Busy
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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Hardware random number generator
16 min read
The story's central concept—an 'entropy mill' where human biometrics generate random numbers—is a speculative extension of real hardware random number generators. Understanding how true randomness is actually generated (thermal noise, radioactive decay, etc.) provides fascinating context for the story's satirical premise.
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Luddite
13 min read
The newsletter opens with 'Greetings machine breakers'—a direct reference to the Luddites who destroyed textile machinery in 19th century England. Understanding the original Luddite movement provides historical context for contemporary AI resistance themes in the article.
Greetings machine breakers -
Hope everyone’s holidays have been nice and restful, and that each of your new years are off to a promising start.
With AI companies growing ever closer to the state and a barrage of headlines about labor automation and burst-ready bubbles carrying over from last year, I thought it’d be fitting to start 2026 off with a vision of one possible future stemming from such phenomena. A few years back, I edited a short story, Busy, by Omar El Akkad, for Terraform, a speculative fiction project I co-founded with the writer and musician Claire Evans. (Terraform was part of VICE, which has since gone bankrupt and has itself been turned into an AI slop farm.) When we published the print anthology, Busy opened the volume.
It’s a great, sharply observed snapshot of a crisis-stricken and AI-addled America, a prescient look at slop, and it’s never been more timely. It also contains an act of resistance and some seeds of hope, and as such, I wanted to share it with BLOOD readers. Omar, who is the author of the searing One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, which won the National Book Award for nonfiction in 2025, and the the novels American War and What Strange Paradise, has kindly given me permission to do so. He only asked that I shout out Illuminated Cities, a group that runs educational programs and creative writing workshops for some of the most vulnerable and crisis-stricken communities in the world. You can donate to their efforts here.
Without further ado, here’s Busy, by Omar El Akkad. Happy New Year.
Busy
On my way to cut God’s tongue I pass a long line of slow-shuffling laborers. Men, mostly. The younger ones look beat to all hell with hangovers and barfight bruises, dentin-colored stains on their shirts like maps of imaginary islands. It is a rule at the entropy mill that all laborers must be dressed in reasonably presentable attire, but I’ve never heard of anyone turned away on account of how they looked. The older men in line, they tend to take too much care with their appearance. There’s something grotesque about watching a stooped retiree in his best Sunday suit, hair all dyed and gelled to shining, plead for a day’s wage. They look so much older than they are,
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