Personal Note: Signing Off, and Announcing a New Platform!

Hello, friends and readers,

 

As you may have noticed, I haven’t posted anything on The Memory Cache since May. I’ve been spending a lot of time over the spring and summer trying to make sense of the chaotic events swirling around us, doing a lot of reading, watching the news and YouTube videos, and reflecting on our fast-evolving political and technological situations. Many of you probably have been too. 

 

The shocking AI-related events and developments that began with the Open AI-Hugging Face incident in July, where AI agents broke out of a testing environment, collaborated with each other and showed signs of independent intelligence and initiative, have made it clear to me that AI is coming for much of what we’ve done online for the past several decades. 

 

I know many other writers and artists are going through a process of re-evaluating what they’re trying to accomplish and how to proceed in the face of these shocking AI developments, and I have been too.

 

I also know that the rise of Substack since the pandemic, and the many people now trying to write and publish opinions and news on it, have created the same kind of vast unedited and unmediated information environment for writing as YouTube has done for video, and Spotify for music, where huge numbers of people are trying to be noticed and heard on the same few massive billionaire-controlled platforms. It’s very hard to get attention, or grow an audience in these sorts of environments.

 

For many internet-based artists and content creators, they’re actually trying to make a living on these platforms. Fortunately for me, I’ve been able to write and share information about good books, movies and TV I’ve enjoyed over the past five years as a retirement hobby. I’ve done it purely for the fun of it, to keep my own mind engaged and active, stay aware of what's happening in culture, politics and technology, and share useful information I’ve learned with friends, family and readers out there.

 

But lately, it’s seemed that writing and publishing my reviews has ceased being very satisfying for me, given the amount of effort required, and the small relative value or impact it has. There are plenty of other sites with good user reviews, and also reviews by pro journalists in various media publications and online, about any content that might interest you.

 

Another discouraging factor is the manner in which individual web sites, like blog sites, are now rapidly disappearing behind AI summaries in web searches. I assume my entire blog site, and the roughly 300 articles I’ve written, have probably become part of the mass of data used to train AIs, which can now restate or reuse what I’ve written without even necessarily giving me credit for having written it. There’s not much incentive for a human to keep writing a personal blog in that situation. 

 

On top of that, AI agents can now also easily whip up a short summary or review of anything, not that different from the kind I would write, but for me it requires considerable personal time and effort. And my list of readers is very small. Lately, it just hasn’t really seemed worth the effort. For me personally, it feels like the time for this fun project of mine has passed, and I want to refocus my thoughts and efforts on whatever is next.

 

Some of you may recall I signed off from this blog a couple of years ago, and then came back after a while, because apparently writing occasional posts for it wasn’t completely out of my system yet. But I’m older now, and I believe this time it’s different. Times do change, and ultimately we must change with them, and move on when it’s time.

 

So once again, I am ending The Memory Cache. As before I will leave it online for the time being, as a time-capsule from this time period. But I will not be posting here any more, nor will I be sending out any more posts from The Memory Cache via Substack.

 

I do still plan to continue writing and recording new music. All my music-related web content, my music web site and social media accounts will remain active.

 

In addition, I have copied my Substack emailing list from The Memory Cache account to another Substack account for Wayne Parker Notes, the “brand name” I’ve used for all my other creative activities, especially my music and video releases.

 

The handle of this new Substack account is @wayneparkernotes, just as it is on YouTube and my other social media accounts. I will continue to send email announcements about my music to my same mailing list, but from this new account.  If you’re on my Substack email list, you’ll be hearing from me from the new account soon, at least to let you know it’s up and running.

 

If I should decide to do any other writing in the future (something other than book reviews), you will hear about it (or be able to read it) through my Wayne Parker Notes Substack account and email list, and not from the The Memory Cache Substack account, or on The Memory Cache blog.

 

Thank you to all my friends, family members and unknown readers on the internet who have taken the time to read and hopefully enjoy my posts on The Memory Cache over the past half-decade. It’s been a really satisfying and rewarding project for me, and I hope you’ve found something useful or amusing in it for yourselves too. 

 

Best wishes to you all!  

 

        Wayne Parker

        Seattle, Washington

        October 26, 2026

Personal Note: Another New Song Release Today!

Hey Friends!

I'm writing to let you know about my new song and its lyric video, All That We've Been Through, released today.

One interesting songwriting note -- this is the first song I've created where I wrote and recorded the music first, then figured out what it was about, and wrote the story and lyrics afterward.

In the past, I've always started with lyrics first, and built the music around them. Starting with the music first is a valuable new and different approach for me to try and learn as a songwriter, and one I hope to use again in the future, at least some of the time. 

 

People often wonder whether particular stories told in books or songs are based on actual people and events in the writer's life. With my songs, it's been a mix. Some of my songs are definitely about me and real experiences I've had. Others are complete fiction. And some are fictional, but maybe based on imaginary composites of different people I know and events in their lives with which I'm familiar. This is undoubtedly a common method of storybuilding for fiction writers and songwriters. 

 

All That We've Been Through definitely falls in that third category. It's not a true story about any specific real people, but its plot may have similarities at different points to the stories of several couples I've known over the years whose friendship I've valued and cherished. In this case, the recent loss of a dear longtime friend also certainly affected the story's trajectory, and elicited  some of the emotions I was trying to work through when I wrote this song.

  

The song is available on all common music streaming services (be sure to find the one by me, Wayne Parker -- it looks like this is a common song title). It is also available as a lyric video you can watch on YouTube. You can follow the link on this page to my YouTube channel.

 

Special thanks to Matt Taylor at Echo Lake Studios for co-producing this song with me, mixing and mastering it, and adding the haunting backup vocals. 

Book Review: Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It (2025). Cory Doctorow.

The title of this book, "Enshittification", became a meme on the Internet shortly after the book was released, and ended up on lists of most popular new words of 2025. It is certainly attention-grabbing, and clearly means something unflattering, but what exactly did the author mean by his provocative new term? Once I’d heard the new word a few times, I decided it was probably time to go read the book and find out. 

It turned out to be not just a general complaint about the state of the world, and the social and historical trend lines we’re on. Instead, Doctorow has devised a conceptual framework for understanding the rise and decline of many of the Information Age’s great product lines and major tech companies.

What most of us have seen as just a series of unfortunate individual management decisions and developments affecting products and brands we once loved, Doctorow describes as a deliberate, repeatable business plan and process which has been adopted by all the iconic tech companies of our age.

The process of “enshittification” as the author describes it begins with the original stage, in which a start-up with a brilliant new innovacation, and flush with venture capital cash, creates a golden age for the new users of their product. Something incredibly useful, original and attractive is handed out to any and all willing adopters for free or for a nominal price. The word spreads, and a large user base for the product and services is built. The users love the product, and keep spreading the word as it becomes more and more ubiquitous and indispensable to the users, and then to society as a whole.

The second stage of enshittification represents a transition to the golden age for secondary businesses lining up to exploit the vast new captive audience for the original product or service. That exploitation can come in the form of advertising, selling compatible and complementary tools, and companies selling their products directly to the users by leveraging services and marketplaces provided through the central product company.

Suddenly many other businesses eager to mine the gold represented by the product’s huge customer base align with or embed with the central product company, using powerful and easy to use business tools the central product company provides.

New fortunes are made by these outside businesses, while the original value to the user and enjoyment of the product begins to diminish. Nevertheless, no one wants to leave the party yet, in large part due to the network effect – the individual costs and inconvenience to the user of disassociating from a service or community where everyone else they know is still present and participating.

The third stage is the dissolution stage, the end stage of enshittification. At this point, the product company at the center of the tech and business environment built around their products now begins exploiting everyone. 

At this stage, they will try to extract maximum value from their users, by adding devious licensing restrictions, rapid planned obsolescence, forced upgrades, selling users’ private data and a host of other hateful policies. At the same time, they will also take increasing advantage of their business partners’ reliance upon their large customer network to charge exorbitant commissions on partners’ revenues, adopt new policies favoring their own business interests over the business partners and other monopolistic and unconscionable tactics. 

The end result for the once enthusiastic users of these products and services is anger, frustration, disillusionment and a feeling of being ripped off. But it’s hard to let go, because of the convenience of the product, the years invested in learning how to use it, sometimes peoples’ identification with the product itself and its community, and the ease of interoperating with others because everyone else you know uses it too.

The end result for the once enthusiastic associated business is also anger, frustration, disillusionment and the feeling of being ripped off. But in their cases, these dependent companies have often increasingly built their entire business plans, their daily operations and their customer relationship management with an utter reliance upon the central product company’s customer base and support services, so escaping from the relationship is inherently threatening to their company’s very survival. Indeed, in many cases competing outside the world of the central product or service provider may be economically impossible by this point.

The author explains this basic theory and how it works in considerably more detail, but he also provides many specific case studies and examples to demonstrate how this process has played out with most of the major corporate players of the tech world, especially Facebook, Amazon, Google, Apple and Microsoft. It is all interesting, and often even entertaining reading.

Many of the details will be instantly familiar to all of us from news reports, or from our own interactions with these companies as consumers and customers. What’s new and startling is not the dirty tactics and outrageous practices themselves, but seeing them in the larger context of this repeatable and predictable process of enshittification which Doctorow describes.

This is a terrific book for understanding why so much of the tech we all use and depend upon has become so constantly infuriating and frustrating, at the same time it’s given us so many marvelous tools we need and love to use. Doctorow also has some proposals for what it would take to try to break these cycles, and take us forward to a world of tech not controlled by the monopolistic companies that now rule our digital lives, although whether these ideas can still be effective remains to be seen.

Enshittification is one of the most important books of the past several years for understanding our modern digital economy, and how the internet and digital tools we thought only a few years ago might be means for advancing freedom and human connection have so quickly devolved instead into such a disturbing and dangerous hot mess. The oncoming onslaught of AI in the mix only makes it more important to try to understand how the large tech companies operate, the monopolistic tactics they use and their ultimate self-serving goals in developing their new products. Highly recommended.

Book Review: Chasing Shadows: Cyber Espionage, Subversion and the Global Fight for Democracy (2025). Ronald J. Diebert.

I previously reviewed a book called Pegasus (2023), by Laurent Richard and Sandrine Rigaud. It recounted the investigation by a small group of journalists and internet researchers into the now-notorious Pegasus software, which allows the operator to covertly take control of smartphones, download all their private data, and turn them into remote microphones, GPS trackers and cameras in a target’s pocket. 

The Pegasus spyware app had been created by an Israeli cybersecurity firm called NSO as a tool to allow governments to spy on citizens, allegedly only to be sold to “good” governments trying to crack down on international terrorism and crime.

But in Pegasus, the authors exposed how NSO regularly violated their own stated policy of only selling to friendly democratic governments, and also sold the software tools to repressive regimes around the globe, who used it to terrorize political dissidents and opposition figures. The authors’ findings, and the dangerous process of uncovering the truth of NSO’s cyber-spying exploits, were the key ingredients of their story. 

Chasing Shadows is a related book, by the founder and director of an organization in Canada called the Citizen Lab, which played an important role in the Pegasus investigation. It is to a limited degree an autobiography of the author, Ronald Diebert, and his role in launching this non-profit organization dedicated to exposing the dark secrets of authoritarian governments, and their rulers, who use the internet and cyber tools to spy on and control their adversaries.

But it is also an up to the minute, true-life spy thriller, full of case studies, dangerous situations, and exploits of the small but committed circles of journalists and tech savants at the Citizen Lab and around the world. It is the story of these few brave investigators, who try to coordinate, share resources, and work together to expose and disrupt authoritarian governments and their operatives, along with the dark cybersecurity companies like NSO that enable their dirty deeds. And it is also the story of some of the victims, and what they experienced as a result of the spyware attacks on their phones.

It's discouraging to read this, and realize the power and technological capabilities of the cyber surveillance tools that are now available to dictators and criminals to control others, and attempt to destroy their opposition. 

But it’s encouraging and inspiring to realize that there are people who have accepted it as their life’s mission to investigate, expose and undermine these bad actors when they attempt to use these powerful spying tools against their adversaries. It’s also impressive how skillful these investigators, journalists and tech wizards have become in tracking and exposing the sales and use of these malicious tools, even with their limited resources, and the constant danger to themselves as well as the targets of surveillance.

You won’t sleep easier after reading Chasing Shadows, but it’s important to be aware of the current situation, and the nature of the high-tech surveillance threats we now face from the smartphones most of us carry with us all day. Recommended. 

Book Review: Nuclear War: A Scenario (2024). Annie Jacobsen.

Hello, friends and readers,

As I mentioned in a recent post, this year I’m planning to continue writing about more books, movies, TV and other topics, but hope to make the articles a lot shorter.

I know from my own Substack subscriptions that I am drowning in too much content from too many smart and interesting people. No doubt many of you are too. What’s most important is that I share my recommendations about content I found worthwhile, rather than trying to summarize and analyze the whole story every time. So let’s get started!

This book, Nuclear War, is not technically non-fiction, in the sense that the story it tells hasn't happened – at least not yet. The author, Annie Jacobsen, is an award-winning reporter who has written a number of acclaimed non-fiction books about different aspects of the U.S. defense and intelligence communities. But in this case she uses a chilling fictional scenario of a single unidentified incoming ICBM missile to illustrate in great (and extensively researched) detail the systemic problems in our nuclear war command and control mechanisms, flaws which would almost certainly lead to a global war of human annihilation in the case of even a single missile launch or nuclear attack against the United States or its allies.  

 In 2025, almost exactly the same scenario was used as the basis for the movie A House of Dynamite, directed by Kathryn Bigelow, a very well-made thriller that reached the same conclusions. Curiously, few reviewers seem to have made the connection between Jacobsen's book and the movie, and I don’t know to what extent the director may have been aware of the book, or the author of the impending movie. But the book and the movie do seem very similar in plot and outcome.

Jacobsen asserts that nuclear war defense strategies against even a single missile or nuclear attack have been exhaustively war-gamed by the Pentagon, as well as by the other major nuclear powers, and always end with the same result – the end of human civilization within a period of minutes or hours. Even a sociopathic fascist leader like Vladimir Putin knows this, which is why his numerous threats to use his nuclear arsenal against Ukraine and the West have ultimately rung hollow. Which does raise a powerful question about why we continue to build and maintain these vast arsenals of planet-destroying weapons, and keep them at a hair-trigger state of readiness. 

This is a deeply disturbing but well-researched case for nuclear disarmament, made palpable by showing how the individual humans with their hands on the triggers, in a situation requiring almost instantaneous decision-making, would be ill-equipped and unable to overcome the built-in institutional assumptions and biases toward immediate escalation that are inherent in Cold War era deterrence theory and strategies.

It’s unfortunate that we’re unlikely to make much progress on this ongoing threat to humanity in the current global and national political climate. Highly recommended. 

Personal Note: My Latest Single, I'm Your Man, Released Today!

Hello, Friends! 

I'm writing to announce that my new song and lyric video, I'm Your Man, was released today.

I must admit I feel conflicted, posting about my fun creative projects right now, given the terrible mess in our country. The daily onslaught of news of chaos, violence and the brutality of the current regime and ICE/CBP, and the plight of all of us, especially those most immediately affected by the federal government's terror tactics, is never far from my mind.

Nevertheless, I finished this song, and it's an upbeat one, about romantic relationships and the joy they bring to our everyday lives. I never wanted to specialize in protest songs, though State of Anxiety, Shots Fired and Unknown Land are certainly in that tradition, and as artists we sometimes have to respond to the times and conditions in which we live. 

During these trying moments, though, I also believe it's vital to treasure the human connections and love that comfort and delight us, and to draw strength from them. So I hope you like it. You can listen to it on my YouTube channel (click on the link on the right column of this site), or on any music streaming service.

One other thing I wanted to mention. Most of my songs tend to sound how I imagine them, but occasionally I do one where there's an artist or band providing inspiration for the instrumentation, the arrangement and vocals, the "look and feel" of the song. 

Those few songs are still all originals, but at least for me and those of us who made them, there was a particular artist or band that influenced the song's sound, and the way we envisioned it as we worked on the recording. 

I'm Your Man is one of those songs, which made it ironic and sad that we completed production on the weekend Bob Weir, legendary guitarist, singer and songwriter for the Grateful Dead, passed away at age 78.

So this one's for Bob, and all his Grateful Dead bandmates, most of them gone now. I hope it recaptures a little of the joyful spirit and the unique sound they created together, and pays appropriate respect and homage from this lifelong fan to the band, and its members' extraordinary musical careers and life journeys.

Special thanks to Matt Taylor at Echo Lake Studios for co-producing this song with me, to Tim Delaney on bass for 'getting his Phil Lesh on' so brilliantly, and to Rich Rowlinson for his beautiful and vibrant piano part.