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Idiocracy was so good, it has become scary.

I began to seriously worry that my satire was being taken seriously about 10 years ago, and I began gradually moving away from it. It was devastating to realize that I needed to be mindful of people with no refined sense of irony when writing.

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Exactly. What if Musk started a trend? Backwards cowboy hats at the beach, at the mall, in class. I mean, when and why did people start wearing backwards baseball caps? To emulate their favourite catcher, maybe?

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Thanks for another thought-provoking piece, John.

Somehow I had missed Jane’s Altman tweet analysis. Genius. The sad part is how few of us probably thought about it in that way.

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Thanks for sharing my slide, John. The Best quote is another one I look at and just want to writing-teacher-annotate, but indeed after a while the annotations are always the same. If any of your readers are interested, I originally made that slide for a talk I gave at Harvard's Berkman Klein Center, which I've published here: https://writinghacks.substack.com/p/writing-and-learning-to-write-in

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A very thoughtful piece.

It is worrying (very) that the Ketamine Kid control so much of US and European goings on. I hope our Governments come to their senses. One man with so much power and influence. Great piece of writing from you John

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Oct 2, 2023Liked by John Warner

I feel like Sylvia was trying to throw you off your game with such a random assortment of books, but you were unfazed! (And Homegoing is such an excellent choice.)

I definitely need to check out Idiocracy. I watched the YouTube clip and laughed until I cried, with no irony whatsoever.

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It was a tricky pick, and both a good one and bad one in that Sylvia said she's already read it, but also that she really liked it, so at least I was on target.

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Oct 5, 2023·edited Oct 5, 2023Liked by John Warner

Your ridicule of these tech bros is well placed. My recent post questioning if Substack cares if the AI bots are crawling through our Substack posts has so far received zero response from the Substack team. This is despite a few high profile readers nudging them. Read the post here if you are interested:

https://boodsy.substack.com/p/the-ai-bots-are-coming-for-your-substack

I would be interested to know how you perceive bias when they promote writers.

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