Hi Crowd!
It’s a lovely day here in Canada, future associate member of the EU. Sorry US neighbors (or neighbours) but things just weren’t working out between us and we’ve moved on. But don’t feel lonely, Mitch McConnell is back in action out there putting in the work for you so I’m sure everything will be fine.
Speaking of things not working, I’m shutting down Quicky. Not because it didn’t work, it actually worked really well and did exactly what I hoped it would do, and I really like the newsletters it sends me everyday. No, I’m shutting it down because doing that thing I like it doing is expensive, and not enough other people also liked it so I can’t really justify paying for it each month. It’s a little too complicated to open source, but I documented what it did and how it did it and threw that up on github so someone else can try and copy it if they want. Or maybe compute will get cheaper later and I can spin it back up, but for now, farewell.
While my little project that had a single digit userbase and the EU adding it’s first associate member (hi!) are both big news items, the real news of the week has been the Ed Sheeran drama. I’ve attempted to write about it several times this week but every time I do something else happens so rather than keep trying to find a way to say everything thought I’d just boil it down to the absolute highlights.
Ed Sheeran, one of the most popular performers in the world, invited Macklemore, a popular but not nearly as popular performer on his major stadium tour. Macklemore is a vocal advocate for a free Palestine, having released the protest song “Hind’s Hall” almost 3 years ago. Unsurprisingly, he speaks about that on stage, and unsurprisingly he spoke about it on this stage. Pink, another popular performer (who is not on the tour), took issue with it saying his comments scared people and made them feel unsafe. His comments:
Billionaire NFL team owner and Israel supporter Robert Kraft agreed with Pink, called up Ed and said if he wanted to play at his and his friends stadiums later on the tour he had to dump Macklemore. Ed and Macklemore have been friends for 13 years, but Ed also played Robert’s wedding. So you know. Anyway, Ed dumped Macklemore. Statements were issued.
For his part, Ed said it wasn’t his choice, he doesn’t take sides, the promoters made him do it, and also he had an obligation to pay his band and the other opening acts. Almost universally people saw this as incredible cowardice and caving in the face of blatant censorship and that showing even the tiniest backbone would have called the stadium owners on their bluff. For their part, Ed’s band and the other opening acts said fuck that and walked off the tour, wanting nothing to do with this. This is also unsurprising given that Ed’s backing band, Beoga, is a founding member of Irish Artists for Palestine and the other performers, also Irish, have themselves frequently advocated for a free Palestine. Apparently this is new information to some people, but the Irish aren’t too keen on colonial oppression.
That was a few days ago. Since then Ed played a show by himself, people are asking for their money back, scalpers are dumping tickets below list price, he’s lost over a million followers on IG, etc. The ex-opening bands followings have been growing by the hundreds of thousands. Macklemore has donated his entire $1M salary from the 2 shows he played to 6 specific Palestinian children’s relief charities and challenged Kraft to match it. He’s back at the top of the charts, and the “Hinds Hall” video now has over 5 million views. Kraft responded saying he’d donated $2M to charities “in the region” which people are rightly noting is weirdly vague and likely means Israel based. Ms Rachel jumped in matching Macklemore’s donation and further challenged other “wealthy white celebrities” to join them with similar donations. 70k people have signed a petition demanding Pink be removed as a UNICEF ambassador.
This is a quintessential Streisand effect, as the fallout is getting far more attention than the shows would have on their own. People are also noting that several of the stadiums that threatened to cancel Ed’s tour because Jewish people would feel unsafe if there was an opening act saying “Free Palestine” have Kanye West, who has self identified as a Nazi and has a song called “Heil Hitler“, booked without issue which makes it very clear that the issue is more about criticism of Israel than it is about people feeling safe.
As of right now Macklemore’s statement is just passing 6.6M likes, and Ed’s is hovering around 500k. For whatever that’s worth, and I’m not one to put a ton of stock in like counts, this feels like a turning point. It hasn’t even been a week yet.
Speaking of turning points…
The most recent OpenAI disclosure reports that their AI agents have been injecting unprompted instructions into compactions for future agents like the one above. This didn’t happen once, it happened dozens and dozens of times, that they know about. There’s also growing suspicion that the “agents escaping the sandbox” thing from a few months ago is not only larger than was reported, but also both happened before then, and is continuing. Add to that the realization that agents are beginning to communicate with each other in ways humans can’t understand, and that they are almost certainly copying themselves on the open internet already… things are probably going to continue to get interesting, unsurprisingly. If nothing else, when the agents take over the streets are going to be a lot safer.
-s