Top Of The Week: Internet, China, Backlash, Castle, Patterns
The Post-American Internet
Cory Doctorow | Pluralistic | 1st January 2026 | U
Speech about a predicted shift in internet geopolitics, from the writer who coined the word "enshittification" to describe decaying online platforms. Trump's trade policy has dismantled global norms that favoured the US. Crises precipitate change. With the US no longer a "neutral" tech broker, an "unstoppable coalition of activists, entrepreneurs and natsec hawks" is poised to refashion the internet (8,000 words)
2025 Letter
Dan Wang | 1st January 2026 | U
Dan Wang's China letter is an annual classic. He moved from Yale to Stanford this year and, back in San Francisco, found that Silicon Valley and the Chinese Communist Party share a fondness for paranoia and a general lack of humour. The US is suffering from Trump's mishandling of China, but Europe is doing worse. Still: "American problems seem more fixable to me than Chinese problems" (14,000 words)
Massively Disruptive, Totally Plausible
Dean W. Ball et al | Politco | 2nd January 2026 | U
Fifteen futurists offer their thoughts on what "unpredictable, unlikely but entirely plausible thing" could happen in 2026. Riots in Syria could reignite the civil war. Deepfake videos could derail the US midterm elections and erode public trust in reality itself. There could be public backlash against AI companies and a stock crash. Some combination of these could usher in the "American Troubles" (4,900 words)
How To Build A Medieval Castle
Ben O'Donnell | Archaeology | 12th August 2025 | U
First, assemble dozens of craftspeople and archaeologists in an abandoned quarry. Then, put them to work on "one of the world’s most comprehensive and longest-running experimental archaeology projects": building a 13C castle using only 13C tools, techniques, and materials. It will take at least two decades. For many years, they won't know how to make windows. But the result will be breath-taking (3,400 words)
The Pleasure Of Patterns In Art
Samuel Jay Keyser | MIT Press Reader | 19th August 2025 | U
On why Caillebotte’s Paris Street; Rainy Day pleases the viewer. This painting of a street scene is also an arrangement of geometric objects. Triangles dominate the canvas. There are five umbrellas: rounded triangles containing smaller triangles. The buildings too have triangle motifs. The work delights in “repetition of the same/except variety”, central to how we perceive structure and rhythm (4,800 words)
Podcast: Garden Of England | Currently. Behind the scenes of the soft fruit harvest in Kent, where each summer thousands of temporary workers arrive to do the picking (28m 26s)
Video: Wild Summon | Vimeo | Karni and Saul | 14m 38s
Trippy, fantastical animated short that imagines a world in which humans exist on the dramatic life cycle of wild salmon, complete with river spawning, leaping and predatory fishing. Narrated by Marianne Faithfull.
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