Cory Doctorow: “Start with what a reverse centaur is. In automation theory, a “centaur” is a person who is assisted by a machine. You’re a human head being carried around on a tireless robot body. Driving a car makes you a centaur, and so does using autocomplete. And obviously, a reverse centaur is machine head on a human body, a person who is serving as a squishy meat appendage for an uncaring machine. Like an Amazon delivery driver, who sits in a cabin surrounded by AI cameras, that monitor the driver’s eyes and take points off if the driver looks in a proscribed direction, and monitors the driver’s mouth because singing isn’t allowed on the job, and rats the driver out to the boss if they don’t make quota. The driver is in that van because the van can’t drive itself and can’t get a parcel from the curb to your porch. The driver is a peripheral for a van, and the van drives the driver, at superhuman speed, demanding superhuman endurance. But the driver is human, so the van doesn’t just use the driver. The van uses the driver up.”
Mint: “Few economies have seen everyday payment habits change as quickly as India has. In less than 10 years, the smallest transactions have shifted from cash to an instant digital rail used hundreds of millions of times a day. The Unified Payments Interface (UPI) today supports an estimated 491 million users and processed around 185 billion payments in the financial year ended 2025—more than 500 million transactions every day. By November 2025, that daily volume had climbed to nearly 700 million. What stands out is not just the scale but the composition of this activity. Much of UPI’s growth has come from the low-value, high-frequency payments that once moved almost entirely in cash including daily household purchases, neighbourhood services, small retail transactions and person-to-person transfers. No earlier retail payment system in India operated at this breadth of use.”
Lauren Leek: “Google Maps is not a Directory. It’s a Market Maker…The public story of Google Maps is that it passively reflects “what people like.” More stars, more reviews, better food. But that framing obscures how the platform actually operates. Google Maps is not just indexing demand – it is actively organising it through a ranking system built on a small number of core signals that Google itself has publicly acknowledged: relevance, distance, and prominence. “Relevance” is inferred from text matching between your search query and business metadata. “Distance” is purely spatial. But “prominence” is where the political economy begins. Google defines prominence using signals such as review volume, review velocity, average rating, brand recognition, and broader web visibility. In other words, it is not just what people think of a place – it is how often people interact with it, talk about it, and already recognise it.”
New Yorker: “Not all writing on social media or in nontraditional forms has turned into slop. But there is value in resisting pure optimization, aggregation, and specialization. Not only for the sake of the humanity of the written word but also because it can be quite lonely at the bottom of a rabbit hole.”
