Unlike most of PKD’s work, this was my first time reading The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. I wonder what my thoughts would have been a few decades ago had I gotten to it at the same time as the rest of his novels, but now I cannot help but admire what Dick achieved and how prescient he was, yet again.

The first achievement was to do with words what Satoshi Kon did with images in all of his works, Paprika most of all. Perspectives change and timelines shift mid-sentence, delirious hallucinations become matter-of-fact reality, all without losing the reader. This is only ocassionaly done for comedy; more often, the result is horror of the Lovecraftian kind — Eldritch is right there in the title. One can only imagine what Kon would have done with this book, or with Dick’s similarly reality-bending Ubik. I am, of course, not the first person to have made this observation.

The second was to see what the religion of conumerism will bring, decades before it become obvious to everyone else: alienation, blurred reality, despair. Their physical manifestations — (a metal hand, artifical eyes, deformed jaw — are the titular three stigmata. The Man in the High Castle had religious undertones; fitting for a book of its title, The Three Stigmata… brandishes a religious foghorn.

The third, unintentional achievement, was to bring into focus what I find particularly pernicious about LLMs: I get a visceral reaction, revulsion, to its common turns of phrase. Is this not a good thing, you ask? After all, it kept me off Xitter and most of Substack, which are now inundated with computer-generated text. But no, the revulsion is there even in texts written years ago: this has to be AI, I say to myself, only to see that the article was from 2018. Much like Dick’s protagonists who keep questioning their reality and see the Eldritch stigmata in everyone and everyhing, even themselves, long after exposure to the transcendental drug which is the book’s McGuffin, I have overcalibratted my bullshit detector to find fault in the most innocuous turns of phrase.

Worst of all: am I myself now writing things that someone will mistake for AI — instead of human — slop?

📚 Finished reading: The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick, a masterpiece that has only become more relevant with time. Not having seen much of the Amazon Prime show I can’t comment on its faithfullness or quality, but I have a hard time imagining it could match the complexity of the original.

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.