Apologies for sending out last week's letter a few hours later than usual. A few things came up on that Monday morning, which got in the way of me clicking Publish. With any luck, you didn't even notice ...

With that out of the way, let's get Monday started with these links:

What is a data centre and why is everyone freaking out now? — A dive into the world of AI data centres and why they're sparking such backlash (in New Zealand and elsewhere).

From the article:

He believes New Zealand should learn from the cautionary tale of social media before unquestioningly embracing either AI, or the data centres that power it. "The utility of being on these platforms seems so beneficial to us that we didn't really see the downsides 'til it was too late, and we were let down by regulators and watchdogs - they didn't see what was happening either."

If we take the same laissez-faire approach to AI, "the impacts are going to be so much worse". AI companies should take heed of the same lessons. "If they don't build that social licence now, it'll come back to bite them".

obligatory one month without social media on my phone substack essay (contrarian edition) — A much-needed antidote to the countless blog posts and videos about the transformative effects of a so-called digital detox. Many of the sentences run on, but the arguments are solid.

From the article:

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 — for me the airplanes landing at O’Hare as seen through my living room window, the shuttling of the train car between Morse and Loyola, the birds gathering around the bird feeder — 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.

The Anti-Amazon — An argument in favour of Costco's business model, a model that limits the choices (at least compared to other retails, both online and off) but which ostensibly offers lower prices.

From the article:

his is a structural effect of Costco’s conscious choice to offer a low SKU count: fewer products to investigate means more time to investigate each product, and a natural gravitation away from the bargain basement. That its member-customers have come to expect a certain quality of everything in their stores reinforces this dynamic.

When the Waiting Is Over — An ode to a time when we weren't distracted by everything digital, and the peace and focus that one person found then. Were the pre-smartphone years better or just different, though?

From the article:

When I think about that time, I wonder how I bore such silence. No signals came toward me from the world, no news, no chatter. These days, I can’t sit five minutes on a bus without checking my phone. How did my brain work? That person is a stranger to me now.