From Oaxaca, with love
A piece of art that really captures the moment
My good friend David Fenton took this photo of poignant street art in Oaxaca, Mexico. It captures the current moment and, for obvious reasons, has gone quite viral on at least one social media platform. A Nazi Elon Musk using his "Roman Salute" to puppeteer lil' Donald Trump with a Pinocchio nose. Wow.
The piece is by Yescka, a well-known Oaxacan street artist. Here is an interview with Yescka from 2016, and here is Yescka on Instagram and TikTok.
David is a fantastic photographer who captured a lot of the 1960s and 1970s through his lens. He was also mentored in public relations by Abbie Hoffman and, in 1982, started a pioneering progressive communications shop called Fenton Communications (where I was a senior vice president from 2013 to 2015).
You can read about David's life and lessons in The Activist's Media Handbook: Lessons from Fifty Years as a Progressive Agitator.
Follow David Fenton on BlueSky.
'Big Balls' and the KGB
Journalist Jacob Silverman has uncovered a fascinating historical angle to Elon Musk's takeover of the U.S. government. One of Elon's little teenage helpers at DOGE happens to be the grandson of a well-known Russian spy:
Among the cadre of DOGE engineers now rooting through the guts of the administrative state, few have attracted more curiosity than Edward “Big Balls” Coristine, a 19-year-old coder who interned for three months for Neuralink, Elon Musk’s brain implant company ...
A lot about DOGE remains unknown – like who’s officially in charge – but Coristine has email addresses at USAID and the Department of Homeland Security and was recently seen inside the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and the State Department. Across the federal government, he seems to have the run of the place.
There’s one aspect of Coristine’s background that has escaped public notice: his grandfather, Valery Martynov, was a KGB spy who played an intriguing role in a sprawling 1980s espionage drama.
Read the whole piece: Prominent DOGE Staffer Is Grandson Of Turncoat KGB Spy. Follow Jacob on BlueSky.
Jacob Silverman
Network State: 'A blueprint drawn in crayon'
Dave Karpf, an Internet Politics professor at The George Washington University, has published a scathing review of Balaji Srinivasan's 2022 book, The Network State: How to Start Your Own Country.
This half-baked and silly book has, unfortunately, been taken very seriously by certain Silicon Valley billionaires. They want to create the world Srinivasan envisions ... but do they have enough brain power to see its glaring and fatal flaws?
Srinivasan, the former chief technology officer of Coinbase and a former Andreessen Horowitz general partner, clearly thinks of himself as a genius. Karpf begs to differ, and he gives The Network State the review it deserves:
If you want to know what the Tech Barons are attempting to replace democracy with, then it is important to take Srinivasan seriously.
But Balaji is not a serious person. The book is manifestly ridiculous. It is a blueprint drawn in crayon. Balaji’s ideas are stunningly undercooked, offered with such conspiratorial self-certainty that you have to wonder whether anyone has bothered to ask him if he’s alright.
Of course, one of the saddest things about Srinivasan's book is that it's not even original. His work largely riffs off of Curtis Yarvin's which, in turn, seems to be based on a 1997 book called The Sovereign Individual: How to Survive and Thrive During the Collapse of the Welfare State, a book that had such a profound effect on Peter Thiel that he wrote the introduction to a new 2020 edition of the book. More on this soon.
Karpf concludes:
The Network State is the ranting of an unserious mind, disconnected from reality. It is bad science fiction, masquerading as bold nonfiction.
I cannot recommend reading the book. I wish I hadn’t. There are so many better ways to spend your time.
But the thing you should know about it is that it provides a blueprint-in-crayon for the government takeover that is currently under way.
The tech barons are enacting a plan. But they have not thought this plan through at all.
Read the whole post here so that you never have to read Srinivasan's book:
Dave Karpf
Or read Karpf's original BlueSky thread on the book.
And here is my original takedown of Srinivasan's feverishly authoritarian apartheid vision for San Francisco:
Gil Duran
