Month: January 2025

“There are many reasons to despair of what Brexit has done to us. It has reduced our sense of national pride, debilitated our economy and corrupted the sense of honesty in our national life. The greatest tragedy though, and the one people do not talk enough about, is the eradication of a particular vision of Britain: of a country that was internationalist, confident, open, liberal and moderate. A reassuring place that had found its role in the world. I don’t think anyone could call us that now. We look neurotic, anxious, timid, needy and occasionally deranged”

https://iandunt.substack.com/p/brexit-five-years-on-a-triumph-of

“Welcome to 2025. No one reads your website or watches your TV show. Subscription revenue will never truly replace ad revenue and ad revenue is never coming back. All of your influence is now determined by algorithms owned by tech oligarchs that stole your ad revenue and they not only hate you, personally, but have aligned themselves with a president that also hates you, personally. The information vacuum you created by selling yourself out for likes and shares and Facebook-funded pivot-to-video initiatives in the 2010s has been filled in by random “news influencers,” some of which are literally using ChatGPT to write their posts. While many others are just making shit up to go viral. And the people taking over the country currently have spent the last decade, in public, I might add, crafting a playbook — one you dismissed — that, if successful, means the end of everything that resembles America”

https://www.garbageday.email/p/yeah-it-s-probably-time-to-panic

“And Americans have largely been very confused at the idea of this genuinely very famous man that they have never heard of before.

I, too, was very confused when I first learned of Williams while I was living in London many years ago. I was even more confused by his Whole Deal, which I guess I’d compare to Mark Wahlberg, if Wahlberg never went into acting and, instead, blew up into a Justin Timberlake-level pop star”

https://www.garbageday.email/p/the-ai-guys-were-lying-the-whole-time

“But my visceral response to this kind of thinking – and even aside from ordinal lists of importance, the smartphone-supremacy attitude is very common – is to say, wow, these people must really enjoy shitting in the yard.

Plumbing – bringing fresh water from one place to another and disposing of human waste via engineering – goes back to antiquity, and you occasionally find claims of affordances like flush toilets in ancient times. Today, modern people in most developed parts of the world have constant access to free-running clean water and toilets that can remove physical waste to a secure processing facility or holding unit, with heated water on demand a very nice extra. That’s largely a 20th-century and forward phenomenon”

https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/the-shitting-in-the-yard-test

“Indeed, it appears that the dominant manufacturers have managed to turn their delivery failures into financial advantage. Using the purported difficulty of projecting material costs over a 2-3-year lead time as an excuse, they have imposed “floating” price clauses onto their customers — allowing them to increase the final price of a rig when it finally goes into production”

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/did-a-private-equity-fire-truck-roll

“More and more, I find myself relieved by endings. When I put on a record on, it ends. When I turn the last page of a book, it’s over. When I finish a comic, it’s done. That can feel inconvenient, but it is actually a moment of empowerment. You will now decide whether you want to hear the album again, or listen to a different one, or do something else entirely. You are not just lost in this endless conveyor belt of content, which you long ago stopped considering with a critical eye”

https://iandunt.substack.com/p/how-to-resist-the-tech-overlords