A trip to the cinema

The hottest ticket in Brooklyn last Friday was for a 7pm showing of 2007's Michael Clayton. I was surprised and a bit pleased to see how packed the theater was as I walked in with two friends; that night, I bumped into two more friends who also attended the screening, which was programmed as part of BAM's "Corporate Thrillers" retrospective series. It was a honey trap for cinephiles of a certain type, clearly. That said, judging by the smattering of gasps as certain events unfolded on screen, it seems a few first timers had been pulled into the theater as well.

I'm only a recent fan of the film myself, having watched it for the first time within the past two years. From Tom Wilkinson's opening monologue, I was hooked. It will probably come as no surprise to anyone reading this that I found myself relating a little too much to the ramblings of Arthur Edens, the brilliant, fraying lawyer so deftly portrayed by Wilkinson.

"I realized, Michael, that I had emerged not from the doors of Kenner, Bach, and Ledeen, not through the portals of our vast and powerful law firm, but from the asshole of an organism whose sole function is to excrete the… the… the poison, the ammo, the defoliant necessary for other, larger, more powerful organisms to destroy the miracle of humanity. And that I had been coated in this patina of shit for the best part of my life."

A man undergoing a mental break while also waking up to the realities of the fucked up deal with the devil he made? Without a hint of irony, I love to see it.

For the past few days, I've had the opportunity to sit and think about the film I just saw a bit more than I've had for much of the rest of the year. That same Friday as the screening, I wrapped up a six week freelance stint that kept me busy and mostly happy–I've had a few such blocks of such work this year, a big reason why I haven't been writing here. In the summer that did dry up for a spell, but I was simply too depressed then to put on the page what I was thinking and feeling about the events of the world unspooling around me, all while I sat at home on the couch sending out job applications and refreshing my inbox in the hopes of finding new availability requests. But many things have happened of late, some of them even good, and along comes Michael Clayton as a catalyst for whatever passes as my writing process in 2025.

Allow me a moment to geek out about Tony Gilroy and his ear for language, or more specifically for certain sounds in words. One of the many small pleasures of the second season of Andor, released earlier this year, is the introduction of the term "foliated kalkite." Set aside what it refers to for a moment and roll the syllables around in your mouth for a bit. The character actor who introduces the term to the show makes a meal out of delivering it. Foliated kalkite, we learn, is a mineral essential to the creation of the Death Star, and the evil empire plans to destroy a whole planet to get it–and since they don't have a Death Star yet, they have to go about that destruction the long, slow, sneaky way.

In Michael Clayton, written and directed by Gilroy some 15 years earlier, we're treated to a similarly satisfying term: Culcitate. Culcitate is the weed killer product at the center of a massive class action lawsuit against the film's Monsanto stand-in corporation, U-North. Edens, burnt out from a cutthroat life in big law and beginning to spiral without his medication, comes across an internal document about Culcitate that the company went to great lengths to hide because it confirms bluntly and plainly that company leadership knew Culcitate had a high potential to cause cancer, as it did to the over 400 plaintiffs in the case.

Midway through the film, Edens goes on another rant targeted right at the company, which at this point has wiretapped his phone. Wilkinson, against a soundtrack of aggressively bland corporate new-age muzak, snarls a righteous monologue about the confirmed dangers of Culcitate into a phone receiver. He wields the product's name with precise enunciation and undisguised ire.

It is my favorite scene out of anything I've seen Gilroy make, in no small part because of the clear and obvious tragedy of it all. Edens is a man who, in desperation, is confronting an evil he once acted on the behalf of in the world head-on, and he does it with his wit and words. His appeal is not hopeful, but defiant–if, as they've so far demonstrated, the people responsible for covering up Culcitate's culling of human life are incapable of feeling any real shame, then Edens is determined to make them at least sit with that.

For his act of bravery, he's killed by hitmen in his loft the next morning.

When it comes to changing the world, movies and TV shows only have so much power. If anything, I kind of find myself agreeing with the notion that they've proven to be more effective at doing harm than good.

We're living in the outcome of an ideological battle represented by The West Wing on one side and The Apprentice on the other–or, if you want to jog into the 2010s and toward media explicitly designed to address the real world, a battle between Last Week Tonight and InfoWars. I'm not a doomer, but I wouldn't fault anyone for concluding that the latter camp won pretty conclusively.

And as if that wasn't enough, the same billionaire class and their attendant wannabes hoping for a windfall of their own are attempting to excise meaning and intent from the creation of all media. I'm talking about the push for generative AI, of course.

Not a day goes by that I'm not a little bit glad (or often very, very glad) that I no longer write about tech for a living, not least of which because doing so would require thinking more about the AI boom and practically guaranteed bust than I'd like to.

I'm not alone, clearly. To steer this post (several paragraphs and three sections in…) back momentarily to the subject this blog was originally about, anti-AI sentiment was prominent in response to last week's announcement of new Steam hardware, including Valve's long-awaited second VR headset. Across the comments sections of several independent YouTube channels that were invited out to Valve prior to the hardware announcement, I kept seeing praise for two things that I see as sides of the same coin: one, a tech announcement with zero features labeled or hyped as having to do with AI, and two, a focus on having the hardware's actual designers introduce the products instead of a PR person or a company executive.

People are broadly tired of being sold some lines by slick, well-rehearsed executives and their ilk. If not in tech, then surely in some other area of modern life. Bastards abound, and my hunch is that even an asshole with a pair of Meta Ray-Bans he's super enamored with can probably think of a rich person or two he'd like to never hear from again.

In their pursuit of ever greater wealth and influence, however, it's just about impossible to be well-informed about the state of the world and not be made constantly, painfully, insultingly hyperaware of the schemes and antics of the world's worst billionaires.

Only in the delusional minds of conspiracy theorists do the rich control the world from the shadows; in reality, they do everything out in the open, brazenly. They go on Joe Rogan to fail at delivering jokes, they have their most idiotic thoughts broadcast out to the world by a docile press dressing them as bold predictions, and they see so little possibility of ever facing consequences that they gleefully volley back poorly written emails about their open secret criminal conduct ("sent," labeled lest you forget these bloodsuckers are illiterate and tech-illiterate, "from their iPhones").

If there's a part of Michael Clayton that I feel dates the film, it's that the despicable CEO of U-North Don Jeffries doesn't take up more oxygen in every scene he's in. He has very few lines; the audience is told that Jeffries directly referred Tilda Swinton's Karen Crowder to the hitmen she later awkwardly orders to kill Edens, but we never see him getting his hands dirty like that.

In this sense he's a very old school character, and as a mostly silent wheeler-and-dealer Jeffries is unrecognizable next to our present's growing parade of blathering dipshit executives, all of whom seem to have melted their brains through overexposure to chummy group chats and bias-confirming chatbots.

Here's another reason why I'm glad I'm not getting paid to write about tech, and by extension AI: I don't think I could stomach having to think about the human cost of it so regularly.

Eddy Burback's recent hour-long documentary descent into playing along with the worst life advice produced by ChatGPT is bad enough on its own: playing the part of a lonely, gullible, and increasingly paranoid man, Burback demonstrates the tendency of OpenAI's GPT 4.0 model (the one that staunch, overly attached advocates loudly protested the removal of) to cheerlead and egg on increasingly deranged and dangerous behavior. Burback has dabbled in tech criticism before, but his ChatGPT odyssey manages to be so bleak you could hardly believe it's from the same channel that previously produced videos about road tripping to every Rainforest Cafe and Margaritaville location.

At least those chain restaurants haven't convinced people to kill themselves. That I know of.

Yes, personally, I find the subject of "chatbot psychosis" and the attendant deluge of reporting on how products like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini–really all of them–are being widely used as a sounding board for thoughts of self harm to all be too much for me to sit with on a regular basis. It makes me sick to my stomach.

Why the fuck would anyone want to waste their time and brainpower litigating whether AI-generated email responses are good, bad, or net-neutral when OpenAI itself estimates that over 1 million people are sending messages to ChatGPT that indicate suicidal ideation every week? What reason is there to defend an industry that's at once built upon the theft of human work and which is now trying to use statistics and marketing speak to excuse itself from blame when its utterly unnecessary products lead to loss of human life?

Writing about tech from a measured or cautiously enthusiastic perspective is not at all the same as being a litigator working on behalf of a massive multinational corporation that's up to no good. The disappointment I feel toward so many journalists who could and should be doing better in this moment (or in previous moments… social media, crypto, the metaverse, and so on) is minuscule compared to the ill will I reserve for people like, say, Alex Spiro, Elon Musk's top lawyer. A large factor in my decision to leave journalism altogether was the intractable difficulty of making a living in the field at all while still resisting unsavory pressures and convenient compromise.

And yet. There are so many reporters and editors evidently happy to look at the public actions and unabashed desires of tech's ruling elite while refusing to pass any kind of judgement on them that I begin to wonder if they're simply writing for each other. People fed up with the state of the world aren't going to bother reading all that apologia, and the people on top who benefit from it would sooner read Grok-generated bullet points of all that coverage for fear of a drop of woke worming its way through.

"The stench of it and the sting of it would, in all likelihood, take the rest of my life to undo. And you know what I did? I took a deep cleansing breath, and I put that notion aside. I tabled it. I said to myself, as clear as this may be, as potent a feeling as this is, as true a thing as I believe I witnessed today, it must wait. It must stand the test of time!"

They're not at all the same in terms of culpability, I tell myself. But on good days, days where I feel equipped to look at the world and to try adding something of real, human value back into it, I also think about how ridding myself of the stench, so to speak, has to be part of that process.

What I find most galling about the tech-driven, AI-caked state of the world as I see it is that many of the key players forcing this on us all aren't just hypocrites or opportunists–they also live in fear and contempt of the world they've shaped.

You see it in every morbid missive and monologue about AGI, a boogeyman which only the really stupid amongst the überrich think could possibly arise from current LLM tech. The savvier ones know the real risk is posed by managing to sell the public on AGI snake oil that'll promptly accelerate the degradation of, well, everything. Par for the course, the instinct they then follow is to become the one selling the oil.

It's the most infuriating form of cowardice I can think of: being so powerful and self-interested that you work to make the world a worse place while taking great pains to shield yourself from the consequences.

Hired some smart people for the express purpose of trying to make your products safer for the public, and now you're mad they're pushing back on you? Fire them and pretend their research meant nothing. Destabilize whole industries and countries with your disruptive practices? Pay for ample private security in case anyone so much as tries to sneeze in your direction. Have you advertised all sorts of dubious and dehumanizing ed-tech advancements as the future of schooling–AI the worst of them all–and now you're worried by the outcomes? Whatever, man: if you've got enough money, you can start an illegal private school in your Palo Alto neighborhood and even your otherwise ultra-wealthy neighbors will have a hard time getting you to stop.

When they're not busy giddily ruining the lives of working people, the billionaire techies appear to live in mind-warping terror at the thought of having to live and die like those they push around. To nod at another environmental justice film (shout out Soderbergh, who produced Clayton), it's like the scene in Erin Brockovich where the PG&E lawyer gets spooked by a glass of hexavalent chromium-laced water.

You did this, and now you have the indignity to act so scared of what you've done?

Like I alluded to near the top, good things have been happening recently. New York and Seattle both have progressive mayor elects that the establishment did everything to stop and failed to. In other recent American races, the fascist right got creamed because nothing in the past year has managed to convince sane people that there's anything behind that movement beyond terrifyingly racist, bigoted hatred. Keir Starmer's feckless anti-immigrant politics is failing spectacularly across the pond. Dick Cheney's dead.

Even against that backdrop, though, I walked out of Friday's screening of Michael Clayton thinking about how the film is such a fantasy. Gilroy is certainly aware of that: in Eden's mania-fueled attempt to undo the Culcitate defense he built up, he latches onto a children's high fantasy book loved by Clayton's son.

Later, when Clayton reveals himself to Karen Crowder after the botched carbombing she ordered on him, George Clooney's cool, confident energy that's been carefully dulled throughout the film now shines bright: his Clayton becomes all effortless quips and stern, righteous anger now, invigorated by taking Edens' mission to its conclusion in his memory and in memory of all those poisoned by Culcitate.

Clayton then shoots past fantasy and straight toward the mythic, invoking Shiva the God of death just as Edens did before him. Crowder folds dramatically. Don Jeffries emerges from a board meeting only to make an ineffectual call for his hired security–instead it's the cops coming to take the bad guys, a CEO and his general counsel, away.

This does not tend to happen in real life. Culcitate is as real as foliated kalkite, which is to say it's as made up as the Death Star and its conveniently exposed reactor shaft. When poisons are released into the real world, there are sometimes consequences and a semblance of justice, yes: Erin Brockovich is a real person who fought on the behalf of victims in the town of Hinkley who were exposed to hexavalent chromium.

But PG&E also still exists. California didn't even formally recognize hexavalent chromium as a cancer-causing substance until almost two decades after the settlement was reached. The remediation of the groundwater that PG&E poisoned, if it's ever finished, will last for at least a few more decades.

You've likely already seen enough people comparing generative AI to asbestos or leaded gasoline. So.

If I allow myself any sort of wish regarding generative AI's prominence in this moment, it's for an outcome where it more or less vanishes away if and when a crash comes. If only we could see the tide of slop recede as quickly as NFTs before it. Let the most prominent historical record of the 2020s AI boom be an archive of the disgusting propaganda churned out by the Trump DHS, standing as a testament to the howling moral and intellectual void at the heart of both this administration and the "AI art movement."

Instead, though, I think it's more likely that we're going to be dealing with the effects of this ill-considered gold rush for a long time. Even if the companies collapse and the datacenters go dark all at once, enough damage has already been done that it's time to start thinking about what AI remediation might look like in practice.

The process won't be sexy or exciting. It won't have the fury and momentum of a Gilroy-penned monologue. It'll involve a good amount of bureaucracy and compromise, and likely some criminally low settlement sums and too-small consequences for the people pushing the poison.

If we're lucky, though, it could also look more like the steps taken to get New York City its mayor elect, a process I'm proud to have been a small part of: one where people banded together and did the unglamorous, often nerdy work of talking to their neighbors to advocate for systems that work for everybody. In the eventual aftermath of this moment, I hope we can all take steps to undo the stench and the sting of the world around us.