2026-06-23

What the left believes

From a letter in The Economist: Were we too quick to attack “Gen Z socialism”? | Jun 20th 2026 Edition

The Economist was too quick to attack “Gen-Z socialism” (June 6th). Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Zohran Mamdani aren’t cold war socialists committed to central planning, vanguardism and foreign dictatorships. They are democratic pragmatists who support civil and political liberties, good governance and expanded public services. This is the stuff of “sewer socialism”, not Stalinism. Today’s socialists want to abolish the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency because they believe in freedom of movement, and because masked thugs are kidnapping people off the streets. The push to tax billionaires comes not from a zero-sum mentality, but from witnessing massive wealth weaponised against liberal democracy itself. Like its namesake, a Green New Deal seeks to save capitalism from capitalists, and cool the planet too. Universal health care is no more a threat to American liberalism than it was to the British kind. Finally, The Economist itself has warned of the risks apartheid poses to democratic legitimacy. The horrors in Gaza have just awakened liberals to this danger.

These can all be defended on liberal grounds. There are illiberal ideas on the left, but it is the liberal ideas that are attracting followers. We should ask ourselves why we so often find that socialists express our values better than our fellow liberals.

How to launch a tech product

How to launch a tech product

hilarious, and very relatable.

…They set deadlines for internal teams: all firms could benefit from a few fixed dates in the calendar where they have to show what they have been up to. But for anyone who thinks that the tech industry suffers from groupthink, these events do not reassure. It doesn’t take long to see a slickly inauthentic formula.

Speakers hand off to each other by saying things like “And now here’s Kevin,” or “To tell you more about that, over to John.” A synth-laden electronic soundtrack, muzak for developers, will blast out while one person leaves the stage and the next person takes their place. (Apple does its launches on video; the camera will find Kevin, or John, lurking somewhere on its Cupertino campus.)

Kevin or John will be wearing an open-neck shirt, dark trousers and shoes with cushioned white soles. The only people who can wear sensible shoes on stage are customers from a boring industry like banking: their function is to show that regulated industries are clients, and it is important they look staid. No one can wear a tie. If you see someone wearing a tie, they are a security guard.

Kevin or John or whoever will stride into view, plant their feet apart and wait for the music to stop. They will look at the audience and, for reasons that are unclear, say: “Wow!” Then they will look at the autocue and start speaking. Every three seconds, they will raise their hands up from their sides and hold an imaginary cardboard box. To mix it up—they’re not robots!—they occasionally hold out their hands as though each contains a mango. Every two minutes they will move to one side of the stage, plant their feet and start doing the box or mango thing again.

No matter what Kevin or John is announcing, they will say they are “super-excited” about it. They might be telling the world that they have discovered a way to teleport, or revealing that a device is now available in a slightly different colour, but it will be impossible to tell from their monotonically rapturous delivery.

…

Kevin or John’s segment will end just as it began. They will say, “And now here’s Rohan,” or “Over to Mike,” and walk off the stage while the giant screen behind them does something vibrant and the muzak starts up again. Rohan or Mike will stride on, stand just where their predecessor did, and say: “Wow!”

2026-06-24

Coffee Video Games

Coffee Talk Tokyo Is The Coffee Video Game Of The Year

I am not much of a video games person, but I remember vaguely dabbling in the first ever game in this series during COVID times. The whole concept is really unique.

We here at Sprudge are no strangers to the video game series Coffee Talk, from Toge Productions. We’ve covered the first two games in the series and have been eagerly waiting for the latest edition, Coffee Talk Tokyo. And when it comes to video games, the track record shows, I’ve played more quirky Japanese coffee games than coffee simulators, so to be passed the baton to cover this episode is a great honor to review.

If you’re like me and can’t be bothered by perfecting a cup of pixelated coffee, I invite you to bring your mediocre pouring skills and curious mind to the Coffee Talk Tokyo.

An heir to the super chill original Coffee Talk game, set in Seattle, this newly released volume focuses on Japan’s beloved Jazz Kissa culture and omotenashi, Japan’s style of anticipatory hospitality. The game is set in the year 2026, in a quiet corner of Tokyo. Over the 17 chapters of gameplay, during the sweltering weeks from July 31 to August 15th (ending on the last night of the Obon holiday), you get to know a cast of yokai, humans, a restless ghost, and even a surprise visit from Seattle Coffee Talk regular, Hendry. All walks of life (and death) have a reason to visit, whether it’s to catch a break on their days off, in search of someone, or looking for a listening ear. You, as the shop owner, are here as the constant to your regulars’ busy, challenging days, and their moments of celebration.

2026-06-25

Matt Levine on Prediction Markets

Insider Trading Isn't Romantic

From Matt Levine's latest.

There are at least four ways to think about prediction markets:

1. They are a “truth machine,” a way for society to harness markets to figure out the probabilities of future events.
2. They are a way for people and businesses to hedge the financial consequences of future events.
3. They are an “asset class,” a way for people to get paid for predicting future events.

4. They are gambling, an entertainment product, a way for people to pay to generate dopamine by predicting future events.

   I tend to be skeptical about the first three views; prediction markets, I often say, are mostly sports gambling, and their expected financial value for users is obviously negative. Mark Zuckerberg … agrees? Or something?

Attention

Umyazu #reading

There’s a prevailing narrative that says we’ve lost our ability to pay attention, that we need drugs or discipline or sternly-worded warnings about the dangers of social media to deal with this growing public health threat. This narrative completely obscures the fact that annihilating attention is a political project with clear benefits for the billionaire class: if we cannot attend the world, neither can we intercede in it. We become passive recipients of their worldbuilding, disenfranchised from our own responsibility to make sense of—and therefore to remake—the world around us.

AI is unsettling the self-help shelf

ChatGPT moved my cheese: AI is unsettling the self-help shelf

You could buy a self-help book, or, cheaper and quicker, just ChatGPT the highlights. According to self-help guru Tim Ferriss, author of The 4-Hour Work Week: Escape the 9–5, Live Anywhere and Join the New Rich (2007) — GenAI is killing the how-to publishing industry.

Last week Ferriss wrote in a blog post: “Using my own books as the cadaver on the table, [this is] what a fatality looks like,” mapping out sales for his five books — including The 4-Hour Body and Tools of Titans (my favourite title of the last ten years). His chart showed a small dip in 2023, the year after ChatGPT was launched, followed by ever-steeper declines. Ominously, he predicted his catalogue “will sell roughly 80 per cent fewer copies in 2026 than it did in 2022”.

2026-06-26

Capitalism vs Markets

The Craft of Capitalism

If I had a penny for everytime I have argued with (both socialist left wing and libertarian right wing) folks about the difference between capitalism and markets

Within mainstream economics and politics, ‘capitalism’ is often spoken of as if it were simply the presence of markets, but markets long precede capitalism. Markets are social spaces where people engage in tit-for-tat reciprocal exchange - I’ll do X if you do Y - but this mode of behaviour was traditionally mixed with many other modes. When you encounter a vibrant street market in the Peruvian Andes, full of local villagers selling roots and herbs, it does not scream ‘CAPITALISM!’ at you, whereas a mall full of mass-produced corporate products really does.

The reason for this is that old traditional markets are rife with all sorts of ‘non-commercial’ logics, with people hanging out or lingering in each other’s stalls to catch up on gossip, and young people flirting, and old men playing chess on the side ranting about politics. These are holistic, integrated spaces, where the ‘economic’, ‘social’, ‘cultural’, and ‘political’ realm are all entangled, rather than siloed off from each other.

Moreover, the type of community who uses an old-school market is also woven together with forms of informal reciprocity. This is a term we use in anthropology to talk about webs of obligations that play out over time. Rather than ‘I’ll do X now if you do Y now’, informal reciprocity is more like “I’ll sort of do something a bit like X in a year’s time if you maybe kinda do Y in a couple weeks”. Informal reciprocity is a style of exchange, but it’s implicit rather than explicit, unmeasured rather than measured, and unenforced and deferred rather than immediate. This means it feels very different to ‘cold’ formal exchange. It’s the kind of thing we associate with community.

Finally, the oldest markets historically formed around the edges of society, rather than forming the centre. For example, feudal society had market towns, but the central defining logic of the overall economy was based on agricultural land. Similarly, ancient tribal societies could certainly engage in trade, but that was often peripheral to their clan systems, kinship structures and traditional pastoralism or horticulture.

Capitalism, by contrast, is a state of being in which breaking even is seen, ultimately, as a failure. It is a system in which everything above the break-even point - profit - is elevated in an attempt to accumulate power in the social web. It often does take place within the market, but the ultimate end goal would not be to maintain a web of egalitarian reciprocity. No, it would be to transform the Peruvian street market into a space dominated by oligarchs who have capitalized on their existing advantage to secure more. That’s what a mall is.

A society starts to feel very ‘capitalistic’ when its resources begin to concentrate into these large nodes of power, and when a class of people who own this concentration of assets start to become gatekeepers to the survival of others. Those others must prostrate themselves asking for jobs - the right to operate the owned assets - so that they can get money to buy the things outputted by those very same assets.

People continue to maintain community, but the social web starts to feel like it contains a constant underlying struggle. They find themselves under pressure to compete, and to do this will increasingly strip non-commercial ethics out of the old market. This hollows it out and leaves it with a ‘pure’ market logic siloed away from other logics, which increasingly get cast as inefficient pollutants. As this is amplified, pure market logic becomes the central driving force in a society, and the end justification for all other activity.

Seemingly Insignificant Minor Interactions

Have you heard of SIMIs? #relationships #friendships

Have you ever come across the term — and concept — of SIMIs (the Seemingly Insignificant Minor Interactions of Everyday Life)?

If you’re an introvert, especially, you might not be inclined to pay much attention to these interactions. You might (as I am) be inclined to focus mostly on your deeper relationships. And I do believe that going deep, relationally, is a deeply satisfying way to live.

But I like the concept of SIMIs too - the constellation of minor interactions that round out our days. To recommend paying attention to SIMIs is not to urge us to be more social than we actually want to be; it’s more akin to stopping to notice a flower or cloud formation.

Neuroscience studies reveal that SIMIs have the potential to shape and reshape our brains countless times. They can either strengthen existing neurocircuitry or overwrite it to create new pathways. Positive SIMIs can provide us with the opportunity to heal past adversity as new experiences overwrite the old. But negative SIMIs can further solidify past relational experiences that did not serve us then and will not serve us now or in the future. Each positive SIMI is an opportunity for neuroplastic shift, which means that the right SIMIs have the potential to alter the brain on the most fundamental molecular level — helping you attain a richer, more satisfying life.

Epictetus on Love and Loss

Epictetus on Love and Loss: The Stoic Strategy for Surviving Heartbreak

Two millennia ago, the great Stoic philosopher Epictetus (c. 55–135 AD) argued that the antidote to this gutting grief is found not in hedging ourselves against prospective loss through artificial self-protections but, when loss does come, in orienting ourselves to it and to what preceded it differently — in training ourselves not only to accept but to embrace the temporality of all things, even those we most cherish and most wish would stretch into eternity, so that when love does vanish, we are left with the irrevocable gladness that it had entered our lives at all and animated them for the time that it did.

2026-06-27

The Bear Season 5

It is back! #tv