| CARVIEW |
Life and times of Jason since 2001
What used to require shame and ostracism is now baked into the internet’s economic infrastructure. The algorithmic reality of technology platforms has codified conformity into the human condition. And it is very profitable—the real late-stage capitalism. Things are going to get worse with the new AI, that leans into the “mid” as a default, built entirely on the notion of conformity.
— Read on om.co/2026/01/16/our-algorithmic-grey-beige-world/
Writing is hard. And I’ll also say, writers are born, not made. As a matter of fact, the more you teach someone how to write the more you risk squeezing the creativity out of them. We don’t need me-too, we need unique.
— Read on lefsetz.com/wordpress/2026/01/12/1929/
The main function of an icon is to help you find what you are looking for faster.
Perhaps counter-intuitively, adding an icon to everything is exactly the wrong thing to do. To stand out, things need to be different. But if everything has an icon, nothing stands out.
— Read on tonsky.me/blog/tahoe-icons/
SOME WEEKS AGO, I quietly shipped a new content type on A Working Library, such that I am now writing short, social-shaped posts on my site and then sending them off to the various platforms. This is not a novel mode of publishing, but rather one borrowed and adapted from the POSSE model (“publish on your site, syndicate elsewhere”) developed by the IndieWeb community. While one of the reasons oft declared for using POSSE is the ability to own your content, I’m less interested in ownership than I am in context. Writing on my own site has very different affordances: I’m not typing into a little box, but writing in a text file. I’m not surrounded by other people’s thinking, but located within my own body of work. As I played with setting this up, I could immediately feel how that would change the kinds of things I would say, and it felt good. Really good. Like putting on a favorite t-shirt, or coming home to my solid, quiet house after a long time away.
— Read on aworkinglibrary.com/writing/coming-home
POSSE is an abbreviation for Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere, the practice of posting content on your own site first, then publishing copies or sharing links to third parties (like social media silos) with original post links to provide viewers a path to directly interacting with your content.
— Read on indieweb.org/POSSE
What you’ve got to do from this night forward is stuff your head with more different things from various fields . . . I’ll give you a program to follow every night, very simple program. For the next thousand nights, before you go to bed every night, read one short story. That’ll take you ten minutes, 15 minutes. Okay, then read one poem a night from the vast history of poetry. Stay away from most modern poems. It’s crap. It’s not poetry! It’s not poetry. Now if you want to kid yourself and write lines that look like poems, go ahead and do it, but you’ll go nowhere. Read the great poets, go back and read Shakespeare, read Alexander Pope, read Robert Frost. But one poem a night, one short story a night, one essay a night, for the next 1,000 nights. From various fields: archaeology, zoology, biology, all the great philosophers of time, comparing them. Read the essays of Aldous Huxley, read Lauren Eisley, great anthropologist. . . I want you to read essays in every field. On politics, analyzing literature, pick your own. But that means that every night then, before you go to bed, you’re stuffing your head with one poem, one short story, one essay—at the end of a thousand nights, Jesus God, you’ll be full of stuff, won’t you?
2025 was rough. Possibly the roughest year to date. Certainly in the top three.
As I’ve been thinking about how to cover 2025, I’ve been mulling over the low points and rough patches throughout, both personally and professionally. But the more I mulled, the more I realized the constant throughout all of this were the blessings in my life.
I’m lucky to have an incredible support structure – family and friends who care and support and put themselves out in such amazing ways when needed. It’s humbling and inspiring.
My wife is my rock, and even as we both navigated some pretty sad moments, being able to be there for her, and knowing she was there for me, was a shining North Star. Our children being old enough to see and experience and understand so much helped them learn some tough real-world lessons, but also made their hugs and support and cheerleading and genuine joy and excitement just stand out at an eleven in so many ways.
Looking back on 2025, yes, I can see a lot of downs and some periods of sadness and uncertainty, but the lasting impression of the year is one of love and support and awareness that we are so very blessed to be able to weather such years and come out stronger in the end.
There are many more years to come, some may very well be as bad (if not worse) than the last. But my resolution is to not fear the future, and instead focus on the good in my life and strive to make sure that is nourished and appreciated.
Here’s to a new year, another year, another chance, and many more blessings to come.
These fears have not been unfounded. Today, we find ourselves in precisely the cultural crisis that Woolf, White, and Sontag anticipated—not a world without books, but a world where fragmented attention and superficial engagement have eroded the foundations of shared meaning and cultural coherence.
The definition of “culture” is as liquid as the phenomenon it seeks to describe. In Princes and Powers, James Baldwin observes that only a culture in crisis would ask for a definition of “culture.”
We are a culture in crisis. We lack, as Byung-Chul Han articulates in The Disappearance of Rituals, the structures and forms that make meaning possible, leading to cultural fragmentation. The result is a sense of civilisational ADHD. A generational restlessness, inattentiveness, and excessive movement in no direction, with insight elusive and ephemeral.
— Read on kasurian.com/p/research-as-leisure
The threat to German auto producers isn’t from Chinese cars flooding Germany. It’s from Chinese cars flooding to emerging markets (red), where they’re killing the market for German cars. That’s not something EU tariffs on China are going to be able to fix.
As a novelist and a journalist covering A.I., I’ve tended to dismiss the threat it poses to authors. I won’t enlist A.I. to write on my behalf for the same reason that I won’t enlist a robot to do other hard stuff—hike a mountain, argue with my husband. But, lately, I’ve been pushing up against the limitations of that logic. I can write a book for my own reasons, but I can sell the book only if readers like it more than what they can get from, say, a chatbot. If readers prefer A.I.-generated fiction, then authors won’t be able to stop it.
— Read on www.newyorker.com/culture/the-weekend-essay/what-if-readers-like-ai-generated-fiction
