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
2026-09-07 16:14:34
When I see people betting their life savings on a memecoin or an influencer monetising every last bit of their privacy on TikTok, my first reaction is, admittedly, contempt. But concluding that people have simply lost their way feels a little lazy.
Henry Fudge’s excellent essay asks us to put the moral judgement aside and look at the economics underneath it. His argument is that these ‘odd’ behaviours are not primarily the result of a generation becoming lazier or morally depraved, but what people do when the productive path to the life previous generations enjoyed has stopped paying.
The piece is behind a paywall, but Henry has kindly made it public for the next few weeks. I highlighted lots of sections; here are some that stood out.
Fudge draws a parallel with Thorstein Veblen’s idea of ‘conspicuous consumption’: if the rich demonstrate their position by visibly wasting resources because they have more than enough, what happens at the other end of the wealth distribution?
“It signals through Conspicuous Despair. It enacts, visibly and publicly, its exclusion from the productive game. It does the things that would be unthinkable for a person with a stake in the future, because it has no stake in the future. The OnlyFans account, the sports-betting app, the ketamine on Tuesday, the bedroom one does not leave: these are not, primarily, hedonism. They are legible refusals. They are the way the propertyless class makes its position visible to itself and to others. They are the bottom-up mirror of the yacht.”
He then applies Hyman Minsky’s theory of financial bubbles to the challenge of getting ahead in today’s economy. Wages once covered living costs and asset accumulation. Now they barely cover living costs:
“You cannot save your way to the life your parents had, because the life your parents had is now priced in a currency (asset wealth) that wages do not convert into.”
In Fudge’s framing, our grandparents lived in the hedge stage, our parents in the speculative stage, and we’re now in the Ponzi stage of being alive. The only way to access the living standards of the past is to inherit, marry or speculate into them.
And he thinks it’s a global phenomenon: whether it’s sports betting in Britain, crypto in the US, lying flat in China, or the manosphere everywhere. Different cultures, same behaviour:
“The structure story is: when the productive game stops paying, agents stop playing it. They either pivot to lottery strategies or they withdraw entirely. The cultural particulars determine the form of the response … but the fact of the response is structural. It is what people do when they have correctly read the odds.”
And because structural causes are abstract and politically difficult to confront, we reach instead for a visible culprit:
“Every late rentier society in history has responded to the behaviours of Conspicuous Despair in the same way: by locating their cause in the character of the despairing, rather than the structure that despairs them.”
If you want a good example, just watch the evening news in any Western democracy right now:
“Migrants do not cause housing scarcity; planning regimes, land banking, and the financialisation of housing cause housing scarcity. But migration is visible, individuals are identifiable, and the structural causes are abstract and politically untouchable.”
The right-wing populists have correctly sensed that the system is rigged, but consistently point their anger in the wrong direction:
“It names the visible rather than the structural, the powerless rather than the powerful.”
And that, for me, summarises the crux of our current, divided moment: you can be right that something is deeply broken while being completely wrong about who or what is responsible. One of the easiest ways for a dysfunctional system to preserve itself is to keep us punching down, blaming the people living with its consequences rather than the structures producing them.
And now to this week’s discoveries. – Kai
2026-08-31 16:12:39
Sci-fi writers have spent decades imagining dystopian futures where humans hand over their agency to the machines for a bit more convenience, a bit more entertainment. And now we’re here. Some days, it all feels a bit too cliché to be real.
The great tech power grab has been a long time coming, but more recently it seems tech companies are being invited through the front door. Where governments have stepped back, Big Tech has stepped in – providing the infrastructure, services and systems we depend on, and increasingly, writing the rules those systems run on.
Writer Rebecca Williams has been watching this unfold for years, and her latest piece lays out how tech cannibalises our markets, our minds and our democratic systems. She breaks it down into five distinct mechanisms:
Tech is a false substitute for political organising. Social media mimics political organising through ‘clicktivism’, creating an illusion of participation without building real power.
Tech evades democratic accountability. It rewrites its own rules and operates under a regime of weak fines rather than enforceable rights.
Tech fills a vacuum left by government neglect, then entrenches it. It creates privatised barriers that make fixing the original problems harder.
Tech primarily serves extractive capital, not people. The underlying incentives prioritise speculative growth and surveillance for profit, rather than helping people.
Tech seeks to replace democratic governance itself. It supplants democratic institutions entirely by taking over core state functions like identity and defence.
Resistance to Big Tech is gaining momentum. Williams points to a growing patchwork of alternatives that aim to ‘refuse, remake, rewild and regovern’ our technology – from embracing open standards to experimenting with cooperative governance.
All of these steps are important and helpful, but for me the most critical point she makes is this:
“While reclaiming the tools is necessary, poetic, and a little meta, it is not sufficient. ... If the deeper problem is that technology has atrophied our civic muscle, then better technology alone won’t rebuild it. The imagination and community-building power of the cultural revolution can help us imagine another world; the next question is how to turn that community into political power.”
The antidote to a world of endless political opinions and frictionless ‘participation’, she argues, may therefore be pretty old-fashioned: unions, coalitions, neighbourhood organising, protests, boycotts, strikes and the messy business of getting actual humans to act together and create demands with teeth. (The data centre backlash is a great example.)
This doesn’t happen from the couch, mid-scroll. It requires skills most of us never learned to exercise, and I worry that younger generations aren’t even taught the principles behind them, let alone the practice.
I used to assume enough climate disasters would eventually force a political awakening. Instead we seem to be sliding smoothly into the adaptation phase: better air conditioners instead of structural change. I wonder if the tech power grab ends up going the same way – not a reckoning, but an increasingly elaborate market for adapting to our own disempowerment. Premium subscription required, of course.
And now to this week’s discoveries. – Kai
2026-08-24 15:41:27
If you’ve been reasonably lucky with your education, aren’t mentally overburdened, and haven’t stopped being curious about other people, something interesting can happen as you get older: your views become less absolute. With every decade of lived experience, I’m collecting more shades of grey, and discovering more holes in the neat explanations that once made sense of my world.
Rebecca Solnit’s latest essay is excellent company for that work. She describes our human tendency to oversimplify complex realities and the many mental shortcuts we use to arrive at tidy conclusions. It’s a piece I wish everyone would read at least once.
We seem to allow less room to wonder, doubt, improvise, or simply admit we don’t know. (See also ‘knowingness’ in DD333.) Solnit describes this pressure as feeling “naked without an opinion”, where confidence and certainty can matter more than having the facts first.
It often looks like this: declaring something a complete success or a total failure, looking for evidence that supports the story we already believe, or treating a diverse group of people as though they were one person with one opinion.
“Categories too often become where thought goes to die. That is, there’s a widespread tendency to act as if once something has been categorized, no further consideration is required.”
From airtight categories come blanket statements: climate action is too late, protest is pointless, voting doesn’t matter. These statements sound like facts but function as an excuse to stop paying attention. Reality is almost always layered and often contradictory:
“We cannot save everything but that does not mean we cannot save anything; we have solutions that though spectacular are not perfect; no one solution can do it all so while there is no solution there are many solutions that must be pursued together; there are heroes and villains and some governments are both at once.”
Solnit isn’t arguing that everything is ambiguous, or that there are never clear answers. Quite the opposite. Context can sometimes reveal a truth that a supposedly ‘neutral’ presentation obscures. ‘Natural’ disasters make more sense when connected to climate change. Violence against women makes more sense when we recognise its systemic patterns. And sometimes a comfortable middle ground can disguise a difficult truth:
“One piece of that is the idea that centrism and the status quo are neutral ground when they’re often either the acceptance of whatever inequality and oppression has long existed, which results in treating the pursuit of equality and rights as acts of aggression. Or it’s the idea that truth is somewhere in the middle as if there’s some halfway measure between truth and lies, human rights and human rights abuses.”
Living with infinite greys will very likely make you an annoyance to anyone certain about a category of people, an event or an opinion. To them it reads like having no firm views of your own, but false certainty has done far more damage than ‘it depends’ ever has.
And now to this week’s discoveries. – Kai
2026-08-17 15:46:00
When in the mid 2010s the first Silicon Valley folks started warning us about the addictive nature of social media, the idea that it wasn’t really our fault felt like a relief. We were being manipulated by algorithms designed to keep us scrolling, our brains rewired by dopamine hits, our attention harvested.
A decade later, that diagnosis still holds true, but we also turned a complicated problem into a very convenient story: we are simply the helpless victims of deceptive design and exploitative algorithms.
Kate Wagner doesn’t buy into the victim story. In her recent essay, she criticises the increasingly elaborate genre of phone-detox evangelism – the books, apps, browser extensions, courses and dumb phones to help us ‘reclaim our lives’. She’s sceptical of the commercialisation of it, and even more sceptical of the promise behind it – that putting down your phone will somehow transform you into a more creative and fulfilled person.
Rather than treating phone use as an addiction we need to defeat, she suggests we should ask what we’re actually getting from it:
“In order to quit, one must realize that what is really being interrogated is not necessarily the thing itself (and yes this includes Phone Capitalism) but the behavior and what we get out of it. What do we want from Phone World? Is it companionship? Prestige? Reassurance seeking? Attention? Entertainment? What do we get from doomscrolling? Why even call it that? Can we not use grown-up words like self-soothing, numbing, rumination, avoidance, paranoia, insecurity, anxiety, despondency, resentment, despair, anger etc. to describe our behaviors and the feelings behind them?”
“Ultimately, phone use is not an existential battle between the human mind and nefarious powerless-making material and mechanical forces – it is a behavior.”
Shaming yourself for having no willpower doesn’t do much, and neither does waging war on your dopamine receptors. What works better is noticing what you’re feeling, creating a little distance between the impulse and the action, and finding another way of responding to it.
Wagner draws on techniques from Dialectical Behaviour Therapy for this – small, sometimes almost comically simple interventions that interrupt an impulse without requiring you to somehow become a more disciplined or enlightened person.
Even if you manage to log off, she argues, you probably won’t read the complete works of Dostoyevsky, overthrow capitalism and discover your ‘authentic self’ with all that newfound free time. You might just be bored and eventually find other – hopefully healthier – ways to channel whatever it was you were looking for on your phone.
To be clear, I’m not defending Big Tech here, and neither is she. There are many good reasons to worry about what our phones and the platforms are doing to our attention, our social lives and our ability to be bored without immediately reaching for stimulation.
But I appreciate Wagner’s counterpoint to the increasingly melodramatic detox narrative: we do have more agency than we’ve been led to believe, and getting more of our lives back doesn’t need to involve becoming a different person or buying an ever-growing collection of crutches.
And now to this week’s discoveries. – Kai
