This is Bloomberg Opinion Today, the bureaucratic pearl clutching of Bloomberg Opinion’s opinions. On Sundays, we look at the major themes of the week past and how they will define the week ahead. Sign up for the daily newsletter here.

Can I trust you? You know you can’t trust me:

But who do you trust more: scientists or aliens? When FD Flam was a science writer for The Philadelphia Inquirer in 1996, researchers allegedly discovered that Martian microbes rode to Earth on a meteorite. “NASA officials wanted to keep the findings a secret until a big press conference — a situation that makes it hard for reporters to do any truth-squadding in advance. And anyone who might have doubts tends to get drowned out by a torrent of early media coverage, which usually parrots the official announcement,” she writes.

“In this case, reporters got a lucky break when the news leaked, and we were able to arm ourselves with information and points of view from independent sources before the big show. President Bill Clinton gave a speech about the historic moment, but the media coverage was not uniformly fawning. Most scientists with relevant expertise suspected the specimen had been contaminated with earthly life, which is the consensus today.”

We’ve seen it over and over: A majorly hyped and supposedly transformative discovery becomes front-page news, only for it to be discredited months — or worse – years later: “Last week, the research journal Science finally retracted a headline-grabbing study published in 2010, which claimed scientists had found arsenic-based life,” FD notes. No wonder faith in scientists — and doctors, too — is nearing all-time lows:

Let’s face it, Americans don’t trust each other on public health, news reporting or Martian microbes. Nor, according to a Bloomberg Opinion series last year called “Republic of Distrust,” do we trust Congress (well, a whopping 9% do), the presidency (26%), the Supreme Court (30%), organized religion (32%), the medical system (36%) and so on. [1]  

It gets worse: Gautam Mukunda, who shapes the minds of the next generation of business leaders at Yale, doesn’t trust ... business leaders. He sees a rise of “predatory capitalism” that puts profit over people — which may be legal, but then so is eating roadkill (although, bizarrely, not in Texas.).

“When businesses take advantage of that legal leeway to harm their customers, people’s faith in the system and in corporate leadership erodes,” he writes. “It’s rooted in the ‘financialization’ of the American economy. As the financial sector has gotten larger and more powerful, its expectations and demands have changed the behavior of companies in all parts of the economy. That means more companies have made outperforming the market — and delivering the best short-term results — their highest priority.”

It’s bad enough if we can’t trust big business, but things are desperate when we lose faith in the industry that has been at the forefront of every technological revolution for centuries: porn.

Parmy Olson reports from the UK, where a sweeping new age-verification law is trying to keep the minors out of the muck. “Critics of Britain’s Online Safety Act call the rules bureaucratic pearl clutching and invasive, political overreach. That’s hogwash,” Parmy writes. The problem lies largely with sites like Pornhub, whose user ID software is a technical train wreck: “In our collective effort to make the internet less of a sewer, critics should remember that companies are accountable too.”

It’s not just in the sewer. Corporations at the center of our homes — and 401(k)s — don’t seem particularly accountable, either. 

“A hacker was recently able to infiltrate a plugin for an Amazon generative AI assistant after obtaining stolen credentials and making unauthorized changes, including secretly instructing it to delete files from the computers it was used on. The incident points to a gaping hole in the security practices of AI coding tools that has gone largely unnoticed,” Parmy writes in a separate piece. “AI’s move-fast dynamic is outpacing efforts to keep its newfangled coding tools secure, posing a new, uncharted risk to software development. The vibe coding revolution has promised a future where anyone can build software, but it comes with a host of potential security problems too.” 

Well, I think we know that:

But look who’s at the top of that chart — America still loves the little guy!! And we are rewarding our tiny engines of growth with … imminent destruction.

“We are entering a Golden Age of big business. Or, depending on how you look at it, a Dark Age for small business. Economic concentration is rising almost everywhere, from Main Street to Wall Street,” Allison Schrager warns. “Why? For all the handwringing about market power and concentration from both the left and the right of the political spectrum, lawmakers continue to enact policies that benefit big businesses at the expense of their smaller competitors.”

Wow, it’s almost like you can’t trust anybody these days.

Bonus Trust in Me Reading:

• Health Screenings Work. So Why Gut the Panel Behind Them? — Lisa Jarvis
• You Can Insider Trade NFTs Now — Matt Levine
• What If the US Isn’t the World’s Most Innovative Country? — Adrian Wooldridge

What’s the World Got in Store ? 

• India rate decision, Aug. 6: The Tariff Shock Puts Team Modi in a Tight Corner — Andy Mukherjee
• BOE rate decision, Aug. 7: UK Consumers Signal a Coming Winter of Discontent — Marcus Ashworth and Andrea Felsted
• Japan LDP plenary, Aug. 7: Who Buys the F-150s, and More Japan Deal Mysteries — Gearoid Reidy

When it comes to entertainment, maybe we should just trust ourselves.

“In the ongoing, fiercely competitive race to see who can come up with the most unwanted, unwelcome AI technology, we may have a new frontrunner. According to Variety, Amazon.com Inc. has made an undisclosed investment in Fable, a Bay Area start-up, and specifically in its newly launched Showrunner service, which Fable is touting as the ‘Netflix of AI,’” writes Jason Bailey.

The Netflix of AI? What does that even mean! “It allows users to use keywords to create scenes or episodes of animated cartoon shows, either of the user’s own creation or (more likely, and easily) from existing templates of television programs,” Jason explains. “Who, exactly, is this for?”

For our vanity, of course!!! Jason says Showrunner is the streaming equivalent of self-publishing on Amazon. Sure, but will it be any less original than what the studios are churning out these days?

“The three biggest movies Hollywood studios have pinned their hopes on in 2025 are the third new take on Superman in the last 20 years, the fourth iteration of the Fantastic Four, and the sixth attempt to recapture the magic of 1993’s Jurassic Park,” writes Gearoid Reidy. “In 2024, there wasn’t a single original film that broke the US box office top 15.  It’s further evidence that Western culture seems to have reached an impasse — wistful for our youth and unable to come up with any new ideas.”

Gearoid contrasts this lack of originality with Japan’s summer blockbuster: Demon Slayer. [2] “In just 10 days, the animated hit grossed ¥12.9 billion ($87 million) and is on track to become Japan’s highest-earning film ever,” he adds. “The ‘creative destruction’ that Western-style capitalism promises doesn’t seem to be inventing much besides shareholder value. Instead, it rewards a risk-adverse management approach that likes the predictable ticket.”

Hollywood, meet predatory capitalism, manga style:

Slaying box-office records.  Photographer: Richard A. Brooks /AFP/Getty Images

Note: Please send alien roadkill jerky and feedback to Tobin Harshaw at tharshaw@bloomberg.net.