“The entire world is memes, one meme after another, everywhere.”
That’s what I said out loud to myself as I was driving a rental car back to Halifax from Charlottetown yesterday.
The word “meme” was coined by Richard Dawkins in his his 1976 book, The Selfish Gene, to mean a small bit of cultural product — a joke, an advertising jingle, tattoo imagery, whatever — that gets passed along, replicates, and evolves with new iterations.
Even the word itself has evolved. In internet culture, memes exploded because they are so easily shared and altered. Internet memes mostly are detached from the real world. That is, they exist only as the social product, detached from any underlying reality, and it’s that property that has been useful to define other categories of memes.
Meme sto…
“The entire world is memes, one meme after another, everywhere.”
That’s what I said out loud to myself as I was driving a rental car back to Halifax from Charlottetown yesterday.
The word “meme” was coined by Richard Dawkins in his his 1976 book, The Selfish Gene, to mean a small bit of cultural product — a joke, an advertising jingle, tattoo imagery, whatever — that gets passed along, replicates, and evolves with new iterations.
Even the word itself has evolved. In internet culture, memes exploded because they are so easily shared and altered. Internet memes mostly are detached from the real world. That is, they exist only as the social product, detached from any underlying reality, and it’s that property that has been useful to define other categories of memes.
Meme stocks, for example, are stocks that have value detached from the traditional fundamental analyses of stock value — looking at a company’s financial statements and assessing value through its sales, assets, liabilities, EBITDA (Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation and Amortization), growth, and so forth. In contrast, meme stocks have value because people just want them to have value.
The most notorious meme stock was that of GameStop, an old-school retail chain that sells video games out of actual physical stores on city streets. Because most video gaming now takes place on the internet, and because even people who buy physical games mostly use Amazon, the company had been closing stores and losing stock value. Hedge funds started shorting the stock — betting that it would decrease in value — because by all traditional assessments of value, that’s exactly what should have happened.
But then a bunch of Redditors organized what is now known as the GameStop short squeeze as a form of retribution against what they considered overly powerful financiers. The price of the stock soared, and the hedge funds lost billions of dollars. Still, there was no change in the basic GameStop business — it wasn’t very profitable, as it was selling stuff in physical stores while most people were buying games through Amazon. By all traditional measures, the stock should’ve been close to worthless.
(Very recently, GameStop has seen a growth in sales as it has cleverly used its notoriety to market collectibles. This is an unusual example of a meme re-connecting to the real world).
I consider Tesla the best example of a meme stock. The company is tiny compared to the major automakers, it doesn’t sell many vehicles, its most recent product introduction — the cybertruck — is a dud, and sales are collapsing.
But Tesla stock is valued more than that of General Motors. That’s because a lot of people have something akin to religious faith in Elon Musk; they either just like him, or they truly believe that despite a lifetime of making absurd and unrealized claims about emerging technologies, he really will deliver on the promise of driverless vehicles.
Tesla stock soared just after Trump was elected, but the Musk glow has faded as more people come to understand just how much of an asshole he is, and so the stock has lost some value in recent months. However, by traditional analyses,Tesla stock is still overvalued by 91%.
A stock disconnected from reality. It just has value because people want it to have value.
We see that disconnect everywhere. Most distinctly, in cryptocurrency, which has no connection whatsoever to the real economy. But it is an excellent vehicle for bribes to enrich those connected to the Trump regime, as the Trump family issues a slew of cryptocurrencies, NFTs, and so forth. The bribery is right out in the open, and no one seems to care, or at least no one with the power to intervene seems to care.
I was in Charlottetown for a journalism conference. On Tuesday, there was a conference session on AI in the newsroom, and of course I was the guy who pissed in the punchbowl, the dissenting voice in the room.
I’ll explain this in more detail at a later date, but for now I’ll just say that I was struck that I was in a room for of journalists, people who work day in and day out to critically understand the world, and yet they mostly don’t even know what AI is and is not, they don’t know the difference between machine learning and generative AI like the large language models behind ChatGPT and such, and they have uncritically bought the hype that AI is inevitable so you better learn how to use it.
That aside, what really bothered me the most is that through a two-hour discussion, I was the only one who spoke about the environmental and social costs of generative AI. It’s not that others discounted those costs, or thought they could eventually be mitigated for. Rather, they simply refused to engage with that critique at all.
For them, the hoped-for future benefits of something vaguely called “AI” are completely disconnected from the actually existing real world harms of generative AI. Don’t worry your little head about it.
In that sense, “AI” is a meme.
The Zombie Coast
Credit: Montage: Iris; screenshots from the Coast
Wednesday morning, I was feeling a little embarrassed for myself. I don’t especially relish being That Guy in the room, especially among people I like. But then I read Philip Moscovitch’s account of The Coast’s Best of Halifax survey, and I felt a little vindicated.
I don’t know exactly how that mishap happened, but it’s not a crazy guess that AI was involved in one and probably some steps of the process of creating and compiling the survey, and that no human reviewed it, or at least no human with actual reading skills reviewed it.
The Best of Halifax survey is, in short, AI slop.
In June, I reported on how The Coast’s new owners were insisting that the future of their business was going to be using AI, and I conveyed my fear:
I can envision a near future in which a bunch more companies with news media sounding names don’t do much in the way of true reporting, but merely punch out enough AI-generated slop and news-adjacent content to qualify for the [government media] subsidies.
As a result, I fear, soon “our inboxes are going to get overloaded with content that’s written by AI,” we’ll see our social media feeds bloated by even more terrible “content,” and in the end, the public will revolt against the subsidies — for good reason.
A day after we published my article, people who worked at The Coast published their own article responding, saying they were indeed human. But just four months later…they publish this AI slop.
This is no small thing.
When I worked at The Coast, I was ambivalent about Best of Halifax. It was a little too close to advertorial for my liking, but I also recognized that it was the biggest source of revenue for the company (before it started Burger Week), and so we all took it very seriously. We spent a lot of time writing clever copy with good questions up front and thoughtful write-ups on the winners after. As with all articles, every bit of writing was reviewed by multiple copyeditors, and as a result, mistakes were rare.
Whatever you thought of the Best of Halifax of old, it was a really big deal in the community, and a really big deal for The Coast.
The utter incompetence displayed in creating this year’s Best of Halifax is stunning. It should not just be job-ending, but career-ending for whoever’s responsible.
Your chatbot fuck buddy
After lunch Wednesday, I said my good-byes and got in the car for the three-and-a-half hour drive back to Halifax.
Along the way, I caught up on podcasts, and as I listened, I considered the “meme” framing I’ve been using with regularity lately.
Just as GameStop and Tesla are meme stocks, “AI” is a meme industry. None of the AI companies — OpenAI, Anthropic, etc. — are profitable, and never will be. (The AI chipmaker, Nvidia, is the exception; but it is profitable because it is selling product that fuels the hype). And yet, investment in those companies is huge, projected to be something on the order of a trillion dollars over the next two years.
The so-called “magnificent seven” tech companies, heavily invested in AI, are responsible for nearly all the growth in the stock market this year. Which is to say, the entire economy is dependent on AI investment. When the investment bubble pops, and it will, unemployment will soar and the value of retirement funds will be undermined. The global economy will go into recession or worse.
There simply isn’t enough money in the world to fuel the number-goes-up investments needed by OpenAI and Anthropic, and so the tech companies are using funhouse smoke and mirror gimmicks to circularly invest in each other, a scheme that would’ve been illegal just a few years ago.
As I was thinking about this, the 404 Media podcast came on (I’m a subscriber), and reporter Samantha Cole discussed her latest article, “OpenAI Catches Up to AI Market Reality: People Are Horny.”
The short of it is that OpenAI recently saw no increase in usage of ChatGPT, so despite promising just two months ago not to, the company is going to allow it to be used for erotic roleplaying. That is, people will soon be able to have a chatbot fuck buddy.
Talk about disconnecting from the real world. I’m no relationship guru, believe me, but even I recognize that relationships are complicated. They involve people with different histories, different wants and desires, different fears, people who make mistakes, people who learn from mistakes — and that’s exactly why they’re so great; it’s connecting on, well, I won’t call it a spiritual level, but how ’bout a human level?
To replace that human connection with a one-sided relationship that is only about meeting the top level desires of one person, without the messy work of negotiation and mutual discovery is, well, sad.
It’s meme sex.
You can bet on it
I don’t know why, but after 404 ended, Michael Lewis popped into my podcast feed. I’m ambivalent about Lewis. Of course The Big Short was insightful, but I can’t always trust Lewis. For one, he’s friends with Malcolm Gladwell, which is enough to make anyone suspect. For two, he even now has a blindspot when it comes to all things Sam Bankman Fried.
But Lewis’s latest podcast series is raising the alarm about the wide legalization of sports gambling, and rightly so. He does a good job.
Just to mention one aspect, he reports that his producer went to a high school class and found that all but one of the boys gamble on sports (it’s illegal for children to bet on sports, but that’s no barrier), while none of the girls do. I don’t know much about the literature on disaffected young men, but if they’re not getting laid maybe it’s because they’re trying to get lucky in other ways.
The problem that Lewis illuminates is that these boys don’t understand that the game is rigged against them. When they win bets, they think it’s because they’re smart and talented; when they lose bets, they blame someone else, and suddenly all those threats against athletes from gamblers makes sense to me.
It’s a sporting meme, a game disconnected from reality.
There is already tremendous harm from gambling, and it’s only going to get worse, as gambling is inserted in every damn thing now. You can’t watch a game without getting bombarded by gambling advertising.
Because of gambling, death by suicide rates among young men will soar. Bankruptcy and financial problems will be even more common, as will the associated crimes of despair and intimate partner violence.
And, inevitably, the sports themselves will be corrupted. As sure as the sun rises tomorrow, there will be players throwing games and scandals that rock entire leagues.
The damn memes are everywhere, I thought, but no one else seems to see them.
There will, however, be reckonings. Multiple reckonings. The world does in fact exist, and has its irrefutable logic. It can’t be wished away. It can’t be memed away.
I pulled into the new rest stop atop Cobequid Pass to pee, and when I got back in the car, I decided I had had enough of podcasts, so I fired up the streaming service and played Jason Isbell:
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NOTICED
1. Part-time faculty at SMU on strike
Saint Mary’s University in July, 2021.— Photo: Yvette d’Entremont
CUPE local 3912, the union representing part-time faculty at Saint Mary’s University, is on strike. Last night, the union issued a statement declaring that “After a long final day of conciliation, we were unable to reach a fair agreement with our employer, and as of tomorrow morning, Thursday, 23 October, we will officially be on strike.”
The Saint Mary’s Faculty Union (SMFU), which represents full-time faculty, issued a statement in support of the part-timers:
It is a sad and historic day for Saint Mary’s University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Our University has never witnessed a strike in the history of our Institution, dating back to 1802.
And yet, here we are in this profoundly unprecedented and disappointing moment, witnessing the first labour action on the backs of some of our hardest-working colleagues, the part-time Professoriate at Saint Mary’s University.
These workers are the poorest paid precarious academic staff in Canada.
Ranked the 3rd best undergraduate university in the country, Part-Time Faculty members, who deliver the core mission of SMU, are among the lowest paid.
Shame on the Saint Mary’s University executive leadership and employer bargaining team, and Board of Governors, for exploiting their academic staff and for their shameful bargaining tactics. This is a very sad day for our institution.
We stand in solidarity with our CUPE 3912 with our full support and call on the SMU President, Provost, BOG and Bargaining team to get back to the table immediately and work towards a fair deal now.
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2. Yarmouth ferry traffic dropped 19% in 2025
The Cat docked at Yarmouth in 2019. Credit: Suzanne Rent
Bay Ferries issued a final report for the 2025 season yesterday, showing a 19.3% drop in traffic compared to the 2024 season.
The 2025 count is also a third less than the hoped for 60,000 annual passengers that was targeted as the minimum needed to sustain the ferry. That target has never been reached.
Here are the passenger figures for the entire existence of the modern ferry service.
2016 — 35,466 passengers 2017 — 38,933 passengers 2018 — 50,187 passengers 2019 — 0 passengers 2020 — 0 passengers 2021 — 0 passengers 2022 — 36,003 passengers 2023 — 38,399 passengers 2024 — 49,299 passengers 2025 — 39,745 passengers
There were no passengers in 2019 because Bay Ferries bungled the move of the Maine terminal from Portland to Bar Harbor. There were no passengers in 2020 and 2021 because of COVID.
The company blamed this year’s decrease on Canadians refusing to travel to the U.S., and said that bookings of U.S. passengers were about the same as last year. It did not provide specific numbers for either, however.
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THE LATEST FROM THE HALIFAX EXAMINER:
**1. **Concerned citizens mobilize to defend proposed Ingram River Wilderness Area
A young hiker with the Ingram Action Group enjoys the scenery at Long Lake in the proposed Ingram River Wilderness Area on Oct. 13, 2025. Credit: Madiha Mughees
Madiha Mughees reports:
Concerned residents of the St. Margaret’s Bay region are preparing a response as they work to halt planned clearcutting within the proposed Ingram River Wilderness Area (IRWA).
Following the announcement of clearcutting in the IRWA earlier this year, the St. Margaret’s Bay Stewardship Association (SMBSA), led by its executive director Mike Lancaster, hosted an information session to underscore the region’s importance for old-growth forests and its role as a habitat for endangered mainland moose, several other species of concern, and a breeding population of Atlantic salmon.
More than 100 people attended that August meeting. Afterwards, many attendees got together and formed the Ingram Action Group, a group of concerned citizens determined to take action to stop the planned high-production forestry (HPF) in the IRWA.
Click or tap here to read “Concerned citizens mobilize to defend proposed Ingram River Wilderness Area.”
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2. Free parking at IWK now only available to patients, families, and visitors
The IWK Health Centre in July, 2021. Credit: Yvette d’Entremont
Suzanne Rent reports:
The IWK Health Centre is making changes to its on-site parking rules, months after Premier Tim Houston’s government announced that parking would be free at all health care facilities in Nova Scotia.
On Wednesday, the IWK shared this statement noting that parking will only be free for patients, families, and visitors. The change is effective immediately.
Click or tap here to read “Free parking at IWK now only available to patients, families, and visitors.”
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**3. **Nova Scotia breaches conditions of $28.5 million nature agreement with Ottawa
Save West Mabou Beach Park signs, like this one in Inverness County, are popping up all over Cape Breton in late October 2025. Credit: contributed
Joan Baxter reports:
Fears are growing that Premier Tim Houston’s government is losing interest in its own legislated goal of protecting “at least 20% of the total land and water mass” by 2030, and in fulfilling the terms of the Canada-Nova Scotia Nature Agreement.
That agreement was signed with much fanfare in 2023 between the Nova Scotia government and Environment and Climate Change Canada.
The agreement was a gift – worth $28.5 million – from the federal government to Nova Scotia. It was intended to help the province reach its goal of protecting 20% of its land mass by 2030, while helping Canada meet its goal of protecting 30% of its land and inland water that same year.
The agreement specified that Nova Scotia could use the funds to add 82,500 hectares (203,862 acres) to its protected and conserved areas by March 2026. This would “result in protection for close to 15% of the province’s land mass” and create “a pathway to the provincial goal of 20% by 2030, by supporting and accelerating processes that enhance land use planning.”
When Houston’s government signed the agreement, it committed to ensuring the province would “lead public reporting on progress implementing this Agreement in July of each year, starting in 2024.”
Further, Section 7 of the agreement stipulates that the progress reporting would be “prepared in plain language” and “at minimum report on outcomes achieved for any commitments scheduled for the Fiscal Year preceding the reporting date.”
Not only has Houston’s government failed to provide the public with any updates on the progress of the agreement since 2023. It has also failed to produce a single annual report, although it should have done so starting in July 2024.
Click or tap here to read “Nova Scotia breaches conditions of $28.5 million nature agreement with Ottawa.”
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4. MSVU unveils new mural to celebrate Mi’kmaq community
The artwork, “Growing Well,” is the creation of four artists: Jessica Jerome, Grace Campbell-LeBlanc, Dr. Krista Collier-Jarvis, and Cheyenne Hardy. It was unveiled on Oct. 22, 2025. Credit: Madiha Mughees
Madiha Mughees reports:
An art project intended to celebrate Indigenous culture and its connection with the Mount Saint Vincent University (MSVU) community was unveiled at the university on Wednesday night.
It is part of MSVU’s Two-Eyed Seeing program, which serves youth across the Mi’kmaq community, and is a collaborative effort by four artists: Jessica Jerome, Grace Campbell-LeBlanc, Dr. Krista Collier-Jarvis, and Cheyenne Hardy.
Dozens of people packed the MSVU library for the event, which began with a traditional Indigenous drumming performance. Speeches were delivered by MSVU librarian Jeannie Bail, Two-Eyed Seeing program coordinator Cathy LeBlanc, and two of the artists, Hardy and Collier-Jarvis, before the mural was unveiled.
Click or tap here to read “MSVU unveils new mural to celebrate Mi’kmaq community.”
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Government
City
Transportation Standing Committee (Thursday, 1pm, City Hall and online) — agenda
Province
No meetings
On campus
Dalhousie
Thursday
Group Read – Reclaiming Power + Place: The Final Report (Thursday, 12pm, Indigenous Student Centre and online) — details
Novel insights into follicle-stimulating hormone regulation: How ignoring well-meaning grant reviewers led to progress (Thursday, 1pm, online) — Daniel Bernard from McGill University will talk
The Politics of Decarbonization: How we get stuck and how we can get unstuck (Thursday, 7:15pm, Potter Auditorium, Rowe Building and online) — Matthew Hoffmann from the University of Toronto will talk
Friday
Noonish Hour Live Music: Saxophone (Friday, 11:45am, Strug Concert Hall) — details
King’s
Thursday
No events
Friday
The Ill-tempered Man (Friday, 5pm, The Quad) — King’s Theatrical Society outdoor presentation
NSCAD
Thursday
No events
Friday
**Workshop: Reconnecting Craft through Crochet **(Friday, 3pm, Treaty Space Gallery) — details and RSVP
Literary Events
Thursday
Writing Rumble 2025 (Thursday, 2pm, Open Book Coffee, Halifax) — the Quilluminati vs the Word Slingers; details
Ghost Stories from Nova Scotia with Cindy Campbell-Stone: The Shadow in the Window (Thursday, 6pm, Bedford Public Library) — details
Friday
An Evening with Zilla Jones: Exploring the World So Wide (Friday, 7pm, Rowe Building, Dalhousie) — the author reads from and discusses her new novel
In the harbour
Halifax 05:30: One Monaco, container ship, sails from Pier 41 for Singapore 06:00: Enchanted Princess, cruise ship with 4,402 passengers, arrives at Pier 22 from Portland, on a seven-day roundtrip cruise out of New York 07:00: One Minato, container ship (152,180 tonnes), arrives at Pier 41 from Colombo, Sri Lanka 07:30: Allura, cruise ship with up to 1,469 passengers, arrives at Pier 20 from Saint John, on an 110day cruise from New York to Montréal 08:00: Nolhan Ava, ro-ro cargo, moves from Pier 42 to Pier 26 09:00: IT Intrepid, cable layer, arrives at Pier 9 from Cape Canaveral, Florida 10:00: ZIM Iberia, container ship, arrives at Fairview Cove from Valencia, Spain 10:30: Oceanex Sanderling, ro-ro container, moves from Fairview Cove to anchorage 12:00: Pictor, container ship, arrives at Pier 41/42 from Portland 13:00: Lake Victoria, car carrier, sails from Autoport for sea 16:30: Enchanted Princess sails for New York 16:30: Allura sails for Sydney 16:30: Oceanex Sanderling moves to Autoport 18:00: ZIM Iberia sails for New York 21:30: One Minato sails for sea 21:30: Pictor sails for Reykjavik
Cape Breton 05:15: Majestic Princess, cruise ship with up to 4,272 passengers, arrives at Government Wharf from Charlottetown, on a 14-day cruise from Québec City to Fort Lauderdale 08:00: Fugro Supporter, research vessel, arrives at Mulgrave from sea 08:00: Rt Hon Paul E Martin, bulker, sails from Coal Pier (Point Tupper) for sea 09:45: Insignia, cruise ship with up to 800 passengers, arrives at Liberty Pier (Sydney) from Corner Brook, on an 11-day cruise from Montréal to Boston 14:30: Nordic Cygnus, oil tanker, sails from EverWind for sea 15:30: Nordic Hawk, oil tanker, sails from EverWind for sea 16:30: Majestic Princess sails for Halifax 18:15: Insignia sails for Halifax 18:30: Suomigracht, cargo ship, sails from Atlantic Bulk Terminal for sea 19:00: Rt Hon Paul E Martin sails for sea
Footnotes
I’m going to Birdies for brekkie.