the 2026 vmas felt less like a celebration of where pop culture is going and more like proof that pop culture is increasingly living off its own past.
madonna dominated the night, snoop dogg hosted, nirvana got the video vanguard award, dolly parton was honored, and taylor swift became the most awarded artist in vma history.
for an awards show that was once supposed to tell you what was next, a lot of its biggest moments came from people and legacies we already knew.
maybe nostalgia isn’t interrupting pop culture anymore. maybe nostalgia is pop culture. image
cuteroid
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claude fable 5
it's already known that from spacex to nvidia, from google to openai, it's all a circular ponzi scheme. the most important factor determining whether or not all that speculative capital investment will pay off is the productivity trend of the flagship model. but that's a long-term prediction. by the time that horizon arrives, you've taken the company public, collected money from the public, and inflated the share price as much as you want based on public expectation rather than experts. as long as the derivative of productivity sits at a certain slope.
anthropic is already used to doom-marketing along the lines of "now this model is gonna mess everyone up, don't forget to ask for it at your …
noteworthy entries of this week (2)
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2026 mtv video music awards
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bandwagon effect
the bandwagon effect is our tendency to believe, like, or do something partly because a lot of other people already are.
a restaurant has an hour long line? suddenly it must be amazing.
a random song is everywhere for three days? somehow you know the chorus.
sometimes popularity is the result of something being good. sometimes popularity is the reason we decide it’s good.