Reboot (Newsletter)

Kernel Issue 6: FEED is ready to be devoured. In anticipation of our Toronto event this week, we’re sharing another delicious essay from the issue. This piece is about the citational disasters and joys of food writing on Wikipedia, and the difficulty of creating archives for dishes which form central but ephemeral pieces of culture.

Kernel Magazine Issue 6 is out now! We’re sharing another piece from the issue — Alex Wennerberg’s examination of what it means to take shrimp welfare seriously, both in terms of hard moral calculus and fuzzier feelings of care.

Kernel Magazine Volume 6 is out now! Thank you to everyone who joined us at our launch party in San Francisco, where you heard Isabel Pabán Freed read the first portion of this essay: a reading of Twitter as novel/carnival/feast, inspired by the late Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin. It was a joy to read and edit; I don’t think we’ve every published anything quite like it.

Kernel 6 is live now! It is an extremely beautiful magazine featuring 200 pages of essays, poetry, short fiction, illustrations, and experimental cocktail recipes! What more can I say?

The cover of Kernel Magazine Issue 6, by the excellent Kristy Gao Next week, we’re publishing FEED, the fifth issue of Kernel Magazine, Reboot’s print publication. This issue was an absolute joy to make, and I’m very excited to see it out in the world.

Today, models are trained on a corpus of knowledge, composed of what humans have chosen to record and the traces they’ve left behind. Building agents that work like experts requires codifying tacit expertise: procedural knowledge that is so internalized and actionable that experts themselves struggle to articulate it. But externalizing tacit knowledge is an open problem: when processes are documented at all, they tend to be retrospective and incomplete.

Over the course of the last century, one particular, calculating form of rationality has gone from a narrow mathematical framework to an organizing logic for much of society. Mathematical rationality has become part of how we understand everything from pharmaceutical trials and machine learning models to sports strategy and, for some, the decision-making of everyday life. But is the adoption of mathematical rationality in itself irrational?

Hi all, I’m very excited to announce that pitches for the sixth issue of Kernel Magazine are now open! TL;DR: submit your pitches here (nonfiction) or here (creative) by February 20. Kernel 6’s theme is FEED. In this issue, we’re exploring all the ways that consumption shapes our relationship to technology; what we feed upon, how it feeds upon us, and all the strange metabolic interactions in between.

Highly-paid “expert” data labelers are behind many of the most recent advances in AI capabilities, even as these workers experience the same indignities as earlier generations of online gig workers. Today’s essay highlights the absurdity of the situation.

Here at Reboot, we don’t tend to think of ourselves as forecasters. But the start of a new year is the ideal excuse to share our rigorously vibe-researched tech and culture predictions, from the future of academia to microsite design trends. Presenting: 2026 ins & outs, courtesy of the editorial board: What’s chic, blurry, and various shades of vague?