A reporter stopped by David Sacks’ house last week to ask him how he felt about a Trump fundraiser being hosted in his neighborhood. “I feel great about it,” Sacks said, to a flood of laughter on X. The fundraiser was, of course, hosted by Sacks, and the journalist was an idiot, but the interesting thing here is just how radically tech culture has changed. Not only endorsing Trump, and throwing him a fundraiser, but laughing about it all online? There was exactly one public figure in tech who supported Trump in 2016 — Peter Thiel. This was considered a scandal so incredible he could never recover. I’m not sure if it was four years of Biden’s policies or the fact that the Democrats are trying to throw Trump in jail, but minds have certainly changed. So anyway… what do you guys think about stop the steal? Jk (unless… ?)

By now, anyone even vaguely connected to Instagram “activist” types will have seen the AI-generated “All Eyes on Rafah” tent image, which has been shared over 42 million times in the past few days. Photojournalists are, understandably, upset their life’s work has been eclipsed by bots, while some activists worry sharing the meme is “performative” (duh). But what’s interesting here isn’t performative activism generally, or this image specifically — it’s the fact this kind of slop now dominates every timeline, from boomer FB to zoomer IG. An attention span disaster in the short term, sure. But aren’t we already realizing this “global town square” thing is hell, anyway? Slop will just burn us out faster and, hopefully, accelerate decentralization. So let the bots cook. At this rate, they might just save the world.

A recent Bloomberg report details how, even in spite of his recent felony conviction, a growing number of billionaires and wealthy Wall Streeters are rushing in to back Trump this election season. In response to that development, and in light of a recent report that Trump may tap Elon for an advisory role in his admin (he denies this), the Biden campaign had this to say: “All billionaires like Elon see is a sucker...They know if they cut him campaign checks, he’ll cut their taxes.” But transactional, unspoken, quid pro quo is how political donations have literally always worked. Why, I’m old enough to remember the 2020 election, when the shoe was on the other foot and billionaires were cutting checks to Biden in exchange for a promised ‘return to norms’ — by which he evidently meant multiple wars, $20 Big Macs, and political rivals going to prison. Wanting to get money out of politics would be one thing, but this “billionaires for me, not for thee” schtick? It just makes you seem like — well — a sucker.

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