After last week's kick-off, this second edition now officially makes it a recurring project. Because of course I've read many little pieces across the internet again.

Reading is magic by Sam Kriss.

Rising illiteracy (not just in an absolute sense, but across the whole spectrum of reading abilities) seems to be one of those slow-moving disasters that anyone can see coming for years (decades at this point), but that can't easily be stopped.

The kids can’t read. I don’t mean that they’re incapable of sounding out letters and forming them into words, although an increasing proportion of them can’t do that either. In the US, literacy peaked around 2014 and has been sliding since. 40% of fourth-graders have ‘below basic’ reading abilities, which means they struggle to extract any meaning from a written text; the number of illiterate students has been rising every year since 2014. But even when students can perform the mechanics of reading, it no longer seems to make their minds start working in textlike ways. It’s an entirely different set of technologies producing their mental processes, and when they come to the written word they come to it from the outside.

The interesting comparison Sam draws in this article is to isolated Soviet ethnic groups in the mountains of Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. Those people were perfectly capable of thinking rationally and deductively, but their lives were defined almost entirely by direct sensory experiences. While some exposure to writing seemed to enable different kinds of thoughts (more abstract thinking?). Though I've seen the same argument being used in the past but with different intentions; namely that the ubiquity of writing constrains our modes of thinking to align with the medium.

Your AI use is breaking my brain by Jason Koebler in 404 Media.

About a worrying homogenization of language and the mental effort of constantly being suspicious of anything you read. And the "zombie internet".

Weakest Link by Lorna Finlayson for New Left Review.

"Merits" of the worker are often only from the perspective of the employer. But employees might already have internalized the game, hoping they are not the weakest link. It isolates workers by spinning a competitive fiction around them that's meant to increase the economic value that tends to trickle disproportionately upwards.

Expertise is irrelevant. Why bother with things like PhDs at all? Why not just give everyone an IQ test? What matters, after all, is not specialist knowledge or experience but all-purpose mental agility, an ability to assimilate information quickly and a willingness to deliver the goods, ideally at short notice and on low pay. By forfeiting judgement, we make ourselves redundant.

The First Democratic Tech Alliance Assembly by Bert Hubert.

A data point showing the increasing momentum of digital sovereignty in Europe. Some links to fresh institutions, a 180 million euro tender from the European Commission, and a European Sovereign Tech Fund. And the Joint Research Center, which looks like a fascinating organization that provides evidence-based knowledge to support EU policies (see, e.g., Supporting science and policy for European digital sovereignty). But Bert emphasizes that there's still not much actually happening. Large-scale changes require the buy-in of people across many companies and organzations in the EU.

Moving away from Tailwind, and learning to structure my CSS by Julia Evans.

Julia's typical down-to-earth and learning-in-the-open style of writing that has inspired many people to be more vulnerable in public (on their website or social media) already.

A good reassurance that CSS is actually really cool and the time you spend seriously engaging with it is a good investment. It reminds me of when I was at the yearly W3C conference in Japan last year and ended up talking with someone from the CSS working group over breakfast. The process of progress in these foundational web technologies is fascinating and maybe one of the better examples of decade-long standardization in the open.

And some very actionable little nuggets of CSS advice of course.