Jul 28, 2023 4 min read

You Should Read - July 28

Just One Thing

Pluralistic Autoenshittification: Forget F1: the only car race that matters now is the race to turn your car into a digital extraction machine, a high-speed inkjet printer on wheels, stealing your private data as it picks your pocket.

⇛ This is probably the most important essay I've read this year. While it uses the auto industry as an particularly disturbing example throughout, but the point is much, much larger one about where capitalism is heading: the extraction of rents instead of creating value through innovation. I've experienced it first hand in past jobs. "How do we create a low-effort (ideally zero), ongoing stream of future revenues?" "What can we offer through a subscription?"

Collected Ephemera

PsychCentral What Is Postural Sway in ADHD?
⇛ I'd heard anecdotes (which matches up with my own experience) about people with ADHD more likely to bang into doors, catch themselves on knobs, and generally feel a little clumsy as we knock through the world. Apparently, there's some research behind this.

Religion News In Thailand, ‘Socially Engaged Buddhism’ Goes Beyond Meditation to Seek Justice: A network of socially conscious Buddhists is challenging conceptions of personal devotion to tackle pressing problems in the faith and even beyond their country’s borders.

Culture Study How Your House Makes You Miserable: The rise of the market-reflected gaze.
⇛ I pine for the days of a coop apartment. My home improvement list is a mile long. I dread what a real estate agent will insist on fixing when we eventually decide to decamp to less pricey digs.

The New Yorker How Gretchen Whitmer Made Michigan a Democratic Stronghold: The Governor’s strategy for revitalizing her state has two parts: to grow, Michigan needs young people; to draw young people, it needs to have the social policies they want.

⇛ One of the YouTube rabbit holes I fell down was reviews of various Japanese train and ferry lines. Basically someone buys a ticket for a long-haul or overnight trip and then just records the experience. It all seems so civilized, clean, and efficient. Then, there's the example above of what train travel is like in the US. I'm occasionally tempted to try train over plane, but, yikes.

Cleveland Clinic Exploding Head Syndrome: Exploding head syndrome (EHS) is a sleep disorder. Although it sounds painful, you feel no pain. You hear a loud noise or explosion in your head. The sound isn't real or heard by others.

The Atlantic Biden Declares War on the Cult of Efficiency: New antitrust guidelines revive the old-fashioned idea that American life is about more than just buying lots of cheap stuff.

PRINT For Paula Scher, Type is Image
⇛ I love type-heavy design and Paule Scher is one of the all time greats. I loved seening her poster work advertising the Public Theater when I lived in NYC. I wish I could see this show, but, Munich. At least there's a book.

Nieman Lab If Other Media Companies Thought About Brand Equity the Way Elon Musk Thinks About Twitter’s (Er, X’s): In the spirit of Tronc, Elon Musk has decided to throw away more than a decade of brand equity by changing the name of Twitter to…the letter X. Imagine if more media executives followed his lead.
⇛ The shade thrown at HBO Max is delicious.

Velvetyne.fr Open Font License fonts that don't suck. Mostly display typefaces. Better crafted than most free stuff out there and more punk and avant garde than your typical Google Fonts options.

Our Present Dystopia

The Guardian We Can’t Afford to Be Climate Doomers: It often seems that people are searching harder for evidence we’re defeated than that we can win

The Daily Beast The Florida School Board Mom Fending Off DeSantis’ Culture War: Jennifer Jenkins never expected to be in the crosshairs of her state’s governor—but she’s not backing down.

Jenkins has gone on to stage often solitary fights in Brevard: first for mask mandates during the pandemic, and later for LBGTQ+ rights and against book banning. Protesters jeered in front of her house and once brandished weapons behind it. Giant letters “FU” were burned into her lawn. She and her family were threatened and followed. She was vilified online. Republican state Sen. Randy Fine, known as DeSantis' attack dog, repeatedly called her a “whore.” Someone accused her anonymously of abusing her daughter. The complaint was dismissed as bogus but not before an investigator checked Olive for marks and bruises, finding none.

The Conversation How After-School Clubs Became a New Battleground in the Satanic Temple’s Push to Preserve Separation of Church and State

The New York Times They Checked Out Pride Books in Protest. It Backfired: Two San Diego residents cleared out the Pride month display at their library and said such materials shouldn’t be available to children, one of several recent clashes over LGBTQ issues in California.

Maclean's I Work in a B.C. Food Bank. We’re Serving Triple the Number of People We Used To: For the first time, many of our clients are people with jobs who can’t keep up with the cost of living. How did we get here?

Techdirt Top Court In Illinois Says Compelling Password Production Isn’t A Fifth Amendment Violation

Science AI Safety on Whose Terms?: As research priorities are being set, it is already clear that the prevailing technical agenda for AI safety is inadequate to address critical questions. Only a sociotechnical approach can truly limit current and potential dangers of advanced AI.

The Wabbit Hole