If nothing else, Writing Tools — or rather its chapter on the ladder of abstractions — reminded me why I abhorred corporate speak. But that is just one of the 55 nuggets of wisdom, most of which I haven’t seen written down in quite that way before. Let’s see how much of it sticks.

📚 Finished reading: You Should Come With Me Now Stories of Ghosts by M. John Harrison. Stories and tweet-length fragments of middle age unease which, looking back, were Harrison clearing his throat before The Sunken Land…

Dreaming in Code is the story of the first three years in the life of the ultimately doomed Chandler, a project that started as a larger-than-life rethink of how computers handle information and ended up as an open-source desktop calendar client at a time when mobile and web apps started taking over the world. In that it was quite similar to the story of Vertex which, admittedly, had a much better financial outcome for those involved.

Rosenberg managed to tick a lot of my personal interest boxes, from handling big projects through discussing the rise of David Allen’s Getting Things Done to talks of recursion and Douglas Hofstadter’s strange loops. He ends the book with a reminder of the very first Long Bet made in 2002 between the man behind Chandler, Mitch Kapor, and the anti-humanist Raymond Kurzweil, that a machine will pass the Turing test by 2029 which it apparently has last year, four before the deadline, though after reading Kapor’s rationale for betting against one realized he didn’t quite know what the test was actually about.

But I digress. Some of Chandler’s initial promise of universal notes and inherited properties lives on in Tinderbox and it is no coincidence that I first learned about the book from its creator Mark Bernstein. Truly shared calendars and being able to edit a meeting that someone else created is no longer a pipe dream but a table-stakes feature of every calendar service. No one thinks too hard about syncing because the Internet is everywhere and everything is on the cloud. I shudder to think how many person-hours the developers of Chandler spent thinking about these, and for nothing.

By coincidence I am typing this from Barcelona, a 15-minute walk from Basílica de la Sagrada Família which began construction in 1882 and is expected to be completed this very year. It had to survive Spanish Civil War and two World Wars, and at the end of it all it will be more of a tourist attraction than a place of worship, a European version of the Vegas Sphere. Such is the fate of grand ambitions.

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.