Anti-Brain Rot Vol 11: From AI Dreams to Tariff Nightmares

Plus reviews of 'Dying for Sex' & 'A Complete Unknown'

Waterfront Mill by Niles Spencer, 1940

Is it just me, or does every month (honestly I should say week), feel increasingly surreal? We kicked off the year with the Tech Right—Palantir’s Peter Thiel, Tesla and SpaceX’s Elon Musk, PayPal’s David Sacks, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman and Oculus founder Palmer Luckey—poised to play a major role in shaping the American economy, technology and future policy. Elon Musk stepped into a prominent role as a “special government employee” within Trump’s administration, and DOGE got to work slashing budgets, firing officials, and removing anything that didn’t align with the President’s agenda.

Why did the Tech Right align themselves so tightly with this administration? Well these so-called conservative free speech (lol) absolutists want unrestricted development of advanced technologies, less regulation and lower taxes.

It seemed like the country was barreling toward a no-holds-barred, tech-aligned future—with AI at the forefront and the rise of AI agents and robots becoming a reality within the next decade. But then the tariff situation emerged, the markets crashed, and recession fears started to feel a lot more real.

Now, members of the Trump administration’s economic team—like Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick and Director of the Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy Peter Navarro—are calling for a return to increase domestic manufacturing. Meanwhile, Elon Musk is out here pushing for a free-trade zone with Europe. He’s also on X throwing insults at Navarro, as a broader fight for influence plays out and GOP members along with Democrats work to draft legislation aimed at stopping the tariffs.

For other members of the Tech Right, boosting domestic manufacturing and sidelining China is about more than just economics, it’s a national security issue and about maintaining a competitive edge. The tariff math is wrong, but the Tech Right is holding steady in their support and seemingly ready to go down with the ship despite their respective companies losing millions of dollars a day in the stock market. And well the rest of us get to feel like we’re in a car being driven off course by a group of drunk clowns who are bad at math but good at inventing problems.

We’ve been living through the dismantling of the federal government, but now, it feels like we’re also watching the dismantling of the economy. It’s disorienting to witness all of this unfold and try to make sense of what it means for our futures, our jobs and our wallets.

Why is this happening?

…the basic design of the American system has broken down, allowing the president to usurp far more authority than is healthy. In many policy areas, the presidency functions less like a democratic chief executive who operates under constraint and more like an elected dictatorship.

And historically, dictatorships — elected or otherwise — suffer from a fatal flaw: they have no ability to stop the people at the top from acting on their policy whims and, in the process, producing national disasters. This tendency is why democracy tends to produce superior policy outcomes over the long run; why America, and not Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union, won the 20th century.

The tariffs, in short, show the true stakes of democratic decline. It’s not just a matter of abstract principle, but the difference between stability and disaster.

— The real reason Trump is destroying the economy via Vox

Leaping Backwards

According to White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy Stephen Miller, the administration’s goal is to “make America the manufacturing center of the world with the lowest taxes and the cheapest energy.”

The Trump economics team has gone back and forth on whether this push for domestic manufacturing means Americans will actually be working in these new factories—which, by the way, can’t really be built yet because tariffs have made raw materials absurdly expensive—or whether Americans will simply be servicing the robots working in these not-yet-conceived factories.

Additionally, President Trump is out here calling for a grand return of “beautiful coal,” which, according to him, will power AI. However, the tech industry overwhelmingly prefers clean and renewable sources of energy like nuclear, solar and wind (which the President particularly dislikes). He also recently remarked that blue collar workers want to work in the mines, they yearn for the mines, they want dig coal, they do not want to assemble iPhones as his Commerce Secretary alluded to earlier in the week. Side note: No one in the White House seems to be operating from the same set of talking points, which is why everything any one of them says at any given time feels completely contradictory.

It sucks that we’ve ended up in such a precarious situation largely because a certain cohort of Americans got bored—despite being, on the whole, more comfortable and wealthy than most people around the world. It’s no secret this group wants a return to the 1960s, but without the civil rights gains.

Now, instead of standing on the brink of an AI and tech revolution, we’re caught in a regressive tug-of-war with those willfully denying economic reality and actively unraveling decades of environmental, social, and economic progress. Whoever ultimately seizes control will either continue to drag us backwards or finally move us forward into the 21st century.

Or maybe none of it will matter, because the Trump administration could crash the economy, and we’ll all just be grateful for whatever job we can get. Or maybe—like in The Matrix—we’re all destined to become batteries for the machines. In the future our bodies are the coal.

Neo awakening in the fetus fields that serve as power plants in The Matrix.

For now, let’s all enjoy coffee while we can still afford it.

Update: After trillions were lost in the market, the President blinked and as of 2:30pm EST he declared a 90-day pause on reciprocal tariffs, but a 125% tariff will remain on China. It seem the bond selloff coming from the Japanese market spooked everyone.

I mean you just have to laugh…

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Tuning In: What’s Worth Your Time on Streaming

Dying for Sex (2025) – Streaming on Hulu
This comedy-drama is one of the best shows I’ve watched in a long time. Michelle Williams stars as Molly, a woman diagnosed with stage IV breast cancer whose dying wish is to have an orgasm. Although she was married for 15 years, she never achieved the big O with her husband, so her final mission is to explore her sexuality and release long-held childhood trauma.

The first few episodes are genuinely funny, and unlike Babygirl, I think this show does a better job of showing how a woman in midlife can engage with kink to discover her desires and gain confidence in expressing what turns her on.

Helmed by a team of female writers and directors, Dying for Sex is actually sexy—embracing male nudity and unconventional pleasure with zero judgment. It’s still all too rare to see sexuality explored through the female gaze (these kinds of projects don’t often get funded, guess why?), especially when it comes to portraying male bodies erotically from a straight woman’s perspective.

Based on a podcast and a true story, the series does get darker in later episodes, but it never feels grim. I especially appreciated how it frames death not as something to fear, but as a natural process the body inherently understands. In one of the final episodes, a hospice nurse calmly explains what the body does to prepare for the end, and I found myself thinking—wow, I’ve never really heard it put like this. The body is like a big ol’ computer, and as the end nears, all its internal apps and windows begin to shut down. We’ve seen countless death scenes on screen, but rarely do we hear such a clear, oddly comforting explanation of what actually happens in real life.

Michelle Williams and Ilana Glazer—who plays Molly’s best friend and caretaker Nikki—are both phenomenal. Engrave their Emmys now! At just eight episodes, this one’s an easy and rewarding binge.

A Complete Unknown (2024) - Streaming on Hulu

This isn’t a typical biopic about Bob Dylan (Timothée Chalamet); it’s more a film about folk music and the controversy over using electric instruments to perform it—an issue Dylan found himself at the center of in the 1960s, as he chafed against the constraints imposed by the folk and protest movements. I had no idea the folk scene had such hardcore purists, insisting that performances consist solely of one person and a guitar. Honestly, I can’t name more than one or two Bob Dylan songs, but this movie made me appreciate the lyrical artistry of folk musicians.

Pete Seeger (Edward Norton) and his wife Toshi (Eriko Hatsune) were, in many ways, even more compelling than Dylan himself. Toshi was a badass filmmaker and environmental activist, and I found myself wanting to know more about her. I really liked how the film used live performances and lyrics as storytelling devices—they added a lot of depth to the script. Although many of the featured musicians, including Dylan himself, were involved in the Civil Rights Movement and their songs were adopted by protestors, the film doesn’t focus heavily on that aspect of their legacies—aside from a brief scene of Dylan and Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro) performing together at the March on Washington.

The ensemble cast delivers strong performances, though Chalamet often felt like he was doing a Dylan impression rather than fully embodying the character. That said, his performance does evolve over the course of the film, but the costuming and hair definitely do a lot of the heavy lifting. Still, this film is absolutely worth watching to learn more about the musicians and key figures who helped shape the folk scene of the 1960s.

Sick of Myself (2022) – Streaming on Kanopy

This is hands down one of the darkest horror comedies I’ve ever watched. Set in Oslo, the film follows Signe and her boyfriend Thomas, who live together and occasionally steal high-end furniture. Thomas is a popular local artist, while Signe works as a barista and feels insecure and dissatisfied with her life. Driven by jealousy over the attention Thomas receives at parties and gallery openings, Signe decides to do something extreme to gain fame and validation.

She frequently lies to get people to pay attention to her, but everything changes when she stumbles upon a news article about a Russian anti-anxiety medication called Lidexol. The drug has been recalled after reports that it induces severe skin disease in those who take it. Signe buys a large quantity from a drug dealer friend and begins taking an excessive amount, eventually landing herself in the hospital.

As her condition worsens, she seeks out media attention, but is disappointed when her social media posts barely get any likes and the news story about her is overshadowed by a nearby shooting. Despite her physical deterioration, she never seeks real help and continues to lie for attention.

This movie is bizarre, gross, and deeply unsettling, but also incredibly well-acted, with top-tier prosthetics and makeup work. Also what goes on in Nordic relationships? This is the second movie that I’ve seen with these weird boyfriend/girlfriend dynamics—where they seem in competition with each other and do terrible things. The Worst Person in the World (2021), is also tremendously good and streaming on Hulu as well.

Until next time! Who knows what state the country will be in by the end of the week.