a lovely and informative appreciation of Richard Scarry on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of Cars and Trucks and Things That Go that turns into a miniature history of children’s books moving from luxury gift items to the everyday objects we have come to now. There are little gems throughout like this one:

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“…Scarry continued to produce books for another two decades, all of them featuring animals in place of humans. This actually caused a mild panic at Random House when What Do People Do All Day? was being published, with the staff asking: Shouldn’t it be called What Do Animals Do All Day? The dispute was short-lived since the answer (“No!”) was so obvious, but it hints at something important about the narrative energy on which Scarry’s engine runs.”

I recommend bookmarking and reading later if you can’t get to it right now.

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2005 Pride & Prejudice To Be Re-Released Into Theaters on April 20th

Before the Knightly/McFayden P&P, the Colin Firth BBC adaptation was the canonical version. I don’t think that’s true anymore. This one is a regular rewatch for me, with McFayden, Sutherland, Knightley, and Pike being the repeat draws (though Tom Hollander’s Mr. Collins and Dame Dench’s Lady Catherine being wonderful villians to hate). The book will always be primary for me, but I have to admit that film can do things that books sometimes can’t, and for me there is no better example than McFayden/Darcy’s hand flex in the climactic meeting with Lizzy. I don’t think I caught this in theaters twenty years ago, so this gives me a chance to remedy that.

“Considering book bans are as much a historical as modern phenomenon, you might not be surprised to learn that historical fiction isn’t exempt from censorship, either. Just because something is historically accurate or important doesn’t mean it’s safe. These four banned historical fiction books tell important stories about the history of this country and others — but there are people out there who don’t want you to read them. Which is, I think, all the more reason you should.”

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