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.

• Trowaway_whistleblow on r/confession: I’m a developer for a major food delivery app. The ‘Priority Fee’ and ‘Driver Benefit Fee’ go 100% to the company. The driver sees $0 of it. Big if true, and of course it’s true. (January 13, 2026 Update: It wasn’t true!) Our family has stopped using DoorDash last year and we have never used Uber Eats so I will allow myself a moral victory lap, but the reasons for not using them were more prosaic (too slow and too many missed orders).
• Dan Wang: 2025. Wang’s yearly letter starts off with thoughts on Silicon Valley and its similarities to China. It is hard to square his generally positive disposition and stories about charming San Francisco billionaires who don’t have time to set up a bed for their mattress in a nearly-empty flat with the above product of Silicon Valley culture. In this I will agree with Wang: SV bros and the Chinese Communist Party are equally abhorrent, and for similar reasons.
• Doug Belshaw: What promised to liberate us instead helps to control us. A fairly short blog post that added many new-to-me rabbit holes to a well-trodden topic that has seen many other metaphors. The Burnout Society by Byung-Chul Hun will likely join the pile though as a slight 72-page essay I hope it won’t stay there for too long.
• Henry Desroches: A website to destroy all websites. Another familiar topic with some clear call-to-action advice, including “Don’t worry about design (unless you want to)”, while of course being beautifully typeset and designed. So, let me get on my soapbox and state the obvious:

Key assumptions that underly this and many similar essays is that people involved have (at least) a laptop computer, know how to use it beyond Zoom and the Office suite, and want to spend time on it over and above what they need to spend on their day job. There will never be a flourishing bazaar of personal websites made by people who are not at the very list interested in web design and/or programming, if not card-carrying members of various IT professions.

I consider myself a dabbler and you are reading this via a product of said dabbling, but if the likes of Nassim Taleb or Frank Harrel or Vincent Rajkumar or whatever other luminary of your field of interest decides it’s too complicated or time-consuming to have personal websites that interact through a muddle of comments, web mentions and whatever other new standard some whiz kid comes up with. So they just keep using X or Bluesky or Mastodon, because that is also where their readers and followers and friends and family members are, so I will also have those accounts despite my best efforts, and so the wheel will keep turning and churning and spitting in and out anyone who is not IT-adjacent and many of those who are, which is to say most of the world.

This is why I am excited about what Dave Winer et al. are doing with 2-way RSS. Winer’s one-man projects have ben technically terrific but ultimately too challenging to use, so here is hoping that broader involvement will add some spit-and-polish. With social media more splintered than at any time since the late 2000s the time to strike is now.

Bret Terpstra’s Marked 3 Beta is out. As powerful as BBEdit is, I still have to deal with many .docx documents without any reliable way to convert heavily tracked and commented versions to markdown and back. After a quick test, Marked 3 seems to fit the bill. I will happily be a paying customer as soon as Terpstra gives me the opportunity, so here is to a successful launch!

• V.H. Belvadi: Working with the end in sight. ⊕ ᔥPhil Bowell, who also noted the beautiful site design. Matches my own experience with Zettelkasten/Slip-box systems, in that none of the very productive people in academia I know actually use anything close to them. Belvadi is sticking to markdown files edited in BBEdit; I am partial to DEVONThink and TinderBox although both of them can also punt text files to BBEdit, which is on my list of should-learn apps.
• Andrej Karpathy: Chemical hygiene. This list of sensible advice for managing our own environment appeared in my RSS reader as part of the Bear blog discovery feed, with small-a “andrej” listed as the author. Since I found myself nodding along to most of it The risk of chemical exposure while handling paper receipts is overblown unless you work at a cash register, in which case you really should wear gloves. I clicked through to check out this andrej’s other work and lo, it was Andrej Karpathy. Unsurprisingly, his 2025 LLM Year in Review was also quite good.
• Brooklyn Gibbs: how to use the internet again: a curriculum. ⊕ ᔥThought Shrapnel, with a much better re-title. Online literacy for adults and children alike. Note in particular that there exist things outside the web: see Project Gemini for an example of a cozy part of the Internet that is very much distinct from the World Wide Web.
• Matthew Haughey: Recent camping and travel discoveries. We will have a fourth-grader in the household next year which means a National Parks pass for the whole family, so this may come in useful!

In today’s episode of Dithering Gruber and Thompson are mystified that Shadowrocket was the second most downloaded paid app in the US App Store, because why would so many Americans want to hide without VPN? The answer, of course, is that those “US” App Store customers are actually Chinese.