2026-07-20 16:03:40
The social apps are long gone from my phone, but there’s one screen habit I haven’t managed to kick: the news. The NY Times, the BBC, a couple of German and Australian news sites – these are still some of the most-visited bookmarks in my browser, and I’m not proud of it.
I know exactly what it does to me. I open a tab, get my little hit of outrage, and often feel worse for the rest of the day. It’s an addiction I’d like to quit, but it’s right there, one tap away, and the clown-cum-fascist political theatre currently wrecking most Western democracies is, frustratingly, very good content.
So I went back and reread Adam Mastroianni’s 2022 essay on quitting the news. Mastroianni has a habit of overstating things for effect, but his central comparison – that reading the news today is a lot like smoking used to be – feels more true every year.
“I stopped importing my grand anxieties into conversations with friends, punishing them with my sullenness because I just read an article about climate change or bad senators, as if nobody was allowed to feel good as long as bad things are happening… That’s how I came to see reading the news like smoking: harmful not just to the consumer, but to anyone nearby.”
From there he builds his case against consuming the news, and most of it will sound familiar. It makes us feel terrible, keeps us on edge and distorts how we see the world and the people in it.
The more interesting part is what comes after that: the pushback he often gets from people once he tells them he’s quit. Two of those arguments I’ve held onto myself: that you need to read the news to be an informed citizen, and that someone has to hold power to account.
But knowing what happened this morning and understanding an issue are two different things, and only one of them is well served by a homepage refresh.
I’m writing this down partly to hold myself to it. I want to unlearn the reflex of checking what fresh horror the ghouls in charge have cooked up overnight, because that reflex has never once made me more useful to anyone.
What I don’t want to cut out completely is the political analysis and commentary I enjoy – so instead of grazing headlines throughout the day, my approach for now is to blacklist most news sites and allow myself an hour or two a week with a proper news podcast (something like The Daily, Today Explained, Today in Focus or a weekly wrap) – one that has time to explain rather than just alarm.
There’s an argument that opting out is its own kind of privilege, but I’m no longer sure that holds, at least not for national or global news. My attention barely moves the needle there.
There’s an old saying that ‘all politics is local politics’ – that the big national fights are really just thousands of small local ones stacked on top of each other. (Also see DD299.) I’m choosing to believe it, mostly because it’s the only version of politics where my attention still counts: a council survey, a park clean-up, a chat with a local shop owner. At the end of the day, I’d rather be useful and optimistic than up to date and miserable.
And now to this week’s discoveries. – Kai
2026-07-13 16:11:51
Last year SpaceX made no profit, but lost several billion dollars. Earlier this year it was valued at close to two trillion. I am not an accountant, but even I know those two numbers are not supposed to sit next to each other looking so relaxed about it. A friend shared a short reel breaking down the ‘creative’ bookkeeping that makes this kind of valuation possible. I watched it twice. Still legal, apparently. Still feels like a crime.
By now most of us have some sense that the AI industry runs on a similar kind of circular logic – a handful of companies investing in each other and calling it ‘explosive growth’. In this opinion piece, an anonymous blogger lays out the hype-flated AI economy in an infuriating and also very entertaining way.
It opens with an old joke: a man sells ten dollar bills for five dollars each, and when asked how business is going, he says it’s booming, he just needs more volume. That’s the essay (and the AI economy) in a nutshell.
“For four years we have watched the smartest people in technology reinvent this joke, add a chatbot and agents to it, and raise money at a valuation that assumes the man will one day discover a margin hidden inside the ten dollar bill.”
The old rule of software was simple: as you scale, cost goes down, profit goes up:
“You write the code once. The ten thousandth customer costs you almost nothing to serve. Marginal cost trends toward zero, margins trend toward heaven, and the spreadsheet curves apart into that beautiful pair of diverging lines that venture capitalists have tattooed on their hearts.”
But AI doesn’t do this. Every query burns real electricity, real water, real chips. Revenue and cost haven’t diverged, they hold hands.
What we’re using right now is a heavily subsidised version of AI, priced to build a habit rather than to reflect what it actually costs to run. As the author notes, “when a company files to go public, it has to stop talking like a founder and start talking like an accountant”. At some point, everyone who’s bolted AI onto their workflow is going to discover the real price of the tokens.
That gap is one of five ways the author reckons ordinary people end up footing the bill, mostly without noticing: through the token costs that surface once the subsidies dry up; through the index funds and pensions that own a slice of these valuations whether you chose to or not; through electricity bills padded by data centres on your grid; through tax rebates communities hand over to data centres chasing jobs that don’t materialise; and through water, which unlike power doesn’t get cheaper once the infrastructure’s built.
Of course, none of which means the technology is fake, and the author is careful to say so:
“Electricity was real during the bubble in electric companies. Railroads were real, and the internet was extremely real, while fortunes evaporated in both. A technology can be world changing and a generationally bad investment at the same time, and history is mostly the gap between those two facts being violently closed.”
Some call it a bubble, some call it infrastructure, some just shrug and say, ‘Ask me in five years’. But we don’t need consensus to notice the scale of it. We’re all in the AI casino now, whether we walked in or got carried in on our pension or super funds. As ever, the house is not worried.
And now to this week’s discoveries. – Kai
2026-07-06 15:07:25
One thing that’s taken me a long time to properly internalise is that not all disabilities are visible. It sounds so obvious written down like that, but it’s one of those things you still have to frequently remind the part of your brain that wants everyone filed neatly into binaries like ‘tall’ or ‘short’, ‘well’ or ‘unwell’.
I’ve been healthy for most of my life, and lucky enough to live in places with great healthcare, which explains why I’m still catching up on things other people figured out the hard way. There’s a lot to learn about fairness and who gets to belong just by listening to the people our system considers ‘unproductive’ or ‘difficult’.
Back in DD379, I discussed Kristie De Garis’ essay on how chronic illness refuses our tidy cultural script of recovery – the idea that you get sick, then you get better, then you’re back to ‘normal’. Pluto Rennie’s short piece for Salient Magazine made me similarly uncomfortable, but this time it’s about palatability.
Rennie says there’s an unwritten rulebook for how to be disabled correctly: consistent, legible, and above all, not too much trouble. Fall outside it, and people start getting suspicious.
“...disability should be obvious, stable, and easy to verify. That it should present itself clearly to others, like evidence. Anything less becomes suspect.”
It’s interesting, and kind of bleak, thinking about what someone’s suffering is meant to accomplish for other people:
“Because pain, as it turns out, is more acceptable when it is useful – when it can be turned into funding, into narrative, into something that circulates cleanly. What matters is not just that you suffer, but that your suffering can be told in a way that reassures people: about institutions, about care, about themselves. To object to that is to disrupt the story; and disruption is read as ingratitude.”
“Disability, then, is not just something you experience. It’s something you are expected to perform correctly. To present in a way that is legible, coherent, and above all, non-disruptive.”
Of course, our bodies don’t care about consistency. And yet we still expect people to stay on one side of that imagined abled/disabled binary, mostly so we know how to act around them.
“The problem is that bodies are not coherent. They change. They contradict themselves. They have good days that undermine bad ones, and bad days that refuse to be hidden. They do not move in clean, linear narratives. They are inconsistent in ways that make other people uneasy. And so you are asked, quietly but persistently, to smooth that inconsistency out. To become easier to read. Easier to accommodate. Easier, ultimately, to ignore.”
I guess most of us are doing some version of this performance, disabled or not. We edit ourselves down into something more digestible and easy to read depending on who’s watching. Rennie’s just naming it plainly, on behalf of people who don’t often get the chance to without suspicion.
And now to this week’s discoveries. – Kai
2026-06-29 17:51:39
Get off the beaten track, find the little town the guidebook missed, eat where the locals eat, steer clear of other tourists. That’s the unspoken creed of many travellers and that was me, too. I’d sniff at anyone who hung out at the obviously touristy spots, thinking that my own experiences were somehow more legitimate, more ‘authentic’.
This essay by David Sze opened my eyes to the fact that the very notion of authenticity rests on a fantasy that cultures are pure, fixed things that tourism then comes along and spoils.
Sze points out that no culture has ever sat sealed off and unchanging. The Silk Road, empires, trade, migration, missionaries, K-pop, Bollywood films played on a TV in a Senegalese mud hut – everything has always been bleeding into everything else:
“Through these processes, the world is increasingly intermeshed – with no country and no man an island. Each country, state, and city, down to the smallest village, is constantly changing with unceasing interaction with regional and global influences. How then to draw a boundary around a culture? We cannot, as each meld into and influence another.”
If a culture is always shifting, then the commodified, tourist-facing version of a place isn’t a fake version bolted onto something real. It’s just the most recent layer.
“If culture is inherently dynamic, we can argue that commodification does not produce a simulacrum of the ‘local’, but is instead just the latest step of a never-ending evolution.”
Sze argues that what travellers are actually chasing is a flattering story about themselves:
“It is a shiny label that the traveler pins on her experiences – a marker of Bourdieuian distinction, to prove that she is more knowledgeable, more adventurous, and more off-the-beaten track.”
So the search for the ‘untouched’ is really a search for something that was never there. Worse, it does a disservice to the people we claim to admire:
“‘Authenticity’ is the denial of a people’s privilege to their changing culture amidst changing times… [It] is a box into which the traveler crams what he wants to see, while ignoring the complexity of reality. It is both distorting, and lazy.”
That’s not to say that tourism doesn’t negatively impact local cultures. Sze’s essay is now nearly a decade old and the full Instagrammification of travel was just beginning to take hold. Since then, social media has flattened travel into a checklist of shareable images. We don’t go looking for the ‘authentic’ as much as we try to recreate a photo we’ve already seen. Nicely summarised in this Domus piece:
“We no longer seek the unknown – or even what’s familiar – we chase images that are already well-known and highly shareable, affirming our place in a global community. We travel pursuing stories shaped by others, where the experience is influenced more by digital narratives than personal exploration. In essence, we create images to confirm an existing fantasy.”
That is its own kind of inauthentic, of course – arguably far more so than ordering that overpriced pad thai.
All of that said, wanting to look past the souvenir stalls to find corners that aren’t yet rearranged for tour groups is still worth doing. I guess we just shouldn’t expect some ‘pure’ version of a place that never existed. Like a panellist suggested back in DD271: serious travellers should do some homework first. Books, documentaries, podcasts by and with locals help us see an ever-changing culture through the eyes of the people who actually live it.
And now to this week’s discoveries. – Kai
2026-06-22 15:00:02
At some point in your thirties, you often start carrying a particular kind of grief. You find yourself mourning the years when friends were a constant, ambient presence – when mundane moments felt significant simply because they were shared. Beneath that grief sits a layer of guilt: for the calls you never made, the messages you meant to send, and for letting it get to the point where reaching out now feels like an awkward imposition.
Pranav Jain has captured all of this in a short, tender essay about how friendships fray in adulthood and how little language we have for that kind of loss.
With romantic heartbreak we can usually rely on a kind of support infrastructure. The dissolving of a close friendship, however, usually goes strangely unmourned. There are no dramatic breakups.
“Most friendships dissolve through unattended accumulation – postponed calls, exhausting jobs, geographic distance, emotional fatigue, (...) One day you realise the person who once knew your thoughts now only knows what you accidentally reveal on Instagram stories.”
When we were younger, school and university did the work of friendship for us – proximity bred intimacy, repetition bred familiarity. Adulthood dismantles that scaffolding:
“Today’s young professionals live inside systems that quietly erode friendship while pretending to celebrate connection. Work consumes emotional bandwidth. Cities stretch distances cruelly. Weekends become recovery periods rather than social spaces. Ambition transforms everyone into project managers of their own lives. (...)
We are perhaps the first generation to possess uninterrupted access to each other while simultaneously becoming emotionally inaccessible. We maintain ambient awareness of one another’s existence without participating meaningfully in each other’s lives. I know what my friends eat. Which cafés they visit. Which things they complain about. I know when they get promoted because LinkedIn informs me before they do. And yet sometimes I hesitate before calling because I no longer know the emotional weather of their lives.”
One of Jain’s best observations is that adult friendship has gradually absorbed the same logic we apply to everything else. We tend to weigh our relationships through a kind of invisible cost-benefit analysis:
“Somewhere along the way, friendships too began absorbing the language of management. We now discuss emotional bandwidth like data plans. Even affection sometimes feels evaluated through invisible cost-benefit analysis: Who texts first? Who makes more effort? Who is emotionally available? Who drains energy?
Friendship, however, has always depended on a certain irrational generosity. A willingness to waste time together magnificently. To listen to the same anxiety for the fifth time. To sit through silence. To remain available without agenda.”
Like idleness (see DD392), friendship is antithetical to the economic system we live inside, because so much of it is gloriously unproductive and unpaid. Friendship doesn’t show up on any balance sheet, so it gets discounted, forgotten, filed under things that can wait.
“It resists the transactional logic modern life rewards everywhere else. Because a real friend offers something profoundly rare: unoptimised presence. Family is structured by blood. Marriage by institution. Work relationships by utility. Friendship survives purely through mutual choosing. Nobody has to stay. And yet some people do.”
The good news is that many of these friendships aren’t dead so much as dormant. The thread is still there; sometimes a single late-night call is enough to pull it taut again and find, briefly, an earlier and more reachable version of yourself waiting on the other end.
And now to this week’s discoveries. – Kai
2026-06-15 15:37:08
When the collective mood is dark and every headline seems to pile it on, the optimists love to wheel out the charts: we’ve never been healthier, wealthier, safer, look at the data! But that comfort evaporates the moment you open the news and see that another country just joined the arms race or another month was added to the record books for heat.
My default setting leans pessimistic (like a proper German) but zooming out and putting our current anxieties in historical context can be a useful exercise, particularly now, when every piece of media wants to hijack our basic threat-response systems.
Oliver Burkeman’s latest newsletter issue makes a great case for keeping a healthy perspective:
“The truth is that we’re probably living through times that future historians will think of as broadly normal. Dangerous and consequential, yes, but still normal.”
The reason this is so hard to accept, he argues, comes down to what has been labelled as ‘temporal chauvinism’:
“The feeling that the time you’re living in now is the most significant or terrifying one ever – simply because it’s the one you happen to be around to experience.”
Burkeman points to centuries of failed apocalypse predictions – from astrologers to religious leaders – and notes:
“There wasn’t some little part of their brains that was thinking ‘I know I’m being superstitious here – it’ll be different in the future, when people aren’t so ignorant!’ As far as they knew, they were in possession of the facts; they surely felt just as secure in their convictions as any AI thought leader today.”
He argues that much of today’s doomerism is a coping mechanism:
“Human existence is intrinsically unsafe and insecure, all the time. Anything could happen at any moment, the future is unknowable, one day you’ll die, and some people end up having vastly more traumatic encounters with these realities than others. Against this backdrop, AI doomerism starts to look like a coping mechanism for dealing with existential anxiety.”
This zooming out connects nicely with something Yuval Noah Harari points out on the Ezra Klein podcast. Harari offers a quick test for whether you’re a liberal: do you believe people should choose their own government, their own profession, their own religion, and their own spouse? If you say yes to all four, congratulations, you’re a liberal. And so are the vast majority of people across the political spectrum today, including most people who’d never call themselves that.
His point is that for most of human history, none of those four things were up for debate, let alone agreement. Today they are, and most of us land in the same place, which means the actual ideological gap is narrower than it’s ever been, even as everyone keeps telling us that we’ve never been more divided.
Optimism always comes with a risk. Lean too hard into ‘it’s all fine’ and you risk sapping the urgency that actually gets things done. Movements for change need momentum and action – they don’t just come about naturally.
But there’s an equally seductive trap on the other side – the doom spiral that feels like German seriousness but is really just another excuse to check out.
Things are bad, some of them are legitimately dangerous, and also, this is roughly what being alive has always felt like. The difficult trick is holding onto both at once: staying angry enough to act, without convincing yourself the sky is permanently falling.
And now to this week’s discoveries. – Kai
