Spent that last week (finally) listening to Cory Doctorow's book, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to do About it. Because I've been listening—primarily while walking—I haven't had the opportunity to take notes like I normally do. I did however, stop under the shade of tree yesterday to jot this quote down.

“Before the term ecology came along, there were a bunch of people who cared about issues but didn’t think of themselves as being in the same fight. The term ecology turned all of those issues into a movement, pulling many different kinds of people with many different concerns into a broad coalition that could be more done together than they could ever do on their own.

It’s hard to overstate how important coalitions are to political struggle. Broadly speaking, if there’s a group of people who’ve been trying to change something for a long time, it’s possible that they just need to think up some cool new tactic and that’ll finally get things moving. But it’s far more likely that they just aren’t powerful enough to make the change they’re seeking.

Whenever you see a big, sudden political change—for better of for worse—you’re usually witnessing the result of a new coalition.”

Something I think about a lot is how building a better world needs models built around cooperation rather than competition. This description of coalitions really nails it. For a coalition to work, you don't have to agree on every single point around every single issue. Rather, it's about drawing wider circles of allyship, getting as many people who can support the larger goal as possible.

This is why I'm thrilled to be officially joining the Simcoe County Greenbelt Coalition as a board member this year. They're an organization I've supported in several ways over the last few years and have grown deeply impressed with their commitment to this sort of coalition building. They are exactly the model that we need.

Also, everyone should read Enshittification.

“The more you allow wealth to accumulate unequally, the more unbalanced the economy becomes—and the harder it becomes to take it away. Economic power consists of the ability to resist redistribution. That’s why a policy focused on only growing the pie was also likely, on a systemic basis, to have prevented it from being cut in the first place.” (Wu, Age of Extraction)

Wu makes a good argument against relying too heavily on redistribution as a plan to combat extreme wealth inequality. His point is that it depends on the willingness—or enforcement—of the upper class to keep paying out. I am absolutely a proponent of wealth taxation; however, I appreciate what he is saying here about it not always being so easy or simple to get those with wealth to part with it. They are skilled at finding ways to keep it for themselves. Wu's suggestion seems to be to build a system that more evenly distributes wealth to begin with and using redistribution primarily for caring for those who most need it.

“The structure of industry and the balance of economic power matter. The worst excesses of the Industrial Revolution were eventually countered by a labour movement demanding that workers be treated better and receive more of the proceeds. Where employees have no power, they can expect to be squeezed or displaced. Where workers are more important and understood as essential and better represented, AIs may be deployed or developed in an augmentative fashion.” (Wu, Age of Extraction)

This past week, Meta laid off another 8000 employees who found out via 4am emails. AI was cited as the reason. Yesterday, Webflow laid off a significant portion of their workforce, many who seem to report being locked out of their laptops with no explanation. Again, AI was cited as the reason. Cisco announced earlier this month that despite year-over-year revenue being up 12%, they were letting go of 4000 employees. Because AI.

The year isn't even half over and the tech industry has already seen around 150,000 layoffs in 2026. Amazon, Pinterest, Paypal, Intuit, Dell, Oracle, Cloudflare, Salesforc—the list goes on and on. And while AI might not have been the stated reason for all of these layoffs, it's certainly being used as a justifying reason for many of them. What was once thinly veiled as 'efficiency cuts' are now being outright touted as the result of companies going all in on AI. But whatever you want to call it, the point is that these companies do not care because they have no reason to. The only thing that matters to them is shareholder profit.

White collar workers have long resisted the idea that we need unions because we wanted to see ourselves as more important—more valuable to the companies we worked for. We told ourselves that we weren't just labourers, we were co-creators with the companies. It's all bullshit.

Tech workers need unionization and AI platforms need government regulation. These things need to be non-negotiables in our societal participation in AI.

“I would suggest that convenience is the most underestimated and least understood force in the world today. As a driver of human decisions, it may not offer the illicit thrill of Freud’s unconscious sexual desires or the mathematical elegance of the economist’s incentives. Convenience is boring. But boring is not the same thing as trivial." — Tim Wu, The Age of Extraction

This is an interesting argument about what is driving the takeover of tech in our lives. The platforms that win the attention game are the ones who make things easiest. Wu describes the concept of 'couch lock,' a stoner term for the inability to move once you get comfortable, as a way of understanding this. Shifting your attention off of a platform, let alone leaving it altogether, becomes a chore.

This makes me wonder about the things that are intentionally slower and more deliberate, things that maybe take a bit more effort. How do you get people to choose inconvenience?

Okay, I've been a bit quiet with serious reading because I got fully hooked on Dungeon Crawler Carl. I think I read all of them in less than two months (finished #8 today). Now I wait for the next one...

There's been a lot of standout moments for me, some absurdly hilarious, some genuinely moving, and others deeply profound. Here's a bit that is currently sitting with me from the most recent book, a Parade of Horribles, in which the AI—spiralling a bit in a sort of existential crisis—is reflecting on what it has observed about human behaviour in the face of overwhelming odds stacked against them:

"I’m searching. Oh, how I’m searching, trying to answer that question. Is there such a thing as fate? You know what I’m finding? You’re unpredictable on a micro-level, but on a macro, long-term level you’re just like any other algorithm. But you know what I’m also finding? Deliberate actions, times when you’ve finally had enough, when you say I am going to make a change—that’s when your possibilities really open up. It’s an important lesson. No, I don’t understand motivations, certain types of emotions, but I do understand that."

I kind of love this idea that to an alien, or artificial super intelligence, we are still always capable of surprise. No matter how rigged the system might seem, or how out of options we might feel—it's not over. We choose life.

There's another line, repeated multiple times in the last couple books, "survival has more than one meaning." This is just as important. Choosing life is about more than just living, it's also not losing something essentially human in the process. Preserving the value and sanctity of life matters. How we survive matters.