20260705
#220
“Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)” — Walt Whitman, Song of Myself
“The logic that protects the individual exposes the group. The defense becomes the advertisement. The sardines never figured this out. The Marlin didn’t either. Something always gets eaten.” — Colin Nagy, The Bait Ball Edition
People: Soft-off days and soft-on days — the WFH lexicon of quiet deceleration. Paris discovers contrast therapy as ceremony. Gen Z migrates to listening bars (Japan’s ongaku kissa) for low-intensity sociality (FR). Steak ‘n Shake goes MAHA: tallow fries, Bitcoin payments, RFK Jr. pinned post. Second axial age. Digital clutter.
AI: Claude 5 Fable works 12 hours on multi-page specs — autonomous isochrone maps, social science papers, art from pure maths. Cisco: AI power users trust their teams less than intermittent users. New cottage industry: lawyers defending students accused of cheating with AI.
AI strat: Sanders, Altman, Trump, Khosla converge on sovereign wealth fund to distribute AI’s gains. Anthropic publishes framework for optional pause on frontier AI development. AI-spending US firms grow revenue 5× faster than the economy.
Tech: Synthetic diamonds surge as heat spreaders for AI chips — they conduct heat but not electricity. Canadian startup builds tractor without computer controls: right-to-repair in steel and mud. EU Open Source Strategy.
Business: The Low-Wage 20: 20 S&P 500 corporations employ 6.7 million US workers at wages below Medicaid eligibility while CEO pay climbs. The vanity trap in leadership.
Foresight: Nine most under-discussed cultural trends from 130 cultural researchers worldwide. The grimoire of tiny rebellions. Urgent optimism.
Football foresight.Random: Berthold Lubetkin’s 1934 Penguin Pool. A 1928 buffalo nickel received as change from a bodega: 23 million made, worth $2. One Minute Park.
The MeDoraH project.
King of Switzerland.
The Soft Ones
The third week of June, and Miriam had not spoken to anyone in eleven days.
This was not precisely true. She had exchanged 847 messages through various AI interfaces, which she privately counted as a form of conversation. She had also said “thank you” to a delivery driver who had looked at her with the particular wariness of someone who suspects the door is opened by a different person each time.
The coworking space at the bottom of her street had been Doris’s idea. “You’ll go feral,” Doris had said, with the authority of someone who had witnessed actual ferality in a colleague she would not name. So Miriam went, on a Tuesday, carrying her laptop and a sense that she was doing something virtuous. She sat at a long table. To her left, Barry was having what he described as a soft-on day.^1
“It’s not slacking,” Barry explained, with some urgency, to no one in particular. “I’m responsive. I’m chipping away. I’m just not pushing myself to maximum productivity.” He had a rerun playing in a browser tab and was annotating a document at approximately the pace of geological time.
Doris arrived at half past ten, sat down, and immediately drew something on a sticky note. She drew it with the focused expression of a person who had read something about sigils on the internet and decided that if the world was going to be absurd, she might as well be absurd back.^2
“What is that,” said Miriam.
“A threshold marker,” said Doris. “I cross it every time I leave the building. To see if it starts to mean something.”
“That’s not how meaning works,” said Miriam.
“You don’t know how meaning works,” said Doris, pleasantly.
Barry looked up from his soft document. “I read that Cisco found their heaviest AI users trust their colleagues less. Like, statistically.”
“That tracks,” said Doris.
“I trust my colleagues perfectly well,” said Miriam. “I have excellent relationships with my colleagues.”
A silence settled. Miriam’s colleagues, in the operational sense, were large language models that did not experience trust in either direction.
What happened next was harder to explain. The three of them stopped working simultaneously — Miriam closing a tab, Barry letting his rerun loop to a menu screen, Doris capping her pen — and sat for a moment in the specific quiet of a Tuesday afternoon in June when nothing is urgent. Outside, someone walked past with a dog. The dog stopped and stared through the window with the bait-ball instincts of a creature that has learned that clusters of beings sometimes mean food, and sometimes just mean beings.
“I found this thing,” Barry said. “One Minute Park. You spend sixty seconds in a green space somewhere in the world. Just watch it.”
He turned his laptop. A park in Osaka. Dappled light. A child running somewhere off-frame.
They watched for slightly longer than sixty seconds.
“The penguins at London Zoo,” Doris said, apropos of nothing, later. “They built them this beautiful pool in 1934. Cork paving, perfect design. Then they renovated it with concrete and the penguins got sore feet. So they moved the penguins out, and now the pool is Grade I listed and nobody can touch it and it’s been empty for twenty years. Because they changed the material and used the wrong species.”
“What’s the right species?” said Barry.
“It doesn’t matter anymore. They’re somewhere else.”
Miriam thought about this for a long time on the walk home. She thought about it in the way you think about things that feel like a parable but resist being extracted into a lesson. She crossed a threshold — just a crack in the pavement — and did not do anything special when she did.
That evening she sent a message to a colleague. A human one. She asked how they were doing.
The reply came back twelve hours later. Slightly chaotic, slightly contradictory, entirely unhelpful on the actual question she had buried in paragraph three.
She felt, obscurely, better.^3
^1 A soft-on day: online, responsive, chipping away, ideally from one’s couch in cosy clothes with a comfort rerun in the background. Not to be confused with a soft-off day, which is when you run personal errands during work hours and feel no guilt whatsoever. Both are now considered mandatory by significant portions of TikTok.
^2 The RADAR newsletter has been publishing a “grimoire of tiny rebellions” — small embodied acts designed to prove that different arrangements are possible. The underlying thesis: you cannot think your way out of stuck patterns. You have to act your way out, starting with gestures small enough that nobody tries to stop you.
^3 Cisco’s internal data from January 2026 found that its 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.” The coaching platform BetterUp found these same users reported higher burnout and a greater desire to leave their jobs. Twelve hours for a reply is, in this context, a good sign.