Anthony Caplan's Blog

Things are working out even though it always seems like they’re not, or better said — things inside your head have a tendency to settle out into dross and nothingness and go bad. The toxic, anaerobic fermentation that takes place with obsessive rumination and confirmation bias, perhaps aided by algorithms which expose us to the very worst tendencies of our inner lives, will bring us down in quick order with evil thoughts of Washington/Zionist cabals, or the dark figures of ghosts.

That’s why we have things like reunions and families that are based on spreading out in webs of affiliation that equate with the medicine of hope. Laughter and self-deprecation take the sting out of the slings and arrows of isolated hopelessness. On our own, we have shadows that fall heavily on large arcs of ground as the sun sinks. With others, we can stand in such a way as to ameliorate the shadows. It’s a trick that seems to work for long enough to wait until the sun rises high enough again and we can be brave on our own pairs of awkward, puny legs, prone to breaks and stumbles.

So I think that we can be grateful for certain things. In this dark time when objectively speaking long shadows fall across the North American homeland. It’s true that they have been falling for a long time. People mention the Trail of Tears a lot, people mention the Tulsa massacre. And some of you will say what about health care, or what about housing. And all those things are true, or even worse things like Epstein and Gaza. The fallout seems to be coming for a whole lot of bad shit. It’s fair to say almost Biblical — as if you can’t worship God and Mammon for long without there being a reckoning.

But then some one will thankfully always bring up the parrots recolonizing the cities of California, or the fact on the other extreme that globalization lifted a large swath of peasantry into the middle class in places like China. Okay so there you have it. It’s hard to say. Maybe we can pull this off and avoid the methane feedbacks of the melting permafrost and the reversing of the Gulf Stream. Maybe Peter Thiel’s Palantir project will yield positive results for humanity and not a totalitarian, mind controlling, dystopian hellscape.

In the meantime we can have some fun, celebrate the wins, vow to do better next time.

But I like small children and grown children being together in the same rooms with their parents and grandparents for a good length of time. I like good hearted people who value authenticity and rhe spirits of ancestors. I like forgiving although I don’t always immediately do so.

I have my shadows. We all do.

Win Column:

Two books on the upswing in the Amazon charts at the same time:

Alias Tomorrow

The Truth Now.

Yeah, so this is me this week. I have a bunch of things to muse on, but not anything in particular detail and not sure how it all fits together. But here you have it, a spread of hors d’ouvres rather than an entree.

First, let’s start with the biggest surprise in the news this week.

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At least for me. It was such a shock when I saw the story of Trump and Mamdani visiting at the White House and watching the press conference later.

In the name of objectivity I must say that I was impressed by Trump’s ability to be swayed by not only the charm of Mamdani’s personality but the obvious political sense of what he was proposing, which was to work together on initiatives that would win back some of Trump’s supporters on containing the cost of living in NYC.

But aside from the obvious shock value of their apparent rapport, it spoke to how Trump has evolved as a President in terms of not sounding like a complete asshole and actually choosing his words carefully and showing particular grace, let’s be honest, when for example he tells Mamdani to go ahead and admit to the reporter that he still thinks of him as a fascist.

The obvious explanation of this turn of Trump’s is that his larger authoritarian project is unwinding in complete abject failure, and he has the good sense, or survival instinct now of displaying a kinder, gentler, or at least sane face to the world on the occasion of Mamdani’s triumphal visit to DC.

At the very least, the occasion was a little window on the way that people in real time will let all the words and meaningless garbage reproduced in print and in the virtual mediums that dominate “communications” go in the name of actual interpersonal reality. But it is a tribute to Trump and his confidence as a leader that he allows this mode of thought to come to the fore instead of sticking to some pre-arranged script, letting Mamdani do the same in that moment, as most politicians would.

It works for him and is why I think his supporters love him. In my opinion he should have stuck to being a reality TV host where that malleable sort of persona works really well. Because when it’s him being played by Putin or Xi Jinping on the world stage it’s not so good for us.

Next up, my visit to Commonwealth Fusion in Devens, Massachusetts as part of a delegation of NH legislators, members of the bipartisan Emerging Technologies Caucus on Friday.

It turns out I was the only Democrat in the bunch, but our shared hope in the future of clean energy was such that we got along like a bunch of kindergarteners at the zoo. I was proud to be there representing Nah Hampshuh.

The young woman who showed us around the amazing, futuristic facility that has sprung up just across the state line in north central Mass, Kristin Cullan, was an exemplar of skill in presentation and engagement. She was hired as employee number eight at the company straight out of MIT, and that attention on Commonwealth’s part to public engagement should pay off for them.

I want to say now I’m a believer, but the fact that should be put out there right at the bat, so to speak, is that they have yet to go Q>1, or net energy out equalling more than energy going in. But the pace and robustness of their approach has put Commonwealth clearly in the lead for scaling and commercializing fusion energy in a visible window of time.

That fact is reflected in the amount of money raised, over $2 billion, and also in the actual contract with Google for the electricity produced by their first plant to be built in Virginia starting in 2028. They expect to be Q>10 and exporting to the PJM grid by mid 2030s, said Kristin, and I give them a decent chance of hitting that milestone, which would be mind bogglingly amazing.

With fusion within humanity’s grasp, we truly would stand at the threshold of an age of energy abundance opening the doors to the next level of global civilization, whatever that shapes up to be.

Which brings me to the threat of AI and neurocognitive technology as potential tools of totalitarian enslavement.

That sounds frightening and futuristic and for transparency’s sake I should say that I am the author of several science fiction novels explicitly dealing with mind controlling societies of the future that use neural implants to engineer compliance.

But it’s no longer science fiction, it’s here and actually as frightening as I made it out to be in those books.

The way that AI right now degrades human ability to distinguish between fact and fantasy is undeniable and dangerous, especially as we have seen the havoc played on democracy by bad actors with the tools of social media already at hand in recent elections around the world.

Serious commentators are questioning whether democratic governance will survive in our technological future, or whether it would be preferable to just give ourselves over to a Chinese model of molding people’s behavior through social control.

When you add the predictive capabilities and the speed of AI to the invasive and rapidly developing, unregulated field of neurocognitive devices, that totalitarian world is well within a visible window of time, with tools that would allow it to be stood up just around the corner.

Is there an appetite for such among investors? The Epstein class anyone? The economic potential alone could be staggering.

And so that leaves us to retreat, or maybe advance, to the world of dreams. Here’s a selection of seven of mine from a dream journal. I hope you like.

10/3/25

A woman is planning or already grilling either her own two children or the corpses of some other two people on the grill. The grill is able to somehow collect or manufacture its own gas, so it is completely self contained and therefore it’s a new process and the woman is showing it off as she prepares to also cook the people.

10/8

There is a white ellipse made out of plastic tubes? I am tasked with identifying or becoming familiar with. I’m part of a group, a family, tribe? I go up a hill after a man I recognize and call out to him. He turns around in recognition, he is weary from working, a farmer. A boar rushes down the hill past him, he warns me. I square up to the boar to block it. He charges me and we tumble through the air. I concentrate on landing as I can see that I am going to fall but the grass is soft and I am ok. The boar takes a great spill, rolls on its back and is knocked out dead.

10/21

The dream was happening in script. The dream was being written while it was happening. Don’t remember the contents of the dream, only that it was happening in writing and the feeling was eerie, like it was as real as any dream, a real dream but it was being narrated through written words at the same time as it was happening.

11/5

I am in a war and am in charge of a banner that has gotten very dirty, illegible. I clean it thoroughly but cannot get it clean. But the leaders, a man and woman, are happy with it and when they unfurl it the words are legible. I don’t know what they say just black letters on canvas. Then I am on a ledge again with my team including my wife. But I only have three of the pistols from the previous battle. Am I the quartermaster? The team is okay and will make do with just 3 pistols. Then I am wandering through the castle, bombed out ruins and jagged twisted metal. In one room with a carpeted moldy floor sit the pundits on their laptops. The room is soundproofed, very still. The pundits look up from their work deep in reflection. I have to get out.

11/9

I was looking through the plate glass. My sister had my baby daughter in her arms and was showing her to me through the glass. Many of the other babies and many of the adults, one woman in particular, had no strength and were not able to stand up. But my daughter could pull herself up higher on my sister’s body. She looked at me in wordless recognition. Then I was on a plane sitting next to Sinead O’Connor and we were flying low over a coast and the pilot was showing off his skill flipping and soaring over the beach and the ledges.

11/19

We were in a new town, it was called Newbury. I found out through a post I saw on FB. There was a war going on. We were charged with finding the right candidates for a prize, don’t remember what the prize was now. The girls had identified local kids who were good at doing something, don’t remember what. My son and I followed somebody outside. He was a local kid. It was night. In the sky you could see the path of a rocket as it made its way through the dark and dipped down whoosh over the horizon on its way beyond and out of sight, flaring in yellow and red bursts. Then today I read about drone warfare and the Ukrainian side perfecting cheap drones that can fly thousand miles behind enemy lines.

11/22

There is an electricity generation device that emits the electricity that then needs to be chased down by an animal like a horse, but in space. You can ride the horse and then it brings you along with the electrical charge back to a gathering like a party. A man there knew my father and remembered the parties thrown by him and my mother when I was a child. There was always chewing tobacco set out on a corner of the table, he told me. Even in the dream I was surprised.

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I was born there. It’s still a sad place in my memories. The smell of sewage running in the gutters, music playing at night, cicadas. I was a catire, a white boy, growing up in a country run by and for the American oil companies.

My father was a lawyer for those oil companies, running the office of an American law firm out of Chicago started by a CIA alumnus he took over for, after an honorable discharge from the US Army and a year of a Fulbright grant to study the country’s Napoleonic legal code at the Universidad Central de Venezuela.

My mother tried to be a good American expat housewife, but the drinking, the maids, the PTA picnics, it was too much to keep up a pretense of exceptional, Southern plantation gentility for an Irish girl from Long Island infused with proto-feminist aspirations.

I used to tell stories to my boarding school pals about the toughness of the people, the poverty, the way they drove, the mad disregard for rules, the proud criminality, the ingenuity born of necessity.

I saw the bloodlust, the centuries of oppression and humiliation spill over in the Caracazo, during my two year stint as the AP-Dow Jones journalist there. It was 1989, and President Carlos Andres Perez was forced to give way to US demands, through the IMF, to “liberalize the economy”, i.e. let prices on food and gasoline free. When they tripled overnight, the people rioted. It started with burning buses and looting shops and ended with house to house combat for a month that left tens of thousands dead across the country and democracy on life support.

It did not survive. The corruption and incompetence of Carlos Andres gave rise to the revanchist rule of Hugo Chavez, who was succeeded by Maduro, a former bus driver and the latest Latin American strongman to claim the mantle of anti-imperial liberation.

So it seems fitting that the empire has now come calling again at the country of my birth, the Venezuela of the cult of Bolivar, the liberator and his army of llaneros, the bareback-riding, mestizo cowboys that drove the Spanish empire from the Americas. Is tRump suicidal enough to launch a war there? That’s the question we should all be asking. Never mind what you think about Maduro.

I have no doubts about the illegitimacy of the latest criminal enterprise run out of Miraflores, the ostentatious, baroque 19th century presidential compound in Caracas. But it’s just the way governing has always been done in Venezuela, where the reins of power are an invitation to feed at the trough of black gold that has never trickled down to the people and never will. Ironically, it’s the governing style preferred by tRump and his cadre of tech bro oligarchs, a semblance of democratic rule papering over the enrichment and the cronyism that loots a nation and its children.

I hear right wing pundits comparing plans for this latest madcap, Ramboesque adventure to the Panamanian roundup of Manuel Noriega back in the glory days of Bush senior. But Panama and Venezuela are very different countries and populations.

A military decapitation of Maduro will inevitably draw us into a war with a two million strong militia army, (conservative estimate). Although true numbers are opaque, I think we can be guided by this old quote, attributed to Bolivar.

Ecuador is a convent, Colombia is a university, and Venezuela is a barracks.

That sums up the relationship of Venezuelans with their army. Any Venezuelan militia forces will be capable of and deeply, ideologically committed to carrying out an insurgency against the gringos over a country the size of Texas with a geography as varied and inhospitable as any in the world. A cakewalk this ain’t shaping up to be, despite the warmongering tough talk of ignoramuses and no matter who gets installed as el/la presidente/a in Caracas.

Is tRump crazy enough to pull the trigger on a regional war in our backyard, knowing full well of the chaos that will ensue? I think we know the answer. It should scare any adults in the room into a sober assessment of where we are and where we might be a few months from now: a country divided, rudderless, led by a very stable genius counting on American loyalty to a wartime leader to maintain his hold on power. It’s ugly as a scenario but very possible.

It’s impossible to keep up. Never mind AI, just the proliferation of straight, human information on this platform alone is so astounding, and it multiplies by the second. It’s like dipping into a trippy buffet of consciousness-raising intelligence and overload every time I go on here. Where to plug in? What can I offer as a benefit to consumers of this noospheric soup? I seem to have the typical “thoughts I think while I sip my coffee” line of Substack musings. But no apologies needed, I say.

That’s me, that’s what I do. I don’t have deep knowledge of a particular hot topic. I’m just a writer using the meager input I get in life — through books, movies, media, and my experience, i.e. the people I love and hate and their example, their thoughts, words, and whatever internal models of reality they carry — to try to fashion a model of reality of my own that is authentic, useful, and fit to serve for others.

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I tell stories that I call novels. But on this platform of long form essays I’m kind of an off-duty policeman doing a shift as a bouncer at a nightclub. I offer my thoughts on things. It’s simple, sometimes compelling when I’m feeling in the groove. But today not so much. I’m just coasting, honestly, while the world spins in an ever widening gyre. Will it all collapse this week? Will the Epstein files get released? Will the Supreme Court offer a definitive judgement which collapses the tariff house of cards? Are Snap benefits on or off? Will Trump send in the National Guard to your city as a distraction? And what we all need to know — will the planes all get cancelled before Thanksgiving?

Sorry, I haven’t got a clue. You won’t read that answer here this week.

There are some good things happening. The people in Gaza are rebuilding their lives in precarious and still deeply tragic conditions. There is movement towards peace in the Holy Land, but also hatred unbound and blood still being spilled. Trump deserves credit for bringing Netanyahu to heel, but their shared past of criminality makes me think it’s a temporary abeyance.

Anyway, further good news. Mamdani in NYC. Gavin Newsom in California. The people have roared back to life on both coasts. The bad news is we still have the great unwashed Maga midlands where only God knows what will bubble up. There are signs of discontent — Marjorie Taylor Green, the Joan of Arc of the Maga Christian nationalist revival, begins to hedge her pro-Trump bets post Gaza and Epstein revelations.

But other GOP politicians and commentarati with a finger on the pulse of their constituents are doubling down on the racism post Mamdani victory. So we don’t know which way this will all go in the longer term, Plus ca change, plus la meme chose, is my hunch.

Another thing on my mind is the onslaught of AI. Is it real or it it all manipulated hype to juice the stock portfolios of the billionaire class at the expense of all what is sacred? I don’t know, but the possible oligarchic end game scares the pants off anyone who is looking up.

(photo credit my daughter Eve in NYC)

Eve, who is looking for a job, is also looking up and around at the same time. That’s how we raised her, thank God. She also notices the proliferation of people on the subway talking into these.

This is a necklace that doubles as a virtual human companion for people who don’t mind losing contact with humanity. It does not bode well, as we evolve into the age of “parasocial.”

Caitklin Johnstone, who is a treasure imho, has this to say about AI and its possible short shelf life.

Generative AI is making everything dumber. It’s crippling people’s ability to write, research, think critically and create art for themselves. It’s making it harder for us to discern truth from falsehood. It’s causing people to become divorced from their own humanity in weirder and weirder ways.

It’s getting harder and harder to know what’s real on the internet. That photo could be fake. That video could be fake. That song could have been made without any actual artist behind it. That essay could have been written by a chatbot. That social media account you’re interacting with could be a chatbot themselves. This is going to have a massively alienating effect on networking technologies whose initial promise was to help bring us all together.

When the internet first showed up people rejoiced at their ability to connect with others around the world who had the same interests and passions, saying “At long last, I’m not alone!” When AI showed up people started logging on to the internet and wondering, “Uhh… am I alone?”

Because you can’t be sure there’s anyone in there.

I hope she’s right in her surmising that this may push a generation off the Internet and in the direction of more grounded and satisfying human interaction with culture and each other.

In the meantime, I will begin to exercise my prerogatives (in the interest of transparency, I just turned 65) and say to younger people who may be listening. Just say no to the AI companion. Don’t be part of that demographic that gives up on dating a member of the human race just because it’s difficult and awklward and pushes you out of your comfort zone. We were not evolved to be comfortable. It’s not good for us. And our priors are always what dooms us. Don’t have priors. Reflect on them and get ready to jettison them to save your soul. It is necessary.

I know that may seem easy for me to say. I’m a comfortable old white guy living in rural NH and I look the part. But until you get to know me in person, don’t assume that demography equals destiny. Ass u me. Makes an ass out of u and me.

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Official Launch Day! Happy birthday to Alias Tomorrow! Check it out, celebrate our collective imagination, and help me launch this book into the stratosphere with a bang!

https://bit.ly/44kKNje

Also, check out this killer video:

Get the week started right, peeps. Together in art we can win this thing. Whatever it is.

Alias Tomorrow, available for purchase starting Nov. 3, is a suspenseful exploration of a society where advanced technology has blurred the lines between reality and illusion, and a character-driven, unflinchingly honest expose of the inner lives of an American family. It intertwines an inspirational narrative of …

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Interesting to have Saroj in the house, Morrow thought. At first he had resented the intrusion on his usually quiet mornings. But he had fairly quickly become used to the company, and it was clear that…

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One little noticed development that may or may not have major repercussions that I noticed was yesterday when Hakeem Jeffries announced his support for Zoran Mamdani’s mayoral candidacy in NYC. I don’t know what to make of it other than it marks the tide turning in a major political battle that may also portend an interesting and blockbuster cultural sh…

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(Credit: Geoff Forester, Concord Monitor)

Today dawned brighter after yesterday’s pro-democracy street festivals across New Hampshire and across the entire country.

The No Kings Day celebration in Concord where I was stationed was a loud and joyous affair, Some 10,000 people lined Main Street from the Statehouse down about a half mile on both sides of t…

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