Last year I was quite enthusiastic about Waymo, Google’s self-driving cars that have been on their way to DC for quite a while now with no go-live date in sight. Well just this week I was in San Francisco again and the difference in experience was striking. Last year I had a family member or two with me so it was never a one-person ride. This year I came by myself, and felt lonely sitting in the back seat of a large Jaguar. I couldn’t look at the phone — those dots don’t really help with motion sickness — so I just listened to a podcast while staring through the window.

In contrast, I had excellent conversations with every taxi and Lyft driver on this trip. But I’ll skip recounting those lest I turn into Tom Friedman.

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.

Laugh or cry?

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

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.

I take back what I wrote about Tapestry: it is not just a pretty face but a genuinely useful pan-media viewer that even takes cross posts into account (see below). Genuinely impressed!

David Bowie was born January 8 and died on January 10, so today is a fine day to remember his genius:

Bowie: I think the Internet… I don’t think we’ve even seen the tip of the iceberg. I think the potential of what the Internet is going to do to society, both good and bad, is unimaginable. I think we’re actually on the cups of something exhilarating and terrifying.

Paxman: It’s just a tool though, isn’t it?

Bowie: No it’s not. No, it’s an alien life form.

That was in 1999, long before widespread broadband, Web 2.0, YouTube or the iPhone. Do watch the whole thing if you haven’t yet.

• 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.

With today’s Alphaville, I have never been more proud of paying for a (not cheap!) subscription. (ᔥJohn Gruber, who also provided some non-gift-link-requiring context)

• Jason Kelly on X: The crisis in biotech startups is not just “biotech being cyclical” - you can see clearly that the rise in Chinese startups is not cyclical over the last 25 years - it’s spiking up in the last 10 years (see chart below from @AsimovPress). This is in response to a post from Bruce Booth arguing that the rise in Chinese biotech is not just a threat for the US but also an opportunity, and one that should be a cause for optimism. Booth responded in turn. I am close to finishing Apple in China and based on that alone I tend to side with Kelly. Riding dragons is a dangerous business, as both Apple and Tesla have found out in their respective industries. There are, of course, a few ways in which biotech is significantly different from cars and phones that requires some more thinking, but that is for a different post.
• Cory Doctorow on Mastodon: On December 28th, I delivered a speech entitled “A post-American, enshittification-resistant internet” for 39C3, the 39th Chaos Communications Congress in Hamburg, Germany. This is the transcript of that speech. Not just post-American but post-Chinese Internet as well, so this is a talk about robustness and dare I say antifragility through decentralization, not anti-imperialist rambling (although this being Doctorow there is some of that sprinkled in too). A video version is also available.
• Matthew Dowd on X: Pickle Expose: Sliced and Diced. Engrossing article in the form of a full-blown X post, with links, in-line images and half-decent typography. (ᔥJohn Gruber))
• Katyayani Shukla on X: Warren Buffett literally gave a free 1-hour masterclass on business. I saw the video and thought that Mr. Buffet was looking unusually spry for a 95-year-old! Well, the speech is from July 18, 2001 and is available in both YouTube video and transcript form, so there was no need for contextless X posts with worse quality video and audio. This particular one got 7.5 thousand likes and 2 thousand reposts in less than two days. I guess not everyone appreciates context and citation as much as I do. (ᔥJohn Mandrola, also on X)

Note: Despite three of the four links being from X, I have to admit that I am finding Mastodon more and more enjoyable and the superior of the four post-Twitter offerings, at least for me and my tastes. I am still vacillating on whether I should just use my micro.blog account to follow all non-X users, but then Ivory is too good of an app not to use. Advice appreciated.