0.0 Context Setting

Morning, on Tuesday 18 August 2026, in Portland, Oregon, where I had a summer catchup call in the morning and then a nice catchup with Ted Han, where this brain idea fell out:

Algorithms as attention black holes -- the more attention you give them, the bigger they get (and the faster they gobble up even more attention)

0.1 Events

Quick one, this, because at this point I suspect you’re just scrolling past them:

• How People Work, Live! ... with Marcin Wichary this Friday 21 August at 9am Pacific, where we’ll be talking about design.

• The How People Work... Does Happy Hour! clinic, every Tuesday at 1pm Pacific.

Allons-y and all that:

1.0 Some Things That Caught My Attention

1.1 Three Short Pieces

Just a few links today.

1.1.1 India’s Unified Payments Interface

India is prepping to tack on a transaction fee for its unified payments interface. Quick version: UPI is infrastructure that lets you send money from one person to another, but without incurring any overhead, and it does it instantly, for free¹.

Caught my attention because: In the U.S. this is “solved” by the private sector by people Cash Apping or Squaring or PayPaling or Venmoing each other, each of which take a cut for certain transactions. One of the reasons why the private sector had to solve it is because the U.S. is very big and very silly in its federalism, so you get lots of banks that don’t really have much incentive to be able to talk to each other until the internet, and by that time they’re all mired in legacy technology systems and obsessed with writing numbers on bits of paper and literally putting them in the post.

Anyway, India put all of that together, for free. You get that by starting a bit later with green-ish field tech, plus a bit of political willingness for centralization and just laying down a spec for implementation. The news now is that India is going to implement a transaction fee (but, Mr. Creosote, just a wafer-thin one) on a system that moved around $313.5 billion in July 2026. Honestly wonder if it’s worth it, given it instinctively feels like such a driver of the economy. Find or save some money [sic] somewhere else.

1.1.2 A 33% Floor

Trump apparently hit a nadir of a 33% approval rating, which is somewhat distressing because it feels like an indicator of his base level of support. Whenever numbers like that come out, I think commentary coalesces around a sort of “he could do anything and he’d still have that core level of support”.

Caught my attention because: One of the ways of thinking about this is that the 33% floor is what you get after doing roughly 220 episodes of prime-time television over 11 years that peaked at a finale of around 28 million Nielsen viewers at the end of season 1 and around 6 million viewers at the end of season 14, or in other words, if you’re the host of The Apprentice².

The other thing is that there may well be just around 33% of a population (or whatever percentage, but, like, a distressing number nonetheless) who simply are up for a bit of fascism. Which also wouldn’t surprise me these days.

1.1.3 Period drama

Apropos of nothing, Time ran a feature on their 50 most under-appreciated TV shows of this century so far³.

Caught my attention because: one entry recommended by Judy Berman, My Big Fat Diary[^time-fat], is described like this:

Oh, to have been 16 years old in mid-1990s England, when Britpop had gone global, the U.K. was the center of the pop-culture universe, and the word Brexit meant nothing to anyone. It sounds like a blast, but not all Cool Britannia comings-of-age were created equal.[^time-fat]

Sounds brilliant! I too was 16 in the mid-1990s in England. But the show is also described by Wikipedia in the genre of “period”⁴, which to me is incredibly offensive and now I am dust. Anyway, it’s a Channel 4/E4 show which totally makes sense. One of my favorite broadcasters in the world, is Channel 4, not least of which because they commissioned the show Ultraviolet⁵, six episodes of absolutely perfect TV that stars Idris Elba as a VAMPIRE HUNTER. That’s right. Idris Elba as a VAMPIRE HUNTER.

OK, that’s it for today.

How are you doing? Remember, I love it when people send me notes, even when those notes are just “hi!”, because they’re like a friendly nod or wave and don’t have to be anything more than that.

Best,

Dan

[^time-fat] 'My Mad Fat Diary': 50 Most Underappreciated Shows (archive.is), Judy Berman, Time dot com, 11 August 2026