week 22 / 2026: fathers and sons
After the hourglass has been overturned, there is a period during which the sand must resettle itself before the flow of time can become regularised once again. We are living through just such a period.
reductionism
week 21 / 2026: empire and multitude
I’m pleased to announce a new publication: you can read a short story by yours truly in the just-released RISCS anthology! Meanwhile, feel free to hang around and discuss the shaky foundations of the USian technopoly, and the possible fates of the nation-state...
week 20 / 2026: regimes and revolutions
If “AI” is a revolution, as its ideologues would have us believe, then they might want to consider how unpopular revolutions tend to end. Are they sincere in their beliefs? I argue that it doesn’t really matter, but that we should nonetheless treat them as if they are.
week 17 / 2026: city and country
It’s not that there isn’t a problem with migration in Europe; it’s that the migration doing the damage is domestic rather than international. Plus: reframing the fear of death as a vital ecological dynamic, and refusing software the franchise of personhood.
week 16 / 2026: language and longing
It’s language all the way up and down, if you ask Alan Moore—which throws an interesting light on the rolling “post-literacy” debate, and on the tech elite’s increasingly open grasp for magic as something more (and less) than mere metaphor. Plus Bruce Sterling speculates on cybernetics...
week 13 / 2026: markets and casinos
Reading round-up: ecomodernism chooses a weird moment to frame climate mitigation as a casino, as prediction markets expose the moral hazard of literally gambling on disaster. Plus: the accusation of technophobia reveals as much about the accuser as about the accused, if not more so.
week 12 / 2026: agents and agency
This week’s reading notes take a blog post by Matt Jones as their springboard, and as an invitation to ask the unacknowledged political-economic question lurking beneath even this fairly sane and sober look at the so-called “agentic” revolution. That question is: “do we really need or want this?”