The internet used to make the world feel bigger. Now it makes the world smaller.

Last month I installed Opal on my computer and phone. This is a service that blocks social media and other distractions in an automated way.

It's been a huge change. I'm no longer constantly stuck in feeds. A major life upgrade.

Still, there are moments you get bored. Where do you go to look?

My first click used to be Twitter, a news site, or other social media. Now I look at NBA and Premier League standings. Study schedules and stats. Look for tidbits to share with my son, who turned ten this week. I love it.

Sometimes I keep clicking around, looking for distractions. And I'm surprised to find how empty most websites are. The amount of content, articles, and depth on most websites is shockingly thin. All the energy is invested in social media where the battle is fought. The homefront feels limp, sad.

The way information willingly consolidated to these channels over the past decade doesn't bode well for the future. The way things are going, the internet itself might come to hollow out and vanish in a similar way.

Information follows attention. As attention shifted from websites to social media, it mattered less where facts and ideas originated. As attention shifts to AI models, the direct source connection gets even more abstract. The way information has traditionally been created, gathered, and presented through organizations and websites becomes much less important than our ability to receive the information itself in a context we're comfortable in.

For the past twenty years, that context has been the universality of websites and product design. The internet as we know it is the UI layer that allows this facilitation of information. But there's a future, not that far from now, when little of this feels necessary, and where the internet itself starts to feel like yet another dead mall.

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The midlife passage#

Vocabulary is age-based. As a kid, vocab was all about learning terms and slang for anything scatological. As a middle-aged person, it's all about learning terms and slang for your neuroses.

A big one for me to learn has been the concept of the "middle passage." This is Jung's preferred way of thinking of the midlife crisis. Sometime around the age of 47, the theory goes, we begin to outgrow the person we've been — a persona largely built through roles and expectations — to become who we actually are — a shift that often provokes huge changes in people's lives.

I've been in the thick of this for the past year. Still am. I keep learning that you must listen to the call within. However inconvenient or challenging, you cannot hide. You cannot push aside your truth. Those that try to go numb, outwork it, or make a perfect life to avoid it will find themselves stuck for the rest of their lives. The voices within never go away, even as your will to face them does.

Another learning: we can try to change ourselves by changing what's outside, then using that to reset what's inside. This is a common first instinct. The other path, more direct, is to focus on understanding and addressing what's inside, commit to that within yourself, then allow the outside world to reset itself around this truer version of you.

This is where I am now. Of the many humbling, painful lessons I've had in my life, this present experience is up there. The past year has been one of constant internal challenge, even while positive external events keep happening. It's not over yet. Undoubtedly more crises and learnings are yet to come.

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The other work#

While the inside keeps churning, the external work continues. Notably, the work keeps intersecting with the themes I'm feeling and seeing around me.

Just as the internet empties, private spaces are seeing increasing activity. In the many 2026 prediction lists I scanned this year, I saw people repeatedly mention dark forest spaces as a trend that's going to grow. This shift is definitely underway — both a response to and acceleration of the changes in the web mentioned before. In this world, the Dark Forest Operating System, a new product Metalabel is releasing very soon, provides the missing infrastructure that makes these spaces powerful, connected, and both harder to access and easier to find.

There's also been a lot of progress on Artist Corporations. This week we published our first Annual Letter that walks through where we are: we've started a non-profit, we're focused on passing a law in Colorado; and we'll be sharing the text of our legislation, the Artist Corporation Act, soon.

In a very very niche Claude code experiment, I published a site called Dotfork that recreates Pitchfork as a publication for reviewing websites. It comes complete with number grades and long, discursive reviews modeled on many of the great Pitchfork writers over the years. You can review your own website here.

And of course the internet isn't done yet. This week People and Blogs, a website devoted to interviewing people about their blogs, did a long Q&A with me about my writing practice.

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Books I read last year#

Books I read in 2025, in no particular order.

Ideas#

• Astrology, Karma, and Transformation by Stephen Arroyo
• Domination and the Arts of Resistance by James C. Scott
• Cosmos and Psyche by Richard Tarnas
• Selected Audre Lorde
• Antimemetics by Nadia Asparouhova
• Feeling Good by David Burns
• A Mind At Home With Itself by Byron Katie

Creativity#

• Creative Industries by Richard Caves
• The Invention of Art by Larry Shiner
• The Economics of Taste by Gerald Reitlinger
• Poor Artists by the White Pube

Fiction#

• Galileo’s Dream by Kim Stanley Robinson
• Go Tell it On the Mountain by James Baldwin
• Sudden Death by Alvaro Enrique
• Dune by Frank Herbert
• Dune Messiah by Frank Herbert
• Children of Dune by Frank Herbert

History#

• Civilization and Capitalism: the Structures of Everyday Life by Fernand Braudel
• A Sexual History of the Internet by Mindy Seu
• Nations and Nationalism since 1780 by Eric Hobsbawm
• 1929 by Andrew Ross Sorkin
• Galileo’s Daughter by Dava Sobel
• The World of the Cold War 1945-1991 by Vladislav Zubok
• Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams
• Apple in China by Patrick McGee