Some Things, Week 6, 2025

something falling from the sky

Photo by Yama Bato.

You Can’t Post Your Way Out of Fascism: “Trusted information networks have existed since long before the internet and mass media. These networks are in every town and city, and at their core are real relationships between neighbors—not their online, parasocial simulacra.”

Simulacrum: “a representation or imitation of a person or thing.”

90’s Hip-Hop: A 45 plus minutes mix of Golden Era Classics + Rarities.

Makara Peak Mountain Bike Park Wayfinding: Cool signs.

Ghimli Sans: A font with “a nice ol' boozer vibe.”

Marginalia Search: “Find lost old websites.”

Existential Kool-aid Man.

AI Bureaucrats

You know, the world is being filled with AI bureaucrats that in the armies, in the banks, in the universities, in the governments, more and more decisions, which house to bomb, who is a terrorist, whether to give you a loan, whether to give you a job, whether to give you a place in a university. These decisions are increasingly made by AI. And these decisions are becoming opaque to us.

Yuval Noah Harari on the Hard Fork podcast.

Solitude changes us

The individual preference for solitude, scaled up across society and exercised repeatedly over time, is rewiring America’s civic and psychic identity. And the consequences are far-reaching—for our happiness, our communities, our politics, and even our understanding of reality.

From The Anti-Social Century. Emphasis mine.

Dashboards

“every dashboard is a sunk cost / every dashboard is an answer to some long-forgotten question / every dashboard is an invitation to pattern-match the past instead of interrogate the present / every dashboard gives the illusion of correlation / every dashboard dampens your thinking”

Charity Majors

Haunted Words

A collection of ghost words …

🆕 Ghost Artists: “Spotify, the rumor had it, was filling its most popular playlists with stock music attributed to pseudonymous musicians—variously called ghost or fake artists—presumably in an effort to reduce its royalty payouts.” /via pixel envy

Ghost Hotels: “The “ghost hotel” nomenclature refers to an entire apartment building which is functionally a hotel because most or all units are short-term rentals instead of tenant-occupied.”

Ghost Network Healthcare: “…he, like millions of Americans, was trapped in a “ghost network.” As some of those people have discovered, the providers listed in an insurer’s network have either retired or died. Many other providers have stopped accepting insurance — often because the companies made it excessively difficult for them to do so. Some just aren’t taking new patients. Insurers are often slow to remove them from directories, if they do so at all. It adds up to a bait and switch by insurance companies that leads customers to believe there are more options for care than actually exist.”

Ghost Network Television: “Now MTV is a ghost. Its average prime-time audience of 256,000 people in 2023 was down from 807,000 in 2014, the Nielsen company said. One recent evening MTV aired reruns of “Ridiculousness” from 5 p.m. to 1:30 a.m.”

Ghost Kitchen: “A virtual restaurant, also known as a ghost kitchen, cloud kitchen or dark kitchen, is a food service business that serves customers exclusively by delivery and pick-up based on phone and online ordering.[1] Virtual restaurants are stand-alone businesses that either operate out of an existing restaurant’s kitchen or from a separate kitchen set-up away from a restaurant.”

See also: American Suburbs Are a Horror Movie and We’re the Protagonists “That’s how I feel when I walk through the bare, people-less parking lots of my neighborhood to get to the grocery store. I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve seen other pedestrians while making this trip. If not for the moving cars nearby, it would be like walking through a post-apocalyptic wasteland. It’s an isolating experience, one that makes me feel very small and vulnerable.”

a recurrent theme is a fatigue with the style of self-narration that the platforms encourage — which, whether we realize it or not, has been heavily influenced by brand storytelling logics. We talk about ourselves like we’re products.

Posting Less

the best defense, the most meaningful work, the best preparation you can do at the level of an individual life is to boost your local resilience. To become a person of place. To connect with the people and land where you live. This is what we’re built to do.

How I became ‘collapse aware’. This is not a depressing read (or listen, the author read option was great)! /via Dense Discovery