June 2026

Unlike previous clippings, this one is organized Robin Sloan newsletter-style: instead of neatly partitioned sections of what I’ve written and what I’ve read, it’s a stream of discrete vignettes from the past couple months. I read the phrase epistemic vigilance in Jane Friedman’s piece on AI and Libraries: Why Librarians May Become Arbiters of Reality. It’s a fancy but perfectly precise way to describe something I’ve been thinking about for a while: AI hallucinations and slop introduce a tax on our learning—before believing what we read, we must judge where that knowledge came from and whether it’s credible, accurate, true. Jane’s usage: ...what’s needed isn’t more instruction but something closer to a wellness intervention: relief from constant epistemic vigilance. I read Extremely Online by Taylor Lorenz. The book, content-wise, was super Up My Alley and so I made my way through pretty quickly. It’s a factually dense, chronological retelling of how people get famous on the internet…