Life on the Wicked Stage: Act 3

Promises, Promises

Harold Hill never had such easy marks

Years ago when I ran professional theatres my principal responsibility was picking a season of plays and/or musicals, then pulling things together to actually produce that season. Planning was based on quite a few variables and data, but you never knew how things were actually going to play out in the end. Show business can be cruel.

The Music Man There were always surprises. Some good and some bad. Some shows would become surprise runaway hits, others that seemed like sure things would flop. Lose a weekend due to a snowstorm and the bottom line got hit hard.

Of course the choice of plays was always the key variable. I remember sitting in a particularly contentious board of directors meeting as we were nearing a season announcement and a board member was pushing back hard on our revenue and expense projections for what we had planned. He pounded the table and asked, “How can you know what will sell tickets a year from now?” I told him I could project, but I couldn’t know and that I always went into each season saying that if we succeeded as much as .300 hitters in baseball we’d be superstars.

Well, we weren’t baseball players, but we still usually came out ahead of the game with more hits some seasons than others. We held our own. The not-for-profit theatre version of the game I was playing relied on picking and announcing a season a year or so in advance. You’d promote and sell that season to subscribers to accumulate cash and support up front, and then once you were in the season proper you’d push hard for single ticket sales and then after they got a taste, try to convert them into subscribers, then donors.

It was always risky, just like many business propositions. I remember asking that same board member if his business would be comfortable announcing his plans and projecting sales a year in advance knowing all of the risks. It was a rhetorical question on my part because I knew his business couldn’t operate that way. Most can’t.

The entire thing was based initially on a promise, and each new season announcement was a new promise. Each time you delivered a promised season the theatre built or kept trust with that subscriber base. That loyal base would resubscribe based on that trust. Those customers knew there may be a play or two in the season they didn’t care for, but they came back season after season based on the quality of what we offered, and also that we delivered on what we initially sold and promoted.

As an artistic director (CEO) I was the one who was responsible for that trust and never took that responsibility lightly. Yes, there were times we had to change our plans, but the trust engendered along the way helped weather those moments as long as we were honest with our customers and donors.

The above is a long wind up to something I’ve been thinking about lately and spurred by an article I saw on Elon Musk’s latest promises about delivering robots “next year.”

No one thinks that’s real. For the life of me, I doubt he does. Given how many “promises” this guy has made and broken I don’t understand how reasonably intelligent (I assume they are reasonably intelligent) reporters and investors don’t just burst out laughing when the next one self-drives out of the empty garage that is his mouth. But then again, everyone is in on the con.

Musk isn’t alone these days when it comes to talking out of more orifices than human anatomy provides. Our politicians do it. Relentlessly. As do Tech and other corporate CEOs. The politicians you can almost understand because they are allowed to say whatever the hell they want under the Speech and Debate clause of the Constitution, granting them immunity for anything they say while doing their legislative duties. Unfortunately that seems to have spread a bit outside of the original boundaries through various court rulings and a willingness to boldly and brazenly lie at the drop of a hat.

But CEOs are supposed to be under more scrutiny. From their shareholders. From various regulatory agencies. And yet, those like Musk and many of the Artificial Intelligence promoters seem to be able to promise the Moon (or Mars) without ever delivering.

As I said earlier, at some point you’d think intelligent folks would catch on and actually run these Harold Hills out of town, instead of allowing them to continue courting the librarians they want to take jobs away from. If the regulators aren’t regulating and the shareholders keep writing checks I guess those of us watching shouldn’t care if they all end up playing air trombones. (Bonus points for those who get The Music Man references.)

There’s a truism in my business that nobody ever starts out to do a bad show. Yet, some shows flop. I used to believe that no one ever started a business to be a bust. But the flimflammery we’re seeing these days makes me wonder. As long as you can continue to fleece the flock along the way, does it really matter if you ultimately succeed in producing what you promised as long as you score along the way?

Set aside for the moment that anything, well intentioned or not, can fail. But after delivering a string of broken promises you’d think there’d be enough erosion of trust that only fools would continue to pony up their money. Perhaps I’ve just underestimated the number of fools.

My business was disposable. Technology isn’t. Essential as the arts are to our collective humanity, the arts are always the first to feel financial hits in tough times, and generally the last to recover. Technology keeps playing an increasing role in all of our lives and is becoming dangerously essential. Lord help us if an EMP ever goes off. Watching this new rush into the a world of Artificial Intelligence it’s frightening to contemplate even a small portion of what the promises offer, even as some have already collapsed under their own weight. It’s even more challenging to contemplate what the remaining ones might actually turn into.

It’s one thing to run a smartphone on a beta OS. It’s another when it runs your life for you.

Frankly, I don’t buy all of the promises. The ones that I think offer possible benefits I’m skeptical about. And that’s because I don’t trust the folks offering the promises, the folks funding them, or those rushing to implement them. They’ve all had their chance to earn my trust. There are very few remaining that haven’t squandered it.

You can also find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. I can also be found on social media under my name as above.

Bruce Springsteen Meets The Moment With New Song: Streets Of Minneapolis

We need more of this from musicians

Meeting the moment in music is what it’s all about. Or should be. Bruce Springsteen has done so with a new song, Streets of Minneapolis. CleanShot 2026-01-28 at 11.13.36@2x.

There’s no metaphors. There’s no guessing. He cuts right to the point and the heart. The way musicians always do when they have a mind to. We need more of this and I’d love to hear this song live at the upcoming Grammy Awards.

Give it a listen and spread it around.

Tim Cook Captured, Trapped, and Caged

Tough to be a performing monkey in a cage

Om Malik has a great piece about Tim Cook and Apple’s current fail mode when it comes to dealing with the Trump administration called A CEO, Captured. M.G. Siegler sees Cook as trapped in his post Aside From That Mr. Cook, What Did You Think of the Movie?

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If you haven’t been paying attention, Cook has indeed seemingly been captured by his efforts to hang onto Apple’s success in the face of the Trump administration’s intent to drag everyone into his ever increasing cesspool view of the world. Attending the premiere of the Amazon produced film Melania on the night that Alex Pretti was murdered in Minneapolis is just the latest in a series of what can politely be called missteps by Cook, but in my view more appropriately called sucking up out of naked and unabashed fear.

Cook, hearing the large number of complaints about his latest knee bending issued a memo to Apple employees expressing his heartbreak over the events in Minneapolis and notes that he had a good conversation with the president about trying to deescalate the situation. From the reactions I’ve seen nobody is buying it. Issuing memos designed to be leaked is another cowardly PR move, certainly from a company once admired for its supposed civic conscience.

Sure, corporations are corporations and do what they need to do to protect their market share and shareholders. You can make that argument with assurance until the MBAs are all penned up in the same pasture. But when you’ve built much of your success by heavily marketing civic engagement, and I dare say a civic conscience, it becomes not just a dent in that hard earned reputation, but a tougher row to hoe going forward. But we are living in the age of melting myths and laughing at legends.

Malik posits:

When your company is worth more than most nations, you cannot afford principles that inconvenience presidents. The moral equation changes. What once seemed unthinkable becomes necessary. Cook learned this the hard way after he skipped a presidential photo op and was thrown back under the tariff bus. So now he shows up. He sits in the front row. He claps when expected. This is what happens when valuation becomes destiny.

Siegler says Cook should have pulled out of the event and “has lost his way,” and probably should wait out Trump or the GOPs defeats before passing on his dimmed torch.

I don’t disagree with Malik or Siegler. But if you carry the captured analogy further it makes one wonder if reaching the top doesn’t just turn you into just another zoo animal behind bars.

I wonder if they teach that in business school.Photo by Artem Bryzgalov on Unsplash

Treading Through the Storms

Rough weather on all fronts still ahead.

Those blobs on weather radar maps that blanketed vast amounts of the U.S this past weekend felt not just predictive, but also somewhat defining. The traditional red and blue color schemes signaling rough weather almost hinted at our political and social divisions, reminding those that pay attention that Mother Nature doesn’t pick sides when she chooses to show her wrath.

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And she’s tossing a torrent in this, our winter of discontent. Weather, politics, culture and technology all seem to be conspiring to obscure our view in a swirling tempest that chills to the bone, while boiling the blood.

We’ve all seen movies where folks get lost in winter terrain during a storm and can’t find their bearings. It feels like we’re all in that movie, or maybe it’s a stultified streaming series, given how it just keeps stringing us along and clogging up the queue, long after we’ve figured out the formula.

But this is a tortuous tempest. Minneapolis murders. Booting Bovino (or not?) Now US owned TikTok being more ruthless censoring than the Chinese. The gun nuts prematurely treading all over their cherished 2nd amendment, only to retreat after the muzzle blew up in their faces with the shots they just fired. Tim Cook continuing to debase himself and Apple by attending the Melania premiere at the White House. ICE here, there, and everywhere including the Winter Olympics. Consumer confidence hitting a 12-year low. The Doomsday Clock moving closer to midnight. Greenland. Venezuela. Canada. Europe. Iran.

Billy Joel in his heyday would have a rough time chronicling all that’s currently swirling in this winter’s winds for a new version of We Didn’t Start the Fire.

I’m not sure if we’ve reached a tipping point, but it feels like we’re closer to it than we have been since these idiots started shredding all of the life preservers and poking holes in the rowboats on their version of the Titanic. (Thanks for that reference J.D. Vance.)

They wanted to flood the zone with shit so that we couldn’t keep up. By and large they’ve succeeded to this point, but you can sense that the smell may be shifting. There’s chaos all over, but there’s just as much chaos in their inner sanctums as they try to trim sails to survive the storms they’ve created. Small victories add up. Take the wins when they happen and build on that.

It’s up to us to keep the pressure on, because if you’re relying on any of those lifeboats or life preservers (Congress, media, the business community) we’re all going to freeze before we go under with them.

It’s not going to happen overnight. There will be setbacks. It’s One Battle After Another. (Talk about a prescient film release.)

No one knows how this is going to end. No one knows when it’s going to end. No one knows what will be once it does end. But certainly it will end.

Rough weather still ahead. Uncharted waters in a storm. No horizon in sight.

Bundle up. Buckle up. Trust your own compass. Follow the lead of the good folks from Minneapolis causing good trouble. As my friend, David Todd McCarty says, Stand Your Ground.

(Photo by Viktor Mogilat on Unsplash)

Cracks In The ICE Are Showing: Keep The Pressure Up

Winter irony alert

Here’s an update to this post from earlier today. It’s being reported that Greg Bovino has been relieved of duty and sent home. He has also reportedly lost access to his social media accounts. Let’s hope the reports are accurate, and even if not they add to the pressure. Pressure works. Keep it up.

After another weekend filled with horrendous news as most of the country weathered a massive winter storm that left snow and ice everywhere, it appears that are a few cracks starting to show in the ICE. To be honest, I’m actually surprised.

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Word is that the latest murder in Minneapolis is giving quite a few so-called Republicans cold feet in Washington DC and elsewhere. The apparent leading candidate for the GOP nomination for governor of Minnesota has withdrawn his candidacy in the wake of what’s happening.

Apparently the White House is also putting on heavy socks and trying to tiptoe out from under the fallout. Or so the reporting says. The guy who passes for a president is sending in Tom Homan to try and clean up the mess, which I’m sure he’ll attempt to do for the right amount of cash in a Cava bag.

Heck, even a few GOP congressional critters are making noise. But I’m sure that will soften as the week goes on. I mean there’s a government they need to pretend to run.

And there’s the rub. The government is facing another potential partial shutdown at the end of the week. The House passed that legislation on to the Senate, with the help of seven Democrats voting for it, without whom the bill would have failed. Senators are hinting they’ll hold the line after this latest murder, but I wouldn’t count on it in the end.

I’m hoping the Senators and all of those who were out and about in horrendous weather protesting this weekend keep the pressure up to widen those cracks in the ICE were hearing before this cold snap ends and things begin melting. It would be both a positive for us all and also be quite ironic.

Will it stop things? I doubt it. There will probably be a doubling down. But in my opinion either way the heat needs to ratchet up and keep the pressure building.

I also encourage you to read this piece by Popehat called We Should Talk About The Morality of Political Violence.

I earnestly hope things pull back from the dangerous way they seem to be heading. I also earnestly hope those who can keep the pressure up will continue, so that the lives lost in Minnesota and elsewhere (there have been others less publicized) won’t have been lost in vain.

(Image from Emily Lauren on Unsplash.

Sunday Morning Reading

Thoughts tumble down on a chilling weekend

I’m going to avoid the horrific news that continues out of Minneapolis (and the rest of the U.S.) for this week’s Sunday Morning Reading. But, then I guess I didn’t avoid it by saying that. Think of it as a wound too sore to touch rather than avoiding. Anyway, onto this week’s sharing.

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I’m going to kick this off with a blog post from Mathew Ingram called Why Blogging Is Better Than Social Media. Title says a lot of what I believe. I wish more believed it also.

I love watching those younger than I live the same lives, fears, and joys I did. Nothing ever changes. But it’s always entertaining and worth reflection. Check out Alex Baia’s I Thought I Would Have Accomplished A Lot More Today And Also By The Time I was Thirty-Five.

Gray Miller suggests You Should Put A Codex In Your Pocket Instead Of Your Phone. If you don’t know what a Codex is, read the piece.

Cory Doctorow in The Guardian says AI Companies Will Fail. We Can Salvage Something From the Wreckage. Salvaging things from wreckage is what we do. Avoid wrecking things not so much.

Speaking of wreckage, AI-Powered Disinformation Swarms Are Coming For Democracy says David Gilbert.

Follow that up with Brynn Tannehill’s piece ‘Trump Has Already Rigged The 2028 Presidential Election’: Us Defense Insider. You didn’t need AI to tell you that. Or insiders. All you had to do was pay attention.

We do seem to like and be drawn to adversity like so many moths. Funny how we know what happens to moths that fly too close, yet can’t predict own fate when we do the same. But if we break that cycle, there wouldn’t be anything to salvage. David Toddy McCarty says We Like It Hard.

Aaron Vegh blogs A Canadian’s Call To Arms, Being Totally Pissed Off At The State Of Computing In The 21st Century. I don’t think the Canadians are alone in their feelings. I know a number of Americans are as well.

I said I would stay away from this weekend’s events. I lied. Sota. Kinda. I admire those like Dan Sinker who are finding ways to do what they feel can in the face of this adversity. Check out his piece We Are All We Have.

(Image from Aga Putra on Unsplash

If you’re interested in just what the heck Sunday Morning Reading is all about you can read more about the origins of Sunday Morning Reading here. If you’d like more click on the Sunday Morning Reading link in the category column to check out what’s been shared on Sunday’s past. You can also find more of my writings on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome.

Try

Another shooting in Minneapolis

Following the general strikes in Minnesota yesterday and in the wake of yet another horrific shooting in Minneapolis this morning, this brilliant YouTube from Ana Marie Cox filtered through my feeds. Using Nemick’s speech from Andor as a eulogy for Renee Nicole Good, it’s powerful stuff.

Watch it the video below. Share it. Do so often. Because I think we’re going to be faced with more of this in the future.

A Disturbing Piece Of The AI Future We’re All Headed Into

AI generated headlines are just the tip of the iceberg we’re sailing into

It’s difficult enough to trust anything you read, see, or hear these days. Trust used to be the coin of the realm, but those days seem to have gone the way of the dodo. It’s bad enough that what used to pass for journalism has devolved into stenography, cheerleading, and blatant lying damaging enough to cost Fox News millions. Yet all of that continues. But we haven’t seen anything yet.

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The Verge is out with a report that says Google Won’t Stop Replacing Our News Headlines With Terrible AI. Sean Hollister lays out the case well, and he’s right, this shouldn’t happen. But it does and it’s only going to get worse, because… well AI is the name of the game that everyone who controls any sort of publishing and most search engines are playing.

Here’s the rub. Content used to be king. Or so the theory went. That king fed his court by selling advertising. But that king got toppled by online advertising usurpers. Yes, there’s still content, but it doesn’t matter what the content is, and long as it can be advertised against. We’re already seeing such an overwhelming avalanche of AI generated content all over the Internet that merely dismissing it as AI Slop diminishes the definition of slop.

As an example, Meta’s on a quest to just create users out of nowhere to feed content to your feeds to make sure the advertising turnstiles always spin whether you’re doomscrolling or not.

Content, much less headlines, really doesn’t matter to those who control the channels. In fact, I’m guessing we’re not far off from seeing the same piece of content (whether AI generated or by humans) recycled with different AI generated headlines. I’m guessing It consumes less compute cycles to gin up a new headline than it does to create a full article.

I remember the days when human editors wrote headlines that often confused readers and pissed off reporters when they slanted or misrepresented the nature of a story’s content. Some of that still happens. But that will pale in comparison to the future we’re just beginning to live in.

(Image from Google, PC Mag, The Verge)

History Is Often Unkind To Comparisons

Time to call a spade a spade

History is often unkind to comparisons. That’s nobody’s fault. No one can grasp the fullness of history well enough to appreciate and/or distinguish all of the references we use to shortcut how we view and label the mistakes we seem hell bent on repeating as we promise to never forget. It’s tougher still when we see children being kidnapped or chemical irritants sprayed at point blank range into someone’s eyes by government employees.

As an example, we conveniently shortcut our descriptions of the current administration’s abhorrent behavior masquerading as immigration enforcement. We call them Nazis. We liken their tactics to the Gestapo. In the face of the murders, kidnapping of children, brutalizing protestors, and lord knows what we don’t know about, I happen to agree with the comparison. It’s not just apt. It’s spot on.

But it’s incomplete.

Those comparisons actually cover up AND reveal a deeper history of sins that is not only particularly American, it’s what Hitler and his murderous henchmen adopted from us.

White Americans, in Hitler’s words, “gunned down the millions of Redskins to a few hundred thousand, and now kept the modest remnant under observation in a cage”

Hitler admired America’s appetite for America’s Manifest Destiny and how it justified the slaughter and displacement of Native Americans. His lawyers studied not only our laws regarding Native Americans, but also our Jim Crow laws, using them as references to draft the Nuremberg Laws that stripped Jews of Citizenship and prohibited interracial marriage.

The forces I think are evil want to erase much of American history, but even the forces that keep trying to array against them don’t recognize the Nazi labeling lineage as history we own a piece of.

The simple point I’m making is this: As we’re coming to grips with so much in these trying days let’s not look beyond ourselves and our own history to try and turn the monsters among us, who have always been among us, into something that removes our ownership of that history. In some ways, that’s the larger fight. We’re not fighting foes adopting some foreign tactics or playbook, we’re fighting our own peculiar history that we have never wanted to come to grips with. We’ve let it fester. Fought a war amongst ourselves over it and pretended we could turn the page, only to allow it to fester again and rise back up to haunt and hurt us all. Again.

Chatbots, Pins, and Other Talking Distractions

The world of talking to chatbots just isn’t for me

In the end everything boils down to a question of taste or a matter of preference. In the beginning everything bubbles up in a hot tub with the jets on high. That’s kind of how I’m viewing all the bubbling around chatbots, AI Pins , possible AI earbuds, AI glasses, and any other kind of method or gadget folks are devising to talk to computers — those with screens, and those without.

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Apple rumors popping like champagne corks are going to turn up the heat on discussions about chatbots, especially since Apple had been previously saying they weren’t interested in creating a chatbot for its Apple Intelligence portfolio. Fortunately most of those discussion will be between humans.

Mark Gurman reports that we’ll see changes to what we currently think of as Siri this spring, but stay tuned for a revamped version that offers the back and forth conversational approach that existing chatbots offer, codenamed Campos, later this year.

Almost simultaneously, MacWorld reports that Apple employees are being encouraged to use a chatbot called Enchanté in their work. So, it sounds like Apple is seeding the ground for what’s to come.

For the record, I’m not big on voice computing. Yes, I use my Apple Watch to ask Siri to set a reminder or send a text message, but that’s about the extent of what my experimenting with voice computing has boiled down to.

I’ve tried some of the existing chatbots on smartphones and on computers, and I’ve been in the company of others who enjoy using voice as their primary method of interacting with smartphones. I don’t begrudge anybody using voice as their input method if that’s their preference, and I certainly don’t if it makes computing accessible to those who can’t type. But it’s just not for me.

Part of it is I find myself being more accurate when I can type, and part of it is the social aspect. While microphone technology continues to improve to allow better pickup in noisy environments I find it awkward when someone pulls out their smartphone and starts talking to it with others around. I feel compelled to silence myself while they are doing so. I couldn’t imagine using it in my theatre work, compared to using an iPad with pen to take notes, because my talking would be distracting to everyone else in the rehearsal hall. Goodness knows being in a room with small children laughing/crying/talking at the top of their lungs doesn’t strike me as a suitable environment.

I spent a good portion of this fall watching the Chicago Bears on their improbable run, while texting back and forth on several chains with my nephews and others. I can’t imagine doing that in my local sports pub trying to do so via voice input.

I won’t get into a conversation about how some are using existing chatbots for social interactions like therapy and companionship except to say that I’m guessing if those trends continue as voice input as chatbots proliferate, we’ll eventually see similar reactions to curtail that type of usage similar to what we saw back in the day about decreasing smartphone and screen time usage.

There are some interesting questions out there though. OpenAI has already announced its inevitable move into advertising for ChatGPT. I’m sure the others aren’t far behind. I’m not sure how viable advertising really is in a voice chat environment, whether it’s a smartphone, pin, or set of headphones. I certainly wouldn’t want a “conversation” interrupted with an ad. Amazon certainly doesn’t seem to have come close with its Alexa products. To my way of thinking, ads in chatbot conversations will give new meaning to the clichés about intrusive advertising.

I’m also of the opinion that while the non-smartphone AI devices might be clever gadget accessories, I don’t see them ever replacing smartphones or significantly denting that market. Too much of everyday life has become so inextricably linked to smartphone usage that requires a screen that I just don’t see voice chatbots replacing it. Someday your voice may be your password, but I think we’re a long ways off from that for interacting with the businesses and other institutions we deal with daily.

But who knows where this is all headed. Quite frankly, I don’t think anybody does. Including the chatbots.