Surveillance Log 002 — Noteworthy links for 2025-10-10
Surveillance Log 002 - Noteworthy links for 2025-10-10
Hello! Welcome to a new experiment on Surveilled, a weekly (or less) log of five (or less) links that I found interesting. The subject matter will mainly remain economic, financial and tech adjacent of course.
The longer, infrequent and irregular posts will continue of course, time permitting, but I felt the need to write something with less pressure and more freewheeling. Let me know what you think, just by replying to this email!
Without further ado, on to this week’s links. All previous issues are available here.
The State of the Republic is Grim - Lawyers, Guns & Money — Georgetown University professor of Government and Foreign Service Dan Nexon makes a persuasive argument that the American Republic as we know it is over, and the vaunted checks and balances in the US constitution have failed. I don’t think this is hyperbole, sadly. (Lawyers, Guns & Money blog)
The ‘tradwife’ fantasy — If you hadn’t come across them yet, ‘tradwives’ are mainly to be found on social media, promoting a ‘traditional’ lifestyle where women stay at home and raise the children, while their husbands go out and work. Upon closer inspection, the movement turns out to be reactionary performativity of course. (FT $)
AI-Generated “Workslop” Is Destroying Productivity — The dystopian AI-driven future that could be feared already shows up in the statistics: coworkers using AI to generate sloppy work, pushing onerous tasks like fact-checking and sense-making elsewhere in the organisation. The net result ends up negative.
Japan buckles under matcha mania — Speaking of bubbles, even my local supermarket is now pushing matcha, but the effects on the tea industry in Japan are not uniformly positive. I’ll just stick to regular green tea. (FT $)
What’s the deal with this A380? — The A380 has always been my favourite plane to fly on, and this particular former Malaysian Airlines aircraft may well have taken me from London to Kuala Lumpur in 2014, starting the “Asian period” of my life. Happy to see this particular one remaining useful in the future.