• Lily Lynch for The Ideas Letter: Cold War Fixations.

Book reviews make for great essays, particularly when the reviewer vehemently disagrees with the author’s main premise. The author here is Michael McFaul, a 1990s style liberal democrat who, much like his neoliberal counterparts can’t see that his project failed and therefore cannot even conceive of taking responsibility for that failure. Lynch takes him to task.

• Andrej Karpathy on X: A few random notes from claude coding quite a bit last few weeks.

Where the reliably sensible Karpathy provides an update on how he uses LLMs for programming and, well ⊕ ᔥTyler Cowen:

Slopacolypse. I am bracing for 2026 as the year of the slopacolypse across all of github, substack, arxiv, X/instagram, and generally all digital media. We’re also going to see a lot more AI hype productivity theater (is that even possible?), on the side of actual, real improvements.

Of course, I would have named it slopocalypse instead of slopacolypse but, you know, potato potatoe.

• Bogdan-Mihai Mosteanu: From Microsoft to Microslop to Linux: Why I Made the Switch.

Both Windows and and MacOS have become sufficiently sloppy that people are looking for an exit. This will be the decade of Linux, and it already started with the Steam Deck about which I haven’t written anything here but have discussed briefly in a podcast (Serbian only).

• Bryan Vartabedian: Three Adaptive Stances of Doctors.

Scenarios on how physicians may respond to recent developments, with a Focus, Fight, or Build phenotype. At a glance it may look like the Build phenotype may be the “correct” one, but of course Vartabedian correctly points out that these people may soon enough become bullshit artists themselves. These are my words, not his. Dr Vartabedian was much more measured:

The problem I find is that a lot of builders aren’t in the trenches for long. They move into startups or administrative positions. And as they evolve, their view of medicine becomes fixed. And when you’re not struggling with the realities of an inbox, you begin to solve for a world that doesn’t exist.

This is something I also noticed, many years ago.

• @AutismCapital on X: Severus Snape - ALWAYS (LIVE at Hogwarts) 🔥🔥🔥

An LLM-generated music video for millennials ⊕ ᔥKevin Kelly which is getting a lot of attention because of course the quick cuts and incoherence of Sora and others are perfect for the medium. This is why people thinking that MTV shut down when it actually didn’t was so salient: its former viewers are being made to think that everyone will soon enough be spinning their own music videos set to their own (kind of) music.

There is a big winter storm threatening most of the continental US, and as any pair of overworked parents with an infant would do, my wife and I waited until a few days before snow piled on DC to get our other kids some new cold-weather boots.

We decided to shop in person rather than on Amazon because: 1) their feet are growing so fast that we have no idea what size boot they would be wearing for a particular model and 2) we had no time to try on a pair and return if the fit was bad, because the snow is coming in, like, less than 24 hours. My wife, having kept some contact with brick-and-mortar stores, suggested we went to the closest large shoes-only stores despite there being a Macy’s, a Nordstrom and a few other general department stores within walking distance from us, because apparently those were’t what they used to be. Okie dokie.

And so we took the green line to DC USA, a “multilevel enclosed urban shopping center anchored by big box stores”, most of which had closed since the mall’s heyday but we both remembered there being a DSW just around the corner and how could it have possibly gone out of business when its nearby competitor went bust shortly after we moved to DC? I think you can see where this is going: DSW too closed its DC locations for good early last year so we “kissed the door” as they say.

But there was a Target in the same building, and a Marshalls, and even something that used to be called “Burlington Coat Factory”. Surely between the three we would find a decent selection of children’s winter boots in the middle of January. Not a chance, said my wife who is wise and knowledgable in the ways of shopping, I write this without wanting to promote any stereotypes because we both in fact hate shopping, but it is all a matter of degrees and she hates it slightly less than I do. and I didn’t trust her but I should have because I did go into the Target remembering it as the Target of my youth — well, late 20s — when I had just come to America and its shelves along with those of Wallmart seemed to stretch into infinity.

My friends, the kids shoe shelf of this particular Target did not stretch into infinity. It barely stretched six feet. It had no more than three sizes of each model and no more than two models of each shoe type. Marshalls was even worse. Under the wise direction of our master shopper we didn’t even walk into the Burlington.

Which is to say, before online services began enshittifying, they had already spurred self-enshittification of the offline world. ⊕ Cory Doctorow may have intended enshittification to signify the four-stage worsening of online services under the squeeze of financialization, but Doctorow himself in the book and elsewhere welcomed the broader use of the term which is what I’m doing here and if you want to be pedantic call if “self-shittification” instead. There is an economy/sociology/other “soft” science paper there somewhere in describing the stages of offline enshittification. Put it together with online and you get a PhD in enshittology. Big department stores have been hollowed out, along with big book stores, big electronics, big toys, big airlines, and anything else big that depended on volume and not personal relationships and brands. Like all bad things, this happened slowly then suddenly: trying to outcompete the cloud businesses, they themselves raised a toe up to the cloud. ⊕ Note how the de-enshittifcation of big box stores involves a more personal approach. Those who can pivot to it will survive. But being a cloud platform is like pregnancy — you either are or are not — and they were clearly not.

Effects of the cloud on everyday life are particularly salient now that I’ve read Technofeudalism Though I maintain that “cloudism” is the better term and will use it instead. so this may be overstating the matter, but the broadest correct use of “enshittification” could be to describe the negative effects of cloud platforms becoming the dominant form of ownership, the thing that people need to have in order to become the movers and shakers of other people’s lives. For most of human history “the thing” was land. For the last few hundred years it was manufacturing capital. And now it’s this.

Each time, it made sense to sacrifice some of the base layer to build up and up. Yes, food was still important but even more important was the capital, so raze those fields of wheat and corn to erect factories. The famine will be worth it in the long run, for the survivors.

This is one big way in which cloud platforms have ruined meatspace. ⊕ Digishittification!Another one is the digitization of what should be simple tasks: from AV equipment at a university to digital homes. This is different from what happened to big box stores as it is not a self-inflicted response to cloudism but rather the effect of cloudists trying to impose themselves further onto meatspace and expand their domain to an ever-increasing number of objects and interactions. Heated seats as the horse armour of our new age, though even Bethesda didn’t have the gall to ask for recurring payments.

The third and personally most irksome form is the enshittification of our inner lives. ⊕ Lifeshittification! I have spent the last hour recounting our family’s voes of shoe shopping instead of cooking brisket. My conversations increasingly revolve about bad things that are happening, the reasons why they are happening, and the ways to prevent them from happening. More often than note this means: Teams is junk; Microsoft is a junk company; try to get Microsoft out of your life even if it means changing your kids' schools. Attention is now the commodity that land and capital used to be, and the cloud platforms have most of my attention. So is there even a way to win this fight?

Two years ago this week, as the implications of widespread LLM use began to crystalize, my (Serbian) podcast co-host and I discussed how ChatGPT would change medicine. It was apparent even back then that we were looking at an onslaught of bullshit — since then rebranded as “slop” — that would inundate platforms of the written word from medical journals to progress notes. Sadly, that ended up being the case sooner than I remember thinking.

What I did not expect was for the already odious video calls to become even worse. Friends, co-workers, business partners potential and current: we can tell when you have a chat window open during the call. The reflection in your eyeglasses changes at the rhythm of our conversation. Your mouth stands half-open, ready to parrot the non sequitur comment that your LLM spat out. You cannot provide context or clarify your question beyond reading it more slowly and spelling out the acronyms.

Job interviewer, beware. If you hire people based on calls only you may be shocked when you meet your new employee in person. If there is absolutely no chance for a real-life meeting before hand, at least make the call video. And be ready to bring a shovel.

Of course, this is a people issue not a technology issue. I wonder, however, if at the margin the availability of LLMs is making people worse. That those who would have otherwise made some cognitive effort now rely too much on this crutch. You can make the same argument about the written word ⊕ On the note of reading and writing, today’s Experimental History newsletter dealt with the topic. I completely agree with Mastroianni’s conclusion and look forward to adding his book to the pile. and how writing caused the decay in our collective memorization capabilities, just as Socrates foretold. Clearly, that particular tradeoff was on net a good one to make. Will we be able to say the same thing about the one humanity is making now?

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.