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.

🏒 A high-scoring game from the Caps last night, yet again! Alex Ovechkin added two to his record, Justin Sourdif had a hat trick. Plus two penalty shots and more than a few brawls to make it the prototypical (if not typical) game of hockey.

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.

• John Plender: How the bubble bursts, with some informative graphs. Remember Melania coin?
• Melissa Heikkilä: Computer scientist Yann LeCun: ‘Intelligence really is about learning’. LeCunn is leaving Facebook/Meta soon to chair a more Euro-centric startup. From how he describes the workings of Meta in this Lunch with FT, it seems to be a wise move.
• Jo Ellison: Please don’t talk about my generation, which in her case is Generation X. Our children apparently include generations Z, alpha and beta which is all you need to know about the usefulness of the model.
• Sam Anderson: Inside the Choreographed Chaos of ‘The Pitt’. We are in the middle of Season 1 and I can see the appeal, including the wonderful performance of Katherine LaNasa as the charge nurse. Glad to learn she received an Emmy for it!

Unlike the last time, I do plan intend to read all of them!

1. You Should Come With Me Now: Stories of Ghosts by M. John Harrison, who is among my favorite writers. I will also most likely re-read Viriconium, which is among the best short story collections out there, just make sure to get the edition with the “correct” story order. He also has a blog through which I learned about at least two good books.
2. The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch by Philip K. Dick, while re-reading Ubik, The Man in the High Castle and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? which are part of the same collection.
3. Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon, which got on my radar after seeing One Battle After Another and learning it was based on several of Pynchon’s stories. So, I picked up an easy one to get acquainted with his work.
4. Letters from an Imaginary Country by Theodora Gross, as recommended by Cory Doctorow whose Enshittification I very much enjoyed.
5. Apple in China by Patrick McGee, which I am reading now and is making me realize what a horrible corporate citizen Apple was and most likely is, though all of those issues are probably more salient so soon after reading Enshittification. Still, you don’t get to a $1T valuation by being a minnow!
6. Breakneck by Dan Wang. At this point I have read so many podcasts and essays by, with and about Wang that I wonder what would be the point of reading the book itself, but I am a completionist.
7. Dreaming in Code by Scott Rosenberg, which was itself recommended in Thinking With Tinderbox, from a journalist embedded in a software development team for a new type of a PIM app (remember those?) called Chandler. Just seeing a few screenshots of the never-quite-released app will help you realize why I have the book.
8. Tools and Weapons by Brad Smith and Carol Ann Browne. This book is six years old which from its mini-review in the FT seems to be a good case for regulating big tech written by someone from big tech (the author was Microsoft’s general counsel for 17 years).
9. Writing Tools by Roy Peter Clark. I don’t remember who recommended this but I love reading about style guides and writing tips, if not necessarily implementing them.
10. Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, Book 1 by John Vervaeke and Christopher Mastropietro. A very good friend has been hounding me for years to watch Vervaeke’s 50-part lecture series of the same name, but who has the time? Let me know when he has a book out, I told my friend, and so here we are.
11. The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurus by Steve Brusatte, as recommended by Matt Wedel of the SV-POW blog. Just keeping up with my kids' interests!
12. Mark Twain by Ron Chernow, which I picked up at random at last year’s National Book Festival after seeing it has at least a few pages on Twain’s friendship with Nikola Tesla.
13. Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson, just so I could learn what on Earth happened with his cancer (non)treatment.
14. Antimemetics: Why Some Ideas Resist Spreading by Nadia Asparaouhova and The Dark Forest Anthology of the Internet by various authors, both released by Metalabel. Dark forests, of course, being very much top of mind for me lately.