“AI is an agreement machine, which is anathema to learning and critical thinking.” https://www.404media.co/ai-is-supercharging-the-war-on-libraries-education-and-human-knowledge
“I have good news for you, though: assholes are a minority. People of conscience, people with good will and good intentions have always outnumbered psychopaths and sycophants.” https://okayfail.com/2025/in-praise-of-dhh.html
I want to posit that one of the things we mean when we say we’re “procrastinating” is that our own sense of what matters has diverged from what our boss or company is concerned with. That is, procrastination is often a political conflict, not a personal failing.
“To be a Luddite today is to refuse the fatalism of techno-inevitability & to demand that technology serve the many, not the few. It is to assert that questions of labor, agency & justice must come before speed, efficiency & scale.” https://www.brookings.edu/articles/we-should-all-be-luddites/
I’ll be opening a winter cohort of the sf writing work/shop soon, get on the waitlist if you want to be the first to find out! Space will again be very limited so that everyone can fully participate. https://everythingchanges.us/workshop/sf
Whatever your company’s rating systems, you and your colleagues are all five out of fives at being human. Act like it: https://everythingchanges.us/blog/re-views/
Digging for the kind of knowledge that you feel in your bones, that gets under your fingernails, that can’t be lifted away and perverted by a thieving bot. https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/undersense
Olga Tokarczuk’s The Empusium is subtitled “A Health Resort Horror Story,” but somehow that undersells it. The book is smart, fun, and subversive, exactly as all horror stories should be. https://aworkinglibrary.com/reading/empusium
“It is about a world that positively blooms around us because we are committing to the quiet and constant and careful work of tending to it.” https://terminal.ahumanfuture.co/posts/2025-10-17/the-world-is-something-that-we-make
After a few days with time spent in a car (unusual for me!), I’m noticing how being in a car makes the rest of the world seem insubstantial, lacking solidity. Everything moves out of the way for you. Nothing is reliably there except you and your companions.
“We should dissociate ‘work’ from the Herculean labor and return the idea of work to the example of the dream, where work is an imaginative activity, a work of the imagination such as takes place in painters and writers.” https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/an-imaginative-activity
“We were angry. Our anger was old, atavistic. We were angry as all civilized men who have ever been sent to make murder in the name of virtue were angry.” https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/we-were-angry
Coming around to the notion that the Venn diagram between workers’ rights and civil rights is nearly a perfect circle. Owners can buy their rights; workers cannot.
Semi-regular reminder that wherever you’re reading this, it’s likely not where I wrote it. https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/coming-home
Once you see RTO as one part of an anti-labor movement, it makes other things clear: in-office attendance requirements are designed to force tech workers to remain in expensive cities. Because a tech salary + a rural mortgage = a whole lot of power to say no.
A word about annual review season and being human. https://everythingchanges.us/blog/re-views/
May I remind people that the range of responses you have to a leader you disapprove of is quite broad: insubordination, sabotage, malicious compliance, slow execution, decision paralysis. Get creative! https://www.theguardian.com/media/2025/oct/07/cbs-news-staffers-react-barri-weiss-appointment
A thing you can do when the doom gets to be too much is reread a book you loved. https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/case-for-rereading
Supremacy thinking is the refusal of observation. https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/beyond-credibility
A whole lot of actually very talented leaders are about to learn that management is the worst place to exercise their leadership.