🍿 Perfect Blue (1997) is a (gory, adult) masterpiece of storytelling and editing which inspired manymoreworks of art. The blurrying of fantasy and reality lands particularly hard in this era of AI slop, and I suspect Satoshi Kon’s Paprika (2006) will have aged even better.
There is a big winter storm threatening most of the continental US, and as any pair of overworked parents with an infant would do, my wife and I waited until a few days before snow piled on DC to get our other kids some new cold-weather boots.
We decided to shop in person rather than on Amazon because: 1) their feet are growing so fast that we have no idea what size boot they would be wearing for a particular model and 2) we had no time to try on a pair and return if the fit was bad, because the snow is coming in, like, less than 24 hours. My wife, having kept some contact with brick-and-mortar stores, suggested we went to the closest large shoes-only stores despite there being a Macy’s, a Nordstrom and a few other general department stores within walking distance from us, because apparently those were’t what they used to be. Okie dokie.
And so we took the green line to DC USA, a “multilevel enclosed urban shopping center anchored by big box stores”, most of which had closed since the mall’s heyday but we both remembered there being a DSW just around the corner and how could it have possibly gone out of business when its nearby competitor went bust shortly after we moved to DC? I think you can see where this is going: DSW too closed its DC locations for good early last year so we “kissed the door” as they say.
But there was a Target in the same building, and a Marshalls, and even something that used to be called “Burlington Coat Factory”. Surely between the three we would find a decent selection of children’s winter boots in the middle of January. Not a chance, said my wife who is wise and knowledgable in the ways of shopping,
I write this without wanting to promote any stereotypes because we both in fact hate shopping, but it is all a matter of degrees and she hates it slightly less than I do. and I didn’t trust her but I should have because I did go into the Target remembering it as the Target of my youth — well, late 20s — when I had just come to America and its shelves along with those of Wallmart seemed to stretch into infinity.
My friends, the kids shoe shelf of this particular Target did not stretch into infinity. It barely stretched six feet. It had no more than three sizes of each model and no more than two models of each shoe type. Marshalls was even worse. Under the wise direction of our master shopper we didn’t even walk into the Burlington.
Which is to say, before online services began enshittifying, they had already spurred self-enshittification of the offline world.
Cory Doctorow may have intended enshittification to signify the four-stage worsening of online services under the squeeze of financialization, but Doctorow himself in the book and elsewhere welcomed the broader use of the term which is what I’m doing here and if you want to be pedantic call if “self-shittification” instead. There is an economy/sociology/other “soft” science paper there somewhere in describing the stages of offline enshittification. Put it together with online and you get a PhD in enshittology. Big department stores have been hollowed out, along with big book stores, big electronics, big toys, big airlines, and anything else big that depended on volume and not personal relationships and brands. Like all bad things, this happened slowly then suddenly: trying to outcompete the cloud businesses, they themselves raised a toe up to the cloud.
Note how the de-enshittifcation of big box stores involves a more personal approach. Those who can pivot to it will survive. But being a cloud platform is like pregnancy — you either are or are not — and they were clearly not.
Effects of the cloud on everyday life are particularly salient now that I’ve read TechnofeudalismThough I maintain that “cloudism” is the better term and will use it instead. so this may be overstating the matter, but the broadest correct use of “enshittification” could be to describe the negative effects of cloud platforms becoming the dominant form of ownership, the thing that people need to have in order to become the movers and shakers of other people’s lives. For most of human history “the thing” was land. For the last few hundred years it was manufacturing capital. And now it’s this.
Each time, it made sense to sacrifice some of the base layer to build up and up. Yes, food was still important but even more important was the capital, so raze those fields of wheat and corn to erect factories. The famine will be worth it in the long run, for the survivors.
This is one big way in which cloud platforms have ruined meatspace.
Digishittification!Another one is the digitization of what should be simple tasks: from AV equipment at a university to digital homes. This is different from what happened to big box stores as it is not a self-inflicted response to cloudism but rather the effect of cloudists trying to impose themselves further onto meatspace and expand their domain to an ever-increasing number of objects and interactions. Heated seats as the horse armour of our new age, though even Bethesda didn’t have the gall to ask for recurring payments.
The third and personally most irksome form is the enshittification of our inner lives.
Lifeshittification! I have spent the last hour recounting our family’s voes of shoe shopping instead of cooking brisket. My conversations increasingly revolve about bad things that are happening, the reasons why they are happening, and the ways to prevent them from happening.
More often than note this means: Teams is junk; Microsoft is a junk company; try to get Microsoft out of your life even if it means changing your kids' schools. Attention is now the commodity that land and capital used to be, and the cloud platforms have most of my attention. So is there even a way to win this fight?
Corey Ford: The Forwardable Email. How to make email introductions easier for everyone involved. I have been a big proponent of avoiding work emails ever since I read Cal Newport’s book, but they are essential for external communication and bringing people together is a common use case. I have bookmarked the site and will be using it frequently. (↬Ben Werdmuller)
Anil Dash: How Markdown Took Over the World. I am typing this in markdown and previewing it in Brett Terpstra’s wonderful Marked 3, so I devoured this history-slash-analysis. Your mileage may, of course, vary.
Saahil Desai for The Atlantic: America Is Slow-Walking Into a Polymarket Disaster. Let’s leave the bad news for last. Maybe the story isn’t that everything is becoming financilized but rather that everything has become gambling. We have removed the Chesterton’s fence of gambling being taboo and now it’s everywhere. Maybe there was a reason our ancestors frowned upon it?
Have a great weekend, everyone, and if you are in most of the US hope you enjoy the snow more than you dread it.
Kyla Scanlon: The Great Entertainment. Scanlon doesn’t mention the author or the book, but it is hard not to read her latest essay and not picture David Foster Wallace looking at the news stream of the past year, shaking his head. Because the world he conjured in Infinite Jest is, in fact, becoming real. So maybe his other essay wasn’t as outdated as I had thought.
Aidan Walker: Clavicular and contentmaxxing. I don’t know about DFW but I was shaking my head throughout… this. One of the many benefits of middle-age is that I don’t know have to know about everything that the kids are up to. Price increases soon!
🍿 Spellbound (2002) was as delightful as I had remembered it. This is the third or fourth time I have seen it, and as with any good work of art the experience becomes richer each time. What made this viewing the best was that we had our spelling bee-bound kids with us who had never seen it before, providing some hilarious commentary.
Somewhat less delightful was seeing how some of the kids did in the 20-some years since, but even those stories — except for one — were more hopeful than I would have imagined.
Two years ago this week, as the implications of widespread LLM use began to crystalize, my (Serbian) podcast co-host and I discussed how ChatGPT would change medicine. It was apparent even back then that we were looking at an onslaught of bullshit — since then rebranded as “slop” — that would inundate platforms of the written word from medical journals to progress notes. Sadly, that ended up being the case sooner than I remember thinking.
What I did not expect was for the already odious video calls to become even worse. Friends, co-workers, business partners potential and current: we can tell when you have a chat window open during the call. The reflection in your eyeglasses changes at the rhythm of our conversation. Your mouth stands half-open, ready to parrot the non sequitur comment that your LLM spat out. You cannot provide context or clarify your question beyond reading it more slowly and spelling out the acronyms.
Job interviewer, beware. If you hire people based on calls only you may be shocked when you meet your new employee in person. If there is absolutely no chance for a real-life meeting before hand, at least make the call video. And be ready to bring a shovel.
Of course, this is a people issue not a technology issue. I wonder, however, if at the margin the availability of LLMs is making people worse. That those who would have otherwise made some cognitive effort now rely too much on this crutch. You can make the same argument about the written word
On the note of reading and writing, today’s Experimental History newsletter dealt with the topic. I completely agree with Mastroianni’s conclusion and look forward to adding his book to the pile. and how writing caused the decay in our collective memorization capabilities, just as Socrates foretold. Clearly, that particular tradeoff was on net a good one to make. Will we be able to say the same thing about the one humanity is making now?
Last week was my first time in Portland, Oregon — all 48 hours of it. There were only a handful of meetings and I had several uninterrupted hours for a leisurely stroll, so I shouldn’t complain. No notes about the city itself except that the coffee was A+ everywhere I went, including at the hotel lobby coffee shop: a good sign of an excellent coffee culture.
It has been a while since I flaneured through an unfamiliar American city, but I am still able to sniff out the key neighborhoods without a map: the 5th Avenue knockoff with its Tiffany and Channel storefronts, the generic skyscraper district, the stately historic home quarter.
The comic I linked to, by Malachi Ray Rempen, is for a generic all-American city so does not include things found only in more upscale towns such as the expensive shopping area, while having dollar stores and mega churches. It was also made pre-covid so there was no spot with encampments of people who are in-between places. Similarly, the generic European city map is missing its immigrant/refugee district. The family favorite has always been what I think of as the “hipster district”: in the midst of gentrification but for whatever reason (close to industry, high crime, etc.) still cheap and affordable enough for independent shops run by artsy types with no business sense to either flourish or (more likely) churn frequently enough to keep every building occupied. Like Carytown in Richmond, or Baltimore’s Hampden.
So, what television told me was that the entire city of Portland would be one big happy hipster hood. To my dismay, not only was this not true, but what I thought would have been that part of town instead turned out to be skid row. We don’t need to go into details, but I thought what happened at the corner of 3rd Avenue and Harvey Milk St was a good symbol for the general state of affairs:
Sign of the times, right across a run-down Voodoo Donuts that needs a security guard to keep watch.
That used to be Cameron’s Books and Magazines, founded in 1938 and in operation until April 2021 when the building owners decided not to renew the lease. It was the gateway to a stretch of 3rd Avenue that I imagine in some better days was tourist central but was now lined with rubbish-filled shopping carts and neon-colored tents.
Walking towards the more expensive part of town I realized that the independent shop owners who were more savvy moved closer to the Tiffany district, with eye-popping prices to match the cleaner interior design; those without business sense moved to Etsy. So goes the K-shaped “recovery”:
But let’s call the phenomenon by its real name: worsening inequality. either you can afford the $20 recycled cotton tote bag brandished with a subtly progressive slogan, or you risk tripping over a passed out drug user on your way to a bargain.
January 18, 2026
📺 Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials (2026) turned one of Christie’s more pulpy novels into an equally pulpy miniseries — with franchise potential! What is there not to love, other than the camerawork which was performed by someone with an essential tremor and no stabilizing equipment?
The final (?) update on my use of the service formerly known as Twitter: I have locked the account and logged out. I shied away from deleting it completely to prevent username squatting. All the posts are still available (and searchable!) thanks to micro.blog’s wonderful import function.
Lily Lynch: Europa.–Make War.–Zenitism.. Wherein Lynch attempts to triangulate one of the distant sources of the rot, which is the hypocrisy built into the foundations of the post-WW2 economy. I will add Lars von Trier’s Europa (1991) to my to-watch list.
Kabir Chibber: What rewatching ‘The Wire’ taught me about nostalgia for a lost America. Here are more proximal sources. I remember watching the last season of The Wire in 2008 while on medical student exchange in Thailand. I spent the last two weeks on Koh Samui and passed the too-hot early afternoons in front of a tiny Asus Eee netbook (remember those?) watching Season 5, which back then I thought was too far-fetched in how it portraid the media. Maybe I should rewatch.
Hollis Robbins: Embrace your lack. Let’s end on a positive note, with a review of another great TV show. I didn’t think that Pluribus was about LLMs at all, but Robbins makes a convincing case for a connection. May need to rewatch that one as well, and Season 2 isn’t event out yet.
