Weekly Summary
March 28, 2026
Last week, we kept pulling on a thread that does not look important—until it is.
Not content. Not “media.” Diet. Intake. Formation.
What goes in does not stay abstract. It becomes you.
We pushed the series forward—not just diagnosing the Cultural Feedlot, but refining the Cultural Diet Nutrition Label into something you can actually use. Something that forces a distinction between formation and deformation. Between nourishment and stimulation. Between what builds a man and what merely occupies him.
This is where things get uncomfortable.
Because once you can see it, you can’t unsee it. And once you can measure it, you are responsible for it. We noted that the founder of OnlyFans, a pornography and virtual sex trafficking site, died of cancer and that many young men are taking responsibility for their cultural diet by rejecting the cancer of pornography.
At the same time, we went back into a system I know too well: education technology.
A recent piece in Fortune laid it out with brutal simplicity. Tens of billions spent. Devices everywhere. Platforms layered on platforms. And the result?
Flat scores. Falling scores. Fragmented attention. A generation that may not surpass its parents.
Not a miss. A reversal.
This is what it looks like when a hollow system is “optimized.” When the language of improvement replaces the reality of formation. When capital flows faster than truth.
No villains required. Just incentives, ideology, and a story everyone wanted to believe.
The edtech boom now reads less like a breakthrough and more like a late-Unraveling artifact—sleek, well-funded, and fundamentally unserious about outcomes.
You cannot optimize what has lost its telos*.
*Telos is the ancient Greek term for an end, fulfilment, completion, goal or aim
Looking Ahead
Next week, we turn the lens outward—and backward.
Why were the futurists so wrong?
For decades, the people with the models, the platforms, the conferences, and the credentials told us what was coming: more efficiency, more abundance, more rational systems, more control.
Instead: drift. Fragmentation. Loss of trust. Institutions that feel large and brittle at the same time.
This was not just a forecasting error. It was a failure to understand the kind of creature man is, and the kind of thing a civilization is.
And then, the harder question. Who pays?
Because resets are never evenly distributed. Some generations inherit. Some expand. Some are asked—quietly, without ceremony—to absorb the losses that make renewal possible.
It is becoming clear that Generation X will be asked to take the haircut.
Not loudly. Not heroically. Just… structurally.
Hold things together. Take less than expected. Stabilize what can be saved. Build quietly for what comes next.
The hinge generation. The Nobodies.
The ones who do not get the story, but determine how it ends.