Links, notes, & sundries — Ethan Marcotte’s website

Taro Yamamoto: “So-Called AI and the Dangers of a New Age of ‘Enclosure’”

2026-10-12T00:00:00-04:00

Taro Yamamoto, a typographer and former Adobe employee, muses aloud about the inherent constraints “AI” puts on creativity — and culture.

Are we not now witnessing the emergence of a qualitatively new stage of “enclosure,” in which even those who appear to possess and control the technology become subject to the limitations of the systems they themselves have created?

A thoughtful, insightful essay.

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Kaeti Hinck on “AI,” tools, and the artist’s practice

2026-10-12T00:00:00-04:00

My pal Kaeti is a tremendously talented artist, and recently launched a lovely newsletter to talk about her work, and how she thinks about her practice as an artist. And her second issue’s wrestling with something we’re all wrestling with right now: what does it mean to make in the age of LLMs?

Part of our work as artists is close observation, engaging in the gore and mess and tedium that others might rather avoid or ignore. Removing ourselves from the process feels antithetical. Isn’t that process the whole point? The friction and effort we feel when bringing anything to life, that’s when we are most present in our work. In using AI, we seem to want to skip the messy and frustrating middle, but we do so at a cost. We can’t unearth anything interesting without digging.

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Kotaku: “Inside The Failed Fight To Unionize Double Fine”

2026-10-11T00:00:00-04:00

Absolutely brilliant reporting from Rebekah Valentine. Though I will say: this one hurt to read.

Solidarity forever with these workers.

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Despite the Machismo of Prison, These Men Collaborated on a Quilt

2026-10-09T00:00:00-04:00

An essay about a quilting workshop run at a prison in southern Vermont.

We provided very little guidance or facilitation. What we contributed was structure — every time we began a session, we started with a short circle check-in where people were able to say, “This is how I’m feeling today.” There’s always someone who’s struggling with something big — like an upcoming court date or a family loss, and they can’t participate in the family grieving process because they’re incarcerated.

Their final work is beautiful; the story, even moreso.

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ascii.rest

2026-10-09T00:00:00-04:00

A library for creating rather stunning ASCII art animations for web pages. Beautiful.

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Jenny Zhang: “Workers Can Take Back Tech“

2026-09-29T00:00:00-04:00

This brief, searing talk from Jenny is absolutely worth your time. The counterweight to so many of our issues today — the billionaire problem, extractive surveillance technology, you name it — is labor organizing.

(Jenny’s made the transcript available as well, if that’s more your speed.)

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Destroy Any Website

2026-09-29T00:00:00-04:00

What it says on the tin: supply a link to any web page, then run around and blow up that web page.

Delightful and therapeutic little throwback to early web shenanigans.

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Lucy Bellwood: “I’m So Tired“

2026-09-21T00:00:00-04:00

It’s impossible for me to know whether you’re writing these emails yourself, although at this point there are tells. I know I turn up in searches for “creators who talk openly online about money and the creative process,” so it’s easy enough to have ChatGPT write to me on your behalf thinking that I’d be a good get for a platform about owning your own creative output.

The fact is: I’m now getting 4-10 emails every day from people purporting to be enthusiastic about my work.

They are not, on the whole, written by people.

Lucy speaks for all of us.

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Fireland

2026-09-21T00:00:00-04:00

THERE IS A NEW FIRELAND DOT COM

I REPEAT, THERE IS A NEW FIRELAND DOT COM

Don’t miss Josh’s gallery of old Fireland designs, yes dad I’m old enough to remember most of these, no dad I don’t want to talk about it

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records of enemy surveillance

2026-09-14T00:00:00-04:00

Cara Esten Hurtle’s art project, using drone photography to record the placement of Flock surveillance cameras. From her artist statement:

More than anything, what stood out to me about the process of photographing these devices was geography: they exist at the boundaries of rich neighborhoods like Piedmont to track who enters; they exist embedded into poor neighborhoods to track the people who live there. Place exposes their purpose.

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mandy brown: In the world

2026-09-14T00:00:00-04:00

mandy’s post is how I learned about Nevan Scott’s passing, and I’m still reeling from the news.

It sounds incredibly mundane to talk about it now, a friendship measured in video calls and commit messages, but then the word mundane comes from the Latin mundi, or world. To be mundane is to belong to the world, to be in the world, of it and within it. Not outside of it — not lost, the way so much technology tries to make us lose ourselves — but in the world as only the truly living can be. As we can only be with each other.

I didn’t know Nevan as well as mandy did, but I was delighted each time I learned we’d be collaborating on a project. He was a kind and caring person, one who used his teaching to make the industry a little better. I wish I’d made the time to tell him that.

Rest well, Nevan. And thank you.

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A declaration on math and AI

2026-09-14T00:00:00-04:00

An open letter from mathematicians, on the “severe misalignment” in goals between researchers and “AI” companies:

The mathematical community functions, in many ways, as a miniature version of humanity. It consists of individuals using a wide variety of different approaches, joined by core values. The most precious resources of our profession are students and ideas, and these we nurture with great care. We feel responsible to let them grow to their full potential, until they can live a life of their own in the mathematical world. […]

In recent months, the success of AI in solving major mathematical problems has made headlines even outside mathematical circles. But solving problems is only a tool and proxy for achieving the primary goal of conceptual understanding and insight. Forgetting this in the world of AI may turn the tool against the primary goal. Indeed, the mass production at faster and faster pace of “true/false” statements could destroy fertile ground instead of breathing life into new ideas.

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Joanne McNeil: “saving the blanks”

2026-09-09T00:00:00-04:00

I guess what I’m describing here is the difference between obsessional or passionate attention. There’s the pursuit of information as way to find joy — even the search itself can be pleasurable — and then there is compulsory completion, a kneejerk response to feeling unmoored where there are blanks in the trivia with which we are familiar.

Lately, I’ve been thinking I need to get more comfortable with the blanks. Why does it matter whether I know the name of a movie I have no interest in seeing or seeing again? To put it more directly: what do I get from knowing about things I don’t even care about?

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“I’m the Guy Who Destroys Antique Books After We Scan Them into Our Company’s Insatiable AI Platform”

2026-09-03T00:00:00-04:00

People assume scanning is the exciting part. And, sure, it is impressive. They shear off the spine, separate the pages, and run everything through these enormous machines so the computer can absorb every sentence ever written and use it to create some fairly compelling LinkedIn posts. But then, boy oh boy, the wheeled cart carrying those decimated remains comes to me. That is where the human touch enters the process, assuming you count industrial shredders and a giant burn pit out back as an extension of the hand, which I certainly do.

I don’t like being in a timeline where McSweeney’s pieces just straight up depress me, and yet here we all are.

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Jeff Halter’s Afterglow

2026-08-25T00:00:00-04:00

It’s not out yet, but I love this: an emulator to run classic After Dark screen savers on modern macOS.

(I absolutely adore that Iconfactory-designed app icon, too.)

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A handy guide for avoiding intrusive AI

2026-08-03T00:00:00-04:00

Jessamyn West gets a lot of questions from library patrons on how to disabling, hiding, or just plain avoiding “AI” in modern software. So she’s compiled a great resource, with an even better short URL: NoToAI.org

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A typographic look at The Black Panther

2026-07-27T00:00:00-04:00

A look at the people and production processes that shaped the revolutionary design of the Black Panther Party’s flagship newspaper.

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pixel skylines

2026-07-17T00:00:00-04:00

A tumblr filled with pixelated backgrounds from old video games.

Beautiful.

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Dustin Mierau

2026-07-17T00:00:00-04:00

I’ve long been a sucker for personal sites that mimic a desktop experience, and Dustin’s designed a fine one here.

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The Pudding: “A History of Menus is a Menu of History”

2026-07-10T00:00:00-04:00

A look at American restaurant menus from the turn of the nineteenth century and, through them, the country as a whole.

Don’t miss their interactive gallery of nearly five thousand menus from that time period. Stunning work.

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clipart.studio

2026-07-10T00:00:00-04:00

Love this site from Sami Smith, which lets you cut out old magazines — either from the Internet Archive, or from your own PDFs — and use them to make digital collages.

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Trici Venola

2026-07-01T00:00:00-04:00

A tremendous profile of Trici Venola, an early MacPaint-era digital artist. Her portfolio is filled with stunning pixel art, but I’m still thinking about this line:

“But where’s the tiger coming from?” he asked in genuine bewilderment, “isn’t there a program for drawing the tiger? That you just tell and it draws one?” and he wandered away leaving me wondering forever, Where does the tiger come from?

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The Media Archaeology Lab

2026-06-27T00:00:00-04:00

The University of Colorado’s Media Archaeology Lab is “one of the largest collections in the world of still-functioning obsolete media.” Their catalog is filled with all the hardware you’d expect — old PCs and Macs, gaming consoles, and more — but don’t miss their trove of software and printed materials.

I have a new life goal, and it is to visit the MAL at some point. What a wonderful thing this is.

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Naz Hamid: “Fade to Blue”

2026-06-24T00:00:00-04:00

Naz talks about his latest redesign, which started as a response to the emerging of “AI” slop. But over time, it helped him reconnect with some older, deeper ideas.

I paused to think about what I found inspiring at this time, and what feels fundamentally me. The answer lay in a mix of blueprints, indigo dyes, and selvedge denim. Add in some mid-century Americana via compartmentalized typography, and here we are. In hindsight, I’ve used shades of blue a number of times with Weightshift, but had left it behind. The blues are back.

What’s new to me is what’s true to me.

Love the redesign; love the way he talks about it even more.

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mandy brown: “Umyazu”

2026-06-24T00:00:00-04:00

mandy has given us two gifts here: a powerhouse of an essay about reading as a form of resistance and rediscovery; and — and! — a gorgeous, stately new redesign.

Also, mandy’s announced a new subscription model for her website. Her site will remain free, but if you’ve ever wanted to support her writing, well, now’s your chance.

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Max Voltar: The non-work

2026-06-23T00:00:00-04:00

Tim Van Damme updates his homepage to show non-work projects, and it’s about as lovely as you’d expect.

(Be sure to click or tap into some of those work samples. That zoom treatment is gorgeous, and not to be missed.)

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HyperBlam!

2026-06-23T00:00:00-04:00

Okay, this is neat: Heydon Pickering’s released an HTML (!!) framework for mixing, sampling, and sequencing music, all right in your browser.

Too cool.

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Ta-Nehisi Coates: “Did Kamala Harris’s Silence on Gaza Cost Her the White House?”

2026-06-22T00:00:00-04:00

Don’t get distracted by the headline: Coates’ piece on American imperialism, racism, and electoral politics is taking a much, much longer view than the last few years.

…a black presidency is a contradiction — it owes its power to a movement against racist state violence at home but seeks an office which has always practiced racist state violence abroad.

But what was known in 1964 was largely abandoned in 2024, and what was offered instead was a questionable survivalist theory of democracy — one that proposed to erect a shield over one group while providing weaponry to destroy another. For reasons moral, pragmatic, and perhaps mostly ancestral, the next black presidency will have to think bigger. To its list of adversaries — which include a renewed white supremacy, a rapacious billionaire class, an energetic Christian nationalism — it must add another, perhaps more formidable than them all: empire.

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Miriam Suzanne: “There's no point resisting”

2026-06-20T00:00:00-04:00

Thank you, Miriam.

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Mandy Brown: “Ten times”

2026-06-20T00:00:00-04:00

Likewise, we are wont to assume that deskilling looks like someone doing more menial work after most of their work has been automated away. The copywriter who once generated sentences and ideas from their brilliant, creative mind but is now tasked with babysitting a sycophantic LLM that spits out uncanny but plausible-sounding versions of the same is an obvious victim. But deskilling shows up in other ways, too: the copywriter who retains their job as an actual writer — because such work remains valuable underneath an avalanche of slop — finds that they are pressured to do more and more work, at lower and lower wages, because there are legions of other people who can do it, too. The deskilling occurs at the level of the community, not only the individual.

In other words, a synonym for “increase in productivity” is “fewer workers.”

I’m always grateful for Mandy’s writing, but maybe especially now.

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Storied Colors

2026-06-17T00:00:00-04:00

A catalog of named colors — think Uranium Red, Chartres Blue, and Raw Sienna — and how they got their names.

A beautiful site, filled with beautiful words.

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The case for an accessibility designer vibe coding when all his coworkers are also vibe coding

2026-06-15T00:00:00-04:00

A tremendous piece by Eric Bailey on his recent accessibility work with LLMs. He takes a clear-eyed look at his experience — the real solutions he’s shipped, the limits of the technology, and its legitimately cataclysmic toll.

I am also firmly aware of the connection between climate change and disability, as well as who gets left behind in climate disasters.

It is hard to escape the guilt I feel that in attempting to address access barriers in a narrow scope in the short-term I am also contributing to mass-disabling conditions in the long-term.

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“Rising Emissions, Depleting Water and Vanishing Land,” a new UN report on “AI” resource consumption

2026-06-15T00:00:00-04:00

The UN University’s Institute for Water, Environment and Health has released a new report on the energy use of LLMs and the data center boom.

“Sobering” doesn’t even begin to cover it.

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Ingrid Burrington’s new edition of _Networks of New York_

2026-06-15T00:00:00-04:00

I am so excited Ingrid’s put this important little book back out in the world. It’ll give you a new way of seeing.

You’d better believe I’ve preordered the new edition.

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Heikki's Garden of Flowers, an archive of pictorial typography

2026-06-15T00:00:00-04:00

An extensive — and extensively catalogued! — archive of ASCII-like artwork, all created on letterpress: with metal type, ornaments, and rules.

Astonishing, and lovely.

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Back at Base Camp

2026-06-12T00:00:00-04:00

I’ve enjoyed following Keisha McKenzie’s words for a few years now, and she’s recently rehomed her writing from Substack back to her own blog.

Here, though state-level politics somewhat buffers my family from the rollercoaster that is the USA at 250, we’re still in the capital region blast radius. And here, in the shadow of Mordor, we feed seniors and walk them as often as they can stand it. We sip tea and coffee, care for the animals, listen to music, or watch sports. I read, edit, and paint. I write.

Excited to add her RSS to the ol’ feed reader.

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“Would You Like to Set Google Chrome as Your Default Browser, or Would You Prefer Centuries of Untold Pain and Torment?”

2026-06-11T00:00:00-04:00

Reader, I chuckled several times.

Nay, the misery will not stop with your final breath; seven generations of your progeny will be cursed with corrupted souls, minds, and bodies. Fate will toy with your offspring like a wolf toys with the slowest bunny. So cease your inanity and browse the Chrome Web Store to find extensions that customize the experience more to your liking.

A McSweeney’s-ass piece of writing, if ever I’ve seen one. (complimentary)

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absenter

2026-06-10T00:00:00-04:00

Naz Hamid revives absenter, his once and future photo blog. This was one of those websites that was such a fixture in my early career: Naz paired exquisitely composed photographs with a lovely pop of color on each page, and I’m so, so glad he’s brought that back for the new version.

It does me a world of good to see this website back online. As Naz said himself over on Mastodon, it feels a little bit like coming home.

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Henry Desroches: “It doesn’t matter if it works”

2026-06-09T00:00:00-04:00

Henry absolutely nails the key point here: it doesn’t matter if so-called AI “works.” What matters is that the value of your labor goes down, and workers are pushed further into precarity.

The widespread deployment of AI/LLMs constitutes an existential threat to labor whether or not it is an adept move by the adoptive industries. Thus it is essential for workers to stop asking whether or not AI works and start asking who ultimately benefits from its deployment.

What really matters, of course, is what we collectively decide to do about that push to deskill us.

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elle's homepage

2026-06-09T00:00:00-04:00

elle has a delightful little isometric homepage, all lovingly rendered in pixel art. Love it.

(Fun bonus: try typing curl elle.sh in your terminal. Maybe you’ll be as delighted as I was.)

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David Wilson: “The solution might be cancelling my AI subscription”

2026-06-09T00:00:00-04:00

Quoting this intensely personal, beautifully written little essay feels like I’m doing it a disservice, but:

The technology, when honed, is genuinely amazing. Ask it to zero shot a parser for an esoteric grammar implemented in an esoteric language with full tests and it’s done. The tooling as it exists today promotes absolutely nothing like the focus required to apply it judiciously.

Almost every vendor and every tool intends to do exactly the opposite: more usage, more tokens, more output. Ask a simple yes/no question of ChatGPT and you can clearly see that it is hard-wired to include a relevant follow-up question to promote excessive interaction.

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KAIJUVILLE: “Taking a Breath with Ethan Marcotte”

2026-06-05T00:00:00-04:00

I did an interview for KAIJUVILLE, my friend Brendan’s blog/newsletter about video games! Nobody has ever asked me to speak about video games! And boy, lemme tell you: it was just the best time.

Ethan I hate to tell you this, but we’re closing in on the tenth anniversary of Breath of the Wild real fast, despite it being a game that came out when I was already an adult. I feel like it’s not okay for the second-most-recent Zelda game to be nine years old, because that game came out basically in the Present, whereas it is sort of okay for the first Zelda game to be forty years old because that is from the Past.

Do you and Zelda go back that far? Because like — I’m right, right? You know what I’m saying? NOTE TO SELF: Brendan remember to tie this question to the whole time theme in Zelda before you post it

Brendan’s questions were so thoughtful and thought-provoking, and he made a GIF of one of our kittens that makes me cackle every time I see it. I hope you enjoy reading this interview as much as I enjoyed participating in it.

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The NAACP on “holding data centers accountable”

2026-05-24T00:00:00-04:00

These facilities influence everything: our water, our air, our land, our utility bills, and the very stability of our energy grid. Because they touch so many parts of our lives, we have to know where the decisions are being made and how our voices can shape what comes next.

An organizing guide aimed at protecting the communities most impacted by data center expansion, and on curtailing that expansion whenever possible.

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Mechanical Pencil

2026-05-22T00:00:00-04:00

Love these immaculately animated little guides by Bryan Macomber, each showing the inner workings of everyday objects like Zippo lighters and mechanical pencils.

Just gorgeous.

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A veteran organizer shares his path to the labor movement

2026-05-19T00:00:00-04:00

Rand Wilson, a organizer for more than forty years, tells the story of how he first got involved in the movement.

I returned home to Somerville determined to do more organizing and put into practice what I had learned in Waterbury. Without much thought or effort, I got a job sometime as a “quality control checker” at Clinical Assays (a subsidiary of Baxter Travenol Labs) in Cambridge.

It turned out to be one of the most consequential (and challenging) experiences of my life.

I’m often asked what labor organizing looks like. I don’t have direct experience myself, so I’m always keen to share stories of what it looks like on the ground. This is one of the best ones I’ve read in some time.

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whatcable

2026-05-17T00:00:00-04:00

If you’ve ever wondered whether a USB-C cable connected to your Mac can be used for data or power, this little menu bar utility looks perfect.

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Forbes: “The AI Layoff Bill Is Coming Due, And CTOs Are Going To Pay It Twice”

2026-05-14T00:00:00-04:00

Deeply appreciated this clear-eyed opinion piece from Sarah Choudhary:

We keep talking about vibe coding and AI adoption as if the only question is whether developers will be replaced. That framing misses the story. The story is that a specific kind of executive, the one who needs a progressive headline every quarter, has been running an uncontrolled experiment on your workforce. The data on that experiment is now in, and it is not flattering.

The so-called “AI” industry is not built on a sound foundation, and the crazed rush to adopt the tech has exposed some deep, structural problems in the industry. We need to repair those cracks, and we need to start now.

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Ron Bronson: “Better Technology for Cruelty (Or Administrative Burden As a Service)”

2026-05-06T00:00:00-04:00

I read Ron’s latest post yesterday morning, and haven’t stopped thinking about it. It’s a hard look at the once-lofty goals of “civic tech,” and how they’re meant to be squared against the events of the last year:

Remaking government in the image of such a destructive lot, given their impact, would say a lot about your view of the world. Facebook on democracy. Uber on labor. Amazon on warehouse workers. The AI labs on knowledge work and copyright. The model produces speed and consequence at the same scale. Importing that model into the apparatus that determines whether a child eats, whether a disabled person retains custody, whether a tenant can stay housed — that’s a politics.

I had a (much) too-brief foray into civic technology, so I can’t really speak to the broader historical context here. But Ron gets at something I’ve been curious about: if an industry measures success in contracts won, rather than in lives tangibly improved, something is seriously amiss. And missing.

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Jenny Volvovski’s unsolicited book cover redesigns

2026-05-06T00:00:00-04:00

In 2012, I really wanted to design book covers but didn’t have any book cover work. So I hired myself to redesign my personal library.

I love this, and I love seeing a space made for personal, unsolicited design projects. Inspiring on every level.

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Empty Screenings

2026-05-05T00:00:00-04:00

A website that searches for empty or near-empty movie theater screenings near you. Absolutely amazing.

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Nilay Patel: “THE PEOPLE DO NOT YEARN FOR AUTOMATION”

2026-05-04T00:00:00-04:00

I enjoyed this just as much as everyone led me to believe I might.

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Ky Decker: “Do I belong in tech anymore?”

2026-05-01T00:00:00-04:00

After years building a career in tech, Ky Decker asks where there’s still a place in the industry for them. Heartfelt, and heartbreaking:

Many of us have bullshit jobs where the goal is not, in fact, to make something good, or even to learn, but to simply make money to pay rent and medical expenses. To hopefully find a little joy on the side. The whole system is broken; AI alone didn’t break it, but it is widening the cracks.

I guess what I’m trying to say is I wish none of us had to live like this. I would like to imagine a future that does not look like this.

From other stories I’ve read and heard over the last year, Ky’s not alone here in asking whether they can stay in the industry. And if you’re asking yourself similar questions, neither are you.

I’ll just note there’s a kind of power in recognizing that we’re not alone.

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“Collider”, a new album by Mute City and Parris Taylor

2026-05-01T00:00:00-04:00

My friend Mike, whose nom de musique is Mute City, has a new electronic album out. It’s a collaboration with Parris Taylor, and folks I gotta say it sounds GREAT.

I’ve been seat-dancing all morning.

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James Bennett: “Let’s talk about LLMs”

2026-04-30T00:00:00-04:00

I really enjoyed this. It begins with a sweeping look at LLMs through the lens of process analysis in software design, and moves on to discuss what “productivity” actually means. And it’s not output:

So the consistent theme here, in the studies and reports and in more recent public examples, is that being able to generate code much more quickly than before, even in 2026 with modern LLMs and modern practices, is still no guarantee of being able to deliver software much more quickly than before.

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What I Learned About Billionaires at Jeff Bezos’s Private Retreat

2026-04-22T00:00:00-04:00

The world has always been run by rich men. The robber barons of the Gilded Age were known for their ruthlessness in the accumulation of wealth — hiring Pinkertons to shoot striking unionists. But they directly engaged with the world around them, using their wealth and power to muscle it into its most profitable form. And although today’s billionaires are clearly manipulating society to maximize their own profit, something else is also happening — a disassociation from the reality of cause and effect, from meaning and history. These men no longer feel the need to change the world in order to succeed, because their success is guaranteed, no matter what happens to the rest of us.

I should have guessed that Noah Hawley’s account of meeting Jeff Bezos would read like a horror story. And yet here I sit, my heart racing a little.

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Spirograph Guilloché Generator

2026-04-21T00:00:00-04:00

Well, hey: typed guilloché generator into a search engine, and I found this lovely little side project from Erik Wrenholt. Just like that!

Remember when the internet, y’know, worked the way you expected it to? Good stuff!

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Barnes Foundation, February 2026

2026-04-14T00:00:00-04:00

My friend Mark’s photography entries are always a delight, but this one stopped me in my tracks.

Exquisite.

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Strokes & Dots

2026-04-08T00:00:00-04:00

What lovely little dots, courtesy of stipple artist Ruben Bos.

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Against the Luddites

2026-04-01T00:00:00-04:00

I thought this essay was fairly thought-provoking:

The contemporary effort to recast the Luddites as thoughtful critics of technology gives modern anxieties about AI a historical pedigree they do not deserve. The movement was a violent defense of guild privilege, male supremacy, and craft hierarchy against the leveling forces of industrial modernity. They could have fought for equality and justice; they chose instead to fight to remain the petty bosses of their own towns rather than cede that authority to the owners of factories.

No movement, labor or otherwise, is above critical appraisal.

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Jason Santa Maria updates his Citywide typeface

2026-03-25T00:00:00-04:00

I love Citywide, Jason’s gorgeous sans serif inspired by bus roll signs, and I really love that he’s now added a chonky yet comfy lowercase to it.

It took a tremendous amount of work, but the final result makes it look effortless.

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Hamilton Nolan on “The Consequences of Bad Labor Law”

2026-03-23T00:00:00-04:00

In this essay, Hamilton suggests that if airline and airport workers weren’t so constrained by federal labor laws, the current airport crises would have already been resolved. I think he’s right, and the whole essay is worth your time:

The main thing to understand about US labor law is that its primary function is to restrict the power of workers in favor of the power of businesses. The ideal of the law as a way to mediate the desires of both capital and labor in the interests of the common good has become wildly tilted towards the interests of capital. It exists, on balance, not to facilitate the existence of organized labor but to handcuff it. This is not a state of nature. It is a policy choice. And, when viewed in the context of a nation slipping dangerously into oligarchy, it is common sense that this policy choice will, in the long run, be proven to have been a very, very bad idea.

The one thing I’ll quietly add here is that since last January, I’ve thought more than a few times that if the federal workforce was legally allowed to strike, the last year would have looked very, very different. But here we are.

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El País interviews the artists bringing hand-painted signs back to Mexico

2026-03-23T00:00:00-04:00

A tremendous (and lovely) look at the history and traditions of hand-painted signage in Mexico.

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An educator muses on a “GenAI future,” and on what it means for society—and for their child

2026-03-23T00:00:00-04:00

And yet, there is no denying AI is an extraordinary tool. It feels as if Pandora’s box is already open and we are not going ‘back’ to a time before it was. So, I keep circling one deceptively simple proposition: using AI responsibly means knowing when not to use it. That is not a rhetorical flourish; it’s a literacy problem, the harder one. The question isn’t “how do I get outputs?” but “should I be doing this here, at all – and what am I losing if I do?”

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Aftermath: “Notes Towards A ‘Woke 2’”

2026-03-23T00:00:00-04:00

Loved every part of this essay from Gita Jackson:

Knowing and being able to see the firmament that upholds injustice is useful, but you also have to know what to do with that knowledge.

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A database tracking worker-led mobilization around “AI” across arts and media

2026-03-18T00:00:00-04:00

A project from the University of Toronto’s Creative Labour & Critical Futures research lab:

Around the world, cultural workers are striking, protesting, running campaigns and mobilizing in relation to the use of AI in the workplace, such as Hollywood writers, game performers in the US and voice actors in Brazil. This tracker aims to document strikes, protests, campaigns and mobilizations by cultural workers — broadly understood as the arts, culture and media sectors — in relation to AI around the world.

Much like Collective Action in Tech, this seems like a tracker worth trackin’.

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Christian Donlan on Marathon’s art style

2026-03-15T00:00:00-04:00

I haven’t played the new Marathon — I think I’ve aged out of shooters, and definitely out of multiplayer ones — but I’m just smitten by the way it looks. Loved this close read of the game’s aesthetic.

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“AI Is African Intelligence”

2026-03-13T00:00:00-04:00

404 Media on the data labelers and trainers staging a workers’ rebellion against “artificial intelligence”:

“You can’t understand where you’re positioned if you don’t understand your history,” Angela, one of the day’s speakers, told the workers who had assembled there (many of the speakers at the event did not give their full names). “When you think of colonialism, we were under British Imperial East Africa Company […] so literally, we are working under a company. We are just products, part of their operation. Stakeholders, we can say, but we are at the bottom of the bottom.”

So many of today’s “innovations” are powered by workers toiling under deeply traumatizing conditions, for very little pay, and working under ghastly levels of precarity.

(FYI, a number of content warnings apply to this article: there are discussions of trauma and PTSD, as well as mentions of graphic or violent content.)

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Archive of Archives

2026-03-12T00:00:00-04:00

David Sizemore’s “curated collection of digital archives”. A lovely thing that links out to many, many other lovely things.

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“Being a Luddite Is Cool and All, but Have You Seen the Hilarious Tapestries These New Looms Are Making?”

2026-03-09T00:00:00-04:00

The power loom, as we know, is inevitable, preordained by God, who works His miracles through the hands of rich and wise inventors. It’s foolish to resist it. We can’t possibly imagine a different social order — we just can’t! God decreed that George should be king and the power loom should replace handicraft, and anyone who says otherwise is just wasting their time.

One of those :lolsob: reads.

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Web 1.0 website roulette

2026-03-08T00:00:00-04:00

Every time you visit this link, you’ll get a random Web 1.0 website:

https://wiby.me/surprise

A glimpse into a different — better? — time.

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Notes from a Burmese Prison

2026-02-28T00:00:00-04:00

Danny Fenster’s account of his imprisonment in Myanmar, told with simple, delicate comic sketches. Powerful; beautiful.

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Taylor Mazer’s stunning pen and ink illustrations

2026-02-26T00:00:00-04:00

Goodness me.

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a personal history of automobiles.

2026-02-25T00:00:00-04:00

An adult life, told through five car purchases.

I’ll read just about anything Stacia writes, and I’m so glad I read this.

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The AI hater’s guide to code with LLMs: The Overview

2026-02-18T00:00:00-04:00

Here’s Aria with a scorcher of an essay on LLMs. It covers a lot of ground — the current state of the so-called “AI” industry; how LLMs work; and, not least, the harms they do — but I found tremendously helpful.

When I think of persuasive writing, I’ll think of this. Aria’s helped me rethink a few of my old arguments; they’ve also helped me sharpen some of the critiques I still hold onto. Strongly recommend.

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Harvard Business Review: “AI Doesn’t Reduce Work—It Intensifies It”

2026-02-09T00:00:00-04:00

Whatever the lofty output gains promised by LLMs, their initial productivity surge is erased over time, and replaced by heavier workloads — and that leads to workers experiencing “cognitive fatigue, burnout, and weakened decision-making.” All this from research out of the notoriously pro-worker rag [checks notes] Harvard Business Review, no less.

These platforms were not built for you and I — and never were.

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Maintaining the Bridges

2026-02-03T00:00:00-04:00

Brian uses two of my very favorite topics — industrial history and infrastructure — to argue that it’s high time we prioritize maintenance and the public good in how we ship technological products. I’m in.

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Kim Kelly on the difference between a general strike and a national shutdown

2026-02-01T00:00:00-04:00

I think Kim’s right to make a distinction between the citizen-led shutdowns we’ve been seeing here in the US, and a real general strike. She’s not suggesting that those shutdowns don’t matter — far from it — or trying to be pedantic. But rather, by understanding what a general strike really is, we can build on today’s shutdowns, and move toward an even greater level of collective power.

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The Guardian: US leads record global surge in gas-fired power driven by AI demands

2026-01-29T00:00:00-04:00

The US is at the forefront of a global push for gas that is set to escalate over the next five years, after tripling its planned gas-fired capacity in 2025. Much of this new capacity will be devoted to the vast electricity needs of AI, with a third of the 252 gigawatts of gas power in development set to be situated on site at datacenters.

I don’t ever want to read another breathy article about the promise of “ai”, unless this paragraph is pasted right at the top.

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Meet Loud Room

2026-01-28T00:00:00-04:00

My pal Jason just launched his new design practice, and wow does it have the perfect name: Loud Room.

I want Loud Room to be a place where I can experiment, play, and make things that don’t fit neatly into one category. Fonts are the focus right now, but not the limit.

Loud Room’s new site is a beauty, as is the design philosophy it’s wrapped around. Can’t wait to see what Jason does with it next.

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Why I’m Leaving Big Tech

2026-01-27T00:00:00-04:00

Bhaskar Mitra, writing for Disjunctions:

…the grand fictitious narratives about AI, both the hype and the fearmongering, will continue to bolster claims of their “foundational” advancements, creating the conditions to commodify labor, renegotiate down worker compensation, and provide political cover for further dismantling of our social services. This will result in the largest ever accumulation of power and wealth in the hands of a diminishing few, while the legitimate needs of the people, from healthcare to education, are met with “let them eat chatbots”. That is the intent and why AI is a project of class domination.

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The Bike Shop

2026-01-27T00:00:00-04:00

I know you’re worried I’m getting religious but trust me I am a stone atheist. I regret it but I am. But how different groups can believe the same story and come to these conclusions — you know in Jon Dos Passos’s American Trilogy it’s about Sacco and Vanzetti and the famous line from it is, “All right we are two nations.” And yet it seems intolerable to us. It breaks our heart. And I want to understand that, but every time I think I do, I can’t quite figure it. Maybe it’s in the Bible. Or I should just finish Dos Passos. Both are hard to read.

The carpet is soft and gray. The steam heat is warm. I have a house. I have a refrigerator.

Paul’s writing again, and I am so grateful for it.

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How to Block ICE In Your City

2026-01-27T00:00:00-04:00

I learned a lot from Eric Blanc’s interview with Aru Shiney-Ajay, executive director of the Sunrise Movement, discussing the organizing principles behind the resistance in the Twin Cities.

I think about it as leverage and power: looking everywhere ordinary people have leverage and seeing where we can pull those levers.

If you’re looking to build power in your own community, there’s a lot to learn from here.

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Dylan Roth: “I Can Say Goodbye To Star Trek Because Star Trek Raised Me”

2026-01-16T00:00:00-04:00

I thought this was an incredibly moving meditation — not just on Star Trek, but on what it means to love something under extractive capitalism.

Star Trek instilled in me many of the same values that are taught in houses of worship across the world, but in my faith, there is no God to judge or punish me — I learned how to rely on my own moral compass and inner strength. Last year, Skydance Media bought my church.

I saw a lot of myself in the author’s relationship to Roddenberry’s legacy, and in the questions they were asking themselves about it. Going to be thinking about this one for some time to come.

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Ben Werdmuller on documenting ICE abuses

2026-01-16T00:00:00-04:00

Prompted by remarks from Governor Tim Walz on ICE’s fascist invasion of Minnesota, Ben reflects on what it would take for state governments to properly collect and analyze citizens’ footage of ICE’s countless abuses. A fascinating and (tragically) useful exercise.

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“A.I. Is Keeping Aging Coal Plants Online”

2026-01-16T00:00:00-04:00

Yale Environment 360:

Since the beginning last year, at least 15 coal plants have had their planned retirements delayed, some indefinitely, according to a recent DeSmog analysis of Energy Department data. […]

[Secretary of Energy Chris Wright] has said he expects most coal plants will stay online to service the energy demands of A.I. Coal, he said in September, “will be essential to powering America’s reindustrialization and winning the A.I. race.”

We are mortgaging away our future for this failed technology. And on so many fronts.

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Tai Ericson’s memorial trans portraits

2026-01-12T00:00:00-04:00

Graphic artist Tai Ericson destroys donated Harry Potter books and transforms them into these beautiful, moving memorials of murdered transgender people, including Ra’Lasia Wright and Sam Nordquist. The result is stunning, powerful, and moving:

The portrait destroys [the novelist’s] work, replacing it with a memorial to someone that lost their life to the culture fostered by the author.

Trans lives matter.

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Fathom Information Design: “A culture of work we believe in”

2026-01-12T00:00:00-04:00

I loved this post from Fathom, a studio based here in Boston, on how their team uses “generative AI” in their work. Spoiler? They don’t, and it’s because of some drawbacks that don’t get discussed as frequently: Fathom’s found that these platforms short-circuit human collaboration and learning, and erode institutional knowledge.

A really thoughtful, considered piece.

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Blogs Are Back

2026-01-09T00:00:00-04:00

I kinda love this: a hand-curated directory of independent blogs, all presented in a lovely feed reader that lets you follow the authors you like.

Best of all, it’s free, and doesn’t require an account. Seems neat as heck.

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A history of the Klaxon horn

2026-01-08T00:00:00-04:00

Did you ever want to know the history of those horns that go “awooga”? Sure you did. And here you go.

(The linked article describes them as “ahooga” horns. They are allowed to be incorrect.)

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Rob Weychert on typographic scales and technical pens

2026-01-06T00:00:00-04:00

Man, do I love it when Rob writes about his website. And this post is no exception.

Rob’s tackling a uniquely hard problem — getting consistent stroke widths for typography and icons — and he’s doing so with some impressive math, elegant CSS, and a tremendous amount of care.

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Niki Prokopov: “It’s hard to justify Tahoe icons”

2026-01-06T00:00:00-04:00

This is a stunning, in-depth look at Apple’s new icon system for macOS Tahoe. “System” may not be the right word here: the author shows just how inconsistent and unclear the current iconography is, and provides some thoughtful critiques on how the design might move forward.

When I think of what good design critique can look like, I’m going to think of this article.

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MTV REWIND

2026-01-06T00:00:00-04:00

An absolutely tremendous side project: a simulator for early MTV broadcasts, featuring tens of thousands of videos organized by decade.

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Anil Dash: “How the hell are you supposed to have a career in tech in 2026?”

2026-01-06T00:00:00-04:00

It’s a depressing shift for people who, earlier in their careers, often actually were part of inventing the future.

So where do we go from here?

Loved every line of this piece, which I immediately read twice. Anil digs into the antidotes for our current moment — talking with each other; mapping systems of power; planning for the future — all of which happen to be the ingredients for building collective power in the workplace.

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Landslide; a ghost story

2025-12-24T00:00:00-04:00

I don’t have the words to describe how important this essay of Erin’s feels to me: it’s about knowledge-making as a communal act of care, and how we might rebuild after the ground gives way beneath us.

And I haven’t give up on the value of bringing knowledge into our brains and our bodies. There is a spooky power in having things by heart; knitting knowledge well into our minds changes us. As a beloved friend noted when I was rat-scrabbling around the edges of these ideas, to learn something well is to make friends with it — or to be in relationship with it, at least. Ghostly index cards in the brain referring out to the slurry are better than nothing, but I want more and I want it for everyone else, too.

I’ve read it three times so far; I know I’ll be returning to it many times over.

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Tyler Sticka: “My Favorite Games of 2025”

2025-12-23T00:00:00-04:00

A tremendous list of games, but wow do I love Tyler’s illustrations for some of his favorites.

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“Transparency is not trust”

2025-12-10T00:00:00-04:00

I love this suggestion that transparency is “the easiest way to gesture at integrity.” Feels like a powerful indictment of where the industry is right now:

For users we’re introducing cognitive load and adding work while not actually being trustworthy. Worse, this type of transparency has become a lazy alternative to actual engineering of trustworthy output. Building grounding mechanisms, validation pipelines, constraint layers, retrieval checks — this is expensive, difficult work. Generating a chain-of-thought paragraph costs almost nothing. So the ecosystem optimizes for cheap gestures rather than costly rails.

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“LLMs are bullshitters. But that doesn’t mean they're not useful”

2025-12-10T00:00:00-04:00

Appreciated this framing from Kagi’s head of machine learning: if you have to interact with LLMs, do so knowing they’re riddled with bias, and best equipped to solve specific, discrete problems.

Though if you ask me, the associated costs are still far, far too high.

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Designing Gotham

2025-12-10T00:00:00-04:00

A tremendous retrospective on the design process — and the type designer — behind Gotham.

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Gregg Bernstein: “The only winning move is not to play”

2025-12-02T00:00:00-04:00

This is a tremendous post from Gregg on the perils of using “artificial intelligence” for user research, and how they impact everyone: the researchers who use the tools; the companies that employ them; and ultimately, the users we design for.

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The Local: “Investigating a Possible Scammer in Journalism’s AI Era”

2025-11-20T00:00:00-04:00

An editor notices some issues with a freelance writer’s pitch, and subsequently finds themselves reckoning with what “artificial intelligence” has done to journalism.

This was overwhelming, depressing, and heartbreaking in equal measure.

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WorkersDecide.tech

2025-11-04T00:00:00-04:00

If you’re frustrated by your employers’ “artificial intelligence” policies, here’s a site filled with resources and tools to help you organize against them.

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The Atlantic: “Here’s How the AI Crash Happens”

2025-10-31T00:00:00-04:00

A clear-eyed (if terrifying) look at the rampant financial speculation propping up the “artificial intelligence” industry.

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Building Bauble

2025-10-31T00:00:00-04:00

I understood, like, 5% of the post’s more technical bits. But despite that, this is a beautifully written look at how the author created Bauble, an in-browser rendering library.

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SPACE TYPE GENERATOR

2025-10-29T00:00:00-04:00

A fiendishly clever generator for animated type.

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Thomas Rumbold: “The world is something that we make”

2025-10-27T00:00:00-04:00

“No change is made in a vacuum, and no step forward in history comes perfectly.”

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Scans of IKEA catalogues from 1951 to 2021

2025-10-27T00:00:00-04:00

Man, if I could have an archive like this to browse through every single day, I’d die happy.

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David Bacon’s stunning photographs of Bay Area residents peacefully blockading ICE agents

2025-10-27T00:00:00-04:00

“The Bay Area has this rich history of people putting themselves on the line for justice.”

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A gallery of weird and wonderful retro GIFs

2025-10-27T00:00:00-04:00

this website was created in a lab with the express purpose of becoming my new homepage

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New York Times: “Inside Amazon’s Plans to Replace Workers With Robots”

2025-10-21T00:00:00-04:00

A close look at Amazon’s plans for rampant automation, and how those plans will impact workers. (Spoiler: “one of the biggest employers in the United States will become a net job destroyer, not a net job creator.”)

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An interview with the CEO of PBS about their strategies for coping with the loss of federal funding

2025-10-20T00:00:00-04:00

The short version: the picture is bleak, and likely will be for a while.

There are just so many tragedies these days, both big and small, and this is a big one.

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The Financial Times studies the effects of “AI” on the translation industry

2025-10-14T00:00:00-04:00

A sobering look at how quickly work has dried up for translators, and how they’re being pushed away from the work they love.

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YouTube: “How a real pool appears live on stage at the Bridge Theatre”

2025-10-13T00:00:00-04:00

I was legitimately fascinated by the backstage logistics involved in installing not just a swimming pool but also actual rainfall in this theatrical production. Dang.

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Jenny Zhang on choosing friction

2025-10-13T00:00:00-04:00

Quoting any part of Jenny’s tremendous piece on “AI” feels like I’m doing it a disservice. I’ll just say that it’s tremendous, and worth your time.

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Kris Sowersby on his new typeface Die Grotesk, and on life “in the long shadow of Helvetica”

2025-10-08T00:00:00-04:00

I thought this was a really moving meditation from Klim Type’s founder on growing up as a designer: the traditions and works that shape us, and how we can, in time, shape them right back.

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Defector: ”No Good Art Comes From Greed“

2025-10-07T00:00:00-04:00

I know very little of Taylor Swift’s music, but Kelsey McKinney’s review of her latest album is just, well, really solid criticism: opinionated, in-depth, and working to move art (and the artist) toward something better.

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The “I Hate AI” Licenses

2025-10-06T00:00:00-04:00

Love this: some open source licenses for projects that want to tell “artificial intelligence” platforms to get in the bin.

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Mandy Brown: “The case for rereading”

2025-10-06T00:00:00-04:00

Mandy on the revolutionary act of rereading: rediscovering old thoughts, to better uncover new ones.

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Megazoid

2025-10-03T00:00:00-04:00

Oh my goodness, I love everything about this: a Jason Santa Maria-designed website for Megazoid, a fun, blocky type family from David Jonathan Ross. The entire page is awash in bright colors and grainy textures, and the sense of playfulness throughout is just overwhelming in the best way.

Don’t miss Jason’s blog entry announcing the project, either. So, so great.

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Andrea Pitzer: “You don’t have to swallow frogs”

2025-10-02T00:00:00-04:00

I haven’t read the Ezra Klein / Ta-Nehisi Coats interview that’s the subject of this essay, and don’t think I will. But even without that context, I really enjoyed watching the author build toward something I found both generous and helpful: moving the discussion past electoralism, and toward a broader moral framework.

Here’s where Coates’ clarity comes in handy. You treat people humanely — everyone.

People can come in the tent without agreeing on every policy. But you have to make the demand that all people will be treated humanely. That belief guides what you yourself will do. You don’t buy into the MAGA lies to get supporters. You give them a vision of what you support, and you call them to it.

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Frank Chimero on “Selling Lemons”

2025-10-01T00:00:00-04:00

Frank employs a really smart lens here, looking at the modern (and broken) internet economy as “a market for lemons”:

This reflects a business culture obsessed with outcomes while treating outputs as speed bumps. But outputs (code, design, the products themselves) are the load-bearing work — the actual prerequisites for the outcomes desired. Focusing on outcomes while ignoring outputs means hiding in abstractions and absolving oneself of accountability. If any output is acceptable to hit your targets, what awful things emerge at scale? What horrors happen when success detaches completely from the necessity of being good — having both skill and ethics?

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Ghost Workers in the AI Machine

2025-09-30T00:00:00-04:00

Communication Workers of America just released the results of a research study into the lives of the US-based data workers behind modern “artificial intelligence” platforms. It is, in a word, grim:

Workers described moving back in with parents, going without needed healthcare, and being unable to afford a car. An AI trainer with a master’s degree and 15 years of work experience as a nonprofit fundraiser spoke about moving in with her parents in order to make ends meet after suffering from neck injuries.

I’ve said this elsewhere, but it’s vitally important to see that every “innovation” in tech is built by a class of workers rendered invisible by their employers. Without their labor — and without the terrible pay and working conditions their employers subject them to — these platforms would fail. They deserve better.

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Scott Jenson on the virtues of “boring” technology

2025-09-29T00:00:00-04:00

I really Scott’s perspective on the “artificial intelligence” hype cycle, and how technology tends to get a lot more boring — a lot more useful — after the bubble bursts:

Early factories were tied to rivers to harness water power, but the dynamo freed them from this geographic limitation. Initially, factories had just one large dynamo, which required a complicated system of pulleys to distribute power to the rest of the building. This made the factory’s workflow convoluted. But as dynamos became smaller and more affordable, factories were able to put them in multiple locations. This second development was even more liberating than the first because it allowed for the creation of the assembly line. The power could now adapt to the workflow, instead of the other way around, which led to a major boost in productivity.

If something useful is indeed going to become of “AI”, the question I’m left with is: useful to whom, exactly? The workers on those assembly line might have some thoughts.

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Messenger

2025-09-29T00:00:00-04:00

A gentle game set in a luscious, tranquil little world — and it all plays right in your browser.

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Ali Alkhatib on defining AI

2025-09-29T00:00:00-04:00

Yes:

I think we should shed the idea that AI is a technological artifact with political features and recognize it as a political artifact through and through. AI is an ideological project to shift authority and autonomy away from individuals, towards centralized structures of power. Projects that claim to “democratize” AI routinely conflate “democratization” with “commodification”. Even open-source AI projects often borrow from libertarian ideologies to help manufacture little fiefdoms.

The whole essay is worth your time, but this paragraph is haunting me. In the best way possible.

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Aaron Weber’s “Consider the college application essay”

2025-09-29T00:00:00-04:00

There are precious few times in our lives when we say something and it becomes true simply because we’ve acknowledged it.

All of this, and always.

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Design Observer: “Authoritarian by design”

2025-09-15T00:00:00-04:00

It’s good to see Design Observer covering the abject failure of the “National Design Studio”. It’s a story that needs more critical coverage, especially from writers on the design beat. Here’s Ellen McGirt, Design Observer’s editor-in-chief:

To believe that this initiative is about design is to willfully ignore the work that has gone before, much of which was improving government services in meaningful ways.

I’m honored they’ve included some of my writing in their round-up, but be sure to check out the other responses. The overall reception has been poor, and deservedly so.

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idle teashop

2025-09-12T00:00:00-04:00

Jillian’s created something really special here: a short browser-based game with a very simple mechanic. And filled with lovely pixel art, no less.

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Union Busting is (Morally) Disgusting

2025-09-11T00:00:00-04:00

This is a rather persuasive argument that laws, and labor law in particular, has an “expressive function” — that it communicates a set of social values, which become reinforced through societal norms.

Put another way: strike-breaking isn’t done because it’s seen as wrong by society as a whole. Once those social mores get removed? Well, things get bleak — both for the law, and for the society as a whole.

At least superficially though, by the middle of the twentieth century, the labor movement appeared to achieve some social consensus that interference with organizing rights was morally wrong. Unions were very popular. In 1957, 75 percent of surveyed Americans approved of unions, a record high. And, more relevantly, violations of law were, on aggregate, few. That year, the NLRB had to reinstate less than 1,000 unlawfully discharged workers, down from nearly 8,000 in 1939.

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Inside Boole & Babbage’s Trek “Vision”

2025-09-11T00:00:00-04:00

Well, here’s a story I’d never heard before. A big, boring IT corporation decides to make a promotional video advertising its services, and then splashes out to tie it to Star Trek: The Next Generation — including casting one of its stars, and shooting much of the video on the show’s set.

Come for the video, but be sure to read the production story: it’s a wild artifact from a simpler time.

(Also, if you’ve ever wondered where the “Smiling Riker” GIF came from? Well, now you know.)

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404 Media: “The Software Engineers Paid to Fix Vibe Coded Messes”

2025-09-11T00:00:00-04:00

There’s a lot of “AI” schadenfreude flying around about this article, and rightfully so. But at the same time, this is quite literally what deskilling looks like: use automation to displace experienced, well-paid workers, then underpay others to perform the same labor. Wages go down; work becomes more precarious.

The system’s a horror, but it’s working as intended.

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Rob Weychert: Launch day

2025-09-10T00:00:00-04:00

My old friend Rob just launched his redesigned website, and it’s a real beauty. He’s turned it into a tremendous personal archive for (nearly) everything he’s ever written.

But it is also: PRETTY AS HELL. The layout! The typography! The colors! The site architecture! Rob’s been working on this redesign for literal years, and I think it really, really shows.

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The Art of How-To

2025-09-09T00:00:00-04:00

A gallery of beautiful vintage how-to manuals. I medically need to own all of these.

Medically need.

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‘Enough devastation:’ West Virginia residents worry about proposed power plants, data centers

2025-09-05T00:00:00-04:00

From West Virginia Watch:

The proposed development — called the Adams Fork Energy project — comes from TransGas and would create the largest natural gas-fueled ammonia plant in the world. The two power plants onsite — which would operate as “microgrids” — would power two new data centers: one at the golf course in Wharncliffe and another near the Mingo-Logan county line at the Harless Industrial Park.

Amid everything else, the tech industry’s unchecked expansion continues to visit terrible environmental and health effects upon people.

(Also, as Ingrid already noted, it’s heartbreaking this is happening to the West Virginia county where our country’s bloodiest wars against union workers took place.)

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The Visual World of Samurai Jack

2025-09-04T00:00:00-04:00

An in-depth look at how Samurai Jack, one of my very favorite animated shows, developed its painterly visual direction.

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Tech continues to be political

2025-08-29T00:00:00-04:00

Ever since I first read it back in February, I’ve revisited Miriam’s essay a few times each month.

I don’t know how to attend conferences full of gushing talks about the tools that were designed to negate me. That feels so absurd to say. I don’t have any interest in trying to reverse-engineer use-cases for it, or improve the flaws to make it “better”, or help sell it by bending it to new uses.

When eugenics-obsessed billionaires try to sell me a new toy, I don’t ask how many keystrokes it will save me at work. It’s impossible for me to discuss the utility of a thing when I fundamentally disagree with the purpose of it.

I don’t care how well their ‘AI’ works – or if you found a fancy fun use-case. It fucks me up watching peers treat this tech from people who want to eradicate me as a future worth considering. I don’t want any of this.

I do it a disservice by quoting it; it’s seriously worth your time.

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gradient.style

2025-08-29T00:00:00-04:00

I’m kinda in awe of the level of polish Adam Argyle’s brought to this CSS gradient generator. Truly lovely stuff.

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I Am An AI Hater

2025-08-27T00:00:00-04:00

Gosh, this is good.

But I am more than a critic: I am a hater. I am not here to make a careful comprehensive argument, because people have already done that. If you’re pushing slop or eating it, you wouldn’t read it anyway. You’d ask a bot for a summary and forget what it told you, then proceed with your day, unchanged by words you did not read and ideas you did not consider.

I am here to be rude, because this is a rude technology, and it deserves a rude response.

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They Might Be Giants, live on KEXP

2025-08-22T00:00:00-04:00

A downright delightful little set, and beautifully produced.

I don’t listen to TMBG as much as I used to, but They were the music I grew up with. Always going to be grateful to them for that.

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American

2025-08-21T00:00:00-04:00

Kieran Healy, on becoming an American citizen in this moment:

I know the nationalities of my fellow oath-takers because of the next stage of the ceremony. This was the Roll Call of Nations. I did not know this was going to happen. Every country of origin represented was announced in turn. As your country was named, you were asked to stand up, and remain standing. Afghanistan came first. Then Algeria. The last person to stand, immediately to my left, was from the United Kingdom. There were twenty seven countries in all, out of only fifty or so people. For me this part in particular was enormously, irresistibly moving. It perfectly expressed the principle, the claim, the myth — as you please — that America is an idea. That it does not matter where you are from. That, in fact, America will in this moment explicitly and proudly acknowledge the sheer variety of places you are all from. That built in to the heart of the United States is the republican ideal not just that anyone can become an American, but that this possibility is what makes the country what it is.

But isn’t it more complicated than that? You know as well as I do that it is. So much more complicated. So much more painful. So much more dangerous. So much more messed-up. I will think about and work on strands and threads of that impossible tangle tomorrow, just like I have thought about and worked on bits and pieces of it since I came here. But I will not forget this moment. I will not forget what it felt like.

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Time is On My Side

2025-08-20T00:00:00-04:00

Frank is back, dear ones:

The AI said nothing about love, loyalty, or enthusiasm. When you wrap those up, it becomes clear that the best thing to do with time is to devote it. That is how you get time on your side. When you are working with time instead of against it, every bit matters, it all counts, even the fallow times, the empty times, the time off the path.

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An MIT report finds that 95% of “generative AI” pilots are failing

2025-08-20T00:00:00-04:00

This isn’t the first study to suggest that companies are still desperately searching for a real-world use case for “artificial intelligence” platforms. But it’s definitely another one.

Also, I’m sorry for the derail, but:

Startups led by 19- or 20-year-olds, for example, “have seen revenues jump from zero to $20 million in a year,” he said. “It’s because they pick one pain point, execute well, and partner smartly with companies who use their tools,” he added.

Emphasis mine because: what

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you do not have to use generative ai “art” in your blogs

2025-08-14T00:00:00-04:00

Want to source free, lovely, and human-made imagery for your blog? Jenn has you covered.

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Scans from a Soviet-era edition of “The Hobbit”

2025-08-14T00:00:00-04:00

I’d seen a number of these before, but never this many.

What stark, gorgeous artwork.

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Kelmscott mono

2025-08-14T00:00:00-04:00

I did not expect I’d ever see the phrase “monospace blackletter,” but here we both are.

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Negotiating tech

2025-08-13T00:00:00-04:00

This is a tremendous resource from the UC Berkeley Labor Center: a searchable database of union-negotiated contract provisions, each of them governing, controlling, or curtailing the usage of technology in the workplace.

If you wish you had a say in how technology’s used in your workplace — you’re tired of feeling surveilled, or worried about your company’s decision to mandate the use of “artificial intelligence” — spend some time looking over these contracts. There are a lot of lessons here.

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This website is for humans

2025-08-08T00:00:00-04:00

I write the content on this website for people, not robots. I’m sharing my opinions and experiences so that you might identify with them and learn from them. I’m writing about things I care about because I like sharing and I like teaching. I spend hours writing these posts and AI spends seconds summarising them.

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Evaluating AI

2025-08-08T00:00:00-04:00

Ben Werdmuller’s essay on evaluating “artificial intelligence” — the technology, the vendors selling it, and the, uh, fraught power dynamics wrapped up in both — was just as good as everyone said it was.

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Honey, AI Capex is Eating the Economy

2025-08-01T00:00:00-04:00

It’s obvious that the spending around “artificial intelligence” is abhorrently high. But in terms of other infrastructural investments, it’s helpful to have it put in a historical perspective:

In a sense, there is a massive private sector stimulus program underway in the U.S. There is an AI datacenter spending program, one that is reallocating gobs of spending, as well as injecting even more. It is already larger than peak telecom spending (as a percentage of GDP) during the dot-com era, and within shouting distance of peak 19th century railroad infrastructure spending.

Well, helpful and galling.

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Do not yell at the language model

2025-08-01T00:00:00-04:00

This was a very helpful framing for me. The author notes that LLMs aren’t simply slot machines for content; they’re slot machines for content that operate in a “personality space” defined by the user.

If you talk in a highly-technical way, the model will be technical right back at you. If you talk in a colloquial way, the model will match your vibe.

The conversations are quite literally self-reinforcing.

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Curate your own newspaper with RSS

2025-08-01T00:00:00-04:00

Here’s Molly White with a delightful love letter to RSS: what it is, why it matters, and — most importantly! — how you can start using it yourself.

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Clear History

2025-07-31T00:00:00-04:00

Sculptor Thomas Doyle imagines what future monuments to our society might look like. Bleak, but beautiful.

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CMYK embroidery

2025-07-28T00:00:00-04:00

Stunning work from Evelin Kasikov, mimicking the colors and visual textures of offset printing with careful planning and cotton thread.

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Adding a feature because ChatGPT incorrectly thinks it exists

2025-07-28T00:00:00-04:00

Adrian Holovaty’s Soundslice added a new feature because, well, a popular “artificial intelligence” chatbot lied to users about its existence.

Welcome to the age of misinformation-driven product design, I guess.

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The sound of inevitability

2025-07-23T00:00:00-04:00

Against inevitabilism in the age of “artificial intelligence”:

These are some big names in the tech world, all framing the conversation in a very specific way. Rather than “is this the future you want?”, the question is instead “how will you adapt to this inevitable future?”. Note also the threatening tone present, a healthy psychological undercurrent encouraging you to go with the flow, because you’d otherwise be messing with scary powers way beyond your understanding.

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The Real GenAI Issue

2025-07-23T00:00:00-04:00

Tim Bray says it better than I ever could’ve:

At this point someone will point out that previous technology waves have generated as much employment as they’ve eliminated. Maybe so, but that’s not what business leaders think they’re buying [with “artificial intelligence”]. They think they’re buying smaller payrolls.

“AI” is a labor issue — specifically, yours and mine. (But you already know what I think about that.)

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The Em Dash Responds to the AI Allegations

2025-07-18T00:00:00-04:00

First of all, this is an attack:

If anything, AI uses me as often as any kind of sentence-obsessive who’s ever stared at a line like it owed them rent. In fact, go to your nearest café and look to your left, then to your right. A hundred percent of those people are slathering me across sentences like adding more cheese to a risotto that’s already drowning in parmesan — without tasting, without thinking, without remorse.

Second of all: I love every word of it.

The “AI” industry thinks it can have my favorite emoji ✨ and my favorite punctuation? This aggression will not stand, man.

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“Even God Cannot Hear Us Here”: What I Witnessed Inside an ICE Women’s Prison

2025-07-18T00:00:00-04:00

A harrowing, heartbreaking, and (at times) hopeful account from Rümeysa Öztürk, who was kidnapped by the United States government and held in an ICE concentration camp for six weeks. As she tells her story, she centers the women — the friends — imprisoned alongside her.

Within this despair, we found small joys in life, like feeding the birds, finding their nests, and hearing them chirp — a reminder of our freedom and the better days to come. My friends from Latin American countries held hands, forming large circles as they sang and prayed to God, trying to stay hopeful. Friends shared humorous news. They took a moment to watch the sunrise as we returned from breakfast. They appreciated small flowers hidden in the yard; some even used them to make hair accessories. They made small decorations using bread as clay. They made colorful necklaces and bracelets from plastic commissary bags, only to have some officers snatch them and throw them in the trash. Still, the next day, they made them again. Aunts from Russia warmly greeted me with kisses on the cheek, while friends from Georgia gifted me beautiful bracelets and colorful plastic necklaces made with their bare hands. I chuckled as my new friends from around the world playfully offered up their unaware brothers as potential husbands. Friends from Senegal enveloped me in warm hugs, and friends from Cameroon shared the recipes of their favorite African dishes, promising to cook me fufu and eru — one day, when we are free.

Abolish ICE. Free them all.

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The New York Times on “AI”-driven automation, and its growing impact on tech workers

2025-07-12T00:00:00-04:00

Yet another reminder that when you read “artificial intelligence,” mentally replace it with “automation”:

Three Amazon engineers said that managers had increasingly pushed them to use A.I. in their work over the past year. The engineers said that the company had raised output goals and had become less forgiving about deadlines. It has even encouraged coders to gin up new A.I. productivity tools at an upcoming hackathon, an internal coding competition. One Amazon engineer said his team was roughly half the size it had been last year, but it was expected to produce roughly the same amount of code by using A.I.

It was never about “making you more productive.” It was always about reducing the value of your labor, and making your working conditions much, much worse.

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The rise of Whatever

2025-07-06T00:00:00-04:00

Almost without fail, you’ll get something. Is it useful? Is it correct? Is it remotely based in reality? Who cares? Far more important is that there is output. Whatever is apparently better than nothing. Cheap and inoffensive and disposable, like a red beer cup. We are doing to the Internet what we already did to the ocean: filling it with a great swirling vortex of trash.

A grand unifying theory of sludge for “artificial intelligence”. (And for the modern tech industry as a whole, really.)

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cute cars 🚗⭐

2025-07-02T00:00:00-04:00

Katherine made this single-serving website for cars she likes, and can I just say how perfect it is? Let’s have more random one-off websites about things we’re excited about! I want to live in that future!

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Ron Bronson on “The Bureaucratic Banality of Andor”

2025-06-30T00:00:00-04:00

Ron wrote one of those essays that I reread immediately after finishing it, and he wrote the hell out of it. I haven’t even seen Andor — I know, I know — but I was hooked:

Unlike most political fiction, Andor doesn’t portray fascism as an aesthetic, but shows it as an operating system. The kind that requires contractors, custodians, caseworkers, and coordinators. There are no central villains in this narrative. Just functionaries. Just people doing their jobs, most of them poorly, some of them too well. What we’re watching isn’t the rise of evil. It’s the maintenance of empire.

A (tragically) timely reminder that authoritarian regimes aren’t magic: they’re built on labor and logistics. Conversely, those resisting authoritarians do so by putting stress on those selfsame systems — in any way they can.

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Mail rules on Fastmail that make my life better

2025-06-28T00:00:00-04:00

I’ve been using email for [redacted] years, and I’ve never set up filters based on email headers. Learned a thing!

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Sarah Gailey’s Hammer Speech

2025-06-28T00:00:00-04:00

Once we have accepted that hope is not the only emotion we can work with – we start to remember that an emotion is an experience, not an action. You can let your emotions move you to action – you can decide to work toward making the thing you hope for into a reality – but you are also powerful enough to act on your principles even when they oppose your emotions.

You can act with compassion even when you feel disgust. You can act with courage, even when you feel fear. You can act as if there’s a tomorrow worth protecting – even when your deepest, most secret heart is convinced there is no hope to be found.

I needed to read this speech today. Maybe you needed to read it too.

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The Gap Through Which We Praise the Machine

2025-06-24T00:00:00-04:00

Thought this was a fascinating theory as to why some people are deeply enamored of so-called “artificial intelligence” software, while others are repulsed by it:

My gut feeling is that, on top of all the potential factors already identified, people underestimate […] how much active interpretation and steering work they do when using and evaluating coding assistants. Those who feel the steering process as taxing end up having a worse time and blame the machine for negative outcomes; those for whom it feels easy in turn praise the machine for the positive results.

Put another way, the author suggests that these tools all suffer from poor interaction design, and require a tremendous amount of configuration and adaptation to move them toward desirable outputs. Some people have a higher tolerance for that “steering” process; others find it draining, have a terrible time, and blame the machine.

I have a whole host of other reasons I find “AI” software problematic — not to mention morally and ethically broken — but I hadn’t considered this perspective as potentially in the mix.

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On the real value of a forty minute tech talk

2025-06-24T00:00:00-04:00

Ana with a reminder that a well-run conference is “valuable” not because it covers the latest technology buzzwords and tips, but because it offers something much more important:

…if you’re to take anything from a conference, it should be the inspiration to improve yourself. Not just technically, but as a human. Code alone doesn’t create that transformation. What does is human connection, lovely chats, and community that cares about people and the web.

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OpenAI wins $200 million U.S. defense contract

2025-06-23T00:00:00-04:00

From “Our mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity” to war profiteer in record time.

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Stuck

2025-06-22T00:00:00-04:00

About the things we love, and the systems that won’t let them die — even when they should:

Don’t misunderstand me: there’s nothing wrong with nostalgia. Remembering the things that once brought us joy is natural, even humanizing. However, there’s a difference, in my opinion, between nostalgia and necromancy. So much of popular culture today, particularly nerd culture, feels like it’s reanimating corpses. Bigger budgets, flashier effects, and algorithmic polish don’t bring these creations back to life. They only parade them around, lifeless and hollow, like mummified icons. The result isn’t a return to something vital or real. Instead, it’s a grotesque simulacrum, stripped of its original context, meaning, and soul.

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Matt Gemmell’s ode to emacs

2025-06-22T00:00:00-04:00

I don’t see myself switching to emacs any time soon, but my goodness this is a tremendous piece of writing. There’s so much genuine love and enthusiasm for a piece of software shining through here; it’s hard not to read this without hearing a smile on the author’s face.

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Photos from the Black Women Oral History Project

2025-06-19T00:00:00-04:00

A lovely Flickr album of photographs taken during the Black Women Oral History Project, a research project that ran from 1976 to 1981, and collected the life stories of older Black women.

Harvard has a page describing the project in more detail, along with links to transcripts and audio recordings of the original interviews.

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Economics & labor rights in AI skepticism

2025-06-04T00:00:00-04:00

An argument against “AI” from a labor perspective, courtesy of Henry:

As technologists, we are workers first. We cannot individually stop the machine of capitalism from exploiting our labor, and, while this tide will shift, many of us are too romanced by the technofuturist dream of LLMs — despite widespread, multidisciplinary criticism of the technology and disastrous consequences in its application so far — to easily reconsider our adoption of it.

Short, searing, and sound.

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Leilani Derr

2025-05-26T00:00:00-04:00

A stunning, color-soaked portfolio from Leilani Derr, a Denver-based artist and designer. (It’s probably just as well that her store is currently offline, or my wallet would be whimpering.)

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Human Noise, AI Filters: "Mr. Watson, Come Here."

2025-05-25T00:00:00-04:00

Noise feels like a remarkably useful way of looking at how these platforms interact with the world, and at how we might structure our relationship with them:

Noise, then, is not only resisting the machinic impulse to constrain; it is the definition given to that which resists being modeled by this political ideology of categorization by 1 and 0. Noise is what lives beyond what the vectors are capable of regulating. In diffusion models, it stands for the uncompressible world beyond the data set, beyond the reducible signal.

(“Bad taxidermy” feels pretty darn apt, too.)

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In Defense of Despair

2025-05-17T00:00:00-04:00

This essay broke me up and open in several dozen ways.

What I love about the heart is that it’s capable of breaking in infinite ways; may we never live long enough to experience all of them, but may we live long enough to experience the ways the heart can repair itself for subsequent breakings. The cycle of rupture and repair is a requirement of living, a cost of surviving, something that goes hand in hand with another reality of survival: that, throughout your life, you may not only lose people but also gain them.

Grateful, as always, for Hanif Abdurraqib and his words.

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