Links and Notes - January 20th 2026

Disaster capitalism

Currently reading Empire of AI by Karen Hao. While I wouldn't say the book is great — the writing style creates a chaotic narrative with a difficult to follow timeline — it's still definitely worth a read. The chapter I'm on right now, "Disaster Capitalism" contains haunting reads of the stories of the people behind the models being trained. If you are someone from a "global south" background especially, you really do get the feeling that colonization never ended. It just reorganized. After telling the painful story of a woman in Kenya who worked for peanuts ^[1] to train various AI models on how to write essays and be a digital butler only to suddenly watch the work vanish with no communication, Karen Hao details this with an accusation at the end that is hard to neglect.

In March 2024, Scale would block Kenya wholesale as a country from Remotasks, just like it did with Venezuela. For Scale, it was part of its housecleaning—a regular reevaluation of whether workers from different countries were really serving the business. Kenya, they decided, along with several other countries including Nigeria and Pakistan, simply had too many workers attempting to scam the platform to earn more money. Such behavior undermined the integrity of the quality Scale delivered to its customers and could risk it losing multimillion-dollar contracts. It simply wasn’t worth it. In a great irony, many of those so-called scams were in fact workers using ChatGPT to generate their answers and speed up their productivity. For white-collar workers in the Global North, such an act, within Silicon Valley’s narrative, would be laudatory and, with enough widespread adoption, do wonders for the economy; in the hands of RLHF workers in the Global South, whose very labor props up that narrative, it was a punishable offense. Scale downgraded Kenya to a Group 5 designation: blacklisted.

In fact, after reading about all the work done through Kenyans to train the models, I remembered this article, "I'm Kenyan. I Don't Write Like ChatGPT. ChatGPT Writes Like Me.". All of it put together reminds me of the racism people of colour, especially black people, face online regarding their intelligence. Meanwhile without intelligence of said folks, so much of these models that are set to (allegedly) take the world into AGI and "post work" would not exist in the first place. We are useful only as long as we are helping make money. The moment that contract ends, we go back to being backwards and savage apparently.

A short story to encourage heinous crimes

Matt Gemmell writes short stories and sends them out every Monday. All of them are easy reads. The latest one though, if you are a software engineer, is rage inducing. I won't say more lest I spoil something. Read it. You may be fuming by the end, but you won't regret it.

Claude Code Won't Fix Your Life - An essay by Joan Westenberg

Every few years, a new tool launches that promises to solve the fundamental problem of being a disorganized person with too many ideas and not enough follow-through.

Each of these tools attracted devoted communities who spent enormous amounts of time documenting their setups and workflows. They created YouTube videos and blog posts and paid courses explaining how to properly configure the tool that would, at last, unlock their potential.

And what happened?

The people who were productive before these tools existed remained productive.

This entire essay resonates hard with me. Claude and every other tool that has happened remains a multiplier of motivation + expertise. Motivated people are going to use it and get what they want. But Claude isn't going to create that motivation.

Honestly, read the essay. Joan addresses multiple angles including how tools are actually useful and time saving... in the right context! I love this line:

The question is whether the bottleneck you’re experiencing is actually a tool problem.

When I look at folks talking about their elaborate agentic setups and gas town systems, most of the time I'm seeing the same people who've made YouTube videos and Reddit posts about their elaborate Notion/Obsidian setups. The productivity porn system lives strongly in the world of agentic AI systems. I'm willing to bet that most people spend their times setting up their systems and banging out stuff that feels like work while really it's as Joan puts it:

Notice what all of these use cases have in common: they’re meta-work. Work about work. Organization about organization.

That said, I might also make a counter argument against this. I just need more time to process what I read. In some ways, I do feel that Claude falls into a special category of tooling being a generalist one in the category of administration. You can be a writer, accountant, scientist, coder, project manager, business owner, or a doctor. Claude does seem to have utility regardless of who you are if you are searching for tools to help with administrative needs. Whether that fact is enough to act as a counterweight to what Joan says is something I still need time to put together.

Heel hang descent

Whenever I see a post like this I want to ask the person why they aren't worrying about protection for if they fall. I have to stop and remind myself that these are experts. I ride the bicycle on our busy roads and that is probably as risky as doing something like this. But if you were to ask me, I know I'm taking a chance but I also know how many years I've spent learning how traffic moves and learning how to read 3-10 vehicles ahead of me at all times.

That said, now that I've boasted a little bit I will go pray for protection from a thorough humbling.

Book recommendations for Kai Cenat

Kai Cenat, the streamer, shared recently that he's learning to read and grow his vocabulary, 20 minutes a time each day. Before I go any further, it's worth pointing out that Kai Cenat does not have a glowing background. I don't watch him personally but I have seen clips of him where despite him obviously having a younger audience, he gravitates towards more mature, even sexualized content. The broad consensus on him seems to be around his misogynistic behaviour, defense of people who've committed abuse under the same roof, overall phobia around the LGBT community, and a bunch of other themes which would NOT make him a role model for youth.

Which is a pity, because him learning to read, do fashion design, etc from scratch is actually the kind of things I would want to bring to the youth. That said, I'm not going to sanitize anyone's reputation here. I in fact wanted to remove this section entirely once I read more about Kai. But, the book recommendations are excellent so I thought it's worth keeping this section for that alone.

In the link I shared, it's a quote post, quoting that Doechii recommended Tony Morrison's books to Kai to read. The quote post itself shares a number of other black authors whose works tell storylines that only their voices could bring to life. (I've currently got Chinua Achebe's "Things fall apart" ready to read as my next book). I've bookmarked it and will definitely be giving some of these a try.

This blog doesn't have a comment box. But I'd love to hear any thoughts y'all might have. Send them to [email protected]

Posted on January 20 2026 by Adnan Issadeen