Oh man, oh geez, it’s not getting any better out there is it?

Wired is absolutely crushing the “off-putting meritless teen plugging random shit into government computers” beat. Toss them a few bucks if you can.

To fully explore this week’s predominant intrusive thought, we have to start with the story of “Fogbank”, some sort of something that does something in America’s nuclear weapons:

The material is classified. Its composition is classified. Its use in the weapon is classified, and the process itself is classified.

Everything about Fogbank is so mysterious, in fact, that when we needed to whip up a new batch, it took millions of dollars and literal years to figure out how to make it again.^[1]

It’s the classic “if we can put a man on the moon, why can’t we put a man on the moon?” story. Put another way: are we, as a society, guaranteed to just keep getting hotter and smarter?^[2]

The last few weeks seem like a pretty clear arrow pointing at “no.” Sure, arc of the moral universe and all, but we obviously can and do go backwards, and the things you naively unplug because you didn’t understand what they did can’t always just be flipped back on.

In the world of the electric grid, they call this a “black start”: when all the power goes out, you can’t just spin any generating station back up in any order. It can take days to make your way through the right sequence of bootstrapping and feeding power around — and the food in everyone’s fridge is rotting the whole time.

And even that’s assuming that everything can be reinvented. It feels like some ideas can only take root in a very narrow season. The most depressing one I’ve come across: can you imagine someone trying to pitch the concept of a library today? There was thankfully a moment in time where we saw the value of broadly distributing knowledge and culture, but just think of the nightmare we’d create after mixing in modern surveillance capitalism and intellectual property law and concern trolling.

Library 2k25™ would certainly have subscription fees and ID requirements and complex business arrangements where authors saw some infinitesimal fraction of a cent per thousand checkouts. The books would all be split into premium tiers and Chase Sapphire Reserve cardholders would be able to hop in front of you on the waitlist. Everything you glanced at would be categorized and sold to data brokers and the whole thing would somehow be brought to you by Draft Kings.

Needless to say, feeling a little precious about the systems we’ve built and immediately taken for granted. Ruminating on Salvatore Sanfilippo’s “we are destroying software” and Jonathan Blow’s “Preventing the Collapse of Civilization” and the many books I’ve enjoyed over the years about how one might get society going again, whether you’d been thrown back before we figured it out in the first place or thrust forward beyond the point we forgot it all.

Have we drifted too far from the weeknotes format? Is this just a blog post without the pretense of paragraphs? Impossible to tell! I really don’t want these to exclusively be a chronicle of my declining mental state. Let the record stipulate that I am not enjoying watching the decline of the American experiment very much.

That said, if these weeknotes devolve into a bulleted list of headlines, someone please do throw a rock at my head.