In such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, not to be on the side of the executioners.

| Albert Camus

…

The quote by Camus is contested. Apparently, it was originated by Howard Zinn in his A People’s History of the United States, with the added clause, ‘according to Albert Camus’.

But I offer it up for its intent, not its provenance. And, to slightly soften the language, and broaden the context, I will paraphrase:

In a world of division, a world of the powerless and the powerful, it is the job of thinking people to stand with the disempowered.

My motivation in this recasting of Zinn and Camus to set up the backdrop for a discussion of ‘being yourself’ at work. Or more accurately, the arguments as to why we should — or should not — take on that challenge.

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Be Yourself, Or Not?

As I was preparing to write this section of the newsletter, I read an article in today’s Economist with this at its head:

Workplace training can confer useful skills. It can also prevent legal trouble and fulfil compliance obligations. And it can be a very easy way to try out time travel. You only have to watch a typical corporate training video to feel the clock rewinding.

First, and most obviously, some of these videos were filmed before you were born, on a subject that is so evergreen it has never needed an update. The footage is grainy. Men wear ties and women wear pleated skirts. They have names like Rodney and Carol. No one has a tattoo or brings their whole self to work. If they had an illness, it wouldn’t be a mental-health issue but something from the distant past, like consumption or scrofula.

I include this fragment, not to delve into the woeful state of corporate training videos, but to note the use of the phrase ‘brings their whole self to work’, which serves as an indication of time: We are in a time where people purportedly do bring their ‘whole self’ to work, in distinction to the olden days, where people didn’t, couldn’t, or wouldn’t. (Likewise, tattoos: another digression.)

We’ve come to a time in which being yourself on the job (or ‘bringing your whole self to work’) is taken almost as a given, that authenticity is a positive factor for the individual and for the enterprise.

But is that true?

Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, one of the most insightful commentators on work, says that it’s not. In When Authentic Leadership Backfires1, excerpted from a book of the same name, he musters evidence that debunks that conventional wisdom. He takes a very micro/personal view of 'being yourself' at work and boils down its pros and cons to appearing competent and leaderlike. He writes,

Simply put, when our behavior feels consistent or aligned with our self-concept, we experience a sense of internal coherence and harmony that lubricates our ego. Conversely, when our actions clash with how we see ourselves, we feel inauthentic, fake, and guilty, and our self-esteem suffers.

However, feeling authentic does not equate to being perceived as talented or competent by others. Despite the subjective benefits of authenticity, being true to ourselves does not translate into being better colleagues or leaders.

So, in effect, if the point is to convince others you are competent and/or talented, being yourself at work is not the way to get there. He backs up his reasoning with research:

In a recent meta-analysis of 55 independent studies, impression management (rather than self-perceived authenticity) was positively related to leadership emergence and effectiveness, as well as to both task-oriented and relationship-oriented leadership behaviors. Even if feeling authentic feels great, you are more likely to become an effective leader if you focus on gratifying others and adjusting your behavior according to what the situation demands. So, it’s not authenticity, but knowing where the right to be you ends and your obligation to others begins, that makes you effective in work settings.

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Turning that around: your obligation to others (and, by extension, the organization) is to manage the impression that others have of you, as competent and effective, rather than letting it all hang out.

He goes on, and the negative undercurrent of inauthenticity and façade-building starts to build:

In short, life is about choices, and one of the most fundamental choices we face in daily interactions is whether to impose our raw, unfiltered selves on others or to regulate our behavior for the sake of relationships. To be sure, this ought to be done with social skills and emotional competence, for there is a high cost to being seen as overly diplomatic or as a social chameleon.

[…]

Skilled self-awareness and sensitivity to how others see you will enable you to seem genuine rather than fake, even when you are making an effort to not be yourself.

[…]

The irony, then, is that by disciplining or editing our authenticity, we may actually come across as more trustworthy and competent to others. People don’t judge authenticity by how you feel about yourself; they judge it by whether your behavior seems appropriate, effective, and considerate.

This echoes a line by the sociologist Erving Goffman, from The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life:

When the individual does move into a new position in society and obtains a new part to perform, he is not likely to be told in full detail how to conduct himself, nor will the facts of his new situation press sufficiently on him from the start to determine his conduct without his further giving thought to it.

Yes, we have to actively choose how to behave in both public and private settings. Still, it is not intuitive that we should begin with the premise that inauthenticity — acting a part — should seem the highest form of work performance.

And we have to keep in mind one question: who is served by the role-playing involved? Chamorro-Premuzic is pretty clear in his formulation: if you want to be perceived as effective and competent it’s likely to be necessary to act like effective and competent people act. He expressly says that if you want to be considered leaderlike — to move up the ladder — you have to adopt the behaviors associated with leaders.

But consider the costs. The extra work involved in playing the role, and the suppression of other behaviors, has to be taken on by the individual, for the benefit of the company.

Kathi Weeks, in her magisterial The Problem With Work, addresses this perspective directly:

In these latter sectors of employment in particular, the dimensions of the self that are considered part of the human resource to develop — and, thus, legitimate targets of managerial concern — continue to expand into new territories of subjectivity. Consider, for example, the new terrains opened up by the recent interest in “wellness.” As the authors of a recent overview of contemporary management concepts and regimes observe, “the idea that one’s employer provides some sort of totalized care for the worker’s wellness opens up a powerful horizon for expanding the boundaries of organized work”.2 Or consider what Peter Fleming3 describes as the “just be yourself” managerial discourse that asks workers to bring their “authentic” selves from outside work into work, attempting thereby to incorporate “the whole person into the production matrix”.

Flemings hits the ‘be yourself’ discourse as a mechanism for the organization to blur the boundaries between our who we are and what we bring to work.

Traditional distinctions between work and life are increasingly blurred by management in these its most self-consciously biopolitical modes. Whether or not the watchwords of such programs — empowerment, participation, responsibility, flexibility, and enrichment — involve empty rhetoric or meaningful improvements in the experience of work for employees, they do give employers opportunities to induce new modes and degrees of effort, and in some cases of identification. Thus, worker empowerment can boost efficiency, flexibility can serve as a way to cut costs, and participation can produce commitment to the organization, thereby “embroiling the subject in the act of organizational control” and internalizing organizational discipline.4 In short, often programs presented under the rubric of work enrichment are also methods of work intensification. In a kind of bad dialectic, quality becomes quantity as the call for better work is translated into a requirement for more work.

Week’s perspective changes the presentation of being a better participant in the machinery at work as a means of intensifying work, of taking on more work — both directly by the play-acting, and indirectly, as the increase in effectiveness creates a margin which workers are then supposed to fill with more labor, somme of which is becoming enmeshed in that same ‘organizational control’ they have already personally adopted.

Weeks takes this to the final end: by accommodating the inherent blurring of organizational control and the need to remain independent of work’s psychic demands, are we losing the ground on a demand for better work?

The problem, therefore, is how to advance demands for better work — how to make good on work’s promises of social utility and individual meaning — in a way that does not simply echo and reaffirm the prescription for a lifetime of work. The question I want to consider is whether the kind of affirmation of work at the heart of the work ethic can be used successfully in the struggle for better work: is it possible to demand both better work and less work without one demand neutralizing the critical force of the other? Muirhead5 offers one attempt to combine these efforts.

To recall the earlier discussion, both Gini and Muirhead call for new ethics of work that can continue to celebrate and encourage commitment to waged work, while insisting that such work should be adequately compensated and personally satisfying. But Muirhead goes further, recognizing that these two commitments, to the affirmation of work’s inherent value and to the improvement of its conditions, can function at cross-purposes. As a way to manage this, he adds a third commitment: to keep work, even good work, in its place so that it does not consume the whole of life, which would moderate the claims about work’s value by simultaneously pursuing a politics directed at work’s reform and reduction. “Tempering the value of work,” Muirhead explains, “also protects against the abuse of that value in the name of practices that are exploitative— an abuse to which the work ethic is particularly prone”.

As my paraphrase of Albert Camus (via Howard Zinn) implies, thinking people have an obligation to stand with the disempowered in the unequal struggle to make work better. We should never have to settle for becoming part of the machinery.

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Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.

| Frederick Douglass

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Quit versus Grit

Lindsay Crouse writes1 a well-researched and well-reasoned essay that adds a new dimension to the ‘men are from Mars, women are from Venus’ trope. Apparently, women are much more likely to grind away when confronted by impossible or difficult situations, while men will simply walk away.

Some excerpts [emphasis mine]:

Under stress, women downshift but make it through. Men under stress go to extremes. They take more risks and walk away with nothing or all. It tracks with what the masculinity scholar Richard Reeves argues about how we’re raised: Boys are like orchids. They are fragile and protected. Girls, he says, are like dandelions — surprisingly tough.

Now I think those men were onto something I missed. Too much grit can work against us. I thought my willingness to push, no matter what, was bold (and virtuous). But what is the point of overcoming every obstacle if the effort leaves you exhausted and stuck? In a marathon, there’s a finish line. In life, we can grind forever.

Women like me are eager (and able) disciples of the “Never give up” dogma. We might benefit from opting out, but we dismiss that option before we ever consider it. Then we pay the costs. We start out as resilient dandelions, but what good is that if it sets us up to be trampled on?

Research starts with kids:

When researchers examined children’s responses to ineffective teaching methods, they found that boys tended to abandon approaches that led nowhere and seek better options. Girls were more likely to continue following directions, even when those directions led them to fail. Girls learn to work. Boys learn to win.

And what about in business?

Researchers tracked nearly 30,000 management-bound employees and found that when women were passed over for promotion, they were more likely to stick with their companies than men in similar situations. The men were more likely to walk away. And they were rewarded for it. They got retention benefits where they were, or they left.

Jumping for advancement is a winning game.

The final takeaway:

Giving up on things that don’t work is the only way to find things that work better or to go farther than before.

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Sidetracked

I read a deeply researched report this week, Sidetracked: The Hidden Crisis in Mid-Career Professional Economic Mobility2. The NYU School of Professional Studies analyzed 1.3 million career histories and learned that

nearly one in four mid-career professionals in the United States is stalled: steadily employed, but experiencing years of flat wages, no promotions, and no clear path to advancement. Unlike unemployment, this crisis is invisible in official statistics. Its consequences are not: underutilized talent for employers, and significant cumulative lost earnings for workers. For the average stalled software developer, the financial penalty exceeds $43,000 over 15 years.

The data is sliced and diced in dozens of ways: by industry, occupation, region, and demographic group.

The researchers diagnose three forces — occupational structure, credential quality and alignment, and early-career trajectory — that play against the individual:

The report also maps real pathways to recovery. Strategic reskilling into adjacent, higher-mobility roles can reduce stall risk by as much as 86%; the gains come not from starting over, but from pivoting into positions where existing expertise unlocks a steeper trajectory. Mid-career stall is a structural problem, not an individual failure. Detected early and addressed with targeted intervention by employers, educators, and policymakers, career momentum can be rebuilt.

Absent is any deep discussion of the failings of employers in this dynamic. Although they offer this;

The infrastructure of upward mobility—internal promotion ladders, job-to-job transitions, scope-expanding roles—has weakened in ways that constrain these outcomes.

Note that this is expressed in the passive voice, although management makes these policy choices deliberately. After all, when employees stall, the company saves money.

But, as usual, the individual is pretty much on their own in the late capitalist economy. But, if you think you are stuck at mid-career, you might take a long look at what you might do to shake loose.

The biggest takeaway:

Three core insights anchor this discussion. First, mid-career stagnation is not simply an outcome—it is a time-sensitive condition that becomes harder to reverse the longer it persists. Second, its foundations are often laid in early career, meaning that early detection and prevention matter as much as remediation. Third, it does not have to be a permanent sentence; targeted strategies involving skill development, credentialing, and occupational pivots can help workers facing, or already in the grip of, career stall overcome the economic obstacles in their path. Together, these findings shift the focus from treating stall as an isolated event to understanding it as a compounding risk that emerges early, can be detected before it hardens, and may be preventable through timely intervention.

Prevention is more powerful than remediation: by the time stagnation is visible in mid-career data, compounding mechanisms are already deeply at work.

And, as Lindsay Crouse laid out: it’s better to jump than to grind.

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I’d really like readers to sign up for a paid annual subscription, so for 2026, I have dropped the annual subscription to $30, the lowest Substack allows. Note that I’ve also lowered the monthly subscription to $5, so I am making next to nothing on that tier. Give annual a try, please.

The hidden value is years of posts behind the paywall, and of course, seeing new posts in their entirety. I rely on your support, so thanks.

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Whereas personal nostalgia peoples the mind with real memories, political nostalgia often travels back to a time that is as unreal as time travel itself.

| Eula Biss, The Theft of the Commons

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From Ground Water To Enclosure

I undertook the newish Resurfaced section here on workfutures.io as a way to reconnect with my own reading and thinking from past years, a way to rethink and explore paths lying latent in earlier notes and writings.

The Eula Biss quote above resurfaced from a newfound approach to personal nostalgia.

First, on 2026-08-29, my Obsidian daily note search offered up an article by David Leonhardt from 2023-08-29, entitled Uncharted Waters1, an evocative name for a prosaic topic. The subtitle is less poetic: The threat to groundwater is a classic tragedy of the commons.

Leonhardt gets the thrust of ‘the tragedy’ of the commons wrong. He cites the infamous Garrett Hardin who said the tragedy was inevitable. It isn’t, as Elinor Ostrom proved, but she goes unmentioned, about which more later.

But Leonhardt’s stats -- from Mira Rojanasakul and Christopher Flavelle -- are terrifying:

• ‘Over the past 40 years, groundwater levels at most of the sites have declined. At 11 percent of the sites, levels last year fell to their lowest level on record.’ Another cornerstone of our economic system based on resource extraction, like energy from fossil fuels. Except now we are talking about eating and drinking.’

I searched but couldn’t find recent data on nationwide ground water stats, but the localized ones — like the depletion of the Ogallala Aquifer which supports much of the agriculture in the midwest — are continuing to decline, and rapidly.

Leonhardt continues:

• ‘The U.S., in other words, is taking water out of the ground more quickly than nature is replenishing it.’

He makes the implicit claim that this is a proof of Hardin’s tragedy of the commons. But Nobel Laureate Elinor Ostrom disproved his theory through her work with many different groups in many different places, where bottom-up agreements among those sharing a common resource—like grazing land for cattle in the Alps—avoided overuse of the commons, in some cases for hundreds or thousands of years. (A good analysis of her contributions can be found in A Review of Vlad Tarko’s Elinor Ostrom: An Intellectual Biography by David D’Amato2.)

I had made a link in the Leonhardt note I made in 2023 to an article by Eula Biss, The Theft of the Commons3, from which I pulled the opening quote. Among the many things she tied together in that essay was the tale of Laxton, the last village in England that has not been enclosed. Enclosure means the displacement of ‘commoners’ from the ‘commons’ from which they could gather wood, graze sheep and cows, and fish. In Laxton, they have been communally farming for over 700 years.

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But her debunking of Hardin’s thesis is compelling [emphasis mine]:

The idea that shared resources are inevitably ruined by people who exploit them is sometimes called the tragedy of the commons. This is not just an attitude that passes for common sense but an economic theory: “The Tragedy of the Commons” was the title of a 1968 essay by the ecologist Garrett Hardin. His essay has been cited so often that it has kept the word commons in use among people who know nothing about the commons. “The tragedy of the commons develops in this way,” Hardin wrote. “Picture a pasture open to all. It is to be expected that each herdsman will try to keep as many cattle as possible on the commons. Such an arrangement may work reasonably satisfactorily for centuries because tribal wars, poaching, and disease keep the numbers of both man and beast well below the carrying capacity of the land. Finally, however, comes the day of reckoning, that is, the day when the long-desired goal of social stability becomes a reality. At this point, the inherent logic of the commons remorselessly generates tragedy.”

Hardin was a white nationalist who subscribed to what is now called “replacement theory.” He believed that the United States needed to restrict nonwhite immigration, because, as he put it, “a multiethnic society is insanity.” In 1974, he published an essay titled “Lifeboat Ethics: The Case Against Helping the Poor,” in which he warned of the dangers of creating a world food bank: “The less provident and less able will multiply at the expense of the abler and more provident,” he wrote, “bringing eventual ruin upon all who share in the commons.”

Hardin was writing long after the commons had been lost to enclosure, and his commons was purely hypothetical. Actual, historical commons weren’t the free-for-all he imagined. In Laxton, villagers who held rights to Westwood Common could keep twenty sheep there, or the equivalent in cows. No one was allowed to keep more animals on the commons in summer than they could support in winter. Common rights were continuously revisited and revised in the course of centuries, as demand rose and fell. In 1662, the court fined a Laxton man “for not felling his part of thistles in the Town Moor.” As E. P. Thompson observed, “Commoners themselves were not without commonsense.”

What Hardin considers the “inherent logic of the commons” is actually the logic of capitalism, the dominant logic of our time. That logic dictates expansion, no matter the consequences, and it has brought our world, as Hardin warned it would, near ruin. “Ruin,” he wrote, “is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons.” Freedom, in this context, is what we might call free enterprise, freedom having been redefined, in our age, as access to profit.

So, the tragedy of the commons lies in taking the commons away, appropriating what smallholders might have conserved, and instead placing the common resource — like the groundwater beneath the Midwest — into the gears of capitalist markets.

That’s fossil water, that was deposited there thousands or millions of years ago, and its recharge rate is less than an inch a year, while we’ve see the water level drop more than 200 feet in many locales.

The water being sucked from the ground at enormous rates is not principally being used by small farms, but by massive agricultural and industrial corporations, which are sucking the land dry. Like they enclosed the commons across England at the start of the Industrial Revolution, displacing the commoners who streamed to the cities to become factory workers, and ‘improving the land’ for industrial-scale farming.

In the US today, we are seeing the end result of industrial-scale farming: the last drops of groundwater are pumped out so alfalfa, soy, and corn can be sold and transported far away, along with the water still in the crops.

And when the farms fail, where will the farmers go? What factories will hire them, when all the water is gone? Have we lost our commonsense?

…

(By the way, the Eula Biss essay is a wonderful piece of writing, linking romantic poetry, her trip to Laxton, and the transition from feudalism to capitalism in glorious prose. Read it. You’ll thank me.)

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The way in which the world is imagined determines at any particular moment what men will do.

| Walter Lippman, Public Opinion

I’ve been Substacked.

A few anecdotes about recent Substack experiences — and imaginings — a topic I don’t write about much.

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AI gumming up the machine.

Yesterday, I spent a considerable time reading what seemed like a solid post on the increasing risks in the insurance markets. At the core, these risks are being driven by the growing climate crisis, which is leading many insurers to send out non-renewal letters to homeowners and businesses. Those letters reflect the growing gap between what insurers assess as the likelihood of catastrophic disasters — wildfires, hurricanes, flooding, and the like — and how much the insured are willing (or able) to pay.

This problem has ratcheted down to the reinsurance markets, which underwrite and allay the risks insurance companies take on: they too are being forced to raise the rates they charge to insurers. And down another layer is retrocession, reinsurance for reinsurers, and below that is the private banking world, where capital seeks opportunity. All of these entities are finding the risks inherent in insuring homes and businesses to be increasingly unprofitable. The result: bundling the risk into financial instruments and selling them to investors, and taking themselves out of the equation. As the article says, retrocession ‘now takes slices of hurricane and earthquake and wildfire risk through catastrophe bonds and other insurance-linked securities, so that a Danish pension fund can end up holding a piece of the Florida wind season in exchange for a yield.’

Reads like The Big Short, doesn’t it?

I believe this is a critical thread in the polycrisis, a term Adam Tooze uses to tie together the many parallel crises that beset the world today.

Note that the chart above doesn't explicitly call out the particular mess around insurance/reinsurance/retrocession/private capital, although it represents hundreds of billions of capital swirling around. Maybe it’s buried in the ‘Debt crises’ bubble, or an undrawn link between that node and ‘Environmental damage incidents’.

That’s all just a build-up to the Substack angle.

As I was reading this incredibly detailed and incredibly long post, I started to have an odd feeling about the writing: namely, that it might be AI-generated. And, sure enough, the first comment on the post is:

100% AI text (check Pangram)

I’m pissed. I want my time back. What parts of this piece are hallucinated? Which ‘facts’ can I rely on, if any? I shouldn’t really rely on any of it, or cite it.

I feel like one of those office workers who’s received some AI slop from a coworker, and it just makes more work for me.

So, Substack has provided a means to check if something is AI-generated (an integration of Pangram) and what percent is human. But they don’t allow me to set a general block against, for example, anything that is 50% AI-generated or higher. That’s what I want.

But maybe they don’t want to pay the tokens for all that compute.

(Note that the new Twitter.now — an attempt to resurrect the old pre-Musk Twitter — has a built-in service called Vera that checks every tweet for AI-ness.)

Substack Creator Match as a first step toward magazines.

I spent some time in the winter and spring whiteboarding a way to create a magazine on Substack, and how to invite other writers to participate. I ran aground on the issues around sharing: sharing revenue, subscribers, content, ownership, and so on.

Without infrastructure to support it — which would have to be Substack building it — I couldn’t pencil it out. Without a standard mechanism, it would be a promise of scale that would require a lot of accounting, contracts, and hackery with posts, subscriptions, and mailing lists.

Substack seems to have offered a first step in this direction with the newly announced Creator Match.

The feature provides a dashboard populated with potential collaborators and relies on overlap in current subscribers. That’s a smart angle, and one that we — the creators — wouldn’t be able to easily discover on our own.

The more important missing piece is some mechanism for revenue sharing, likely based on a variety of factors that the co-creators could tweak to make sense for them.

Note that Substack’s recommendations are very loose:

Creator matches show you the Substack publishers whose audiences and yours cross over the most. Many creators message matches directly to propose collaborations on posts, livestreams, or podcasts. Others connect to trade notes on their Substack experience and build community with other creators.

It may be that Substack is attempting to fix the leak at the bottom of the boat: subscription fatigue. How many $8/month subscriptions can the average reader afford?

Here’s Scott Carney’s take on the progression of shrinking revenue for creators [emphasis mine]:

Early adopters on the platform did the best. Writers like Heather Cox Richardson and Matthew Yglesias arrived early and earned millions. But as more writers showed up the subscription revenue pie didn’t grow commensurately. Even with Substack’s discoverability mechanism (something that is missing on places like Ghost and Beehiv) it was getting more difficult to establish a real career here.

So Substack tried to solve the problem by adopting a strategy that every other tech company had already worn thin. They pivoted to adding a twitter-like function called “Notes” (which created a distinction between ““subscribers” and “followers”). Soon they incorporated video and live-streaming and encouraged posters to clip shorts into their feeds with an AI-generated clipping program.

In other words: Substack’s growth strategy was to offer almost the exact same things as every other social media network. They pushed the idea that the subscription revenues would keep the best creators on this platform and the new engagement opportunities would grow truly massive audiences. The stated plan was to make Substack the go-to-place for everything internet in a winner-take-all contest.

At first the strategy even sort of worked. A lot of new users DID join the platform and engaged with all this new free content—increasing the overall number of eyeballs that were here. These new “engaged users” helped skyrocket the VC-backed valuation , but, notably, didn’t do much to help the flood of new creators who came here to actually earn more money.

In fact, they started earning a lot less.

Take for instance this note from Taylor Lorenz from just yesterday.

Paradoxically, she wrote that as a Substack note.

This has also been my experience. I have a growing mob of followers and a shrinking community of subscribers.

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Real publications, not creator matching.

Carney goes on with his analysis, and wonders why Substack doesn’t build the infrastructure to support magazines or newspapers, which might be a way around the mess: people might subscribe to a publication with 25 contributors for $8/month, and it might attract more than 25 times as many subscribers, so the numbers would line up.

Carney spelled it out similarly:

It’s interesting to me that the higher-ups at Substack didn’t see this coming a long time ago and head it off before we reached a crisis point. One obvious thing they could have tried would be to allow creators to team up and pool their creative resources into something akin to the role previously held by newspapers.

They could have instituted some sort of curated subscription bundle that allowed me to team up with 20 or so other similar writers and share a pool of money. Perhaps readers would be open to paying $15/month to access a bunch of writers at once so that writers could share helpings of an overall larger pie. I’m not sure this would work, I assume that there would be squabbles between writers about what percentage of the bundles that they actually deserve, but I would certainly give it a go.

Ed West arrives at more or less the same conclusion, after proposing an all-you-can-eat model like Spotify or Medium [emphasis mine]:

From the consumers’ point of view, the ideal system would allow them to pay a monthly subscription fee and read anything they want, as with Spotify. Yet even if Substack were far more generous than the music streaming service, this would be disastrous for the ‘creators’, as I suppose we’re supposed to call ourselves. Substack has attracted a lot of very good writers because it offers a great deal of money to those who succeed, and the top earners would refuse to take part in such a system. Some customers would like to pay per article, but that would also translate into a significant pay cut, unless they were perhaps allowed only one such purchase per writer; after that, you need to subscribe. A pay-per-article system would also change the incentives which currently make Substack interesting, encouraging far more clickbait.

Perhaps the alternative is bundling, whereby consumers buy paid subscriptions to 3 or 5 or 10 substacks at much reduced rates, with the income shared between the writers. Maybe it could be distributed based on how much time the consumer spends on each, although that sounds complicated, or just shared evenly.

[…]

Writers would have to opt into the bundling system, and the very high earners might not feel the need to join, but that probably wouldn’t matter; there might be issues about contrasting prices between substacks, but this doesn’t sound like an insurmountable problem.

The insurmountable problem is we need Substack to implement all the plumbing needed for such federations — newspapers or magazines — to come together and to handle all the complex publishing, sharing, and funds sharing in such a way that the creators can spend their time writing, and not managing the ‘back office’ of such publications. It won’t work if all involved have to take on an additional part-time (or full-time) job.

The reality is that Substack is principally making money from their slice of subscriptions, and followers aren’t paying those fees.

What’s next? Advertising?

Well, yes. From Substack:

A new economic engine for culture

Build on the trust creators have earned on Substack. Drive cultural impact for brands. Real revenue for creators.

Substack is launching a new initiative to expand revenue opportunities for writers, publishers, and creators in ways that are additive to a subscription foundation.

We’re working with a select group of flagship partners to create bespoke partnerships with the most influential voices on Substack. We’re also building tools to connect bestsellers to brands investing in the Substack creator ecosystem.

This program will make connecting with talent easier and better than ever before—our pilot partners are proof of the potential.

They have already lined up ‘best sellers’ for a pilot sponsorship program. But the gradient of gaining subscribers has shifted downward, so it has become harder to become — or remain — a best seller.

Dying the death of a thousand unsubscribes.

I hope they implement magazines so that like-minded creators can band together and attract sponsorships before the economics of Substack collapse. It won’t be successful if only the top few percent of writers here can survive. And if most leave because it doesn’t really pay, Substack will dwindle into a social network platform with a difficult-to-achieve sponsorship tier for a select few writers.

But maybe it was destined to go there anyway. After all, Medium went through various iterations of publication infrastructure — up to announcing a planned advertising scheme — and then backed out. Maybe that was just Ev Williams's ambivalence, but maybe something else made it hard to pull it all together.

However, I come away thinking that there has to be a way to bundle, say, a dozen writers into a magazine-like collective, and that the economics will pencil out better than a dozen individuals dying the death of a thousand unsubscribes.

A diagnosis with no way out is just a more sophisticated despair.

| Lough For Ever

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FOBO

A new term for our times: FOBO, or ‘fear of becoming obsolete’. This spirit haunts the corridors of the workplace under the specter of AI.

I first encountered the concept in an Economist piece1, in which Bill Winters became the poster child for heartless capitalism in the age of AI job threats.

Bill Winters, the chief executive of Standard Chartered, an emerging-markets bank headquartered in Britain, made waves recently when he talked about a planned 15% reduction in back-office jobs over the next four years. Four words in particular landed him in trouble: a reference to the replacement of “lower-value human capital” by financial capital invested in automation. The kerfuffle provides an instructive case study in a problem now faced by almost every manager: how to talk about the effect of artificial intelligence on jobs.

I doubt he will live down the dubious distinction of saying out loud what corporate boards and the C-suites have been saying — and calculating —behind closed doors.

The Economist continues [emphasis, here and above, is mine]:

Even if the numbers do not point to widespread lay-offs yet, an AI backlash is well under way. It has spawned the acronym “ FOBO ”, for “fear of becoming obsolete”.

A literature review by Magnus Sverke of Stockholm University and his co-authors—published in 2019, before the start of the generative- AI age—found that [job insecurity] is generally associated with worse health outcomes and decreased job satisfaction. But firms suffer, too. In theory, job insecurity might benefit organisations if it spurred greater employee effort. In practice, it seems to lead to impaired performance.

A paper by Wen Wang of the University of Leicester and her co-authors analysed data from a national survey of British employees and employers, covering over 16,000 respondents at 1,100 organisations. The researchers found that objective measures of job insecurity, such as cuts in working hours, were generally associated with lower levels of employee commitment, but that this effect was weaker if workers viewed bosses as being honest, reliable and fair.

In one way, Winters was right: by increasing job insecurity, he decreased productivity and therefore the value of those made more insecure.

The anonymous author of this Economist piece starts by acknowledging the inherent adversarial nature of workers and management, but then slides into defeatism, asserting that governments will have to clean up the mess made by companies dumping the newly ‘obsolete’.

Firms and employees have different incentives—they are not all in this together. And the burden of managing widespread disruption will fall largely on governments.

Alternatively, governments could get ahead of this catastrophe, regulate the wholesale rollout of AI, slow the transition, and give people more time to transition careers where necessary.

Remember the China Shock's impact on blue-collar manufacturing, which rusted out manufacturing industries and from which the Rust Belt still has not recovered, 25 years later. A similar AI Shock may be on the near horizon.

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AI Shock

Annie Lowrey, earlier this year2, tried to assess how bad a massive downturn in white-collar work could get, and she starts by saying no one knows:

Businesses really are shrinking payroll and cutting costs as they deploy AI. In recent weeks, Baker McKenzie, a white-shoe law firm, axed 700 employees, Salesforce sacked hundreds of workers, and the auditing firm KPMG negotiated lower fees with its own auditor. Two CNBC reporters with no engineering experience “vibe-coded” a clone of Monday.com’s work-management platform in less than an hour. When they released their story, Monday.com’s stock tanked.

I don’t think anyone knows what will happen, or even what is happening now. AI technology is changing at an exponential pace, and changing the workforce in a thousand hard-to-parse ways. But if AI quickly eliminates white-collar work, the country is going to end up in something much stranger than a downturn, and something much harder to recover from too.

[..]

If white-collar layoffs cause a downturn, Washington might not be able to restore hiring and lift consumer spending as it has done before. Businesses wouldn’t need the skills workers possess. Firms wouldn’t want to hire the legions of accountants, engineers, lawyers, middle managers, human-resources executives, financial analysts, PR types, and customer-service agents they just laid off. (Writers would be fine, I choose to believe.) The United States would have a “structural” unemployment problem, as economists put it, not a “cyclical” demand problem.

She quickly shifts from the macro to the micro view: away from mass economics to people and their lives.

If AI eliminated the need for office work, many people would be unemployed for years; their earnings would potentially fall, their mental health would deteriorate, and their chance of finding a new position would diminish with every month that passed. Plus, the unemployment system isn’t designed to support six-figure earners. Most state payments max out at $500 or $600 a week, a quarter of what many upper-middle-class employees earn. Young workers would face their own challenges: The pool of entry-level white-collar jobs would shrink, as it already is, pushing recent graduates’ income down for years, even decades.’

She makes the obvious comparison with the rise of the Rust Belt:

White-collar workers would go through what blue-collar workers went through beginning in the 1970s. Advances in machine technology improved productivity and depressed employment in Detroit; Pittsburgh; Gary, Indiana; and Worcester, Massachusetts. Rust Belt communities fell apart and never recovered. Then China joined the World Trade Organization, and globalization spurred another round of job losses, causing even more permanent damage. Affected workers ended up poorer, less happy, and less healthy. They died sooner. Their kids were worse off too.

Retraining/upskilling has a terrible record for blue-collar workers, and for jettisoned white-collar workers it might be worse: a 50-year-old accountant might not be open to becoming a plumber, for example, and a 30-year-old middle manager at a software company might not want to become a nurse.

And UBI is no answer; just a band-aid [emphasis mine].

UBI is a dystopian outcome, not a utopian one. For families to thrive in this new post-work paradigm, the government would need to redistribute a lot more than $1,500 per person per month, necessitating confiscatory taxes on corporations—taxes they would fight tooth and nail. The bigger problem would be that Americans would hate a world without work, where the jobless rate floats at 30 percent instead of 4 percent. Many Americans like working.

And what are the societal implications of widespread unemployment?

Long-term unemployment destroys people’s mental and physical health, and generates toxic societal unrest. Politicians love saying that Americans want a hand up, not a handout—and they aren’t wrong.

Lowrey doesn’t explore the unrest angle very deeply, but the unemployed elite is a well-understood powder keg, a source of revolution.

Edgar and Co, in Surplus Elites and Revolution, looked into historical revolutions where ‘elite overproduction’ (to use Peter Turchin’s term3) led to countries being turned upside down:

What happens when elite supply vastly outstrips elite demand? You get a massive pool of highly educated, hyper-ambitious, wealthy “game-losers.” These frustrated individuals become counter-elites. Because they cannot enter the existing structure through traditional means, they have a rational incentive to use the “popular immiseration” (the angry, underpaid working class left behind by the wealth pump) to attack and consequently overturn the system. This oversupply of surplus elites fuels the bitter ideological warfare seen in media and politics. Factions of elites weaponise populist anger to destroy their rivals through the dry, deadwood created by popular immiseration, and the desperate leaders willing to strike the match are produced by elite overproduction.

We’ve seen the glimmerings of populist anger pulling the US and Europe into warring camps, already. Now push millions of well-educated, relatively flush, and now furious ‘elites’ into a growing pool of joblessness.

Lowrey ends ambivalently:

I don’t really think society will come to this. Throughout history, people have used technology to become more productive and prosperous without reducing the demand for human labor overall. Then again, maybe I’m just in denial.

Tell it to those who lost well-paid jobs in the manufacturing centers of the Rust Belt, and who have never rebounded. But they didn’t have a wave of well-educated, ambitious elites to lead them.

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…

What spark of humanity, of possible creativity, can remain alive in a being dragged out of sleep at 6 every morning, jolted about in suburban trains, deafened by the racket of machinery, bleached and steamed by meaningless sounds and gestures?

| Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life

…

Raoul Vaneigem

I confess that until this week, I was unaware of Raoul Vaneigem and his highly influential writings, like The Revolution of Everyday Life. Adam Nossiter’s obit makes clear his lasting impact on French and global discourse [emphasis mine]:

Mr. Vaneigem’s prescience in diagnosing French discontent with post-World War II prosperity, reiterated in dozens of subsequent books that tapped into a rich vein of national unease, made him an intellectual reference point in France over the next 50 years. When French citizens took to the streets, as they so often do, journalists frequently came calling to get Mr. Vaneigem’s take.

[…]

The world of mindless work, of materialism, of authority; the state’s instruments of control and repression — these were the targets of Mr. Vaneigem’s poetic prose, honed into easily remembered phrases that were well-suited for a street demonstration or a university wall.

“Who wants a world in which the guarantee that we shall not die of starvation entails the risk of dying of boredom?” he wrote at the outset of “Revolution.” The question perfectly captured the anomie of the generation that would take to the streets less than a year later. Material well-being was as unsatisfactory as a safe 9-to-5 job, in his view.

Mr. Vaneigem hit communism as hard as capitalism. “The great collective illusions, anemic from shedding the blood of so many, have since given way to the thousands of prepacked ideologies sold by consumer society like so many portable brain-scrambling machines,” he wrote.

Vaneigem’s anti-work — and anti-Maxist and anti-establishment — positions may be ripe for reassessment in the 21st Century. Are we returning to the ‘ecstasy of revolution’1 that peaked in 1968 Paris?

Vaneigem was an early member of the avant-garde Situationist group, along with Guy Debord and others, decrying the dark negatives of capitalism. But his way diverged, focusing more on the tensions of everyday life, leaving grander political theory to Debord, whose The Society of the Spectacle stands as a takedown of both mainstream and Marxist dogma. As Robert Zaretsky wrote in 2017 during Trump 1.0,

With the presidency of Donald Trump, the Debordian analysis of modern life resonates more deeply and darkly than perhaps even its creator thought possible, anticipating, in so many ways, the frantic and fantastical, nihilistic and numbing nature of our newly installed government. In Debord’s notions of “unanswerable lies,” when “truth has almost everywhere ceased to exist or, at best, has been reduced to pure hypothesis,” and the “outlawing of history,” when knowledge of the past has been submerged under “the ceaseless circulation of information, always returning to the same list of trivialities,” we find keys to the rise of trutherism as well as Trumpism.

In his later work, “Comments on the Society of the Spectacle,” published almost 20 years after the original, Debord seemed to foresee the spectacular process that commenced on Jan. 20 [Trump’s first inauguration]. “The spectacle proves its arguments,” he wrote, “simply by going round in circles: by coming back to the start, by repetition, by constant reaffirmation in the only space left where anything can be publicly affirmed …. Spectacular power can similarly deny whatever it likes, once or three times over, and change the subject, knowing full well there is no danger of any riposte.” After Trump’s inauguration, the actual size of the audience quickly ceased to matter. The battle over images of the crowd, snapped from above or at ground level, simply fueled our collective case of delirium tremens.

Debord and Vaneigem turn their smudged mirror to reflect today’s world, just as much as that of the Twentieth Century. And in Vaneigem’s quote, at the top of this issue, is a perfect echo of today’s disaffection in work, and its place in our lives: ‘bleached and steamed by meaningless sounds and gestures’.

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Short Takes

More AI Slop

And here is a company that sent a job application rejection email to a candidate that read, “Write a warm but generic rejection email that sounds polite yet firm. Do not mention specific reasons for rejection. Make the candidate feel like they were strongly considered even if they weren’t. Remember to use candidate name and company name variables.”

| Jim Edwards, Fortune

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Yes, we are still workaholics

This article uses labor force surveys from 160 countries to build a new microdatabase on hours worked covering 97% of the world population in cross section. We also construct time series spanning over 20 years in 86 countries. Hours worked per adult slightly decline with GDP per capita but are weakly correlated with development overall. Hours worked by the young (aged 15–19) and elderly (aged 60+) fall with development, driven entirely by growing school attendance and public pension coverage. Hours worked among prime-age adults (aged 20–59) are stable with development but undergo a great gender reshuffling: falling hours per male worker have been exactly offset by increases in female labor force participation in many countries. Labor income taxes are strongly negatively related to hours worked across countries. This correlation is attenuated when controlling for social spending and disappears when further controlling for working hours regulations. Both social spending and working hours regulations are associated with lower hours worked.

| Amory Gethin, Emmanuel Saez, Global Working Hours

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Resurfaced 2026-07-19: Job applicants have rights, don’t they?

In The Hunt for a Job Has Never Been Worse. These Applicants Are Fighting Back.2, Jessica Grose makes the case that job applicants have rights, no matter how AI-ified the hiring process is.

She says AI doesn’t seem to be helping employers find the candidates they (say they) need, or shortening the time involved. Meanwhile, applicants interact with AI systems and often receive no feedback on their applications.

As employers continue to use A.I. to rationalize the process of identifying strong applicants, applicants have begun to use similar tools to game the systems evaluating them. The vicious cycle thus begins: Employers buy or build new tools, which job seekers cotton on to, and on and on. It becomes a futile “Spy vs. Spy” showdown instead of a useful way to meet the ostensible goal of giving qualified people jobs.

This is a problem that seems as if it could be solved only through a return to some analog processes and better regulation at the federal level that forces employers to make their current methods of evaluation more transparent and fair.

Or just make the process legible for the applicants.

And what sort of regulation could be employed?

The most important remedy for job applicants is likely fixing the laws around automated hiring at the federal level so that there is much more transparency about the use of A.I. and your personal data.

New York City’s laws could be a model for such legislation, my newsroom colleague Steve Lohr pointed out in 2023. “The city’s law requires companies using A.I. software in hiring to notify candidates that an automated system is being used. It also requires companies to have independent auditors check the technology annually for bias,” he wrote.

[Emory University law professor, Ifeoma] Ajunwa also thinks that the Fair Credit Reporting Act should apply to all A.I. companies that collect data on applicants and then give them a score. Applicants should be able to access that score and “check it for inaccuracies, and also demand a correction from whoever holds that file,” she said. This is the argument behind a class-action lawsuit filed in January against Eightfold AI, a company that uses a data set that includes the profiles of more than 1 billion people. The plaintiffs want transparency into how they were scored and what information was used to assess them.

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In some sense capitalism is already behind us. We live here in its fevered midst, to be sure, but a recognition is emerging, especially among younger generations: It isn’t sustainable. The devastation of the natural world; the mindless consumerism; above all, the human misery that corporations trawl the world to extract, like ore, from souls as divine as yours or mine. All of it, increasingly, in service to the pathological greed of a few thousand mentally ill men. It cannot last. What comes next may be better, or it may be worse. But it won’t be this.

| Charles Finch, Her Job Was Real. So Why Did Her Work Feel So Fake?

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2025-08-15

Robert D. Putnam, Richard V. Reeves, Boy Crisis of 2025, Meet the ‘Boy Problem’ of the 1900s

Many boys and men are struggling today, too, in an America once again disrupted by technological change, immigration and growing inequality. Since 2010, suicide rates among young men have risen by a third — they are now higher than they are among middle-aged men. The share of college degrees going to men has fallen to 41 percent, lower than the women’s share in 1970. One in 10 men aged 20 to 24 is effectively doing nothing — neither enrolled in school nor working. That’s twice the rate in 1990. This crisis demands a response equivalent to what the Progressive era delivered, not just in public policy but equally important, from our civic institutions.

We continue to fail our young men.

2023-08-15

Economists Reconsider Industrial Policy | Dani Rodrik, Réka Juhász, Nathan Lane

Better economic techniques are leading to a broad reappraisal of industrial policy, like Bidenomics [emphasis mine]:

As policymakers around the world embrace industrial policy in pursuit of a wide variety of objectives – supply-chain resilience, green technologies, geopolitical advantage, good jobs – the debate over its effectiveness is reaching fever pitch. Typically, this debate is portrayed as one where sound economics is squarely on the skeptics’ side. “There is a strong case against industrial policy in economics,” intoned one recent commentary, and embracing it “just wastes money and distorts the economy.” This is an increasingly outmoded view.

While it is generally true that mainstream economists have responded to industrial policy with knee-jerk hostility since at least the 1970s, things have been changing fast, owing to new academic research that is less driven by ideological hostility to government intervention and better grounded in rigorous empirical methods.

In the past, economists too often focused on simple indicators such as import tariffs, capturing only limited dimensions of industrial policy and conflating its objectives with others (such as raising government revenue or playing special-interest politics).

For starters, industrial policy has been ubiquitous, and its prevalence predates the recent rise in its use and prominence in public discussions.

And the prevalence of industrial policies tends to increase with income: advanced economies use it more often and intensively than developing countries do.

The results of [modern statistical research] are much more favorable to industrial policy, tending to find that such policies – or historical accidents that mimic their effects – have often led to large, seemingly beneficial long-term effects in the structure of economic activity.

Newer studies also shed light on the long-standing controversy over the contribution of industrial policy to East Asia’s economic miracle. [...] The early economic literature on East Asia’s rise had argued that industrial policies were at best ineffective. Newer analyses paying closer attention to the structure of upstream and downstream linkages in these economies reach considerably more sanguine conclusions. [...] Critics of East Asian policies thought governments could never pick the right sectors because they lacked information on where market failures were more prominent.

Princeton economist Ernest Liu has recently provided a useful guide for policymakers confronting an economy where market imperfections occur across multiple, linked sectors. In such settings, subsidizing upstream sectors generally minimizes policy mistakes. Liu shows that the actual policies used in China and during South Korea’s HCI were in line with this guidance.

Some commentators have recently criticized US President Joe Biden’s industrial policy because it “lacks a rigorous economic foundation.” The reality is that plenty of good economic research already exists on industrial policy.

I wonder if the economists stuck in the past on industrial policy are also the ones who wanted Powell’s Fed to raise interest rates — post-COVID — because they believed high unemployment was necessary to avoid a recession?

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[Man] can adapt himself somehow to anything his imagination can cope with; but he cannot deal with Chaos.

| Suzanne Langer

2025-08-14

Working, Fast And Slow | Greg Satell

More about slow productivity than behavioral economics, despite the homage to Kahneman.

Creating something new and meaningful is slow, often tedious work. And for long stretches, it’s not clear whether you’re making progress at all.

Like the discovery of penicillin, which languished in a journal article for ten years before a group of researchers—not the original discoverer—turned it into a widely available medicine after years of hard, slow lab work.

Apart from Fleming’s initial accident, every step required teams of people performing mundane, repetitive tasks: maintaining lab equipment, preparing cultures, and logging data. Despite the historical impact, that’s what most days looked like.

Even people who do exclusively creative work devote only a few hours a day to it. Hemingway, quite famously, wrote each morning and stopped by noon. In Slow Productivity, Cal Newport notes that this pattern is common. I’ve found the same to be true in my own work. The rest of the day is spent handling more routine tasks.

Reminds me of how Ignacy Jan Paderewski, the Polish pianist, composer, and Prime Minister, put it:

Before I was a genius, I was a drudge.

Satell returns to his central example, penicillin, to hammer his point that the slow drudgery of daily practice is the wellspring of work of value, not just the lightning strike of insight or discovery:

Producing work of lasting value requires learning to mode shift —from reactive execution to reflective creation, and back again. The story of penicillin shows why. Each breakthrough led to a flurry of activity, with tasks that needed to be performed with efficiency and skill in the moment. Yet inevitably, that progress led to unsolved problems, which needed much slower, more reflective modes of work and thought to overcome.

2023-08-14

How Economists Missed the Big Disinflation | Paul Krugman

Inflation optimists -- like Krugman -- and pessimists -- like Larry Summers -- were both wrong. The optimists were wrong that inflation would prove small and transient. The pessimists were wrong that inflation would be high enough to require large increases in unemployment for a long period of time to bring down inflation. The optimists seem to have learned from their mistakes, but the pessimists haven’t. The Fed got lucky, because it tried to engineer a recession to bring down inflation, but the economy just muscled the recession away.

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America’s logistics boom has turned to bust | The Economist

The logistics sphere -- trucking, warehousing, freight -- has been whipsawed by economics. Overhiring and overbuilding is now being reversed as the supply-chain bottlenecks of the pandemic have straightened out and people aren’t buying rice cookers or Pelotons anymore. Yello goes out of business, Amazon closes or delays hundreds of warehouses, and 20,000 truck operators have gone bye-bye since mid-2022. However, some companies are holding onto excess workers:

Lay-offs in the industry have thus far fallen short of what one might expect given the stagnation in consumer spending, argues Aaron Terrazas, chief economist of Glassdoor, an employment portal. Having long suffered from labour shortages, many firms have been reluctant to lay off workers, reckons Tim Denoyer of ACT Research.

…

Peter Turchin says elite overproduction leads to an increase in inequality, and then a decrease in societal cooperation:

How does growing economic inequality lead to political instability? Partly this correlation reflects a direct, causal connection. High inequality is corrosive of social cooperation and willingness to compromise, and waning cooperation means more discord and political infighting. Perhaps more important, economic inequality is also a symptom of deeper social changes, which have gone largely unnoticed.

Elite overproduction generally leads to more intra-elite competition that gradually undermines the spirit of cooperation, which is followed by ideological polarization and fragmentation of the political class. This happens because the more contenders there are, the more of them end up on the losing side. A large class of disgruntled elite-wannabes, often well-educated and highly capable, has been denied access to elite positions.

| Peter Turchin, Blame Rich, Overeducated Elites as Our Society Frays (2013, but in my notes from 2023-08-12)

Given time, these surplus elites can become a counter elite, fighting the system. Look at the polarization against establishment politicians in 2026 elections.

…

I recently rejiggered my workflow in Obsidian so that files I created one, two, and three years ago are shown in each day’s daily note. This is to prompt me to scan them and to decide if I should retire them or reconsider their subjects.

It occurred to me that I should pick notes surfaced by this mechanism that are worth sharing, and post them.

Welcome to Resurfaced.

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2023-08-12

Samuel Moyn’s ‘Liberalism Against Itself’ | Becca Rothfeld

‘The central thesis of Samuel Moyn‘s daring new book, “Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times,” is that Cold War liberals and their contemporary heirs do not champion a stirring vision so much as they adopt a self-protective crouch.’

She reminds us of the adage, often attributed to Robert Frost, ‘A liberal is a man too broad-minded to take his own side in a quarrel’.

Rothfeld thinks Moyn is too dismissive of Isaiah Berlin, whose words she elevates:

A liberal sermon which recommends machinery designed to prevent people from doing each other too much harm, giving each human group sufficient room to realise its own idiosyncratic, unique, particular ends without too much interference with the ends of others, is not a passionate battle-cry to inspire men to sacrifice and martyrdom and heroic feats.

…

The Hidden Value of Time | Esau McCaulley

A very family-centric polemic against time poverty, and McCaulley argues that the poor have the worst time poverty of all. He then contrasts the challenges his impoverished mother faced and his own, but as a well-off public intellectual.

McCaulley makes an oblique argument for basic income, and comes up with a great one-liner: ‘A living wage should be one in which there is space for something beyond work’. Kind of a weak ending for what should be either a direct call to action or a stronger condemnation of the status quo.

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2024-08-12

How San Francisco Longshoremen Made Their Union a Powerhouse | Benjamin Fong

San Francisco was a strong union town. San Francisco dockworkers went on strike in 1919, as in many other American workplaces, cities, and industries after World War I. That union was racially exclusive, like other unions before it in San Francisco. And not surprisingly, employers used African Americans and black West Indians as strikebreakers in 1919. That was one of the reasons that that strike failed. And then that ushered in an anti-union era in San Francisco, which was and would be the biggest and most important port on the West Coast for decades.

Employers had used divide-and-conquer tactics very effectively. And many white workers were hung up on racism. And, of course, California was the heart of the anti-Chinese xenophobia of the nineteenth century. That also played into the anti-Black racism that persisted. And so employers cleverly, cynically but brilliantly, played race in San Francisco on the waterfront. And as a result, San Francisco dock workers suffered the consequences. They lost their union. Their wages went down. The shape-up persisted. All the bad things that happen when workers are weak occurred on the San Francisco waterfront in the interwar era.

The International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) has been a strong player—although a small one—in the integration of American unions, despite efforts of all arrayed against them.

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2025-08-12

AT&T CEO’s Memo Just Made It Official: Workplace Loyalty Is Dead | Aki Ito

John Stankey says the quiet part out loud, and says the unwritten compact between workers and company have been rewritten:

‘It’s not every day that a CEO’s 2,500-word response to an employee engagement survey goes viral. But that’s exactly what happened last weekend, after AT&T CEO John Stankey sent a memo to his managers that my colleagues Dominick Reuter and Katherine Li published for the entire internet to see. Upon first reading it, I laughed at just how blunt Stankey was in his admonishment of his staff who apparently complained in the company’s survey. Here goes another executive lashing out at frustrated employees, I thought.

But the more times I read it, the more I saw something deeper: perhaps the clearest attempt yet by a major CEO to rewrite the terms of the workplace in contemporary corporate America. Last year, in an essay about the changing relationship between employers and employees, I argued that decades of layoffs, slashed benefits, and hardline management killed off our long-held norms around workplace loyalty. But I had never heard the head of a large corporation actually admit that. Now, here was Stankey — the CEO of a 140-year-old company that once epitomized corporate loyalty — declaring the death of loyalty himself. “Some of you may have started your tour with this company expecting an ‘employment deal’ rooted in loyalty,” he wrote. “We have consciously shifted away from some of these elements.”

He’s laying his cards on the table, say, this is no bluff. Take down all the inspirational posters in the cafeteria. The deal is now nakedly transactional. Late-stage capitalism sheds all posturing and mushy mumbo-jumbo about the intangibles of the relationship between the organization and the people that comprise it. The implicit mutual regard between management and the managed is erased, and all that is left are the steely jaws of the machine.

‘That “employment deal” Stankey references is known by another name in organizational psychology: the psychological contract. As I wrote last year, it’s the set of things that employers and employees believe they owe each other and are owed in return. Usually, these beliefs go unsaid — they’re more inferred by the totality of a company’s culture. What’s unusual about Stankey’s note is that he goes on at length making the implicit explicit, telling employees what they’re right to expect from the company and what they aren’t. Stankey says his workers deserve a transparent career path, a functional office, and the proper tools to do their jobs. But he says they’re wrong to expect promotions based on tenure, the flexibility to work from home, and something about “conformance” that I can’t decipher for the life of me. Most of all, he says, don’t expect loyalty.’

We don’t, Mr. Stinky.

Tech giants need to be held accountable for the harms their products cause, not just encouraged to innovate. [...] These companies must be subjected to a liability framework that exposes them to meaningful financial losses, should they be found responsible for harms. Only then will they take safety more seriously in both the AI-development process and “downstream”, once it is deployed. Liability has the power to wire new incentives into the foundation of AI businesses.

| Tristan Harris, A tech ethicist on how AI worsens ills caused by social media (2024)

…

‘We can’t wait another year.’ Oops.

Harris1 wants us to reason by analogy in the case of AI development, basically saying ‘remember how things went with unregulated social media?’ He offers this:

What’s driving AI research, development and deployment is already clear: a dangerous incentive to race ahead. If we want a better outcome this time [than with social media], we cannot wait another decade—or even another year—to act.

And, in fact, today is more than two years later, and the safeguards against AI are rudimentary, at best.

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The hidden value is years of posts behind the paywall, and of course, seeing new posts in their entirety. I rely on your support, so thanks.

The Many Faces Of AI Regulation

AI needs to be regulated: a topic frequently discussed, but not exhaustively. At one extreme, the Tech Overlords might want complete freedom to do whatever they want. At the other end, the Neo-Luddites might demand a serious slowdown (or total shutdown) of AI development. But let’s look at some of the discussions that various constituencies are involved in, and who is supposedly being protected from what.

What China is doing.

I’m starting with recent court cases in China, because the perspective there is wildly different from the ideas of ‘protection’ from AI in the West. China wants to protect workers from being displaced by AI.

Earlier this year, various court rulings have come down heavily on companies which have laid off workers replaced by AI. Catie Edmondson reports2:

When a Chinese court ruled late last month that a tech company had illegally laid off a worker after replacing him with artificial intelligence software, it delivered an implicit warning to other employers.

“The development of artificial intelligence technology should be applied to liberating labor, promoting employment and improving people’s livelihood,” the Hangzhou Intermediate People’s Court wrote. “Labor law allows employers to undertake technological changes and upgrade their operations, but it should also take into account the protection of workers’ legitimate rights and interests.”

The case — the third time the Chinese government has highlighted a ruling siding with workers displaced by A.I. — underscores how Beijing is contending with the need to balance its ambitions for the widespread use of A.I. with the unemployment that might accompany it.

This is a Chinese take on ‘right to work’ laws: not the conventional anti-union laws we find in Red states in the US, but an anti-AI-displacement ruling protecting ‘workers’ legitimate rights and interests’.

These are not the words we are hearing in various debates outside of China.

The Chinese situation is quite different: while the country has invested heavily in AI development, high unemployment in many sectors of the economy — more than 200 million workers have been swept into the vortex of low-paying gig work jobs — the government and its courts are drawing a firm red line to assuage concerns about AI job displacement.

The courts’ decree is harsh:

The three court rulings have offered an early glimpse of what that response might look like. In each case, the court said employers remained responsible for keeping workers on the payroll, even if A.I. had rendered their jobs redundant. Judges have repeatedly ruled that replacing workers with A.I. is voluntary cost-cutting that does not justify mass layoffs.

So, in the case of China, the ones being protected are workers, who cannot be subjected to AI-driven layoffs.

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What progressives in the US are pushing for.

You’d presume that progressives in the US would be at least as protective of workers as authoritarian China. But, no.

Gavin Newsom, for example, wants to stand up to support workers in the time of AI, but not very much:3

California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, issued an executive order on Thursday to explore a broad overhaul of labor policies, an attempt to front run a potential mass job displacement caused by artificial intelligence.

Mr. Newsom, a Democrat, signed the order mandating state agencies work with academics, labor groups and the A.I. industry to study how to subsidize companies that keep employees rather than replace them with the technology.

Oh, carrots, not China’s sticks.

The order calls for an expansion of job training programs, particularly for white-collar workers like customer service representatives, software developers, and marketing and sales people whose roles are expected to be eliminated by A.I.. Mr. Newsom also ordered an examination of universal basic capital, which would give all residents stakes in assets like corporate stocks, bonds or wealth funds.

Sounds like Newsom has been palling around with AI tech executives, because they always roll out retraining and UBI whenever AI job displacement comes up.

I won’t recapitulate the difficulties involved with retraining obsoleted employees when there are mass layoffs (go see Remember Lordstown). It doesn’t work well unless they are retrained for new jobs in their existing companies.

Unemployment insurance and other traditional safeguards will not suffice, Mr. Newsom has said. A.I. leaders have warned him of swift and major changes in employment, where entire job categories are at risk of extinction — particularly for white-collar workers.

If Newsom, in deep blue California, can’t actually fight against AI job displacement, we’re in trouble. The Democrats should adopt the approach of China, and directly protect jobs, not this UBI, retraining, namby-pamby half-ass horseshit.

…

What about workers in the EU?

EU laws are mostly aimed at protecting people from rogue actions that AI chatbots might take, not jobs. See the Artificial Intelligence Act, which has no mention of ‘jobs’ or ‘employment’. It does mention various sorts of transparency for AI systems, which is in principle a mechanism to understand AI’s workings and potential dangers, like hacking into corporate computer systems and deleting company data, or turning off the streetlights.

But what about the people at risk of job loss?

What is the Trump administration proposing?

Literally from today’s headlines, Trump White House Readies AI Framework to Review Security Risks, which is solely geared to evaluating AI models for their likelihood for rogue behavior, such as circumventing security guardrails. We’ve heard a lot recently about that happening.

In a meeting on Tuesday with top artificial intelligence companies, White House officials said the federal government planned to review only certain types of artificial intelligence models for potential security risks and not others, according to four people familiar with the discussions.

The A.I. models the government plans to review are known as “closed” models, which do not publish their underlying code and are made by companies like Anthropic and OpenAI, according to three of the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the details of the meeting were private.

The administration does not plan to review “open source” A.I. models, which have computer code available to the public to download and modify, although that could change as the technology advances, the people said.

The moves are an effort by the Trump administration to take a more hands-on approach to regulating A.I., and they formalize oversight of leading A.I. labs like OpenAI and Anthropic. But they delay addressing some of the most pressing regulatory issues with the technology, including potential threats posed by increasingly powerful open-source models made by Chinese companies.

So this ‘hands-on’ approach will be conducted in total secrecy, which inspires a great deal of confidence that the Tech Overlords will be reined in:

Details of the framework governing the reviews of the A.I. models, one of the most significant federal efforts to oversee a fast-evolving technology, will not be made public, the people said. Neither will a list of “trusted” institutions that will get early access to advanced A.I. models alongside the government, said a person familiar with the matter.

So, Trump and his crew are really only concerned with institutional protection. The hell with ‘workers’ legitimate rights and interests’.

Can’t we do as well as those heartless, godless Communists, Mr. Trump?

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If we are always arriving and departing, it is also true that we are eternally anchored. One’s destination is never a place but rather a new way of looking at things.

| Henry Miller

…

Sometimes it’s helpful — especially when long-held or widely accepted ideas don’t seem to be working — to turn the issue upside down, or, as the physicist Richard Feynman suggested, go back to first principles, and try to explain what appears to be complex in terms as simple as possible. In fact, Feynman maintained you were simple enough unless a 12-year-old could understand your explanation. That’s a very new way to look at things.

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Culture Change? No: Behavior Change.

I read the transcript1 of a discussion led by Bruce Daisley with Rob Briner, professor of organizational psychology at Queen Mary University of London. The title is Stop talking about culture - deal with behaviours.

The transcript is quite long, so here’s the TL;DR.

First of all, Briner is attempting — and seemingly, has been doing so for years — to get people to drop the entire premise that culture can be directed to change behavior.

Daisley seems to have internalized Briner’s work as an attack on the ideology around organizational culture. As he puts it:

At one stage [in the discussion] Rob says: ‘If you tell someone - whose favourite thing is organisational culture - and you tell them it’s not a very useful idea - they don’t like it.’ Well, I felt seen.

I’ve pulled what I think are the most salient points in Briner’s exposition [emphasis mine]

‘I’m not saying you can’t change behavior. There’s hundreds of years of theory and evidence and data that you absolutely can. So I have no doubt about that. So let’s just dispel that. I’m not saying that. What I’m saying is, culture is not a good route to doing that. It’s not a good way to do it. In fact, it’s very poor way to do it.’

‘Let’s say we have got good measures and good assessments of these behaviors. […] They are things we want to change. My question is, what is the most effective way changing them? And my understanding is culture is pretty useless [at doing that]. And I’ll tell you some of the reasons why. But you actually mentioned one of the problems that we talked about, of counterculture. One thing is, people assume organizations have a culture. That is highly contentious.’

‘It’s making assumptions. We feel we can see the culture. You go to a new workplace, you go to a new office, you say, can feel this culture. The amount of data you have about that organization is minuscule. So you’re not in a position to judge it. But I guess we know, cognitive biases, we want to see patterns and things that are consistent in the world around everything kind of make may help us make sense of it. It’s kind of a bit ridiculous. It’s a bit like it’s going to the north of England and saying, oh, I went to Sheffield where I lived for six years. Oh, everybody was really friendly, a really friendly culture. It’s just nuts. How can you possibly have enough data to make that kind of judgment? Are there norms of behavior? Sure. But then, like your example, the WhatsApp group in the metropolitan place, the question is, how many people doing that? Is it shared? Is it not shared? What actually is the problem with that?’

‘So the first issue around culture is: is there a culture? And people never really ask that question. They just assume or you just can feel it. It’s just a vibe. You can kind of sense it.’

‘No, you can’t.’

'If you define culture as ‘the way we do things around here’ then saying you want to use culture to change the way we do things around here is circular reasoning, and it’s circling in the wrong direction.’

Briner implies circling the other way: change the behaviors and culture — whatever the hell that is — will follow. And does so by a Millerian switcheroo in how to look at the knot of culture and behavior: putting behavior change foremost, and that nebulous culture-thing will follow along.

‘So if there’s a group of people behaving in a way, and maybe there is a norm for that behavior, what you need to do still -- let’s just put culture out of the picture -- and say, we still need to change those behaviors. Then the real question is, how do we change behavior? And as I say, there’s hundreds of years of research into this in many different kinds of fields, from psychology, from health psychology, to social policy, which is almost never used in organizations.’

That final statement is one of my enduring pet peeves: how little of social science research results are even considered by managers of even the largest and most ‘well-run’ companies.

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More Behavior-First Thinking About Culture

Last year, I cited work from 2018 by Jon Katzenbach, Carolin Oelschlegel, and James Thomas2 who actively tried to blunt the widespread psychobabble about leader-driven cultural change [emphasis mine]:

We don’t believe that swift, wholesale culture change is possible — or even desirable. After all, a company’s culture is its basic personality, the essence of how its people interact and work. However, it is an elusively complex entity that survives and evolves mostly through gradual shifts in leadership, strategy, and other circumstances. We find the most useful definition is also the simplest: Culture is the self-sustaining pattern of behavior that determines how things are done.

Made of instinctive, repetitive habits and emotional responses, culture can’t be copied or easily pinned down. Corporate cultures are constantly self-renewing and slowly evolving: What people feel, think, and believe is reflected and shaped by the way they go about their business. Formal efforts to change a culture (to replace it with something entirely new and different) seldom manage to get to the heart of what motivates people, what makes them tick. Strongly worded memos from on high are deleted within hours. You can plaster the walls with large banners proclaiming new values, but people will go about their days, right beneath those signs, continuing with the habits that are familiar and comfortable.

Their best takeaway: find the positive deviants — people already displaying the desired behaviors — and hold them up as examples, and have those exemplars explain to others why and how they do what they do [emphasis mine]:

The best way to start is to ask yourself a series of questions. What are the most important emotional forces that determine what your people do? What few behavior changes would matter most in meeting strategic and operational imperatives? Who are the authentic informal leaders you can enlist? And what can you and your fellow senior leaders do differently to signal and reinforce those critical behaviors?

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Strategy in service to action.

Strategic thinking can often seem a bit up-in-the-clouds, looking for grand trends and movements, and then laying out plans to meet the identified challenges. This may not take into account modern realities, like the speed which markets can shift, competitors may innovate, or formerly stable principles that turn out to be ephemeral.

In other words, the conventional approach to strategy can be a trap.

Mike Jones3 pulled this sort of strategic thinking inside out in A Strategy that Survives Contact with Reality Starts by Protecting Your Ability to Act:

We spend too much time assuming strategy fails because of poor thinking, faulty plans, or lack of buy-in. But more often, strategy fails in execution because, when it meets the real world, the organisation is unable to act.

Not unwilling. Unable.

Not because of resistance, laziness, or incompetence, but because the structures that once enabled action have eroded by bureaucracy, or been replaced by performance theatre and a lack of freedom to make decisions. The people closest to the work, those most aware of what’s changing, are too often the least empowered to respond. Execution dies not from lack of effort, but from the slow erosion of agency.

So if you want a strategy that survives contact with reality, start by protecting your organisation’s ability to act.

His argument follows this reasoning:

• Orientation without the capacity to act is just awareness. It’s a strategy of observation only.

• The missing link is agency. Strategy lives or dies in the organisation’s ability to move. Not just from the top, but throughout the organisation. To shift direction, to adapt, to seize an opportunity before it disappears, to respond to a threat before it becomes a critical issue.

• Worse, it becomes a blame mechanism. We ask people to be empowered, then give them no viable way to act.

• The point of planning is not certainty. It’s manoeuvrability.

• You don’t plan to predict. You plan to act. And that means your planning process should surface risk, expose assumptions, and create the conditions for movement.

• The organisations that execute strategy well are the ones that stay loose, not locked.

• That is the real job of leadership. Not to command every action, but to shape the environment in which good action becomes possible.

• A strategy that survives contact with reality is not the one with the best plan. It’s the one that enables the most meaningful action, that protects the edges of the organisation from centralised dysfunction, that decentralises sensemaking, and that builds structural autonomy, not just rhetorical intent.

Jones' analysis of the paralysis that can follow the hardening of a company’s arteries echoes that of Richard Rumelt4, who also focuses on the capacity for action as the purpose of strategic thinking:

Despite the roar of voices equating strategy with ambition, leadership, vision, or planning, strategy is none of these. Rather, it is coherent action backed by an argument. And the core of the strategist’s work is always the same: discover the crucial factors in a situation and design a way to coordinate and focus actions to deal with them.

Action follows strategy, yes, but strategic planning — and organizational orientation — has to be dedicated toward decreasing impediments to act.

I’m reminded of Heinz von Foester’s Ethical Imperative!

Act always so as to increase the number of choices.

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The most important discoveries are often not the ones we set out to make. If we build a world that delivers only what is asked for, we will lose the capacity to discover what we didn’t know to ask.

| Anne-Laure Le Cunff

…

We Need Abduction For New Ideas

One of the dead-end rabbit holes implicit in the growing sanewashing of the enormous push into large-language-model AI is that all you can get are answers to the questions you ask.

Roger Martin approached this from the perspective of strategic thought [emphasis mine]:

In business (and the rest of the modern world) students are taught only two forms of logic and then further socialized to rely on only these two forms when making decisions. They are taught and socialized to use deductive logic—reasoning from general principles to a specific conclusion—and inductive logic—reasoning from specific data to a general principle. Those are the only two forms of logic considered admissible in making decisions.

A strategic thinker needs to utilize the third and untaught form of reasoning: abductive logic, or inference to the best explanation, as conceptualized and named by the great American pragmatist philosopher, Charles Sanders Peirce. To create a future that doesn’t exist today, strategists need to pay attention to his assertion that you can’t use inductive and/or deductive logic to come up with any new idea.

The current understanding in the field of AI (and philosophy) is that current LLM systems can not reason abductively:

Current gen AI/ML doesn’t do abduction, and there’s some reason to believe it will not be general artificial intelligence without such capabilities.

It may be totally reasonable to use AI to figure out your taxes, or analyze aerial video streams to check an oil pipeline for methane leaks, but as Le Cunff says poetically, and Martin says prosaically, discovery requires coming up with possible answers to questions formerly unasked.

We need to dream up solutions and the unasked questions, at the same time.

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Open Tabs

Millennials bailing out.

Caroline Warnes, Why Everyone Wants Out of Corporate

Over the past few months, you might have noticed a particular type of content appearing everywhere on social media: the great Millennial career crisis.

The name changes, but the themes are the same. Millennials are burned out and want out of corporate. Everyone is having a midlife career crisis. At the extreme end, some Millennials think they’ve been sold a lie.

Clearly, something is striking a nerve.

Warnes goes into this trend at some length, which is why it is still an ‘open tab’ (meaning in my case I haven’t done my usual deep read, yet).

There’s a short video summarizing her points, a page in.

…

The enshittification of work.

Anne Helen Petersen (or the editors at Buzzfeed) excerpted1 her book, Can’t Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation, back in 2020.

In contrast to Warnes, Petersen’s focus probably goes back 10 years, pre-pandemic. And her focus is more on the hollowing out of stable, full-time work, and the rise of the freelance economy. A few quotes:

‘Uber merely took a trend among corporations — employing as few people as possible — and adapted it for the smartphone era.’ | Sarah Kessler

Uber solved the problem [of employment] by calling their employees “customers” and by officially designating them as “independent contractors.”

The gig economy isn’t replacing the traditional economy. It’s propping it up in a way that convinces people it’s not broken.

Freelance and gigging don’t make drudgery or anxiety disappear. Instead, they exacerbate them.

I love this framing:

Masking exploitation in the rhetoric of freelancing and independent contractors’ “flexibility” avoids talking about why that flexibility is coveted: because the supposedly “thriving economy” is built on millions of people being treated as robots.

…

The Mar-a-Lago Accord

Adam Tooze summarizes the so-called ‘Mar-a-Lago Accord’ that has earwormed the international economics community. Basically, human beings searching for a grand vision behind the chaos of Trump’s policies. Or as he puts it,

Chartbook 363 Stockholm syndrome in Mar-a-Lago: The belief that “something must be done” and the sanewashing of economic policy in the age of Trump

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Elsewhen

A Paradox of Leadership | Stowe Boyd (from 2024)

Sam Walker, Ursula Le Guin | Boreout | Factoids | Elsewhere, Elsewhen

One of the paradoxes of leadership is that the better you are at it, the less people tend to notice you. When leaders remain calm and consistent, and unite people over a sensible course of action, observers may be less likely to recognize their influence or give them proper credit.

| Sam Walker, What Football Can Teach Politics

We don’t have that in the US federal government, at present.

…

On Serendipity in Reading | Stowe Boyd (July 2026)

A medievalist offers wise counsel for broad reading as a means to revelation.

Workings

On Serendipity in Reading

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2 months ago · 3 likes · Stowe Boyd

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When your life feels horribly constrained by forces beyond your control, when it feels as if every possible avenue has been exhausted, socialism arrives with a vision of another way: Here, it says. Here lies the way out.

| Jia Lynn Yang, How American Socialism Changed, and Stormed the Democratic Party1

The Decline of Capitalism

We may have reached a turning point in the US, and it comes under guise of a growing dissatisfaction with unfettered capitalism and the Democratic Party. I will again quote Jia Lynn Yang:

Some Democrats argue that in the face of the rising tide of D.S.A. [the Democratic Socialists of America], the party should affirm its support for capitalism. This may be a tough sell in a time when capitalism is falling in popularity. Under half of Americans say capitalism is working very well or even somewhat well, down from 60 percent a decade ago, according to a new Wall Street Journal-NORC survey. Whatever you want to call the status quo, many Americans say they simply don’t want it.

I plan to focus over the next few months — leading up to the mid-term elections in November, and beyond — on the implications of growing acceptance of a ‘social democracy’ agenda. Which is not communism, as some pig-headed detractors claim. American socialists today are not advocating for a revolutionary overturning of capitalism and generally advocate an ethics-based — not class-oriented — gradualist approach with the goals of reducing inequality and nationalizing aspects of society that should be universal: health care, child care, access to housing, and a living wage for all.

I will not take on the hair-splitting task of dissecting the literal agenda of the Democratic Socialists of America. But I will be digging in on the clearest voices on a socialist-driven reformation of the economy, government, and, in particular, the growing power of oligarchic corporations, which is the US, are run as ‘private governments’ as Elizabeth Anderson styles it (see The Right To Have Rights, The Unfreedom Of Work, The Struggle For Meaningful Work).

Stay tuned.

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How Corporations Play

Michael Sainato reports on how large corporations game the system, relying on governments to provide public assistance to their workers:

Many workers at some of the largest US corporations have no choice but to rely on healthcare and food assistance because of low wages, even as CEO compensation continues to grow, according to a new report released Wednesday [2026-03-04].

The report, published by the Institute of Policy Studies, focuses on 20 of the S&P 500 corporations that have primarily US-based workforces and report the lowest median wages of the group.

Collectively, this “Low-Wage 20” employs 6.7 million people in the US. The median pay at a majority (75%) of the companies is lower than the income minimum for a family of three to be eligible for Medicaid in most states. At 13 of the companies, median pay was also lower than the Supplemental Nutrition Assistant Program income threshold for a family of three.

Nearly a quarter of Walmart employees (29.3%) and half of Amazon workers (48.4%) in Nevada – which collects Medicaid enrollment numbers among employees at large companies – were on Medicaid in 2024, according to the report.

Among the four states that disclose Snap data related to large companies – Colorado, Massachusetts, Illinois, and Michigan – 10,920 Walmart workers and 9,633 Amazon workers were enrolled in Snap in 2024.

The report noted Donald Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” is expected to result in some 7.5 million Americans losing Medicaid and 4 million losing some or all of their Snap benefits after budget cuts.

First, corporations underpay front-line workers, who will, of necessity, turn to government assistance to survive, and then the federal government reduces the funds available for programs supporting the powerless. And neither the corporations nor the Feds step up to cover the shortfalls.

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A Duopoly of Wheelchairs

Leila Fadel of NPR reports on private equity-backed wheelchair manufacturers that, in recent years, have acquired dozens of smaller competitors, leading to a classic example of corporatocracy: two competitors acting in concert to steer wheelchair users toward buying new wheelchairs by slowing repairs.

Fadel interviewed Megan Smith of Boston’s WGBH, following a local protest by wheelchair users:

SMITH: So the wheelchair users I’ve talked to say that 10, 15 years ago, there were a lot more options - a lot of mom-and-pop shops that they could go to where technicians got to know them personally. But that’s not the case anymore. The wheelchair repair market is now dominated by two companies - Numotion and National Seating & Mobility. Both companies are owned by private equity investment firms, and each has bought up dozens of companies and competitors.

Critics say the business model prioritizes profits and cost-cutting and that these companies take forever to fix people’s chairs. They’re investing more in the part of the company that brings in more revenue, which is selling new chairs rather than fixing old chairs. For example, critics say they don’t hire enough technicians to keep up with repair work. So I hear stories about people waiting three, five, nine months or more for a part. And the wheelchair users I talked with said the problem gets so frustrating at times that they sometimes order parts online or from a hardware store or even just go to their local bike shop for a fix.

There’s a bill pending at the Massachusetts legislature to require wheelchair repairs to take no more than 10 days, and Representative Ayanna Pressley, a Massachusetts Democrat, introduced a national bill in the US House.

So, another example of large corporations — that in this case should have been blocked from forming highly concentrated monopolies that only benefit their financial backers, and disadvantage the public — exerting their economic force to coerce customers to cough up money unnecessarily. And, even worse, these folks are blocked from living their lives, going to work, going to school, caring for loved ones, while their wheelchairs are sidelined for weeks or months.

Rather than just calling for regulation of the timeframe for repairs, we should be calling for these companies to be broken up on anti-trust grounds.

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There are tranquil ages, which seem to contain that which will last forever. And there are ages of change, which see upheavals that, in extreme instances, appear to go to the roots of humanity itself.

| Karl Jaspers

Let’s see… what sort of age are we in, I wonder? And what did we think was looming over the horizon, twenty years ago?

…

For a variety of reasons — some of which I hinted at in previous posts — I have been pushed off my normal routines. Forgive my absence.

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Short Takes

‘Dating’ at work?

Juno Kelly reports:

More than 90 percent of people who have had sex with a colleague didn’t regret it.

Higher than I would have expected.

…

But, meanwhile, no hugging.

Just 29% of Gen Z workers say casual hugs are acceptable in the workplace, while 28% say colleagues should stick to handshakes only, and 4% say there should be no touching at work, according to a survey from EduBirdie, an online writing service.

| Kevin J. Delaney

Well, no ‘casual’ hugs.

…

Americans can’t find jobs.

Americans can’t find jobs.

The number of Americans not in the labor force who currently want a job rose +76,000 in May, to 6.2 million, the 3rd-highest since July 2021.

These are people who are not officially part of the labor force, meaning they are not actively looking for work, but say they want a job.

This marks the 4th consecutive monthly increase, totaling +349,000.

Since March 2023, this figure has surged by +1.2 million people and is now above 2008 Financial Crisis levels.

As a % of total employment, this metric is up to 3.8%, the 2nd-highest since October 2021.

By comparison, the 2001 recession and the 2008 peaks were 3.6% and 4.3%.

Labor market conditions are deteriorating beneath the surface.

| The Kobeissi Letter

…

A China wind is blowing.

Keith Bradsher, Qilai Shen report on China’s dominance in wind power:

Last year, China installed three times as much wind power capacity as the rest of the world combined, even as its turbine exports jumped. The global industry’s center of gravity has shifted decisively: All of the world’s six largest wind turbine manufacturers are Chinese, displacing once-dominant European firms and companies like General Electric.

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Elsewhen

Because of changes in my work process, I have been uncovering and re-exploring old materials. I thought I’d share some things from the archive that were predictions or pronouncements about the future of work, and which largely haven’t panned out.

…

How Anti?

Reading Even With a Dream Job, You Can Be Antiwork1, by Farhad Manjoo, is a dizzying experience, since it was written in 2021, when employers were hiring like mad, and workers felt like the balance of power had shifted:

The world’s long-suffering workers have finally gained some measure of leverage over their bosses, and their new power is a glorious thing to behold.

In South Korea this week, tens of thousands of union members staged a one-day strike to demand better benefits and protections for temporary and contract workers. In Britain, where Brexit has contributed to severe shortages of goods and labor, Boris Johnson, the prime minister, has been taking dubious credit for what he calls a new era of higher pay.

And in the United States, a record nearly 4.3 million people quit their jobs in August, according to the Labor Department, and more than 10 million positions were vacant — slightly down from July, when about 11 million jobs needed filling. The shortage of workers has led to a growth in wages that has surpassed many economists’ expectations, and seems to have discombobulated bosses who are used to employees leaping at their every demand.

How things have changed, in this brave new world.

Manjoo borrowed ‘antiwork’ from kathi weeks, the originator of the term, who shared this with him:

“The pandemic gave us a kind of forced separation from work and a rare critical distance from the daily grind,” Kathi Weeks, a professor of gender, sexuality and feminist studies at Duke University, told me. “I think what you’re seeing with people refusing to go back is a kind of yearning for freedom.”

And remember the surge in Reddit’s /antiwork?

You can get a peek of a post-job world at /antiwork, a Reddit forum “for those who want to end work” that has gone viral in recent months, with hundreds of thousands following its subversive cause. /antiwork teems with posts from workers who are mad as hell and are not going to take it anymore — including many screenshots from folks saying they are telling off their managers, quitting in a rage after years of abuse.

That rage has died down, a few years later (which seems like a lifetime, nowadays), now that we are in the ‘hire slow, fire slow’ era, and people are hunkered down, hoping to weather the storm of the 2020s economy.

Manjoo lands on a relatively mild and uninsightful truism:

Even a dream job is still a job, and in America’s relentless hustle culture, we have turned our jobs into prisons for our minds and souls. It’s time to break free.

Break free of what? Like most of those living inside the prison of work, he still wants to make it a personal quest, like people thinking they have to become more resilient instead of smashing the machinery that’s driving them like chattel.

…

The edge of chaos.

In 1999, Richard Pascale wrote Surfing on the Edge of Chaos2, making the argument that we were — then — entering a new era of ‘management science’.

I started out dubious, since he refers to the era immediately preceding — Michael Porter’s Five Factors and Competitive Advantage, and other now discredited models — as the ‘strategic era’. (At least he left out Clay Christensen’s Disruptive Innovation baloney.)

He states, [emphasis mine],

During the 1980s and 1990s, performance improvement (e.g., total quality management, kaizen, just-in-time, reengineering) succeeded the strategic era. It, too, has followed the S-curve trajectory. Now, as it trails off, an uneasiness is stirring, a feeling that “something more” is required. In particular, disquiet has arisen over the rapidly rising fatality rates of major companies. Organizations cannot win by cost reduction alone and cannot invent appropriate strategic responses fast enough to stay abreast of nimble rivals. Many are exhausted by the pace of change, and their harried attempts to execute new initiatives fall short of expectations.

The next point of inflection is about to unfold. To succeed, the next big idea must address the biggest challenge facing corporations today — namely, to dramatically improve the hit rate of strategic initiatives and attain the level of renewal necessary for successful execution. As in the previous eras, we can expect that the next big idea will at first seem strange and inaccessible.

So, did the unnamed ‘It’ succeed?

He names it: complex adaptive systems.

“Unlike the earlier advances in hard science,” writes economist Alex Trosiglio, “complexity deals with a world that is far from equilibrium, and is creative and evolving in ways that we cannot hope to predict. It points to fundamental limits to our ability to understand, control, and manage the world, and the need for us to accept unpredictability and change.

He spends a great many paragraphs outlining the interconnected notions of complexity, complex adaptive systems, and emergence. And while I confess that I was one of many who likewise looked to that body of science for insight and understanding for the world of work, my judgment in 2026 is that it has not meaningfully percolated into the average Fortune 1000 company, nor has it notably formed a new ‘era’ for management strategy that had moved into wide use. There may be a large cadre of consultants, academics, and even within-the-walls-of-the-corporation practitioners, but it is hard to see foundational change in management thinking across the board, alas.

His characterization of ‘old’ management approaches sound a lot like today’s management approaches:

As executives move up in organizations, they become removed from the work that goes on in the fields. Directives from the top become increasingly abstract as executives tend to rely on mechanical cause-and-effect linkages to drive the business: strategic guidelines, head-count controls, operational expense targets, pay-for-performance incentives, and so forth. These are the tie rods and pistons of “social engineering” — the old model of change.

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We need to stop evaluating corporate leaders simply on the basis of how much wealth they create for investors. A healthier yardstick would be this: the extent to which leaders create firms that are economically, ethically, and socially sustainable.

| James O’Toole, Warren Bennis, A Culture of Candor1 (2009) [emphasis theirs]

…

O’Toole and Bennis mostly discuss organizational transparency — and its absence — in A Culture of Candor, but I am focused on their proposed yardstick for evaluating leaders more broadly. And, alas, there are so many examples of corporate leaders falling short of this yardstick, it’s honestly hard to find many that measure up.

A case in point: many of the corporate overlords provide a stream of psychobabble about their hardened post-pandemic Return To Office (RTO) strategies, and very few offer actual data or research to support that move, which few observers deem economically, ethically, and socially sustainable.

But as Adam Grant, Marissa Shandell, and Courtney Elliott spell out in the section below, those promoting RTO are liars. And maybe they can’t help it, because they are narcissists before anything else, and they see remote work as ‘a threat to their authority and admiration. They want to be worshiped at the office altar.’

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RTO Is A Form Of Worship, Not A Productivity Boost

The bottom line on RTO, from the authors:

When the pandemic came to an end, many people who had been working from home assumed they would be allowed to maintain that habit at least a few days a week. But today in the U.S., a third of companies have forced everyone back to the office full time and have banned remote and hybrid work.

Some leaders say they insist on full-time in-person work because it boosts productivity, despite clear evidence that it does not. Others claim it’s about collaboration, creativity or culture. Our new research reveals that the objection to any work from home is more likely to be driven by something else entirely: ego.

The authors undertook a major research study that shows a strong correlation between narcissism of leaders and enacting RTO policies:

Over the past six years, we’ve studied why some leaders continue to support remote work, while others resist it. We surveyed thousands of executives, middle managers and frontline supervisors on a host of personality traits. When we later asked them about their stances on hybrid and remote work, their answers didn’t correlate with how much they trusted their employees or how much they loved being around people. The only trait that consistently predicted objections to remote work was narcissism — the tendency to be self-centered and entitled. The higher the opinions of themselves leaders expressed, the more they coveted power and status — and the more they favored return-to-office mandates.

They go on to detail the many defects in these policy decisions, and how they manifest:

• ‘Psychologists have long suggested that narcissism is like a drug — it leaves people craving a regular supply of attention and validation. Remote work deprives leaders of access to that supply.’

• ‘When people aren’t in the office, it’s harder to command and control.’

• ‘Self-centered leaders often respond to these threats by tightening their grip. They declare that people are shirking from home instead of working from home. They threaten to fire people who aren’t on site five days a week.’

• ‘Rigorous evidence shows that forcing people to come in every day backfires. Take it from studies of over 450 companies and over three million employees: Return-to-office mandates fail to increase financial returns. They succeed only in motivating star employees to quit, reducing the satisfaction of those who stay and discouraging new talent from joining. Experiments at tech companies and nonprofits show that letting people work from home part of the week boosts happiness and decreases turnover by a third — without any cost to performance. In many cases, those employees even get more done, because they don’t have to spend time commuting and don’t get distracted by office interruptions.’

Remember the O’Toole/Bennis yardstick? Do these sound like the results of economically, ethically, and socially sustainable policy decisions? Grant et al. don’t explicitly mention the financial benefits of not commuting or the ecological impacts, but they matter. And they should matter more than the sensitive egos of puffed corporate honchos.

There are some downsides to remote work, true, but these can be countered:

• ‘Research suggests that working from home for more than half the week can be isolating — it’s harder to build connections and cultures. It’s also more difficult to encourage creative collisions, informal learning and mentoring. But it doesn’t take five days a week to accomplish these goals. In fact, it turns out that people are most collaborative and creative when they work remotely part of the week.’

• ‘Coordination counts. Teams need anchor days when everyone shows up — especially to welcome newcomers and mentor junior people.’

• ‘Intensity beats frequency.’ Companies like Atlassian have shown that quarterly team gatherings can do more for team building and connection than daily commuting.’

• Being flexible — based on circumstances, type of work, and individual lfe situation (like care-giving) — is better than a blanket remote work policy, especially for women.

The authors close with what is likely to be a call for reason that narcissistic leaders will be unable to hear:

The responsibility of leaders is not to mold the world to their needs. It’s to adapt themselves to the world’s needs, even if it means learning to live without the thrill of a live audience.

In my experience, people can’t change their personalities past adolescence, short of cataclysmic psychological events. So the authors’ words may really only influence those who aren’t narcissists to not adopt the draconian dictates of the C-suite egomaniacs running so many large and prominent corporations.

There are those who feel that O’Toole and Bennis’ yardstick should be adopted as a golden rule and take precedence over other considerations in policymaking. Those people are unlikely to be narcissists.

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Other Inputs

Management doesn’t do science

In a stark expose of the anti-scientism in today’s management, Eryn Brown investigates the sad state of affairs in ‘evidence-based management’, where findings from scientific research could be applied to critical management initiatives and decisions, but generally are not.

| On Evidence-Based Management | Stowe Boyd (2018)

…

Red-Collar Crime

A Shocking Number of Killers Murder Their Co-workers | James Graham (2018):

In a 2010 study, researchers administered a test frequently used to gauge psychopathy to 203 managers and executives at seven companies. On a 40-point scale, the average person scores 3 or below. Shockingly, eight subjects pulled a score of 30 or higher, which is serial-killer territory. “Their excellent communication and convincing lying skills, which together would have made them attractive hiring candidates in the first place, apparently continued to serve them well,” the researchers concluded.

How many office psychopaths turn violent is less clear: The FBI doesn’t track red-collar crime, nor does OSHA. Richard G. Brody, another CFE and an accounting professor at the University of New Mexico, sometimes trawls the web for murder trials involving white-collar defendants, and has become convinced that red-collar crime is more prevalent than most people suspect. Detectives don’t always spot such homicides, he told me, so crime scenes may be contaminated and murders may pass for suicide. “Whenever I read about high-profile executives who are found dead, I immediately think red-collar crime,” he said. “Lots of people are getting away with murder.”

…

Your boss may actually be a psychopath.

Yes, Your Boss Is A Psychopath | Stowe Boyd:

If you find yourself working for a manipulative, cold, irresponsible boss, you are not alone. But you might not think he’s a realio-trulio psychopath. But he truly could be. (And it’s almost always ‘he’, not ‘she’.)

And when you ask yourself how could this psychopath been promoted into a role theoretically based on sound judgment and acting responsibly, you have to realize that senior executives in the company may have quite different perceptions of your manager than you and your co-workers do. In particular, the traits your boss is demonstrating to his superiors may be considered the hallmarks of management potential, because a surprisingly high number of managers — especially senior executives — are looking for people with psychopathic traits to promote.

Clive Boddy, in A Climate Of Fear: Stone Cold Psychopaths At Work, summarized research on the numbers:

Estimations are that while about 1% of junior employees are corporate psychopaths (assuming an even distribution of psychopaths across society) they exist at a higher incidence of about 4% at senior organizational levels. Notably, these percentages may be even higher in certain types of organizations, as corporate psychopaths are thought to gravitate towards organizations where they can acquire money, power and control, as well as honours and prestige, rather than to the less rewarded and less well-remunerated caring professions. Caring for other people is simply not on their agenda.

Estimates for the proportion of senior executives go even higher.

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Every fall is an excuse to rise.

| Gia Kourlas

…

Resilience v. Doom Trolling

I think this is the first time I have featured a quote from a dance critic, a field perhaps uniquely suited to discuss the fall-and-rise dynamic inherent in mastery and confronting challenges: being resilient in the face of disruption and uncertainty.

Interest in resilience in the business context has been steadily growing in recent years, peaking earlier this year:

Looking at the queries involved, we see very high growth on all sorts of facets of resilience. Note the spike in operational resilience:

As I wrote in 2023,

Put into everyday terms, resilient systems are designed with as many points of failure in mind as possible and organized to withstand adverse circumstances. And, since a system isn’t self-aware, each is a reflection of the thinking of their designers who must consider the adversities the system confronts. Those who build resilient systems are pessimists. But being a pessimist isn’t enough: you have to build pessimistic systems, as well.

And organizational resilience adds the human factor. Not just as system designers, but as agents in the system:

Organizational resilience is even more complex, since organizations involve the intersection of the human (like social networks, partnerships, governments, markets and customers) and artificial (computer systems, software systems, facilities, and information).

One clue to organizational resilience is the root word for resilience. It’s based on the word salire, which means to jump (while resalire means to jump back).

Unlike systems, the human parts of organizations can be self-aware. And in recent decades we’ve learned that organizations that seek to become more resilient work to incorporate certain capabilities: they create emergent organizations, where decision-making is distributed, groups and individuals have high degrees of autonomy to create and execute plans, they invest in high degrees of learning and well-being, and where leadership — like decision-making — is distributed across the organization.

As in system resilience, resilient organizations continue to carry out their mission in the face of adversity, but along with jumping back they can also jump ahead: they can adapt and improve when confronted with challenges. In this way, those who work to shape resilient organizations are optimistic: they plan for the worst, but they believe they can overcome it, through the capabilities they have developed organizationally.

I suspect that the spike in interest in organizational/business resilience is driven by increased uncertainty: climate change and its increased risks, political turmoil, economic disruption, and — perhaps most central — the emergence of AI.

In years gone by, I would argue that personal resilience requires us to embrace uncertainty:

Those who design resilient systems are pessimists, and those who shape resilient organizations are optimists, but we as individuals must rely on hope, ‘the embrace of the unknown and unknowable’1. Resilience is, in the final analysis, to reach beyond certainty to our capacity for hope, and the acceptance of uncertainty as a counter to adversity.

I remain aligned with hopecore, but I confess I see mounting uncertainty and risk with growing concern.

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Consider the recent essay by Cal Newport, Dear A.I. Companies: The Doom Trolling Needs to Stop, about the efforts of AI companies to scare the shit out of everybody, unlike earlier prophets of tech:

Technology revolutions in the digital age are typically accompanied by optimism and excitement — recall Steve Jobs basking in thunderous applause as he introduced the iPhone in 2007. The major A.I. companies seem to be following a darker and weirder strategy: They like to solemnly describe the harms that their models will cause, while acting helpless to do anything about it.

He singles out statements by Anthropic and OpenAI, and gives a name to this mirror-world, downer, prophetic forecasting:

Let’s call this strategy “doom trolling.” It’s one of the defining and most arresting properties of our current A.I. moment, and I’ve come to believe that it’s morally indefensible.

There are really only two options for the intentions of A.I. companies when they engage in doom trolling. The first is that they actually believe that the systems they’re building have a nontrivial chance of producing massively disruptive events — from destroying the economy in the best case to wiping out our species in the worst. If this were true, every reasonable ethical system would argue that there is only one acceptable response: to immediately stop working on any product that might accelerate such a future, and lobby with all of your resources to help force other A.I. companies to do the same. From a moral perspective, any other reaction would be monstrous.

The second option is that these A.I. companies aren’t really concerned about these risks, and that they’re injecting these doses of unresolvable doom for other reasons. They might want to amplify the perceived power of their technology at a time when they’re setting up their initial public offerings. Or they hope their performative reports and somber interviews will help them compete for top engineering talent coming from a Silicon Valley culture that’s steeped in this type of doomerism.

He goes on at length, handicapping why these AI firms might want to carpet-bomb the popular zeitgeist like this. He then ties the last ligature in his argument:

As a computer scientist and a digital ethicist, I’m both optimistic about the possibilities of A.I. and confounded by the terrifying and grim way that current technology leaders insist on talking about it. This could have been a period of hopeful innovation, but instead our emotions are being manipulated by Silicon Valley’s self-serving and morally untenable addiction to doom trolling. This communication strategy has to stop. The harm it’s causing to the public’s mental health has arguably outweighed the benefits that A.I. has so far delivered.

And possibly leading business leaders to search for ways to increase resilience in a world undergoing an earthquake, disturbing the foundations of the economy, business, and society. I am uncertain how we can build resilience when the ground is shaking so much.

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Elsewhen

Constructive Uncertainty

A few years ago, I wrote about constructive uncertainty, a skill which is relevant to the discussion above, but from a different angle:

One of the paradoxes that reveals a great deal about making sense of the world is the tension between uncertainty and action. On one hand, we are often told that being effective relies on decisive reasoning, and quickly choosing a course to pursue even with incomplete information. However, opting to eliminate the discomfort of an uncertain or ambiguous situation by making a quick decision can often backfire, and in predictable ways.

When I recall events in my life where my decisions went sideways, they were often hurried, and driven more by my desire to end a period of stress and insecurity than actually determining what could go wrong… before finding out the hard way.

And the world is more complex than ever, more ambiguous, less predictable. As Margaret Wheatley points out in Willing to Be Disturbed,

we live in a complex world, we often don’t know what’s going on, and we won’t be able to understand its complexity unless we spend more time in not knowing.

Wheatley’s formulation, that we need to spend more time in not knowing, is a first step in deconstructing uncertainty. One aspect of contemporary emotional maturity is to accept the state of not knowing. Not having a quick answer for complex questions. Being willing to admit being confused by new situations, or rapid changes in the context we are living and working in. Remaining open to spending more time listening to alternative viewpoints before shutting down gathering inputs. These are all aspects of constructive uncertainty, a term I learned from Howard Ross: ‘learning to slow down decision-making’.

You might want to read the whole thing. I made constructive uncertainty open to all.

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When you’re young you think that time moves forward. At 80 you know that it doesn’t, it stands still. We’re the ones that move.

| Bob Dylan1

…

I’ve been distracted this past week, partly because of a menagerie of visitors passing through in homage to my mother-in-law, Erna Hoover, who celebrated her 100th birthday last Friday. With all the comings and goings, I was pulled away from my daily patterns, which can be both positive and negative simultaneously.

The pleasant distraction of the World Cup, and great conversations with family and friends led me back to Dylan’s observation that time is actually standing still while we are the ones moving, an echo of ‘time is a flat circle’ from True Detective. Everybody I spoke to — even 100-year-old Erna — spoke about where they are headed, new directions and new impulses.

And I discovered a new move that I will be making, in a series of discussions with one of my sons, Blake. You’ll be hearing more about that soon.

In the larger context of the Dylan quote about being 80, he also wrote about attaining freedom ‘from the lie that anything was ever under control. You don’t chase the parade anymore.’

Well, I realized that I am not 80 — or 100 — and I still have a parade or two left in me. More to follow.

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AI Threatens The Back Office

Ben Casselman reports2 on a group that may be more vulnerable to displacement by AI than the often-discussed, higher-degreed knowledge workers like IT staff, lawyers, consultants, and radiologists: namely, back-office workers:

Many economists are more concerned about a different, larger group of white-collar workers: customer service representatives, bookkeepers, payroll clerks and human resources specialists who fly under the radar but collectively account for tens of millions of jobs.

These jobs typically offer a middle-class salary or a pathway to achieving one — much as manufacturing jobs did for men before decades of globalization and automation wiped many of them away.

“I worry that A.I. will be to high-school-educated women what deindustrialization was to high-school-educated men,” said Molly Kinder, a former researcher at the Brookings Institution who is starting an organization focused on A.I.’s impact on workers and the economy.

Like manufacturing in the early 2000s, when China was admitted to the World Trade Organization (leading to what is known as China Shock 1.0), Kinder is referring to the potential for outsourcing back-office jobs that provide a possible path to the middle class for many:

“If you think about the back office, that’s not the main function of the company, so they might think of it as a cost center,” said Jung Ho Choi, an accounting professor at Stanford.

Economists at Northwestern University recently recalculated measures of A.I. exposure based on the makeup of the total work force, not just the people using the technology. Administrative and frontline roles, such as customer service representatives, rose to the top of the list.

“The most affected jobs are secretaries, are routine clerks,” said Michelle Yin, one of the working paper’s authors. “They’re not computer scientists or data scientists at all.”

Widely cited measures of A.I. exposure, she added, “give the wrong impression” about who will be most affected — and, in particular, tend to understate the impact on people without college degrees, older workers and people of color.

[...]

“My worry is that the lesson from deindustrialization is that many of these women will be able to get another job, but it might be a much worse job,” Ms. Kinder said. “It might be more precarious.”

This is parallel to the IT revolution of the ‘80s and ‘90s, when typists, filing clerks, bookkeepers, and secretaries were displaced by office suites, email, and web services.

And even if AI comes on slowly enough for these millions of workers to make a transition to the new economy, so long as they get the chance to gain skills to take the next step on a new career ladder, like a receptionist moving into human resources.

If A.I. eliminates that middle step, it could be harder for workers to move up the career ladder, said Justin Heck, a coauthor on a recent article with Mr. Muro.

“What happens if we’re no longer building those skills on the job? Where is there available to move up?” Mr. Heck asked. “What are the ramifications three years from now, when workers remain stranded in low-wage work, and employers are struggling to fill high-wage roles because we’ve carved out the middle?”

What, indeed.

…

Meanwhile

Tech workers not using AI are three times more likely to be laid off, according to Gallup:

In the same survey, only 1% of laid-off workers claim AI was the reason. But consulting firm Challenger Gray & Christmas reported in March that AI had been cited in over 12,000 job cuts in the U.S.

Maybe people were laid off without being told AI was the supposed reason?

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Short Takes

The Luddites are back.

In Understanding the Luddites in the age of AI, Brian Merchant writes

The Luddites are back in fashion, but too many people still get them all wrong. This is what they really stood for, fought against, and why they matter now more than ever.

I haven’t read it all yet, but looks like a long and detailed treatment of what neo-Luddism is, or might become, not just a Wikipedia entry on loom smashing.

…

Nothing about us, without us.

I’ve downloaded this report from CircleForward.us, entitled Nothing About Us, Without Us: A Protocol for Decision-Making with Consent. May be more material for my series on Deciding How To Decide.

…

Something You Buried Might Still Be Breathing

Circling back to the teaser at the top of this issue — where I wrote that I ‘still have a parade or two in me’ — I am reading and rereading this post by Anna from Back to Senses, who describes herself as the human equivalent of a psychedelic, entitled Something You Buried Might Still Be Breathing.

She warns that ‘the word reinvention is a little misleading’, and when I read a few paragraphs down, I felt like I’d fallen into a deep well [emphasis hers]:

Here’s the thing: the thing you set down doesn’t leave. It goes quiet, but it doesn’t go away. It often shows up as a small persistent pull toward something you can’t quite justify. A faint ache when you see someone else doing the thing you used to do. A restlessness that doesn’t respond to any of the reasonable fixes. We’re very good at not noticing these signals, or noticing them and looking away, because they don’t add up on paper and we’ve built whole lives on the principle of only taking seriously the things that add up on paper. But the not-adding-up is sometimes the most honest information you’ve got. It’s the part of you that was overruled, still filing its objection.

There’s a catch in all this, which is that the part you’re listening for doesn’t speak the language you’re listening in. We usually go looking for it the way we look for everything — by thinking more. We sit down and try to reason our way to it, make a list, weigh the options, wait for it to present a coherent case. But it doesn’t deal in thoughts. It deals in energy, in flow, in the particular and slightly embarrassing joy of doing something for no reason. It shows up as experience, not as argument. Which means you can’t usually find it by sitting still and reflecting harder. You find it by doing things and watching what happens to you while you do them.

So the better instrument isn’t analysis, but paying attention.

Again, more to follow.

Takeaway:

The part you’re listening for doesn’t speak the language you’re listening in.

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On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.

| H.L. Mencken (1920)

…

One hundred years later, Mencken’s prophecy has been borne out.

While we have to concede that Trump has a ‘feral genius’1 for turning grievance into a political movement (like other authoritarian populists), and thereby getting himself elected, he’s clearly out of his depth when trying to actually steer the nation in a positive direction, to put it mildly. Less mildly, he’s a ‘downright moron’, which he has demonstrated over and over again: the tariffs, ICE, gerrymandering, antagonizing our allies and trading partners, and most notably, an absolutely unnecessary war with Iran that will cost us $100 billion at the minimum, with absolutely none of the supposed war aims met.

And, to top it off, the ludicrous UFC fights staged on the White House lawn, yesterday. I couldn’t even bring myself to hate-watch it.

Everyone Hates Data Centers, But Isn’t AI the Real Culprit?

It seems that every day, I encounter another story about growing opposition to data centers, ranging from citizens shouting at their elected local officials at town halls, to states barring their construction after dozens or hundreds have already been built.

To me, though, that’s akin to blaming sewing machines for the fast fashion trend. Yes, sewing machines are employed to make all those cheap, and unsustainable clothes, but the root cause are the businesses that have souped up supply chains to smother the world in a glut of throwaway clothing.

Shouldn’t our anger and opposition be directed to the tech companies contracting for all this computing power, instead of the buildings housing the bazillion server racks that AI requires?

Tressie McMillan Cottom wrote about data center hatred2, recently [emphasis mine]:

Americans hate data centers. They really, really hate them.

A Gallup poll from May found that 71 percent of Americans would oppose a data center being built in their area. In rural communities in Utah and North Carolina, regular people are organizing to stop data center construction, speaking out at public hearings and pressuring politicians for bans. They are passionate enough to attend political education sessions about water rights, land use and thermodynamics. Cities like Tulsa, Okla.; Birmingham, Ala.; and New Orleans have recently passed temporary moratoriums on data center construction. Last week, lawmakers in New York passed a statewide pause on large-scale data centers; other states, including Maryland and Michigan, could be next.

According to polling by Heatmap News, more than half of all Americans support a national ban on data centers. The public seems to agree that data centers are giant, ugly, noisy, smelly altars to industrial-scale hostile architecture. In our virulently partisan country, this constitutes a rare show of consensus.

She goes on to make an impassioned case for the Democrats mobilizing this anger as a central aspect of their platform. She cites some Democrats efforts versus data centers:

Senator Elizabeth Warren has made a proposal that focuses on taxation of A.I. firms and mandating transparency about how the A.I. boom is shaping companies’ financial risks. All of these are good-faith attempts to respond to voters’ anger, but Warren’s message is too wonky to match the moment.

Senator Bernie Sanders has gone further, floating a big idea that’s consistent with his brand of democratic socialism. He called for a national data center moratorium and labor protections for workers displaced by A.I., and he is proposing the “American A.I. Sovereign Wealth Fund Act” to give the American public shared ownership, and therefore control, over A.I.’s expansion and its profits. But, Alex Hanna, director of the Distributed A.I. Research Institute, told me that a wealth fund act would enshrine the tech sector’s as-yet-unproven claims of its importance. This is the risk of treating A.I. as something that is as important as humans discovering fire and inventing the wheel. That’s zealotry. It has no place at a tent revival.

Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Ro Khanna of California are going after data centers with an organizer’s flair for spectacle and an anti-oligarchy message. Khanna has called data centers extractive and uses them as justification for his proposed wealth tax.

This all feels like a rear-guard action to me. Apparently, the Democrats have ceded the high-ground of AI’s inevitability to the Tech Overlords. She spells that out, to some degree:

Data center infrastructure is a marriage of the technology and energy sectors. Separately, the two industries are economic powerhouses; united, they are a behemoth. A.I. interests are well on their way to spending hundreds of millions of dollars on state and federal elections in this midterm cycle, when there are far too few competitive races to influence. The A.I. industry’s deep pockets are making candidates on the left and the right cagey.

Important, too, is the seductive cultural narrative that flows from the pro-data center camp. A powerful bench of celebrity C.E.O.s, exuberant financiers, developers and futurists consistently present artificial intelligence as an inevitable technology Americans must adopt, lest they be left behind. If you accept the inevitability thesis, you are likely to believe that data centers are necessary and public dissent is naïve or, worse, un-American.

To which I say fuck them, and fuck that shit. Instead of bracing for lifelong membership in Jasmine Sun’s ‘permanent underclass’, or tinkering around the edges with anti-data center protests, we should demand AI regulation so that jobs are not lost in order to make billionaires richer.

China — of all places — is leading in this fight, as reported3 by Catie Edmondson:

When a Chinese court ruled late last month that a tech company had illegally laid off a worker after replacing him with artificial intelligence software, it delivered an implicit warning to other employers.==

“The development of artificial intelligence technology should be applied to liberating labor, promoting employment and improving people’s livelihood,” the Hangzhou Intermediate People’s Court wrote. “Labor law allows employers to undertake technological changes and upgrade their operations, but it should also take into account the protection of workers’ legitimate rights and interests.4

The case — the third time the Chinese government has highlighted a ruling siding with workers displaced by A.I. — underscores how Beijing is contending with the need to balance its ambitions for the widespread use of A.I. with the unemployment that might accompany it.

China has invested billions to become an artificial intelligence superpower and raced to integrate the technology across a broad range of industries. But those aspirations have run headlong into a growing political problem: anxiety over the workers who could be displaced by the realization of Beijing’s technological drive.

This issue is singularly acute for China, where more than 200 million workers are stuck in gig economy work, with a weaker safety net than in the US. Youth unemployment is 17% there, and growing. Instead of considering universal basic income — as is being discussed in South Korea, Japan, and the UK — China’s courts are taking a hard line on employers: you can deploy AI, but don’t use it to cut jobs.

Again, Edmondson:

The three court rulings have offered an early glimpse of what that response might look like. In each case, the court said employers remained responsible for keeping workers on the payroll, even if A.I. had rendered their jobs redundant. Judges have repeatedly ruled that replacing workers with A.I. is voluntary cost-cutting that does not justify mass layoffs.

Chinese policymakers appear eager for both workers and employers to get the message. The Hangzhou ruling in favor of the tech worker replaced by A.I. was given a special designation signaling that it should serve as a model for future cases.

In that case, an employee identified in filings only by the pseudonym Zhou had worked as a quality assurance supervisor at an A.I. company until the technology replaced him. When the company offered him a new role that would cut his salary to 15,000 renminbi per month from 25,000, he refused and was fired. The court ruled his employer had failed to properly accommodate him.

We should emulate China, as soon as is possible.

In earlier eras, US unions fought for similar resolution of job-killing technological advance. For example, the International Typographical Union (ITU) was part of the Columbia Typographical Union (CTU) which at its peak had over 120,000 members.

In 1974, the [Washington] Post had about 1,000 printers on the payroll, working some 700 “situations.” But another revolution in printing was taking place and the Linotype machines and the jobs involving hands-on contact with pieces of type begin to disappear.

With some sections already converted from “hot metal,” Post CTU members in 1974 signed their first contract to include a “lifetime job guarantee” that recognized the inevitable disappearance of their craft.

Decades later, only a few hundred ‘printers’ remained, having made the transition from Linotype to cut-and-paste compositing and photography, and then to computer layout software.

But that approach allowed a social transition without dumping 100,000s of ‘printers’ onto the streets. Somewhere between that union-led generational retreat, and Chinese judicial policy to hold onto all jobs threatened by AI, is a human-first answer to the looming AI jobs apocalypse.

If we leave it to the Tech Bros and the corporate finance corps, millions might be laid off over the next decade. We need more time — more breathing room — and a better response than is being offered by even the most left-wing progressives.

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Short Takes

Brace yourself for bad news.

In The Kobeissi Letter (@KobeissiLetter on X) June 14, 2026 we learn some bad news:

Americans can’t find jobs.

The number of Americans not in the labor force who currently want a job rose +76,000 in May, to 6.2 million, the 3rd-highest since July 2021.

These are people who are not officially part of the labor force, meaning they are not actively looking for work, but say they want a job.

This marks the 4th consecutive monthly increase, totaling +349,000.

Since March 2023, this figure has surged by +1.2 million people and is now above 2008 Financial Crisis levels.

As a % of total employment, this metric is up to 3.8%, the 2nd-highest since October 2021.

By comparison, the 2001 recession and the 2008 peaks were 3.6% and 4.3%.

Labor market conditions are deteriorating beneath the surface.

Meanwhile, our federal government is firing workers, closing agencies, and cancelling Joe Biden’s efforts toward industrial policy.

We are on a sharply downward trend.

…

What about bringing back manufacturing jobs?

Back in January, David Uberti looked at factory jobs in the US:

The manufacturing boom President Trump promised would usher in a golden age for America is going in reverse. After years of economic interventions by the Trump and Biden administrations, fewer Americans work in manufacturing than any point since the pandemic ended.

Manufacturers shed workers in each of the eight months after Trump unveiled “Liberation Day” tariffs, according to federal figures, extending a contraction that has seen more than 200,000 roles disappear since 2023.

An index of factory activity tracked by the Institute for Supply Management shrunk in 26 straight months through December, but showed a January uptick in new orders and production that surprised analysts. The Census Bureau estimates that manufacturing construction spending, which surged with Biden-era funding for chips and renewable energy, fell in each of Trump’s first nine months in office.

This is one part of a larger trend: a decline in blue-collar jobs:

It’s not a pretty picture.

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Young people can’t get started.

Molly Jong-Fast was writing about commencement speakers being booed5 when they waxed lyrical about the wondrous future of AI, but she dropped some stats, too:

Young people are facing what M.I.T. Technology Review calls a “ looming crisis in entry-level work,” and college, once assumed to be a prerequisite for a secure job, no longer feels worth it. The general gestalt coming from a certain sliver of affluent Americans is that college graduates are more liberal trouble than they’re worth and perhaps could be replaced by bots. Marc Andreessen, the venture capitalist and G.O.P. megadonor, mused to Joe Rogan that a bot “never gets drunk, never gets sick, never gets high” and “never files H.R. complaints.” (It never boos a smug commencement speaker, either.)

According to a recent working paper from researchers at Harvard, hiring for entry-level roles at companies that have adopted generative A.I. has dropped each quarter since 2023. What is not clear is whether A.I. is taking people’s jobs or if companies are using A.I. as an excuse for not hiring. Either way, A.I. is not exactly popular with people entering the work force for the first time.

Time to smash the looms?

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I want to be the owner of my own trouble.

| Louise Bourgeois

…

Bourgeois’ quote reminded me of the distinction between positive and negative liberty, as delineated by Isaiah Berlin.

There are supporters of “negative” liberty, best defined as freedom not to be interfered with. Negative liberties ensure that no person can seize his neighbour’s property by force or that there are no legal restrictions on speech. Then there are backers of “positive” liberty, which empowers individuals to pursue fulfilling, autonomous lives—even when doing so requires interference. Positive liberty might arise when the state educates its citizens. It might even lead the government to ban harmful products, such as usurious loans (for what truly free individual would choose them?).

| The Economist, Berlin, Rawls and Nozick

I suppose Bourgeois’ wish is an example — perhaps a shining example — of the overlap of negative and positive liberty: the freedom to be unmolested while pursuing a ‘fulfilling, autonomous’ life.

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Short Takes

Employer concentration is an enormous social ill.

Large corporations are both keeping their low-wage employees at or below the poverty line, and playing the American public as suckers, since our taxes are diverted to provide a social safety net for them, as Michael Sainato reports:

Many workers at some of the largest US corporations have no choice but to rely on healthcare and food assistance because of low wages, even as CEO compensation continues to grow, according to a new report released Wednesday [March 04, 2026].

The report, published by the Institute of Policy Studies, focuses on 20 of the S&P 500 corporations that have primarily US-based workforces and report the lowest median wages of the group.

Collectively, this “Low-Wage 20” employs 6.7 million people in the US. The median pay at a majority (75%) of the companies is lower than the income minimum for a family of three to be eligible for Medicaid in most states. At 13 of the companies, median pay was also lower than the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program income threshold for a family of three.

Nearly a quarter of Walmart employees (29.3%) and half of Amazon workers (48.4%) in Nevada – which collects Medicaid enrollment numbers among employees at large companies – were on Medicaid in 2024, according to the report.

These corporations should be regulated to pay a living wage. We should raise minimum wages, and impose additional regulations and taxes on giant corporations acting as cartels to immiserate the most powerless. More links in the footer.

…

ChatGPT Health.

ChatGPT Health regularly misses the need for medical urgent care and frequently fails to detect suicidal ideation, a study of the AI platform has found, which experts worry could “feasibly lead to unnecessary harm and death”.

OpenAI launched the “Health” feature of ChatGPT to limited audiences in January, which it promotes as a way for users to “securely connect medical records and wellness apps” to generate health advice and responses. More than 40 million people reportedly ask ChatGPT for health-related advice every day.

The first independent safety evaluation of ChatGPT Health, published in the February edition of the journal Nature Medicine, found it under-triaged more than half of the cases presented to it.

| Melissa Davey, ‘Unbelievably dangerous’: experts sound alarm after ChatGPT Health fails to recognise medical emergencies

Isn’t this one of the areas where LLMs were supposed to excel?

…

Speaking of health care.

Jena McGregor reports that some young, healthy workers are opting out of employer health-care plans:

Some 61% of workers who have the option to enroll in a company health plan did so in 2025, down from 64% in 2020, according to health policy organization KFF.

Workers dropping employer-based health insurance cite rising costs, and experts warn employers may see health-care costs rise if plans lose too many young, healthy members.

Economists warned this would happen as health care costs continue to rise, even for those with employer-provided plans. If we had universal healthcare this would not be an issue, note.

…

The case for year-round daylight saving time.

Staying on daylight saving time year-round would prevent an estimated 36,550 collisions between deer and vehicles, whereas staying on standard time would add 73,660 of these collisions every year — a difference of more than 100,000. The human toll of staying on standard time would also be significant: Compared with year-round daylight saving time, year-round standard time would cause 100 more deaths, 6,000 more injuries and at least $3.5 billion in costs every year through increased deer-vehicle collisions alone.

Of course, having more crashes with deer is far from the only cost of standard time. The number of fatal traffic accidents at night — caused by deer or anything else — is three times as high as it is during the day, and in the dark the risk of pedestrian accidents is up to seven times as high. Permanent daylight saving time would prevent 366 fatal pedestrian and vehicle accidents a year with the help of brighter evenings during the four and a half months of the year we currently spend on standard time. Conversely, staying on standard time for an extra 7.5 months each year would add about 610 fatalities — a difference of nearly 1,000 human lives.

| Laura Prugh

Year-round standard time shouldn’t even be considered.

…

Got milk?

More than 750,000 immigrants left the U.S. labor force during the first half of 2025, according to the Pew Research Center, creating a growing challenge for industries that rely heavily on those workers. Dairy farming is near the top of that list: Immigrants make up more than half of that sector’s labor force.

Another administration could have promised that shifting away from immigrant labor would deliver real benefits without misleading Americans about the nature of those benefits. It could have sought to help family farms — for example, by providing low-cost financing for automation. It could have dealt openly and fairly with immigrants who will continue to milk many of the nation’s cows for years to come.

| Binyamin Appelbaum, 2026-02-09 Trump Wants More Jobs for Americans. He’s Getting More Robots Instead.

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I’d woken early, and I took a long time getting ready to exist.

| Fernando Pessoa

…

Since my son Conrad and daughter-in-law Lydia had a new baby (Killian) in September, I have a new role in life: walking their dog when Conrad drops him off around 6 am, Monday through Friday.

This has a few benefits. One, I take a walk in the morning light (at least now that winter is over) and gently mull over thoughts before I sit in front of a screen. Second, this has led me to go to bed an hour or so earlier and get a longer rest. Third, because I am obliged to take the walk, once Rocky and I return, I am already a few thousand steps toward my daily step goal.

I often think about Pessoa’s quote when making that walk, and when 7 am rolls around, and I sit down at my desk with a cup of coffee, I am ready to exist.

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AI is unraveling the social fabric of work.

Aki Ito, who had become one of my favorite writers, has written The antisocial workplace1, and I pulled the lede as the title of this section, although she — or her editor — buried it like seven paragraphs in:

AI is unraveling the social fabric of work.

She uses a marketing director, Daniel Duceuster, as a lens into how AI is attenuating human interaction in the workplace:

Deceuster is early to recognize a profound shift underway as AI tools permeate corporate America [he said he is interacting 50% less with coworkers]. “People are increasingly choosing to work alone,” says Jessica Reif, an incoming professor of management at Wharton who’s been studying AI’s effects on teamwork.

Signs of strain are already emerging. In January, Cisco found that its employees who were the most active AI users trusted their teams less than intermittent users, likely because the power users were spending more time on their own and less time with their colleagues. “AI can unintentionally create isolation,” the company concluded, “when it’s adopted individually rather than collectively.” The coaching platform BetterUp found that some workers are turning to AI for the kind of feedback they used to seek from mentors and managers. Those employees tended to report lower levels of team coordination, along with higher rates of burnout and a greater desire to leave their jobs.

Less contact and socialization with others can lead to a fragmentation of the social glue holding things together:

“If we aren’t thoughtful about this, we risk turning work into something that feels more isolated and atomized,” Reif tells me. “We’ll just be combining our inputs in a way that feels more like an assembly line than a vibrant workplace.”

[…]

If the previous office tools made it easier for colleagues to connect, AI seems to be replacing those connections altogether. “ChatGPT and tools like it are giving us this alternative way to accumulate knowledge that would otherwise be shared interpersonally,” Reif tells me. “It gives people this option of opting out.”

Pre-AI collaboration tools have led to over-communication and overwhelm. Now AI shows up, and users may adopt it to reduce the overhead and friction of collaboration.

Even Ito started to opt out herself, relying on ChatGPT instead of interacting extensively with her editor, Zak.

For a while, I was pleased with my lower-friction ways. But as I reported out this story, I started to wonder what I might be losing in my quest to bother Zak less. I was certainly talking to him less. Was I missing out on opportunities to learn from him? Was I losing my ability to navigate disagreements? Did I feel less close to him? I wondered what being less needy was doing to the most important professional relationship I have — and what that meant for how I ultimately felt about my job.

Collaboration overwhelm is a real thing. But are they throwing out the baby with the bathwater?

The small interactions that our jobs previously forced us to have were what made teams work well together — often without anyone realizing it. They built the goodwill colleagues need to navigate the disagreements that inevitably come up.

[…]

People will still need to coordinate effectively and trust each other — even if their day-to-day work becomes more solitary.

Ito quotes some others who are trying to balance LLM use with social ties, so that the benefits -- like strategic alignment don’t get lost as everyone is talking to the LLM agents, and critical insights never get shared.

The challenge for all of us will be to juggle these new tradeoffs: the immediate productivity benefits of a less interdependent workplace, alongside our need for teams that work well together and jobs that still give us a sense of connection.

I think this personalization of the social impacts of AI is just wrong, much like exhorting individuals to become more resilient in the face of the pandemic or other exogenous forces. Ito does point her finger at the companies:

That’s why it’s ultimately up to our companies — and the people who are redesigning the way work gets done inside them — to figure out systematic ways to preserve the social aspects of our jobs.

And maybe our governments, as well. Regulations to slow or stop the alienation (or replacement) of people by AI could be crucial, but never mentioned. She contrasts the pandemic and remote work upending everything: on one side, post-COVID, some companies forced everyone back to the office, while others retained hybrid/remote work and emulated face-to-face interactions. She also compares the blowback on screens in schools (which is the closest she comes to discussing government stepping in).

How long will it take for our workplaces to figure out how to benefit from AI’s productivity boosts without driving us away from each other? “We don’t even know what we’ve unleashed yet,” says Deceuster, “or how to effectively use it.”

Which is a good reason to slow down.

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Week In Review

The Anti-Social Century

Aki Ito referenced Derek Thompson’s The Anti-Social Century, which draws on Robert Putnam and Eric Klinenberg‘s work detailing how lonely and alone Americans are, but even without bowling leagues and rotary meetings,

we still go to work. Even as all those other communal institutions withered away, work kept bringing us together with other people. If we lose even that to AI, we’ll become more efficient than we’ve ever been — and more alone, too.

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Soft and Softer

I wrote about the new memes of ‘soft off’ and ‘soft on’ days, where people pretend to be working or work at a slower pace, respectively:

I wrote

My hunch is people are building the four-day workweek organically and bottom-up, since their employers aren’t smart enough to institute it as top-down policy.

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Gaslighting, not career advice

In Suspended Terror,

the main section was about women being gaslighted, and I gathered insights from Ephrat Livni, Tressie McMillan Cottom, and Jessica Grose. An excerpt:

The obstacles that come with working in a sexist culture are beyond any individual’s control. And so advocating a do-it-yourself approach to on-the-job equality may actually be a kind of gaslighting—just one more way for institutions to deflect blame and make women question themselves and doubt their sanity. It’s the society we operate in that needs fixing, not how we ask for money, the tone of our voices, or our outfits.

| Ephrat Livni

Livni’s referenced article, All career advice for women is a form of gaslighting, really says it all.

…

Over at Workings.co

This is really for Obsidian nerds. I wrote

Workings

First Look: Sync Embeds Plugin

I came across the new sync embeds plugin recently. From the repo…

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3 months ago · 1 like · Stowe Boyd

where I explore a new plugin and how I use it in my workings.

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