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Shadow AI Surge, The Coming AI Backlash, and Apollonian Tyranny - Related to your interests, Wednesday

Also: Claude Managed Agents, Antigravity, Project Glasswing, repugnant economics, and writing observations.

Composite still featuring characters from multiple Wes Anderson films arranged in his signature symmetrical, pastel-toned visual style.
From: Wes Anderson's Impossible Dreams
  • Innovations from Google I/O 26 on Google Cloud - Google seems the cleanest when it comes to describing their AI stuff…it’s something like a mix of clear naming (aside from “Antigravity”) and functionality, and not carpet combing you with tools like AWS.
  • Announcing Claude Managed Agents on Cloudflare - “Integrating with Claude Managed Agents is another step in this direction. You can run your agent loop on the Claude Platform, while using Cloudflare to execute code, secure connections, and run custom tool calls.” // Multi-cloud, hybrid-cloud, etc.
  • 🤖 Agent Skills Deliver Gains Only When Curated, Structured, and Secured - Structure workflow work best with skill, and AI is not great at writing skills. // Summary
  • Project Glasswing: what Mythos showed us - Excellent overview.
  • Shadow AI surges in the workplace - “Of the 45 percent of all professionals using AI in the workplace regularly, 67 percent of those were accessing the platforms using personal accounts that were not authorized by their IT teams, data from Verizon’s annual data breach investigations report showed. Verizon said that the proportion of users accessing AI through personal accounts now represents a fourfold increase in non-malicious insider actions detected across this year’s dataset of more than 22,000 breaches globally.”
  • AI skepticism grows among US youth - Along with datacenter backlash, 2026 and 2027 is shaping up to have a big, general population backlash against AI. “Polls show that 70% of Americans think AI is moving too fast, over 50% have negative views of it, and just 18% of young people say they feel hopeful about it. Partly, they are turned off by AI’s upending of the job market. ‘Every other day, a new AI agent is being released in the market,’ said Vaishali Hireraddi, 23, a University of California, Davis, graduate student who’s applied to 500 jobs so far. ‘What am I doing with my life?'”
  • Your Slop, My Sludge - AI sludge: the build up of comprehension debt and day two toil due to AI generated apps.
  • The coming AI backlash
  • Rampant shadow AI
  • 🤖 Against the Tyranny of the Apollonian - Beautiful becomes meaningless when machine-generated beauty is infinite; the human response is an embrace of messiness, imperfection, and visceral creativity as a cultural immune reaction. // Summary
  • The VW ID Buzz: six months and eight thousand miles later - “it feels like you’re driving around in a giant phone booth, but in a good way” Seems like a great car: “We don’t regret anything about this purchase and I bet we’ll have this car for the next ten years”
Editorial illustration accompanying a Semafor article on US youth attitudes toward AI.
From: AI skepticism grows among US youth

AI Summaries

Things I asked the robot to summarize for me.

Chart of the federal funds rate over time, illustrating the relative scale of historical interest rate cycles.
From: Economic history as it's happening is alway relative

Wastebook

ICYMI

Logoff

Perhaps you have noticed something new above: links to AI summaries. As I mentioned in my “please use AI to write shorter shit” post above, I have the robot summarize a lot of things. I have been debating whether or not to publish those. I mean, I love publishing - just publishing anything. So, I see that big stack of content and it pains me to not publish it. But people hate the fuck out of AI.

So, I have done the following. I started selectively publish summaries on incomprehensiblemedia.com. In this newsletter, I’ll include links to summaries for the links I have above, plus a new section that lists the some of the other summaries I’ve run.

This is a blog with an RSS feed. I set the robots.txt to exclude crawling of all types. I’m intending to capture traffic from the original. So while it’s not “hidden,” hopefully it will not damage the OP’s Google juice - or LLM juice…or whatever juice the authors like.

Ideally, I would automate this even more so that I can read the summaries in the same flow as reading my RSS feeds. Also, I’m occasionally generating podcasts of summaries. These have a different script written to be more natural voice and use an AI version of my voice - my thinking on that last one is that way I won’t piss anyone off but myself.

Eventually, I need to publish these.

My hesitation for posting this stuff - beyond the juice concerns above - is the AI posting something stupid or, worse, shit-talking about my work, etc. It’s very annoying to have that bottleneck what would otherwise be a nice flow of reading: stuff just shows up in my RSS feeds and podcast client.

All that AI governance stuff is real!

Anyhow, there it is.

And, finally:

Vintage hotel luggage labels spread across a desk - colorful international travel ephemera and stickers.
From: Hotel Retro: Vintage Luggage Labels from Tokyo to Buenos Aires

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