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.