Upstream #232
opt out 🙈🙉🙊, empathy 🥰, feet in 🦶, self improve 🤖, mother 👩
Hi. I’ll be brief. I get it. You’re busy. Winter still has his cold knarly grip on us. But we’re gathering strength. Rising up. Fighting back. Victory is near. There’s been some rugby. And some racing. Both were fun. Busy start to the year here. Hope you’re ok and good busy too? Shur look it. Anyhow. Let’s go.
“The outlaws, the heroes, the wanderers, the lovers, the saints, the persecuted, the outcasts, the bewildered, the ecstatic ― these are among those who have sought out the forest’s asylum in the history… Without such outside domains, there is no inside to dwell.”
Robert Pogue Harrison
culture // opt out 🙈🙉🙊
What happens when we’re permanently surrounded by *waves arms around* all this. It’s too much. Do we simply disconnect? Shows like Pluribus, Severence and Fallout present us with, as Lucinda Bounsall writes in this piece about Opting Out, a consistent fantasy of disconnection. People willingly or otherwise, giving up or opting out. Joining something else. A collective mindlless sludge. Dystopia is everywhere. Jonathon Boymal similarly asks in this piece on the borrowed self and the human habit of outsourcing, “What remains of the self when it distributes itself across surfaces designed to please rather than challenge, to reflect rather than resist?”. What happens when we outsource everything? What will we become? We must stay alert to German sociologist Hartmut Rosa’s warning: that in a world of acceleration and frictionless design, the greatest luxury and the greatest act of resistance may simply be the willingness to be genuinely affected by something you did not choose and cannot control. See as Ja Westenberg wrote in a soft landing manual for the second gilded age, dystopia isn’t inevitable. We can change. We will change. She writes how, reforming and rebuilding Berlin in 1945 seemed impossible. Yet, within a decade, they did it. Dystopia sells a view that destruction is permanent. It’s not. As Ja writes, “They’ve looked at the current state of affairs, noticed that things are going badly, and concluded that “going badly” is the only possible trajectory. But this ignores the entire history of social reform, in which terrible conditions produced political movements that eventually forced institutional change”. As Ja writes the future is still up for grabs. So grab it. We just need to feed the right wolf.
brands // empathy 🥰
Nick Parker wrote here about UK Green Party candidate Hannah Spencer’s victory speech in a UK by-election. She beat incumbent Labour and millionaire-backed Reform party candidates. She’s a plumber, and as she points out, now a plasterer. Because, as she says, she gets things done. As Nick writes, in a world of fakery, lies and hollow rhetoric, her speech is stood out. Because she said normal things. Used modest language. Had empathy. Appealed to real people. The truth still matters goddmanit. It’s also magnetic. Phil Adams also shared this beautiful Red Hand Files from Nick Cave, which as Phil wrote is very much “AI eat your heart out”. Inspired by a letter from grieving father who’d lost a son, Nathan wrote “Nick, I’m writing songs again. They’re fucking pouring out of me”. And Nick replied “Through The Red Hand Files I have made some rather sketchy attempts to express the nature of consciousness, as I perceive it or have experienced it — the feeling that consciousness exists both within us and outside us. I have described it as a form of intelligent energy present in all things, both living and non-living, and on both atomic and cosmic scales. I have also suggested, based entirely on my own intuition, that this force is moral in nature, inherently good and fundamentally creative. Within this immanent vitality exist all the future ideas of the world — all our art, music, words, and so forth. Nathan, sometimes our grief can serve as a gateway into this creative flow.” There’s great honesty and realness in both of these. That still matters. More than ever now.
creativity // feet in 🦶
Enjoyed Martin Wiegel’s piece on Feet In. He wrote about actor Buster Keaton and his comittment to his art (and stunts). For Keaton, he writes, “the stunt was never the point. The point was the integrity of the emotional contract between the character and the audience that underpins all his work”. Which, he says hinged on being conistently real, and authentic risk. As he writes “Keaton understood that intimacy we’ve constructed ourselves always feels truer than the prepackaged intimacy”. So “Keaton never sent anyone in his place…..he understood there is no version of that where you get to be somewhere else. You are in the frame, feet in - or you have betrayed something”. It marries well with this piece by Douglas Brundage, AI gave everyone a generative engine, it also showed who had nothing to say. He wrote about Joris-Karl Huysmans’ novel from 1884, À rebours. It’s about a man with perfect taste and no life who devotes his life to aesthetic refinement. But produces nothing. And eventually goes insane. As Brundage writes “Huysmans understood, 140 years ago, that a taste level which only consumes eventually consumes itself”. Real taste he writes is discovery, editing, and “the long, private, often embarrassing process of figuring out what you actually like, as opposed to what you’ve been trained to approve of”. Which speaks to the bigger issue with AI which is “we gave the world a generative engine for taste and 99% of companies, brands, and people produced slop with it. Then we blamed the engine”. Just like Keaton, creativity…..real creativity….has a cost.
technology // self improve 🤖
Ethan Mollick believes we’ve entered a new phase of AI. He wrote about it in the shape of the thing. After ChatGPT was introduced, human-AI work took the form of a sort of co-intelligence, where humans would prompt AI back-and-forth to get help on tasks. But in late 2025, we entered a new era thanks to AI agents like Claude Code, OpenAI’s Codex, and OpenClaw. These are AI systems that you can just give work to, sometimes hours of human work, and get back reasonable and useful results in minutes. This is an era of managing AIs, rather than working with them. Exponential improvements are enabling a radically different way forward. He points to 3 person team StongDM, a security software company, who announced they had built a Software Factory. They now write, test, and ship production software without human involvement. Ever. Look at how human voice agents feel and sound now. Jesus. And what comes next for AI will be enabled by recursive self-improvement, or RSI. Where AI systems are used to build better AI systems, creating a feedback loop to accelerate AI, faster and further. Like it or not, the future is here and it’s starting to evenly distribute. You ready for it?
five random (ish) things:
Painting through music 🎶.
Yes. De La Soul tiny desk 🎧.
Viet people welcome the Spring 🤗.
4 rules of a good walk 🚶♀️.
AI in the Enterprise 🤖.
Listening // mother 👩
For the weekend that it is. Thinking of all the mums and all the hugs, and all the love, and all the work, and all the worry, and all the joy. Also, Kiwi band The Beths are neat. Relatively new album, Straight Was A Lie, is good. Enjoy the weekend 🏉.