2026-10-19 14:21:24
A couple of years ago, my mum nearly sent $1000+ to someone on WhatsApp who was pretending to be me. A (human) bank teller saved her by suggesting she call me first.
This isn’t to mock my mum. We’re all potential victims. But some days I’m surprised nothing worse has happened, given how much of the internet has become fertile ground for scams, fakery and plain nonsense.
Merritt K thinks the only sane response is to go back to the suspicion of the internet’s early days. She writes:
“We must return to 1990s-type hysterics with regards to the internet. Refuse to take anything or anyone at face value. Assume that everything you see is a falsehood tailor-made to mislead or manipulate you. If it seems too good to be true, if it reinforces your beliefs in a neat little way, it’s probably AI-generated.”
I remember those hysterics. I was just on the other side of them. When I first got online, there were pretty much two kinds of people. There were the curious tinkerers, thrilled by ‘right-click, view source’, and then there was a much larger group of sceptics who saw the whole thing as a waste of time and assumed anyone merely mentioning the exchange of money was up to no good.
Scams and dodgy sites have always been part of the furniture, of course. But back then the elaborate cons sat at the edges. Hardly anyone typed their credit card details into a random website, mostly because hardly anyone was selling anything.
Today everyone is selling something. Everywhere we look, someone is scrambling to profit from whatever they can push into the tubes, and that desperation doesn’t stop with the scammers.
One of the comments under Merritt’s piece captures this well. Most of the people chasing attention for a living now have to feed the machine with engagement bait, outrage, contrarianism and half-baked takes, whatever keeps the show rolling. News outlets do it too, the legitimate ones as much as the ones rehashing everyone else. And once honest people have to perform as well, the line between real and fake stops meaning much.
Spend two minutes on Product Hunt and you’ll see how much of what gets celebrated is the plumbing for this desperate economy: tools to generate posts at volume or to spin one idea into fifty variations. Fakery used to be the exception you had to spot. Now authenticity is the exception you have to verify.
Worse, curiosity itself has become something to fake. I see it in my inbox every day. A dozen AI-generated pitches pose as loyal subscribers, all running the same prompts to get my attention. I can live with the volume and the extra admin. What bothers me is the pretence. It’s interest that’s been automated and scaled. All the right words, none of the curiosity.
As I’ve written here before, I’m wary of romanticising the early web. It was narrow, mostly white, mostly male. But I miss its honesty, its naivety. Sure, many small, personal corners of the web will survive, but it’s hard not to grieve, just a little, for a web where most of the people talking to you actually meant it. And were, you know, actually people.
And now to this week’s discoveries. – Kai
2026-10-12 13:36:50
Whenever I come across yet another ‘why does everything look the same’ essay on modern design, I tend to roll my eyes. Not that I disagree. I just think the sameness they complain about isn’t a glitch but the logical endpoint of our operating system. When markets and algorithms decide what is good, and efficiency decides what gets made, convergence is the result.
I’ve grown pretty tired of design discourse overall. For all the noble language around craft and care, the discipline’s main job is usually just to help grease the engine of consumption – with better kerning.
So I was sceptical about Ezra Klein’s conversation with designer Debbie Millman on why the modern world looks so drab. I admire Millman’s podcast, but to be honest, her answers here fell flat for me. Klein raises some interesting questions, though.
He says modern apartment buildings, cars or even some municipal infrastructure make us feel nothing. Much of the built environment has been smoothed into something frictionless, functional and inoffensive – convenient, but increasingly hard to distinguish from anything else.
“I actually think some of the drabness that we’re talking about comes from people living in a world that has been smoothed for them, such that it, on the one hand, works really well, and on the other hand, it doesn’t feel alive to them. It just sort of has been like flattened into a kind of soulless service.”
Klein makes a great point: some of the reasons for this drabness are actually positive. When it comes to housing, we now know how to make buildings more energy efficient, thermally comfortable and safer in earthquakes or extreme weather, and those technical requirements inevitably narrow the range of forms and materials.
And, sadly, housing has become a tradable financial asset. For many people it’s a stepping stone, not somewhere they expect to stay for fifty years. Painting your house flamingo pink might express your personality, but it won’t do your resale value any favours.
The charming old streets we romanticise for their beauty are mostly what’s left of housing built for people with money. The workers’ cottages were largely bulldozed or thoroughly renovated. It’s a bit like judging how people live today by watching Grand Designs.
So everything is being nudged towards the inoffensive middle. But there’s a counterforce now too: attention. In a desperate attempt to stand out, design has swung hard the other way – loud, oversized, garish, deliberately grating. Millman describes it as ‘vulgar’ design. The Cybertruck is the perfect example.
Most design these days feels as though it passed through a branding agency. The new ugly cuts through the noise because it feels like somebody made it, rather than a committee approved it. It provokes a reaction, good or bad. That’s a rare feat in a world gone numb.
“It’s not that the market hates beauty. It would love to sell you something beautiful. But the intentionality of the market is to sell product.”
Every bargain has its price. In houses, we traded character for comfort. Instead of our grandmother’s soulful dining table that lasts generations, we buy a flatpack we can carry up three flights of stairs to our tiny apartment where we live for a couple of years until the landlord wants to sell.
Beauty is still possible. It’s just that the freedom to build a world around your own tastes and expectations of quality is largely reserved for those who can afford it. As it always was.
And now to this week’s discoveries. – Kai
2026-10-05 14:17:27
I’ve lately been enjoying Lisa Sibbett’s newsletter The Auntie Bulletin, which stretches the word ‘auntie’ to cover anyone who helps raise kids that aren’t their own. Her writing explores the idea of ‘alloparenting’: the step-parents, neighbours, paid carers and family friends who somehow became family. Almost every issue leaves me with a couple of essays or books to dig into.
A recent one was a piece by Gemma Hartley on the emotional labour so many women carry in their relationships. She describes the running mental list of who needs what and when, a list their partners often don’t know exists. She also asks what we pass on to our kids when these roles go unquestioned.
Interestingly, my own relationship runs counter to that pattern, with me taking on most of the household duties. But Hartley’s piece made me once again think of my mother, who did an amazing job raising two kids while working, with hardly any day-to-day support from my father.
Another essay, by a writer named Astrid, explores a related imbalance through something we tend to think of as a personal choice: our hobbies. Women, she argues, are expected to fit leisure around their responsibilities, while men more readily treat their interests as non-negotiable.
“Women have been steered toward hobbies that happen when life allows them, while men get to pursue hobbies that require life to move aside.”
Astrid organises hobbies into a matrix, sorted by whom they serve and how much life has to make room for them.
“A woman who says she loves to bake is assumed to have found her hobby. A man who says he loves to golf is assumed to have found his. The difference is that one of those hobbies also has a pragmatic end, it feeds the family.”
Hobbies that demand uninterrupted time, like surfing, climbing or long-distance cycling, need someone else to pick up the slack. When women do take them up, they’re often encouraged to frame them as self-care, or as a way to become better carers, instead of something worth doing simply because they want to. The fitness industry’s marketing hints at it, too:
“The men’s version sells performance, dominance, achievement. The women’s version sells community, balance, fitting training into a busy life. ‘A plan that works around your schedule’ is a subtle apology for the hobby’s demands and a reassurance that it will not ask too much, will not require you to be inconvenient. It is sovereign hobby activity marketed in restorative hobby language, because the market understands, even if it does not say so, that many women need permission to be inconvenient before they will sign up.”
Inequality persists through big, obvious divisions of labour, and also through the habits and assumptions that make an unequal arrangement feel perfectly normal.
Of course, every relationship is different, and plenty of people don’t fit these patterns, my own household included. The irony here is that spotting these imbalances, naming them and writing them up for the rest of us is yet another job that mostly falls to women. Add it to the list.
And now to this week’s discoveries. – Kai
2026-09-28 15:28:40
I don’t intend for DD to turn into another op-ed column chasing the week’s AI headlines, but if you’ve read the last few issues, you’ll have noticed I keep circling the same question: what kind of power is being built around these tools, and what can the rest of us do about it?
So the title of Garrett Bucks’ recent essay got my attention: The opposite of the apocalypse is a neighborhood
Bucks expresses something that goes through my head whenever I hear one of these CEOs talking nonchalantly about the likelihood of the end times:
“If I were an executive at a company that produced water guzzling theft machines, and I also believed that there was more than a 10% chance that my robots would kill us all, I’d like to think that I’d offer more than vague gestures of concern.”
Like Bucks, I think the apocalypse talk is overcooked. The more pressing worry is the one Bucks borrows from Tressie McMillan Cottom: that AI is just one visible part of “a superstructure that merges regressive politics with unchecked economic power in the guise of technological innovation”.
Gary Marcus makes a similar point in another recent essay. Extinction isn’t what keeps him up at night. Wars escalated by AI-generated disinformation and hacks on critical infrastructure do.
“My p(doom) is low; my p(dystopia) is high.”
A handful of men rewriting the rules of the economy and geopolitics out of greed and a hunger for power makes for a duller plot than killer robots. It’s still plenty dangerous.
I share Bucks’ anger about the way tech sneaks into every crevice of our lives without us always noticing (or noticing too late) what we give up in return.
“I’m mad at myself for all the previous times I’ve been conned, when I thought that past technological breakthroughs actually would make my life better, when I excused somebody else’s love of wealth and power because my phone got cooler and played more songs on demand.”
Don’t look for much practical advice in his essay. It’s more like a love letter to being human.
“When everything that makes you human is outsourced to a big, dumb beep boop machine, the only logical responses is to revel in the absolute best parts of our humanity, loudly and collectively.”
“And that is enough, at least in aggregate, at least with persistence and organization and threads being tied between one community’s fight against a data center and another town’s valiant stand for all of our kids’ future.”
I’m hardly a purist here. I have a skeleton Facebook account for Marketplace sales, I still collaborate in Google Docs, and yes, I lean on the odd AI tool when a job is tedious enough.
Most of us are tangled up in these systems in one way or another – let’s not pretend otherwise. But being implicated doesn’t disqualify us from calling them out, in the same way you can drive a car and still argue for cities built around walking/cycling.
The difficult part is making sure the convenience doesn’t end up making our decisions. So it’s worth pausing to ask what we actually want from a human life, and whether the tools we reach for each day are bringing us closer to it or talking us out of it.
“We don’t need the robots. We never did. We need to be less alone, and less vulnerable to the whims of billionaires. We need our towns and neighborhoods to be celebrated, to feel like where we live and who we are matters. We need neighbors who pick up the slack when we reach the limit of our abilities and energy.”
“It isn’t just that we don’t want to die. It’s that we want to live, and we don’t want to do it alone.”
And now to this week’s discoveries. – Kai
2026-09-21 15:36:46
I was ready for bed when my partner put on The AI Doc on Netflix, which I hadn’t heard of before. Naturally, she was asleep within ten minutes and I ended up watching the whole thing. Not completely unexpected, it turned into an irritating late-night rollercoaster ride through humanity’s potential futures.
Directed by Daniel Roher (of Navalny fame), the documentary explores the existential risks and potential promises of AI through a colourful collage of interviews, archival news footage, whimsical sketches and animations. Visually, it’s a joy to watch. He talks to many of the big names in AI, vocal sceptics but also the CEOs themselves, while making himself – a soon-to-be father – the film’s central character.
The first third is pure doomer fuel, talking about catastrophic misuse and the end of our species. He then overcorrects with a techno-optimist counterweight – a parade of accelerationists describing AI as the beginning of a new age of abundance and human potential. That part made me so furious that I had to get up and start stacking the dishwasher to avoid yelling at the TV.
It’s quite a tonal journey: thanks to AI, your kid might not make it to high school, but also, congratulations, he’ll thrive without ever needing a job. Roher eventually tries to land somewhere between these two extremes, and – surprise! – it’s not a place that gives us much closure.
The documentary aims for broad appeal rather than going particularly deep (for depth listen to Ezra Klein’s monologue below), and it leaves plenty of important territory underexplored. Many of the interviewees also feel too lightly challenged. It’s a very US-centric, very male group of ‘experts’.
But that’s partly beside the point. Roher isn’t a journalist. The real subject is a human quest: how frightened should we be about the future we’re building? Is it worth bringing children into it? The underlying theme is one of dread, and I’d say most of us carry some version of it.
I won’t spoil too much about how he attempts to resolve the tension, but there was a line in the closing that I found hard to disagree with: AI is too important a technology to simply be cynical about.
Cynicism has sadly become my default response to things coming out of Silicon Valley. It’s tempting to leave the whole thing to burn itself out while we make snarky remarks and carry on with our lives.
But wherever you are on the doomer–cynic spectrum, disengagement is too big a gamble. We don’t have to believe the hype, trust the companies behind it or like where things are heading. But we do need to understand the technology well enough to push back, and to make sure the people building the AI future aren’t the only ones deciding what it looks like.
The film only touches on this briefly, but nuclear technology could offer a useful precedent: we didn’t stop developing it, but we eventually agreed that something this powerful shouldn’t be left entirely to the people in the labs or military. Public pressure helped push governments towards testing bans, tighter safety rules and independent oversight. AI needs the same.
For all its shortcomings, The AI Doc does what a documentary should: it makes you feel more strongly about an issue and leaves you with something to argue about. Which is good, because, once again, we need enough people to pay attention and make it politically inconvenient for governments and companies to do whatever they like.
And now to this week’s discoveries. – Kai
2026-09-14 15:52:04
If you’ve spent some time in Germany, you’ve probably noticed the strange calm that descends on Sundays. Shops are shut, there are fewer cars, and everyone is moving at about two-thirds speed. If you’ve run out of groceries, it’s maddening. If you haven’t, it’s the best day of the week.
It’s Sonntagsruhe – literally ‘Sunday rest’. The German constitution protects Sundays and public holidays as days of rest, giving workers and families a predictable day when commercial activity largely stops. The roots are Christian, but the argument that keeps it alive is based on labour rights: if shops could open seven days, employers would inevitably need more workers on Sundays, and the ‘choice’ to work would become less voluntary.
When I first started visiting big cities outside Germany, I found the idea of a day when shops are closed a bit embarrassing, a bit churchy and provincial.
Well, I’ve come around somewhat! Deliberately slowing the consumption machinery down for a day now feels almost too good to be true. Though, as Ted Gioia points out in How Our Leisure Time Got Monetized, there was a time when you wouldn’t have needed the law. Free time was commercially uninteresting. Nobody was billing you for it because there was no mechanism to.
“Life is different now. People use up their leisure time scrolling through web ‘content’ saturated with advertisements – teens especially, who devote 4-5 hours per day on these platforms.”
“Most of the world’s free time has now been monetized by tech companies. In fact, the monetization of leisure time is how Silicon Valley execs make their billions. Our fun is their gravy train.”
Gioia cites the marketer Ron Marshall, who one day counted 487 ad exposures before he’d finished breakfast, and concludes:
“I’m not sure anybody has made a totally accurate measure of our daily monetization. But there has to be as much ad garbage in our heads right now as microplastics in our body.”
I spent much of my childhood riding my bike around town to see friends, disappearing into the woods or mindlessly kicking a football against a wall for two hours. Like Gioia’s, my childhood was full of time spent simply finding things to do. Nobody was selling me stuff to do it better.
And yes, it’s tempting to romanticise that world. But what I find more baffling is how little resistance there is to the steady colonisation of our free time – as though having every spare moment turned into an opportunity to sell us something is simply the natural order of things.
The Germans decided that a day without commerce was worth protecting, and wrote it into law. We can’t quite replicate that on our own – a day off is worth considerably less when everyone else is working, scrolling and shopping. But we can create our own tiny versions of Sonntagsruhe at home: phones off on Saturday mornings or an afternoon on the bike with no wallet or watch and nothing to buy. Frivolously unmonetised time. What a concept!
(My current favourite pet conspiracy theory is that this World Cup’s new ‘hydration breaks’ were added partly to ease Americans into football. You can’t just introduce them to 45 commercial-free minutes of sport cold turkey.)
And now to this week’s discoveries. But first, an ad break. It’s not a Sunday, after all. – Kai
