Upstream #228
friction maxing 💪, humanity🧍♀️🧍🏻♂️, globes 🏆 , infrastructure 🏗️, make art 🖼️.
Right. Ok. Hi. We’re back. All of the huff, puff, eating and drinking, all over. Hope you enjoyed yourself. I had a blast. And then, like clockwork, it froze. The real slog begins now. Peak hunkering. More reading. I read this, then this. Both great. Saw Hamnet too. Wow. Right. Enough of that. And this. March on. Let’s go ‘26.
"All truly wise thoughts have been thought already thousands of times; but to make them truly ours, we must think them over again honestly, until they take root in our personal experience."
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
culture // friction maxing 💪
It’s been a long time coming, but change gonna come (right on Sam). So, it looks like we’re getting sick of screens & algos. Irish people want to reclaim their attention (48% aim to cut mobile time - 60% of 18-24’s). Others think social will die in 2026 (it’s just anti-social now). The Grok stuff too 🤮. The mood is shifting. Matt Klein wrote about the attention war, and how infinite knowledge is making us insane. Yet “we plug our untrained minds into the infinite machines – our smartphones, our social media, our Oura rings, our prediction markets, and our AIs. And as a result, we are going mad”. We’re not built for it. Tech companies also positioned life itself is an inconvenience, “to be continuously escaped from, into digital padded rooms of predictive algorithms”. And as Raffi Krikorian wrote here, “we’ve willingly become creatures of instant gratification”, which has “stripped us of something profoundly human: the joy of exploring and questioning”, which is “transforming our relationship with the very notions of effort and uncertainty”. Everything is efficient. Frictionless. But stripped bare of meaning. We need to make heavier more meaningful things. Not just more forgettable junk. Because as Jasmine Bina put it, everything is porn. The act matters more than the intimacy. Which feels accurate. And related. Maybe 2026 is the year for friction maxing. Off screens. Embracing inconvenience. Getting bored. Getting intimate. Going slower. Going Deeper. Brands too, as Ana Andjelic points out, can benefit from the friction advantage because “for a while, efficiency was a competitive advantage for brands too, but it became a trap….Brands optimised themselves into invisibility”. Journeys and processes matter. Not just destinations, and outcomes. Let the friction maxing commence.
brands // humanity🧍♀️🧍🏻♂️
Charles Eames once wrote “Eventually everything connects - people, ideas, objects. The quality of the connections is the key to quality.” This is so true for brands. Culture, and what people value, obviously influence the brands that become popular, and vice versa. And ideas, influence the objects and brands created, and vice versa. Thought of this when I saw Hermes redesigned their website with drawings from illustrator Lina Merad. Each illustration has been hand-drawn in a style that evokes lithographic printing techniques, with illustrated elements playfully interacting with the Maison’s products. It’s beautiful. And in a world of easy to generate AI slop, it stands apart. It connects with the brands timeless beliefs around craft. Acta non verba etc. Similarly, the invitation for Pierpaolo Piccioli’s debut runway show as creative director of Balenciaga, was a cassette player that played a recording of a beating heart. "The heartbeat is the rhythm we share, the pulse that reminds us we are human" Piccioli wrote. Nice. Luxury is often about cost signalling, and with AI slop, it’s clear that low cost = low signal. It’s basic scarcity and abundance economics. For luxury brands at least, 2026 looks like it’s getting more human (and more retro) by the day.
creativity // globes 🏆
Watched two of the Golden Globe winners recently, Hamnet, and One Battle After Another (both great). Two things struck me. Both related to creativity. Firstly, small details matter. Massively. In One Battle, Benicio Del Toro’s “a few small beers” is doing the rounds. It’s great. A nothing, throwaway line. But that little smile. That tiny detail, was everything. Similarly, the car chase scene was shot on a narrow lens for dramatic effect, with camera’s fixed to the cars. But when it was first shot, it felt too perfect. Too digital. So they reshot it, but loosened the bolts on the camera, giving it a shaky feel (outlined here). As Kahlil Gibran wrote in The Prophet, “Work is love made visible.” Secondly, feelings matter. They’re everything. Chloe Zhao is Chinese. Her English isn’t perfect, so she was worried it might be difficult shooting the scenes where Hamlet was spoken. She felt she might get lost. Paul Mescal told her not to worry, that when Shakespeare is done well, you don’t have to know what they’re saying, you just feel it. Chloe also spoke here, about how there is wisdom in the body (sometimes more than the mind). That sense that great creativity moves you at deeper levels. Unearthing subterranean feelings. Yeah, small details and deep feelings are often what make great creativity endeavours memorable.
technology // infrastructure 🏗️
The biggest AI race at the moment, is infrastructure. Sounds boring, but this is where the money’s going. And money talks. Alphabet paid $4.75b for Intersect Power, which provides data centre electricity systems. Normal projects to power a new data centre could take years. This would fast track that. Giving them unique competitive advantage. Meanwhile Meta just unveiled Meta Compute, a new division focussed on building, owning, and controlling the AI monster behind all of their products. Chips, data centres, power, the lot. They’ve committed $600B in U.S. infrastructure spending by 2028, and recently agreed 20-year nuclear power agreements (while reportedly laying off 10% of Meta’s Reality Labs and metaverse divisions). They’re building ENORMOUS data centres to generate the computational strength they need to win. Prometheus, the first one, is a 1-gigawatt campus under construction in Ohio. Due in 2026. The first of the “titan clusters” as Zuck calls them, which are focussed on the pursuit of “personal super-intelligence”. The Hyperion centre, another planned for Louisiana, will be the size of Manhattan. JFC 😧. The scale of it all is mind boggling.
five random (ish) things:
Here’s to Q1 👏 📈.
Useful concepts for 2026 👌.
Trends for the year ahead 🔮.
A short story about tech 😂.
Life affirming stuff 😍.
Watching // Make Art 🖼️
“Creativity is our power to enact change”. Right on. In a world out of control, creativity reclaims our attention, gives us more agency, makes us more powerful. In a culture of consumption, we need more creation. We create to feel more human. Lean in to that. Take back your time. Make something worthwhile.