Sign in Subscribe
6 min read 09

UofWinds 432, Week 09 2026: Hold On To Your Hardware, Seeing Like A Scoreboard, Rebelión: An Andor Zine


Good morning. I'm stretched out on the sofa with a laptop prepped with a couple dozen open tabs that I will have the pleasure of closing, one by one, over the next two or three hours as I write this to you. I can already see blue skies from the window but I temper this observation with the reminder that Windsor is only in the midst of our second false spring. It is still the end of February.

I have to admit that there have been several times over the last week in which I felt lost in the widening gyre of all of the stories of all of the compounding polycrises of this present moment. But, as I try to remind myself, feeling overwhelmed doesn't serve anyone. This week I have watched a lot of comfort shows and while I have been comforted, I feel like my senses have been made dull.

I am glad that it is almost time to move outside again. British Summer Time Walks begin on March 8th.

Hold on to Your Hardware


I have a long list of things to do under the heading of Spring Cleaning.

It includes:

  • transfer documents from Windows 10 Lenovo laptop to Kitchen computer
  • backup documents from Lenovo laptop to My Book
  • install Linux Mint on Lenovo laptop
  • install Minecraft on Lenovo laptop
  • slay the dragon in Minecraft

Friends, if you want to buy a hard drive to back up your files you best do it now because WD and Seagate have already sold out their inventory of hard drives they are going to manufacture in 2026 [ht]. You probably have already guessed the reason why there is now a shortage of computing devices: The Steam Machine Has Been Delayed Because Stupid Little Babies Can't Stop Using AI To Write Their Emails.

Friends, hold on to your hardware:

With large manufacturers having sold out their entire production capacity to hyperscalers for the rest of the year while simultaneously cutting consumer production by double-digit percentages, consumers will have to take a back seat. Already today consumer hardware is overpriced, out of stock or even intentionally being delayed due to supply issues.
In addition, manufacturers are pivoting towards consumer hardware subscriptions, where you never own the hardware and in the most dystopian trajectory, consumers might not buy any hardware at all, with the exception of low-end thin-clients that are merely interfaces, and will rent compute through cloud platforms, losing digital sovereignty in exchange for convenience. And despite all of this sounding like science fiction, there is already hard evidence proving that access to hardware can in fact be politically and economically revoked.
Therefor I am urging you to maintain and upgrade wisely, and hold on to your existing hardware, because ownership may soon be a luxury rather than the norm.

Seeing Like A Scoreboard


Last weekend, I wandered into my local bookstore and noticed that copies of The Score: How to Stop Playing Someone Else's Game was part of a sports display. As I stopped in front of it, I had a brief conversation about the book with one of the booksellers there. In our conversation, I felt I had to reassure her that this wasn't a self-help book or a guide to resist some pick-up artist playing The Game.

The Score is a very enjoyable read that doesn't quite stick the landing at the end. It is written for a wide audience, unlike C. Thi Nguyen's previous book which was written as a text of modern philosophy with much probing and argumentative rigour. The Score begins with a more playful exploration of what games are and why we enjoy them. But what CT Nguyen really offers in this work is an important discussion about the other scoring systems in our lives, like grades and other institutional metrics that diminish us and our options, such as those that constrain our politics.

In this work, I think CT Nguyen does his best work when he illuminates why gamification can be problematic. Here's a précis of his response from a conversation between C. Thi Nguyen and Jared Henderson:

Thi: I was writing my first book, which is a love ode to games. Toward the end of writing it, people were like, ‘Oh, you love games, so you must love gamification.’ I hate gamification! My gut sense was that if you actually understood what was good about games, then you’ll see forced and pervasive gamification as kind of horrible.
The term I’m using for this process is value capture. This is when your values are rich and subtle, and then you are presented with a simplification of your values in an institutional setting, and these are typically quantified. The simplification takes over your reasoning and seizes your attention. It starts to replace your values.
Jared: Here are some examples: language apps, fitness trackers, law school rankings. In my own world of YouTube, we have views, likes, comments, revenue, and more. These become markers of good videos rather than thinking about educational quality, entertainment value, or just making something you’re proud of.
One thing you note is that when our values are rich and subtle, they’re usually qualitative. They can even be a bit ambiguous. We’re both analytic philosophers, and we’re always told to take the ambiguous and make it precise. But part of your book might be that ambiguity is where the freedom is. Ambiguity gives you a sense of ownership and agency. That clarity might also be fake clarity.
Thi: Yes! When I first started doing this, I used the term ‘gamification.’ But I’ve come to think that what actually matters is the long progress of the last thousand years of an emphasis on institutional accountability at scale. The thing I’ve been chasing is an attempt to explain why a lot of our values might be better captured by ambiguous, fuzzy, rough language, or by poetic, metaphorical language.

This book is not served well by its byline, How to stop playing someone else's game because while Nguyen spends the book pointing out the various forms of value capture in our lives, he doesn't point us a way out of these structures. Games are systems that can be designed to help us think about system thinking, and games can help us practice agency in a safe environment with others, but playing games can only feel like an escape from The State, or as I have started calling it, The Empire.

Rebelión: An Andor Zine


I finally finished season two of Andor. At the dinner table, I immediately announced to my family that I would be willing to bribe them all if that what it will take to watch the entire show together. My motivations are two-fold: I want to watch the show again and I want to give my children an opportunity to not just enjoy the show, but to learn from the show.

As Andor Creator Tony Gilroy tells the Hollywood Reporter in an "Interview He Couldn’t During Its Release" :

“You get out your Fascism for Dummies book for the 15 things you do, and we tried to include as many of them as we could in the most artful way possible,” GIlroy tells The Hollywood Reporter. “How were we supposed to know that this clown car in Washington was going to basically use the same book that we used? So I don’t think it’s prescience so much as the sad familiarity of fascism.”
Fascism is a word that Disney asked Gilroy to refrain from saying during the earlier promotional phases of Andor’s spring 2025 release.

The Hollywood Reporter interviewed Gilroy at an event to celebrate Andor's 14 much-deserved Emmy nominations. As part of the show's For Your Consideration campaign for the award, Disney produced and printed a small publication called, Rebelión: An Andor Zine [pdf]. It includes the original pitch for the second season of the show as well as visuals of the backdrops and costumes from its universe.

I don't consider myself a Star Wars fan but I have come to realize that I love the visual aesthetic of the Star Wars universe, especially in Andor. This is surprising even to myself because one of the many visual design rules of the franchise is no paper*. This means that the forthcoming book of the art of Andor could not exist in its depicted universe where you can travel faster than the speed of light.

*Well, almost to no paper as the Jedi get to have 6 sacred texts. When you think about it, so many storylines in this movie series are predicated on a universe in which no one makes back up copies of maps or crucial battle plans or ... O M G is this because all of the Ai they use for droids has used up all of their hard drives?

Member discussion