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UofWinds 444, Week 34, 2026: Why We Like Things ✭ If I Can't Play, I Don't Want to be Part of Your Revolution ✭ What’s behind the rise of teens spying for Russia?


Good morning. Last night, I didn't sleep well. I woke up a million times for a million different reasons. One of those reasons was being startled by the sound of rain on the roof. I can't remember how its been since I've heard the sound and it did soothe me, although not into sleep. Today will be taken slow and carefully.

Why We Like Things


I subscribe to many newsletters that cover technology; some cover the sector as good journalism while others follow the beat by largely paying attention to emerging trends. In the latter group of newsletters, I couldn't help but notice an increasingly urgent concern: how can one develop one's own individual taste in a world where algorithms suggestions were driving everything and everywhere to look and sound the same.

I started collecting bookmarks on the topic but then stopped after stumbling upon Why We Like Things by Celine Nguyen that was published this month in Asterisk Magazine. It begins with how Silicon Valley technology companies have moved from being data-driven to making decisions based on taste as a marker that demonstrates an ineffable distinctive value on their part.

Tech’s preoccupation with taste has intensified in the last two years; it is now, the critic Kyle Chayka observed, “as much of a tech-world cliché as ‘disruption’ was in the 2010s.” And it has much to do with the industry’s embrace of generative AI, which is shifting the focus of knowledge work from production to selection and curation. “I can easily imagine a world,” OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman said to Die Welt, “where 30, 40% of the tasks that happen in the economy today get done by AI.”
Taste has become the catch-all term for what’s left. “In the AI age,” the Y Combinator cofounder Paul Graham tweeted in February, “taste will become even more important. When anyone can make anything, the big differentiator is what you choose to make.” Greg Brockman, the president of OpenAI, was even more succinct: “Taste,” he wrote, “is a new core skill.”

The article then progresses into an exploration of the matter of taste itself and how it has been defined across the disciplines, with some arguing that taste is purely a measure of striving for differentiation and to impress others within one's social class while others suggesting that taste is more like a feeling of social kinship.

Ai technologies are, in so many ways, profoundly anti-social. The stories that I've been reading which suggest that the companies who create LLMs are growing anxious that they losing the very social markers that they used to convince themselves that they were somehow distinctive, seems very appropriate.

If I Can't Play, I Don't Want to be Part of Your Revolution


My happiest childhood moments were those warm evenings when all the kids around about the same age in my neighbourhood would gather at the front yard of my house and of my friend next-door to play a game of "Buzz off". It was our variant of Hide-and-Go-Seek that allows those who have been caught by "It" to be set free by a brave soul who reached "home base" without getting tagged first.

I feel like I'm still waiting for another chance to play these games again. That's why for years I used to follow (with much longing) the Come Out and Play Festival that is held irregularly in New York City. (An aside: New York City's Parks Department —I have just learned — hosts a Street Games festival just for kids... NYC you are the greatest city in the world).

My street games days are over and I look for other opportunities and forms of social play. Now I read the newsletter Immersed in NYC newsletter and I long for all the strange and beautiful immersive theatre experiences held there. And it was only Thursday that I realized that the Immersed in NYC newsletter is written by Nicholas Fortugno... one of the organizers of the Come Out and Play Street Games festival. I only clued in on this because Nicholas in his newsletter brought attention to his recent 18-minute keynote for the Games for Change Conference and they mentioned it in his intro.

That keynote is called, If I Can't Play, I Don't Want to be Part of Your Revolution and it is a wonderful talk that gently brings introduces the viewer to instrumental play and liberatory play. It's also one of first talks that I know of that does so in within the context of labour organization. And it's another love note to NYC.

What’s behind the rise of teens spying for Russia?


Play can be liberatory. But you can also find yourself being played if you are not careful how you pursue adventure.

Adrian Hon has published a written essay called, What’s behind the rise of teens spying for Russia? The video version of the title answers the question: How Russia is Recruiting Teen Spies with Gamificiation and The Gamfiication of Espionage.

I try not to share alarmist stories in this newsletter but I'm sharing this story because I believe that Hon is not trying to put us in a state of fear but is reporting on this matter to help us better understand what is already in play from bad state-sponsored actors. Hon concludes with a provocative question: have these outcomes arisen because there is currently no other outlet for teens to play (street) immersive games?

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