• Ted Gioia: 25 Propositions about the New Romanticism. Consider this the antidote to the techno-optimist bullshitfesto manifesto. It rings true.
• Chris Arnade: Engineering as Humanity’s Highest Achievement. But then so des the title of Arnade’s latest essay. The answer, of course, is est modus in rebus, including engineering.
• Ed Zitron: This Is Worse Than The Dot Com Bubble. “This” being the AI boom, which is putting its final putrid touches on the American rot economy.
• 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.

• David Foster Wallace for Review of Contemporary Fiction (1993): E unibus pluram: television and U.S. fiction. On television as voyeurism-enabling best friend of a young fiction writer, among other things. Look, I know it is too long because DFW loves his asides and his self-references, but in year 2026 those make the actual value of the essay: any points he had about network versus cable TV and how those two affect American fiction have become irrelevant as all three of those things are now dead or dying. So, sit down and savor it if you haven’t already — they stopped making DFW essays, you know! — possibly with a better formatted if somewhat distorted PDF version.
• Sam Kean for Slate (2014): Phineas Gage, Neuroscience’s Most Famous Patient. I have used the case of Phineas Gage in an old lecture as an example of a “natural experiment”, and the amount of uncertainty about him this essay reveals makes me think it was an even better choice than I originally thought. Gage’s personality differs with each retelling, shifting to match the point being made; call it the narrative degree of freedom. No one, not even scientists — heck, particularly not scientists — is immune to a good yarn.
• Gay Talese for The New Yorker (2016): The Voyeur’s Motel. Like this essay from the great — and still alive! — Talese. He was 84 when he wrote the essay about things that happened back in the 1960s through the ’80s. How much of it was true? And for what purpose did he end up putting it to paper? This reviewer was skeptical, but please hold off from reading the review until after you read the essay, because of course you have the time.
• Terry Eagleton for London Review of Books (2023): What’s your story? This is a review you should read before the book — I certainly did. The book reviewed, Seduced by Story, will not make its way on to the pile as I have long ago internalized the point it seems to be wanting to make. The review, on the other hand, is a delightful reference to other people’s work on the subject, including that

Slavoj Žižek has pointed out that Donald Rumsfeld’s sole contribution to the sum of human wisdom – his litany of known knowns, known unknowns and unknown unknowns – lacks a fourth permutation: unknown knowns, things we know but don’t know we know, a more suggestive notion of ideology than Brooks’s systems of extremist ideas.

An example of an unknown “known” Eagleton plops in a preceding paragraph:

Brooks also refers to myths as ideology, but makes the classic liberal mistake of overlooking his own. Along with most Americans, he probably believes in Nato, the free market and private education, but it’s unlikely he would call this an ideology. Like halitosis, ideology is what the other guy has.

But then we are getting into headier topics than simple storytelling.

There is a big red circle of my MacBook Air’s System Settings icon. Oh no! Is it a system error? Is it an update? No! It is an offer to add the two Apple TV devices I have to an AppleCare One (Plus?) Plan!

Yes, these kinds of annoyances are becoming ever more salient.

My default conflict management style is avoidance. This may seem irresponsible and even dangerous in the long run, but in (1) well-functioning organizations which are (2) staffed with generally good people, it is often the best course of action. Passions die down, issues are thought through and ultimately resolved in the background, and the organization in question — whether family, workplace or the society — moves on.

Of course, “the default” does not mean only, especially when the two assumptions above are violated. It does, however, take more activation energy for me to do something outside of the default, and with age the energy required goes up not down, and so with each passing day I more and more look forward to a retirement of conflict-free nirvana. Which is to say, something truly catastrophic needs to be happening for me to even dabble in concepts and books which are more or less calling for the overthrow of the current class system and a bottom-up revolution.

But here we are.

Technofeudalism and its equally evil twin enshittification are two very good attempts at describing the elephant stomping our backs. Varoufakis was an academic, an employee at Valve and the prime minister of Greece, so his perspective is broader and dare I say more valid than that of the usual writer of takes. His opinion of capitalism aside — I do think it is the superior form of organizing interpersonal relationships than anything else humanity has ever tried, which is something Varoufakis never quite admits — he makes a convincing case for the current state of affairs being as far removed from capitalism as capitalism was from feudalism.

The mechanism by which “technofeudalism” ⊕ I am not a fan of technofeudalism as a term, as it may cause one to think that it is a step back towards the middle ages and to a time when land ownership was king. The feus of feudalism were land. What land-feus were to feudalism, the cloud would be to — and this would perhaps be the better description — cloudism. It would also directly reference this frighteningly relevant 1969 episode of Star Trek which Varoufakis cites. supplanted capitalism will be familiar to anyone who has read Ben Thompson’s Stratechery, in particular his pet aggregation theory. Thompson has insisted since at least the mid 2010s that the reach of cloud services combined with the zero marginal cost of distribution amount to something qualitatively different from markets as we knew them before. While his attention is focused on the details and mechanics of that state of affairs, Varoufakis is thinking about the consequences to us personally, and to the society. And they are not good.

He also attempts to provide a solution, which I found too fanciful and akin to Ada Palmer’s Terra Ignota trilogy. But you have to start somewhere! If and when another financial crisis drops and the pillars of society come tumbling down, it would be good for builders of the new order to have Star Trek in mind as the preferred outcome instead of The Matrix.

Laugh or cry?

It would have been even funnier if it were on an iPad, but I am still happy with my Daylight tablet.

• Kevin Kelly: How Will the Miracle Happen Today?. Kelly, age 73, looks back at his days as a hitchhiker and describes what it was like to feel that the universe was conspiring to help you:

My new age friends call that state of being pronoia, the opposite of paranoia. Instead of believing everyone is out to get you, you believe everyone is out to help you. Strangers are working behind your back to keep you going, prop you up, and get you on your path. The story of your life becomes one huge elaborate conspiracy to lift you up. But to be helped you have to join the conspiracy yourself; you have to accept the gifts.

How many adults younger than, say, 45, would have anything but a deeply cynical take to the above?

• Rachel Kwon: Bye 2025. OK, I may have found one such person as these memories of a particularly harrowing year end on a much more hopeful note than anything I would have written if all of it had happened to me.

• Branko Milanović: Was the world of the 1990s better than today’s? Betteridge’s law of headlines easily applies even without taking into account that the 1990s were particularly rough in my then-home country. In particular:

Thus almost all that was believed in the 1990 was either proven wrong, or was self-serving. Hypocrisy’s uncontested rule relegated any daring or alternative opinions to the lunatic fringe. Freedom of expression in the ideologically dominant part of the world was not controlled by the thought police but was controlled by the mandarins of knowledge and requirements for success. They asphyxiated the thought and created a wooden language that distorted reality. Everybody knew what to think (or at least what to say) to get ahead. It was ideologically a barren period where clichés were regarded as ultimate accomplishments of human thought. Today’s world may not be better but is certainly intellectually freer.

• Luis Garciano: A New Year’s letter to a young person. On how to choose a career path that won’t easily be replaced by AI, with a head-nod to oncology. I am myself partial to plumbing. (ᔥTyler Cowen)

A working telephone, as seen in the lobby of the Fairmont hotel in San Francisco. Note that the dial is not, in fact, rotary and that the phone is digital — the physical equivalent of the faux vintage (fauxld?) photo filters that are themselves now quaint but used to be a new phenomenon.

• Casey Newton: Debunking the AI food delivery hoax that fooled Reddit. It fooled me as well. Interestingly, I would not have found out had I not boosted this Mastodon post and had Ivory notify me about the edit. Caveat lector!
• Brent Donnelly: It’s Not Just X, It’s Y. The article gives voice to the feeling I get reading much of the small-i internet. It ends with a tip sheet that includes this valuable advice: “Assume long form articles on Substack and Twitter are AI-generated unless there is reason to believe otherwise.” Indeed.
• Steven Bush for the FT: AI cannot take responsibility for human faults. But of course, AI doesn’t lie to people, people do. “Machines cannot claim moral agency. Even if a human’s role is just to come in at the end, tidy up the more difficult bits or adjudicate on properly knotty problems, they must accept responsibility for the outcome.”
• Derek Lowe: A Clinical Trial Nightmare. And it isn’t just AI we should we worried about, and not only online. Lowe points to a particularly horrific example of clinical trial misconduct, this time in a few drive-by research clinics in South Florida. And here I don’t know which is worse, that a small startup didn’t know better and fell for the scheme, or that they paid $35M for the privilege to be scammed. But that is what happens when the whole ecosystem is rotten.