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  • “Late Stage Capitalism” is annoying and cringe

    The phrase “late stage capitalism” is getting thrown around more and more lately in ways that are cringe and annoying. I’m starting to shut out people who use it.

    Consider:

    • Many of the ills of “late stage capitalism” have been features from the beginning
    • What evidence is there that “late stage capitalism” is even a thing? Some accelerationists even think that AI is the evolution of capitalism. I’m not sure what the signs are that “late stage capitalism” is here, but I am very sure there are equally valid countersigns that capitalism continues its forward momentum, such as the continued absence of any meaningful alternatives, the comparison in price between goods highly exposed to capitalism (price goes down) and the goods shielded from capitalism (price goes up), and the growing exposure to markets everywhere
    • Speaking of worldwide markets, I’m more convinced “late stage capitalism” is just capitalism introduced to world markets without adequate domestic safeguards, leading to all sorts of distortions and pain. Instead of “late stage capitalism” that’s more “unwise state execution of capitalism” – doesn’t quite roll off the tongue, though
    • Lots of “late stage capitalism” claims are better suited to “late stage republic,” not “late stage capitalism”

    I regret to say that this phrase has moved into the mainstream so much that it’s time to start rolling your eyes whenever you hear it and asking for evidence of the claim.

  • How does AI analyze human personality?

    The robots think you are a slightly anxious wreck. They also think they are an extraordinarily open, agreeable, low-drama universalist who would rather read than party. Then their own next release shows up and disagrees with them.
    — Read on persona.earthpilot.ai/

  • Playing to Win Overview

    Playing to Win Overview

    …of course the experts will absolutely destroy the scrubs with any number of tactics they’ve either never seen, or never been truly forced to counter. This is because the scrubs have not been playing the same game. The experts were playing the actual game while the scrubs were playing their own homemade variant with restricting, unwritten rules. The actual game really should be more fun if it’s not degenerate.

    — Read on www.sirlin.net/articles/playing-to-win

  • What the University Is Now For

    The university has told one story to its trustees, its accreditors, and the public, which is the story of the holistic education, the formation of citizens, the cultivation of judgment, the well-rounded life of the mind. It has told a different story to its students and their families and the labor market, which is the story of the credential, the ticket, the signal, the return on investment. The two stories were never quite compatible. They were held in suspension by an institution wealthy enough, slow enough, and culturally trusted enough that no one had to choose.
    — Read on amardashehu.substack.com/p/what-the-university-is-now-for

  • “Seriousness is the maniacal belief in a project greater than oneself”

    If you’re pinpointing a time when America became less serious, it’s around the same time when America began sacrificing communal responsibility in favor of individual pursuits. Though it’s unfair to pin everything on the Boomers, the concept of finding oneself did not exist during the German Blitz. As the sociologist and Freud scholar Philip Rieff wrote in The Triumph of the Therapeutic, “the psychological man” emerged as the dominant moral type in the Western world in late 1960s, replacing tradition and community with the idea of “himself and his own emotions.”
    — Read on boyle.substack.com/p/on-seriousness

  • How the Rich Manipulate the Hollywood System

    I like to call this “poorface” – performing a hardscrabble origin you didn’t have. The problem becomes when actual poor people, who do not have huge amounts of resources, try to imitate the path of people who do poorface. Hollywood’s talent pipeline increasingly rewards narratives of marginalization while paying less attention to class, creating incentives for affluent artists to emphasize hardship and understate resources.
    — Read on hollywoodgadfly.substack.com/p/survival-of-the-richest-hollywoods

  • Internet I Still Think About: House Hunters

    Like me, you may have long assumed that reality TV shows were not exact descriptions of reality. Still, I thought this was just at the level of selective editing and choice of focus.
    In fact, reality TV is not just faker than I imagined, it’s faker than I could imagine.
    — Read on www.atvbt.com/internet-i-still-think-about-house-hunters/

  • Building your “personal culture” in America, one book at a time

    Building your “personal culture” in America, one book at a time

    Despite brooding accounts in outlets on both ends of the political spectrum, to my delight people’s desire to have an active internal life has far from diminished. From seminars to workshops, from idea-based friend-making to reading-club singles mingles, people around America and the world demonstrate every day that neither the book nor conversation is “dead”. Link here.

  • Will chatbots fix toxic online culture?

    GenAI chat interfaces, however, represent a new paradigm. They are programmed to engage in positive, constructive, and polite interactions. Regular engagement with these platforms can subtly influence users to adopt a similar demeanor in their personal interactions. By consistently modeling respectful and thoughtful communication, genAI chat interfaces like ChatGPT could potentially encourage users to mirror these behaviors in their real-world interactions.
    — Read on rationalstuff.com/technology/chatbots-and-manners

  • Millennials as the Forever Generation

    My prediction is that counter to the current doomsaying around millennials, we will end up remembered as the cosmic and eternal boomers where millennials will be the ones astride all the commanding positions of power, influence, and wealth when we reach AGI, the singularity, and anti-aging and then, unlike the boomers, millennials will largely never retire, never pass on their wealth, and never give up their positions of cultural prominence.
    — Read on www.beren.io/2025-08-04-Millennials-as-the-Forever-Generation/

  • Asymmetric Bets: How Small Risks Create Unfair Upside

    Most people are taught to focus on the probability of failure. They ask “what if this does not work?” and stop there. The people who consistently end up with an unfair upside see something different. They pay attention to the ratio between downside cost and upside potential. If the downside is survivable and the upside could be transformative, they lean in. They worry less about being wrong and more about what happens if they are right.
    — Read on www.thevccorner.com/p/asymmetric-bets-unfair-upside

  • Your Reading Habits Know Your Politics Better than You Do – Here’s How to Find Out What You Actually Believe

    Your Reading Habits Know Your Politics Better than You Do – Here’s How to Find Out What You Actually Believe

    Most people don’t choose their political beliefs. They inherit them from their town, their church, their family, and their peer group. That inheritance used to come with a useful constraint: local accountability. You lived near the people you disagreed with. Your beliefs had to survive contact with reality.

    The internet broke that. Now people are constantly bombarded with political beliefs from all over the place. The internet replaced your actual neighbors with an algorithmically curated feed optimized to keep you engaged.

    Most political identity today is based on this barrage of information, and people struggle to articulate their beliefs as a result. Local political beliefs get tested through action at the local level. Almost nothing changes based on political beliefs inherited from the news firehose. This means it’s hard to filter through everything coming at you to determine where you stand.

    Here’s the thing though: your reading behavior is harder to fake than your stated beliefs. What you’re reading at 11pm, alone, with no audience, is where your actual politics live. It’s easy to analyze this data with AI, and this produces a sense of calm because it becomes easier to filter the barrage of news.

    The Workflow

    • You need the following tools to make this work: Claude Cowork, Obsidian, and Obsidian Web Clipper (or any clipping tool of your choice).
    • Clip everything that makes you stop. The friction of clipping is low. The result over months is an honest map of what actually engages you.
    • Process clips into permanent notes. Periodically point Claude Cowork at your clips. Ask it to process these into atomic notes (one idea per note). Ask it to create links between notes. This becomes a library of what is important to you.
    • Point Claude Cowork at your atomic notes. 1/ Ask it to find patterns you might not have thought about. 2/ Ask it to derive your political orientation from the notes rather than from your stated identity. 3/ Ask it for 3-5 affirmative bullet points of what you believe.
    • Create a steering file. After you’ve worked out the right questions to produce accurate analysis, ask Claude to create a steering file. This file contains the instructions, so you can run this analysis over and over as you add more content.

    Why This Works

    It’s hard to determine political thinking when you’re constantly blasted with everyone’s opinions. But you can create a private, audience-free record of what you actually engage with and use that as raw material for a more honest self-assessment.

    Your Obsidian vault is that record. The steering file turns a one-time analysis into a running conversation with your own intellectual development.

    News is designed to get your attention and convert you to one of two political parties. You are allowed to reject this system. There are hundreds of political orientations, and you’re allowed to choose the one that works for you.  

    Your goal isn’t a label. In fact, you want to get away from labels. You want to move toward a position you’ve earned, that has nuance that matters to you.

    If you have any questions, let me know in the comments.

  • Nothing changes

    Nothing changes

    “If you’ve seen the present then you’ve seen everything—as it’s been since the beginning, as it will be forever. The same substance, the same form. All of it.”

    -Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

  • I completed an Unknown Armies movie list

    ….and it was super underwhelming. The goal was to watch ten movies that were reminiscent of Unknown Armies, an occult themed role playing game focused on obsession and Jungian archetypes. But the only genuinely excellent movie on the list was Ghost World. That movie is stellar, may be one of my top 30 favorite movies of all time, and made this journey to watch 10 films reminiscent of Unknown Armies worth it. But that was it.

    An honorable mention goes to Bubba Ho-Tep, which was weird and unique, and led to an interesting thought: “were the fifties the weirdest time on earth, because technology produced global screen gods?” But Bubba Ho-Tep gave me more of a Savage Worlds vibe and it didn’t move me, nowhere near Ghost World.

    The rest of the films were a mish-mash that were sometimes interesting, sometimes boring, mainly produced flat emotional reactions and worst of all, didn’t give me the Unknown Armies vibe I was looking for. Maybe that’s because the source list was huge and I chose the wrong ten movies, or maybe it’s because I’d already seen the good movies from the source list so I didn’t choose them. Either way, Ghost World was the only true standout.

    The movies I watched were: Hard Boiled, Bubba Ho-Tep, John Dies at the End, eXistenZ, Barton Fink, To Live and Die in LA, Wild at Heart, Ghost World, The Fisher King, and Stranger than Paradise.

  • How I used AI to clean my Obsidian Inbox

    My Obsidian inbox had 40 fleeting notes (fragments from books, podcasts, conversations, and half-formed ideas). In the past I would set aside time to make them into proper Zettelkasten notes for my vault with 1000+ notes. I know that this is an important part of the Zettelkasten, but in the spirit of experimentation I wanted to see how AI could help with it. I tried delegating the process to AI, and it worked better than I expected.

    Here’s the process I used.

    1. I started with a steering file. Before touching a single note, I wrote a steering file that defined exactly what a good note looks like: one idea per note, written as a direct timeless claim (not “this article says”), a headline that states the idea rather than the topic, five tags maximum, up to three cross-links to related notes, and a source field. The steering file also defined when to create a Map of Content (only when five or more notes cluster around a coherent theme).
    2. I let the AI read the inbox, then write to a separate folder. I’m not yet ready to test something new on my full Obsidian vault, so I limited the AI to a single folder with a test batch of 40 notes. I kept the folder read-only (so I could check work) and asked the AI to write notes to a separate folder. Claude read all 40 notes in one pass, identified which ones contained multiple ideas, and wrote each cleaned note from scratch in the Zettelkasten format. Three long research documents became seven separate notes. Four Maps of Content emerged naturally from the clusters that formed.

    The result was 40 notes processed in one session, properly formatted, tagged, and linked. What I’m looking for ultimately is not the note rewriting, it’s the cross-linking and the ability to see patterns within notes. So I expect to continue testing beyond this first batch to explore that idea.

  • Do you know your default shape?

    When people rhetorically ask, “why does everyone like Taylor Swift so much,” or, “why do people fall for conspiracy theories,” they are often displaying incuriosity about the shapes of others. Take a second to be curious.
    — Read on usefulfictions.substack.com/p/do-you-know-your-default-shape

  • Quest Active: Unknown Armies Movie List

    Quest Active: Unknown Armies Movie List

    I’ve never played the roleplaying game Unknown Armies, but I’ve read the book, and it’s a fascinating read into a system of magic (essentially) based on the works of Carl Jung. It’s paranoid and interesting, with magic built on obsessions made real.

    I stumbled across the ruleset in a Reddit discussion of the movie Under the Silver Lake. That movie captures a very specific flavor, of a world hidden within the world, conspiracy and paranoia humming just beneath the surface, buried in pop culture. A descent into the underworld, but the underworld is Los Angeles with Egyptian undertones.

    I wanted to find something like it. I needed a movie list.

    So I built one by drawing from several online sources, ending up with a recommendation of about 50 films that evoke that same uncanny frequency, the feeling that something vast and strange is organized just out of view.

    I’ve already seen a chunk of them, and now I’m working through the ones I haven’t (not all of them, just ten or so).

    I’m three movies in, and I have to be honest, they have been, without exception, bad. Some have been vaguely interesting.

    Still, a quest is a quest. And a quest has a decidedly Pilgrim vibe. The remaining titles look interesting:

    • Lord of Illusions, Barton Fink, Ghost World, Layer Cake, To Live and Die in LA, Wild at Heart, The Stepford Wives, The Machinist, The Limey, The Fisher King, The Cooler, That Obscure Object of Desire, Stranger than Paradise, My Own Private Idaho, Klute, Lost Highway, and Blue Velvet.

  • Kundera, Hegel, and the AIs

    These absurd creatures live life fantasizing about this or that pair of eyes following their adventures, trials, and development: an absentee mother, an elusive mentor, or “the one that got away” functions as a mentally conjured juror and benefactor whom the person…wants to please, impress, or enrage.
    — Read on american-innocence.com/p/kundera-hegel-and-the-ais

  • 32 things on Mars that look like they shouldn’t be there

    The more scientists study the Red Planet, the more they find unusual objects and patterns scattered across Mars’ surface. Here are some of the most baffling.
    — Read on www.livescience.com/space/mars/32-things-on-mars-that-look-like-they-shouldnt-be-there

  • The usefulness of useless knowledge

    Unfortunately, politicians are not well placed to venture an informed opinion on the value of scientific research. The fact that research sounds silly or strange is no guide to its value. My own hunch — and it is just a hunch — is that it’s the research that seems obviously useful that is most likely to be polluted by bad science. The merely odd, purely curiosity-driven research is less likely to be tainted. Incestuous as it might seem, the people best placed to hand out funding for basic scientific research are other scientists.
    — Read on timharford.com/2026/04/the-usefulness-of-useless-knowledge/