Smudged together into the same tone
Five fragments for February 17, 2026
Hello from the Tuesday after a holiday here in the United States. The kids are off in Oregon skiing with my husband. In San Francisco, it’s raining so hard I thought my speakers were crackling with static…but it was just water smacking the windows.
I had quite a transcendent weekend with Claude Cowork, the people’s Claude Code. Highly recommended; flow state like I’ve never experienced outside of video games.
Here are five fragments that stuck with me last week…
We live in a utopia that is appearing, pushing its way up into our surroundings and into our pores. What is happening around us and in us is fantastic, and all previous utopias, whether they were positive or negative, pale in comparison to it.
– Vilém Flusser, Into the Universe of Technical Images, 1985. Pushing its way up into our surroundings and into our pores! So evocative. I gave Claude the past two years of Diagonal editions as PDFs and asked it to recommend a reading list for me. With so much context, it knew me well.
Early on, whenever I felt discouraged by my mediocre writing, I would cheer myself up like this. First, I would find a newsletter or blog I admired: stylish, well-written, distinctive in voice and approach. (And popular: they often had thousands of readers.)
Then, I would go into the newsletter’s archives and scroll down to the very first post I could find. It was always more raw, unpolished, and amateurish than the writing I was familiar with. I can’t describe how reassuring this was! I could see how people had become—through persistent and publicly-observable attempts—the writers that I knew and loved.
– Celine Nguyen, “writing is an inherently dignified human activity,” December 28, 2025. Don’t miss the snaps of Celine’s handwritten journal entries here. She’s my reading (and writing) role model.
A somewhat sad casualty of AI is that there were a lot of small time bloggers, writers, ppl sharing stuff that all had distinct voices that are now just smudged together into the same tone bc they are all using these tools to help them write. I think they didnt even know how unique their way of writing was, and that built a sort of kindred (almost parasocial) bond with them that feels broken now, like losing a friend to meds that have made their brain mush, and i dont open anything they write anymore
– Adam Behrens on X, February 15, 2026. Thinking a lot about voice this week.
The best people want to be close to other people who have tricks they haven’t learned yet
– Amy Tam on X, “The Cost of Staying,” February 16, 2026. Something I love about my colleagues at Gamma is how many tricks they have up their sleeves. My dear work pal Kelsey has been sharing a series on them.
It’s worth noticing that not all technologies impose magic circles. I have a blender, and I can put a lot of different things in it; indeed, I can try to blend anything. Even another technology concerned mostly with symbols, the notebook, will accept all sorts of inputs. I can tuck a dry leaf between pages. The paper can absorb a bit of perfume from the hand moving across it.
Computation is therefore paradoxical: supremely flexible, yet narrow and stingy. Inside its magic circle, anything can become anything else … but how do you get inside? Why can’t I tuck a dry leaf between browser tabs? The question is nonsensical, and for that I blame the tab, not the leaf.
– Robin Sloan, “Flood fill vs. the magic circle,” February 9, 2026. Robin’s sleeves are full of tricks, including a pop-up mailing list I didn’t even know about until now despite being an avid follower of his work & words for…18 years now? This is why I visit friends’ homes on the world wide web every week. “Now I’m getting speculative, a bit romantic … but I wonder how history will regard the forty years that humanity spent in the fairy realm of the internet? I wonder if everybody will say: wow … that was weird!
Until next time,
Diana
https://dianaberlin.com