Three soul-meltingly hot takes for animal activists in 2026

🌶️ get ready for a wild year

I have heard from a few people who enjoy this newsletter. But I’ve heard from many more people who say, “WTF man, I can’t read a 10,000 word post every week.” To the latter group, who apparently don’t care about animals very much, I say: this post is for you. I even gave it a clickbaity title and everything! So gather round, children, and let ol’ uncle Sandcastles tell you what is going to happen in 2026.

Hot Takes

1. AI will be accelerating so hard that no animal activist can ignore it

Wait, sorry, that describes 2025! Or at least, I think it should. Yet my latest post about AI and animal advocacy still got a few replies (from intelligent people, no less!) claiming AI progress has run into a wall, or is about to do so. I think this perspective is badly wrong but only time will tell, so I’m registering my predictions that:

• The METR task-length chart will track a 4- or 5-month doubling time (or faster) throughout 2026 (one proxy for capabilities improvement continuing exponentially)

• There will be signs AI is taking a bite out of U.S. employment, especially in white-collar sectors, though alternative explanations will abound

• There will be nothing like a bubble-bursting event despite an ever greater share of the stock market and GDP growth hinging on AI investments

2. Getting cancelled is over

Cancel culture is so last decade. It’s 2026– nobody is cancelled anymore! Anyone who was previously cancelled is officially un-cancelled, and nobody new is getting cancelled. People will keep trying to cancel each other but it’s not going to work anymore, because the rest of us have had enough. We’re not going to ostracize our friends because other people weren’t interested in resolving their conflicts constructively.

3. The animal movement will focus on winning

Various old factional disputes in animal activism will all finally be seen for the smoke and mirrors they always were. I’m talking about:

• Grassroots vs. professional

• Welfarist vs. abolitionist

• Radical vs. moderate

• Pragmatic vs. idealist

• Veganism vs. reducetarianism/offsets

A new faction will emerge to take their place: Team Winning. This faction will natively understand the synergy between many different forms of winning. As a result, Team Winning will spend much less time criticizing each other, freeing up all that energy to focus on—you guessed it—winning! We will win so much we will get tired of winning, and by the end of 2026 we will say, “Please, enough, no more winning!” And we will even start to feel pity for the factory farm industry.

OK, it’s too spicy, here’s some cashew sour cream

You’ve now been warned, so if you get caught off-guard by these wonderful developments, you’ll have only yourself to blame. Here’s what you could do instead of that to prepare for a great year of animal activism:

Build your first AI automation: Go start a conversation right now with Claude using the following prompt:

Hey Claude, I’ve been wanting to become more savvy about using AI and LLMs lately. One idea I had was to try to automate some component of my work using Claude Code, n8n, and/or Zapier. But I don’t know where to start. I’d like to ask for your help! Could you interview me about my weekly work rhythms, identify one or more tasks that I could save time by automating, and then help me build automations? Assume I’m a total beginner with all this stuff and walk me through it step by step. I’m excited to work with you on this!

Read my previous AI posts [1, 2], then start following some of the recommended podcasts or newsletters if you really want to stay caught up on AI news.

Get off the cancel train: it’s just going to make you look silly at this point. In fact, if you have any old friends you stopped talking to because they were being publicly shamed, 2026 is a great year to reach out and welcome them back into the movement.

Go get maniacally obsessed with winning a campaign: almost any campaign, it doesn’t matter. I haven’t yet seen anyone in the movement come close to meeting the burden of proof I’d need to be convinced that any pro-animal campaign has been net negative– from the most welfarist/incremental campaign to campaigns against those very welfare schemes. Though I’m on the record saying campaigns for non-farmed animals won’t do much to end factory farming, even that is a far cry from net negative.

To summarize all of that: 2026 will be a great year to stop focusing on things that don’t matter, and focus on what matters instead– and therefor, a great year to read more Sandcastles 🏰

Build on,

Sandcastles