The frontier Anthropic & OpenAI models are only ~4 months ahead of open models — at 5x the price. “Most organizations should ideally be using open models as the default for the majority of their work, according to [a report] from Mozilla…”

Here at the DNC, we’ve been dismayed by the string of progressive and socialist candidates who’ve recently won primaries in Michigan, Colorado, and even deep-red Florida. Sure, these folks might stir up enthusiasm and make a splash online, but when they’re tested in a general election, they’re bound to lose.

These fringe upstarts are speaking unabashedly about our country’s crushing affordability crisis and utter lack of a social safety net. That’s the kind of frank, uncompromising honesty that scares independent voters away. They’ve floated ideas like abolishing prisons and taxing the ultrarich, and yeah, we sort of see where they’re coming from, but we’d never say so out loud. They’re brash and messy on social media and dress like a cultural studies faculty meeting at Brown. They’re young and charismatic and, in some cases, muscled and hunky. We don’t like that. If you’re going to be hunky, you better start talking about building bridges and donor meet-and-greets real quick, to put us at ease.

As we’ve long held, the smartest midterm strategy is to do what we’ve always done: Play it safe, tack to the center, and hope for the best. Go small and predictable, or go home—are we right? Of course we’re right. That’s why we currently have $16 million in our coffers and upwards of $17 million in debt, which should comfortably buy one to three of our hand-picked congressional contenders a spate of crippling attack ads that will run for the first few days of October.

Yeah, we know, we’re seen as boring and old and out of touch. But we’re hungry for progress. As long as it feels scripted and familiar. We’re ready to usher in profound change, abstracted into a focus-group-tested campaign slogan.

We realize we’re up against an extremist far-right machine that has $130 million in its war chest, no scruples about denying facts or undermining democratic processes, and moves in terrifying, cultish lockstep. Given this unprecedented threat that’s pushed our republic to the brink, we suppose we could break the mold and risk candidates who are novel and scrappy and even, dare we say, radical—taking a cue from Mamdani’s commanding mayoral win in New York, the enduring appeal of DSA firebrands like AOC and Bernie Sanders, the shaky showings of establishment candidates we’ve backed in recent presidential cycles, and the Mariana Trench–level unpopularity of the Democratic brand overall—but that’s not the DNC way.

When our opponents go low, we go into neutral. When they serve up a DQ Blizzard full of nails, we order sugar-free froyo in a waffle cone. When they go Napalm, we go Lysol. When they go brazenly cruel and corrupt, we mention it at a press conference. Then we have a friendly meeting with them to explore common ground.

We know Americans are angry, and according to polls, that anger cuts across parties and demographics and could be the very thing that pulls this weary, divided nation together and forges a new kind of coalition that votes on systemic issues rather than partisan identity. And what better way to harness that collective outrage than to cue up a PowerPoint about infrastructure and get into the weeds, baby?

So, let those pie-in-the-sky utopian dreamers appeal to the frustrations of Americans who might want to one day own a house or afford a root canal without missing rent. Let them project a posture of social care that directly implicates climate-denying corporations, marauding ICE agents, billionaire donors, and the reckless techno-elite. If you ask us, that’s electoral suicide. Sure, these are issues we’ll talk about to shore up the sympathies of the base, which is good politics. But we don’t actually plan to fight for them if it means rocking the boat of the status quo, even if that boat is sinking under its own weight, most of its sails are on fire, and the majority of its passengers are crammed in the hold fighting over scraps of orange peel.

So as this crucial, do-or-die election season continues to unfold, we urge you to vote sensibly. Risk normalcy. Vote your outrage, and then scratch out that vote and tell the poll workers you messed up, ask for a fresh ballot, and pick someone else. Vote for blazers, not trailblazers. Vote with your head and your gut, as if you’ve just popped a handful of Tums and a Lorazepam.

Above all, let us be your wary, unimaginative guide, despite the seductive allure of candidates who say things that actually resonate and meet the moment. We’re confident we know what’s best because we have experience and precedent on our side, which means avoiding anything scary and new that isn’t supported by big data. Trust us.

Finya Swai, reporting for The Hill two days ago:

MapQuest has surged in popularity on the app charts after the mapping service said it would not rename Lake Ontario to “Lake America” after President Trump signed an executive order changing its name.

The company said its mobile app received hundreds of thousands of downloads after it announced Thursday that the name Lake Ontario would remain on its apps, despite Trump directing the Interior Department to update the lake’s name in the Geographic Names Information System (GNIS).

By Monday morning, MapQuest had climbed to No. 1 among navigation apps in Apple’s U.S. app store and No. 4 in non-gaming apps. In Canada, which shares the lake with the U.S., the app reached No. 2 overall over the weekend. The app’s usage also jumped to roughly 50 times its normal level, according to MapQuest.

Here we are on Thursday and MapQuest still holds the #1 spot, ahead of ChatGPT, Vinted (never heard of it), “TikTok Pro - Events” (a confusing new app, apart from the main TikTok client), ESPN Fantasy Sports (the NFL season is about to start), Claude, and Gemini.

When opportunity knocks, you need to open the door. The political corner that both Apple and Google get painted into when Donald Trump asserts a new name for an established geographic feature is a huge opportunity for an underdog like MapQuest. Good for them.

These days, the conversation in tech and business, and in a lot of society, is still all AI, all the time. And one of the most fundamental questions boils down to: How do you get people to change what they’re doing in regard to AI? For people who (understandably) have moral or ethical objections to the many harms caused by Big AI, there’s the challenge of how to drive action while lacking the resources and capital of the tech tycoons who’ve driven the broad cultural push towards AI adoption.

As a result of the power differential between those pushing AI and those fighting its advances, the typical rhetorical tactic for AI critics has been to try to attach stigma to the use of AI, and to the outputs of AI systems. There is also little cultural discussion, or even mention, of alternative offerings that aren’t from the Big AI companies, so the entire narrative is framed as either using the most harmful, exploitative, damaging AI tools from the likes of OpenAI, or using nothing at all.

And for the most part, this has been pretty effective for people who have any taste or sense of culture. If you’re a creator, or engaged in creative culture, you probably either can’t stand the AI aesthetic, or feel betrayed when you find out something that was appealing to you was AI-generated or made by someone who used generative AI to create it. The only creative discipline that’s broadly an exception to this is coding, where for the most part people don’t have as many aesthetic objections, but even there, people pretty stridently object to the slop aesthetic in user interfaces and other human-facing aspects.

There are, of course, diehard cohorts of AI advocates who insist that they love the AI aesthetic and don’t mind the hyper-real look to what these systems output, but the mainstream discourse in the arts, design and creative disciplines reached a consensus some time ago, and it’s fairly stringently enforced amongst fan communities.

But shame isn’t an effective strategy for stopping the advance of Big AI as a force in society. I’ve said before that scolding people out of using these tools hasn’t worked and isn’t going to work. What I want to get at here is why it structurally can’t work — and what has to replace it.

Shame is already priced in

I wish shame and stigma were more effective ways of driving or changing behavior in society in general. It has been a project in many social circles over the last 15 years or so to remove shame as a social curb on bad behaviors, and this has largely succeeded; this is why we see the richest man in the world monetizing accounts that share child sexual abuse material on his social network, and the president of the United States having been found liable for sexual abuse, and no one holds these men to account, or is even unwilling to be seen with them. Having grown up fluent in an Asian culture, I’m well aware of how shame can shape entire communities’ functions and norms.

But in the particular case of how new technologies shape society, trying to use shame to drive behavior change isn’t an economically effective tool for curtailing the impact of bad actors. During the rise of the social networks, when we first started seeing the kinds of harms that they could cause, many activists and academics who wanted to champion alternative approaches tried to shame people out of using the then-dominant platforms. That stigma persists — you still see people today who are half-embarrassed when they talk about how they’re “still” on Facebook. But they are on Facebook.

People being embarrassed or ashamed while still using the technology does not bother the authoritarian owners of those platforms in the least, as long as they’re profiting off of those ashamed users.

That pattern repeated with the gig economy. Though the #DeleteUber movement early in the first Trump administration was briefly very effective at scaring Uber’s leadership, they quickly adapted to the criticisms people had, and most people have forgotten they were ever supposed to be angry in the first place. They knew they could weather the brief shame or stigma that was attached to using the app.

In short, the venture capitalists and CEOs of Silicon Valley have priced the costs of shame into their business plans. It may make creative communities feel good to shame people about using AI (and maybe that has some purposes for social cohesion amongst those groups), but it rarely stops people from using the platforms at all — it just makes them quieter about it.

Whenever I say this on social media, a bunch of really angry folks come into my mentions and say “you love AI and slop and why don’t you go give Sam Altman a hug” even though my bona fides of criticizing these tech tycoons go back to when the angry people were still in diapers. But I don’t fault people for having spare reservoirs of rage aimed at the harms that the authoritarian billionaires have done to their world; I just want them to aim their rage more effectively.

Are we being effective?

We have to care more about being effective than we care about being “right”. We have to care more about power and actually winning than we care about merely dunking on people. (And I mean, dunking on people is fun! It just can’t be the only thing. And it doesn’t win any converts.) I wish we would learn one goddamn lesson from our failures to stop the last several waves of tech adoption, where we’ve just kept repeating the same failing patterns, preaching to the choir with our platitudes while regular people all get fed into the insatiable user acquisition maw of big tech, social stigma be damned.

I’m lucky enough to be the kind of NYC policy nerd who saw Zohran Mamdani’s first campaign video when it came out, right after Donald Trump won a second term. It’s worth a re-watch, but in short, what he does is go to the Bronx and engage with folks in one of the areas of the city that swung hardest toward Trump during the election. And he just starts asking people what they care about, why they voted that way. One of the most remarkable things about the video is, Mamdani doesn’t argue with anybody, he just listens, and then he asks them if their life would be better if their rent were frozen, if buses were free, if childcare were affordable. Perhaps most relevant to this point, he doesn’t shame them, even though they had very obviously made a devastatingly self-defeating choice. He gave them an affirmative alternative to move toward, and in doing so, empowered both those people and himself to do something better.

This is the kind of solution that most AI critics are not allowing for right now when they only picture a shame-based corrective to individual people’s use of AI. It is possible to build human-centric, empowering tools and platforms that are owned by the people instead of by billionaire tycoons, that are responsible about the environment and with people’s data and privacy, that are accountable to the communities that they serve. If we engaged every person who made some AI slop and said, “would you rather have tools that help you make something amazing, and brought you into a community of creators?” I don’t think anybody would say no.

And truthfully, I think two big reasons why critics don’t use that framing instead are due to laziness and arrogance. It takes a lot more time and effort to engage with people over time and to bring them into community. It’s a lot easier to dunk on them, and then return to one’s existing community of peers who will praise you for saying how ugly that person’s slop was. But that won’t stop the Big AI companies.

We need a new theory of change if we care more about stopping the harms of Big AI than we care about feeling righteous. The good news is that it already exists, in pieces: there are tactics for winning the platform war, there are direct actions that ordinary people have already used successfully, and there are alternatives being built right now that are worth pointing people toward. What’s missing isn’t the alternative. It’s our willingness to offer it to people instead of just yelling at them.

We live in a world of ordinary abundance & luxuries only dreamed of in centuries past: music on demand, photographs, books, eyeglasses, refrigeration, vaccination, bicycles, and the washing machine.