daniel.industries

What Would the Rock Say to the Tree

2026-10-03T18:39:42-05:00

🪨 “Hey.”

🌳 “Hey.”

🪨 “Decent morning.”

🌳 “Yep.”

🪨 “Hell of a storm last night.”

🌳 “Yep.”

🪨 “Thought I was going to get washed away there for a minute.”

🌳 “Oh yeah?”

🪨 “Yeah. At least you have roots. I just have weight.”

🌳 “Well at least you have that.”

🪨 “That water, though, it has weight.”

🌳 “I like the water.”

🪨 “You would.”

🌳 “Tastes good.”

🪨 “Gets me wet.”

🌳 “Well, the sun’s out now.”

🪨 “Yep. Feels good.”

🌳 “Can get a little hot.”

🪨 “Have you seen that construction?”

🌳 “Oh yeah, I’ve seen it for a while. It keeps moving this way.”

🪨 “Oh, yeah? I just noticed it. I guess you saw it sooner from up there.”

🌳 “Yep.”

🪨 “What are they building?”

🌳 “Not sure. But they’re moving a lot of dirt.”

🪨 “I wonder if my cousin has been affected.”

🌳 “What’s his name? I’ll ask if anyone has seen him.”

🪨 “Steve. Steve the stone.”

🌳 “Ok, I’ll put the word out.”

🪨 “Hey what’s the noise?”

🌳 “Something’s coming.”

🪨 “What’s it look like?”

🌳 “Yellow.”

🪨 “It’s loud!”

🌳 “Yeah, I don’t like the looks of this.”

The Cuck Internet Theory

2026-09-26T22:33:14-05:00

So what we’ve been talking about–machines and algorithms are just kind of like running the whole show…That’s been referred to as the dead internet theory, the idea that there’s really not a lot of humanity on the internet, it’s all the bots and we kind of just sit there. Aiden Walker took that a step further recently and his theory–it’s somewhat colorful–is that it’s like the cuck internet theory…which is that the synthetic product of these artificial intelligence things, be it a slop video of a cat dancing on a street in Paris or whatever, that a bunch of people are flicking through Instagram reels or Facebook and just hitting like or whatever, “Oh that’s cute I’m going to forward that,” …it’s machine made, it’s trained off of all of these other machines. Then you have the algorithm which is predisposed to like that stuff because that stuff is all trained off of what the algorithm has already shown you and given you, right?

What’s happening is those things are meeting. Those things are in the room interacting with each other and the human is sitting in the corner in the chair watching that. The human is the consenting observer to an interaction, a melding of sorts of these two machines that have been predisposed to do this in service of viral advertising revenue. And that is a lot of what the internet is. The internet isn’t dead. The internet is really active. It’s moving. It’s doing stuff. These two elements that aren’t human are doing it all night long and we the human are just sort of sitting there like, “Okay, yeah, no, I’ll have some more, I guess. Yeah, sure.” You know, we are consenting to it in some sense.

Aidan Walker: Cuck Internet Theory

When your eye lingers on an AI slop reel, you are allowing two bundles of algorithms that were made for one another to finally meet. It’s a match made, if not in heaven, then in the neural net’s n-dimensional representation of destiny.

…The most lucrative products in the world today are numbers manufactured by American tech companies and financial institutions. These numbers are processed into training data, pitch decks, valuations, and justifications. Each of these become instruments for extracting more value out of the world of actual people who make things and putting it into the world of people who make slide decks.

…Look at it just in terms of internet history over the past two decades. Every minute of those twenty years, people watched videos, chatted, and shared stuff online. Some, but not all, of those engagements resulted in exchange between two humans through the medium of the machine: a creator got a follower or payment, a viewer arrived at an epiphany, or another meme hit the group chat and made everyone smile. But lately (as anyone who makes money from the internet or spends a lot of time there will tell you) this seems to be happening less and less.

…If we’re cucked, as I argue, then the solution is to see the algogarchic [algorithmic + oligarchic] project not as productive or future-facing at all, but as extractive, a vast magnet pulling money, agency, and meaning out of real life situations. And the question to ask is how to reverse that magnet’s polarity so technology is not taking the world away from you, but giving it to you…

There Just Isn’t the Wherewithal

2026-09-20T15:36:01-05:00

A few of my students were deported. It’s happening everywhere, and we talk about what we’re allowed to in the halls between our training sessions. The kids I lost were some of my best artists with great families who tolerated my compliments of their kids’ work in my poor Spanish. I’ve screamed a lot. And felt sad and still, then screamed again. TPS ending has been devastating to our communities.

broken tamagotchi feels

I held my hands the way your voice held my mind.

to love the cosmos

In those years, I understood faith only as a transaction, and I could not abide the idea that I lost my parents because I did not pray enough or we were bad people. But as time passed, I knew I had reached an unhappy plateau. I found myself wanting to believe in something mystical but not knowing how.

Some people told me it was simply a matter of making a decision, that I could even invent my own higher power if I liked. But I required proof. A burning bush. A voice that shook the heavens. I waited for signals and signs until, around the time I started Midnight Radio, I learned to laugh at my absurdity. I mean, dig the size of my ego: demanding the divine prove itself to me rather than the other way around.

Now I believe we’re meant to generate the signals and signs ourselves.

American Twilight

Sometimes it feels like we’ll never get to the end, that the books are growing back on the shelves as we remove them.

books of obsolete facts

tooting bec by Steve Collins

I miss you, man. That’s why I picked up my phone, scrolled to your name, and sent you 15 reels on Instagram.

I Noticed Our Friendship Was Waning, So I’ve Sent More Instagram Reels

I very much want to write…but at the moment I just don’t have the wherewithal. “Wherewithal” is a funny word, but an appropriate one: if you lack wherewithal you lack whatever it takes to do something you want to do. The elderly Harold Bloom wrote to the elderly Ursula K. Le Guin to plead with her to write another novel as great as The Dispossessed or The Left Hand of Darkness and she replied that at her stage of life “there just isn’t the wherewithal.”

Wherewithal

…this was less a mantra than our only way forward: Find a way to separate what happened from what happened to us, to decline participation in most of the ceremonies and pageantry in favor of figuring out on our own our family’s new geometry…

The Worst Day Of My Life Is Now New York’s Hottest Tourist Attraction

The Cost of Caring

2026-09-06T21:29:02-05:00

Preface

Now, we all know that LinkedIn has been a bountiful Lolcow for years and years, but this recent timeline that we’re in has seen it transform into a true hellscape. Nowhere else on the internet has in sloppification been more wholly embraced. It’s really hard to decide where to even begin with this platform.

But we can’t talk about this new era of LinkedIn cringe without talking a little bit about design. Now, I swear I hardly ever see this kind of stuff out in the wild, but on LinkedIn, it is thriving. And these designs are not just hard to look at. I think they’re also a fascinating insight into what’s happening to LinkedIn users brains right now. It’s like when the cops check a suspect’s journals and they find like this, it’s telling us something.

You see, these people have become so consumed with the ethos of hyper optimization and outproducing your competitors at all costs that when they make a flyer, diagram, or graphic, they need it to do the most. And they have clearly lost the cognitive capacity to consider anything else. They have apparently not even thought once about what it feels like to be a human being looking at this stuff. It reminds me of a great article I read in The Atlantic where a writer was describing his experience on board [a] cruise ship…and he remarks, “There is no visual mercy.” And that is precisely what is happening here. There is nowhere I can point my eyes where I am not facing an all out screaming assault. This is not just bad taste. We’re staring into the psychotic depths of hell, my friends. I guarantee you these guys are talking backwards and crawling on the ceiling when they post…

The load-bearing vocabulary of Claude

We grouped GitHub PRs since 2025 into 10 clusters of vocabulary using KL-divergence k-means.

One of the clusters appeared in 2026 and represented 40% of all human-attributed pull requests last month.

Its most representative words should look familiar to anyone who uses coding agents.

I was inspired to write this after reading some LinkedIn posts from a prominent CEO here in Dallas. Every post is transparently written by Claude. There is no attempt by this CEO’s handlers to tweak the content to make it less sloppy. The actual content is often good, but the actual “writing” has that slop stink and makes it indigestible.

Then the two links above crossed my desk.

Caring

My working hypothesis for this slop age we’re living in is this: these people never cared. I don’t have the expectation that everyone on the internet care about what they publish there, lord knows that ship has sailed. Online marketers haven’t cared about their craft since the first time someone breathed “SEO”.

But I have assumed that executives and other professionals representing their intellectual abilities on the internet would care. I now think that assumption was wrong all along.

But they care about something, right? Otherwise why post?

Over a year ago I said:

LLMs aren’t good writers if you’re trying to actually sound smart or original. Conversely, LLMs are good at navigating scenarios where business theater has replaced actual truth and meaning, like security audits. LLMs are great bullshit machines.

About a month ago I gave a presentation that included this:

Capital, Again?

We’re in an age where much of the labor required by capital is bullshit work. So much of the work required to maintain software has been pushed onto the customers of that software. I don’t need to review that landscape. But that simple observation brings us back to LinkedIn and CEOs’ Claude-generated posts.

Business leaders are, and have always been, half business and half theater. Some excel at both (Steve Jobs comes to mind). Some lean more towards one or the other. But neither necessarily rewards creative craft. Both modes are simply checkpoints on the way to greater profitability.

So if you feel obligated to post to LinkedIn to fulfill your duties, but don’t have anything to say, don’t have the time to say something you thought and wrote yourself, or simply don’t care about writing and posting…well, Claude to the rescue.

There is a lot of bullshit in my life that I’d love to outsource to Claude. Despite my best efforts, the level of bullshit has only grown since I observed it and began attempts at fighting it. AI promises to remove that bullshit, yet somehow…unbelievably, I know…has only multiplied the stinky piles.

After writing, I realized this is another version of When Machines Make the Incompetent More Confident.

The Grid

2026-09-05T11:57:28-05:00

…this neutralization of difference is crucial to capitalism, a flattening that allows otherwise-diverse objects to be brought into the realm of exchange value.

The glamor and vibe some branding company worked so hard to imbue is dulled by the cardboard and tape and shredded packing paper. How am I supposed to fetishize this wrinkled blouse torn only moments ago from a recalcitrant plastic pouch?

This is where the aesthetic decanting and TikTok restocking comes in. It’s a piece of theater that allows consumer goods to regain the appeal and shiny product-ness that wore off them in transit. Without the department store, we must stage our own closets. Without the supermarket to enable the child’s formative encounter with the object of desire (the cereal aisle, where Captain Crunch and Count Chocula call out like sirens from child-height shelves), it’s up to mom to reanimate the dead bulk Froot Loops by decanting and displaying them and bringing some spectacle back. When the warehouse is your house, you have to revive the commodity yourself, spank its cheeks a little and turn it back into a product.

I can imagine a world where this newer, more intimate connection with the abstraction and depraved randomness of contemporary supply chains would lead somewhere different. Experiencing the crappy banality of the drop-shipped Insta-purchase might lead to a disenchantment with the commodity, and even an empathy with the other poor schmucks further up the chain to whom you’re inextricably linked via some godforsaken tank top or tub of cookies.

Per Adorno and Bishop, the logistics play of the Home Edit pantry could be seen as a reaction to and a reflection of a world already swallowed whole by managerial logic and inscrutable supply webs. It’s a coping mechanism, for sure, but that doesn’t mean it’s not art.

At one point during the tour I saw a box of Cholula hot sauce come down the line. Khloé has Cholula in her pantry. I suppose it could have been the very same sauce. Those bottles stowed into a caddie at the warehouse, then retrieved weeks later by a picker responding to the computer ping of an order that was placed by Khloé’s assistant. Into the box they went, box taped closed, along a conveyor belt, onto a truck, eventually delivered to a mansion in the Santa Monica Mountains. The box received, cut open. The bottles removed, held in the pristinely manicured hand of an entirely different kind of worker performing an entirely similar task. Cholula stowed into a new cubby grid, shiny long acrylics tap tapping on the bottle’s glass sides, as they plunk down on the lazy susan one by one. “I’m not crazy, I’m just organized.”

– Merchandizing the Void

📼 Yesterday’s Concepts for Today’s Lifestyles.

via Tracy Durnell’s Weeknotes

Steven Ahlgren Photographs

The Office

via Flashbak

📼 Is the #1 fiction bestseller AI slop?

📼 The Vergecast What’s behind the Google AI shakeup (also available in your podcatchers)

I think that it is going to be fundamentally dangerous that a company like Google that does not have any top-down product strategy.

Quit Your Phone and Change the Nature of the Universe

2026-08-22T09:52:14-05:00

obligatory one month without social media on my phone substack essay (contrarian edition) (Apologies for a substack link but this one is worth it.)

Quit your phone and change the nature of time and the universe!

What amazes me so much about these notions is how similar they are to discourses from the beginning of modernity, when our perception of time, disconnected from the rhythms of the world, became abstracted, seen as a meaningless container shuttling from moment to moment leaving it up to us to give that moment meaning. Walter Benjamin called this fixture of modern life homogenous, empty time and believed it to be a real sickness inhibitive of social progress, though these days it’s nothing special…>we find ourselves stuck in the cafeteria of ultramechanized capitalism where the sushi of time goes round and round on the carousel. How tragic that we don’t pick a plate and eat it because we’re on our damn phones!!!! Or something!

…Thus, invoking (whether unwittingly or not) the utopian visions of the Arts and Crafts movement which thought, a bit too late, that the tide of mechanical reproduction and the resulting deskilling and abstracting of labor could still be turned by a return to handicraft, today’s analog influencers want you to believe that if you buy their course and put down your phone, you, too, can resist the world’s immiserating forces by using your hands to make things that matter, such as this needlepoint pillow kit that says ‘log off,’ which you can buy via this Etsy referral link for $39.99.

…I would say that the most important thing to keep in mind when quitting anything is that it is possible to change one’s behavior and have agency in one’s actions, thoughts, and feelings. This may sound obvious but you wouldn’t believe how many people are willing to cosign the idea that they are slaves to dopamine, that they are irretrievably enmeshed in the Matrix world of Screen Time Capitalism or whatever, that they are helpless to control their own minds. I have a serious mental illness that requires neurochemical modulation and even I can log off

…In order to quit, one must realize that what is really being interrogated is not necessarily the thing itself (and yes this includes Phone Capitalism) but the behavior and what we get out of it. What do we want from Phone World? Is it companionship? Prestige? Reassurance seeking? Attention? Entertainment? What do we get from doomscrolling? Why even call it that? Can we not use grown-up words like self-soothing, numbing, rumination, avoidance, paranoia. insecurity, anxiety, despondency, resentment, despair, anger etc. to describe our behaviors and the feelings behind them? If we can name these things, these actions, these needs, only then can we actually take the necessary steps to put the phone down and seek either help for ourselves or satisfaction of these needs in less maladaptive ways, because that’s the thing: ultimately, phone use is not an existential battle between the human mind and nefarious powerless-making material and mechanical forces — it is a behavior.

…The other advice I want to give is that regardless of what one does with one’s newfound quiet time, putting the phone down itself is enough. You don’t need to go form a political party or read the entire work of Dostoyevsky in a month with all that time. The harsher, more disappointing, more Benjaminian reality is that, when abstaining from our phones, when we suddenly feel the embodied length of a minute…we soon realize, horribly, that we don’t actually have much free time to begin with. Those three minutes at the bus stop may feel longer without Instagram but they are still only three minutes.

…getting off my phone and limiting my screen time has not radically reoriented my existence. It has not made me suddenly erudite, though it has welcomed considerable peace into my life. It is actually very relieving to not have four hundred commentators yelling in your ear about how we are all going to die from the climate change no one in power is doing anything to address whenever it gets a little smoky outside even though this is, in fact, true.

I updated the nav area of the archives (and corresponding categories) page. This precipitated a lot more historical metadata cleanup, and makes me want to speed up the archive culling process…but…meh.

Unease About Ambiguity

2026-08-12T21:09:17-05:00

…the discomfort with temporal uncertainty that manifests as false certainty about the future has, I’ve come to realize, an equivalent in the unease about ambiguity, complexity, contradiction, and opacity that manifests as the urge to stuff reality into airtight categories. Categories are inevitable—language itself is a collection of categories—but their leakiness and limits should be recognized…Categories too often become where thought goes to die. That is, there’s a widespread tendency to act as if once something has been categorized, no further consideration is required.

…We live in a time where people are more isolated than ever from the kind of private, personal engagement where you can wonder, doubt, improvise, or just admit you don’t know, and where many of us are instead more than ever in the para-public sphere of social media where you perform for an audience of casual acquaintances and strangers who may savage you if you get anything wrong or even seem weak or uncertain or uncommitted. This requires a performance of confidence and certainty that is seen as powerful even when it’s also uninformed or oversimplified.

– Rebecca Solnit

Madeleine's Magic Muffin Market

2026-08-11T08:47:49-05:00

(1,910)

(2,002)

The browser tab’s title on Madeleine’s 7-year-old laptop dutifully ticked up.

Checking on my order from July 20th…

Just wanted to find out if my order a month ago went through or if I should try again. It showed up on my PayPal.

Madeleine’s muffins were made in a small commissary space well outside the purview of the health department. It had two main doors with keypad locks, and each of the individual units had their own keypad locks. Madeleine’s was just four ones, but nobody knew that. Nobody at the commissary knew her name.

WTF is going on [8]

Second order went through, still nothing…

Many of the other tenants made odorous food, some for their own facade-less DoorDash restaurants, others for actual restaurants across town. Others still made things ordered online, everything from things consumed, like Maddy’s “muffins”, to curios carved from reclaimed wood.

(2,098)

(3,064)

The smell of decay took a long time to overwhelm the curry spices from Manav’s Masala Mansion next door. It took even longer for it to become strong enough for another tenant to text their landlord about it. It took a few days longer for the landlord, having received a few more texts, to text her maintenance supervisor. It took most of that day for her maintenance supervisor to make his way over to Madeleine’s unit.

I really don’t want to have to find another place to get these, yours are so good. :(

…I also noticed your Twitter (I mean ‘X’, ugh) hasn’t been updated…

They’d never bothered to set up a master code for the digital locks, and the maintenance guy guessed 1-2-3-4, 1-4-7-8, and a few others, but never 1-1-1-1. It was a couple more hours before the firetruck arrived.

(3,065)

I’ve tried to find similar stuff around here, but none of it works. I’m in a bad place…

The units were well insulated, but as soon as the fireman was able to crack the door frame with his crowbar, everyone gathered outside could hear the buzzing of flies, and they all pulled their shirts over their noses.

(3,066)

…hope you’re ok…

Every Online Contretemps Is Definitionally Stupid

2026-08-08T08:52:25-05:00

Title from The Homebound Symphony’s sprawling along the way: a polemic and an exhortation

What characterizes the hopeful Christian, Thomas says, is the status viator – the state of being a wayfarer. Thus Josef Pieper refers to “the wayfaring character of hope.” Wayfarers know their destination but aren’t sure how to get there; all along the way they look for signs indicating the best path, and seek help both from their companions and from those they encounter on the road. They know that they have to be flexible and agile; they know that their enemies are Aimlessness and Fixity. They trust in a Guide they cannot see; they listen for His still small voice. Maybe things will be better than they expect; maybe worse; unquestionably different. But they make their way along the pilgrim road…

Leading with the conclusion there. When I started this site in 2001 I wrote the tagline “seeking stories beauty meaning” and as I read the above portion of a post that had me nodding all the way through, I thought about how well that tagline served me in my wayfaring. I was in the midst of an escape from a season in evangelicalism that began with four years in a charismatic cult during college, about another four years in more mainstream evangelical institutions culminating in disillusionment (what is now called “deconstruction” by the current generation of evangelical expatriates discovering faith does, in fact, live outside those walls), followed by a permanent state of in via, I suppose. And now, at least in terms of strictly religious practice, a casual return to the Anglicanism of my childhood. In terms of real praxis…it is, as they say, complicated.

Where would Jesus eat? 🤔

Living in a place where evangelicalism is dominant is an odd experience for someone like me. Trying to understand the visceral tailings of the cognitive dissonance engendered by its practice still discomforts me.

I have a page in my notes app titled “The Hypothesis” with various versions of this idea, which I haven’t, and still will not, share here, but then Alan already wrote in 2022:

Whenever Christians decide that they need a strategy, they’re writing a recipe for disobedience to the Lord Jesus.

One of those notes is just a link to Luke 12:13-33, where Jesus himself says something simple and obvious:

…not even when one is affluent does his life consist of his possessions…

…then tells a story about a rich person who goes to a lot of trouble to prepare his wealth for its future protection and expansion, only to die the next day. Not the most creative storytelling, but it gets the point across. He then continues on to one of the more quoted of his quips, my favorite version coming from the Coen brothers:

…consider the lilies of the goddamn field.

The curse inverts the comparison. The lilies’ field is devoid of the alienation of capital, of course they grow without labor, damn it.

A Christian deciding they need a strategy isn’t a recipe for disobedience only because it might prevent them from obedience by prioritizing their own plans. It is a violation of the very thing evangelicals are so on about: being in the world not of it. To western Christians, the world is immorality as determined by their cultural mores, justified by specific readings of their core text. (Large, disconnected collections of ancient texts are very useful for justifying any given moralistic position.) But there’s a different reading of those same texts, one that is more akin to a physics curriculum than an economic one, one that is less math and more a window into a different dimension where the math is totally different.

In that dimension, that we now see in a riddle, many who are first will be last, and the last first, and the Godhead itself is literally embodied in the poor, immigrants, and prisoners. Even if still a riddle, the themes seem to indicate some actions relatively more involved than holding a poster board with “John 3:16” written on it.

The great commission isn’t winning a debate or buying a Super Bowl commercial. It is something far more radical.

“Seeking” served me well. But now, in the back half of my brief moment in time, perhaps I get a glimpse of something beyond the hazy horizon, something weird, liminal, numinous. Something radical. Something like grace.

Most of my writings about the state of modern Christianity happened before ~2005. But this post from 2008, in which I critique modern art scenes, where I had exiled to in my search for meaning, has a concise aside encapsulating all my previous thinking: Just as many Christians have come to worship the text instead of the God who presumably authored it, we will continue to make attempts at words that will give authority to what essentially amounts to some vaguely aesthetic abstraction of our desires. ↩

Commonplinks

2026-08-02T12:39:16-05:00

Notes

MRM. We’re in this liminal space between the date Margot Rose was born – July 23rd – and the date she died – August 13th. July 23rd we arrived at the lake. Carissa brought mini cupcakes and we had cupcakes and sang happy birthday on the dock at sunset. I said, “Are we going to sing?” Carissa said, “I don’t really want to,” but then led the singing. Grief is so multivariate, but it is almost always awkward.

I missed July’s IndieWeb Carnival. Despite having an idea and a to-do from approx July 1. It was a month. August looks to be no better.

I managed to make it to church this morning. The old testament reading was from Isaiah 55. 8th-century BC Israelite prophets speaking to 21st century late-capitalism.

Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which does not satisfy? Listen carefully to me, and eat what is good, and delight yourselves in rich food.

Our priest referenced Babette’s Feast in her sermon. During the service, as I struggled to stand up and sit down, failed entirely to kneel, and declined the wine at communion, I had the strange thought: “Don’t drink, can’t walk, what do you do?”¹ On the way home I randomly listened to Die Young.

In this paper, I will…

David Bowie’s Blackstar is a work about a dying man facing his death. St. Vincent’s All Born Screaming is a work about men already dead despite being far from physical death. They are connected by the thread of the highly syncopated drumming of Mark Guiliana. In this paper, I will…

A Form of Truth by Mark Guiliana

Commonplinks

Air Conditioning

I’ve posted about James Reeves and his Midnight Radio before. So I just have to get more effusive each time. This time it’s: JFC this continues to be the epitome of personal publishing (I dare not call it just “a blog”)

Show me the work

I’ve always felt pity for folks with ridiculous job titles…

…in the software design field there’s a total lack of shame. Someone will shake your hand with the most pathetic, lick-spittle job title in a vain attempt to impress or intimidate, to place themselves above you in a deeply lame, invisible hierarchy.

How Podcasts Ruined America

…they are mostly unbowed, hurtling ever-further into the algorithmic vortex, enthralled by the insatiable appetite of their vast and growing audiences—the precise metrics of which they and their handlers can meticulously track.

…the currently existing podcast media superstructure, which has become a colossal engine of nonstop hysteria-fomentation and dysregulated magical thinking with zero concern for bare-minimum accuracy. It also operates within a churn of algorithmic stimuli perversely arrayed to ensure this sanity-contaminating trend continues indefinitely.

Colophon

I updated my writing page to a 2-col grid on desktop-width viewports and separated fiction from nonfiction.

Apologies to Adam Ant ↩