This is the 500th letter.

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So for new year’s, I went to my pal Kathryn’s place and hung out with a few friends. Extremely lowkey. My partner was out of town, so I rolled up solo in my casual suit with a bottle of bubbles, and we all shared tea and ate charcuterie and journaled.

When it got close to 11p, we tried to turn on the ball drop in New York. And since Kathryn is a zoomer (non-derogatory) she does not have any sort of “”””””actual””””””” TV (also non-derogatory). Tech took over TV just like it took over pretty much everything, and since we exist in the slow-motion birth of a horrifying world, truly nothing worked on the streaming tip. After some fustigation we did find something that looked like a stream. Unfortunately, instead of the mass-popular entertainment that was actually happening in Times Square, the actual ball-drop bit was relegated to a tiny thumbnail in the corner, and we just got a supercut recap of everything the fascist regime did to our country this year. Since we live in Chicago, a place that is now thoroughly radicalized, comprehensively unsubscribed, and really, really take-no-shit (CW applies for the aforelinked), this did not come off as terribly fun or enjoyable to those present, especially those who had consumed wine and were laying on the floor under a pile of blankets because gosh who stays up until midnight anymore. So we muted whatever channel we found and looked away, talked about the universe a little, and with one minutes to go the little thumbnail that we found in the corner enlarged and an actual countdown miraculously happened and well gosh the ball looked pretty small this year? The “2026” was in the same old font, and everyday partied with hats that were sponsored by the worst gym chain in America. Happy new year!

So that was 11p, because we live in Central Time. Chicago apparently had its own new year’s celebration going, and so then we had to try and search for that in the whole weird neoliberal disaster. It straight-up took 45 minutes for us to do this. We are all intelligent people, some of us work in tech, and most of us were sober. But. But! Every 30 seconds or so, the stream we found would jump-cut to a test pattern, accompanied by a loud censored-beeping sound, for a couple of seconds. At other times the signal would drop entirely and the picture would freeze. Also, the subtitles didn’t work, and again, zoomers were present, and I don’t mean to stereotype but that one got noticed. Alas, this was the best we could do, and we had already spent 45 minutes struggling to get anything to work, so we kept watching.

Eventually we realized that the technical difficulties were probably more widely shared. At one point, the actual stream was replaced with a logo of the new year’s eve celebration, but somehow the inset video of the ASL interpreter was working just fine, as was the sound? It also became clear that this was not a well-run party. A famous rapper went on stage at 11:55p and proceeded to wonder aloud whether he was, in fact, entrusted with the countdown or not. My final memories of 2025 involved my pals & I watching all of this unfold while the stream occasionally kept cutting out to a test pattern while beeping, which happened with 15 seconds to go, but cut back right in time for midnight.

While tech spent the past few years attempting to force false impressions of the future on all of us, it lost sight of how to take care of the things that people actually use tech for. Tech captured all of this territory. We exist as stewards of that territory now. And we’re doing this with it.