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Cult Brand Behavior by Alex Tran

We're more than a quarter way through the new century and we can now ask: what is the aesthetic of the twenty-first century? Which are the important secessionist movements of today? Which will be the most important great works? Today, futuristic aesthetics often mean retrofuturistic aesthetics. So, what should the future actually look like?

A call for new aesthetic perspectives and creative approaches.

The magic of this mysterious technology is starting to lose its luster. What looked like magic is turning into work.

The current state of personal AI infrastructure. via ondiscourse.substack.com

Corporate profit margins have risen to nearly 20%, which is double the historical 10% levels seen in previous decades. via Eric Basmajian x.com

Star Trek's unproduced 'Phase II' series from the 1970s included 19 episode scripts that were never filmed via kottke.org

The trouble with these calculations is that they mire us in epistemically tricky terrain. I’m bothered by how quickly the discussions of AI become utopian or apocalyptic. ... It also forces thinking to be obsessively short term. People start losing interest in problems of the next five or ten years, because superintelligence will have already changed everything. The big political and technological questions we need to discuss are only those that matter to the speed of AI development. Furthermore, we must sprint towards a post-superintelligence world even though we have no real idea what it will bring.

Dan Wang's 2025 annual review letter.

I started my tools.simonwillison.net site last year as a single location for my growing collection of vibe-coded / AI-assisted HTML+JavaScript tools ... The new browse all by month page shows I built 110 of these in 2025!

Simon Willison's Annual review blog post examining major trends and developments in large language models (LLMs) during 2025.

You’re not crazy. The internet does feel genuinely so awful right now, and for about a thousand and one reasons. But the path back to feeling like you have some control is to un-spin yourself from the Five Apps of the Apocalypse and reclaim the Internet as a set of tools you use to build something you can own & be proud of — or in most of our cases, be deeply ashamed of.

A truly beautiful essay proposing a return to independent publishing.

For these three systems, newly entering the public domain today are: works by people who died in 1955, for countries with a copyright term of “life plus 70 years” (relevant in UK, most of the EU, and South America); works by people who died in 1975, for countries with a term of “life plus 50 years” (relevant to most of Africa and Asia); films and books (incl. artworks featured) published in 1929 (relevant solely to the United States).

Public Domain Review article highlights works entering the public domain in 2026, including books by William Faulkner, Langston Hughes, and Hermann Hesse.

Gen Z listeners are 27% more likely to purchase vinyl records than the average music consumer, despite having grown up in the era of Spotify. In fact, half of U.S. vinyl buyers today don’t even own a record player – they buy records as tangible tokens of fandom and identity

via lightcapai.medium.com

Then, as restaurants started to publicly decry the hefty commissions these apps collected, some diners rebelled. This was the “delete your apps” era. We did not delete our apps. In fact, we’re more hooked now. Data from the National Restaurant Association suggests demand for restaurant delivery is growing.

Expedite article analyzing **that** viral Reddit post about food delivery app algorithms.

The first price point for usable solar technology that I can find is from the year 1956. At that time, the cost of just one watt of solar photovoltaic capacity was $1,865 (adjusted for inflation and in 2019 prices).10 One watt isn’t much. Today, one single solar panel of the type homeowners put on their roofs produces around 320 watts of power.11 This means that at the price of 1956, one of today’s solar modules would cost $596,800.12

Our World In Data explaining why renewable energy prices have dropped dramatically, showing how solar and wind technologies have become cheaper than fossil fuels within just 15 years.