Prospect Park in Brooklyn, doing its best impersonation of the Windows XP background, but actually entirely real and you can sit in it. (Photo by Amanda Katz)
This week, speaking to the German Chancellor on the future of work, the CEO of computing infrastructure company Nvidia laid out his vision for the factory of the future. “Every single company in the future will have two factories,” Jensen Huang said. “The factory that is real, and the factory that is digital. And the factory that is digital will be so real it might as well be real… I believe that most people here in Germany will mostly work inside a digital twin of their company. They will build digital cars, those cars will have digital brains, the factories will of course have artificial intelligence robots, building inside a robotic factory, building cars that will be robotic.”
Okay? Okay. Huang’s dramatic if slightly gibberishy description obscures how much this scenario might be just an extension of the present day—are you saying car factories will use automation set up by humans, bro? But I keep turning over his words in my mind. A digital factory that is so real it might as well be real. In his vision, that is where we will spend our human labor, and our days on earth. This is fine, at least to an owner who stands to benefit from that outcome.
Finding sea glass at Coney Island. (Photo by Amanda Katz)
All around me is evidence that humans do not want to live out their days inside a digital twin of their company—quite the opposite, in fact. We are addicted to our screens, but we know very well this is not where happiness lies. Even my screen knows that. My Instagram Reels algorithm has shifted to showing me almost entirely short videos of people recovering physical artifacts of nature or material culture—amateur geologists cracking open geodes, mudlarks finding old brass buttons on the banks of the Thames, house restorers scraping layers of paint off Victorian mantelpieces, a guy who cleans up estate jewelry otherwise headed for melt. People darn jeans, take in runty baby goats, show you how to make cake.
In real life, the people I know actually are baking and dancing and gardening and climbing trees and taking up crafts they had abandoned. The kids run in and out of neighboring houses, helping to decorate each other’s yards for Halloween. Among the many DC neighbors who are out of work or working from home, people meet, hungry for contact, during the day. We know that in digital isolation lies loneliness, removal from each other and from the warm autumn sun of the world. A digital twin of a company sounds bleaker still, a vision of a world where we stay chained to the screen in trade for bread and healthcare, enriching the owners above us with every keystroke without even the hope of meeting our fellows for a beer after work. With inflation outpacing wage growth and AI overhyped far beyond most people’s use for it, the upside of this evolution is hard to see.
TFW you’re working from home but your colleagues are a little weird (Photo by Amanda Katz)
As the last days of the 2026 midterm election tick by, Donald Trump’s messaging and actions point ever further from creating material improvements for regular Americans. High gas and grocery prices due to his elective war in Iran and tariffs seem non-negotiable, with Trump declining to moderate his decisions even for political gains. An estimated 12 million Americans have lost health insurance under Trump’s second term, while others are hanging onto their plans white-knuckled as premiums soar. He has promised American adults $5000 of their own tax dollars back if they give victory to his party in the House and Senate, but even members of his own administration have cautioned that he may not follow through. Trump insists on the importance of data centers, on which the huge AI companies propping up the stock market depend but which are heightening electricity costs and environmental hazards for locals, mostly to shore up a technology many people barely want to use. Meanwhile, a public amenity like trees in a park? He will chop them down speedily enough to beat a judge’s orders, then force DOJ lawyers to claim this was just routine maintenance, even as he announces he is taking over the park immediately to turn it into an upscale golf course.
Put simply, the federal government is currently bringing no material improvement to the lives of anyone who isn’t in on the AI-driven stock market or (even more advantageously) a beneficiary of the graft that defines the administration. Trump ran on an implicit deal of a purge of immigrants in exchange for economic gain, but in practice, while he has indeed harmed the safety and livelihoods of many immigrants and brown people in general, the economic gain has failed to materialize. Not surprisingly, polls show that the 20 or so percent swing vote of Americans who were willing to give him another shot based on this deal have abandoned him, leaving only the true MAGA faithful. For that chunk of the electorate, faith may be enough. But for most voters, pragmatically stuck on feeding their families, going to work and school unmolested by a paramilitary force, and perhaps occasionally taking a walk under a tree, reality matters.
From a strategic perspective, it’s not clear why Trump isn’t taking a card from the far more popular Zohran Mamdani, the New York City mayor whose stock in trade, aside from his charm, has become fixing real-life problems: more affordable housing, free 2K seats, a lower crime rate, potholes filled, lights on the soccer field at night. My favorite thing about Mamdani’s tenure so far is that teens far outside New York have started using “Mamdani” as slang for “a person who solves things.” That’s the zeitgeist, baby. It’s also how you win elections. (Also, is there now an entire Wikipedia page for the term “Mamdanification”? Yes, yes there is.)
Not the only post I’ve seen to this effect.
Ultimately, Trump and his fellow travelers have an uphill battle to victory without putting some bread into the bread and circuses. Even the circus, it seems, is going to be happening online, with no cotton candy or peanuts, and you’re the one paying for it. If Democrats do succeed in taking one or both houses, the new Congress in January will have its work cut out restoring some accountability to this administration, shoring up our democracy and its ideals, and trying to impose some basic regulation on this every-rich-guy-for-himself chaos—including, yes, on the masters of AI. But they also need to keep the focus on the deteriorating real-life circumstances of Americans, and their resistance to giving up real-world necessities and pleasures to endure life in a box on a screen, all to benefit someone else.
Ah, a bucolic walk in a DC park. (Photo by Amanda Katz)
In short
France has had a brutal year, with thousands of deaths due to extreme heat, a series of enormous wildfires, and now massive student protests that have been seized as an opportunity for looting, destruction, and rallying the far right. I feel for its people. However, I can only be grateful for this New York Times headline, a classic of what is known by linguists as a “crash blossom.” A bas le champignon!
This year-long project where a New York Times magazine reporter embedded with some of the few remaining OB-GYNs still trying to practice in Idaho despite the state’s draconian restrictions on reproductive care is really worth reading. “The impact of what some are calling a generational loss of doctors is already clear: By banning abortion, Idaho has become a more dangerous place to give birth,” writes Lisa Lerer.
Just one of those ill-starred faerie circles that you see sometimes. Do not enter it at any cost. (Photo by Amanda Katz)
Speaking of the real world and of fungus, I stumbled on this mysterious circle of mushrooms in a field. Fortunately, my instincts were good enough to stand clear and simply photograph it for consultation with my witchiest friend. “OMG IT’S A FAERIE CIRCLE! Don’t step inside it!” she responded immediately. Anyway, here is Smithsonian Magazine’s scientific explanation for this phenomenon, though I also hear reliably that these are created by fairies or elves dancing under the full moon and that that “entering or disturbing one [can] only bring ill fortune.”
Recommended
Canadian poet, essayist, and translator Anne Carson has won the Nobel Prize for literature. If you’ve never read any of her work, start with “Autobiography of Red,” a prosy book-length poem about a sad red monster boy named Geryon. I used to teach poetry workshops, and assigning this book to beginners immediately made them realize they were allowed to write about more than just love, spring, and the moon, mercifully for their instructor.
Finally, I just want to note that Porch Party would have gone out yesterday had my kids and I not spent nearly all of Wednesday night in the emergency room. Everyone is fine. Real life! Big thanks to the extremely kind and competent Dr. Nate Jones, a pediatric ER doctor with great bone-relocation and people skills.
If you’ve read this far, thanks for your support. Got ideas for topics or people Porch Party should cover, or pitches for a guest piece? Drop me a line. And if you haven’t done so already, please become a paid subscriber, which will allow you to comment and get invites to future in-person events.
Get ready to vote, if you have the right! And see you next time.