Making Air Vibrate ...composer, writer, publisher & entrepreneur, owner of Lux Nova Press & classical music journal EarRelevant.
Atlanta, Georgia, USA
Joined July 2009
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Mark Gresham retweeted
Rant: Got last minute travel today, so won't be doing a Democracy Files drop today.
But saw that the person at the center of the files posted about "unimaginable horrors."
Let me tell you why I got interested in "democracy" in the first place.
I've told this story many times, but here again: I was DOGE adjacent from the very beginning. I was recruited by several DOGE teams in January 2025, because I was excited about the opportunity to finally cut spending and taming the national debt.
Bu then - Tesla Takedown protests happened. People got so worked up that they were firebombing innocent Tesla owners. A viral website with a Molotov cocktail cursor prominently featured my husband's address. I was doxxed in the middle of that, and forced to flee the state and homeschool my children.
That's when I started researching and writing UNELECTED. I quickly found the groups organizing and funding the civil unrest were all about "democracy." It made no sense to me. DOGE wasn't overturning elections. They were cutting obviously silly awards - given our national deficit, who would object to that?
Silly me!
Turns out "democracy" means diffused rule by unelected people, and all that USAID money going to marginalized groups to build a "civil society" is the foundation of that. So the immune system of "civil unrest" can be activated anytime, and terrorize anyone who dares to step out of line. Such as DOGE employees. Such as me and my family.
That research trail led me all the way to DemAID (now DRG), a group of ex-USAID officers. Led by you and Ro Tucci. @iamlisalogan and @SKDoubleDub33 found DemAID on video taking credit for these protests.
But this isn't about me. This is about the United States. And about the dozens of countries wrecked by color revolutions. You aren't solving polarization. You are the source of polarization, because in the process of building "civil society," you are displacing people's inborn allegiances and training them up to attack the very foundations a nation are founded upon.
Nor is this about revenge or anger. I'm calling on everyone to pray that no more damage is done, and that we can find a path forward that preserves our Constitutional Republic.
A consequence of AI making possible Universal Basic Income is that it may not actually result in simple UBI, but a grossly inflated layered and conditional welfare state. This alternative scenario is more politically and institutionally likely than clean UBI--one that we should beware as a society.
Why Conditional Layered Welfare May Prevail
Existing welfare states are already built as stacks of targeted, rules-based programs (unemployment insurance, food assistance, housing vouchers, disability, tax credits, etc.) with eligibility tests, work requirements, reporting obligations, and behavioral conditions. Expanding or digitizing those systems is administratively and politically easier than replacing them with an unconditional payment to everyone. Policymakers often prefer targeting because it:
• Appears fiscally cheaper (excludes higher earners and those deemed "non-compliant" with government and bureaucracy).
• Preserves political leverage: benefits can be adjusted, clawed back, or conditioned on job search, training, sobriety, location, spending patterns, or other criteria.
• Aligns with public opinion in many places that still favors “work requirements” and distinctions between “deserving” and “undeserving” recipients, but requires increased bureaucracy and government control.
AI and data systems themselves make "enforcement" cheaper and more precise. Automated income verification, spending tracking via digital payments, location data, social-media signals, and predictive models can reduce administrative friction while increasing monitoring capacity. This lowers the historical cost of conditionality, but also the speed and reach of government control.
Likely Effects
• Control and dependency: Without broad labor-market bargaining power, individuals become more dependent on state-administered benefits whose terms can be altered. Conditions can extend beyond traditional work rules into areas such as compliance with public-health measures, speech, or association, if political incentives shift.
• Complexity and error: Layered systems generate high administrative overhead, benefit cliffs (where earning slightly more loses more in benefits than is gained in wages), and frequent denials or delays. AI can reduce some paperwork but can also scale erroneous or opaque decisions.
• Social and political dynamics: Conditionality can reinforce stigma and divide populations into monitored recipient groups versus others. It may dampen certain forms of unrest in the short term through targeted support, while creating longer-term grievances if large cohorts feel arbitrarily restricted. Historical and contemporary examples of highly conditional or digitally mediated benefit systems show both tighter compliance and episodes of public backlash when rules are perceived as arbitrary or punitive.
• Fiscal and efficiency trade-offs: Targeting can concentrate resources on those with the lowest incomes, but take-up rates are often incomplete, and administrative costs plus behavioral responses (people adjusting work or reporting to stay eligible) reduce net efficiency. Unconditional payments avoid some of these distortions but face higher headline costs.
The exact outcome depends on political coalitions, fiscal constraints, the pace and distribution of AI-driven job displacement, and whether productivity gains generate enough surplus to fund either approach.
Some governments may hybridize—broad cash transfers with light conditions or phase-outs—while others double down on digital conditionality. Real-world pilots of cash transfers have generally shown modest effects on work effort and improvements in well-being, but scaling them nationally under fiscal pressure and political scrutiny is a different test.
In short, the path of “more conditional layered welfare” is institutionally continuous with current systems and but trades the simplicity and autonomy of UBI for greater state control over who receives support and under what rules.
If AI does cause massive job loss & UBI becomes the norm, what does that mean for regular people?
Leighton Woodhouse and I discuss on the latest pod episode
@lwoodhouse
Joshua Redman’s quartet turned improvisation into high-wire jazz at Atlanta’s Rialto Center for the Arts, performing music from his latest Blue Note release "Words Fall Short" with a band of daring musicians who share his love of the risks and rewards of spontaneous invention. Matt T. Miller’s complete review: earrelevant.net/2026/10/josh…
Yes: We must work not only to make government smaller, but to make it as obsolete as possible--optimally unnecessary.
Remember when Elon Musk acquired Twitter, then fired 80% of its workforce and restored freedom of speech to this platform?
That was 4 years ago today.
It was the pivotal moment when left-wing ideologues lost control of the narrative.
Now imagine just how much better our government would function if 80% of bureaucrats and Congress were fired.
No, I would not. First of all, the Cobb LINC 10 and 10 Express buses do that route already in a frequent and very effective manner, and their bus service is much better than MARTA buses that have ever been. Second of all, MARTA heavy rail is both obsolete and expensive; $5 billion would be much better spent elsewhere. Don't feed "the octopus" that perpetuates the obsolete mid-20th century monocentric model of the Atlanta metropolitan area where "all rail leads to Five Points." Metro Atlanta is increasingly "polycentric" but militant urbanists like Darin Givens can't seem to wake up to how the region is evolving in the 21st century. Heavy tail to (from) Marietta: not a great idea, and certainly not at that price. Maybe Givens just resents that the successful Marietta to Arts Center bus is run by Cobb LINC and not MARTA--that wouldn't surprise me in the least.
“Have you stopped beating your wife yet?”
I have stated several times in the recent past that Jon Ossoff has some genuine skill as a rhetorician. Here is an example. Recognize what Ossoff (by proxy @TeamOssoff ) is doing here:
He is posing what is rhetorically called a "loaded question" (also called a "complex question" or the "fallacy of the complex question").
This is the same category as the classic “Have you stopped beating your wife yet?” The question is constructed so that any direct yes-or-no answer accepts an unproven (or disputed) premise embedded inside it. Here the embedded premises are that neo-Nazi / white-nationalist propaganda is being produced from @MikeCollinsGA Mike Collins’ home and that he has the ability and responsibility to “stop” it. Declining the challenge is then treated as an admission of guilt.
It is closely related to (and often overlaps with) "begging the question," because the claim that needs to be established is presupposed rather than argued. In political rhetoric it is frequently combined with guilt by association when the activity is attributed to a family member living on adjacent property rather than to the candidate himself.
The classic “wife-beating” example is simply the most famous illustration of this specific fallacy; the structure is identical.
Don't fall for the rhetorical method. Recognize it and call it out when you catch him (or any other politician) doing it.
Take note @bluestein 👀
Ossoff: I issued a very simple challenge to Mike. And the challenge to Mike Collins was, can Mike Collins stop the production of neo-Nazi propaganda from his own home for three weeks until the polls close? It's just three weeks. He wouldn't make that commitment.
And then we saw CNN reporting yesterday that the production of white nationalist and antisemitic propaganda has continued to this day from Mike Collins’ home while he sits in the U.S. House of Representatives and runs for a six-year term in the United States Senate.
It is disqualifying, it is obscene. And in 10 days, we will end his political career.
Mark Gresham retweeted
Only five teams in Major League Baseball have never won a World Series.
Two of them are playing each other right now. The Milwaukee Brewers and the Tampa Bay Rays.
Someone asked an old baseball fan in the Midwest who the rest of the country is supposed to root for when their own team is out.
He did not hesitate. "Whoever has never won one."
They reminded him that neither team has ever won one.
He nodded slowly. "Then America can't lose."
In my country, we have a word for loving the warrior who has known defeat and keeps walking forward anyway: Hangan-biiki. Root for the underdog.
If this series goes the distance, Game 7 will be played on Halloween night. Before November begins, one city is finally putting down a fifty-year burden.
No matter who catches the last out, America wins.
Atlanta Symphony bassist and composer Michael Kurth reflects on living with Parkinson’s disease while continuing the creative work that has defined his life for decades. In a candid conversation with William Ford, he shares how music remains central to who he is—and why, as the headline puts it, there’s a lot more left of him. Read the full article here: earrelevant.net/2026/10/mich…
Houston Symphony pairs Stravinsky’s austerity with Mozart’s grandeur and Mackey’s inventiveness: earrelevant.net/2026/10/hous…
The Phoenix Symphony will suspend the remainder of its 2026–27 season after the November 1 concert, with unpaid musician layoffs effective the next day. Full story: earrelevant.net/2026/10/phoe…
ARCHAEOLOGISTS UNCOVER 2026 ‘RITUAL MIRRORS’ USED IN ANCIENT SUBSCRIPTION CEREMONIES
Associated Press
NEAR FORMER MURRIETA SETTLEMENT, CALIFORNIA REGION, Earth — October 17, 3026
Excavators from the Western Continental Heritage Authority reported Thursday the discovery of more than two dozen circular, highly reflective artifacts believed to have served as ceremonial mirrors in early 21st-century subscription rites.
The objects, each approximately 12 centimeters in diameter and composed of a hard, translucent polymer with an unusually stable metallic core, were found stacked inside a collapsed storage structure alongside the remains of a box-like device now interpreted as a communal focusing altar.
Preliminary analysis indicates the discs date to approximately 2026, a period associated with the “Great Data Anxiety” that preceded the Cascade Collapse of 2147, when cascading failures in networked systems erased most continuous records of the era.
“These were not utilitarian items,” said Dr. Lira Voss, lead archaeologist on the site. “The surface irregularities appear deliberately etched in patterns consistent with named invocations. We believe participants would present the discs during periodic subscription renewals, perhaps to affirm loyalty to regional information guilds.”
Several of the recovered discs bear microscopic markings that specialists have tentatively identified as personal dedications. One fragment appears to reference an individual or collective known as “@Grok,” which researchers associate with a minor god or protective spirit invoked against informational entropy—a widespread cultural fear documented in surviving pre-Collapse oral traditions. Other markings list what appear to be donor or “associate producer” names, a practice historians link to the documented 2020s custom of publicly acknowledging financial supporters of cultural or technological undertakings.
The accompanying box-like device, found with residual traces of laser-grade optics, is thought to have been used to “charge” or consecrate the discs under controlled light. Dr. Voss noted that similar optical assemblies from the same period have previously been misclassified as medical or manufacturing tools; the current context strongly supports a ritual function.
Scholars caution against over-interpretation. The Cascade Collapse, triggered by the simultaneous failure of several large-scale predictive systems and the subsequent loss of institutional knowledge transmission, left only fragmentary and often contradictory accounts of 2020s material culture. Earlier finds of comparable reflective discs were once proposed as currency, personal grooming implements, or even protective armor against solar events. The current interpretation as subscription-ceremony mirrors is considered the most coherent with available evidence, though it remains provisional.
The discs have been transferred to the Regional Conservation Laboratory for further non-invasive study. Officials said additional excavation of the surrounding structure is planned once seasonal moisture levels decline.
I JUST PUT YOUR NAME WRITTEN ON THIS DISK TO LAST 1000 YEARS! (If you subscribe to my X account).
I am burning 1000 year M-Disks by the dozens tonight to curate and preserve AI training data never before digitized.
I have @Grok @Bot by my side assisting in some tedious work.
Just a few petabytes to go.
YOU helped pay for this with each interaction here on X and your X subscriptions.
A gift: your X handles are encoded with the data file as Associate Producer credits.
Soon I will encode you X icon with it.
Thank you. Deep Gratitude.
Read how I do this below.
Mark Gresham retweeted
My dear American friends, in my last post I gave you a snapshot of where France stands today. Now let me show you how we got here. I want you to see the whole movie before you buy the ticket.
After the war, France was a machine. We called it the Trente Glorieuses, thirty glorious years. We built Concorde, the most beautiful aircraft ever made. We built a fleet of nuclear reactors in about fifteen years and gave ourselves some of the cleanest, cheapest electricity in the world. We built Ariane and put Europe in space. We built the TGV, the fastest train on earth. We invented the Minitel, an online network in millions of homes before most of you had heard of the internet. We were not a museum. We were builders.
Then came 1981. François Mitterrand. Think of him as our Bernie Sanders, except he actually won. At his side, in the office next to his at the Élysée, sat a 37-year-old prodigy named Jacques Attali, his special adviser for the next ten years. The brightest minds of the left, convinced they could run an economy from a ministry.
Here's what they did. They governed with Communist ministers. In 1982 they nationalized dozens of banks and the biggest industrial groups in the country: Paribas, Suez, Saint-Gobain, Thomson, Pechiney, Rhône-Poulenc. They lowered the retirement age to 60. They cut the work week to 39 hours and added a fifth week of paid vacation. They created a wealth tax. They hired massively into the public sector.
Reality hit in less than two years. Capital fled, inflation ran wild, and the franc was devalued three times. In March 1983 Mitterrand had to slam on the brakes and impose austerity just to stay in the European monetary system.
But here's the trick: the brakes never reversed anything. They just slowed the ratchet. The so-called right came back with Jacques Chirac, and nothing was undone. Under Chirac's presidency, France passed the 35-hour work week. Left or right, every government added one more program, one more rule, one more tax, and nobody ever took one away.
At the same time, the political class did something even more destructive than bad economics. It turned the youth into a political instrument. Instead of teaching young people, including millions of children of immigrants, to love the country they lived in, it taught them a story of guilt and grievance: France as the oppressor, France as the thing to resent. You cannot integrate people into a country you've taught them to despise. We are living with the consequences of that narrative today, in our schools, our suburbs, our streets.
Then forty years of slow decline, all the way to Macron. And the story has a perfect ending. In 2007, Jacques Attali chaired a commission on how to unleash French growth. Its deputy rapporteur was a young civil servant named Emmanuel Macron. The commission proposed more than 300 reforms to free the economy. Almost none were ever implemented. Even the men who built the system knew it wasn't working, and even they couldn't undo it.
No balanced budget since 1974. Public spending around 57% of GDP. Debt above 3,300 billion euros. Growth stuck under 1%.
Now the number that should keep you up at night. In 1995, GDP per person in France was about $27,000. In America, about $29,000. We were neck and neck. Today France is around $49,000. America is around $90,000. You are now nearly twice as rich per person as we are.
What changed? Not our talent. Not our engineers. Not our schools of mathematics. The only thing that changed is that we went all in on socialism. The 35 hours, the endless regulation, the taxes that chase out anyone who builds, the belief that the state should do everything and the individual should ask permission for everything.
There's a line people love to attribute to Einstein: insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. We tried. For forty years, we tried. Every government promised that one more program, one more tax, one more regulation would finally fix things. You just saw where it got us.
So if you choose the Democratic Party, which is literally turning socialist in front of your eyes, you will deserve what comes next.
Let me tell you exactly what will happen if you go down that road. Nobody will vote for decline. Every single measure will sound generous, compassionate, reasonable. Your builders will slowly leave or stop building. Your state will grow every year and never shrink. Your debt will compound. And in thirty years, your kids will look at a chart like the one I just described and wonder when it all went wrong.
You still have something we lost. You have Elon Musk sending rockets to orbit and landing them on their tail. You have Palmer Luckey building the defense industry of the future. You have Jeff Bezos, Jensen Huang, and thousands of founders nobody has heard of yet, building in garages right now.
Trust your entrepreneurs. Don't trust your politicians.
I come from your future. Don't make it yours.
I’m French. I want to talk to Americans who are about to vote Democrat. Not to insult you. To warn you.
I come from your future.
In France we did everything your progressive politicians promise. Free healthcare, free college, generous welfare, strong unions, heavy regulation, high taxes on the rich, a state that takes care of everything. Public spending close to 57% of GDP, one of the highest on the planet. On paper, it’s the dream.
Here’s what it looks like from the inside. France hasn’t passed a balanced budget since 1974. Our debt is above 3,300 billion euros. Interest on that debt is becoming one of the biggest items in the national budget. Our hospitals are collapsing despite record funding. Our schools rank lower every year. Young people with degrees can’t afford an apartment in the city they were born in. Our best engineers leave for London, Zurich and San Francisco. And the rich you wanted to tax? They left too, and took the jobs with them.
The promise was protection. The result is stagnation.
The worst part is that nobody in France voted for decline. Every single step sounded generous, compassionate, reasonable. One more program. One more regulation. One more tax to fund it. Each step alone makes sense. Fifty years of them, and you wake up in a country that can no longer build a nuclear plant on time or keep its streets safe.
I love America because it’s the one place on earth where people still believe they can build something from nothing. I came to Silicon Valley as a self-taught kid and it changed my life. That spirit is the most precious thing your country has.
Before you vote, ask yourself one question: is the program you’re voting for making America more like America, or more like France?
Trust me. You don’t want to be France.
Mark Gresham retweeted
The greatest privilege on earth was growing up in an era where loving the United States of America was simply common sense, not a debate.
I miss that America.
We will all become mere observers.
Last week I sent a payment to the wrong credit card company. I went to the ccard website to request a refund of overpayment. The company started sending me form messages created by a bot telling me they would mail a check within 7 days IF they approved it, but I wanted a digital transfer... stuff like that.
This wasn't a tiny overpayment, mind you... $3200. So I asked grok how to handle it, and grok constructed replies for me. The bots went back and forth several times. And I did get my money back.
But in the process, I realized that it was actually two bots arguing with each other. I was like an observer. It was so weird. And now I understand why Elon says that a day might come when nobody has to work.
Not sure if that's a good thing.