Every Friday
Cruise-ship purgatory, Italian getaways, and drone music in a cave.
3/4 of our Relay cohort is hiding away in Italy dodging emails from our bosses (with mixed success). We’ll be back in the saddle for you with full capacity next week. This is largely a James Issue™️ so give him a cheers in the comments as your happy hour begins.
Writing to you from our last full day, we hope you’re getting some much needed R&R this weekend.
If you show up everyday, that’s pretty much most of it.
― Bill Murray
You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.
— James Baldwin
Top of Mind
Crying Myself to Sleep on the Biggest Cruise Ship Ever (The Atlantic)
The ship makes no sense, vertically or horizontally. It makes no sense on sea, or on land, or in outer space. It looks like a hodgepodge of domes and minarets, tubes and canopies, like Istanbul had it been designed by idiots. Vibrant, over-signifying colors are stacked upon other such colors, decks perched over still more decks; the only comfort is a row of lifeboats ringing its perimeter.
I haven’t laughed this hard at something I’ve read since my uncle gave me a copy of short stories by David Sedaris. I hate cruise ships. In my head, they’re floating prisons full of screaming kids and drunk parents. In the interest of transparency, it’s worth noting I’ve never actually been on one. But, as the author of this piece points out, if even David Foster Wallace wrote about cruises in a piece titled A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, I think I’m in good company.
Gary Shteyngart boards the Icon of the Seas (the largest cruise ship ever built) and slowly loses his grip on reality. What starts as a straightforward travel assignment turns into a weeklong fever dream of buffets, badge hierarchies, and soul-numbing mall suites with no ocean view. It’s all here: an aquatic amusement park, a dystopian caste system marked by SeaPass card color, and existential dread.
The cruise ends up being less about relaxation and more about American myth-making. Everyone onboard is chasing status (pinnacles! suites! diamond plusers!) all locked in a loyalty-points arms race where the prize is restaurant access one deck up and a faster elevator.
AI That Works for Workers (Kyla Scanlon)
But here's what all this macro analysis misses: how do actual people navigate these pressures? What do they want? What are they worried about? How are they making sense of working alongside intelligence that's powerful but unpredictable?
So… how do people feel about it?
I know you’re about to scan past this wall of test with “AI” in the title - but Kyla Scanlon surveyed 1,200 people and the TL;DR is: workers are not stoked about the “revolution.” People want help with the soul-crushing parts of their jobs (paperwork, payroll, reviewing JIRA tickets). Instead, it feels like CEOs are spending what amounts to the entire GDP of the developing world on server farms to power half-baked integrations and LinkedIn posts from middle managers using ChatGPT to crank out inspirational content.
Yes we live in reality — adoption is going to be driven by our lazy brains that want to opt out of mundane tasks and the powers that be are going to shape our daily lives around their sunk costs in data infrastructure (there’s a really interesting piece about how the AI economy is finally driving the real economy here) — but boiled down, workers feel like this is just an AI retrofit. Teachers are grading AI-generated essays with detectors that don’t work. Healthcare admins are wondering whether they’re liable when AI misdiagnoses someone’s pancreatic cancer. This whole thing isn’t just a tech story (or even mainly a tech story) it’s a labor story without a clear ending.
ICYMI: Happy Hour Edition
Sometimes it feels like we’re looping on the smart glasses as a society. Does anyone want this?
Japan Gets There First - “I love Japan because it shows me what's coming. Japan is a time machine. The Japanese live our future first.”
Best of Substack this Week
This Week in Relay’s Shopping Cart
Ethel Cain, The Caverns (James)
Do I dare bring my norm-core looking self to Pelham, TN and brave two hours of drone music to hear the three songs of hers I like? TBD. I’ll report back.
Babolat Pure Aero 98 (James)
Happy US Open to those who are observing. I may or may not have accidentally cracked my racket head in brief fit of anger last month (it was nowhere near as bad as Medvedev earlier this week after getting knocked out in the first round) but it is giving me an excuse to finally get a new racket or two.
It’s Not That Deep, Randy
Thanks for reading—or for mega scrolling all the way down here.
The internet is an overwhelming mess of headlines, ads, and mid takes from the worst people you know. Big Tech owns our attention spans. Everything is content. Nothing makes sense.
We’re not here to “fix discourse” or “build a better internet.” Relay is just our attempt to riff on what we’re already talking about at happy hour without feeling like we’ve been hit by a content truck. Some analysis, some memes, call it a day.
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Looooovee a Jissue (james issue)
Cruise trip next