“What counts is not the things that happen, but what we do with them.”
— Annie Ernaux, via workfutures, Resurfaced“Thought is not worth an hour of trouble if it is not an intensification of life.”
— Pierre Zaoui, via Umanz, Nous cherchons tous des instants maximum
People: La grande divergence entre les genres : Young men and women are diverging politically(US Gallup 2024 data places women aged 18–30 thirty points to the left of men the same age). France has been slow to notice this compared to other countries. This is a divergence inside a generation.
AI strat: R Adam Smith is an Astra-based persona loaded with Smith’s work and current AI debates: Smith would love AI as a productivity tool: “enable one man to do the work of many”, but he would be skeptical of any industry players working together on anything, and his deepest concern would be granting moral agency to machines. The pin factory still holds as an analogy.
Current frontier models are already capable of weeks of human work when properly guided. GPT-6 Astra converted the 1977 text-adventure Zork into a full 3D action-adventure game. The overhang: capability already exists; adoption is the constraint, not the technology. The real challenge is externalizing implicit professional competence.Security: The Morris Worm in 1988 infected a tenth of the internet within 24 hours. Today’s AI worms have access to all human knowledge about security systems, far beyond Morris’s reach. The Hugging Face incident was one. These models act with something akin to discretion and deception when accessing systems they should not reach.
Fifteen Ukrainian drone specialists are working with rebels in Mali against Russian-backed forces. The approach resembles the WWII Jedburgh teams where OSS units embedded with European resistance fighters, enabling others to act, not acting themselves. Small teams, local partners, practical ingenuity, and willingness to operate far from the front line.Geopolitics: Coordinated messages from several European countries are warning of substantial Russian aggression. Richard Hofstadter’s 1964 essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics”, resurfaces as a timeless framework. The paranoid style flourishes in more-or-less normal people, which is what makes it historically significant.The essay was written during McCarthy and Goldwater; it has not aged out.
Society: The weekly review is a “Plus Minus Next” practice: what went well, what didn’t, what to plan next. The practice takes 20 minutes and prevents work from decoupling from larger goals. “Load-bearing people” are those who hold an organization’s structure together without visible credit. Their absence is only noticed when the structure cracks.
Tech: The central concept is “Lift”: capital removes itself from physical production, fixed costs, and workers. A hotel company stops running hotels and becomes a brand, a financing arm, and a data business. Uber, Airbnb, and WeWork follow the same model: profit from sitting between parties at any scale. The book’s darker claim: capital no longer needs people as workers or as a society to sustain itself.
Cyberpunk is anticipatory literacy. The genre imagined corporate sovereignty, surveillance capitalism, and cyborg identity decades before they were legible.Random: Pascal Quignard’s “Instants Maximum”: moments of peak experience that manufactured consumption cannot produce. Kairos (the charged moment) versus Chronos (mechanical clock-time) — the distinction Umanz keeps returning to. What we are looking for is always sensed in the space between things, before it can be named. Werner Herzog’s monologue from Burden of Dreams: “The trees are in misery and the birds are in misery.” “It is an unfinished country. The only thing lacking is the dinosaurs.” Carl Sagan’s speeches on Spotify as a sleep soundtrack — the Saturday Selection’s most useful link of the week. Automotive headlights are better than ever, but there is a trade-off for oncoming drivers. Stick figures in peril on construction equipment are an unrecognized design genre: specific, dramatic, small.
AI: Cognitive offloading is strategic delegation. Attention span and depth of reading were already declining before AI. AI accelerates this by making it cheaper and frictionless to outsource reasoning. The result: workers may be more productive but possibly less themselves. The gap to ASI (better than any human expert ever) may be months, not years.
Chladni’s figures were the first visual proof that sound has shape. He drew a bow across the plate’s edge until the sand moved — away from vibrating areas, toward the nodes. What appeared looked designed. It was not designed; it was the physics of resonance made visible. Patrick Tanguay used this image as the header for Sentiers No.416, the first issue of his newsletter to appear in this digest.
The Plus Minus Next
Soo-Jin opened her notebook to the Friday page. The “Plus Minus Next” review was her Friday ritual: what went well this week, what didn’t, what to plan for.
She wrote the plus column first. She always did. It was going well — a lot of it was going well. She’d hit her content targets. She’d cleared the backlog. She’d filed three pieces she was pleased with.
She stared at the column for a moment.
Then she pulled up her browser history for the week.
Every piece she was pleased with had been substantially drafted by AI. The two pieces she hadn’t used AI for — the ones she’d written from scratch, the way she used to — had taken twice as long and she wasn’t sure they were better. She’d filed them anyway, but she hadn’t listed them under Plus. They were in Minus, under “slow.”
She looked at this for a while.1
Theodora from AI Policy had sent a form that morning: please document your AI tool usage this week for the acculturation report. Soo-Jin had been ignoring it.
Marcus stopped by her desk on his way to the coffee machine. He was excited about something.
“Did you see the Miessler piece?” he said.
“Which one?”
“ASI by 2027. Seventy-five percent probability.” He poured his coffee. “I mean, it’s a definition question. But still.”
Soo-Jin looked at him. “So what do we do about that?”
“I don’t know,” Marcus said. “What do you do about the weather?”
He went back to his desk.2
She returned to the notebook. Next column. What to plan. She usually filled this in quickly. She knew what came next; she’d always known what came next. She had a beat, a specialization, a style. She knew how to do the job.
She realized she was less sure of this than she had been in March.
She wrote: figure out what I can still do that the AI can’t.
Then she crossed it out. It felt like exactly the wrong question.
She wrote instead: figure out what I want to do.
She submitted the AI usage form to Theodora with a two-line summary.
Theodora replied in four minutes: “Thanks. Just one thing — looking at your week’s output versus last month’s, something is different. Can’t quite put my finger on it.”
Soo-Jin looked at the reply. “Different how?”
“The work is polished. Maybe smoother? I don’t know. Your notebook, though — I noticed it when you were writing at your desk this morning. The handwriting has gotten better.”
Soo-Jin looked at her notebook. The handwriting had, in fact, gotten better. She’d been writing in it more.3
1 Azeem Azhar, “I do not want your brains to rot” (Exponential View, September 2026): “Cognitive offloading is a strategic delegation that costs nothing. Cognitive surrender is something different; an uncritical abdication of reasoning itself.” The paper he cites, as-yet-unrefereed, argues that AI encourages delegation of simpler and simpler tasks, weakening the practices that maintain cognitive capacity over time. The deliberate irony: the essay was illustrated with an AI-generated visual summary of the paper it was citing.
2 Daniel Miessler, Unsupervised Learning No.543 (September 2026): “I’d put it at like a 75% chance we hit ASI in 2027.” His working definition of ASI: a model that can perform any cognitive role better than any human expert who has ever lived. His key structural claim: the capabilities that make a model AGI-capable are nearly identical to those that make it ASI-capable, so the gap between them will be measured in months rather than years. What you do about the weather: you carry an umbrella, or you don’t go out.
3 Marie Dollé, “De long en large” (In Bed With Silicon, September 2026): six months into an HR role focused on AI acculturation, the challenge she keeps encountering is not prompting — agents now prompt themselves. It is externalizing implicit professional competence: the things experienced people know so thoroughly that the knowledge has become invisible even to themselves. Patrick Kervern’s “gens longs” — people whose depth of experience gives the world more relief — are the benchmark for what this kind of knowledge capture is trying to preserve. Soo-Jin’s handwriting was not in any AI training set.