Intro for April 2, 2026

Dear Gossips,

Lots going on in the world these days. Too much, some might say. Going back to the moon? To visit Earth’s lil space girlfriend? Okay, yes, but don’t expect me to watch any of that sh-t live, I never recovered from the Columbia explosion, and a generation before me never got over the Challenger explosion, and a generation before them never got over Apollo 1, what I’m saying is, we do not belong in space. I know why we invest in it, I’m not even against it, it’s just like the ocean. Space is not our realm. We are angering the gods. There is no Rocky to greet us, happy happy happy. There is only Selene asking us kindly to go home before the awful vacuum of space does something terrible.

On terra firma, meanwhile, things continue awfully, because the absolute worst people have the most power. Remember Disney’s billion-dollar deal with Open AI’s Sora platform, to bring short-form AI slop to the masses? Well, that deal imploded last week when Open AI sh-tcanned Sora because it was losing, reportedly, $15 million PER DAY. Going to space is one of those things that produces a lot of ancillary benefits for humanity. It’s not just about imagination and inspiration; we get concrete scientific advancements from space exploration that moves all of humanity forward. But AI? At least in its generative form? It’s a vacuum more crushing than the galaxy around us. It sucks up resources—money, time, environment—and gives nothing back. It incinerates possibility.

Disney, however, gets no brownie points from being forcefully ejected from the generative AI partnership. The new CEO, Josh D’Amaro, whose corporate portrait makes him look the president of the Southern California Street Magician & Illusionists’ Guild, is not opposed to forming his own generative AI partnership with some other money-burning enterprise. The Sora deal was Bog Iger’s parting gift, the new regime isn’t mourning it, they just want to architect their own deal. They’re still on the same bullsh-t, just under a different business daddy.

And if you’re wondering how companies that lose $15 million a day are profitable, don’t worry, they’re not, and the red flags are mounting that the AI bubble is about to burst, if it hasn’t already started. On Tuesday, Oracle fired 30,000 employees via email. Twenty years ago, it was a major plot point of the film Up in the Air that it was considered callous and tacky to hire consultants to handle job elimination, now it’s done with the push of one button.

The job cuts are directly linked to Oracle’s “aggressive” expansion into AI infrastructure. Oracle’s debt is so bad, banks won’t lend to them anymore (pop goes the bubble). And if this is ringing some bells, yes, Oracle and its land-hogging captain, Larry Ellison, promised to underwrite nepo baby David Ellison’s acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery. Suddenly Wall Street is nervous about the Paramount Skydance/WBD merger. Suddenly people are wondering about the math. I said all along these were not healthy companies, but I’m just a gossip. What the f-ck do I know.

But gossip has always been at the forefront of upheaval. Gossip predicates change. And the gossip we’ve been tracing over the last decade, of an entertainment industry slowly choking as tech companies moved in and devoured resources and left nothing of value behind, is a precursor to the AI debt bomb poised to wreck the global economy, for what will be the THIRD “once in a generation” economic collapse of the last twenty years. Hollywood is the bellwether for the coming storm, just as the auto industry was in the mid-20^th century. But unlike that, no one cares about Hollywood’s struggles because we’ve been conditioned to think of Hollywood as elitist and frivolous and not see it for what it was, in its first century of industry: the home of a robust, highly skilled, middle-class labor force.

Some people are in the halls of power, pushing for support for Hollywood as an industry, such as Noah Wyle, who recently spoke in a congressional hearing about supporting film and TV production in the US. Hollywood, as an industry, will probably never be what it once was. Just as with the auto industry, there is too much international competition to wholly concentrate production in one place. But we don’t have to let it die. Saving it, though, means prioritizing human creativity over AI slop, and I don’t think the people in charge right now are interested in that. Can we outlast them long enough to see a revitalization of Hollywood? Only the moon knows.

Live long and gossip,

Sarah