Daniel Greenfield / Sultan Knish Articles at DanielGreenfield.org

Microsoft. Warner Bros. Electronic Arts. These are only some of the major corporations who appear on the list of clients for Sweet Baby Inc: a DEI consulting firm that some video game players believe is reshaping the industry. Sweet Baby Inc was only founded in 2018, but its clients now include Xbox, Microsoft’s dominant video game platform and subscription service, Warner Bros, whose video game arm publishes Batman and Harry Potter games, Electronic Arts, which is behind the Battlefield series, the NFL, NHL and FIFA soccer franchises, the Sims franchise, as well as Star Wars games, Ubisoft, the makers of the popular Assassin’s Creed series, Square Enix, makers of Final Fantasy, and Wizards of the Coast, who control the Dungeons and Dragons franchise. As well as Valve whose monopolistic Steam platform controls 75% of global video game sales. Of the top 10 best-selling games in 2023, 8 were published by studios that were either affiliated with Sweet Baby Inc. or that, after Microsoft’s ...

Big Tech has a great big dream of destroying the internet. And it’s mostly a reality. The vision of the internet was an open universe while Big Tech’s vision is the internet reduced to the feed on a few proprietary apps preloaded on your locked phone. Trying to censor the internet of the 90s or the 00s was a laughable proposition, but censoring today’s internet is laughably easy. Want to eliminate a site from the internet? Just wipe it from Google, ban a point of view from Facebook, a book from Amazon, or a video from YouTube. It’s still possible to browse a site off the Big Tech reservation, for now, at least until your browser goes away. Then content will be limited to the permitted apps on Google and Apple’s proprietary app stores. But Big Tech has even more ambitious plans to replace the internet with itself. Big Tech has dramatically simplified the user experience off the internet. It did so by moving users from ‘pulling’ content by browsing the internet to ‘pushing’ content at th...

Luftmensch meant a 'man of air' who lived detached from the real world, had no income or any way to pay his bills, and yet here he was. With the internet, we're all cloud people now. Our economy is dominated by companies with unclear business plans except that they somehow involve the cloud.   Facebook, which despite its recent downturn, still has a stock price twice the value of GE, unveiled its big achievement, ' Legs ' which will allow its avatars to enjoy the appearance of feet in the metaverse. Netflix's stock price is double that of IBM, even though it suffered some reverses when investors realized that its plan to continue growing forever while spending $17 billion a year on creating bad movies and TV shows was not actually sustainable. Good thing there's solar panel and wind turbine companies to bet on. Beyond cryptocurrencies (just imagine if your money were even more intangible, less secure and backed by even less in the way of assets than it is n...

In 1988, a new program was created that would, unwillingly, give its name to an entire field of fake pictures. At the end of the eighties, Adobe Photoshop was not associated with faked photos. But the popularization of the graphics software made it possible for people to produce plausible fake pictures. And, the world is still here. Deepfakes, what can be called "Photoshopping for video," has set off an hysterical overreaction by Dems and the media that’s usually reserved for discovering that their flaming pants were made in Moscow. Rep. Yvette Clarke, a politician no one had previously accused of understanding technology, has proposed the DEEPFAKES Accountability Act. The bill exists for no other reason than to remind people outside her miserable Brooklyn district of her existence and for the Supreme Court to strike it down. The bill mandates a digital watermark for any "advanced technological false personation record" created "with the intent to distr...

Every now and then a hobbyist inspired by splashy magazine covers featuring art deco cities and soaring vehicles full of the cheerful people of the future puts together a flying car. The result is noted chiefly for its novelty and then everyone moves along because we aren't a flying car culture. From the bottom up we might long to soar above the highways, but from the top down we are a light rail culture, a biodegradable house culture and a guard rail culture. For the people at the top the flying car should be able to fit in a closet, have a minimal carbon footprint, run on the tears of Third World children and not fly. It should be the sort of thing that you can leave outside a vegan tofu restaurant in Portland in order to shame working class truck drivers. That is if you have to have a car at all, rather than a bike and a light rail pass. The flying car belonged to an America at a crossroads. A nation tiptoeing between the adventure of innovation and the progressive order o...

The media trajectory of computer technology has gone something like this. One brand name is embraced as a trend and all the media's collective hype machine focused on it. The internet has seen an acceleration of these brands and the media's lazy reporting gives us months of stories created entirely through the following formula. Brand Name + Anything = News Story There have been plenty of brands that have held this dubious honor. Microsoft. Apple. Yahoo. Google. The IPod. MySpace. And now the latest and nearly the most irritating of them all, YouTube. And so we get an endless barrage of news story about Youtube, the way we did about Myspace not so long ago and the IPod before that. Reporters can now browse Youtube, dig up a video and treat it as news. Any story involving politics or business that has a video placed on Youtube about it, also whirlpools it in as news. The latest and phoniest of the bunch is a campaign commercial produced by an employee for a company working for O...