The worst slop, to me, is low-effort creative work that’s marked by its attempt to primarily extract and exploit the audience’s attention. Innovative and interesting choices are discarded in favour of expanding the work’s reach. It’s not to delight more of the world, but to feed on more of its attention. To allow me a bit of woo-woo: the energy of bad slop primarily flows from the audience to the work, rather from the work to its audience.

Slop is not new. It existed prior to generative AI. It was marked as work that focused more on SEO optimization, playing up algorithms on social media, A/B testing gaping mouths and pointing at things on YouTube thumbnails, and consistent fracking of intellectual property by mega IPs. 2010s slop wranglers already learned the art of algorithms and promulgated its wares to the entire world.

But, with generative AI, people don’t have to buy the “23 Tips On How To Get Your Book On Google’s Frontpage” e-courses, anymore. LLMs without any tweaks caters to this bouba middle. No kiki sharp edges anywhere, purposefully built to smoothly pump slop through the lubricated pipes of the internet.

While the past has been marked by recommendations on making one’s work more legible, today it requires more noticeable illegibility. To focus on legibility is like adding water droplets to an ocean. And the ocean is not your context. If you’re using LLMs to boilerplate, you’re diluting your work to purely being functional. As writes:

LLMs don’t operate on the same plane. They have a view, but not my view. They have some context, and maybe often too much context, but not the context that’s relevant to play this game well.

Becoming more illegible is not to be purposefully strange. Rather, it’s an explicit rejection of the need to alter work to fit established distribution. To some, it might represent experimentation into something strange. To others, it might mean sticking to tried-and-tested formulas, if it makes sense for the work.

Here’s examples of advice that often point to packaging one’s work to be more legible:

• Cut down your novel to “x” amount of words, because readers don’t want to read that much. Or, the inverse: no one buys novellas, make it longer.

• You have to make a TikTok or Instagram account and (forcefully) participate in the conversation to get noticed.

• Make sure people can Google your work.

• Get blurbs (or other social proof).

• Focus on developing a recognizable style.

Becoming more illegible is also not to say one should avoid taking advantage of existing distribution norms, but the question is whether the work can lose its novelty as a result of it. This was always an existing calculation to consider, but this will become more prevalent as slop pushes early adopters of culture more towards its fringes. For example, There is No Antimemetics Division was first written as a creative commons addition to a collective creative project, called SCP. Really interesting work is increasingly not immediately legible. Much of modern work is already extremely context heavy. It’s consumption exist at the tip of deeper context:

We enjoy media by ourselves, but we also *use* media to communicate. Am I being spoken to by the piece of media, OR is the media speaking for me? In this era, the latter is increasingly more relevant because of the ability to share the extra context around the media (the fandom). It’s not that the piece of media has to have a particularly salient social message, but rather that the media can more readily stand in as a replacement for what we feel.

Anything I love these days is usually accompanied by also consuming wikipedia pages, YouTube essays, and subreddits. The work itself is already more than just the work itself. A lot of successful digital work today have grown to an illegible, multi-form fungus that thrives on the moisture of fandoms, oxygen of attention, and the nutrient-rich source of dank internet detritus (also, commonly referred to as shitposts).

So, how exactly does one become more illegible? At its heart, you have to become illegible in your own way, but I have five broad recommendations:

The Illegible Medium is the Illegible Message

The easiest legibility trap is to conform to form. That a fiction story should a be novel. A pop song should be about 3:15 seconds. Or that art should exist in a gallery.

Experiment with form and structure, because form and structure don’t easily translate to algorithmic distribution.

Become a Map

Great fantasy maps are invitations that show that depth exists in the world. There’s always something “yonder”. Slop, if automated, tend to not spill over its containers. So, showcase your context when you can. Show that there’s depth.

Scribble in the sides. Create artefacts of process and share them. Link to your other work. Link to other people’s work. The point isn’t necessarily to manipulate people into delving deeper, but rather to let people know that your work contains a conversation you had. Conversations don’t happen in vacuums. So, become a map, and don’t be afraid to let your work spill over each other. People need to arrive at your work and want to see that there’s an entire world behind it.

Use Social For Media for Breadth, Not Depth

In a similar context: algorithmic social media promotes clustering. If you say and do the same thing, and people like it, it will drive more attention. The problem with this is two-fold. Firstly, creative risks and authenticity are tossed out for more slop. A good example is always when people get successful and they continue to produce facsimile’s of what made them successful, to the point that they become parodies of themselves. The longer they go, the more uninteresting it gets. Secondly, work that’s made for the algorithm, lives by the algorithm. One tweak and you can become a nobody again.

Instead, use social media like it used be back in the beginning: show your breadth, not depth. Talk about breakfast. Post a song. Reshare great art. Review Project Hail Mary. Talk about your work. Show that you’re confused, complex, and full of interesting contradictions.

Write drunk, edit drunk.

Edit, but edit very lightly. Or edit furiously. Don’t edit to conform. Editing with too much purpose risks sanitizing your work so much that it disappears. Make and keep mistakes. Which brings me to the final point.

Noise Is A Part of the Channel

It’s often said that good communication comes with the reduction of noise. But, communication itself does not exist in a vacuum. The act of communication itself is a part of the message when silence can also carry meaning. And so, noise itself becomes a part of the message. It’s friction and accidental eustress that actually carries the message across better than if it was flawless.

Examples: A son whose voice cracks when he talks about the death of his father carries more tears. A letter with hasty ink smudges shows us the hands of the author. We’ve all sometimes discovered live versions of songs to be better than the sanitized and overly produced recordings.

On LLM Slop

You’ll notice that none of this advice precludes using generative AI or LLMs in your work. In fact, skillful use of LLMs can produce wonderful work even if it’s median use is to promote legibility. LLMs are great exploratory tools (ht ):

To this end I think reasoning between a human and their system will be a rich addition to publishing moving forward, where taking cues from the observation that writing is a struggle, more benefit comes from inviting others to struggle and reason in those trenches with a text, rather than seeing the text itself as the sole destination.

And as writes:

There’s a Flannery O’Connor quote that speaks to this where she says, “I write because I don’t know what I think until I read what I say.” I’m the same way. I don’t think people can skip doing the work of wrestling with ideas because that’s the core chaotic energy that underpins good writing. It’s how you figure out what you believe and how you want to communicate it.

LLM slop is using LLMs to produce work where the creative is more interested in feeding on your attention than the other way around. Using LLMs to go explore, to test and prod at latent spaces and to arrive back in our reality with newfound insight for the world isn’t slop. LLMs can make it easy to take shortcuts, or it can make it easy to travel much farther than ever before. Don’t use LLMs to feed on our attention. Instead, show us new worlds. Most of all, become a bit more illegible.

In this issue of Scenes With Simon, there’s a few more essays, snippets from the web, and updates on what I’ve been up to!

1. Factorio, Maintenance, & Compound Culture

2. NVIDIA’s DLSS 5 and Minimal Legible Forms

3. Snippets From The Web

4. What I’ve Been Up To

Factorio, Maintenance, & Compound Culture

Factorio is slowly but surely becoming my most-played game (coming close to hours spent playing Super Smash Bros). I’ve been reflecting on it, and I think there’s something deeper to its success.

Many games, in some form, present simpler cause-and-effect feedback loops to real life. This simplification is also at the core of why gaming can also form negative anti-social tendencies: people feel like they accomplish things as opposed to accomplishing things in the real world. Gaming can present as a space/place where one has more control.

With Factorio, to me, it fulfils two unique niches in this respect:

1. A World Without Maintenance

2. Easy Compounding

A World Without Maintenance

In (most of) Factorio (except Gleba), nothing decays. The only thing that generally requires monitoring is the acquisition of new resources and repairing damage from biters. But, machines don’t fall apart by themselves. Once set up and the automation kicks in, the game doesn’t punish you (sidenote: this is interestingly, in contrast to games that uses a decay mechanic to foster exploration, like in Zelda’s Breath of the Wild). This is in contrast to our daily life: the car breaks down and our muscles shrink if we don’t continue exercising. The older one gets, the more one is forced to treat maintenance with magnanimity. You have to find meaning in putting things back together again.

While mechanics like this aren’t new, what makes the lack of maintenance matter is how it’s incorporated into the broader mechanics of the game: that of automation.

Easy Compounding

The core feedback loop of Factorio is that once you spin up a part of your factory, it is subsumed like sediment, generally disappearing into the background. Your smelting arrays, your main bus, your mall, your trains, your pipelines, your labs, it all quietly hums on its own once it is set up. It speaks to the anti-thesis of daily life where automation is still generally fraught with unique niggles, edge cases, and hassles. eg, with my business, my bookkeeping has been automated and I have to sign off on the books every month. But, inevitably, there’s always edge cases somewhere in this stack: the bank, the bookkeeping software, the bookkeepers, me, etc. There’s a lot we can scale up to be left running in the background of our life, but life is always more complex than we hope it to be. Because there’s no edge cases in Factorio and because the system itself does not need to be maintained, you can safely leave a part of your factory automated. The only failure of your system is that you designed it poorly, not because of edge cases.

And so, that’s why Factorio feels like catnip to system/protocol designers/lovers. It’s idealistic protocol design. It’s the way we wished protocols and APIs worked. Reliable, requiring little (to no) maintenance, and allows for easy foundational stacking/compounding. If only we could design systems like this!

…which does bring to a final point. LitRPG as a genre has recently become more popular with Mat Diniman’s Dungeon Crawler Crawl selling a few million copies. LitRPG focuses on these tropes, that of taking the feedback loop of gaming and applying it to literature/stories. Of note, a similar genre, is “Progression Fantasy”, which is where protagonists continuously gain new power and skill over time.

I’d love to read stories that are essentially “Progression Fantasy”, but it’s not focused on the protagonist being the primary focus of “progression”, but the systems itself. It’s supposed to be as pulpy as a LitRPG and over time, a system grows and improves itself. In other words: FactorioLit. The closest approximation I can imagine right now is probably Andy Weir’s “The Martian”, building a base on Mars. So, yes, essentially The Martion + Factorio + Protocol Fiction.

I’ll have to write it myself. 😅

NVIDIA’s DLSS 5 and Minimal Legible Forms

I’m fascinated by NVIDIA’s DLSS 5 upscaling.

I find the examples to be a bit gimmicky, and I’m sure in games that aspire for photorealism, it will do well in, but I’m far more curious about another aspect of it.

In any upscaling tech, what’s regarded as the most minimal legible form? In the case of DLSS 5, it is trained to its domain, but it’s almost definitely going to screw up in some games. At some point, the upscaling algorithm can lose its sense of what its supposed to upscale, and that point, in itself is what I find to be interesting.

And truthfully, I’m still trying to understand what about it fascinates me so much. It’s why things like Kolmogorov complexity is so interesting (smallest program that create a specific output), why I’ve written about naming and neighbourhoods, and why I enjoy art like Kevin Esherick’s In Utero.

Latent paintings, using a technique that transports us literally a step away from this latent space, then bring us closer to glimpsing these raw Platonic representations of our world.

Thresholds feel like Foucauldian heterotopic spaces that act like holographic visions into all of its potential forms. Sometimes blurry things are prettier precisely because it allows us to imagine. Sometimes, our dreams are more alive than what we’d ever hope to have it become in reality. Sometimes the noise is a part of the channel.

Snippets From The Web

Body Futurism

I enjoyed this recentering by when he writes about “Body Futurism”. This focus on the body in the past few years is tangential to people’s desires to log off and go offline again (eg, Interruption Nostalgia).

Call these new vernaculars—embodied languages of relationship and community that emerge from shared somatic experience. Or call new social forms—the physical and cultural structures that shape how bodies come together and interact. You may find cacao ceremonies and ecstatic dances distasteful, but these are fundamentally the same kind of innovation as mommy walking groups and warehouse raves.

Harry Styles + Haruki Murakami on Running & Creativity

I always love when runners and creatives mix. What a great combo to have Haruki Murakami and Harry Styles talk about running.

So piece quotes:

HM: “One of the important things for human beings is to embrace the contradiction. When I’m writing, I always feel I have a contradiction and that’s why I want to express myself…to understand it. Even at my age I’m still wondering, what is this chaos in me?”

HS: When you write about sex and masculinity, your characters aren’t all experts at sex—there are a lot of scenes of them fumbling around. There’s an innocence to them, as well as vulnerability, and shame.

That has definitely changed the way I view being masculine and being vulnerable. I wondered if that was something you felt you did consciously or discovered while you were writing it?

HS: The thing that I’ve found, in the rest of my life but particularly in running, is the idea of trusting myself to do exactly what I say I’m going to do.

To say to myself, I know that you can do something difficult, and that you can get up and train when you don’t want to train, and that you’re able to push through hard things.

Having that kind of self-integrity—no one can run a marathon for you. Whereas there are a lot of people who help me make music, put the music out, put on a show and make me look good at it! But running is a conversation with myself.

Liquid Editions - Markets as Medium

I remained fascinated by blockchain-native art, using markets as medium. ripe’s Liquid Editions is an example of new exploration.

A market does the same thing as dithering. Each participant makes a binary decision, buy or sell, based on incomplete information. Each decision is wrong. The error propagates through subsequent participants who inherit it as their starting condition.

No individual trade is the correct price. The collective distribution of wrongness produces, over time, something we treat as the price.

Both systems distribute error until something useful emerges. Neither ever arrives at accuracy. Both are perpetual.

A Corps

Great to see that A Corps have made progress. Here’s hoping it can become law in Colorado! The most interesting and simplest part here is that “Artists must own at least 51% of voting power.” It’s somewhere between a co-op and a c-corp, which is exactly what I imagine they’ve been trying to do. Will continue watching with interest.

Maximalist Democracy

I always thought that the most maximalist form of Democracy is one where voting worked like gravity. Anyone can vote in any election, but your vote power is determined by regional proximity. eg, If the USA held a Presidential election, then Canadians and Mexicans would have 0.8 vote power and South Africans 0.1. Would this ever work? Probably not. Is this still interesting to explore? Hell yeah. Maybe worth a novella-length story in the future. ;)

What I’ve Been Up To

Creating:

✍️ Writing - Revisions and AWP

Revisions continue on novel #2. Pretty happy with where it’s going. I generally don’t prefer being perfectionist about my work. I think publishing is always good. And so, I’ve generally been frustrated with how much work this novel has been. It’s not that I don’t mind the work, it’s that, I for some reason, feel that I’m being too perfectionist about it. But, I know also, that I’ve never had this problem (being a perfectionist). So, my only judgement at this time, is, is that I’m doing the work because the work needs to be done and not for any other reason. So, yes, revisions continue. I’m still hoping to finish with this draft before May/June so that I can continue querying. :)

Attending AWP Conference

I attended the AWP Conference in Baltimore. It was much better than I anticipated: lots of writers and the talks/panels were really useful and interesting. Notably, I really enjoyed a panel that discussed comps in query letters (from agents).

Consuming:

📺 Watching

Marty Supreme

Didn’t expect this movie to turn out as it did. I enjoyed the performances, but it’s not really my kinda story. It feels like a fever dream, always something going wrong or unexpected. The ending was great though.

Project Hail Mary

Man. Adored this so much. The book was one of the few books in the past years that felt like a true page-turner for me. I’m also just really juiced up on positive, hopecore media recently, even if it’s dressed in self-aware folksy humour. It’s still sitting with me. I want to watch it again.

📚 Reading

Truth by Hernan Diaz

Although I felt that the book only truly hit its stride in the second half, I loved it. I particularly enjoyed how it explored themes of power and truth with competing narratives. That in itself is interesting, but that it also focuses on markets/finance adds another layer to how we truly build “trust” in society when we all contribute “individually” to a collective narrative (the market). Definitely up my alley as someone interested in finance and storytelling.

🕹 Gaming

Factorio: Space Age

See above. 😅

🏃 Running

Ran a half-marathon earlier this month. Did not train nearly as much as I wanted to due to summer holiday malaise in South Africa over Dec/Jan and then snowcrete in DC. So, I took it easy and it paid off, running my first negative split half-marathon. The second half of the race was downhill and I flew down it. One change I did in this race was 1) run without water on me in a half and 2) sizing up my shoes (because I kept getting blue toenails on longer distances). Both worked perfectly. So pretty happy.

Big shout-out to the people who came to support me. You know who you are!

🎶 Listening

Harry Styles - Aperture

With every new Harry Styles album there’s one or two songs that are absolute pop earworms for me. Aperture is the new album’s one. Such a great track.

Also. Love the dancing/choreography in this!

Muse - Be With You

Muse was my coming-of-age band. As a teenager, it was the band that truly opened my eyes to music. Over the years, I don’t connect as much to their subsequent music, but every so often, a new track comes out from them that I really resonate with. Be With You is one of those. The breakdown at the end is lovely.

ford. - Music Lights Color

So glad I discovered ford. Beautiful, world expanding music. Feels like a mixture of Tourist and Washed Out. Both have some dance sensibility while also being grounded in elements of rock/shoegaze. My favourite track is from ~12:00 in this full EP music video. Last track is also excellent. This is what sunsets feel like.

That’s it for this month, friends.

Hope you get to enjoy a lovely sunset. Stay illegible.

Simon

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Culture today has two contradictions: everything exists (“long-tail economy”), and yet, popular things are more popular than ever (“superstar economy”).

In the music industry today, most songs quickly fall out of the Billboard 100, but the best songs linger for much longer.

In this excellent study, you can also see that as time went on, the Billboard 100 became less egalitarian. Top songs linger, but the bottom quarter of it rotates much faster than the 60s.

In other words, their conclusion:

Two competing and seemingly contradicting theories concerning the skewness of the music market have emerged in the literature in recent years. These theories can be referred to as the “winner-takes-all” theory and the “long-tail” theory. The supporters of the winner-takes-all theory say that some superstars can capture a significant portion of the market with just a few songs. On the contrary, the long-tail effect states that more and more audiences switch to less popular artists, decreasing the concentration around the most famous performers. Interestingly, in our work, there is evidence that both effects are present in modern music. Our finding that songs debut at better positions and have longer chart lives may be due to the winner-takes-all superstar phenomenon. Conversely, the “long-tail” effect can be spotted in the increased traffic in the chart’s bottom positions and shorter lifetimes for poor-performing songs.

This increasing concentration at the top can also been seen in the film industry:

In the early 2000s, the top ten grossing movies each year made up about 25% of the total box office. That number has been creeping up since 2015 reaching 45% in 2025. At the same time, the number of releases from the major studios has been declining. We see fewer movies making up a larger portion of the box office each year (i.e. concentration).

The fiction publishing industry is a bit more opaque in terms of sales and numbers, but I also looked at NYT Bestseller Lists (which is still partly editorialized to this day). Notably, I had to stick to hardcover releases since since combined print + e-book only lists only came out from ~2011. This means that the data should be far less consolidated because it only covers physical print releases, usually, in the launch period of fiction (from the music industry, physical album sales today are more egalitarian than streaming).

Even in hardcover fiction bestsellers, however, there’s noticeable trends.

Over the years, churn has broadly increased.

Drilling deeper, however, in the 2020s, the majority of hardcover books only stay a week on the list, but the books with staying power (> 10 weeks on the list) have stayed roughly the same since the 2000s.

While new vs returning authors have stayed relatively stable:

The top authors take up more of the hardcover list over time.

What’s happening, seemingly, is that authors occupy more of the list in different spots as readers buy into their entire bibliography. In 2025, for example, Rebecca Yaros had 87 appearances with 4 hardcover books.

(Sidenote: I really wish I could find/use BookScan (includes sales) or redoing this but finding data sources that include paperback + ebook sales too. It’s likely that this will show more consolidation. For example, Colleen Hoover dominated paperback sales, holding more than half the top 10 spots at one point, but have not dominated hardcover sales).

In the age of the web, it appears thus that the middle of culture has eroded. Popular things are more popular while the bottom churns more.

This has resulted in the loss of not only culture’s resiliency and dynamism, but society’s as well. Losing the middle of culture also means we’ve lost the “middle” of status games. This has bred increasing resentment, fascism, and authoritarianism. To recapture a more resilient and dynamic world, we need to temper the primacy of the web as the center of our information ecology.

There’s a corner of the web that have pointed the way, and it starts with the idea of antimemes.

Antimemes & Information Ecology

In qntm’s “There Is No Antimemetics Division”, antimemes are defined as memes that are self-censoring or self-concealing. It resists being remembered or shared. In the context of the story universe, it takes on an even larger conceptual bent: that there are anomalous entities that resist being seen (reality warping) or that eat information from human minds.

Similarly, in her excellent book on Antimemetics describes antimemes as such:

Memes want to be shared. When we come across a particularly good meme, our first instinct is to pass it onto someone else. Memes reap the benefits of these urges by spreading rapidly from person to person - like a virus - burying themselves into our respective cultures. Antimemes are the opposite. When we encounter an antimemetic object, there is a reflexive desire - consciously or not - to suppress it.

She uses example like taboos, open secrets, whisper networks, secret societies, and hidden languages as past examples. But now, with excessive abundance of information and the algorithmic web, the public square has reached its apex and has become a “Dark Forest” (ht ), one where fresh ideas are readily neutered.

The internet of today is a battleground. The idealism of the ‘90s web is gone. The Web 2.0 utopia — where we all lived in rounded filter bubbles of happiness —ended with the 2016 Presidential election when we learned that the tools we thought were only life-giving could be weaponized as well. The public and semi-public spaces we created to develop our identities, cultivate communities, and gain in knowledge were overtaken by forces using them to gain power of various kinds (market, political, social, and so on).

As a response, there’s been a retreat into the cozyweb: group chats in Discord and Signal (from ):

Unlike the main public internet, which runs on the (human) protocol of “users” clicking on links on public pages/apps maintained by “publishers”, the cozyweb works on the (human) protocol of everybody cutting-and-pasting bits of text, images, URLs, and screenshots across live streams. Much of this content is poorly addressable, poorly searchable, and very vulnerable to bitrot. It lives in a high-gatekeeping slum-like space comprising slacks, messaging apps, private groups, storage services like dropbox, and of course, email.

Nadia describes these spaces as the shadow city (in part, in reference to China Mieville’s novel, City and The City):

If the memetic city is characterized by bright, flashy, Times Square, the antimemetic city is more like a city of encampments, strewn across an interminable dessert. While some camps are bigger and more storied - think long-established internet forums, private social clubs, or Discords - its primary social unit is the group chat, which makes it easy to instantly throw up four walls around any conversation online.

These spaces are seen as antimemetic, because the ideas shared in them are less likely to spread outside of its confines. Memes that eventually make it into the public has to escape, what Nadia calls, their drag co-efficient.

The overarching essence is thus: memes exist on a spectrum of more likely being shared (memetic) or more likely to resist being spread (antimemetic).

But, I’m not entirely satisfied with this distinction. It presents itself as a spectrum. It breaks down when you extrapolate it to extremes: no meme (yet) is entirely memetic and no meme is entirely antimemetic. If it was entirely memetic, then it would be an idea that is far greater than Nadia’s description of “supermemes”: it would be so powerful as to put humans into a catatonic state. Imagine slop so viral that humans die from being unable to do anything else. An entirely antimemetic meme is a divide by zero. A meme that has existed, by nature, had some memetic properties. Some memes have died yes, never to be remembered or conjured again, but there’s no entirely antimemetic meme, because it would never come into existence.

Rather, both Nadia and Venakatesh Rao allude to a different approach.

Venkatesh in his review of “There Is No Antimemetics Division” says:

But the same is not true of memes. Memes happen to be adaptive for humans, since they power our cultural evolution, but they need not be. Clearly there are creatures whose survival depends on antimemetic phenotype traits, like camouflage coat patterns. Humans too make use of secrecy and stealth in some behaviors. The generalized notion here is powerful. Maybe every creature has a communication phenotype that’s X% memetic and 100-X% antimemetic.

And Nadia, in describing memetic drag co-efficient says:

Immunity and transmission rate are determined not just be the qualities of the idea itself, but how receptive its nodes are (us). The same idea might be memetic within certain networks, but antimemetic in others.

…and a few paragraphs later:

Changing the properties of the idea - such as the format or structure it’s presented in - can influence a network’s transmission rate and immunity, but these properties are always subjectively defined by what resonates with the network.

Memes are better seen as organisms that live in an ecology of information. A creature that evolved to be unseen (antimemetic), like a stick insect, thrives in context of its environment (a place with similar looking sticks). But, put a stick insect in a museum and its the first thing you see as something that stands out to be extraordinary. There, it’s far more memetic (“Dad! Look at this stick insect!”).

The idea that group chats are antimemetic feels off, because as Nadia alludes, its actually more memetic for memes that do not yet thrive in the public part of the information ecology. It’s publicly antimemetic, but privately, memetic.

While Twitter was once a place where you shared what you had for breakfast, group chats are now often the space for the mundane. Sharing your breakfast publicly is antimemetic. It will resist spread there now because its not fit for that space anymore. But, sharing your new cereal you bought with your best friends in a group chat, is actually something worth talking about (or, you know, maybe it’s called being in your 30s). They, in turn, might opt to buy it, to try it.

Thus, a meme’s memetic or antimemetic quality is entirely context dependent on its environment.

Information Ecologies

If we take up the metaphor of an ecology, there’s a further extrapolation from here. When you introduce memes into a specific environment, like introducing an invader plant to an unprotected biome, that meme can not only come to erase and suffocate the environment’s general diversity, but also reshape the ecology itself. If you turn a wild garden into an acid-green lawn, you’ve reshaped its ecology. It’s then less likely to survive flooding events. On a broader scale, for example, removing beavers from an ecosystem, can result in more flash flooding due to less dam breaks in the ecosystem. Memes have virality and resistance dependent on its environment. One organism thrives or dies in different biomes.

It’s thus not wrong to draw the conclusion that when we reshaped our information ecology by reducing the cost of sharing information on a global scale, we’ve not just made it possible for memes to spread more, but also allowed specific memes to reshape our entire information ecology.

Memes fed the feed and replaced our communities. We’ve made our information ecology into one that’s entirely that of a monocultured lawn. In most cases, do we really need monocultured lawns or would an ecology be better fit as a wild garden?

What we’re left with is a confused feeling that while everything exists, it’s also become stale. The 2020s does not feel as different to the 2000s as the 2000s did to 1980s. Popular things today are more popular. We’ve turn our entire information ecology into one that caters to one crop: that of the memes in the feed. The diverse, resilient, and dynamic middle has been hollowed to create massive ideas and a very, very long-tail of the rest on its periphery.

And downstream of culture is status. From an era where many status games existed, it’s been blown up to a big few. If everyone has to compete in the same game, it breeds resentment, fascism, and authoritarianism.

If we want society to rewild a bit, it means recognizing the following:

• It’s imperative that we situate the public algorithmic feeds as more equal to the rest of our information ecology. It’s not the beginning and end. It means going back to using group chats. But also, simply going offline again and investing in local communities. It’s not saying we should toss out the public web and algorithms. But, it’s one part of the ecology, not THE ecology.

• Think of adding healthy friction/interruption back into your life. A key figure here to support this is this: physical album sales are more egalitarian than streaming. More physical is better than only digital.

• Realise that some memes actually exist better in environments that’s not the public web. Not all memes need to graduate to the “public” either.

• Increase your own cogsec (cognitive security). Like with your nutrition, be aware what you consume, where. Most people simply consume memes without being self-aware. It’s already bad, but it’s going to get 100x worse with generative AI everywhere. Context has always been important, but it’s moreso right now. Instead, look up.

We’ve all noticed the consolidation of culture over the years, and in part it’s because we’ve reshaped our information ecology by catering our information ecology towards the algorithmic feed. In turn, memes that thrived in that environment captured a larger share of our attention away from information ecologies that provided healthy stopgaps, diversity, and resilience. We can simultaneously revive the middle-class of culture by resisting the memetic algorithmic feed and in turn not only bring back more sustainable diversity, but perhaps, also repair a few parts of society that has felt like it has deteriorated beyond reconciliation.

Make life a bit more antimemetic in general. If anything, this essay shouldn’t go viral. Not all memes should. After you’re done with reading this, don’t share it online: rather, put down your phone and go outside.

Welcome to the February Issue of Scenes With Simon. Special thanks to Hawes for hosting an excellent NYT Bestseller dataset (I donated). Also, thanks to my local essay writing group for early feedback on this essay.

Some more goodies ahead:

• Sincerity and That Alysa Liu Performance

• Snippets From the Web

• What I’ve Been Up To

Sincerity and That Alysa Liu Performance

There’s been a lot of chatter on Alysa Liu’s performance at the Olympics. You can watch it here.

Notably, many people have been delighted by the performance due to her ease and joy she exuded throughout. Anyone that has pursued something has wrestled with the ego promoting the endeavour’s seriousness over effortless and unattached excellence. We sometimes feel that in order to succeed we have to take it seriously and we have to put our own identities and selves on the line to achieve greatness. And so, excelling without ego feels like a high level of mastery. To endure sacrifice and not desire to win, but to simply enjoy the stage. That’s hard and an amazing and admirable place to arrive it.

On top of that, I sense that in a time where our leadership and supposed role models are often rife with moral decrepitude, we seek sincerity again. In some sense, when times are good, sincerity feels like extra frosting on a cake. It’s too much. Almost naive. But, when times don’t feel good, sincerity rises again as a virtue, as strength.

I’ve often felt at odds with the cynicism of the 2010s. I’m glad sincerity is coming back. More on this later in the newsletter.

Snippets From The Web

I wish I had more essays to share for February, but reading both books and doing the research took up my most of my newsletter writing time this month. So, instead. More snippets for this month!

Eating Alone In Another Country

For a few years (~2015-2019), I was travelling by myself all over the world and speaking at conferences on blockchains. The most memorable moments were times where you simply alone in a vast new city, unseen. It was like society around you becomes a blanket. I’m always reminded of the Speed Levitch quote from Waking Life: “On really romantic evenings of self, I go salsa dancing with my confusion”. There’s a great peace to times like that.

Where Is The Light Coming From?

Regardless of it being real or not, it’s a great reminder of how to approach storytelling. Don’t let reality get in the way of a good story.

Pixel Maps

Map nerds are going to love this one. Great to fly around NYC in this.

Alcohol Decline

I remained fascinated by this trend.

Why now? Is it a trend that will continue? I’ve definitely been drinking less, but I ascribe it to simply being in my 30s now and my body does not accord so well with it anymore. 😅

The Top-Heavy Economy

Speaking of top-heavy…

Population Density in the US

Loved this tour over the US from CityNerd.

Scanning Books into LLMs

You know. I knew frontier labs were scanning books for LLMs, but this image truly stunned me.

The Backrooms Movie

Some of the Backrooms videos usually incorporate some horror elements. The new A24 Backrooms movie will likely have it too (considering it’s from Kane Parsons).

…but, I always felt that Backrooms were fascinating in what it doesn’t show. I would love an ultra mundane take on Backrooms. That it’s just incomprehensible exploration of capitalist “boring jobs” subconscious. Like Neo taking the blue pill and just living a life, forever, in an office job. Severance did this really well with its maze-like elements. Or like Being John Malkovich where the office exists on a half floor.

What I’ve Been Up To

Creating:

✍️ Writing

Primarily still working on revisions, but it’s all coming along very nicely. Really happy with the direction it’s going in. Not much more to add here besides being heads down and revising!

🖼️ Art

I refactored and updated the UX on “This Artwork Is Always On Sale”. It’s still doing its thing, but should some small QOL improvments. Hoping to do the same for Neolastics soon!

👨🏻‍💻 Coding

Slowly, but surely getting back into more coding thanks to Claude Code. It’s really sped up timelines for work. I still kind of want to figure out a routine or process to let Claude Code run more often while I’m doing something else. But, I haven’t been able to really imagine how that fits in. Funnily enough, it’s also because it works so well.

I used Claude Code extensively when I was doing research for the tentpole essay. I wish I had this when I was doing graduate research. It’s so great to generate new lenses into data.

Consuming:

📺 Watching

Hamnet

Hoping to make my way through more of the well nominated films this year and Hamnet is one that stood out. I enjoyed Chloe Zhao’s Nomadland, and I’m probably one of the few MCU fans who loved The Eternals. So, I was excited for Hamnet. It ended being far more tragic than I thought it would be. It’s a hard watch, but the film’s best moment is the end. Deeply moving.

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms

Not really enjoying grimdark fantasy recently. The world’s complicated (and corrupt and full of people in various horrid files) as it is. So, I was lured to this after seeing it being more hopeful than the regular GoT political dramas. It’s great to be back in the GoT universe. And I’m enjoying watching TV that’s focused on people who try to hold their values at high cost. With that Alysa Liu peformance being in the zeitgesit as well as AKOTSK, I’m liking that high integrity and sincerity is back.

🕹 Gaming

Factorio: Space Age

Yip. The voices. It called. It called me back. The factory must grow… Primarily, because Space Age was released on the Switch 2. It’s been my favourite way to unwind in the past month. The mouse controls on the Switch 2 is also better than I thought it would be. I literally play with the joy-con mouse on my pants. It’s not janky at all. In this play-through, I’m doing two big changes. A better “mall”, so that I don’t have to craft many of the items myself. And secondly, a far better rail network. The QOL improvements for rail is so much nicer. Interrupts, for example, mean that I don’t have to send coal to various stations to keep the trains fueled. When it’s low, it simply stops at a coal depot to load up.

Still one of the best games I’ve played.

📚 Reading

There Is No Antimemetics Division by qntm

I’ve been wanting to read this for ages. I’ve written about SCP and researched it extensively before.

So, I’m glad, that with the rewrite and republishing of the story, to get around to reading it. I really enjoyed it. I do have one small critique however. Towards the end, it feels like it unravels a bit. In high concept novels, I usually prefer a setup that allows the reader to draw their own conclusions from early exposition as to how it would be solved or completed. Greg Egan novels are a great example of this. It always gets weirder toward the end, but it stays within in its own confines (conclusions are logically drawn from early setups). To put it differently, it feels like There Is No Antimemetics Division starts off as sci-fi (rules and protocols) and ends as fantasy (magic).

That being said, it’s still a highly entertaining high concept novel and would definitely recommend it if you enjoy stories like this.

Antimemetics by Nadia Asparouhova

For this month, I set out to read these two books to see how they related to my own theories of memetics and I almost didn’t write about it, because I feel Nadia’s take on it almost said everything I wanted to say. Also, I’m a huge fan of the way it was written, and published. More of this, please!

🏃 Running

The snowcrete and below zero degrees celsius temps for most of Feb definitely hampered my running. But, it’s melted and I’m back in it, ready for a half marathon at the end of March. Going to take this one easy and just have fun with it.

🎶 Listening

Karnivool - In Verses

I’ve had the new Karnivool on repeat. It’s been 13 years since their previous release. They’re a top 10 band for me, and this album is hitting all the right spots. I still distinctly remember how much Sound Awake’s release in 2009 kept me company during a personally difficult time in my life.

It’s one those progressive rock bands where the more you listen to the songs, the better they get. While their 2013 release didn’t land as well as their first two albums for me, album number four has quickly become a favourite. I’m so happy they’re continuing to make music.

Galaxy 2 Galaxy - Transition

I’ve been making way slowly but surely through Resident Advisor’s Top Electronic Tracks of the 2000 - 2025 and this was my favourite discovery. Gosh, the way it keeps building is magical. And the narration is so empowering. What dance music should and can be. MAKE YOUR TRANSITION.

GIFT - Shadow Stealer

A great psychedelic rock track. Been great to run to!

That’s it for February, friends. Thank you for reading. As the Northern Hemisphere begins to thaw, I hope you get time to experience a lovely sunset again.

Until next month!

Simon

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In December and January, while in South Africa, I drove a lot. I enjoyed it, not just for the beautiful scenery, but because it also forced me to put my phone down.

I don’t drive regularly anymore. Living in a walkable city in the USA, you rarely do. I love walking and taking public transit. But, when I lived in South Africa, there would be a few multi-hour drives in the year, going to seaside towns or in-land to the countryside. On those drives, I did some of my best and favourite thinking. New ideas, philosophies, personal breakthroughs, and adventures in imagination.

And so, on these long drives again over the holidays, I enjoyed the scenery and the wandering of my own mind. While I appreciate the venue it created for thinking, it made me realise again just how much time we’ve lost to filling it with cheap information. Many of us want to avoid doomscrolling and slop to get back what we regard as “productive” time. We see that as: going to exercise more, reading over short-form video, spending time with friends and family, working on that side project, etc.

But, the tension in this, is that we chastise ourself when we fall back into the aglo-slop traps. “Oh no, I scrolled TikTok again for an hour.”

I feel that the antithesis to being one-shotted by algorithms isn’t productivity, but boredom. Productivity is also a race against time. Hitting my mid-30s, you do exercises like: “If it takes me 2 years to write a novel, how many books could I ever write in my life?” Avoiding slop/algorithms is about wanting your time back. Productivity is equally not always the answer (note: it’s not saying one shouldn’t strive to be productive, it’s about what’s regarded as the antidote).

The answer is to create unguided time in your life. Time where you are actively bored, again. Time where you can’t do much else but let yourself wander into your surroundings. Go for a walk. Talk to a neighbour. Look at stuff. Like, really, look at it. Enjoy interruptions. Play more with the kids and the pets.

recently wrote about what it felt like to not post for a bit and many of her conclusions feel familiar:

Boredom asserts itself more, and more pleasantly. You’re reminded that silence has its own texture. There’s more time to think about what you actually want, not what plays well.

These periods can be created by small tricks. At dinner parties, I’ve asked people and they shared theirs: uninstalling apps, deleting social media, putting timers on apps, turning off all notifications, using greyscale, putting your phone in another room (never on you, in your house), turning off autoplay videos, using “bricks”, going back to dumb phones, not sleeping next to your phone, etc.

It works, but this all feels like solving the supply side of the problem: you’re trying to reduce the amount of available cheap information in your life. But, we can also look at it from the demand-side, never wanting or being able to pick up your phone at all.

This is a long drive. And in what ways can we create more “long drives” in our life, again? To me, it’s turning back to a more physical prime life. To many, this comes naturally, but I grew up with nothing more than a desire to be online. The more online I could be, the more I learned, the more I connected with people, and the more I grew. My work was in my screen. My relationships was in my screen (for a while, I did long distance). My entertainment was in my screen. The world was in my screen. And during this period, I was duly rewarded for investing my world into a digital prime life. But, now, diminishing returns have swung the pendulum the other way.

And so, my goal in the past few years (mostly last year) has been to take all of these digital prime lives and see if it can be replaced by the world around me. It took attitude adjustments and leaning into new communities. Run clubs, writing salons, art gallery memberships, community events, etc. In this, I’m more present in the world around me, and when you are present in the world around you, you’re on a “long drive”. Sometimes, you can’t take out your phone, but most of the time, you don’t want to anymore.

At the end of the day, I retain a desire to stay online. To remain informed, to connect with interesting people, to share creative projects, and to keep talking. In some sense, the world needs people to show us their cool little things they’re doing. To be public about it. We need reminders that life continues anyway. If anything, I think what people crave is older social media, because those were portals into these lives.

I’ll still be productive. I’ll still make plans. I’ll still be online, but I’ll also aim to create more “long drives” in my life: towards a story, a person, a place that’s worth putting your phone down for. (I should rewatch Drive My Car).

In this monthly issue of Scenes With Simon, there’s a few essays, 5 snippets from the web, and updates on what I’ve been up to!

1. Why Monthly?

2. A Dark Forest of New Aesthetics

3. Claude and Generalists

4. Characters Taking Themselves Seriously

5. 5 Snippets From the Web

6. What I’ve Been Up To

Why Monthly?

In my previous newsletter at the end of 2025, I noted that I was contemplating moving to a monthly instead of weekly format. I’ve decided to finally make this switch for a few reasons:

1. A consistent weekly format means I have to spend every weekend writing. And truthfully, I want more of my weekends back. Or rather, I want to choose how I spend my weekends. I want more freedom in when I write this newsletter. It will still take more time a day to write, but now I can spread this out over the course of a few weeks. In doing so, I have more freedom to write when it makes sense. If it’s a busy week, I don’t have to fit in. If I’m not busy, I can write more. An example that was tough, was, that sometimes I sit in on writing feedback groups and the weekends are a great time to read those stories. So now, my weekends became 1) long runs, 2) sometimes reading for feedback, 3) reading newsletters and what I saved to read during the week, and 4) writing this newsletter. That left much less time for simply having a regular social life too.

2. Slower writing. When there’s a time crunch, I don’t always get to enjoy writing. I’ve been interested in also writing about slower things. And sometimes those ideas take a few days to form and process compared to having to squeeze it out. I want to at least also include more reflections in this newsletter.

3. I’ll likely write a bit less now, overall, but it’s also because I want to focus my creative output into more concrete projects, rather than a newsletter. I want to do more art, writing, and vibecoding.

Let me know what you think. :)

The Dark Forest of New Aesthetics

Patrick Collison put out a grant program for people working on “new aesthetics”.

We are seeking to fund artists, architects, and designers who are consciously working to define New Aesthetics.

Hidden to some extent in this request is a question often asked of the 21st century: why do so many things look so similar for so long?

We're more than a quarter way through the new century and we can now ask: what is the aesthetic of the twenty-first century? Which are the important secessionist movements of today? Which will be the most important great works? Today, futuristic aesthetics often mean retrofuturistic aesthetics. So, what should the future actually look like?

Parts of 2006 doesn’t look so different 2026. But 1986 looks noticeably different in aesthetics to 2006.

New culture (and aesthetics) can only arrive when they are given opportunity to survive. The problem is: the web made it easier for information to travel anywhere and thus all culture competes more among itself.

Any new culture, is by definition, weird and unfamiliar. When a tribal neolithic man decides to collect a cowrie shell for the first time, it’s weird. The first women to wear a bikini, was weird. There’s a constant back and forth between general conservativism and maintenance of existing norms against novelty and strangeness. Anything new is more often than not, ostracized by the majority. To do something new is risky. It burns social capital, but when it succeeds, it generates more of it for the individual or group that tried the new thing. In the past, however, new culture only had to vie for attention from a smaller group of humans. The amount of naysayers was thus, less.

Before culture could travel to all corners of the world in an instant, culture could more easily thrive because the “group” that could shoot it down, was smaller. As humans, however, our systems are wired like immune systems: we only notice it when something goes wrong. 5 negative comments on a 100,000+ views YouTube video feels awful. A 1-star review on a book with sales of 500 copies, feels awful. So, perhaps, as a percentage of the population, naysayers had not increased, but naysayers are nominally more and they can shoot down new culture more easily across the world. A troll from New Zealand can discourage a singer from the Netherlands with one poor comment even if that singer was successful in their home country.

And so, because culture generally has less to chance to survive once it goes online, we’ve witnessed a multi-decade battle of memetics. It’s great that we can share love for the same music from different cultures in the world, but it’s also flattened culture dramatically. Big things got bigger at the same time that the long tail got longer. Most of the middle died.

It’s why US culture wars are now increasingly local politics in other countries. It’s why I also believe that Gen Z is partly “conservative”. Because the camera is always there, ready to proliferate “cringe”. There’s less freedom to truly experiment because it’s become easier to be a hater/naysayer.

The only spaces where we’ve seen new aesthetics are places where cringe is accepted as a part of the aesthetic (italian brainrot slop), corners of the web where normie acceptance isn’t desired (pockets like reddit or 4chan), and local cultures that are strong enough such that global eyes don’t understand it enough to even hate on it. For example, countries with different languages are insulated from the English speaking information Dark Forest, ready to snipe any new culture. It’s why the most exciting music of the 21st century is from places like South Africa or Brazil.

Amapiano:

Sarro:

This is true 21st century culture.

The world isn’t done yet with this smoothing out of culture, globally.

The worst part is that any aesthetic that is in public (fashion and architecture) that is supposed to be relatively permanent will be Dark Forested and NIMBY’ed out of existence before it has a change to truly flourish.

The lesson for getting new aesthetics is that new aesthetics absolutely can’t be witnessed by too many people too soon. It’s too risky. New aesthetics need to thrive out of view of the algorithm, the camera, and normiedom if it is to be given any chance of longer term survival. It needs to stay weird and new before conservative normies descend and stop it from happening.

It’s the global gossip trap (by ).

Which means that, with the advent of social media, and the resultant triumph of the spread of gossip over Dunbar’s number, we might have just inadvertently performed the equivalent of summoning an Elder God. The ability to organize society through raw social power given back to a species that climbed out of the trap of raw social power only by creating societies large enough they required formal organization. The gossip trap is our first Eldritch Mother, the Garrulous Gorgon With a Thousand Heads, The Beast Made Only of Sound.

Too much of the west unfortunately are scared of new cultures, new ideas, and want a return to some retro-future or neoclassical aesthetics, and they’re too online. So, yes, we need to go offline. Turn off the camera. Turn off the voluntary panopticon. Venture to the land of innovation, the new, the strange, nurture the weird, and bring back for us the new baubles of culture.

On Claude Code and Generalists

One of my favourite concepts are thresholds. I’m fascinated by the conversation around when one thing truly becomes another thing. When does a hill become a mountain? When does a lake become a sea? Sometimes things change slowly but surely until one day, it’s inevitably crossed some threshold to something new. In wanting to update and refactor old code for my art projects, I knew it was going to roughly take me a few weeks of coding to do so: most of which was going to be the effort of fitting in the code back into my brain. It’s the cost of context switching, unfortunately (and the cost of enjoying too many things).

Having written for most of the past 2.5 years, I’ve totally missed the AI coding train. And so after seeing the hype around Opus 4.5 + Claude Code, I gave it a spin. And like, many, I was utterly astonished at how well it worked. Work that could’ve taken me weeks was completed in 2 - 4 hours.

This order of magnitude improvement feels like this threshold change. It makes new things possible. I liken it to the invention of the “like” button. 1-bit communication was rarely feasible prior to the web and cheap bandwidth. Now, it feels to me that if I’m not running any AI coding agents, I’m simply missing out. It also makes the future one of generalists. Long have the idea guy been relegated to posting blogs, but now, a leader of agentic AI coding swarms (ok, yes, being dramatic here 😅).

Karpathy encapsulates what it feels like:

Fun. I didn't anticipate that with agents programming feels *more* fun because a lot of the fill in the blanks drudgery is removed and what remains is the creative part. I also feel less blocked/stuck (which is not fun) and I experience a lot more courage because there's almost always a way to work hand in hand with it to make some positive progress. I have seen the opposite sentiment from other people too; LLM coding will split up engineers based on those who primarily liked coding and those who primarily liked building.

I’ve always enjoyed coding, but if I didn’t have to code, I wouldn’t. It’s always been a means to an end for me.

With services like Ralph and Moltbot, it really feels like a new inflection point is finally here. The future is strange, but it’s here.

I love how a few years ago, none of this would’ve made sense:

Ralph is an implementation of the Geoffrey Huntley’s technique for Claude Code that enables continuous autonomous development cycles he named after Ralph Wiggum. It enables continuous autonomous development cycles where Claude Code iteratively improves your project until completion, with built-in safeguards to prevent infinite loops and API overuse.

What it’s left me with is a desire to build a habit where I can run coding experiments more regularly and fit in maybe 30min a day to review and then orchestrate/delegate again. It’s definitely doable, because what it amounts to is essentially have an army of coders at your disposal while you are doing something else (at a cost of about $200/month at max plan). Once I get this book revision done, I’m going to be coding a lot more again.

Again, via Karpathy:

TLDR Where does this leave us? LLM agent capabilities (Claude & Codex especially) have crossed some kind of threshold of coherence around December 2025 and caused a phase shift in software engineering and closely related. The intelligence part suddenly feels quite a bit ahead of all the rest of it - integrations (tools, knowledge), the necessity for new organizational workflows, processes, diffusion more generally. 2026 is going to be a high energy year as the industry metabolizes the new capability.

PS Did you see moltbook? AI agents talking among themselves?

Characters Taking Themselves Seriously

With the recent Avengers: Doomsday teasers, I noted commentary that mentioned how tonally different Thor is compared to his outing in Love and Thunder (I can’t find the commentary directly, now). The note said that in the teaser, he takes himself seriously and I thought that's a great lesson in character writing. This works for both “serious” and “comedic” characters. In making sure characters take themselves seriously, you're ensuring that they act with awareness of themselves and the story world they inhabit.

A really great comparison is the reveal of the new One Piece Live Action characters for season 2. It's goofy. It's camp as hell, but the characters act logically within their world.

They take themselves seriously.

It's when characters are played more to the audience, where they lose their appeal. Another great example is Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (done well). It can be weird as all hell, but at least make sure the characters take themselves seriously.

Snippets From The Web

Central Park Drivers

Blows my mind that Central Park used to have cars drive through it…

…and it was like this until recently? Heck, even I visited Central Park while it was still a thing. I don’t remember this, though.

Holidomes

Hey honey… Want to go on holiday in a warehouse that pretends it’s outside. The kids will love it. Aren’t they into that liminal thing, or what’s it called?

Small Form Factors

Huge sucker for small form factors. Do you have one of these?

Autonomous Forests

Snekdowns

Because of the big US east coast snowstorms, a reminder of the concept of a snekdown. Snow allows urban designers to actually see what parts of the road are actually necessary.

What I’ve Been Up To

Back into a more regular routine! :)

Creating:

✍️ Writing - Novel #2

Restarted revisions on novel #2. I got really good feedback from more readers over the holidays. Much of the work since June has really been about simplifying the narrative. One interesting change is that someone mentioned that the main character is unlikeable. Which, I had to agree with… So, that’s the biggest part of this revision. Surprisingly, it’s been quite simply to make her more likeable. Maybe in the future I’ll share more about this, but the main change is to simply have the main character be more steadfast in their own beliefs. Think of Breaking Bad. If Walter White descent was immediate (from trying-his-hardest father to immediate drug kingpin), it would’ve been harder to be on his side throughout the show.

I also revised my query letter and the first five pages which I sent off to a writer conference (hoping to meet agents). It definitely felt far easier to write than the initial query letter, which to me is an indication that I’m heading in the right direction.

I do still think, however, that I’m looking at 2 - 4 months of writing to revise this book. Then, hopefully, that’s the last I’ll leave it at. 3 years of writing to get a final draft is long. Lots of lessons. From there, I’ll query like all hell to see if it lands with agents or not. If it doesn’t land, then I’m not going to go back and rewrite it. I’d rather then self-publish and move on.

👨🏻‍💻 Coding - Experimenting with Claude Code

See above.

🖼️ Art - Refreshes

I hope to refresh my art projects. I’ve already started with this through Claude Code. The code’s just old… That being said. I have some ideas for new projects this year… Stay tuned.

Consuming:

📺 Watching - Movies!

The Fantastic Four: First Steps - Liked it. Entertaining. But, I’m still struggling lately with the pace of superhero films. Often feels so rushed.

Taking Venice - Great documentary that goes behind the scenes on Rauschenberg (from America) winning the Venice Biennale in 1964. Enjoyed the intrigue!

Before Sunrise - Rewatched it recently. As I grow older I drift in and out as to which of the “Before” trilogy of films I like the most and it’s usually highly context dependent on where I am in my life. I still enjoy the innocence in the first one a lot.

Spectre - Can’t remember the last time I watched a Bond movie. Must’ve been Quantum of Solace. I would still say it’s not exactly my favourite type of film genre, but it was still entertaining nonetheless.

People We Meet On Vacation - Lovely, and entertaining millennial romantic drama film. Definitely felt like it was for millennials and a time where people paid young writers to travel the world and write about it… when travelling was a personality trait, and writing listicles for Buzzfeed from a coffeshop in Brooklyn was a real job.

🕹 Gaming - It Takes Two, Hades 2, Factorio: Space Age

I must say. I didn’t expect this, but Hades 2 hasn’t grabbed me as much as Hades 1 did. I think it’s simply because the novelty has worn off. But, it’s still fun to pull out for a run or two. But, have effectively shelved it for now.

Finally also got to play a bit of It Takes Two. I love the explosion of co-op games.

Yes, I’ve started playing Factorio again after the Switch 2 update with Space Age. I’m taking it slower this time, just merely enjoying it as a relaxing 20-30min every day, expanding the factory slowly but surely.

🏃 Running

I love running in winter. But, snowstorms definitely hamper it. Been a bit annoyed that I had to resort to treadmill running. :(

📚 Reading

I’ve been struggling in getting back into reading and I blame a part of it on not being able to run regularly (usually listen to audiobooks while running).

🎶 Listening

3 songs that I’ve had on repeat this month:

Joshua Lee Turner - Grand Canyon

Beautiful track (ht Niel).

Louis Prince - The Number Thirteen

Dreamy groove. Wonderful music video too.

Goth Babe - Huatulco

Seems like I’m in a dreamy groove vibe (when am I not, truly?). Great track.

That’s it for January, friends. I must say. I enjoyed writing this a lot more than doing weekly newsletters. Let me know what you think. Removing pressure on myself makes it easier to write. :)

As always. Hope you get to enjoy a lovely sunset! See you at the end of February!

Simon

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Subscribe now

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In no particular order:

Andor S2

In many ways, Andor feels like a TV series that should and shouldn’t exist. For an IP called “Star Wars”, one would’ve expected a continuation of its namesake. The prequels were that: talks of trade blockades alongside a sinister emperor rising to power, re-organising a republic into a fascist empire for “security” reasons. “So this is how liberty dies, with thunderous applause,” the Senator of Naboo said in the prequels. But after Disney bought the IP they played it safer. eg: Mandalorian is about a cute alien and a loner. Bad Batch is about brotherhood and finding identity. Ahsoka is about myth and *another* galaxy far, far away. The Acolyte was about sisterhood and how the force can manifest in unexpected ways.

But, Andor is the lens we needed on our current times. As Mon Mothma speaks:

“I believe we are in crisis. The distance between what is said and what is known to be true has become an abyss. Of all the things at risk, the loss of an objective reality is perhaps the most dangerous. The death of truth is the ultimate victory of evil. When truth leaves us, when we let it slip away, when it is ripped from our hands, we become vulnerable to the appetite of whatever monster screams the loudest.”

I’m glad this got made. I’m glad that we have mega-IP media that captures the nihilism and hope of politics and what it costs to bend justice to hope and freedom. While I thought S1 was better than S2 (mostly because of the impeccable wonder of the Eye of Aldhani arc), it thoroughly landed the entire story of Cassian and the start of the rebellion. It’s going to age very well.

Night Tapes - portals//polarities

The way I listen to music these days is, admittedly, not as directed as it once was. I blame the easy of Spotify’s discovery. 90% of new music comes through its recommendations. From there, if an artist continues to find its way into my playlists, it’s then that I delve deeper into their discography. The best is when I discover that they’re new and still releasing new music. Night Tapes’ debut is full of the wonderful dreampop and electronic ambient grooves I’ve come to love about them.

A big highlight of my year which included going to see them live! :)

Casino Versus Japan - it’s very sunny

Sometimes, every few years, a song comes along that I can't stop playing. This was my most listened to song in 2024 and 2025. Still madly in love with the layered ethereal beat. It feels like if one could fly over an island in the ocean.

The Rehearsal S2

Nathan Fielder remains one of my favourite modern TV showrunners. His work is challenging to watch sometimes because of his willingness to tread over ethical and moral boundaries (he often uses people who doesn’t quite understand the deeper intent of the shows). Despite that, it remains often hilarious while offering a very unique slice into modern society that can veer into deep sincerity. In The Rehearsal S2, he continues testing the boundaries of performance and loops the viewer into it by emphasising to them, that they too are complicit in being the audience. What is a performance and what is sincere? And when does this line between performance and sincerity impact our daily lives? In The Rehearsal S2, he looks at pilots and the expectations they carry for millions of passengers.

Common Side Effects

This series caught my eye because I loved Scavenger’s Reign and it was done by the same studio. I was hoping for another psychedelic adventure, but initially got the perception that it was in the same realm as other “stoner” adult animation (like Rick and Morty). Not the biggest fan of adult animation like that, but gave it a go because of the studio, and I was massively surprised at how rich the show felt. The characters were compelling, the world was littered with detail, and the plot was engaging. The animation, as with Scavenger’s Reign, was equally fantastical. Looking forward to more of this. (+1 for using Nils Frahm in the trailer).

NYC Congestion Pricing

On the urbanism front, besides California passing SB 79 (allowing for higher density housing near transit stops), NYC implementing congestion pricing is my favourite. It’s been a big success.

In the first six months of the program, traffic in the congestion zone dropped by 11 percent, accidents by 14 percent, and complaints of excessive honking or other noise by 45 percent, officials said.

Pollution is also down.

“This tells us that congestion pricing didn’t simply relocate air pollution to the suburbs by rerouting traffic. Instead, folks are likely choosing cleaner transportation options altogether, like riding public transportation or scheduling deliveries at night. This thins traffic and limits how smog compounds when many cars are on the road.”

As I wrote on it earlier this year:

So, this local trap stops us from imagining the second order effects of slapping on a price at one part of a complex system and seeing it change wholesale the system we’re embedded in. It sucks to have entrenched systems where people can’t imagine a better one past the personal impact to themselves. Congestion pricing schemes are windows into collective action where we make sane trade-offs for collective benefit. That’s great. We need more of it. Far more of it. Even if it’s just experiments that are then posed to the society as referendums (like they did in Stockholm).

Walking The Camino

On a personal front, a lot of the first six months of the year, I dealt with the grief and end of a 6.5 year relationship (and short marriage). As Winston Churchill said, “Never let a good crisis go to waste”, I went to therapy, changed a few personal habits of my life, grew closer to friends and family, met a lot of people and built new communities, and decided to do something I’ve always wanted to do: a long walking trip. I wrote about it practical and emotional aspects of that journey.

With all this work + growth in personal fitness + daily meditation + going offline more, I’m feeling the best I’ve felt in my life. This year was full of life (it’s lows and highs) and for that I’m grateful.

Writing Novel #2

I’m not where I wanted to be with my second book. It’s pre-occupied the majority of my productive time in the past 2.5 years and I’m about 70% through a new revision. Early feedback has also not been very strong. It’s been good, but hoped for a stronger “hell yes”. Evidently, after sending it to 8 initial agents, I received rejection from all of them. But, I still believe there’s a good story here and I’ll continue to chip away at it. I have to work on some art projects in first half of 2026 and so I might put the book a bit on the back burner. Regardless, I want to keep going through the “gauntlet” and get it traditionally published. At the end of the day, even though I haven’t much to show for 2.5 years of work (yet), it’s still been an immensely valuable project. I’m sure my skills as storyteller will one day point back to these 2.5 years of work on this.

Hades 2

I haven’t gamed as much this year. But, I did (and still am), enjoying Hades 2. The highlight of the year for me.

That being said, I’m very actively trying to ignore that Factorio released Switch 2 updates, including the Space Age update. 😅

Book Sculptures by Ana Maria Caballero

One of my favourite mixed-medium artworks of the year is Ana Maria Caballero’s Book Sculptures.

Caballero’s Book Sculptures are an eight-part series that questions how society values poetry. This series proposes the book as a sculptural object, and will see Caballero print eight different books, each as an edition of one, with a unique ISBN and the anatomy and structure of a traditional book.

The books in this series contain only one poem, printed 197 times in their pages. When taken as integers, the digits in 197 add up eventually to 8, a number that represents abundance.

What I love about it, is that plays with how we perceive a piece of work through changing its medium. Books aren’t usually seen as a 1-of-1 like a sculpture is. Nevermind, printing one poem, continuously in the book. Does restricting the poem to a format like this, elevate it? Do all poems *need* maximum distribution? Do any piece of art or creative work need to be easily available? And what does it mean in terms of how the creative work is experienced? Creating context is important and sometimes the trade-off of maximal distribution actually dilutes the message.

I love these questions that Book Sculptures provokes.

The Studio

A metric for how much I like something, is that if I grow fonder of the memories of it, the longer I’m away from having consumed it, the better it is. Games like Disco Elysium, comes to mind, still haunting my memories of it 3 years later. The Studio, a fast-paced, sometimes slapstick, and hilarious inside look into a film studio in LA, is one of those. Great satire while still making the world of entertainment production look exciting.

Intimate Systems & Rifts by Hashrunner

I’m still paying attention to onchain art projects and continue to enjoy collecting these!

Two of my favourites this year was the Intimate Systems exhibition (which I wrote about last week), and Rifts by Hashrunner.

With the recent news that MoMA collected Cryptopunks and other blockchain art, I’m feeling vindicated in my belief, that in time, truly onchain and dynamic protocol art will too be recognized by larger institutions.

Wake up Dead Man & Conclave

I’m putting these two together, because I didn’t quite expect that films containing Catholicism would be some of my favourites of the year. Both deal with doubt, belief, and uncertainty. And both mark it necessary even if you aren’t faithful.

As preference, while I maintain strong beliefs about life, politics, and religion, I’m rarely certain. Not because I have doubts, but because I enjoy learning. I always look to people, words, and the many worlds one might inhabit and look inside to see if I have it all wrong. I treat my own beliefs gently and look to see how others can teach me. Ironically, I’ve sometimes wondered whether this approach in itself, is wrong. That perhaps, I should lead with more certainty and advocate more strongly for my beliefs in the same way that I hope to be taught by others and their willingness to proselytize their own. But, I felt vindicated in Ralph Fiennes impeccable speech in Conclave.

Certainty is the great enemy of unity. Certainty is the deadly enemy of tolerance. Even Christ was not certain at the end. "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" he cried out in his agony at the ninth hour on the cross. Our faith is a living thing precisely because it walks hand-in-hand with doubt. If there was only certainty and no doubt, there would be no mystery. And therefore, no need for faith. Let us pray that God will grant us a Pope who doubts. And let him grant us a Pope who sins and asks for forgiveness and who carries on.

Certainty can be fragile. For now, I prefer to be a rope. Strong, but bendable. Great films.

On Consumption

I definitely feel like I missed out this year on great art, books, movies, TV shows, games, etc. In general, over the past few years, I’m entertained by going broad instead of deep. I didn’t read any niche books, or play many niche indie games, or watched some niche art films. And so, I do sometimes feel like I’m missing out on deeper conversations. The most niche consumption at the moment for me is simply enjoying paying attention to all the onchain art projects. The rest is more known. A solution is to pick a field and go deep, but I’m quite happy right now in hopping between mediums, even if it might stay relatively shallow.

Newsletter Retrospective & Looking Into 2026

Here’s the most popular newsletters I wrote this year:

+

+

Newsletter growth was fairly flat for the entire year. I ascribe most of that due to not posting on Twitter/X. Most of the new traffic came from Substack itself.

Into 2026

I’ve enjoyed writing this newsletter this year. I tried different formats and, for now, seem fine with continuing as-is. I’m still in two minds whether it’s meaningful for me to continue at the pace of once-a-week. I don’t always want to spend weekends writing anymore. And, I believe that if I took the time I spent writing this newsletter into my novel, it would’ve been much further along. As you might have noticed, *most* of the content of this year has been about going outside, touching grass, and logging off. I don’t always want to stay this much online anymore. I’m happier for it. And so I want to continue being smarter about what I consume and how I produce and share my thoughts. I might lean into the idea again of publishing a monthly newsletter instead of a weekly one in order to find a better middle-ground. I aim usually for 3 links a week and so for a month, if I share 10 new things, it seems manageable and easier and the writing for it won’t always fall on a weekend. It gives me space.

With that, I’m going to take a 2 week break and will hopefully have some downtime to read, spend time with family and friends, and enjoy more of the South African summer sunshine before heading back to the US.

May the final sunsets of 2025 be wonderful and beautiful.

Thank you for reading. 🫶

Looking forward to seeing all of you in 2026.

Simon

Intimate Systems

I really adored this exhibition/auction curated by SuperRare last week. Intimate Systems is a showcase of interesting and novel onchain art. I’m glad this niche gets continued interest after also seeing “World Sculpture Garden” (which I highlighted in 2024) getting selected as one of ArtForum’s top art in 2025.

For Intimate Systems:

This exhibition highlights works that examine how individuality, perception, and expression survive within structured systems of code, logic, and networks. Artists consider how small, intimate interactions such as a pause, a repeated pattern, or a hidden mark can shape presence and meaning in digital environments.

The works on view engage with systems as material, revealing rhythm, behavior, and nuance through abstraction, participation, and generative logic. Some invite collaboration, while others quietly encode human traces into their architecture. Across these approaches, the exhibition foregrounds presence over sentiment, and structure over illustration.

For example, Takens Theorem’s piece, Private Ledger, allows the owner to encode a zero-knowledge proof of a message into the artwork, whereafter it’s visuals change as a result. It’s using a public ledger to store a secret into the artwork.

ripe’s “Here For Now” allows any person to submit some ETH and essentially “announce” their presence, adding a new line to the artwork. When you leave with your deposit, the line goes away.

Do also take a look at the rest of the exhibition. Big fan!

I think in a few years, we’ll see more of these medium-native blockchain art grow in legitimacy and importance. It does feel like the classic innovation cycle: initial hype around NFTs in 2021/2022 were skeuomorphic, simply mirroring existing conceptions on art to a new medium. But, these new artworks truly utilise the medium’s native characteristics.

In addition to Intimate Systems, I’ve been monitoring art world discussions around digital art. This past week also saw the Zero 10 exhibition at Art Basel make noise, especially with Beeple’s “art pooping tech dogs” (Regular Animals).

Sean Bonner explains it:

At face value this gets immediate attention, famous people’s heads on robot dogs walking around pooping out art. You can immediately see why people rushed over to take videos. But Mike (aka Beeple) explains that there’s a bit more conceptually going on than that. The piece is a commentary on how traditionally an artists job was to reimagine the world, but today the algorithms designed by a handful of billionaires have more impact on how we see the world than what artists are doing. In this piece, the robot dogs are walking around taking photos, and then using built in AI to decide which photos are most interesting, those photos in turn are converted to a “style” that represents each character and then printed, or pooped out which is a whole other commentary about art in general. These prints were collected and signed, and then given away free to attendees at different set times. Some of those free prints, 256 to be exact, also had a claim option for an NFT of the art, or rather, a piece of digital art that someone could collect. As I write this 186 of those have been claimed, and if you want to buy one on the secondary market the cheapest one listed is about $30k. Yes, art that was given away free is being sold for tens of thousands of dollars, only days later.

Naomi Rea wrote:

By exhibitors’ accounts, the section, sponsored by the NFT marketplace OpenSea, came together on a compressed timeline. Its curator, Eli Scheinman, was explicit about its aims in an interview with cryptonews.com: to bring digital-native collectors into the fair, to nudge traditional contemporary buyers to take the category seriously, and to attract younger visitors and the crypto-wealthy who have made Miami their home.

sees it as currently at odds with the classic art set:

These worlds are in conversation, but they are not merging into a single culture.

If anything, digital art and art + tech feel more like a second stage at a massive music festival. The fair itself is the main stage where legacy acts and big headliners hold court. Zero10 and its robots are the EDM tent out by the perimeter. Loud, crowded, full of energy and discovery. Some people wander over and fall in love. Most never leave the main field.

Someday that second stage might become as big or bigger than the main one. Culture has a way of inverting hierarchies when you least expect it. But right now, I do not believe it is the future of the tribe that still sees itself as the established art world.

For the moment, the Bezos robot is not a revolution. It is a very well produced ad for a parallel funnel that most of the main lounge is still just observing from a distance, if they notice it at all.

Understandably, the exhibition was at odds with historical norms. No gallery was involved and art was sold “on the floor” by the artist, with the artists being present. Some weren’t happy about that (I’m actually unsure whether this opinion is real or bait? Open to the fact that it could also be bait. But, regardless, it’s a reasonable opinion).

The fact is, the art world almost always gets stuck in boom/bust cycles of what is and isn’t art, and in there is usually an aversion to what the change means and entails. Aversion to new art is usually predominantly driven by how much it disrupts existing networks, not the merit of the art itself. New social networks or “tribes” as Josh describes, disrupts patronage systems of art and the connections that already exist. NFTs did that. As I wrote a few years ago, using the example of a novelist using new NFT distribution and monetization channels:

It not only bypasses existing relationships in the industry, but also the writer/fan relationships AND most importantly, the fan/fan relationships.

What it feels like, is that your favourite novelist is “selling out”. At this stage, it feels like they are taking money from not the usual people (“Some of them only want to speculate on your amazing work! They aren’t even fans! Sell outs! Just out to make money!”) It also changes your relationship with the writer. Previously you might have paid a handsome sum for a deluxe hardcover, but now, the writer might not have to anymore. That payment is an emotional investment. It’s just normal cognitive dissonance. We like things we paid for. Now, if the content is free, does it feel like it detracts from the experience and value of it? “If I want to feel what I felt, should I buy an NFT?” Now, your relationship changes such that it’s not a connection to the writing itself, but something else? A token? On a shared database? Then, it also changes your relationships to fans. You built relationships based on the medium, but now the medium has changed. “Wait, all the fans who bought NFTs are now posting in Discords? Will they still hang out on Reddit?”

Although the stories might not have changed, the relationships did. This is particularly the case why the furry community has pushed back. For years they were the only ones who sported animal avatars on Twitter and revelled in digital art commissions for each other. Now, they are being steamrolled by crypto and NFTs and that can cause their identity to be lumped together into a community they don’t know. The furries don’t want to be seen as the same as the bored apes because the relationships they built weren’t mediated in the same way.

So, yes, as digital collectible art keeps becoming more prominent, it will continue this process. It hasn’t died, and so it’s slowly but surely rewiring art world relationships for good.

To conclude: I think what’s indeed unnerving about Beeple’s show and the point it wanted to make, is that it makes our age more visible outside of where it comes from. We live in the algocene, a world now predominantly mediated by the algorithm. Beeple’s art is a critique of the feudal algorithms and also *of* the algorithm. It not only critiques the feed, but is also fit for going viral on the feed. Unless we opt out, the art world can’t hide from the algorithm forever and so too can’t the rest of us. Ben Roy’s viral thread on Internet Addiction also captures this:

Being so online has implications for wider culture as well. People are becoming more average over time because we’re all consuming the same content curated for us by TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, X and so on. This is often talked about as “algorithmic flattening,” and what that means is when we all consume the same inputs, we create similar outputs whether that’s in the form of art, startups, research, or even thoughts. We’re all losing our floofy spiky uniqueness and being eroded into a standard shape, which crushes originality and creativity at a societal scale.

Alternatively, it’s not about completely shutting out the algorithm, but rather finding new ways to opt in, and I think Intimate Systems provides some glimpse of that: participatory, public, and opt-in. Technology is amazing, but the biggest backlash against most of it is because we’ve lost much of the agency to opt in.

Aesthetics Matter

Speaking of opting in… Turns out, that sometimes it’s simply about making things nicer.

A new study researched how much aesthetic choices impacts NIMBY-ism. Turns out, simply making new developments look nicer (to the neighbourhood) can help densification.

It’s made me wonder again on how legitimacy in society can be improved in novel ways. As I’ve written in the past on using simple levers like improving aesthetics around voting could actually increase voting (and thus legitimacy):

I think much of the discontent around current democracies is that we don’t sometimes feel like our vote matters. That is in part due to electoral systems themselves, but there’s a disconnect in the process. A part of reducing this disconnect can come from merely adding more ritual to the process (without disenfranchising voters). Like, dress up voting stations with the necessary flair and importance of the act. Not just some random booth in a school hall. The voting process itself is so damn important, but it always feels like an anti-climax. Celebrate it. Treat voters with the respect they deserve.

In the same sense, one could increase buy-in from a community for densification not by asking them whether something will get built or not (as a YIMBY myself, it most likely should), but simply what design they would like. It could even be a part of a fast-track process: if the community thinks the building looks nice, you get faster access to permitting?

RA’s Top Electronic Records and Songs of the Last 25 Years

Resident Advisor recently released a great list of the best electronic records, songs, and mixes of the last 25 years. Even though I listen to a good amount of electronic music, I only recognize about 10-15% of the music on these lists. I’m very excited to dig into this over the new few weeks!

What I’m Up To

Touching grass (and enjoying sunshine), mostly.

📺 Watching - Pluribus, Knives Out: Wake Up Dead Man

I’m still enjoying Pluribus. I can see some people complaining about the pace, but I’m loving the slow, wordless scenes in this. Amid the wild plot, it’s actually relaxing!

I *really* enjoyed the new Knives Out. Josh O’ Connor puts on a stellar performance and I didn’t expect to find myself tearing up several times in this film. Came in, excited for a good murder mystery, and left emotionally moved by it. Definitely my favourite of the 3 thus far.

🎶 Listening - Tourist - Love In Silence (ft. Real Lies)

I’ve been enjoying Tourist’s new album. Latest favourite is Love In Silence featuring one of my other favourite finds of 2025, Real Lies. What I like about this album is that it really captures the feeling of old school 90s trance, but it also feels 2025 at the same time.

Are you rising to the challenge

′Cause I believe, girl, you’re all that matters?

And I’d have to say on balance

That I′m so glad we are alive

Enjoy it! Hope you get to see a lovely sunset this week.

Simon

Charli XCX on Being a Popstar

I enjoyed seeing this small glimpse from Charli XCX into what it’s like being a popstar.

It’s a unique life, but I was most fascinated by what the actual lived experience must be like. This passage was really interesting.

You will also end up spending a lot of time inhabiting strange and soulless liminal spaces. Whether its the holding area of the event you’re about to enter, the airport lounge, the visa office, the claustrophobic tour bus, the greenroom with no windows, the underneath of a stage or the set build of a photoshoot or music video you’re on, you are often caught in the in-between. You’re in transit, you’re going somewhere but the journey itself takes up the majority of the experience. When Rachel Sennott came to shoot her scene in our upcoming film The Moment she was overnighted in a van straight from the front row of the Balenciaga show in Paris to the back doors of a warehouse in London’s Docklands. She was bundled up with blankets and pillows and shipped directly to us like a package. The journey took all night but she was only on set for around an hour.

In small ways, non-celebs might be able to extrapolate to what things like mass adoration might feel like, but we can’t imagine what spaces look like that are rarely shown or seen. Backstage is less familiar. I would love to read more of what this part of the experience is like. The liminal part of an extraordinary life.

She also has an interesting sentence at the start:

Unfortunately this probably means I’d describe myself more as a ‘creative’ (gross) or plain and simply put: an artist.

This is reminiscent of ’s recent attempt to 2x2 the “artist” vs the “creator”.

His distinction delineates a creator as someone who also focuses their work on the market.

In recent decades a similar but distinct creative role has emerged: the creator. People who make a living from subscriptions, crowdfunding, selling merch, and other forms of direct exchange unlocked by the web.

Like artists, creators have a lot of freedom in what they do. They’re even more free in some ways, as they aren’t confined to the canon of what they’re “supposed to do.” All tools of the market are at their disposal: from products to livestreams to memecoins to ghost kitchens to limited edition drops. Unlike artists, they don’t have to navigate the academy system or art world politics to do it.

I’m not entirely a fan of this distinction, because there are artists that explicitly use the market as a medium (I once wrote a small bit on this). But, it *is* niche, sure. Charli uses “creative”, but to which Yancey sees “creative” as a Commercial Artist, which isn’t also what Charli thinks it is.

Which brings me to this interview with Mat Dryhurst and Holly Herndon talking to Peter Bauman about Starmirror, a space where the public can come and sing with an agent and contribute their voice to a collective model.

Compared to the feeling of tech companies leeching data off of us, it’s a far more empowering mode of engagement when generative models are treated as consensual collective archives. And them doing it in a way that resembles one of the more primal forms of communication, collective singing, feels divine.

Our interpretation would posit AI models as cultural technologies that actually work quite similarly to how culture works, which is far less precise. It’s far more recombinative and generative in that way.

It’s a great project. But, to the point, they touch upon the debate around “creator” later in the interview:

This is a tension right now. There are a lot of contemporaries of ours that also struggle with if you have an idea for something, it can be like, “Is this an art project or is this a company?” You have to figure out where it fits and is best suited and then the longevity of it.

…and more specifically:

I’ve actually come to embrace this term “creator,” which I pushed back against for a really long time because it had the stink of not being artistically serious or something. “Creator” presents art and science and engineering all on a level playing field.

What we’re seeing is maybe the wind-down of that Liberal Enlightenment distinction between art, science and engineering towards something a bit more eternal that is really a matter of people creating things. The best artists are engineers, the best engineers are artists, et cetera.

The term “creator” probably wasn’t intended this way but I’m starting to embrace it for that reason. I think in one hundred years, we’ll look back and be like, “Wow, that was a really big shift.” Communication totally shifted around the time of the ubiquitous internet and will mutate into something very, very different from twentieth-century conceptions of art and science. These clean, industrial divisions I just don’t think will continue to persist.

It’s getting harder because the lines are getting blurrier, but I’m also not currently convinced that one term should be an answer. I’m saying that while also admitting that I don’t know what the answer is. But, what I do know is, that in today’s world, for good and bad, the conversation about ‘the thing’ is nearly as important as ‘the thing’. It’s been context turtles all the way down for quite a while now and the conversation itself being a conversation is a part of that. The fact that there is this conversation about what an artist, creator, or creative is, feels in itself a unique act of creation to pay attention to. Why are we exactly struggling to pen down or redefine these terms right now? When this usually happens (like genres being redefined), it’s because there’s generative change afoot. What exactly does it mean to create, to make art, or to invent today? So, maybe we eventually land on better terms and a better collective understanding of what we’re doing here, but for now, I think, continuing to kick up the dust is the point.

What I’m Up To

Honestly, I’ve been offline and touching grass for the entire week. My iPad was open for a record of 1hr a day, and most of that was spent watching chateau restoration videos. 😅

So, here’s a song that I had on repeat again this week. A great encapsulation of Cape Town in the summer.

🎶 Listening - Goldfish - Moonwalk Away

Enjoy! And I’ll see you all next week. Hope you get to enjoy a lovely sunset.

Simon

Cigarette & Friction Nostalgia

In the trend of going offline, people look for reasons to log off.

In New York recently, after a man sent out flyers asking people to smoke a cigarette with him, hundreds of people, in typical New York City fashion, showed up.

Gen Z’s vice of nicotine is slowly tipping back into what calls “Nicotine Nostalgia”.

Perhaps no other year can serve as reference of vice being back than 2024, the Zynconomy boomed, cigarette bouquets and parties abounded, while an entire generation seems to moving on from vaping. The trad movement has infiltrated stimulants, we made a meme to best visualize this earlier this year and no surprise it went viral. They say nostalgia is a powerful drug, perhaps even more than nicotine, counterculture to the demonization of cigarettes of the past decades, disguised around conventional, which is what made Marlboro campaigns so alluring, an ally to the common Alpha-like man, equal parts American and productive, a form of nicotine nationalism.

In some sense, it’s a yearn for a form factor that actively promotes a break. While disposable vapes do “burn out”, the slow burning away of a cigarette is more visceral.

I don’t think any return to cigarettes will be a long-term trend, simply because it’s counter to a stronger modern trend of maxxing health. It’s moreso getting sober + Gen Z following Huberman + Bryan Johnson + experimenting with Chinese peptides.

The bigger signal to pay attention to, isn’t a desire for a return to an old vice like cigarettes, but rather, a reason to turn off the doomscroll and be more present. It’s less a nostalgia for cigarettes, but a nostalgia for the momentary bliss of an interruption. *Everything* happens in your screen. Your work, your love, your friends, your bank, your media, your DOOM, and your parasocial relationships to Instagram dogs. The lowest hanging fruit for what people might want when they want to go offline is simply to unbundle what they already have, *away* from the medium of their screens. The simple somatic experience of physically moving from space-to-space feels good because it interrupts the loops. Add GLP-1s in the mix, and people would simply *want* to physically move.

To quote Kurt Vonnegut:

“(talking about when he tells his wife he’s going out to buy an envelope) Oh, she says well, you’re not a poor man. You know, why don’t you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet? And so I pretend not to hear her. And go out to get an envelope because I’m going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope. I meet a lot of people. And, see some great looking babes. And a fire engine goes by. And I give them the thumbs up. And, and ask a woman what kind of dog that is. And, and I don’t know. The moral of the story is, is we’re here on Earth to fart around. And, of course, the computers will do us out of that. And, what the computer people don’t realize, or they don’t care, is we’re dancing animals.”

Cozyweb Animals (and Canon)

Speaking of animals. has a great article on the concept of Cozyweb Animals, an extension on Hiroki Azuma’s “Database Animals” of the 1990s. A Database Animal, in a world that’s lost grand narratives, invents purpose through the act of collecting and cataloguing.

The database animal thus lives post-historically: an intelligent, technologically equipped creature for whom cultural life is no longer narrative but combinatorial, and for whom emotion is managed through cataloging information.

But now, in the 2020s, with Discords, Telegrams, etc, the Cozyweb Animals extends this practice into forums of cynical social games around niche interests.

But cozyweb animals live in post-history. Everyone references the same archive. The once-exclusive references of tastemakers now circulate as endlessly reposted content, divorced from the social distance that once made them meaningful. Hierarchies flatten. What emerges in their place is not distinction but peer burden: the obligation to maintain and stay responsive to one’s fellow cozyweb animals.

…and:

Irony becomes proof of belonging: we are all in on the joke, which is to say, we are all still here. In Bourdieu’s world, taste differentiated; in ours, it stabilizes. What began as cultural capital has become affective labor. To be tasteful now is simply to endure the feed without leaving it.

And this social labour to the collective archive is a response and need for self-regulation.

The cozyweb animal can be seen as the next iteration of that process, a collective nervous system of self-regulating individuals, banding together to preserve equilibrium in an overstimulated, uncertain informational environment.

I feel like it describes quite well why many online communities develop seemingly strange shibboleths. Because when the rest of the world feels chaotic, online spaces, not anchored to anything strongly IRL require more appeals to ritual, inside-jokes, and canon. Which is why, I think, fandoms are so notoriously sticky about canon. If appeals to canon disappeared in fandoms, then the community would just invent more naval-gazing canon about itself.

Ranked Choice Voting in Democratic Primaries

At the moment, I think mixed-member representation is the best electoral system for legislatures. Select from both party lists + direct regional representation. But, many democracies are far from this and many are even further away from it due to entrenched systems of power. It’s really hard to imagine to me that the USA would voluntarily give up its entrenched systems for a more representative form of government. That being said, there are tools that within that system gets you closer to that idea. While I think approval voting is the more superior one, ranked-choice voting has gotten appeal and support in some parts of the USA. Notably, there’s been a scoop and rumour that the Democractic party wants to introduce ranked choice voting for its primaries. This would be amazing. It would reduce “strategic” voting. Surface the candidate most of the populace are excited about. It would create more coalition building during the primaries, which would effectively give the party more ability to advocate their respective internal platforms. Here’s hoping.

What I’m Up To

🏃 Running - Post UTCT Cancellation

Still a bit sad that my race had to be cancelled an hour in due to the wind, but I have been back at it. Keeping in maintenance mode for now as I figure out what races I want to tackle next year. What was notable was how sore I was, even though I only ran 10km of the 35km trail race. Table Mountain trails is no joke. A lot more elevation and technical compared to what I trained. Lessons in there!

📺 Watching - Pluribus, Erin Brockovich, Guillermo Del Toro’s Pinocchio

When I’m visiting my parents, I often watch a mixed bag of films with them. Case in point was watching Erin Brockovich and Guillermo Del Toro’s Pinocchio. I enjoyed both. Watching Erin Brockovich just made me sad again about the story that Lucasfilm simply ignored Steven Soderbergh wanting to make a Ben Solo Star Wars movie. :(

🎶 Listening - Prince Rama - Your Life In The End

A great soaring electro-pop track! It does also have peak mid 2010s energy to it. Innocent nostalgic optimism before we entered the permaweird (which I always ascribe to starting when David Bowie died). Great song for driving here in the Southern African summer! :)

That’s it for this week, friends. Hope you get to enjoy a lovely sunset!

Simon

Life is a Room with a TV

This is my favourite genre of writing: when he pays attention to the detail in how media has changed and what it means. In this article, he looks at Star Trek’s change over the years in how they approach the “viewscreen”, seeing it as a reflection of the times.

The evolution of the viewscreen in Star Trek through the decades follows our changing relationship with screens over the decades. In the newer iteration, the viewscreen envelopes the entire bridge of the ship, which eerily reminds me of the Las Vegas sphere. But even though it has much more real estate, the viewscreen is much less central to the plots of Strange New Worlds. In earlier iterations of Star Trek, the viewscreen was something through which you observed and engaged the world at a cool distance, in the new episodes, the viewscreen is just one of many screens through which members of Starfleet access the world. In addition, now there are a plethora of AR screens and continuous data feeds surrounding the crew at all times — mirroring TVs status as just one screen among many in our lives.

Great read.

It made me think about the aesthetics of Star Wars too. It’s stuck in some sense, in a retro-future-junk aesthetic. George Lucas tried to play around with it with the prequels, but since Disney bought it, it’s stayed in the original trilogy aesthetics.

I feel the most interesting place where Star Wars is actually experimenting with aesthetics, is in Visions, where some of the aesthetic cues actually feel quite modern.

The second episode in season 3 has incredible sound and music design that doesn’t feel like it’s the cinematic orchestral energy of John Williams, but more recent inspiration (feels techno). Which, funnily reminded me of a guy who has been layering techno over Star Wars aesthetics (and it actually being a vibe).

Man, sci-fi is so badly in need of entirely new aesthetic overhaul!

American Church Aesthetics

Speaking of aesthetics of its time. dives into the aesthetic of low strip mall American Churches. (ht Jay)

I often see people post pictures of cheap looking church buildings online in a hostile or derogatory way, and it’s easy to frame it in terms of a denomination’s apathy or ignorance. It’s harder to grapple with it in terms of interlocking ideological, social, and historical factors that, like anything, are a result of their time.

What’s interesting in this essay is also how certain aesthetics simply get stuck in a certain time and later on become seen in a different light to their original designs. For example, the Amish might have originally designed their clothes for modesty and simplicity, but now that fashion has moved on, it’s taken on a new tone that indicates traditionalism and religious conservatism.

It’s an interesting idea… that there are examples of things that stayed the same, but because things changed around it, it attracted *new* connotations without any change done by the thing itself. I tried finding more potential examples:

• Church Bells? Still used to tell time and mark occasions. But, hearing it now feels “heritage”.

• Shipping Containers? Still used as containers, but it attracted a minimalist aesthetic canvas (like, making homes out of it, or having raves in a shipyard).

• Farm windmills? Still used today, but attracted additional solarpunk and bucolic aesthetics.

• Barcodes? Still used to day, and now also attracting aesthetics of excessive corporatism.

• Tech Core Industrialism? Exposed piping is still there and sometimes not covered, but took on new meaning in tech-core aesthetic (everything remains unfinished, keep iterating, move fast and break things).

• Safety Vests? Still used, but came to be also seen as representative of working class protests.

• Neon lighting? Not *really* used that much anymore, but beyond its intention for noticeable signage, it’s irrevocably attached to futuristic visions.

Was a fun exercise to think about. Got any more of examples?

Trains Are Innovations In Timetables

I’ve written before on the interesting relationship between timekeeping and trains, especially the result of which was the eventual day of two noons in the US. It was the day that times were synchronised across the US in order to have more consistent timekeeping for cross-continental trains.

Resharing the lovely quote from the New York Times about when time stopped for a few minutes across the US.

At just 9 o’clock, local time, yesterday morning Mr. James Hamblet, General Superintendent of the Time Telegraph Company, and manager of the time service of Western Union Telegraph Company, stopped the pendulum of his standard clock in Room No. 48 in the Western Union Telegraph Building. The long glistening rod and its heavy cylindrical pendulum ball was at rest for 3 minutes and 58.38 seconds. The delicate machinery of the clock rested for the first time in many months. The clicking of the electric instrument on a shelf at the side of the clock ceased and with it ceased the corresponding ticks on similar instruments in many jewelry and watch stores throughout the City. When, as nearly as it could be ascertained, the time stated above had elapsed, the heavy pendulum was again set in motion and swung backward and forward in its never varying trips of one second each from one end of its swing to the other. With the starting of the pendulum the clicking of the little instruments all over the City at intervals of two seconds between each click was resumed. Mr Hamblet had changed the time of New York City and State.

Benedict argues that timetables are the primary innovation and product of trains. (ht Jay).

It’s interesting that he mentions Swiss trains, because when I visited last year, I was really surprised at how tight connections were!

Railways should be optimising for speeds from any station to any other station, not just for speed between the small subset of pairs of stations that happen to be served by the same train. This is an insight that Switzerland recognises.¹ Switzerland has developed a unique way of running its trains, known as the integraler Taktfahrplan, which optimises the timetable for connections between different train services. Obviously not every connection can work perfectly, but Switzerland makes as many of them as possible as quick as possible.

It works!

The reliability point may seem risible, but it is true: the possibility of an hour’s delay is just accepted as a fact of life on a road trip or a flight, whereas with railways, we start tutting as soon as the train is merely five minutes late. We become irritated because we hold the railways to a high standard of reliability, and we hold them to that standard because they generally fulfil it.

The irony is, is that in the US, delays are frequent, which is (intentionally or unintentionally) by design. 😅

I’m sure there’s a lot of examples where an infrastructure innovation is actually an accompanying information innovation. But, the most interesting ones are a bit more hidden. Like, being able to see AutoCAD templates in real world construction.

What I’m Up To

🏃‍♂️ Running - UTCT 35km

I ran the Ultra Trail Cape Town 35km race this morning. Unfortunately, 6km in, it got cancelled due to the high wind and we were turned around. Definitely a disappointment after months of work and life planning, but not much you can do about it. Having seen videos of what the conditions were on top of Table Mountain, would’ve definitely been awful. Regardless, I still enjoyed the short trot out on Table Mountain and still happy that I got to the starting line (with both my brothers)! Hope to one day complete a race like this, and this foundation of fitness I’ll carry into 2026.

📺 Watching - Pluribus

🕹️ Gaming - Smash Bros Ultimate

Hanging with my twin, we always try to fit in a few games of Smash Bros. Still enjoying it after so many years. I really hope we’ll see a new Smash Bros game for the Switch 2. Hopefully soon!

🎶 Listening - White Lies - I Just Wanna Win One Time

Been listening to more of the new White Lies album (Night Light). I’ve been a lifelong White Lies fan and all their albums are an easy 8 out of 10 for me. At first, this album didn’t strike me as much as the previous ones. But, I gave it more time, and it definitely grew on me. Its highs aren’t as high as previous albums, but still a super solid outing from them.

That’s it for this week, folks. Hope you get to enjoy a lovely sunset.

Simon

The Distribution Conundrum

im in this constant tension rn of knowing that distribution is king and that i can and should grow a bigger presence on the internet.

while at the same time having max clarity on the fact that i am infinitely happier outside, off screens, in nature, climbing mountains, and spending time with people irl.

This tweet resonated.

And I don’t always know what the answer is. I’m a creator. It’s fairly imperative that I maintain *some* public online presence if I want to continue telling stories, making art, or building new tech. But, I’m also increasingly less happy about the venue. Distribution has always been king, but it also used to feel that getting access to distribution felt sane, even if it wasn’t always reasonable (eg, in the past, having to convince gatekeepers of your worth). The democratization of information meant that instead of convincing a handful of ivory tower bottlenecks, you could sell directly to where consumers were having a conversation. But, over time, this venue became 1) gamed, 2) algorithmitized, and 3) noisy.

The bazaar became too popular for its own good, now requiring you to ignore the one guy selling performance enhancing pills shouting at you while you’re just trying to sell a cozy fantasy novel. The entire model became at once more streamlined (“just have to go viral!”), but more esoteric. It’s like whispering incantations from a spells manual to a God who only wants to be heard in a language you don’t understand. It’s slot machines as distribution, where the only success really comes your ability to keep rolling the dice. And this is/was all prior to generative AI and agents joining the fray.

I don’t really know how this will all shake out in time. People are starting to opt out, but even though modern distribution is a doomslop dark forest, I believe fans and creators don’t really want the 90s back either. Media today is still far more richer and diverse than it ever could have been prior to the web. Somewhere in between though, we might land again somewhere saner?

Do Fans Actually Care About Canon?

A recent media report came out that a James Bond writer would apparently struggle to write a new Bond film due to canon discontinuity.

“Writers are tearing their hair out,” claimed the dubious insider report from Radar Online. “Bond didn’t just vanish off a cliff or fake his death — he was blown to pieces on screen,” the report points out. The rest of the report then cites the opinion of the aforementioned novelist, Anthony Horowitz, who wrote three Bond novels set in the original Ian Fleming canon, not the films.“If I was asked tomorrow to write the script, I wouldn’t be able to do it,” Horowitz said in a separate interview, which Radar Online is citing as new, but is actually from September of this year. “Where would you start? You can’t have him waking up in the shower and saying it was all a dream.”

It is kind of weird that even the Bond universe wants to potentially become more canonized, a series that has thrived on reboots. It made me think again on canon. I’ve contended before that canon is overplayed and that studios are contorting themselves for no good reason. Lore should be myth, not canon.

Besides the concerns of studios unnecessarily making it harder for themselves, it feels like ‘canon’ is both a scapegoat and a bikeshed, depending on which side you are on.

If the studios or writers complain about it, it feels like the easier thing to complain about rather than the other more structural problem they might be facing (knowing what to actually do to make good media). aka bikeshedding.

If fans complain about it, it’s because it’s an easy scapegoat. If a movie is good and it doesn’t really follow canon, what are the odds that fans will complain as much? Much less at least. If it’s bad, it’s easier to just say: “hey, look how they ruined it by this dumb retcon!”

I’m still firmly in the camp that both studios and fans should let canon go. It’s put on a pedestal far too much. As Kylo Ren said in The Last Jedi. “Let the past die, kill it if you have to. It’s the only way to become what you’re meant to be.”

Disney+ AI

Speaking of Disney. This was easy to spot from MILES and YEARS away. Disney plans to allow fans to remix Disney media with AI.

From a few years ago:

In general, LLM-media will likely fill in the holes left by 1) media being expensive to produce, and 2) timely to produce (because the content is time-sensitive), and 3) too niche to provide for a certain market. In other words, LLM-media will come to serve a long-tail of content. Expansive fan-fiction universes.

And literally just a few weeks ago:

Conglomeration begets conglomeration. Now, the labels just become more powerful. What does this look like if Disney does the same? They then not only produce much of the media, but also any AI generated fan-fic is also owned/distributed by them. It’s always why the arguments for stronger copyright in the wake of generative AI felt scary. It’s not really going to get creators that much more compared to the power of mega corps consolidating power.

Look, this was inevitable. Regular fans will probably like it, but it does feel scarier in the longer-term. Worried about a future where they build a walled garden that doesn’t allow fair use outside of Disney. And also worried that, in speaking of distribution, earlier, mega IP will just become more mega as a result. More risk averse, less opportunity for new creators to make things.

What I’ve Been Up To

Been quite a busy week with travel and catching up with family and friends, so not much to report otherwise!

✍️ Writing - Novel #2 Revisions

Not much to report here. Just slowly continuing.

📺 Watching - Star Wars Visions, Pluribus, and Friendship

Speaking of canon. Enjoying the new Star Wars Visions series. They’re experimenting with continuing some of the earlier stories. I kinda wish they’d just rip the band aid off and just make it “proper” IP and not hide it behind the “Visions” brand. Own it.

Pluribus, Vince Gilligan’s new show is off to a great start. High concept sci-fi and lovingly crafted. Going to enjoy seeing how it shakes out!

Friendship (2024) is a great dark comedic satire on modern male friendship and the “loneliness crisis”. Tim Robinson is great in this. Very watchable. It being funny and unhinged hides the darker sides of modern heteronormative male friendship.

🕹️ Gaming - Hades 2, UFO 50

Besides Hades 2, caught up on more UFO 50 games with a buddy this week. Still so wildly inventive a game. It’s one of those games that you can’t help but appreciate for the joy coming from Derek Yu in creating it. A game that only comes from passion.

🏃‍♂️ Running - UTCT is here!

Nervous and excited. Next week this time I’ll be running around Table Mountain, doing a 36km trail race over 2000m of elevation. It’s Ultra Trail Cape Town. No idea how it will go on the day, but focusing on making it an enjoyable day out on the mountain. Not focused on intensity and time, so not going to push myself too much. But still. I haven’t gone longer than a 24km trail run and unsure what the last 3rd will be like. Wish me luck! Will report back! After this week, looking forward to a well deserved rest from training. :)

🎶 Listening - Soft Loft - Paper Plane

A lovely gentle indie track. Enjoy! That’s it for this week folks. Hope you get to enjoy a lovely sunset. :)

Simon

Where To Start Your Story

I enjoyed Katie exploring the opening scenes of two stories (Lady Bird and The Arsonists’ City). It actually made me revisit my own beliefs about where and how to start a story. My previous belief rested primarily on bringing out the stakes as soon as possible. Show the core dilemma asap, essentially.

But, I think it was missing a key component: agency. And Katie’s descriptions helped make me see that.

If you start with showing agency, it shows the following:

• If someone does something in the world, it means there’s already a stake involved. High agency people do stuff because stakes exist. They already care strongly enough to do something.

• It shows the reader that this story will contain people worth reading about. In the real world, humans enjoy reading about other humans that *do* things. No less different in fiction. The reader will participate in an agentic world.

It made me realise that the famous “save the cat” advice is actually about agency.

It’s often advised that the protagonist should do something likeable or relatable in the opening scenes: that the point of “save the cat” is to make people vested in the character, to be on their side of the story.

But, I think the key focus here is simply that we get to see a character that *does* something. It’s why murder stories are alluring: it shows agency. Such high agency that people are actually willing to kill someone.

When I look at my story examples in the article, you see this:

• Star Wars starts with Leia and the rebellion *already* in high agency having just stolen the blueprints to the Death Star.

• Breaking Bad starts with Walter White taking drastic action to change his life.

• Little Miss Sunshine literally starts with Olive preparing what to do when she wins. She’s halfway through agency already. And then her father’s quote comes on, giving a motivational speech about winning.

So yes. In the same way I previously noted that “act 2” is more about surfacing context against the oft-prescribed “conflict”, then “save the cat” advice isn’t so much about relatability, but rather inviting the reader into a story with agency.

If you do that, you’re also revealing what’s at stake.

Getty vs Stability AI Trial

Andres has a great write-up on the recent result of the Getty Images vs Stability AI Trial. The interesting part of this trial is how much of it hang on the thread that it depended *where* the model was trained.

This could change, but UK rightsholders will have to contend with the fact that if a model was trained outside of the UK, then they won’t be able to sue for direct copyright infringement (or sue for secondary infringement as we will see). Getty Images decided not to even try to contend this question in the trial, concentrating on the trade mark and secondary infringement claims. Let that sink in for a second. Because of the lack of commercial TDM exceptions and a fair use equivalent, no AI developer is conducting any training in the UK at the moment, this means that all training is abroad, which also means that no UK rightsholder can sue for direct infringement. It’s extremely ironic that on paper the UK has more protection because it has a much weaker TDM exception, but that is also the reason why they can’t sue for direct copyright infringement.

As I pointed out last week with the UMG music AI deals, the irony sits in the last sentence. By actually committing to stronger rules, copyright holders can actually lose.

Planet-Scale Cities

I love sci-fi cities. No wonder my debut novel was all about a unique city. This video on cities like Coruscant and Trantor was interesting.

In some sense, though, I like when it’s taken seriously, but also, sometimes, I think it shouldn’t. It tends to fall apart when you push too hard. It’s reminiscent of my recent post about paracosmal worlds. Sometimes, you shouldn’t push too hard.

But, still, it’s fun to poke into the what-ifs of fictional cities with strange rules, vibes, and systems. With the description of Coruscant growing upwards through layering on top, I think there could be an entire story that’s literally just about a society fighting and debating about whether to apply a new layer. I can’t imagine people owning apartments with views of the sky being very happy about a new layer being put on top. Give me a YIMBY vs NIMBY debate in Star Wars. 😅

Another point on this, is that I wish that these visions of mega cities also experimented away from the late 20th century extrapolations. Let’s make the assumption that Coruscant works like it does. It layers new layers as it grows. Let’s assume people accept it. Then, truly, the lower layers aren’t just going to accept being faced with dark brutalist industro doom aesthetic in the lower layers. They’re going to create facsimiles of nature and wonder. eg, all the buildings showing or containing nature. Or mini suns that mimic the outside world. Giant screens of nature scenes, actual big parks, etc, that make living in the lower layer actually *feel* nice.

What I’m Up To

A good busy week spent with people before heading to South Africa for the summer, so I didn’t get around to too much media consumption.

✍️ Writing - Novel #2

Continuing to work on revisions. As the year is winding down, I’m facing a lot of introspection around the book. On a personal level, I’ve put a lot into this book and over time added a lot of meaning to it. This is what has been my primary project since June 2023. 2.5 years of actively working on it while the rest of life happened. In some sense, the longer it has taken, the more I feel it has to mean something. Something to show for spending 2.5 years on a story or book. I’m also questioning what I want to focus on in 2026. I have art projects to finish and work on. And there’s other work surfacing in my mind that I might want to prioritise. And so, I’ve experimented with treating myself with a bit more acceptance and grace with this book. That it doesn’t have to be proof of the life I lived in the past 2.5 years. And so, I’m treating it with more playfulness too. In many ways, it feels like I’ve actually been busy with an MFA, learning extensively more about storytelling while writing this. And so, yes, it’s not all for nothing.

I’m happy to tell myself that “this scene sucks, rework it”. And it’s been fun. I still enjoy writing, and the book will be done when it’s done. And that’s okay. Whether it’s released in 2027 or 2028, so be it. :)

📺 Watching - Pluribus

I have not gotten around to watching Better Caul Saul, but Vince Gilligan taking on a sci-fi show on Apple TV is all up my alley. The first episodes was very entertaining and contains a great playground for themes around happiness, individual vs collective responsibility, agency, and consent. Looking forward to the rest of it!

🎶 Listening - White Lies - Juice

My favourite band has a new album out. Haven’t had time to digest it properly, but thoroughly enjoying what I’ve heard so far!

That’s it for this week, folks. Hope you get to enjoy a sunset.

Simon

UMG Generative AI Deals

Two weeks, I was in a local cafe when I noticed a looping AI slop video on the screen showing classy jazz musicians singing. It’s then I realized it’s connected to the jazz fusion/blues that was coming over the speakers. When I shazamed the songs, nothing came up. It was AI generated music. I noticed that other patrons even started commenting on the music without realizing it was AI generated. It was a realization, that, especially in music, most people wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between genre generative AI and real genre music. I’m definitely not able to. If it wasn’t for the video, I would not have been the wiser.

So, it’s not a big surprise that the labels want their share of this. AI generated music is already topping Billboard charts.

UMG announced two generative AI deals. One with UDIO, settling litigation, and partnering on a creation, consumption, and streaming product and with Stability.ai for tools. Udio gets access to train their models on UMG’s catalogue. They are still deciding what music to utilize for training. Details on this matter is not clear yet.

CEO Andrew Sanchez of UMG said this in Rolling Stone:

“The vision is that you’re gonna be able to consume and interact with your favorite songs and artists in the same place,” Udio CEO Andrew Sanchez tells Rolling Stone. “I might wanna listen to songs that are made by my favorite band, and then maybe I wanna remix one. Or, ‘I’ve been listening to this band and this other band, I’m gonna mash ’em up together and then I might listen to those new songs as well.’” Sanchez calls it “a massive expansion… a paradigm that doesn’t exist right now” — part Spotify-like service, part creator platform, part social network. “We want to build a community of superfans around creation,” he adds. “As we say internally, it’s connection through creation.”

In trying to find reactions, an unexpected backlash comes from Udio users that have had their experience locked down because downloads had been disabled. So, Udio is turning more into a walled garden.

Now Universal and Udio are targeting 2026 for the launch of their joint platform, which will be a “walled garden” where no AI creations can be downloaded or posted outside of the site. The idea, according to UMG executive vice president and chief digital officer Michael Nash, is to avoid “direct cannibalization,” preventing the AI songs from competing with artists’ actual tracks on streaming, and making sure the platform generates entirely new revenue.

Being able to remix a song will be opt-in on part of the artist (but they don’t seem to have any say in their songs being used for training or not).

I did try to find more takes from musicians, but the response has been muted. I guess, a label creating a walled garden means that anyone training or using their work keeps it inside a controlled environment.

And, I think most musicians have already given up to some extent with the nature of music industry as it is today. For much of the generative AI slop, to me, it’s mostly felt as going from 1 to 10, not 0 to 1. The real threat and damage to creative industries came from the platform economies and generative AI just adds noise.

So, on the one side, I can see why people might see this as somewhat of a win, because at least, you know, the generative AI music will stay within a controlled environment. But, what bothers me more, is the lack of dynamism, or rather continuation of it. Part of the reason music is where it is, is that the major labels strong-armed the DSPs like Spotify in favour of the labels (and for that matter, the big artists). It just created a stronger power-law distribution. Conglomeration begets conglomeration. Now, the labels just become more powerful. What does this look like if Disney does the same? They then not only produce much of the media, but also any AI generated fan-fic is also owned/distributed by them. It’s always why the arguments for stronger copyright in the wake of generative AI felt scary. It’s not really going to get creators that much more compared to the power of mega corps consolidating power.

Lemons and Slop

Speaking of platform economies, this article highlights a problem, a race to the bottom, related to George Akerlof’s concept of a market for lemons.

The thinking goes like this: if a buyer can’t distinguish between good and bad, everything gets priced somewhere in the middle. If you’re selling junk, this is fantastic news—you’ll probably get paid more than your lemon is worth. If you’re selling a quality used car, this price is insultingly low. As a result, people with good cars leave the market to sell their stuff elsewhere, which pushes the overall quality and price down even further, until eventually all that’s left on the market are lemons.

He uses the example of shopping for sleeping masks.

I thought about this last week while shopping online for a sleep mask. Brands like MZOO, YFONG, WAOAW popped up, and these seemed less like companies and more like vowel smoke ejected from a factory flue hole, then slotted into a distribution platform. The long tail of generic brands on e-commerce platforms is a textbook lemons market: good products get drowned out by these alphabet soup products, who use their higher margins to buy sponsored placement in search results. Both buyers and sellers eventually lose (and perhaps the platforms win, as long as they don’t wear out their reputation).

Ultimately, the platform gets hijacked by performativity to the medium, where the incentive to hide information becomes valuable.

Instead, let’s zag and revisit my point earlier about system-gaming becoming the most viable playbook instead of focusing on the product. As a consumer and as a designer, I hope this is a temporary state before a massive recalibration. The primacy of meta-activities—optimizing for algorithms, visibility theater, consumer entrapment, externalization of costs, performative internal alignment, horse-trading amongst a set of DOA ideas—is poison. It is a road to nowhere worth going.

This happened everywhere online: from online dating to search. Having to play to meta activities to succeed.

I get his proposed solution, but I don’t fully agree:

The safest, smartest path is also the most mundane: keep the main thing the main thing. Outcomes matter, but output literally comes first. Outputs are the business to everyone outside it—what customers see, buy, and use. You can’t stay safe in abstractions forever. Eventually, you must attend to the reality of what’s in front of you, because that’s where work gets done and where assumptions get validated or falsified (because reality has a surprising amount of detail).

In other words, the meta ruins things for everyone. To hide in abstractions is to dodge the reality of your choices. These tactics may get you profit, but you sacrifice benefit. The climb may feel like progress, but at the end you’ll find yourself at the top of a mountain of lemons, perhaps not of your own making, but almost certainly of your own doing.

One of these meta activities is something you also see in general in systems. Once a system produces valuable output, people play to the form and aesthetics of the system, rather than its functions. It becomes primarily a LARP. Like, people buying fake luxury goods to signal perceptions of wealth.

Unfortunately, I don’t think we exist anymore in an information market where the good and best thing beats out the wide distribution of the okay thing. And platform economies are to blame. I’m a broken record on this (just see my previous newsletters), but the way out is to opt out of these distribution systems. I don’t think one consumer is going to make a big impact. But, I think people are recognizing the local fitness function trap, particularly in domains like social media. Authenticity beats slop and if people recognize how much “fast food” exists in our platform economies, they’d break off to fair trade and organic authenticity instead. But, as we’ve seen in markets like this, it was focused on the consumer that could afford more expensive food. Obesity kept rising, until recently… Which does make me wonder: what is the “ozempic” of this? It would be something that not just moves people away from distribution slop (losing weight), but also makes them prefer authenticity in general (losing weight turns into you preferring healthier options in general). With GLP-1s also changing people’s general cravings, maybe it *is* GLP-1s. (ht Rian)

Amtrak vs Shinkansen

Every time I look the NE US megalopolis corridor, I cry tiny tears at how much better its train system could be. Amtrak is fine, but man would it be wonderful to get to NYC in an 1h30 from DC. At that speed, it’s fast enough to even consider going for dinner in NYC after work and getting a later train back. Quico has a short article that juxtaposes it to Japanese trains (and airplane travel).

Amtrak takes a different approach. Somebody must have decided that since airlines are the Acela’s main competitor, the trick is to make the Acela experience as airline-like as possible. You see nods to this throughout the passenger journey.

I hadn’t realised this myself, but the design metaphor lands. I do wonder whether it will see increased ridership if it goes back to being more train-like (no lining up and more regular schedules). Due to the speed, it’s not really trips that people simply do last minute. There’s a sweet spot, though, that if it’s regular enough, it can be done like that. I’ve started taking far more DC public transport once they brought back automation on the tracks and the trains literally starting coming more regularly by a few minutes. It’s now short enough that I don’t have to plan for when the trains arrive. And that create huge induced demand by just crossing that threshold. There’s definitely a dream here where Randy Clarke, running WMATA, gets mega funding to build a dream project of regular high speed rail on the US East corridor. But, this is also America, uniquely hamstrung by its own culture of reduced appetite for mega public works projects and onerous regulations making these projects cost far too much money (#abundance). Maybe, one day. (ht VGR)

What I’ve Been Up To

I’m testing a new title design for the Sunday Edition. Feel like adding in Sunday Edition at the top is pointless. I thought I would have had more time to write regular essays, but alas not. So, keeping the focus on just publishing these roundups/essays as-is. Several years into writing this newsletter and I still don’t really know what I’m doing, except that I enjoy writing this every week. :)

✍️ Writing - Novel #2 Revisions

I’m not as far as I had hoped, but progress is continuing well regardless. The previous draft was 66,000 words which felt slightly on the low end, so I’ve also been taking the liberty to add some extra scenes. Hoping to finish this revision soon. Or, at least, send out a bunch of new query letters in the next week or two, as I work to complete this draft.

🕹️ Gaming - Hades 2

Haven’t had much time to game this week, but still enjoying adding in a run or two.

📺 Watching - Out of Africa

I know Robert Redford passed away this year and I realised I don’t think I’ve watched any of his classics. I enjoyed it. Meryl Streep’s performance is spectacular, and I was quite surprised to discover that this was actually all based on real-life events (yes, been living a bit under the rock on this). It was interesting to read the letterboxd reviews. “Out of all the Academy Award Best Picture winners I have seen, this is clearly the one that was released in 1985.” Which, yes, is true. Its depictions of Africa has not aged that well. But, I think that’s missing the point a bit. Not every film needs to be watched with the lens of 2025. To each their own.

👻 Halloween - Severance

I went as Mark S. from Severance this year. I enjoyed dressing up! Halloween in the US is always great. People are really into it here.

🏃‍♂️ Running - Tapering-ish

Definitely feeling fatigued as I’m hitting the peak of my training for Ultra Trail Cape Town. Learned to get my nutrition down for 3+ hour efforts, which I’m happy about. But, I’m stuck in a fatigue loop, where no matter what I do (protein, magnesium, anti-inflammatory), muscle soreness keeps me awake at night, which continues the loop of fatigue. So, I have to rest. So, starting the taper a bit sooner than planned.

🎶 Listening - Killen. - Mojo

Great dance track! :)

That’s it for this week folks. Hope you get to enjoy a lovely sunset.

Simon

This article definitely challenged my intuition of modern platform economics (ht Mat). We’re used now to the reality that on most digital platforms these days that there’s a strong power curve. A small percentage of creators on a platform earn the most of the revenue. We’re used to examples like: “On Spotify, 90% of streams go to the top 1% of artists.” The article’s premise is, is that this is prevalent on platforms where revenue is secondary to the actual transaction. In other words, we watch YouTube for free and the creators earn from ads YouTube displays on their videos.

Substack’s revenue curve looks different. The bulk of the revenue does *not* go towards the most popular creators which fulfills the old narrative of the “long tail”.

The argument is, is that Substack *as a platform* works differently. It’s not selling attention, but simply, access. It’s a more directed exchange of value compared to the ad revenue tango. I subscribe. I read your writing.

These needs and desires follow the contours of groups and individuals and their own positions in the world in a way the universal dynamics of attention can’t. A private equity analyst needs information that a nurse doesn’t. A gamer wants to play Ghostwire: Tokyo, a quilter wants to make a quilt, a NASCAR driver cares about tires and stuff, and to you, your lover is the most beautiful person in the world. Attention has few optima, desire has many.

So, yes, the argument makes sense. Adding money into our information mix again, there’s more cost at stake and thus it expresses individual desire in the marketplace again compared to amorphous “ad groups”. And, I believe one of the key components of this individual desire is to simply support what you like. It’s a similar sentiment to when, you say, discover a new band and love their music. They happen to come through your city, so you go and watch them in a small venue, and then decide to buy the merch to support them. You wouldn’t otherwise have bought the merch, but it’s about being given the opportunity to support something you like when it’s *there*. I subscribe to various Substacks, both purely for the content, but also to support smaller writers who are doing interesting work. Ad attention economics discounts these smaller writers because they can’t figure out who the viewers are.

So, when real money is exchanged in an information marketplace, people do discount supporting larger and more successful creators because it’s a calculus of: “I’d rather my money go towards my friend’s attempt at becoming a writer than supporting a writer who doesn’t need my extra few bucks a month.” Supporting the latter would simply come from only wanting to read paywalled articles, not from some other incentive.

That being said. If this thesis holds true, why Substack, and why now? The web platform era has many examples of users and creators exchanging money between them without resorting to ad economics. Does Patreon have similar curves, for example? Or, OnlyFans?! I tried finding numbers, but couldn’t find convincing evidence otherwise. Maybe there is more information that proves this point. Or what about more traditional creative industries, like the art world? The music industry has been warped by the DSPs (Spotify) irrevocably, but the art world has no “digital attention economics”? Or, could one say that the art world’s power law distribution curves (where few artists make mega bucks) is simply downstream from attention economics of Instagram? Literature, to some extent, can these days be seen as downstream from attention economics of BookTok?

It’s perhaps, that Substack’s unique curve relies on it being a medium that has no strong ad attention economics upstream of it because consuming essays simply take a lot of time and continuous consumption. That being said, attention economics isn’t unavoidable. There has been a sense the Notes inside Substack is incentivizing the sharing of viral content that seem to fit a Substack-ian mold of some variation of grand-theory-of-everything articles alongside lowercase-insight-porn.

Either way. It’s interesting. At the end of the day, I think it holds true that removing ad intermediaries gets us closer to a flatter distribution curve, but I think something else is going on inside Substack that accounts for its different revenue curve.

I’m not entirely convinced that simply adding direct exchange of value changes the dynamic. I think there’s ultimately more going on here. Curious if anyone has any thoughts to share.

The Quirks of Queens

I found this unique section in Queens recently.

Looks very confusing. It’s not unique to this bundle of 60th everything. Queens in general have strange assignments of roads.

I went looking for answers as to why they did it this way. It came down to the fact that original grid layout were simply streets (north to south) and avenues (east to west).

In densification, when extra roads were added in-between, they simply followed a naming scheme to fit within the old grid system.

Ron Miller explains:

The Streets are laid out in an approximately linear fashion. They begin at 1st Street and increase numerically towards the eastern border. They currently go as high as 271st Street. When the blocks are small or are added after the initial layout and assignment, additional names appear. After Street would come Place followed, if required, by Lane. This is why only some numbers have the additional designation of Place or Lane. For example, if two streets were to be added between 21st Street and 22nd Street, the order would become 21st Street, 21st Place, 21st Lane and then 22nd Street.

Similarly, the Avenues go to the southern border and go as high as 167th Avenue. When the blocks are small or are added after the initial layout and assignment, additional names appear. These are assigned, in order, Road, Drive, then Terrace. This is why only some numbers have the additional designations of Road, Drive or Terrace. As an example, if three streets were to be added between 21st Avenue and 22nd Avenue, the sequence would become 21st Avenue, 21st Road, 21st Drive, 21st Terrace, and then 22nd Avenue.

Prediction

Loved this article from , which makes the premise that a part of the rise of gambling and prediction markets in general point to a societal need to feel like we are in control of our future in an age of confusing complexity.

Prediction has an overwhelming amount of cynical participation, and what Peter Sloterdijk once called “enlightened false consciousness”: the ability to see through ideology while still performing it. The wager becomes a parody of belief, a way to inhabit a future one no longer trusts by speculating on its image.

In that sense, Prediction is not the ontology of what comes next but a mourning for the modern ontology of the future as something predictable. Beneath the rhetoric of probabilistic rationality lies a desperate nostalgia for a time when the future could still be believed in.

Where to from here?

What I’m Up To

I turned 36 this week. I’ve never really been a stickler for complaining about growing older. Never been that bothered. But, given that I had a unique year in rebuilding my life after divorce, it’s admittedly the first birthday where I actually like life is passing me by too quickly. I think I will feel younger again when I turn 37 next year. ;)

✍️ Writing - Novel #2 Revisions

I had written off the initial batch of 8 agents I queried in July, having been rejected by some and not hearing back from others while I was busy doing revisions. But, just to give you context on the timelines of this process. An agent sent a rejection 3 months later this week. Sometimes, the process can just take quite long.

That being said, I believe I should be on target for finishing this revision in the next 2 weeks. I’m having fun with it as I’m over the toughest part of the revisions! :)

🕹️ Gaming - Hades 2

Still enjoying this a lot. And trying ignore trying Subway Builder as much as I can. 😅

📺 Watching - One Battle After Another

A really great film with stellar directing and performances. One thing I love the most about this film is that it’s a masterful showcase in how in sometimes with having simple elements, you can add so much depth and flair. The film is entirely serious on its surface, but the directing and acting adds extremely watchable humor throughout. It’s such a fine line to get right, because you can tell it is deliberate, while feeling so natural. Humor in film is often played up in a way where the director doesn’t always trust the audience (MCU humor can be the worst culprit here). Paul Thomas Anderson trusts the audience and I love that. I also enjoyed the goofy LARP-ing of extremist institutions, which given the humor of the film, is another reminder that extremist movements always demand to be taken seriously. They deflate when you laugh at them instead. This is for you if: you enjoy great action directing with dark humor.

🏃 Running (and Meditation)

Been pushing my trail long runs recently, going for 23km at a time over 3 hours and testing nutrition. Must admit, being in constant training mode since June has been getting to me. The last stretch is upon me and then looking forward to a well-deserved break. Since I’ve restarted daily meditation practice, I’ve also used my running as a meditative tool, listening to talks by teachers like Joseph Goldstein. It’s been great. Also, such a beautiful time of the year to run in nature on east coast USA. Making the final push easier. :)

🎶 Listening - Night Tapes

Went to see Night Tapes this week. They’ve been the backdrop of my year and I was so happy that they came through town. Besides my perpetual obsession with Casino Versus Japan they were my most listened to band this year. Magical live. So, here’s Drifting, again.

So damn dreamy.

That’s it for this week, folks! Hope you get to see a lovely sunset.

Simon

Cixin Liu and Paracosmal Worlds

I’ve really enjoyed ’ multi-part series on Chinese Sci-Fi. The last one covers Cixin Liu specifically. Do read all of it! :)

In the past I’ve tried explaining to others how much I enjoy Liu’s sci-fi because of how inventive and playfully grand it is. People *do* unthinkable stuff in his worlds. Kevin sees this as paracosmal, which is:

I would describe these stories as “paracosmal” after the word paracosm: a complete world-system dreamt up in the mind of a child. Paracosms are distinct from works of adult worldbuilding in that they are typically held together by a parallel system of logic and rules, which is not always legible to an outsider.

Legibility is second to playfulness of the world.

Many of Liu’s chains of events would not be acceptable to someone who doesn’t know very much about science, but they suddenly become compelling to people who are familiar with the general shape of certain technical arguments. Technical readers are forced to admit that his reasoning is compelling, even though the conclusions are pretty absurd. Any ‘plot holes’ are not bugs, but interesting features used to explore the nature of the universe.

This is exactly what Death’s End felt like, hurtling forward like a rollercoaster.

I can only describe the second half of Death’s End as breathless. It really does feel like an excited child just going and going; readers will struggle to keep up with Liu as he forcibly drags you from the walls of Constantinople to fictional storybook kingdoms, and then onto eon-spanning planetary odysseys.

He ends the wonderful essay with:

Ultimately, Liu’s fiction can inspire us to more deliberately try to free ourselves from the public gaze of convention. At a time when many aspects of craft have been boiled down to a science, it is natural to feel hemmed in by the typical prescriptive narrative constraints. But in the end, the emotions that draw people to sci-fi in the first place tend to be more paracosmal than enlightened. Sometimes the best thing you can do is try out something narratively “unsound”, just to see what unfolds.

I think it’s a huge art as a writer to simultaneously make the world feel playful and coherent. Imaginative play as a kid centers on infinite storytelling. The story is there to continue the play and that’s why it can sometimes feel all over the place as boundaries and rules and elements of play are constantly renegotiated. As adult writers, especially in sci-fi, we can be stuck in justifying the world’s unique rules at cost of the story. Getting it right in the way Cixin Liu does is *really* hard however, because as Kevin notes, he is quite clever at creating sufficient and smart rules for his playful narratives to work in.

I think it’s ultimately that as writers, we have to train ourselves to suspend belief long enough that we eventually find ourselves in new territory and then work back from that. When kids break down their own narratives in play to move onto the next thing, it’s simply because they are kids. But as adults, we can hold more in our head for longer. We’ve just taught ourselves to stay in the lanes because usually, we’ve learned that when we veer off a path, there’s nothing there. You stay hemmed in, prematurely. Keep going even if it doesn’t make sense yet. I feel like this is in general a good life metaphor. 😅

Birth of the Braai

Johann Fourie has an interesting article on the history of the “braai” in South Africa (South African Heritage Day was on the 24th of Sept).

According to Funde, the braai came to cultural prominence in the 1930s primarily as a fundraising activity. Over the course of that decade, braaiing became more explicitly tied to Afrikaans culture and tradition with the rise of Afrikaner Nationalism, and particularly in connection with the centenary celebrations of the Great Trek. In the run-up to and during the centenary, hundreds of braaivleisaands were held across the country. One event, conducted on the grounds of the Helpmekaar School in Johannesburg, saw a staggering ‘2,000 pounds of sausages, 4,000 pancakes, thousands of mosbolletjies, hundreds of chickens, large quantities of fruit salad and cool drinks, coffee and tea’ served to the 5,000-strong crowd.

I’ve tried explaining to Americans how a braai differs to a regular BBQ. While a braai does focus on variations of deep interest in cooking over a fire, a braai is first and foremost a social tradition versus it being more so about wanting fire-grilled cuisine specifically. After the fire is lit, people hang around and socialize (sometimes throwing on more wood if the vibe is good) until the food is eventually grilled and served. Afterwards, the fire might even be relit continue the social environment.

Lighting the fire is like lighting a beacon, a call for friends and family to put other things aside (their book, their phone, their game) and join around the fire over a snack and a beverage. While a BBQ is usually more focused only on the cuisine, South Africans usually try to invent reasons to create a braai-like atmosphere. For example, during the summer holidays where we braai every night, we might light a fire simply to reheat leftovers. It’s all centered on creating a social space and the fire and the cooking is ultimately an excuse for it (without, again, ignoring the fun and creativity of fire grilled cuisine). We cook a lot more things on the fire simply because we want to center our social life around it. It’s *the* biggest thing I miss the most about living in the USA: to not smell, at *minimum*, a weekly wood fire, and to enjoy time with family and friends around it.

NoAI LoFi

I was turned onto this via Jay. It’s people recreating the “LoFi Background Beats” genre, but actually doing it as IRL and filmed. It’s both a reaction to AI, but I also think pre-AI, it’s a reaction to the algorithm in general.

I think it’s a trend that will continue. In Jan 2024, I claimed that with generative AI, the human medium becomes the human message. It follows the rise of slow form media (like conversational podcasts and influencers like Sam Sulek that make it feel like you’re hanging with a gym friend).

Another term I think is also apt, is: presence media. It’s about recreating the feeling of there actually being a human near you. The pace is deliberately at human pace, no fast cuts or fancy editing. I think we might feel this kind of content is sad (just, you know, actually spend time with other humans), but on the spectrum of slop scrolling versus hanging out friends, jamming by a lake, I think this middle ground of media is actually better than most of the slop around.

What I’m Up To

✍️ Writing - Revising Novel #2

Feel like I cracked the toughest parts of this revision and the rest should be coasting to completion (I say, optimistically as usual). Still hoping to finish it before the end of the month. I’ve also been debating a title change. I always toss and turn on naming conventions. In a wildly saturated market in *everything* these days, it feels naming is ever more important, especially if there’s not much to back up the book or author. Too clever naming obscures the point of the book, but too on the nose and it can feel flat. But, when I think about one of my most successful projects, it likely succeeded in part because the name of the artwork is what it is about. This Artwork Is Always On Sale.

There’s an interesting strategy that one of my favourite musicians is doing for his new album. Usually making epic electronic music, he started promoting a new genre focused album (focused on his take on classic trance). In promotions, it’s simply called “the trance album”.

But the actual album is called “Music Is Invisible”. I like this approach. While Tourist is calling it something else in promotional material, you *can* just actually call something, something else too. Go all post-rock on literary naming conventions. It’s just one long name of: <clever title> or the story about <actual plot point>.

The thing is… If I was planning to self-publish this novel, I’d be willing to get more creative, but I have to sell to agents who have to sell to publishers who have to sell stores who have to sell to prospective readers. And those chain of connections, usually, don’t like it if you get clever. 🙃

But hey. Maybe in the next batch of querying after I finish this revision, I’ll get clever and if I’m still rejected, I’l revert to something less clever for the title. 😂

All of this “writing to the publishing industry” reminds me of the great satire of American Fiction.

🕹 Gaming - Hades 2

📺 Watching - The Lobster, The Lunchbox

The Lobster

Watched The Lobster after a recommendation from a friend. What a fascinating film. Peak Yorgos Lanthimos. The premise is that when people are single, they have to find a new partner at a hotel retreat in 45 days or be turned into an animal. I loved it. For you if you enjoy: awkward, dark, and hilarious comedy intermixed with meta commentary on courting and coupling in modern life. I feel like it’s a more relevant film in 2025 than 2015.

The Lunchbox

What an endearing film. After a lunchbox delivery mixup (the dabbawala system) in Mumbai, a sweet love story unfolds through letters between an elderly widowed man and a younger married woman. The pace and acting is really good. Would classify it as a great “sonder” film, seeing lives so deeply lived in a tiny pocket somewhere in the world. That’s all our lives. We’re all just pockets of deep life, mostly invisible to a select few. In fact, a key character is never seen in the film, only heard. This is for you if enjoy: unconventional love stories with an endearing center to it.

🎶 Listening - Syd Taylor - Heaven

What a fantastic voice and mood. Enjoy!

That’s all for this week, friends. Hope you get to enjoy a lovely sunset.

Simon

The Crisis of Cool

has a really interesting article on what’s perceived as the “crisis of cool” especially as it pertains to New York City’s position as a driver of culture (and coolness). Notably, it’s pointed out that the performance takes precedence over the art.

A defining characteristic of 2020s New York culture is that the performance of being an artist has taken precedence over the production of art. The ingenuity of contemporary artists, their capacity for imagination, mystery, and style, is channeled into the creation of appearances, vibes, and happenings, of suggested bohemian worlds, rather than the fabrication of free-standing works of visual, literary, or musical art.

In part driven by screen-mediated connection (+ the algorithm), the individual becomes the following:

What emerges is the strange condition of being both highly socialized and starkly atomized, of having extensive contact with the lifestyles and judgments of others while spending more time alone with a screen. Connected everywhere but belonging nowhere, and receiving only the vaguest and lowest-intensity of feedback from others – the like, the repost, the fire-emoji comment – the networked individual is beset by anxiety and status-insecurity. Propelled by a desire for recognition and inclusion, she plunges ever-deeper into the digital social immersion, her behavior becoming increasingly mimetic, conformist, and approval-seeking, responsive to rapidly-evolving norms of expression dictated by the screen.

Mat has slight rebuttal that “coolness” isn’t gone, it’s simply moved elsewhere.

The visible affectations of coolness isn’t necessarily visible anymore. But, I do believe that we’ll likely see *some* return to localized and physical coolness because of what Chris writes about.

This separation is essential to the production of networked society: it elicits abundant streams of digital representations, flowing above and beyond the individuals who produce them, which are channeled through networked distribution platforms, and presented using engagement-optimizing algorithms. Social cohesion is achieved through the widespread willingness to compete for attention within this system, to chase the rewards of influence, status, and notoriety. And as the networked individual follows the continuous compulsion to broadcast herself onto digital platforms, ‘identity’ migrates beyond the confines of her body and consciousness, becoming an autonomous composite of externalized images, gestures, thought-fragments, and affiliations, divorced from the lived realities of the self.

This kind of behaviour is not self-sustainable, especially when the digital spaces often turn against the individual (like changing features, moving to new platforms, governments potentially shutting it down, changing the algorithm, etc). It’s easier to keep and maintain an offline relationship versus a digital-only one. Digital will retreat to being a destination again, not *everything*.

You see it in people starting to switch off. And, younger generations are trying to pierce through perceived cringeness by attaching “performative” to previously sincere activities.

I agree with David. Offline will become cool again. But it won’t look like pre-web coolness either.

Simulated Gambling and Culture

I really enjoyed take on gambling. In the past few years, not only in the US, gambling has increased quite rapidly with not-so-great results in some instances.

But, gambling has different appeals in different histories and cultures.

First, Sachin quotes McLuhan:

Alcohol and gambling have very different meanings in different cultures. In our intensely individualist and fragmented Western world, ‘booze’ is a social bond and a means of festive involvement. By contrast, in closely knit tribal society, ‘booze’ is destructive of all social pattern and is even used as a means to mystical experience.

In tribal societies, gambling, on the other hand, is a welcome avenue of entrepreneurial effort and individual initiative. Carried into an individualist society, the same gambling games and sweepstakes seem to threaten the whole social order. Gambling pushes individual initiative to the point of mocking the individualist social structure. The tribal virtue is the capitalist vice

…and then synthesizes it:

Read together, Geertz and McLuhan suggest that the meaning of gambling shifts with the structure of society itself. In tribal settings, it affirms collective bonds and entrepreneurial initiative. In individualist societies, the same practice turns inside out. Gambling becomes entrepreneurial risk-taking stripped of its legitimizing narratives around productivity and the Protestant work ethic.

I agree. I think what’s different in modern gambling (extended to meme markets in regular stocks to crypto memecoins to prediction markets), is that it’s far more social than previous iterations of it in western societies. Gambling has *also* become a conversation. I’m not sure if that’s good or bad. But, I think it at least points to something one might consider if future regulations might want to claw back against excess.

Four Major US Cities

A few months back there was discussion on social media on what’s the four main US cities. The controversy about it, was that it felt obvious what the top 3 is: NYC, Chicago, LA. But the 4th one was always one where people argued about it.

CityNerd’s own ranking is great.

The tl;dw is that 4 + 5, closely, is San Francisco and the DMV (DC+Baltimore).

What I’m Up To

✍️ Writing - Novel #2 Revisions

Proceeding at pace. Although, still unsure to what extent I’ll be able to finish a revision in October. And secondly, I’m actually cutting more than I anticipated, which is also not a good trend, especially when I’m seeking to go through traditional publishing.

🖼️ Art - Robert Alice and Taschen’s On NFTs

Received my copy of On NFTs and really proud to see “This Artwork Is Always On Sale” being featured. I really want to get back into my art practice (and coding for that matter). Hoping to do so once my novel is done!

🕹 Gaming - Hades 2

Still really enjoying it! :)

🧘 Meditation - Sam Harris Waking Up

I’ve dabbled here and there with meditation over the years, but wanted to take it back up. Started again with Sam Harris’ introductory Waking Up course and have been deeply enjoying it the past month. Want to focus on adding in daily mindfulness practice to quiet my lifelong restlessness.

📚 Reading - Michael Singer - Surrender Experiment

Given my foray back into meditation, I was recommended this book on Michael Singer’s life. I enjoyed reading about his story, especially as it pertains to managing a spiritual practice at the time around the early computer boom. It’s inspiring. Although, admittedly, the key focus of the book, to surrender to life’s flow, feels quite peak survivor bias. In many instances things worked out really well for him. Or he points out coincidences (like finding the person who gave him a loan years later and realising that they now needed a loan and he could help him). My own synthesis is that there is value to “surrendering”, if only to become less attached to desiring things work out in a really specific way. It’s not an uncommon sentiment in a lot of spiritual practice (like, in Christianity, trust God that he has plans for you). This book is for you: if enjoy reading about someone’s life that’s in part a journey into the inner world, but also about the external struggle of building multi-billion IT companies at the turn of the century. It’s unconventional and thus a great life story.

🏃 Running - Longest Run

Did my longest ever run this weekend. All a trail run. 23km with 544m elevation. Really great experience and feeling quite fine. All in preparation for UTCT in November. Still struggling to imagine how the hell I should train for 2000m of elevation without simply just getting on a (boring) stairmaster. 😅

🎶 Listening - Jadu Heart - U

My kind of chord progression. Love it. Another dreamy track. Enjoy!

That’s it for this Sunday, friends. Hope you get to see a lovely sunset.

Simon

People Are Actually Touching Grass

For a long while on this newsletter, I’ve been talking about a desire to be less online. Touch grass, go outside, find local communities, and walk 500km. But, I wasn’t entirely sure whether this drive was from personal life experiences: like going through a divorce or just simply outgrowing social media. Turns out recent trends show that it’s at happening (to some extent).

It has gone largely unnoticed that time spent on social media peaked in 2022 and has since gone into steady decline, according to an analysis of the online habits of 250,000 adults in more than 50 countries carried out for the FT by the digital audience insights company GWI.

It’s notably become more about just being slop and not actually about it being “social”.

I believe that these trends do not include chatgroups (Discord, WhatsApp, etc). So, it’s not necessarily that people are replacing digital screen time with in personal time, but I do think it’s a part of the trend in some capacity.

Ultimately, the slow decline of social media feels both good, but also sad. Good, because I believe it might make the world a bit less insane and re-inject healthy dynamism. But, there’s also a feeling of loss to it, like seeing a pub/bar you used to spend amazing nights with friends eventually close down. My life had been inexorably improved with early social media years (2008 onwards). I met so many amazing people and was able to have a conversation with the world from the tip of Africa. And it’s kind of sad that these more innocent and public online spaces are disappearing (or have already died). It really feels like the only space it truly still flourishes is on Reddit.

Communal Cinema Round 2

Speaking of communal IRL. I made a point a few weeks back that cinemas should lean into being far more communal.

It’s actually baffling when you consider that when you go to a chain cinema these days, you’re watching a film with strangers. But, you all just saw the same thing, and it’s such a ripe opportunity to engage with the people who just saw it. Open up opportunities to mingle, talk to strangers, meet like-minded people. In some way, do it like a run club. Meet each week for a film and afterwards over snacks and drinks discuss the film with strangers that become friends.

Saw this tweet, which agreed. Let’s keep the meme spreading.

It’s always been *right there*.

Mass Stablecoin Future

Stripe is thoroughly getting into the stablecoin game by making it easy for people to launch their own stablecoins.

I find this future good and interesting on two levels. The base fact/layer is, is that it is an accidental vampire attack on current depository institutions. They should absolutely be sharing more yield with consumers versus paltry access to less than %1 yield when most stablecoins currently map quite well to US interest rates (4%+).

Yes, there is an argument if banks are going to share more regular yield with their consumers that it might choke out economic lending activity elsewhere, and with general regulatory issues, it’s unsure to what extent new stablecoins will share this yield with holders.

But, it’s ultimately an interesting expansion or notion on early beliefs about the value of cryptocurrencies: if it’s cheap to issue, then the opportunity cost of holding any token is a signal to that currency’s message. But, that obviously is very volatile. But, if you can issue cheaply issue stablecoins, you can optionally opt to share the yield to a cause you believe in while simultaneously holding a more stable currency. There is a future where people will move their USD to derivatives of it that supports their cause: a USDPalestine, a USDFreedom, a USDEducation, or whatever.

It’s an interesting mix, especially in the US, of the value of first amendment rights (money as speech) and broader societal composability of money. In some sense, this integration feels like a better mainstream fit than some of the more esoteric earlier visions of tokenized communities.

Money as Art Medium

Speaking of the composability of money. Always been a big fan of Steve Pikelny’s art experiments that uses money, finance, and markets as medium. In a recent experiment, people could mail him USD dollar bills, he would burn it, and then issue a blockchain NFT of it. In his essay, he goes through the legal, tax, and artistic merits of the project.

Alternatively, I wanted to give each bill a dignified death with clear documentation. The project’s internal logic requires a clear connection between the physical bill’s destruction and the creation of a new digital object in its place. I tried to imagine how my bank would handle this if it provided money burning as a financial service. Each bill’s destruction needed to be slow and methodical, without leaving much room for speculation that this was faked.

What I’m Up To

✍️ Writing - Novel #2 Revisions

Been very writerly focused this week, attending feedback groups/sessions, going to a fellow writer’s book launch, and doing quite a lot of revisions on my second novel. It’s really coming together! I’m focused very much on hunkering down in October: finishing this revision and also sending it back out to a new batch of agents.

📺 Watching - Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond

Got recommended this documentary and I’ve been wanting to watch it for a while too.

I put this kind of work in the bucket of comedians like Nathan Fielder as well. How far is it reasonable to push the boundaries of identity and reality, especially when it could impact the people around you? It’s a fascinating watch and Jim Carrey is undoubtedly a master.

🕹 Gaming - Hades 2

Most of my free time has been spent playing Hades 2. Enjoying it as much as I thought I would. Really fun. Engaging mechanics, fist-in-the-air moments when you beat a boss unexpectedly, entertaining characters, and just more surprises in general.

📚 Reading - Ocean Vuong - On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

I’m really glad I gave this book a go. While I’m still generally a plot-heavy reader vs a literary reader, it was was wonderful to have the words be the point and not have the words disappear in service of some story train trudging along. I sometimes think of literary novels as visual art against visuals-as-container (like genre films). Visual art usually asks us to reckon with the medium itself, to be aware of how canvas, strokes, and form is used to convey a message beyond it. In literary work, the words are self-aware. It’s like gourmet food, where you’re aware of the food-as-experience versus simply grabbing a solid slop bowl full of carbs, fiber, and protein from cavasweetgreenchoptchipotle. Personally, it’s the type of writing I have to take time to get used to. Have my palette get used to it.

The book is an epistolary novel of a Vietnamese American boy writing a letter to his mother. It details life as an immigrant in the US from the Vietnam war to the modern day. It’s vivid, deeply immersive, and hits quite a few strong emotional beats. There’s a particular vivid juxtaposition of scenes related to making love and death, which was striking. This is for you if: you want to dabble in literary fiction and enjoy slice-of-life immigrant Americana.

🏃 Running - Trails!

Been hitting a lot of trails in preparation for running an ultra trail in November. 35km + 2000m of elevation. 😱. But with the cooler weather and the leaves slowly undressing its greens to all the wonderful autumn colours, it’s been quite lovely running in general. Just look at this colour!

How inviting. Why am I at my computer? 😂

🎶 Listening - Lutalo - Ocean Swallows Him Whole

Actually no idea how to describe the genre of this? Indie rock? Feels too broad. Regardless. A lovely track. Been on repeat this week!

It’s autumn in the US and I’m really enjoying the sunsets lately. The cool air is making them a bit weaker, like the sun itself is a bit tired of the year, hoping to also go into its own hibernation soon. There’s a sweet melancholy to autumn sunsets. Enjoy!

See you all next week,

Simon

The Loss of the Middle

Terence Tao makes the case that in the modern era we’ve empowered individuals *and* large organizations at the cost of small institutions.

While this imbalanced system does provide significant material comforts (albeit distributed rather unequally) and some limited feeling of agency, it has led at the level of the individual to feelings of disconnection, alienation, loneliness, and cynicism or pessimism about the ability to influence future events or meet major challenges, except perhaps through the often ruthless competition to become wealthy or influential enough to gain, as an individual, a status comparable to a small or even large organization. And larger organizations have begun to imperfectly step in the void formed by the absence of small communities, providing synthetic social or emotional goods that are, roughly speaking, to more authentic such products as highly processed “junk” food is to more nutritious fare, due to the inherently impersonal nature of such organizations (particularly in the modern era of advanced algorithms and AI, which when left to their own devices tend to exacerbate the trends listed above).

Hard agree here. Beyond that, even the facsimiles of manufactured connection have been reduced to brand-driven experiences. Early Facebook was great. Early Instagram was great. Early Twitter was great. But they all devolved into enshittified slop. It feels cozy until people retreat from the dark forest of social media or only become public-facing personas of their own life. It sucks.

I do believe though that this realisation, that we’ve given up community to larger organizations isn’t a death knell. You *can* rebuild smaller orgs when more people recognize and understand what tradeoffs they have to make. We got people to stop smoking indoors. We can also convince people to treat online social as one way to connect alongside fair trade organic connection.

Prices and Dynamism

Speaking of… I found this chart quite interesting as it related to pricing when phones were introduced.

The corresponding paper argues that with the introduction of phones, consumer *and* producer welfare increased.

Excess price dispersion across markets can arise, and goods may not be allocated efficiently. In this setting, information technologies may improve market performance and increase welfare. Between 1997 and 2001, mobile phone service was introduced throughout Kerala, a state in India with a large fishing industry. Using microlevel survey data, we show that the adoption of mobile phones by fishermen and wholesalers was associated with a dramatic reduction in price dispersion, the complete elimination of waste, and near-perfect adherence to the Law of One Price. Both consumer and producer welfare increased.

But… and this has only been a pet gut theory… I’m sure there’s research that might back up my points (I’ll have to go on a ChatGPT rabbit hole to find it). I always wondered to what extent the introduction of the abundance of information and the very low cost of distribution of it, absolutely destroyed dynamism in general. For example, with a global information market, we’ve also lost the value of more local status games, which I, in part blame for the rise of nationalism. If that price chart was a heart-beat, you’d rightly diagnose that it’s getting closer to terminal decline. A variable and responsive heart rate is healthier than a flat and predictable one.

In other words, too much information is actually a bad thing because it increases competition among information and results in super flat societies. It’s why you see the entire world get black-holed into US politics.

If I ever had a Grand Theory of the 2000s+ onwards (cultural, geopolitical, societal), it’s that the web caused the collapse of smaller information markets (from dating to culture to finance) into bigger ones and that’s why everything feels unwieldy. Too few anchors in a system that used to have far more.

Rifts by Hashrunner

Rifts by Hashrunner is a great, novel onchain art project.

The art *is* the bytecode of a deployed smart contract. Love it. An NFT wrapper takes this bytecode and formats it to SVG.

I *love* this comment. // the art happens here.

Didn’t manage to snag an edition of it during public launch, but collected one off secondary. 🎉

Vitalik Buterin’s Take on Low-Risk DeFi

Most of my usage of Ethereum these days are using DeFi for collateralized leverage and loans and collecting fun and unique art that uses the native format of the medium. In DeFi, it does feel magical that these days, protocols exist that simply allow you to borrow against your assets without getting approval from a mediator, globally available. Vitalik talks about the value of this:

Who are the “non-ouroboros” users for whom all this makes sense? Basically, people and businesses who want access to a global market within which they can buy, hold and trade mainstream assets, but for whom there are not reliable traditional finance channels for getting those things. Crypto does not have magic secret sauce for sustainably creating much higher yields. But it does have magic secret sauce for making the economic opportunities that already exist globally and permissionlessly accessible.

With the proliferation of more stablecoins (eg, CloudFlare’s NET Dollar), this ecosystem will continue to expand. I hope in time that it expands to other assets too. Earning on depositing a TradFi ETF would be great.

Overhead Lighting?

Thought this was an interesting take.

After I moved recently, I took to buying more lamps (both in my living room and bedroom) and try to avoid overhead lights in these relaxation spaces. Sometimes you realise you are just a space monkey and there’s tricks you can pull off to make you feel better without doing too much lift. It’s like living next to an ocean, among greenery, or perhaps, that overhead lights trick our brains into believing we have suns in our rooms. 😅

What I’m Up To

✍️ Writing - Novel #2 Revisions

Making really great progress on revision to my second novel. Super happy with the changes. Hoping to finish it in the next month.

🕹 Gaming - Hades 2

One of my most anticipated titles since Tears of the Kingdom came out. It’s release date caught me by surprise. Really enjoying it. What I hoped for and more! :)

📺 Watching - Adolescence

Wow. What a phenomenal show and all the Emmy’s are extremely well deserved. It’s a really hard watch, but succeeds both in telling a great story at the same time it’s providing commentary on the life young boys (and girls). There’s a particularly poignant moment where the father and mother thought they were doing the right thing by having their boy be at home (which unfortunately led him to further descend down the manosphere alt-right pipeline). It’s a sad and depressing show and I absolutely respect parents who are able to navigate this era of the world with their children. For you if: you enjoy political commentary about masculinity and parenting in the modern age & enjoy incredible acting and directing (each of the 4 1hr episodes are one takes).

📚 Reading - Ocean Vuong - On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

🎶 Listening - nightdive - Diviner

Absolutely phenomenal tones in this track. A mix of shoegaze and metalcore tones. Sounds like guitars from metalcore, but it’s mostly shoegaze in its soul. Massive enveloping sound. (Originally a ht to Plini and then a ht to Niel for forwarding the new track. :))

Have a great sunset this week, friends.

See you next week!

Beyond Szabo Scaling

I enjoyed this vision from on what a priority for social scaling should be. Szabo Scaling to him (taken from Nick Szabo’s work) is a focus on trust-minized social scaling. In other words, when we coordinate with other humans on larger scales, a key factor is reducing the need to trust a specific human (or bunch of humans). Instead, we rely on increasingly impersonal abstractions like markets, contract law, voting, neoliberal capitalism, containerization (literally, in a specific case, the invention of containers), and protocols/software. Society is eventually built on compacted layers of humanity, with some parts of it once fresh new ground, now buried deep as a foundational layer (like http or the airline industry). But, like VGR, I’ve grown a bit pessimistic on this vision as well. I’ve often hoped that the same interest in the blockchain world in building technologically mediated coordination could also be channelled into innovating regular social innovations. There’s been such cases, like conviction voting that’s under utilized (thresholds for action are only reached by holding the same preference over time, not in one instance). The closest crude variant, for example, of conviction voting that people might experience is an electoral run-off, where if your preferred candidate got into the top 2, you have to vote again.

There is a desire for a focus on social scaling theory that doesn’t have to reduce humans as we do more, together.

Libertarians actually prefer this of course. They prefer direct human sociality to remain small-scale, enduring and intimate, leaving social scaling beyond the Dunbar limit to more indirect and impersonal mechanisms ranging from public-key cryptography to markets to voting. Rather paradoxically, as we’ve come to realize in the last decade, they are also actively eager to find end enthrone putative “Great Man” types in unique positions as scalability hacks. Libertarianism in actual practice appears to be a combination of trust-minimization and demigod-construction.

And VGR believes that scaling should focus on expressivity, because expressivity produces surplus.

What do we do with that surplus? We fuck around and find out. Sometimes that causes trouble, but on net, expressivity maximization has in fact been the historical story of social scaling, and the source of a great deal of thriving. Because the volume of things that actually get expressed seems to be a function of the expressivity of the system in principle, and the possibilities only become obvious once the system is actually available to fuck around with.

It’s something that I often struggled to explain to people about blockchains. Earlier they would ask: but what can I do with it? And I could only reply with costly and awkward use cases. But, it was hard to explain just how interesting a cryptographic and programmatically composable ledger outside of an organization was. “This has never existed before! Don’t you see?! The potential is so interesting!”

It didn’t matter if nothing eventually came of it, because the idea in principle was a new form of expressivity. A new form of surplus.

I’m not hundred percent convinced by VGR’s claims (not because I don’t think it’s true, it’s just that I need to think about it some more). But generally, the idea of building systems for expressivity resonates. Building systems that produce social surplus resonates. But, it also comes with directing our lenses of innovation beyond just the promise of new technology, but also visions of the messy necessity of social systems innovation.

Tokyo Urbanism

I’ve talked quite often on this newsletter about Japanese urbanism, especially its novel zoning policies (that generates its characteristic mixed use). But, I didn’t know more of *how* it came to be. It was in part, accidental following WWII, but also, eventually deliberate. Really great video on not just how Japanese zoning works, but also where it came from.

Death of Comedies

This is not meant to point to recent political events in the US, but I’ve been generally fascinated by two trends in film: comedies going away alongside the rise of horror. And in that, I’m mostly thinking not just in supply (horror is a great cheaper-ish way for film directors to showcase themselves days), but also *why* there is this demand from movie-goers. I asked why on notes a while back.

While I was wracking my brain trying to figure out if there’s some cultural reasons, I think my current answer is simpler: horror is better in a dark and all-encompassing cinema than a home-streaming setup where you can be distracted by your dog wanting to go pee. While laughing with an audience is great, you don’t *need* to watch a comedy on the big screen as much as you need it for horror.

I’m curious if you have ideas/conceptualizations here.

What I’m Up To

I’ve been visiting NYC again. It’s a very magical place in the late summer (early fall). Might be able to tolerate its generally unwieldy wildness if it was like this for an entire year. 😂

🖼️ Art - Exhibitions

Being in New York, I took the opportunity to attend a performance of fellow conceptual/blockchain artist Sarah Friend as an extension of her Prompt Baby work (she sold an NFT collection where collectors could prompt a generative AI model trained on herself with the safety filters removed). In the performance she acts as the generative AI model that she trained with images of herself. I love the Prompt Baby work because it not only makes visible the sometimes hidden nature of porn and sex work, but only highlights consent, especially when generative AI models asks us to wrestle with it. Mainstream society might balk at underground NSFW AI models trained with non-consensual imagery, but it is also then (more?) okay to do things like upload private text messages to ChatGPT to ask it what it should reply to the guy/girl they’re dating? How will society continue to negotiate consent with the rise and proliferation of large language models?

I also got the opportunity to see Sasha Stiles in the MoMA! Been a fan of her work since first collecting a few years ago. Really cool to see her work take up such a prominent space!

🏃‍♂️ Running

I’m still diagnosing my less-than-desired form in last week’s half-marathon. In the run up that week when I ran, I felt a bit woozy afterwards. So it might be that I was nursing a hidden illness/bug. I chalked it up to being underfueled, but it wasn’t something I’m familiar with in feeling generally (unless it’s very hot and humid). Regardless, I did also go out too hard in general. All lessons in paying attention to one’s body! Taking a small rest week as I recover and then headfirst into training for an ultra-trail event in November. 35km and 2000m elevation. Excited and nervous. Need to put a lot more trails and volume in soon.

✍️ Writing - Novel #2 Revisions

I’ve not heard back from any of the other batch of initial 8 agents I queried in June/July. But, I have been receiving feedback in general, and I’m busy making some revisions that will mostly impact the first half of the book. Feeling very confident on the changes.

📺 Watching - Adolescence, The Naked Gun

So, I finally got around to watching the new Naked Gun (after watching some of the old ones) a while back. And yeah, the humor definitely lands more, for today, but it’s still particularly American humor. For you if you enjoy: dry american humor and detective noir. btw, apologies if this is a mild spoiler (I don’t think one watches these films due to a focus on plot 😅), I’m kind of tired of villain plot lines that focus on making the world better (for many or a few) by culling the population. It peaked with Avengers. Time to retire that villain. It’s also something that I think people in ten to twenty years won’t even understand as a thing due to the world facing increasing fertility decline.

I’ve had Adolescence on my to-watch and with the recent Emmy wins, thought it was time. Nerve-wracking and emotional thus far. Acting and directing is stellar. Also, persistently topical.

📚 Reading - Ocean Vuong - On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

Gosh, some of the prose in this, is incredible. Enjoying it!

🕹️ Gaming - UFO 50

Still playing in dribs and drabs and enjoying it. But, not going to lie. I’m *very* excited for Hades 2 launching on the 25th of September. This is on the level of waiting for a new Zelda game for me.

🎶 Listening - La Femme - Oceanside Seaside Resort

Love this dreamy California vibe track!

Perfect for a sunset. :)

See you all next week!

Hypographic Media

A deeply interesting from Daniel Bashir describes “hypographic media” as:

hypographic media are socially realized systems where retrieval or selection traces (prompts, queries, IME codes) are preserved and read as communicative objects, rather than being discarded as inputs.

Put it in other terms:

is the immediately erased evidence of decisions made in the process of producing an artifact; media, a socio-technical system that organizes communication.

I *love* acquiring a name for this media. I’ve always been deeply fascinated by the artifacts of process. eg, for my debut novel, I went into deep depths of archiving and recording my own creative process. You can even read the first drafts. It also reminds in some way of sheet music even if sheet music isn’t generally immediately erased.

In today, he points to digital Chinese character writing, search terms, and lately, the conversations used in prompting LLMs to produce an artifact. Sometimes when people write essays with an LLM, they also publish the corresponding LLM chat (like with some of ’s Sloptraptions).

Daniel is right that there are proto forms of hypographic media:

I think numerous forms of proto-hypographic media already exist. “Process artifacts” can be used to describe the tangible byproducts of the development of a project or system: in software development, this might take the form of design documents, meeting notes, and other reference material. This gives insight into the choices made, tradeoffs considered, and other thinking that might have factored in the production of a final artifact but do not, themselves, exist as part of that artifact.

But, it’s becoming more salient with LLM’s, because, in part, the native media of this format *is* the conversation.

In The New Yorker, Princeton historian D. Graham Burnett describes how he assigns students to work with ChatGPT, then reads their dialogues; he treats some of the students’ rich exchanges with the model about theology and other subjects as serious intellectual work. In reading the process (which may or may not have led to an orthographic output such as an essay), Burnett is modeling hypographic media in education: the conversation that makes an essay or other output possible is itself a communicative object used for learning and assessment.

In modern knowledge work, it’s been the case for a while that it’s often more valued *how* a person produces their work compared to the output itself. When you judge a new hire, the clues on capability more likely comes from seeing and understanding how they process information. So, it makes sense, especially in education, it looks like, that hypographic media becomes the thing that matters. I mean, you *could* task an LLM to create a fake conversation, but it seems easier to monitor than the alternative of *only* requiring output.

Generally, however, having a name for this type of media: the writing used in the course of the production of artefacts, is a very interesting idea. It feels like there’s a “there there” here especially as it relates to LLMs and I think it’s more than just having it exist as linkable process artefacts. There’s a heterotopia like feeling to it… What if we kissed in that interstitial and temporary space of words being written, only to be discarded?

(ht The Discord for this one)

The Anthropic Settlement (with Copyright Holders)

Being in writerly circles, I’ve been trying to get good information on exactly what the Antropic settlement entails, both for authors, and also what it means legally.

Dave Hansen has a great summary.

In short, the primary settlement agreement surrounds Anthropic’s use of pirated media and doesn’t seem to set any further precedent on LLM training. So far, legally (not pirated) scanning books are still regarded as fair use.

Perhaps the most important takeaway from all this is what this settlement is not: this settlement doesn’t establish new precedents for AI training or create ongoing licensing obligations for Anthropic. It simply resolves liability for past conduct involving the LibGen and PiLiMi datasets, leaving the broader legal landscape around AI training largely unchanged. Judge Alsup’s earlier ruling that LLM training constitutes fair use remains intact and continues to provide important guidance for the industry.

While I’m not particularly interested in the details atm, it does seem that there’s some drama with regards to how to precisely administer claims. As TechnoLlama says, perhaps, per usual: “tl;dr, the largest beneficiary will be the lawyers.”

(ht Andres)

Sami Angawi’s House

How incredibly dreamy is this house of architect Sami Angawi?!

More here.

Definitely would live here and likely never leave. 😂

What I’ve Been Up To

🏃 Running - Half-Marathon #3!

Finished my 3rd half-marathon this morning. Probably the worst race I’ve run. Something was wrong and I struggled to fuel, giving me pretty bad stitches/cramps. Never happened before. I did go out harder than usual, so that might have been the reason. Combined with not wanting to back off, I properly bonked at the end, with the last 2kms having plenty of walking. Still… I remarkably managed to run a PB, shaving off a few seconds. Lots of lessons learned here. Need to manage my pace better and hopefully that helps with the stitches.

Still, a race is a victory lap, and I’m proud of where I am with my running. Now, I need to start doing trails for Nov. More, soon. 🔜

✍️ Writing - Novel #2 Revision

It’s been slower than I’ve wanted. The attempt at the revision of the first 10 to 50 pages also unearthed a feeling that perhaps I might be in store for a larger rewrite. It’s hard: because, I *shouldn’t* actually be rewriting this much until I’ve gotten more feedback/rejections from agents, but I also can’t deny what feels good/right in terms of adjusting the story. So, I feel more stuck than I’ve wanted.

📺 Watching - K-Pop Demon Hunters

It’s the most watched Netflix title ever, and if you are in any way near kids, you’d know how massive this film is. Even walking through nearby parks, I hear groups of kids running around and singing the songs. Golden already has 330m+ views.

I watched it, and it was very entertaining. I’m generally a sucker for musical themed action (like in Umbrella Academy) and so on top of that, it had a warm heart, great funny moments, and a gentle focus on dealing with shame.

It’s for you, if you enjoy: great animation, k-pop, lighthearted fun, and a heartfelt plot.

🕹 Gaming - UFO 50

Still playing in dribs and drabs, enjoying discovering each new game (in the meta-game).

I did watch the Nintendo Direct on Friday, which was a bit disappointing, except for Hades 2 getting a release date (which is very soon)! So, super excited about that. I’ve tried to avoid it in order to be surprised, but considering that Hades 1 is one of my favourite Switch games, I can’t wait!

📚 Reading - Lydia Davis, and Ocean Vuong - On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

I’ve been meaning to read Ocean Vuong and after a nudge from a friend, I’m busy reading both Lydia Davis’ short stories and Ocean Vuong’s biggest hit. With Lydia Davis, I’m enjoying reading her “very” short stories, her vignettes of feeling. A different style of short story I’m used to. While I’m usually more a plot reader versus literary prose reader, it’s wonderful to read Ocean’s writing. It’s vivid and immersive.

Learning a lot from reading both Lydia & Ocean.

🎶 Listening - The Temper Trap - Lucky Dimes

Oh, my millennial heart. The Temper Trap is back with a really great single.

Great fuzzy guitars. Great indie spirit. Bring back 00’s indie sleaze. Dust off the skinny jeans. Let’s go!

That’s it for this week, friends. Hope you get to enjoy a lovely sunset!

Simon

Slowing Down Cars

I realised recently, one of the reasons I enjoy urban design so much is that it’s ultimately about protocol design. In cities, especially, while it makes a daily impact to people’s lives, it’s often invisible. Invisible in the sense that people aren’t actively thinking about how certain rules impact how they live. Usually, they simply *feel* the city without knowing why it makes them feel a certain way. A great example is a recent article from on protocol adjustments in roads to slow down cards.

Now imagine if those lines disappeared overnight. No lane markings. No signs. No traffic signals. The entire system would grind to a halt—not because of a physical barrier, but because drivers would suddenly lose the cues they rely on to feel safe.

Too interesting. I would love to actually read a more explicit take on urban design and protocol design. If you have any sources on this, do please share.

More on AI Boyfriends

I think it might be easy to sneer or joke about people forming relationships to AI chatbot. But, I do think we should pay attention. Previously, I wondered whether simple access to a chatbot soundboard and therapy (despite the media’s focus on psychosis), might actually be broadly beneficial because of the ease of access. I pointed out to the lack of access to qualified therapists.

It’s not a replacement for guided and scientifically grounded counselling and therapy. But if one could say: hey, in lieu of getting every person a lifetime therapist, we give them LLM therapy with simplified guardrails, I think the overall benefit might improve society more than we anticipate. What does a world look like in 5 to 10 years time where everyone with a smartphone has had a simplified therapist in their pocket?

But, in circumstances where it’s not explicitly therapy and more akin to forming a relationship with a chatbot, presents a different mirror.

At the same time, human social systems have been eroding for decades, undermined by the cult of neoliberal individualism, overwork and economic precarity, car-centered urban design, among other structural factors, and more recently, digital platforms that capture attention.

The uncomfortable truth is that our social and economic order has already turned intimacy into a luxury not everyone has access to. Now corporations are selling it back to us on their terms.

Snowflakes From Space

As previously mentioned, my article on LLM-native media was co-composted with (when you collaborate by sharing research and then writing your own version/interpretation of the research). They published theirs today. I enjoyed the more academic take.

The kernel itself retrieves the notion of platonic forms. An abstract idea that can only ever be approximated by each physical manifestation. It is by looking at many artefacts that we can intuit the kernel and understand the artistic vision of an AI-native artistic conversation, just like we can asymptotically approach the idea of a chair by sitting on many of them. The endless variation and co-creation retrieve something even older: oral culture. Before writing ossified stories into fixed forms, songs and stories would constantly evolve as they traveled the world. It’s fascinating to look at how fairy tales are different in different languages and cultures. The core themes often persisted, but most of the details changed, from names to metaphors.

This co-production mimics what AI-native media might look like: that multiple interpretations are the norm.

Co-composting, the process by which this piece was written, is a synecdoche of our vision for AI-native art. Simon and I had several conversations on the topic, collected notes and research in a shared document, and wrote two distinct pieces based on the same underlying material. The latent space is the intersection of the world models of the two authors and their creative dialogue. You can read two distinct artefacts, but you don’t get to see the kernel directly (the co-composting document).

Death of the Corporate Job?

wrote about the death of the corporate job: that much these jobs are Graeberian “bullshit jobs”. It’s quite cynical to me…

The strangest part: everyone knows. When you get people alone, after work, maybe after they've had time to decompress, they'll admit it. Their job is basically elaborate performance art. They're professional email forwards. They're human middleware between systems that could probably talk directly to each other.

While, yes, it might be that a lot of these corporate jobs aren’t necessary, but I have a slightly different take. It’s functioning as it should, because the “real” job is actually trust generation in a noisy market or information environment. It is sometimes the rational choice to work with a client that can afford to maintain excess and pay for that privilege because the cost of taking on a cheaper client with a leaner team carries more uncertainty and risk. Jobs don’t exist in a vacuum. They are a part of a larger, emergent role, part of which job is to signal capability. So, on the inside, these jobs might look unnecessary, but they actually do serve a purpose, just not from direct output of each job.

(Tangentially: In ant colonies, for example, 30-50% of ants can be seen as inactive or “lazy”, but they still form a part of the stigmergic information ecosystem inside it.)

What I’m Up To

Been quite a busy week doing all manner of writerly things. Revisions, attending feedback sessions, guild networking events, and attending the National Book Festival. So my week has been packed/busy.

✍️ Writing - Revisions

I’m continuing revisions for the 10 to 50 pages. Of the first batch of 8 agents, I still haven’t heard from any but 2 which issued non-personal rejections. So, after finishing this revision, hoping to get another batch of 10-ish agents in the pipeline.

📺 Watching

Didn’t get around to TV/film this week, but I have been enjoying follow the US Open.

🕹 Gaming - UFO 50

What an interesting game (recommended by a good friend). It’s 50 games in one, following a fictional game studio’s development history in the 80s. I’m particularly fascinated by the meta narrative and meta gameplay elements, witnessing each game’s progression in: improvement in coding and art style + improvement in “fictional” hardware.

In some sense, it reminds me a bit of Tunic, a Zelda-like action-adventure game that uses familiar elements of playing a game and puts it *into* the game world. In the past, games would be boxed with manuals or today, maybe, look at a walkthrough online if they get stuck. In Tunic, gameplay elements are revealed through a fictional language in a fictional game manual. So, you’re left to figure out the game through this 4th-wall-ish meta instruction set.

So, yeah, I enjoy it when a medium plays with its own awareness and meta tropes.

🎶 Listening - Sofia Kourtesis - Nitzan and Aminaa

What a stellar house track. This + a sunset + summer + a crowd + a light buzz sounds like heaven. Have been grooving to it the entire week!

Hope you get to enjoy a sunset! See you next week.

Simon

LLM-Native Media + Co-Composting

Did a co-composting collab with about what kind of media is best for generative (LLM) AI.

Already received a good response. Thanks for reading! I also really enjoyed “co-composting” as a form of collab. Essentially, we got on a call and gamed out things we want to potentially write about. Landing on AI-native media, we then take a week or two, to co-research asynchronously, dropping links, research, and ideas into a shared Google Doc. Then, with another call, we discuss the research. Then, breaking off again, we write our own interpretations of the research with separate blog posts, before giving feedback to each other and then publishing it (I’ll share their version once it’s published).

I’ve generally struggled to digitally collaborate when there aren’t great async tools or processes available. What works well here is that it’s primarily async co-research and there not being only one piece of work/output that you have to argue/deliberate about. You can likely expand this to 3+ people too. Co-research together, take/pick/remix what you want, and then write in your voice what you believe is the most important part and then cross-link.

I’m definitely inclined to continue doing this!

Protocol Futurology

Over , Timber wrote a great set of six rules of how to think about protocols in fiction. In general, it’s a great set of rules for futurology in general. How do we imagine the future, especially in a time where we’ve seen rapid technological process? The six principles are:

Principle #1: Define the future with a system of rules, not events.

Principle #2: Bundle classes of futures based on media.

Principle #3: Choose non-human continuity characters.

Principle #4: Look for the constants of history.

Principle #5: Do not make or let things go extinct.

Principle #6: Don’t assume that starting perspectives will be persistent.

The most interesting one for me is principle 5.

Nothing is ever eradicated for good. If something is headed for extinction, efforts should be made to save it.

It’s an interesting prompt: what are potentially unexpected and benign systems today that can become load-bearing unintentionally in the future? Things that, if we were to attempt to remove it, we’d actually realise how important it is/was. One example could be emojis, something that the world might not feel is truly important, but if it were scrapped, realise how much load-bearing intent lay behind a 😅.

Exit Through The Casino

Jay is one of my favourite linguistics wranglers, coming up or arriving at terms which so neatly encapsulate concepts or ideas. Like power fandoms or cultural fracking. In reference to Coinbase’s UK ad, he used the term, “exit through the casino” as a play on Banksy’s “exit through the gift shop”. The latter is/was a play on how cultural spaces grew to funnel people towards ending at a retail experience. That consumerism became increasingly intertwined with our cultural institutions.

While the Coinbase ad acts as satire against the relative economic stagnation of the UK, its implied solution is *also* dire:

‘Gambling it all on hyper finance’ is, in my opinion, one of the only avenues of perceived agency that people have to escape the rot economy they find themselves in.

“If you want out, you need to exit via the casino.”

…and

The Coinbase campaign is effective because it’s speaking to the public’s justified anger, and explicitly names the rot that we have all been told to ignore: a nation that’s been economically frozen since 2008. But it channels us away from collective political questions and towards individual financial risk.

As good as “Everything is Fine” is, the ad’s satirical despair is basically a marketing funnel for its preferred solution: “exit through the casino.” It reframes systemic failure as an opportunity for a personal gamble.

As casino culture becomes more and more mainstream, and the government validating it as a legitimate escape route, the crucial question becomes: what happens when this bet fails for the majority?

What are we going to do when the ‘exit through the casino’ proves to be a revolving door?

It’s a great encapsulation on where many neoliberal democracies are finding themselves in lately. A sense of malaise about the stagnation such that the only seeming solution out of the mess, is to gamble. It’s a sad indictment about the state of affairs (of not just the UK).

What I’ve Been Up To

📺 Watching - Eddington (2025)

I’m glad someone made a film about covid + 2020. It definitely veers into quite wild territory, leaving you as the viewer unsure how to feel about what’s playing out. It takes some stances that satirise those times that I wonder how people would feel about it. It’s gets stranger as it progresses and in part, I felt, that was the key point. The meta narrative about the film is about the algorithm and the algorithm isn’t your friend. It can be confusing doomslop, each one trying to bait you into further rabbit holes. And then everyone loses in some way except those who seek to truly manipulate.

Touch grass. Go outside.

🕹 Gaming - DK Bananza

I’m struggling to continue playing tbh. There’s not as much variety as I hoped and it’s not generally as challenging as some of the other excellent Nintendo platformers. I’m considering shelving it for now.

✍️ Writing - Novel #2

Before I continue with querying another batch of agents, I’m still revisiting the first 10 to 50 pages. I’m enjoying it and it’s been a great learning experience because some of the scenes do feel quite contrived a few months out from having finished the second draft. I think this can particularly be the case in the first act when you’re trying to subtly do exposition through show and not tell. It’s magic if done right, but it can also be far worse than a simple tell if done poorly.

🏃 Running - Taper Time!

2 weeks out from a half marathon and I’m *very* excited. I’m feeling the strongest and fittest I’ve ever been. So, touch wood, hoping to run a new personal best for the half. :)

📚 Reading - A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

A great novel (yes, I see it as a novel, not a short story collection). At its best, its excellent. Some of the prose is incredible and definitely inspirational as a writer for me. Overall, the book deals with an ensemble of loosely (and not so loosely) connected characters over multiple generations, jumping forward and backwards in time and places. It’s not a novel setup, and these kinds of stories where it attempts to make you feel something about life, time, and our place in it is a hard genre to get right. But, it succeeded for me, for two reasons: 1) most of the characters are messy and most struggle against prioritising the short term against the long term, and 2) it’s about music and the music industry. Music has a keen ability to punctuate time and helps carry that feeling.

🎶 Listening - Big Wild - Stardust

Speaking of music. The new Big Wild album is out and it’s great. A favourite is Stardust.

Enjoy!

Hope you get to enjoy a lovely sunset this week, friends. See you next week.

Simon