This year I kept circling the same theme: power. Who has it, who’s lying about it, and who’s trying to rebuild it with better branding and worse morals.

“The Humanoid Fallacy” made the case that Silicon Valley isn’t building better tools. They’re rebuilding the master-servant relationship in chrome and calling it innovation. “The Christmas Pivot” was my holiday special: peace-on-earth messaging on top, resource extraction underneath, like a fruitcake of imperial policy. I even connected Christmas mythology to capitalist horror with “The Misfit Singularity” and “The Reindeer Industrial Complex,” because nothing says seasonal cheer like disposable beings and coerced usefulness.

Then I took a harder turn into how power gets enforced. The Caribbean series asked an impolite question: when the U.S. blows up boats as “drug policy,” is it policy or just body counts with a press release? “The Grand Old Putsch” treated modern far-right politics the way it deserves: as a long-running project with recurring tactics, not a sudden meteor strike. The throughline from the Klan’s original “America First” to Trump’s “vermin” rhetoric isn’t a slippery slope. It’s a paved road.

On the tech side, I wrote the pro-human version of “touch grass.” “The Local AI Manifesto” argued the future is people owning their tools and data, not renting their brains back from cloud platforms. “The Panic Is Old, The Technology Is New” pointed out that half the current AI discourse is reheated moral panic with a fresh label slapped on it. If your argument against AI is the same one people made against photography in 1850, you might want to sharpen it.

And because I’m still from Tennessee and still capable of feeling things (unfortunately), “Faith, Fear, and Limestone” went quieter: graves, names, place, memory, and that weird Appalachian sense that the world has thin spots. Some essays need receipts. That one needed a cemetery.

The 2026 Deal

In 2026, most of my new work is going member-only, because deep reporting and high-effort writing aren’t powered by vibes. Medium membership runs $5/month or $50/year. It unlocks unlimited reading across the site and directly supports writers through the Partner Program.

So yes: $5/month gets you my upcoming work, plus access to a whole ecosystem of writers trying to do more than feed the content mill. If you’ve gotten something out of even one piece above, subscribing is the cleanest way to keep independent writing alive without turning it into ad-optimized sludge.

Thanks for reading this year. I’ll be back in 2026 with more reporting, more receipts, and less patience for nonsense.