Something For the Weekend #53
Thrive Market, The Grand Budapest Hotel, and Understanding the Luddites in the age of AI: selections from the weird and wonderful for the week ending June 26, 2026
Welcome to SFTW #53.
So many wonderful things found their way to me this week. I polished off (for the first time since I was a teenager) The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, then started into Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity, by Paul Kingsnorth, which has been resonating deeply with me. One of those books that you start at the store then realize you are already taking notes on every page. More on this well-written, dense volume in a future update.
Enjoy and have a great weekend!
Benj
Top 5 this week from the Daily Active User:
The quest to replace Amazon for many of our needs continues, and a great way to loosen ourselves from its grip has been Thrive Market. We’ve been using Thrive Market for about a year now, and their organic, in-house products are excellent. Delivery times are fast, and it’s with much joy that I unpack the frozen boxes and watch the dry ice dissipate in the sink—because, well, I’m still a child. But seriously, I love that these folks do what they do. The prices seem reasonable and, from what I can tell, it’s good to support an independent company whenever you can. They don’t have everything, but they have plenty, and are well worth a look. So before you add to your Amazon cart, consider getting it from somewhere else.
I was having an enjoyable debate the other day about Wes Anderson films, and as I’ve mentioned before, my favorite of his is Rushmore. However, over the Father’s Day weekend (happy belated Father’s Day to those who celebrate), I re-watched The Life Aquatic, which is a strange film with some brilliant moments, but it just doesn’t land for me. I thought that the audio was somehow less than perfect, whereas his other films don’t suffer from this. My thinking is that there’s an inside joke here. The character of the son is tasked with holding the boom mic, and due to his inexperience could it be a joke that the entire film is a sort of meta play on this? I haven’t looked it up, and I don’t want to. But it felt good in the moment.
So last Sunday we re-watched (the third viewing for me) The Grand Budapest Hotel and I think it’s up there with his best—so beautiful, so funny, so heartwarming, so truly a perfection of his style. I can imagine, and know firsthand, that as a creative person, getting stuck in a groove is something you want to avoid, but it feels like he just leaned into it with this one, and it truly is one of my favorites. The soundtrack is phenomenal, the ski-chase scenes are flawless, and the entire film had us rolling.
The always-great Brian Merchant (see SFTW #1) restated the case for the Luddites this week in a piece called Understanding the Luddites in the age of AI, which I thought was both great and timely, as we are officially in the Summer of Ludd. Brian’s newsletter is a delight, and well worth supporting since he’s made it his full-time job. Loved this from this week’s piece:
“What the Luddites fought for, after all, was ultimately pretty straightforward:
Fair wages
Checks on fraud and abuse
A working life in which they maintained dignity and personal autonomy
A seat at the table in deciding how technology would be used in their workplaces and communities
To put down, not all machinery, but, as they put it in one of their most famous letter, “the machinery hurtful to commonality”
The Luddites were not against progress or anti-technology. They were against exploitation; they were anti-poverty.
Only when wages were pushed so low that workers could not feed their families, when the indignity of soulless factory work looked inevitable, when fraud and exploitation ran rampant, and they had exhausted every avenue to have their voices heard did the Luddites take up their hammer.”
Amen! Hammers up!
Mokkiri-zake:
To check out of politics entirely is a sin, to wallow in them without reprieve a mistake. But how does anyone strike a balance in such unbalanced times? - In the Dark Times Will There Also Be Singing? - Meditations in an Emergency - RebeccaSolnit
AI agent traffic grew 7,851% in a single year. Now, for the first time, bots outnumber humans on the open web. Cloudflare’s Radar tool now shows agentic AI bots generating 57.4% of web requests globally, with humans accounting for just 42.6%, a milestone that arrived well ahead of even the most aggressive projections. Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince had predicted bots would surpass humans by 2027. It happened this month. (Source: cnet.com) - A Very General Document. - by John Ellis - News Items - news-items.com - John Ellis
it got harder to become rich, it got easier to become famous. - Stop eating Lady Gaga’s Oreos - experimental-history.com - Adam Mastroianni
No one doubts that, functionally and aesthetically, iPhones and iPads are remarkable technological achievements. But so were the clipper ships that carried opium to China. - Limbic Capitalism Has Been Driving Addiction for Hundreds of Years - afterbabel.com - Jon Haidt
People who do great things don’t get a lot done every day. They get something done, rather than nothing. - How to Do Great Work - paulgraham.com - Paul Graham
Although we don’t deserve it, and have done nothing to merit it, we have been offered a glorious ride on this planet, if only we accept it. To receive the gift requires the same humble position a hitchhiker gets into when he stands shivering on the side of the empty highway, cardboard sign flapping in the cold wind, and says, “How will the miracle happen today?” - How Will the Miracle Happen Today? - kk.org - Kevin Kelly
Good stuff.