Last month I linked to two things that are now worth following up on:

• John Nerst’s book “Competitive Sensemaking” is out. The only non-Amazon option is an ebook, so I will leave this one for the Daylight tablet.
• Steven Johnson’s NotebookLM project “Planet Of The Barbarians” is also live, accompanying the newsletter series of the same name. Even more interesting to me are [the notebook][3b] and [newsletter post][3c] titled “The Architecture of Ideas”, referencing Johnson’s work on tools and workflows for writing. Warning: both are full of rabbit holes.

And on the abandoning Apple front:

• Matt Gemmell has concerns about Apple much better baked than my own. He also has thoughts on detaching but seems less willing to give up on the ecosystem than I am. (ᔥJohn Brady)
• My own toe in the Apple-less pool is giving up on the essential Mac-only apps. OmniFocus was the first on the chopping block, replaced by Emacs org-mode, though instead of going through now pretty dated tutorials behind that link I just asked Google Gemini how best to convert Kurosh Dini’s Creating Flow with OmniFocus into Org. And it worked! The idea is be to keep replacing apps with open-source equivalents until making the switch becomes easy. It will probably take years but you have to start somewhere.

The Dark Forest Anthology of the Internet by Yancey Strickler was a valiant attempt to paste together a collection of blog posts about dark forests and the cozy web into a physical object.

The posts were hit-and-miss, as anthologies tend to be. But since the connection between them was tenuous in the first place I didn’t feel like I missed out on anything by skipping one or two that were too steeped in post-modern mumbo jumbo.

A nit to pick: Strickler insists on using the term “dark forests” to denote the cozy bubbles people retreat to in order to escape the methaphorical predators of the Internet dark forest. This is clearly nonsensical: a dark forest ecosystem, one where everyone is quiet as even predators can become prey, is unquestionably anti-human. Dark forests are something you escape from, not into. So, Venkatesh Rao and Maggie Appleton’s “cozy web” is much more apt.

But if you already knew about Strickler, Rao and Appleton’s writing and don’t care much for post-modernism, is there anything of interest left in this collection? The concept of moving castles ended up having more to do with performance art than I hoped for, so not really my thing though of course it may be interesting to some. And two essays by Caroline Busta were thought-provoking, particularly one about (counter)counterculture.

Worth the price in terms of utility? Probably not, unless you are sociologist or a left-leaning artistic type wanting to make your own “collective”, “co-op”, or what not. But then chipping in so that people who seem to care about the same things as you can do something about it is not the worst way to spend money, time and attention.

Antimemetics is a book about anti-memes, but what those are I didn’t quite get because the book itself was written antimemetically.

A part of it may be about inconvenient truths that are important but suppressed: you have to wait for the right time to share them more broadly outside of your group, as “the others” may ignore it or, worse yet, reject it outright. The work of on Curtis Yarvin features here prominently and you know what, maybe his ideas should have been suppressed? Although if I write so I would be a hypocrite, as I have myself recently wrote about the benefits of being more closed which is one of the main antimemes of Yarvin’s that Asparouhova cites.

Or they could be clear truths that are just inconvenient to follow and therefore get ignored, like handwashing. No argument there, although I would take her data point that only around 50% of medical professionals washes their hands at work with a large grain of salt.

And then of course any idea can receive the antimemetic treatment by the way of Straussianism or, what is much more common out there in the wild and is in fact the case with this very blog, by being coated in opaque, obscure and obtuse prose.

There is no shortage of praise for Dan Wang on this blog. In fact, I have read, watched and listened to so much of him that I wondered whether I should even read Breakneck. Ultimately, I was so primed by Apple in China and Technofeudalism that I was eager to learn more about the country. And good thing I did, because while I appreciate the ambition of Breakneck and Wang’s quick sketches of several major events in Chinese history — the one-child policy, rise of tech manufacturing, covid-19 pandemic — I am not sure that I at all agree with his central premise.

Wang paints China as a society of engineers and the US as a society of lawyers. One is oriented to action and building, the other to stasis and obstructing. In China, the heavy and unkind hand that forced sterilization of women and locked down millions of people during the pandemic had also literally moved mountains and laid down thousands of miles of high-speed rail. In the US, the only thing that the hand wields is the pen, with consequences all Americans can recognize: nothing gets done, good or bad. If only China paid a bit more attention to the rule of law instead of wielding rule by law; and if only America built more, or rather made its legal environment more hospitable to builders.

But then this model is as simplistic and misleading as the 1970s Population Bomb projections that the world would run out of food. Engineers in the US are doing just fine in building needle skyscrapers in Manhatten and changing the skylines of Nashville, Austin, Las Vegas, and even DC. Isn’t the infrastructure crumbling, though? American Society of Civil Engineers gives it an overall score of C (“mediocre, requires attention”) in its report card. ⊕ To be cynical for a moment, the report card is a lobbying tool from professional society more than an objective assessment. I am willing to bet that more civil engineers in America work in aviation than rail. But this is about maintenance, not scale: rail gets the second-highest score of B (“good, adequate for now”) while aviation gets the second-lowest, D+ (poor, at risk). Overall rankings — which I would, to be clear, also consider dubious — still place US ahead of China ⊕ This large of a drop is a reflection of the ruler more than the table. even as America dropped from 1st place in 2018 to 11th in 2025.

Having never even visited China I don’t dare comment whether or by how much Wang’s assessment of his birth country is off. I did notice that the verbal tendencies of the Chinese Communist Party were much like those of corporate America: big initiatives with bombastic names among which are sprinkled some gentle euphemisms. I would also note that there must be at least some kind of law, otherwise what would be the point of special economic zones (special from what)?

Wang does touch upon what I think is the central problem: the financialization of America. It is wise to follow the money, and as powerful as the lawyers here appear to be they are but a proxy for the people who wield pay them. Responsible for the current American condition are not lawyers, it is greed. If the autocrats of China were able to recognize this peril to their own country and avoid it then kudos to them, but then greed can manifest in many ways.

• 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.

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.

• Steven Johnson: Introducing Planet Of The Barbarians. A serialized account of the earliest, pre-historic civilizations, which will also come with its very own LLM chatbot? Sign me up! Johnson has been a subject matter expert for Google’s NotebookLM project since back when it was called Project Tailwind, so it is not a surprise that he is also its promoter. I remain cautiously optimistic.
• Joseph Epstein for The Free Press: I Want to Die with a Book in My Hands. Although only mentioned in passing, any essay that highlights the idiocy of transcendetalists gets my recommendation. See also, and in much greater detail, Venkatesh Rao’s description of waldenponding.
• Joan Westenberg: Comfort Food for the Thinking Class: The Great Intellectual Stagnation. A well-made dig at Malcolm Gladwell and his ilk is also much appreciated, as is this exquisite critique of Joe Rogan and the entire marathon-length podcasting enterprise:

A three-hour conversation sounds like it would allow for careful exploration of ideas, but in practice it often does the opposite. The length encourages rambling, the conversational mode encourages agreement and rapport over challenge and critique, and the audio format makes it difficult to engage with complex arguments that might benefit from being written down and studied. You can’t fact-check something as easily when it’s buried in hour two of a podcast. You can’t easily quote and critique a verbal statement the way you can with written text.

• Molly White: The year of technoligarchy. An account of the last five years in tech with a looks towards 2026, in which “[w]e’re not all gonna make it. But neither, necessarily, are they.” Kyla Scanlon hit similar notes last month.
• John Nerst: 2025: The Final Final Year. Always good to see signs of life from a blog I thought was defunct. Nerst is close to publishing a book, “Competitive Sensemaking”, which is a topic he has covered in the blog since 2016 (!?) and one that has gotten ever-more relevant since then (see Westenberg, White and Scanlon above). So, I will gladly add Nerst’s book to the pile once it is out, and would happily preorder it, if only there were a way to do so.
• Nikita Prokopov: It’s hard to justify Tahoe icons. A beautifully illustrated case against the new MacOS visuals. Like I needed another reason to ditch Apple.

Apple in China was a difficult book to read. Not because of the prose — the words flow beautifully and the chronology is easy to follow — but because after each chapter I was questioning my relationship with Apple products and second-guessing my decision from 2012 ⊕ An interesting year, that one, as I had also decided to detach from Google; facebook account deletion came the following year. Two for three ain’t bad.to go all-in on their ecosystem.

The first issue is what they did: supporting, even enabling, of an autocratic regime that has no respect for personal freedom, privacy, or culture other than Xi’s. Whether they sleepwalked into it at first makes little difference. That Xi Jinping was a dictator-in-waiting was clear to some soon after he came to power in 2013, become even clearer in 2016 when he designated himself core leader and obvious even to the willfully blind in 2018 when he abolished term limits. That last step was seven years ago, and each year from 2013 to 2018 Apple was investing tens of billions of dollars into the economy.

The second is why they did it: to increase shareholder value. This is as far away from the 1984 athletes and the 1997 crazy ones as you can get. There was no reason why Apple products could not have been made around the world — per the book, Samsung has only a token presence in China, and manufactures its chips in Korea in the US. But at what cost? And with what margins? Profits seduced the company right into a quicksand trap. McGee and his interviewees have a difficult time imagining it escape.

The third, and most painful to read, was the how: by being ruthless in negotiating and relentless in what they demanded of their employees. It is a company of sharks that destroy their partners and chew up their employees in pursuit of engineering excellence higher margins. You do net get to a trillion dollar valuation by being a minnow.

I first heard of the book in May 2025, on The Talk Show. I would like to think that John Gruber was under its influence back in March when he wrote that something was rotten in the state of Cupertino. That article was about the false advertising of Apple “Intelligence”, but the rot started much earlier and is infinitely deeper. Warren Buffet was smart to have been selling, and I should get smart about detaching.

Unlike the last time, I do plan intend to read all of them!

1. You Should Come With Me Now: Stories of Ghosts by M. John Harrison, who is among my favorite writers. I will also most likely re-read Viriconium, which is among the best short story collections out there, just make sure to get the edition with the “correct” story order. He also has a blog through which I learned about at least two good books.
2. The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch by Philip K. Dick, while re-reading Ubik, The Man in the High Castle and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? which are part of the same collection.
3. Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon, which got on my radar after seeing One Battle After Another and learning it was based on several of Pynchon’s stories. So, I picked up an easy one to get acquainted with his work.
4. Letters from an Imaginary Country by Theodora Gross, as recommended by Cory Doctorow whose Enshittification I very much enjoyed.
5. Apple in China by Patrick McGee, which I am reading now and is making me realize what a horrible corporate citizen Apple was and most likely is, though all of those issues are probably more salient so soon after reading Enshittification. Still, you don’t get to a $1T valuation by being a minnow!
6. Breakneck by Dan Wang. At this point I have read so many podcasts and essays by, with and about Wang that I wonder what would be the point of reading the book itself, but I am a completionist.
7. Dreaming in Code by Scott Rosenberg, which was itself recommended in Thinking With Tinderbox, from a journalist embedded in a software development team for a new type of a PIM app (remember those?) called Chandler. Just seeing a few screenshots of the never-quite-released app will help you realize why I have the book.
8. Tools and Weapons by Brad Smith and Carol Ann Browne. This book is six years old which from its mini-review in the FT seems to be a good case for regulating big tech written by someone from big tech (the author was Microsoft’s general counsel for 17 years).
9. Writing Tools by Roy Peter Clark. I don’t remember who recommended this but I love reading about style guides and writing tips, if not necessarily implementing them.
10. Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, Book 1 by John Vervaeke and Christopher Mastropietro. A very good friend has been hounding me for years to watch Vervaeke’s 50-part lecture series of the same name, but who has the time? Let me know when he has a book out, I told my friend, and so here we are.
11. The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurus by Steve Brusatte, as recommended by Matt Wedel of the SV-POW blog. Just keeping up with my kids' interests!
12. Mark Twain by Ron Chernow, which I picked up at random at last year’s National Book Festival after seeing it has at least a few pages on Twain’s friendship with Nikola Tesla.
13. Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson, just so I could learn what on Earth happened with his cancer (non)treatment.
14. Antimemetics: Why Some Ideas Resist Spreading by Nadia Asparaouhova and The Dark Forest Anthology of the Internet by various authors, both released by Metalabel. Dark forests, of course, being very much top of mind for me lately.

Another great year of reading, and with a back log the length of human history why would every year not be as great?

Fiction

1. The Space Trilogy by C.S. Lewis, which if I were being pedantic should be books 1–3 but I view this particular trilogy as really just the final book, That Hideous Strength, with two extended prologues.
2. Perhaps the Stars by Ada Palmer, last in the Terra Ignota trilogy, made me want to read The Illiad.
3. Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut, even better than I remembered it from 20 years ago.
4. Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir will make for a good movie but please do not watch the trailer unless you want to see a major mid-story spoiler.
5. Babel by R. F. Kuang felt rushed and ultimately forgettable.

Science and technology

6. Thinking in Systems by Donella H. Meadows was the best introduction to systems thinking for people in your life who are not into systems thinking.
7. How Big Things Get Done by Bent Flyvbjerg, a slice of Incerto applied to large projects.
8. The Notebook by Roland Allen, better than I expected.
9. In the Beginning… Was the Command Line by Neal Stephenson, an essay that aged very well indeed.
10. A Thousand Brains by Jeff Hawkins, a billionaire turned neuroscientist.
11. Thinking With Tinderbox by Mark Bernstein will be useful only to users of the Tinderbox app but if you are reading this you may want to take a look.
12. Enshittification by Cory Doctorow, a much needed antidote to the pro-big tech authors I tend to listen and read.
13. The Occasional Human Sacrifice by Carl Elliott, an antidote to the pro-clinical trial authors I tend to follow, though I still question whether it was needed.
14. The Billion-Dollar Molecule by Barry Werth, yes, biotech is broken by design.

Philosophy and religion

15. The Abolition of Man by C.S. Lewis will be on my yearly re-read list because sadly the anti-human movement has gone from strength to strength propelled by useful idiots who think that this time it’s different.
16. The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis was hilarious.
17. A Guide for the Perplexed by E. F. Schumacher opened my eyes to Shumacher’s work which is as timely as ever.
18. Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered by Ernst F. Schumacher, the world could have taken a turn for the better in the late 1970s but then something happened.
19. Good Work by Ernst Friedrich Schumacher was not as strong as the first two and has an uncomfortable addendum about superior people tacked on at the end so I still don’t know what to make of it.
20. Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind by Shunryu Suzuki, who sounds like a delightful person to be around and the half-lotus is in fact my preferred position for reading books but that is as far as my Earth-locked self will go into Eastern mysticism.
21. Books - A Manifesto by Ian Patterson, delightful.
22. Wittgenstein’s Poker by David Edmonds was a better introduction to Wittengstein and Poppper’s works than any formal biography.
23. Feline Philosophy by John Gray, mediocre.

And here are years past: 2024 — 2023 — 2022 though of course the book reviews go way back.