20260614
#217
“An Event is something that arrives without the right word attached to it. You reach for your vocabulary and come up empty. You reach for the law and find it wasn’t written for this.”
— Where Do You Make the Cut?, Karl Schroeder“Ernest speaks with the authority of success. I speak with the authority of failure.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, via La lettre de Umanz
Society: One in three American men not working and not looking. Partnership as class privilege: 43% of French living alone by 2030. Universities “rich in information, poor in meaning“. Local (AI) news outlets for PR stunts. Disneyfied world. Cartoonification. The security envelope liner collectors. Thai restaurants in America — Bangkok paid for them. Wargaming’s long path to D&D. Best japanese stationery.
Work in a world in flux.Planet: Chernobyl fungi. Whales chatting.
AI: China’s efficiency moat from export controls. Backlash growing: booing at commencements. Anthropic CFO: $50B ARR. Microsoft and OpenAI consciously uncoupling — $13B invested, $30B returned, no longer exclusive. Who taught them to write with AI?.
Regulation: EU Digital Omnibus agreed: high-risk AI rules delayed to December 2027. From August 2026, EU residents must be told when talking to AI. Europe and drones.
Foresight: AI as Badiou’s Event — conditions for which our legal and ethical vocabulary was never written.
Hardware: Tetris on a book cover.
The Water Test
Derek had printed out three articles about the AI backlash before Hank arrived. This was, Derek thought, either research or anxiety management — he wasn’t sure which line separated them anymore.1
Hank came through the back door at noon, as he had every weekday for the past three months since he’d left his job at the fulfillment center. Not quit. Left. There was a distinction Hank maintained carefully, which Derek had learned not to challenge.
“Water still coming out right?” Hank asked, filling a glass at the kitchen tap. He held it up against the window. Clear. Hank had been monitoring the tap water since a data center was announced in the next county, and his vigilance had taken on a quality Derek recognized from his grandmother’s rosary habit — not really about the thing itself, but about the rhythm of the ritual.
“It’s fine,” said Derek.
“AOC held up a jar of brown water from one of these sites on C-SPAN. Just lifted it up and let it sit there.” Hank set the glass down. “Brown.”
Derek didn’t answer. He worked for a company building AI scheduling tools for hospitals. He had a complicated relationship with the data center question — somewhere between civic discomfort and financial dependency.
Avery came in from the living room, still wearing her teacher lanyard. She taught eleventh-grade English and had spent the morning marking what she’d begun calling “the slop pile” — essays that were technically adequate, grammatically flawless, and entirely empty. Not written by students who were cheating; written by students who had never been taught to care.2 She dropped the stack on the table with a sound that communicated everything.
“How was it?” Hank asked.
“I gave eight of them feedback on the wrong essay,” she said. “They’re all the same essay.”
Hank nodded. He’d been spending his free time — and he had a lot of it — reorganizing his collection of security envelope liners. The patterns inside the envelopes that banks and doctors’ offices sent: cross-hatch, diagonal wave, fine-grain spiral. He’d found a community online — thousands of them — cataloguing and trading photographs. It turned out this was a real thing. It turned out a lot of things were real things once you had time to notice them.
“Charlie found one from 1987,” Hank said, to no one in particular. “A pattern they haven’t made since. Just the diagonal, extremely fine, like fish scales.”
“What do you do with them?” Derek asked.
“Just know they exist.”
That night, after Hank had gone, Derek read an article tracing a straight line from the Prussian Kriegsspiel — the 19th-century wargame used to train officers — through a series of American hobbyists and miniature painters, directly to Gary Gygax and the first edition of Dungeons & Dragons.3 The path was absolutely clear once you saw it. Military doctrine becoming leisure becoming mythology. He thought about Hank’s envelopes. About the slop pile. About the water.
He held his glass up to the kitchen light. Clear. He set it down.
1 The same question haunted several tech executives that week, who were solidly booed at commencement addresses. The water test, in retrospect, applied to them too.
2 This is not the students’ fault. It is difficult to care about an outcome when every incentive in the system you have grown up in has been carefully designed to reward the product rather than the process.
3 The article was in Asterisk. It turns out war has been a hobby since war was invented.