Hi everyone,

I’m making a change this week: I’m turning off paid subscriptions.

I’m no longer comfortable putting my writing and work behind a paywall. I want it to be free, open, and accessible to anyone who finds it useful.

My work is already

The psychologist Robert Bjork called them desirable difficulties. Learning sticks better when practice is made harder, rather than easier. Students who have to struggle to retrieve an answer remember it longer - and clearer - than students who are handed the same answer with minimal effort on their part. The

Jean Buridan was a 14th-century French philosopher and logician who twice served as rector of the University of Paris. His subject was the will, and he made an austere claim: the will follows the intellect. Show a rational creature the greater good and it'll pick the greater good.

A Scottish journalist named Charles Mackay published a book about the way crowds lose their minds. Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1841) catalogued tulip speculation, alchemy, the South Sea Bubble, witch hunts, and the slow-burn lunacy of people who grow so attached to an idea that they

At FedMart, the discount chain Sol Price built in 1950s San Diego, you could buy a can of WD-40 in one size, the big one, and that was the end of the conversation. Anyone who wanted the small can went without. Price called it the intelligent loss of sales: carry

A man named Harry Readford once stole close to 1,000 head of cattle from Bowen Downs station in central Queensland and drove them south, down through the Channel Country and along the Strzelecki Track into South Australia - across a stretch of desert the squatters swore no herd could

Demosthenes lost his first appearance before the Athenian assembly. His voice came out thin and failed him mid-sentence, and the crowd laughed him off the platform. Plutarch tells us he walked home with his cloak pulled over his face, certain his public life had ended before it started.

What he

In 1713, Johann Sebastian Bach sat down at his desk in Weimar and began copying out concertos by Antonio Vivaldi. He transcribed them note for note, in his own hand, working through at least nine of the L'estro armonico concertos like a medical student dissecting a cadaver. The

Avis was losing $3.2 million a year; and they'd been unprofitable for thirteen straight. 

In 1962, they sat at number two in American car rental, well behind Hertz, with no plausible path to catching up. Robert Townsend, the new president, hired Doyle Dane Bernbach and asked

The motivational industry has built any number of small empires on the notion that fear is a problem to be either managed, suppressed or out-manoeuvred. Fight the fear, etc. The language is typically martial - as if fear were a hostile enemy, camped at the gates of your better self.

The European Union spent four years drafting the AI Act, with OpenAI shipping GPT-4 to a hundred million users in two months. By the time Brussels finalised its definitions of "high-risk" systems, the systems in question had moved twice and grown various new appendages. The regulators were neither

There was a time when adults could feel something without screaming at you about it. We could disagree, hard, in a meeting and walk out with our faces still attached. Bad news arrived at the dinner table and the meal finished anyway. Call it discipline: the capacity to feel a

William Randolph Hearst bought the New York Morning Journal in 1895 - and immediately started running stories designed to make his readers furious before they’d finished their breakfast. The pages manufactured a mood, and that mood sold papers.

Three years later, when his correspondent Frederic Remington cabled from

The winterer is out of the loop; they're not maintaining a position because they don't have a position to maintain. They can do work that takes longer than a quarter, longer than a year, longer than 5 years, because nobody is auditing the line item.

We keep replaying the same human mistakes -bubbles, strongmen, scapegoats, and panics -because the operating system in our skulls hasn’t updated in ten thousand years.

Prediction markets are the clearest single sign our civilisation has entered a late and decadent stage. The reason isn't that they're new or sinister. It's that the case for them is defensible, the technology works, the outputs are useful, but the long-term effect is corrosive anyway.

Before 1840, noon in Bristol happened about ten minutes after noon in London, and nobody much cared. The railway needed a common minute or it couldn't run - and that common minute is now a common nanosecond, shipped in real time.

In 2006, Joe Sugarman published a book called The Adweek Copywriting Handbook - and an axiom stuck...

"The sole purpose of the first sentence in an advertisement is to get you to read the second sentence."

That line, more or less, explains how social media turned into a

Alexandre Dumas ran what was essentially a content production house in 19th century Paris. His most famous collaborator was Auguste Maquet, who wrote substantial portions of The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo. Maquet would produce drafts and outlines, and Dumas would rewrite and polish them, but the

I had coffee last year with a guy - I won't use his real name - who told me he was "building a business." I asked what it did. Dropshipping jade face rollers.

I made him say it twice.

Jade face rollers.

He'd found

I keep a folder in Apple Notes called “cursed websites,” where I save various artefacts that make me feel like the social contract has dissolved. Call it an act of self-loathing. Call it collecting evidence of the fall. Dansugc.com went straight into the folder this morning.

It&

I opened Twitter this morning and three different startups were announcing "the world's first" something. An AI CMO, an autonomous AI marketer, and a design agent "with taste," which is a phrase that made me close my laptop for about ten minutes.

None of

Since roughly // broadly 2020, I’ve been running a solo-powered minor empire. I have no employees, and my only office is my home office, filled as it is with cat hair and various comic books. My business is: me, a laptop, a set of AI tools that scale the