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After 25 years of fighting for human rights amid the wreckage of bad tech policy, I'm here to tell you that the road to hell is paved with badly thought-through tech policy.
The most galling thing about this wreckage is that it was both foreseeable and foreseen. Back when Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy was telling the world "Privacy is dead, get over it," digital rights advocates were saying, "Not only are digital tools pretty dang good at helping you protect your privacy, but a society-wide abolition of privacy sets us up for infinite harms long into the future":
https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/31/losing-the-crypto-wars/#surveillance-monopolism
It wasn't just business leaders who hated privacy, it was also our political classes. Bill Clinton tried to put a backdoor into every microchip (no, really):
This week at Revenue Rulebreaker, we're talking about whether or not newsletters are going to go extinct with AI inboxes. We're looking at why Lovable stole a designer's work and pretended it was AI for an ad. And we're hearing what Legends use their welcome sequences for.
🎙️ Subscribe to Rulebreaker Radio on Apple, Spotify or YouTube.
This is your brain. This is tech dependence. This is your brain on tech dependence.
Drugs might be addictive but they've got nothing on the tech fumes people are smoking these days. No one is safe, because unlike drugs where maybe a couple friends tried to suck you in, nearly everyone you know is buying into the same narrative about tech and parroting it daily. Drug distributors wish they could hit this level of evangelism. We're living in a time where a dangerous number of people believe that not only is what the tech industry wants inevitable, but we must participate or die.
Last week, The Ankler published a story about whether or not we're at "peak newsletter." The concern that newsletters are a dying medium has been with us for a couple years. It's mostly propagated by outlet-employed journalists who live in a state of panic that their window to start a Substack is closing. The experts they turn to for advice are a mix of the guys running the newsletter platforms, newsletter consultants and sceney Substackers. It's a narrow view on what's actually a massive, diverse space and there's never a satisfactory answer.
Tech journalist Taylor Lorenz opens the article with a quote saying "Newsletters are cooked." Her belief is that AI will make them obsolete in five years.
Where do you stash content from your former life?
If you have previous websites or blogs with lots of great content, but it doesn't really apply to your current business / career, what have you done with that content? Especially if you don't want to continue paying too much money to keep the content online. —Asked by Legend Sara Obando.
This question is part of our Ask The Legends Series. Legends are invited to answer in the comments. Just sign in and comment on this post. Your experience helps our community and some of your quotes will be featured in our newsletter for added visibility.
It's not often that I find myself on the same side as the US Copyright Office. In fact, I think this is the first time in 25 years that I've found myself cheering on the office's official actions as good for art and good for free expression, taking the side of creative workers over our bosses.
The source of our miraculous accord: the US Copyright Office's position on AI. The CO has taken the (entirely correct) position that copyright law exists to incentivize human acts of creative expression, which means that only works of human authorship are eligible for copyright.
This isn't a controversial position within legal circles. But for media executives, this is shocking; absurd, even. This gap between the industrial and the legal understanding of copyright comes from a fundamental difference over the evocatively named legal doctrine of "sweat of the brow."
"Sweat of the brow" is fundamental to a correct legal understanding of copyright. Copyright rewards and protects creativity but it does not protect hard work. You can labor for ten years over a phone book listing the numbers of every person in a town and (as a collection of uncopyrightable facts) it will receive no protection at all. Zero. Zilch. Anyone can copy and sell that phone book:
Within hours of the $6.4 billion Binance hack, before the blockchain analysts had begun to weigh in, someone suggested the thief might be North Korea. “Very likely,” I said. It wasn’t some bold guess; North Korea is behind almost every crypto theft of this size. Since then, I’ve gotten a lot of questions: How do we know it was North Korea? How do they cash out? What do they do with the money? Here’s a quick primer.
For more on the hack itself, read my night-of coverage.
The largest crypto hacks in recent history — Bybit ($1.5 billion in 2025), Axie Infinity ($620 million in 2022), Bitget ($388 million in 2026) — have all been blamed on the DPRK. According to a Chainalysis report from last year, its state-sponsored hackers had stolen at least $6.75 billion in crypto by the end of 2025.1 This year, the DPRK was responsible for 76% of the losses across all crypto hacks, according to TRM Labs.2 These are just based on the known hacks and what can be attributed to them; the real figure is likely higher.
To be clear, neither Binance nor law enforcement has publicly attributed the hack to North Korea yet. But blockchain analytics firms TRM Labs,2 Elliptic,3 and Chainalysis4 all have, and all three have been tracing North Korean crypto thefts for years.
A notorious North Korean cybercrime group has stolen around $6.4 billion in cryptoassets from multiple hot walletsa belonging to Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, and still controls around $3 billion of it after stablecoin issuers and other protocols froze what they could. These estimates are still in flux as various platforms work to freeze tokens or otherwise thwart the attacker from cashing out, and as both Binance and independent security researchers continue their investigations.
Unlike many supposedly “multi-billion dollar” crypto hacks, where the headline figure relies on the notional value of illiquid assets that could never be sold for anywhere near that amount, the majority of these stolen assets were major stablecoins, bitcoin, ethereum, and other fairly liquid tokens.
Binance has estimated the total theft at $6.3 billion; external estimates later revised the total up to around $6.4 billion. At least $5.5 billion of these were liquid assets. Tether announced they had frozen at least $1.567 billion of the stolen USDT, and Circle has frozen around $800 million of stolen USDC. World Liberty Financial froze the $27 million in USD1 stolen by the attacker, and the Arbitrum ethereum layer-2 network froze an additional $30.5 million that had moved to its network. The attacker is estimated to have made off with between $2.4 billion and $3.4 billion.
Binance founder Changpeng Zhao, who is legally not allowed to have any active role with the company [I98] yet still has remarkable amounts of inside knowledge into its inner workings, posted on Twitter less than an hour after the theft that “User funds are safe!”, adding early estimates of how much Tether and Circle had frozen. He added, “I don't manage Binance (.com) anymore, but as a shareholder, I expect all user funds will be fully covered.”
You've got a book or you're thinking of publishing one and you're wondering where you should sell it. You know Amazon, Barnes & Nobles, and Bookshop. How are today's creators and brands rethinking book fulfillment to eliminate upfront costs? And what if I told you there's a way you can know exactly who is buying your book?
We tackled these questions with the help of Lulu's CMO Matt Briel. Matt and his team have helped millions of authors publish, print and distribute their books. Indie authors can do so much more than just getting a book into major retail channels. In this session, Matt explains why selling direct to your audience is a catalyst for your success. Watch our conversation or read the recap below!
📚️ This event was held in partnership with Lulu: Sell your books worldwide with their scalable tools for indie publishers.
(This is my affiliate link but there's no additional cost to use it)
What are you missing if you only sell through major retailers?
Matt said you're "missing out on remarketing opportunities and the ability to continue building the audience that they're already working hard to build." The only way to get customer data is to "own the transaction," which means selling direct.
What should you do with that reader customer data?
"Having it is one thing. Doing something with it is actually the most important thing." He suggested segmenting your list and sending things like birthday emails or postcards, as romance authors do with Valentine's postcards.
Designer Joe Ben Taylor took to LinkedIn yesterday to call out Lovable for running Meta ads that passed his original design work off as something their tool created. Lovable shut the ads off after 9 hours of them running and commented on Joe's post to say so, but they did not provide any explanations or solutions.
Their comment reads "We’ve discontinued this ad everywhere and are investigating how this happened" and they included their general support email. It's a response that both fails to acknowledge the gravity of stealing someone's intellectual property and doesn't provide a legitimate contact to actually address the problem. This is the kind of situation where an executive should have stepped in to offer a personal resolution path.
Joe says he didn't use Lovable in any part of the design process, that the project was "designed by hand, developed by hand." He did use a couple other AI tools for image generation and website performance optimization, but neither of those tools was Lovable. He used ImagineArt and Claude. He also wrote that "Every interaction, every animation, every design decision and every line of code was the result of genuine human craftsmanship" and that the website took two months of work. The website he designed was for Forge Automotive, a custom vehicle manufacturing company in the UK, and it's won several awards including "Site of the Day" on both Awwwards and CSS Design Awards.
You can still see Lovable's ad with Joe's exact design on their Instagram and, even though it only ran for 9 hours (according to Facebook's ad library), it racked up 658 likes and 103 comments as of this writing, which means it reached thousands more people. There were four different versions of the ad and it looks like they ran in the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Ireland across Facebook, Instagram and Threads. Joe lives in the United Kingdom.
I’m taking a week off of premium as I’ve had a family situation that has absorbed a lot of my time this week, but I’ll be back with a barnburner next Friday (11/6).
In the interim, I’m running a week-long sale — 10% off of the $70-a-year subscription for life (click here!) — for new subscribers. It’s a great way to support my work, and you get an absolute ton of value at a lower price than basically every competing newsletter.
Over the past few months, I’ve published a two part guide to the world of AI debt, an analysis of the (dubious) impact of generative AI on the global economy, deep analyses of the biggest players in the AI infrastructure space like NVIDIA (part one and two) and Oracle (part one and two), how OpenAI will eventually kill Oracle, and how venture capital is killing itself.
If you want to get in touch — and especially if you have any juicy information about Anthropic, OpenAI, Blackstone or any other companies in the AI bubble — hit me up on Signal at ezitron.76. I’m also on IB on your Bloomberg Terminal.
As I've mentioned a few times here, one of our family traditions, besides regarding costumes with the appropriate level of seriousness and usually DIYing them, is Scary Shabbos.
First, though, reminder– (and the reason I'm sending our Thursday post a day early):
THIS IS TONIGHT. LAST CHANCE TO GET IN ON IT!
Give yourself permission– and the tools– to get your work out there.
Join me for two practical workshops to bring your ideas into the world.
The first widely read piece of tech criticism I ever wrote was "Metacrap: Putting the torch to the seven strawmen of the meta-utopia," a response to the underlying philosophy of the "Semantic Web" that I published in 2001:
https://people.well.com/user/doctorow/metacrap.htm
The piece holds up surprisingly well today (if I do say so myself), and not just for its criticism of the ontological incoherence of "web semantics." The most relevant concept I develop in that piece is a criticism of any plan that starts with "first, everyone else in the world just needs to set aside their needs and advantages in favor of my priorities, and then my plan will work."
This is especially relevant today in the context of "agentic AI." When this idea was first mooted, the big idea was that you could instruct a chatbot to venture out onto the public, unstructured web and it would do your bidding, for example, finding all the flights that fit your criteria and comparing prices for all of them, picking the best one and booking it for you.
Getting a late start on the news this week as the big story was Anthropic finally filing for their IPO and that just seemed too boring so I waited, but nothing more interesting has really happened in the last two days. It's time to get this show on the road and I'm sorry to say...it's all tech news.
Microsoft is trying to offload 60,000 employees. Instagram and Netflix want to be YouTube, beehiiv wants to be Spotify and that PHP bug is still following us around.
Here's what is shaping up this week...
Prediction is hard. Especially about the future. That Yogi Berra gem proves that you don't have to be a science fiction writer to get irritated with people insisting that you must know what's going to happen tomorrow, but (as a sf writer), I can tell you that this is one of our main occupational hazards.
Obviously, this is a self-inflicted injury. Our genre is full of big names who self-mythologized as scientific Nostradamuses. From the "future history" bar-charts in Heinlein's books (I was once on a panel with Robert Silverberg where he referred to RAH as "Robert A Timeline") to the McGuffin of Asimov's Foundation series: a "scientific" discipline that could predict the trajectory of human civilization for millennia into the future.
But me, I find the prospect of predicting the future incredibly dismal – even offensive. A predictable future is set in stone, immune to human agency. A predictable future runs on rails, and we're the prisoners of history, tied to the tracks.
For me, the most exciting thing about sf is the idea that the future is contingent. Sf is a long, sharp pin that can prick inevitabilism's bubble: that assertion by tech-bros and policymakers alike that the future is out of our hands and must be accommodated, not shaped. Inevitabilism is a form of vulgar Thatcherism, the assertion that "there is no alternative."
When it comes to terrible practices by website operators, it takes a lot to shock me. I literally wrote the book on the subject. But last night, I encountered a piece of genuinely appalling fuckery and I can't get it out of my head, because it's such a perfect storm of outrageous conduct and institutional decay.
It happened when I followed a link to an LA Times article. Having lived in LA three times (and having been an Angeleno for a decade and counting this time around) I generally have warm feelings for the Times. The Times's Festival of Books is a great event that I speak at most years, and I'm broadly happy to have a daily newspaper covering my city.
That said, the Times has been chipping away at my goodwill for the past decade. First, there's the personal: after a Festival of Books appearance some years ago, the books editor approached me and asked if I'd contribute regular book reviews to the paper. I said yes, and then immediately my editor got laid off, reportedly so they could avoid giving him benefits that would come with seniority.
I wrote several reviews for a new editor, though the paper never sent me a contract for any of them – or a payment! Many months (and published reviews) later, an editor I'd never had contact with at the paper got in touch to get the paperwork squared away, and the Times sent me a contract with broad, one-sided language that I would never sign onto.
This is Life as a Sacred Text, 🌱 an everybody-celebrating, justice-centered voyage into ancient stories that can illuminate our own lives.
It‘s always human-authored, and it's run on a nonprofit, so it’s 100% NAZI FREE. More about the project here, and to subscribe, go here:
This newsletter is a reader-supported publication.
Paid subscriptions allow our tiny team to keep doing this work.
If you want in to the House of Study but paying isn't on for you right now, reach out and we'll hook you up, no questions asked. Always.
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Life is a Sacred Text is about truth & transformation, with ancient stories serving as mirrors & lights. Collective liberation. Always human-authored, run on a Nazi-free platform. ❤️
Justin Moore was not about to become a sad statistic about book sales. Even before he started writing his debut book, he saw a presentation by Lulu CMO Matt Briel showing that most authors' sales decline dramatically after month three. Justin made a commitment with himself then that he wouldn't write a book only to have it not reach its intended readers. He knew he needed a plan to sell it long before it went to market.
Justin just passed 10,000 copies sold of his book Sponsor Magnet last month. He didn't stop selling it three months post-launch. He sells the book all the time. On social media. On his email list. In person at events. When he does speaking gigs. It took him about 20 months to smash his goal of selling 10,000 books, but he's not slowing down now that he's hit it. "I put my blood, sweat and tears, everything I know about brand partnerships [into the book]. I'm going to keep talking about this book for fricking ages, for years," Justin told me.
Anyone who watches Justin work knows his marketing game is masterful but, as prepared as he was for the launch, he developed many of his sales techniques once the book was in the market. What's more impressive is that only about 500 copies were sold in bulk orders. The rest were individual sales. Justin has found creative ways to keep book promo both interesting for him and engaging for his audience going on two years now and he kindly shared a bunch of what's worked with us.
Pre-orders weren't as big for Justin as I thought they were, having followed his journey to the book release online. He said it was "maybe a couple hundred copies" sold in the pre-sale phase, but what was really effective was creating a public milestone campaign around getting the book in readers' hands post-launch.
What's your welcome sequence for?
I asked this question on Threads the other day and lots of people disagreed about what a welcome sequence is for. Mine is for sales. It wasn't always that way. It used to be just about saying hi but that feels pretty useless these days when most people join me list already knowing a lot about me. What's yours for?—Lex
This question is part of our Ask The Legends Series. Legends are invited to answer in the comments. Just sign in and comment on this post. Your experience helps our community and some of your quotes will be featured in our newsletter for added visibility.
Through my own writing life, nothing has done more to improve my writing than diligent participation in peer-based workshops; that's where a group of writers, all at about the same stage in their artistic development, gather to read one another's work and offer feedback specifically aimed at improving each other's stories.
This is a deceptively simple exercise, and the reasons it works so well are quite counter-intuitive. The most obvious benefit is the way that a workshop encourages you to write at all. When you're at the start of your writing career, you are almost totally reliant upon your own internal self-discipline to keep producing.
Acquiring that self-discipline is infinitely valuable, but it's also incredibly hard. Being part of a group of writers who expect you to regularly turn in new work adds a very useful bit of external motivation that augments your still nascent self-discipline. Knowing you have to turn in a story for the group by Friday can get you in gear when you feel discouraged or blocked.
Before you're getting published regularly (or at all), your critiquing circle might be the only source of validation you get for your work, so the knowledge that you're in for that validation if you get that story in on time is a great motivator. But this is where the counter-intuitive part comes in: as great as it feels to be the center of your peers' attention and to get close feedback on the work you sweated over, that's not the real value you get from a writing workshop, at least not at the start of your career.
Last week I joined Joe Plenzler on the Meidas Defense podcast to talk about crypto. Meidas Defense is the MeidasTouch Network’s national security show, so we spent more time than I usually do on crypto as a geopolitical problem, in addition to a consumer protection one. The full episode and transcript are up on the Meidas newsletter, and there’s a shorter cut on YouTube:
The use of crypto for sanctions evasion isn’t something I’ve covered in depth yet, and so this was a great opportunity to dig into it. While crypto used to be more of a supplement to the usual shell companies and shadow banks that sanctioned states rely on, now it is core infrastructure. According to Chainalysis, the value of cryptoassets received by sanctioned states increased almost 700% last year as Russia moved huge sums through the A7A5 ruble-backed stablecoin, and more than 50% of crypto-denominated funds going into Iran in late 2025 were sent to wallets linked to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).1
Joe and I also had a great conversation about the domestic side of this story. While the Trump administration says it wants to crack down on crypto-enabled sanctions evasion, it disbanded the Justice Department’s crypto enforcement team and pardoned Binance’s founder after the company pleaded guilty to compliance failures that included enabling Iranian sanctions evasion. Trump personally is doing lucrative business with Binance, even as reports suggest the exchange has continued to knowingly allow Iran to evade sanctions [I110].
You can watch or listen to the full episode at the Meidas newsletter, or check out the shorter version on YouTube.
For whatever reason, Blackstone founder and CEO Stephen A. Schwarzman has a thirty-chapter-long series called “My Personal History” that is, well, exactly what it sounds like — a financial hagiography that frames him as a noble, sensible man with strong values, like when he sent a letter to “distinguished skull and bones alumni” Averell Harriman, whose father Edward Harriman had crashed the stock market in 1901 in his dogged attempt to monopolize the post-bubble railroad industry. Averell himself had co-founded a bank with Fritz Thyssen, who banked the nazis.
Anyway, seven chapters in, Schwarzman makes a bold claim while telling the story of his first job on Wall Street in 1969, where he saw the oncoming collapse of a nearby student fridge rental and life insurance business (no, really):
While we’re on the subject, why is it that you invested $275 billion of Blackstone’s roughly $1.4 trillion in assets under management into data center and digital infrastructure investments? While people might get excited about their products, I have it on good authority that the $2.3 billion debt financing deal you did for CoreWeave (back when, per The Information, it only had $16 million in revenue) closed despite everybody having serious misgivings about the financial health, ongoing returns and actual viability of the business.
Based on everything I’ve learned about Blackstone, it appears that the only people you do business with are “salespeople trying to persuade you of something that is not real”!
This is Life as a Sacred Text, 🌱 an everybody-celebrating, justice-centered voyage into ancient stories that can illuminate our own lives.
It‘s always human-authored, and it's run on a nonprofit, so it’s 100% NAZI FREE. More about the project here, and to subscribe, go here:
This newsletter is a reader-supported publication.
Paid subscriptions allow our tiny team to keep doing this work.
If you want in to the House of Study but paying isn't on for you right now, reach out and we'll hook you up, no questions asked. Always.
Sign up for Life is a Sacred Text
Life is a Sacred Text is about truth & transformation, with ancient stories serving as mirrors & lights. Collective liberation. Always human-authored, run on a Nazi-free platform. ❤️
What are three pieces of advice you wished someone had given you before starting your newsletter?
This question was asked by Legend Jennifer Obidike.
This question is part of our Ask The Legends Series. Legends are invited to answer in the comments. Just sign in and comment on this post. Your experience helps our community and some of your quotes will be featured in our newsletter for added visibility.
Enshittification is particularly galling because (in theory, at least), digital technology should be really hard to enshittify.
That's because the only digital computer we know how to build is the "Turing-complete, universal von Neumann machine," which is to say, a calculating engine capable of computing every valid program. In some deep, important, foundational sense, every computer is the same as every other computer. Sure, they vary in terms of speed, storage and RAM, but given enough time and electricity, every computer can run every program.
This has profound implications for enshittification. Say a tech boss takes away a feature you value (as when Sonos pushed an update that removed nearly all the functionality from its "smart" speakers), or adds a feature you hate (like when Chamberlain blocked third-party apps from controlling its garage doors so it could force its customers to view seven ads before they could open or close their garages). At that point, a programmer can write an "interoperable" program that restores the good feature or blocks the bad one.
This program can be costlessly and instantaneously distributed to every affected technology user, and those users will likely pay something for it. After all, enshittification is a way to shift value away from technology users to tech companies, which makes the case for you paying for disenshittification technology that wrestles that value back.
This is Life as a Sacred Text, 🌱 an everybody-celebrating, justice-centered voyage into ancient stories that can illuminate our own lives.
It‘s always human-authored, and it's run on a nonprofit, so it’s 100% NAZI FREE. More about the project here, and to subscribe, go here:
This newsletter is a reader-supported publication.
Paid subscriptions allow our tiny team to keep doing this work.
If you want in to the House of Study but paying isn't on for you right now, reach out and we'll hook you up, no questions asked. Always.
Sign up for Life is a Sacred Text
Life is a Sacred Text is about truth & transformation, with ancient stories serving as mirrors & lights. Collective liberation. Always human-authored, run on a Nazi-free platform. ❤️
I published my first story in 1988, when I was 17 years old. Today, at 55, I've published more than 30 books, with three more coming in the next year or so. In the intervening years, I've spent a lot of time thinking and talking about publishing.
I've had plenty of opportunity to reflect on publishing: I've been a bookseller and worked in libraries, I wrote a column for Publishers Weekly, self-published a few books of my own, published the first-ever book licensed under Creative Commons, and broke several Kickstarter records for audiobook projects. But most of all, I've worked with publishing professionals: publicists, marketing directors, operations people, copyeditors, and, above all, editors.
My first novel editor was the magnificent Patrick Nielsen Hayden, who supported my publishing career from the very start, donating to help send me to the Clarion science fiction writers' workshop and inviting me to come read slush at Tor Books whenever I was in New York. Patrick didn't teach me everything I know about publishing, but he sure taught me a lot about publishing, and hardly a day goes by without my having cause to reflect on one of our many discussions over our decades-long professional and personal association.
Out of all the things I learned about publishing from Patrick, one truth stands out above all: publishing is "the act of making something public." Publishing may or may not involve editing, layout, printing, binding, marketing or other activities that we associate with publishing houses, but publishing always involves identifying a work, identifying an audience, and finding ways to connect that work to that audience.
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In return, you get a weekly premium newsletter that dives deep into the finances of the AI bubble. Over the past few months, I’ve published a two part guide to the world of AI debt, an analysis of the (dubious) impact of generative AI on the global economy, deep analyses of the biggest players in the AI infrastructure space like NVIDIA (part one and two) and Oracle (part one and two), how OpenAI will eventually kill Oracle, and how venture capital is killing itself.
Friday’s piece will be the Hater's Guide to Blackstone — one of the most loathsome companies in existence, and one that’s staked its entire existence on the AI bubble.
If you want to get in touch — and especially if you have any juicy information about Anthropic, OpenAI, Blackstone or any other companies in the AI bubble — hit me up on Signal at ezitron.76. I’m also on IB on your Bloomberg Terminal.
How do I get this thing in front of more people???
That's the question many of us are asking.
Whether it's your podcast. Your website. Your events. Your newsletter. Or just your name. Audience growth is A PROJECT and it's not one most of us are excited about.
There's a million ways to grow your audience, but one of the most fun ways to do it is to team up with other people and spread the word about each other. But where do you find those awesome people to promote with?
"Technopolitics" are the politics embedded in technology. The Ur-text of technopolitics is "Do Artifacts Have Politics?" by the rock critic turned scholar Langdon Winner:
https://faculty.cc.gatech.edu/~beki/cs4001/Winner.pdf
With "Do Artifacts," Winner demands that we move beyond the idea of technologies having "intended consequences" and "unintended consequences" and towards a political economy of tech. In service to this, he divides the politics of artifacts into three categories:
I. Artifacts that have politics embedded in them by their creators, like Robert Moses's infamous bridges over the Long Island parkways. According to Moses biographer Robert Caro, Moses deliberately specified that these bridges must be too low for a city bus to pass under, in a bid to block Black people from traveling from New York City to the beaches he'd developed on Long Island.
More than half of all internet users have installed an ad-blocker; Doc Searls calls it the largest consumer boycott in history. As large as that boycott is, everyone – yes, everyone – should block every "programmatic" ad, because the entire system is so insecure that failing to do so could result in the total compromise of any or all of your digital devices.
That's the inescapable conclusion of Citizen Lab's latest blockbuster investigative report, "Exposing AdFection," which reveals how the largest ad-tech companies in the world, including Google and Facebook, allowed themselves to be hijacked by a "mercenary spyware" company that used the ad system to locate targeted individuals and serve "zero-click malware" that took over their computers and phones without them having to take any action:
https://citizenlab.ca/research/how-discover-tech-turned-targeted-ads-into-a-pipeline-for-spyware/
These tech giants amassed detailed surveillance dossiers on virtually every internet user, and they've assigned each of us unique, persistent identifiers, like a Social Security Number for spying. These companies also allow advertisers – or anyone pretending to be an advertiser – to serve blobs of code (which is all an ad is) to anyone based on those identifiers.
Soundtrack: Spinnerette — A Prescription For Mankind
About fourteen years ago, the government made a mistake that would allow tech companies and venture capitalists to conspire to legally scam millions of retail investors, simultaneously depriving them of good information and spuriously inflating the valuations of every major tech IPO of the last 14 years.
On April 5, 2012, President Obama signed the Jumpstart Our Business Startups (JOBS) Act under the auspices of it being “too difficult” for small businesses and startups — though overwhelmingly the latter — to access capital, all while reducing reporting requirements in ways that mostly helped venture capitalists fund and startup founders run businesses in reckless and destructive ways, all sold as a good thing for society.
In simple terms, while the JOBS Act (which was passed with rare bipartisan support) allowed companies to raise more money from more people, it also incentivized companies staying private for longer by eliminating a rule from the 60s that required companies of a certain size — above 500 shareholders and $10 million in assets — to report as if they were public.
The crypto industry’s flagship super PAC, Fairshake, has announced the House candidates it plans to back in the midterms. All 32 are incumbents, and all but four are in safe seats, which makes for a convenient way to pad a win rate and then claim it proves the existence of a crypto voter bloc. Rather than fighting for competitive seats, the PAC has abandoned several reliable allies in tough races. It seems more focused on rewarding high-ranking allies, such as Financial Services Committee chair French Hill and Bryan Steil, who chairs the House’s digital assets subcommittee.
Meanwhile, the revolving door between Trump’s White House and the crypto industry is spinning so fast it’s threatening to fly off its hinges. Patrick Witt, the latest executive director of Trump’s crypto council, has left for an as-yet-unnamed job in the private sector, leaving the council without a director or deputy, and the crypto industry wondering whether the White House has lost interest. New reporting from the Wall Street Journal outlines how stablecoin giant Tether cultivated a lucrative business relationship with his predecessor, Bo Hines, while Hines negotiated the Genius Act stablecoin law. Tether paid millions to Hines’ family consulting firm, then hired him to run its US arm after he stepped down from his advisory role. Tether’s other friends in high places are drawing scrutiny too: a Senate subcommittee is probing the stablecoin issuer’s ties to Cantor Fitzgerald, the firm Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick supposedly divested from by handing it to his sons.
Bo Hines, President Trump’s bizarre choice [I72] to serve as the first executive director of his crypto advisory council, was among the key architects of the Genius Act, the stablecoin law signed in July 2025. Hines’ previous qualifications consisted of playing college football, losing two Congressional races, and co-owning a small consulting firm called NXUM with his father. He kept his stake in NXUM when he joined the administration.
The Wall Street Journal has now reported that weeks after Hines began working on the bill, his father and their fellow NXUM co-owner Gary Dennis met with Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino. Tether is the largest stablecoin issuer, and had the most riding on the legislation. Though NXUM previously had little involvement with the crypto sector, it pitched Tether on a “strategic lobbying” and PR campaign that has netted NXUM at least $6.3 million to date, with payments that began while Hines was still at the White House and were split three ways among the co-owners. The final deal omitted any mention of lobbying, and was routed through a separate marketing firm.
It's time again: We have the extraordinary privilege of being in a community with a ton of other insightful, thoughtful people who also engage deeply with hard questions about the stuff that matters–
whether ethics, justice, spirituality, religion, how best to try to love one another down here, and/or just the messy stuff of being a person.
Ask the Community posts are a special time for folks to connect in an unstructured way– to get the advice you'd been looking for and to just get to know one another. And to share your recommendations of books, movies, podcasts, other media, whatever else—as always, the floor is yours.
If you liked this piece, you should subscribe to my premium newsletter, and you can subscribe on the following links: $70 a year, $18 a quarter, or $7 a month.
In return, you get a weekly premium newsletter that dives deep into the finances of the AI bubble. Over the past few months, I’ve published a two part guide to the world of AI debt, an analysis of the (dubious) impact of generative AI on the global economy, deep analyses of the biggest players in the AI infrastructure space like NVIDIA (part one and two) and Oracle (part one and two), and the role private credit is playing in funding AI data centers, and how private equity, reeling from years of successive failed software acquisitions, is doubling down on the AI bubble.
On Friday, we’ll take a look at the JOBS Act — or, the Obama-era legislation that created the regulatory environment that would ultimately prove essential for the AI bubble to inflate - and why it might be time to reform or entirely repeal it.
If you want to get in touch — and especially if you have any juicy information about Anthropic, OpenAI, or any other companies in the AI bubble — hit me up on Signal at ezitron.76. I’m also on IB on your Bloomberg Terminal.
Today:
1) One snapshot of this political moment.
2) A less-discussed lens on how the Religious Right brought us here.
3) What that, and our other wisdom, teaches us about how to mobilize now.
It's easy to forget while we're so immersed in it, but this white supremacist, Christian nationalist authoritarian chapter of history was never a foregone conclusion.
Note: Christian nationalism is a movement that asserts that the US was founded as, is now, and should be, a Christian nation. It's not synonymous with Christianity.
FUN FACT!
The U.S. Was Not, In Fact, Founded As a Christian Nation
despite the many other harms baked into its founding documents
Ladies and gentlemen, we are in a glorious, splendiferous, outrageous era of crap!
Some call it “high-yield,” some call it “speculative-grade,” but to those of us living in the real world, we know them as junk bonds, the formerly-sleepy world of below-investment grade debt that’s exploded in the last six years.
The high-yield market has continued to balloon over the last few years thanks to the vagaries of the global economy and, in recent years, the arrival of an entirely new category of crap - AI.
And “junk,” in the case of today’s newsletter, is going to extend so much further than simply “high-yield,” and into the murky world of leveraged loans that have been used to fund dodgy software deals and an increasing amount of data center debt deals.
This is Life as a Sacred Text, 🌱 an everybody-celebrating, justice-centered voyage into ancient stories that can illuminate our own lives.
It‘s always human-authored, and it's run on a nonprofit, so it’s 100% NAZI FREE. More about the project here, and to subscribe, go here:
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If you liked this piece, you should subscribe to my premium newsletter, and you can subscribe on the following links: $70 a year, $18 a quarter, or $7 a month.
In return you get a weekly premium newsletter including vast, detailed analyses of NVIDIA, Anthropic and OpenAI’s finances, and the AI bubble writ large. It's a great way to support my free work, and you'll get full access to my massive archive of premium analyses of the tech and finance industry. I just did a two part Hater's Guide To AI Debt that's essential reading given the current climate around AI data center loans.
On Friday, I’ll dive into the world of junk debt – or, what happens when a hyperscaler's credit rating slips into the abyss, or what might happen as a certain money-losing AI lab moves into the world of junk, building on the story I'll tell today.
If you want to get in touch — and especially if you have any juicy information about Anthropic, OpenAI, or any other companies in the AI bubble — hit me up on Signal at ezitron.76. I’m also on IB on your Bloomberg Terminal.
After years of political pressure, hundreds of millions of dollars to fund the campaigns of pro-crypto politicians, and at least $8 million in lobbying,1 the Clarity Act collapsed at the eleventh hour when a procedural vote to advance the broad-ranging cryptocurrency market structure bill fell far short of the 60 votes it needed. While the crypto lobby had a long wishlist for Trump’s presidency — and has already secured wins such as the Genius Act stablecoin bill and regulatory capture at the CFTC and SEC — broad legislation that would cement the deregulation of the crypto sector while giving it a veneer of legitimacy was their top priority.
This is good news. The Clarity Act isn’t about “clarity” any more than the PATRIOT Act is about patriotism. It promised regulatory structure but would have carved out crypto from the scrutiny applied to similar financial products, instead building a custom regime to allow it to operate without meaningful oversight. Trump has already dismantled the agencies that should police the sector, replacing bipartisan commissions with a handful of loyalists who have dismissed the majority of crypto enforcement actions and investigations. But those are changes that can be reversed when Trump leaves office. Legislation is far more durable — which is why the crypto industry so desperately wanted the Clarity Act to lock in deregulation. Rebuilding from Trump’s devastation won’t be easy, but today we can be grateful there won’t be additional bad legislation blocking the way.
As I wrote just prior to the Clarity Act vote, Republicans had decided to plow ahead with a bill that had only token provisions to address Trump’s crypto corruption, without securing bipartisan agreement. When Democrats made a last-minute counteroffer, which would have reportedly added more restrictions on things like the amount of crypto elected officials could hold and paid crypto promotions, Republicans shot it down. Senate Banking spokesman Jeff Naft characterized the Democratic proposal as an attempt to “move the goalposts again” after he said Republicans had agreed to numerous Democratic demands.2
While members of both parties had been working together on a final version of the bill after it advanced out of the Senate Banking Committee in mid-May, that cooperation eroded as the time left to feasibly pass the bill dwindled. Republicans repeatedly shared draft text with the crypto industry — or even the general public — before providing it to their Democratic colleagues.3
This week, the Wall Street Journal ran an alarming illustration of AI’s potential share of GDP that I’d argue did more to muddy the waters than actually telling anyone anything, mostly because its measurement, for whatever reason, covered 2025 to 2032, meaning that six out of the eight years of the analysis were estimates of spending.
To be fair, this analysis came from the Brookings Institution’s Stijn van Nieuwerburgh rather than the Journal itself, but I cannot express how profoundly unhelpful it is to discuss things years in the future.
The Journal itself acknowledged this, giving us a far-more-useful number, emphasis mine:
Yet it’s important to be specific that this is almost entirely a result of AI data center construction and GPU sales rather than anything to do with the companies actually renting AI compute. In other words, AI itself isn’t helping boost America’s economic growth, but rather the infrastructure for it to theoretically run on.
This is Life as a Sacred Text, 🌱 an everybody-celebrating, justice-centered voyage into ancient stories that can illuminate our own lives.
It‘s always human-authored, and it's run on a nonprofit, so it’s 100% NAZI FREE. More about the project here, and to subscribe, go here:
This newsletter is a reader-supported publication.
Paid subscriptions allow our tiny team to keep doing this work.
If you want in to the House of Study but paying isn't on for you right now, reach out and we'll hook you up, no questions asked. Always.
Sign up for Life is a Sacred Text
Life is a Sacred Text is about truth & transformation, with ancient stories serving as mirrors & lights. Collective liberation. Always human-authored, run on a Nazi-free platform. ❤️
If you liked this piece, you should subscribe to my premium newsletter, and you can subscribe on the following links: $70 a year, $18 a quarter, or $7 a month.
In return you get a weekly premium newsletter including vast, detailed analyses of NVIDIA, Anthropic and OpenAI’s finances, and the AI bubble writ large. It's a great way to support my free work, and you'll get full access to my massive archive of premium analyses of the tech and finance industry. I just did a two part Hater's Guide To AI Debt that's essential reading given the current climate around AI data center loans.
On Friday, I’ll interrogate generative AI’s effect on the economy to date — the dubious claims about productivity, the consequences of hyperscaler spending on treasury yields, how it’s driving inflation, and what could happen when the bubble finally pops.
If you want to get in touch — and especially if you have any juicy information about Anthropic, OpenAI, or any other companies in the AI bubble — hit me up on Signal at ezitron.76. I’m also on IB on your Bloomberg Terminal.
There’s a pattern that Facebook (well, Meta — you know, those folks behind Instagram and WhatsApp and the direct enabling of the Rohingya genocide) has been following for decades now that everyone in the worlds of policy and regulation and journalism seems to be constitutionally incapable of understanding. So I wanted to take a moment to explain it, clearly and simply, in hopes that this will at least make it obvious when everyone is being tricked again. Feel free to use this as a reference to send to your favorite legislator or journalist the next time they’re getting fooled by Mark Zuckerberg.
Of course, by the time the transgressive technology comes back around, everyone has moved on to the next terrible thing, and the company gets away with the thing that had everyone up in arms in the first place. Within the company, this is taken as proof that it wasn’t a bad idea to begin with: “See? They were complaining about nothing!” It’s a part of the “inevitability” strategy that so much of Silicon Valley has been using for years, where treating new technologies as if they were inexorable parts of nature is a tactic for getting every part of society to go along with their most extreme plans.
Much of this relies on people having short attention spans, on institutions that don’t hold these big companies accountable, and on the coercive power that big platforms like Meta’s have over people’s lives (they effectively make it impossible for most people to opt out without facing dire social consequences).
It’s especially important to identify these patterns because the alumni of these companies bring these toxic behaviors with them when they go on to their subsequent roles. It’s no coincidence, for example, that so many former Facebook product managers work at OpenAI and that ChatGPT has run the same playbook in terms of abusing people’s privacy and trust.
This is Life as a Sacred Text, 🌱 an everybody-celebrating, justice-centered voyage into ancient stories that can illuminate our own lives.
It‘s always human-authored, and it's run on a nonprofit, so it’s 100% NAZI FREE. More about the project here, and to subscribe, go here:
This newsletter is a reader-supported publication.
Paid subscriptions allow our tiny team to keep doing this work.
If you want in to the House of Study but paying isn't on for you right now, reach out and we'll hook you up, no questions asked. Always.
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Life is a Sacred Text is about truth & transformation, with ancient stories serving as mirrors & lights. Collective liberation. Always human-authored, run on a Nazi-free platform. ❤️
The year is 2026, and you are a hyperscaler CEO. You zip up your Patagonia Vest, type UDPATE CALENDER WHERE WHY to your Muse agent, and it tells you that your CFO has sent you an email about something called a “critical finance meeting,” and you roll your eyes.
You were up until 2AM talking to your 38 GPT-6 agents that were vibe coding a dashboard of “company efficiency wins,” and if anything it’s kind of rude that your CFO is interrupting your “mindfulness hour” where you listen to Andrew Hubermann and do something called an “elevated ab crunch” that hurts your neck every time, somehow.
Behind you, your horribly-trained Shiba Inu (called “Basis Points”) angrily humps your Eames chair, and when you tell it to stop it only seems to hump it harder. Your CFO, who has been waiting for 15 minutes, appears on the video with a grim look in their eyes. “What is this? What is the need for this interruption?” you snap. “You’re ruining my mindfulness! Have you any idea how important my mindfulness is? It’s so early in the day, and I’ve barely had any mindfulness!”
Your CFO stops themselves from saying that it’s 12:15PM, and decides to cut to the chase. “Hey, so, remember our conversation last week?”
The day before a cloture vote scheduled for Tuesday, September 15, Senate Republicans have released a final draft of the Clarity Act cryptocurrency market structure bill: an industry-drafted attempt to deregulate the sector even further and strip away what little oversight existed. One of the biggest sticking points throughout negotiations has been an ethics regime meant to rein in President Trump’s personal crypto ventures, which brought in $1.4 billion last year alone.a Senators should vote no on cloture tomorrow: the supposedly “unprecedented” ethics restrictions, tacked on at the last minute, are riddled with loopholes to protect Trump’s grift.
Republicans tried and failed to pass off weak ethics language as a meaningful concession back in July [I107], with laughable provisions including prohibitions on officeholders issuing tokens with enforcement left only to a Department of Justice staffed by Trump-appointed loyalists. Under that revision, any violations would have resulted in a fine capped at $500,000 — less than 0.04% of Trump’s crypto income last year — and the ethics language was set to expire upon Trump’s exit from office in 2029, preventing any future, less-captured DOJ from prosecuting him.
After weeks of silence on subsequent ethics proposals, the White House indicated on September 14 — the day before the scheduled vote — that they would agree to “a significant portion” of the newest ethics proposal. And while the new draft language blessed by the White House appears to address some of the Democrats’ objections, they shouldn’t be fooled by ethics language that appears tailor-made to allow the president to continue his grift. While the new draft removes the sunset provision and increases penalties beyond the $500,000 cap, it leaves clear paths for Trump to dodge any enforcement in the first place.
Citation Needed is an independent publication, entirely supported by readers like you. Consider signing up for a pay-what-you-want subscription — it really helps me to keep doing this work.
Every year, for 25 years, I’ve written on the observance of this anniversary. Some years, it’s been for me, some years it’s been for the people who’ve been with me along the way. Some years, I didn’t know why I was even doing it any more. But this year, for the first time in a long time, I can feel exactly what story I want to tell.
Right from the day of the attacks, that evening, I remember people all around the world saying to us, “Today, we are all New Yorkers.” It was so earnest, a statement so sincere, that I am still surprised how much it moved me. It might be hard for folks to imagine now, but it felt so real, that people everywhere — including people across America — felt like they loved us in New York City, and they were grieving with us, and cared about us.
And now we’re here in 2026, where it’s been wondrous to watch the world, for the first time since then, tell us once again that… their hearts are with New York City. This time, not in grief, but in joyous celebration. Celebration of our victories: Knicks in five! The Liberty and Gotham FC were champs less than two weeks after that! The World Cup lit the city up! Hip hop fans in the city came together for career-cappers by Wu-Tang and Jay Z. Countless festivals popped off, parades were more alive than ever, and nearly every one of those festivals and parades featured a shout-out to, or appearance from our wildly popular mayor Zohran Mamdani.
There are so many more highlights of how our city is serving us: the rollout of universal child care for 2-K, expansion of school safety zones to slow traffic for our kids, fixing up playgrounds, tickets for kids to go to Broadway and regular folks to go to the U.S. Open, repairing the BQE, $100 million in tips rightfully going to delivery workers, simplified paperwork for small businesses, the launch of the offices of Deed Theft Prevention, Insurance Affordability, Worker Power, and lots more.
So, we've been breaking down the way venture capital has evolved over the last two decades or so (spoilers: it got worse!), but a lot of that has been kind of theoretical. Now it's time for us to talk about how that impacts players in the real world, at a practical level.
Let's take founders, the entrepreneurs who actually build companies and invent new technologies. Now, what I mean here are people who have a great idea for a product or a service, and who want to get it out to the world in order to make something amazing happen. (These days there's also a cohort of people who call themselves "founders", but who basically just identified a pile of money that they wanted to grab, and decided that they were willing to suck up to whatever investors they had to in order to get that pile of money. Let's file these horrid people away for later — we'll come back to them.)
The deal for founders used to be pretty straightforward. You'd have an idea you were obsessed with, you would build it out as far as you could with whatever resources you were able to scrape together yourself, or with the help of your friends and family, and then if you absolutely had to have more money to make your idea succeed, you might seek out some investors to help you get to the next level. The conventional wisdom was that investors were a bunch of predators (everyone called them "vulture capital", often to their faces), and that founders should go in extremely skeptical about them, but at times they were a necessary evil in order to achieve one's goal.
On the other side of the table, investors knew the deal, and the best of them understood their role within the ecosystem. Here in New York City, we had influential firms like Union Square Ventures priding themselves on how founder-friendly they could be, both by trying to be straightforward in their communication with founders and by having an understandable thesis for their investments, which would let founders anticipate whether their company would be of interest or not. This avoided wasting time on the part of both founders and investors.
When I talked about the rise of Cancer Capital, I mentioned that it represents a massive shift from how venture capital has worked over the years. But my conversations in recent years with people in tech, and especially with those outside the industry, reveal that most folks have no idea just how huge that shift has been. It's easy to illustrate exactly how extreme things have gotten just by using a few examples, starting with companies that are familiar to everyone, and sharing some details of what I've seen firsthand.
First: The companies that defined the modern era of tech weren’t founded with venture capital.
Neither Microsoft nor Apple took a penny of venture capital funding when they were founded. Both got started from money they got from their founders and their first customers, and took off from there.
In Microsoft's case, they didn't get any venture capital investment until the company had been around for six years, and were already doing $17 million dollars a year in revenues. (That was a lot in 1981!) The founders didn't need any startup capital at the beginning because they basically formed the company in order to serve their first customer, and had revenues from the start. More strikingly, Microsoft didn't close their venture capital funding until after they had made their deal with IBM and shipped MS-DOS — the deal that actually made Microsoft into the industry-dominating player that they've been ever since.
We really, really need to talk about venture capital. Because it’s not “venture capital” anymore.
There’s a huge disconnect between what most people think of VC, where an investor has a big fund and cuts checks to help a founder build a company, and the current reality, where a handful of billionaire extremists use the cover of “VC” to advance an outrageous agenda where they’re accountable to no one.
I’m gonna explain this from a standpoint that almost never gets articulated: I’ve personally raised tens of millions of dollars in venture capital funding as CEO of startups, and been directly involved as a board member or advisor in raising hundreds of millions more. I’ve sat in board rooms, across the table from the people I’m talking about here, or been at the industry events that they frequent. So this isn’t sour grapes because these VCs wouldn’t cut me a check, or some chip on my shoulder about these investors due to a business deal. This is what I know about these bad actors because I’m part of the community of creators and inventors who build the things that they used to invest in — back when they still cared about innovation.
Many of the trends in society and politics that people are most angry about, from data centers being forced down everyone’s throats, to all of our favorite apps and services being enshittified, to politicians being paid to ignore the will of the people, are all being supercharged by these cancer capitalists. They have warped the structure of venture capital into a form of oligarchy that answers to no market, no regulators, and no voters. So it’s worth understanding exactly how they did it.
Bitcoin prices have recovered somewhat to around $79,000 after a sustained period below $70,000 — and at times, below $60,000. The rebound was driven in part by the Treasury’s decision to ramp up bond buybacks in hopes of lowering interest rates, and a short squeeze that liquidated over $4 billion in bets against the asset.
As prices come up, guardrails are continuing to fall. Though the Senate has struck out for now on the Clarity Act, both the SEC and CFTC have pledged rulemaking if Congress can’t force the bill through. To that end, the SEC just dropped “Regulation Crypto”: a 400-page proposed rule that carves out exemptions and safe harbors to reduce disclosures and reporting requirements on crypto issuers.
The CFTC has promised crypto rulemaking, too, and is busy battling with states over prediction markets — invoking emergency authority it hasn’t used in decades to prevent the catastrophe that would surely occur if Michiganders and New Yorkers couldn’t bet on things like “will Trump say the word ‘golf’ this week” (or sports. Mostly sports.)
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These days, the conversation in tech and business, and in a lot of society, is still all AI, all the time. And one of the most fundamental questions boils down to: How do you get people to change what they’re doing in regard to AI? For people who (understandably) have moral or ethical objections to the many harms caused by Big AI, there’s the challenge of how to drive action while lacking the resources and capital of the tech tycoons who’ve driven the broad cultural push towards AI adoption.
As a result of the power differential between those pushing AI and those fighting its advances, the typical rhetorical tactic for AI critics has been to try to attach stigma to the use of AI, and to the outputs of AI systems. There is also little cultural discussion, or even mention, of alternative offerings that aren’t from the Big AI companies, so the entire narrative is framed as either using the most harmful, exploitative, damaging AI tools from the likes of OpenAI, or using nothing at all.
And for the most part, this has been pretty effective for people who have any taste or sense of culture. If you’re a creator, or engaged in creative culture, you probably either can’t stand the AI aesthetic, or feel betrayed when you find out something that was appealing to you was AI-generated or made by someone who used generative AI to create it. The only creative discipline that’s broadly an exception to this is coding, where for the most part people don’t have as many aesthetic objections, but even there, people pretty stridently object to the slop aesthetic in user interfaces and other human-facing aspects.
There are, of course, diehard cohorts of AI advocates who insist that they love the AI aesthetic and don’t mind the hyper-real look to what these systems output, but the mainstream discourse in the arts, design and creative disciplines reached a consensus some time ago, and it’s fairly stringently enforced amongst fan communities.
For years, I’ve wanted to have a standalone version of Apple’s Touch ID authentication feature for my Mac, but without having to use an Apple keyboard. (I generally like their keyboards, but my daily driver keyboard these days is a big clicky mechanical beast.) I’d gone down various dead ends of trying to find substitutes, and even checked out the efforts where people had ripped apart expensive Apple keyboards just to scavenge the Touch ID sensors out of them. None of them quite solved the problem.
So today, I’m sharing an open source project called Dashboard Touch, which lets you make your own Touch ID-style sensor for your Mac, using low-cost off-the-shelf part. It’s based on an extensive refactoring of the excellent tinyTouch project by Zimeng Xiong, who recently cracked the code on how to make a useful fingerprint scanner system that’s also reasonably secure for regular Mac users. (You should definitely check out his project and support his new hardware build if you’re interested in this stuff.)
I took my own approach to this work because I wanted to focus a lot on having a friendly web interface for configuring exactly how the fingerprint sensor system works on your computer. When you get Dashboard Touch set up, it presents you with a nice web interface that runs right on your own Mac, letting you do things like set the color of the ring light on the fingerprint sensor, or capture your fingerprints so they’re recorded in the system.
Behind the scenes, the way the system works couldn’t be simpler. You buy a little fingerprint sensor, and a small microcontroller, wire them together (it was actually fun to get back to soldering stuff!), and then plug them into your computer with a regular USB cable. After you run the setup script, you just go to the web interface and add your finger(s) to the system.
The crypto industry is having an increasingly rough time as prices remain depressed. Bitcoin is hovering around its lowest price since autumn 2024, well below the “Trump pump” prices spurred by traders who hoped his inauguration would bring about a crypto renaissance. Robinhood reported crypto trading revenue down 38% and trading volumes down 35% year-over-year.1 Coinbase reported a net loss of $359 million and has stopped using trading volume as a key metric, claiming it “no longer reflects the breadth of our business”. This is, I’m sure, entirely unrelated to the fact that their trading volume is down 38%/48% over the past three/six months.2 At least three crypto exchanges — AscendEx,3 BitMEX,4 and BitMart5 — announced in July they would be shutting down. Other darlings from the web3 bubble have also announced they’re closing up shop recently: the Proof of Attendance Protocol [W3IGG], the Step App “move-to-earn” product [W3IGG], and MVMT Labs [W3IGG]. Poolin, a bitcoin mining firm that once accounted for a fifth of the global hashrate, has filed for bankruptcy [W3IGG].
The president’s own Trump Media & Technology Group posted a $238 million loss. While losses are routine for the company, this quarter’s came alongside announcements that the firm would be unwinding multiple crypto-related partnerships with Crypto.com.
And despite many, many promises from pro-crypto senators, the Clarity Act didn’t make it to a vote before the August recess. A cloture vote is scheduled for shortly after the Senate reconvenes, though it now looks less like a serious attempt to pass the bill and more like an effort to provide crypto industry super PACs with a list of opposition spending targets.
Citation Needed is an independent publication, entirely supported by readers like you. Consider signing up for a free or pay-what-you-want subscription — it really helps me to keep doing this work.
My newest Citation Needed project made an appearance on Last Week Tonight with John Oliver!
It’s a work in progress, but you can see the new interactive version of my map of the Trump family’s crypto ventures at map.citationneeded.news.
The map contains hundreds of business entities and links to the Trump family (with more being added!), augmented with data from the president’s most recent financial filings to estimate how much money is flowing in. It will be queryable by other researchers and journalists.
Click any node or connection in the Trump crypto empire map to open its panel and view explanatory annotations and citations. Toggle the income overlay to see financial-disclosure figures from the most recent filings. Search for entities, or filter by category.
The vast majority of the documents people use to do business are really quite poor. Presentations that make your eyes glaze over, memos that are inscrutable or unclear, and all kinds of artifacts that say more about how they were created than whatever message they were ostensibly trying to communicate. It's been one of my great frustrations for years, and a big part of why I wrote Make Better Documents a while ago. That post captured a list of the suggestions I've been giving people for years on how to make better, more effective documents that can actually do work for you, instead of fighting at cross purposes to your larger goals.
To my great surprise, that list of suggestions on how to make better documents got a pretty huge response, and a lot of people told me they found it really helpful. So now, I've created a Better Documents skills.md file for people who use LLM tools like Claude to help assist them in creating business documents, to prompt their AI tools to make better documents by default.
If you're not familiar, agent skills are simple text files that describe new capabilities or processes that LLMs can take advantage of when carrying out tasks. (They're Markdown files — more proof of how Markdown is taking over the world!) The way this skill works is that it's distilled the broad principles I outlined in that post into a series of 5 tests, covering areas like whether you've properly considered your target audience, whether the overall structure is correct, if you've overdone things with your formatting, and if things are named clearly, and then either generates a new file that follows those rules, or reviews an existing document to make sure it is obeying best practices.
It's nothing too fancy, but I've been using it for a while, and shared it with a few friends, and people have told me they found it handy and it's improved some of their routine documents. I'm especially glad that people have found it useful even if they're the kind of folks who would never let an LLM generate a document on their behalf, but do think software tools are useful for things like spell check or grammar check. I see this as being a tool in that kind of category.
The Clarity Act, a sweeping cryptocurrency market structure bill aimed at enshrining the crypto industry’s deregulatory wins into law, may be dead. Republicans’ “compromise” on ethics, endorsed by the President — a temporary provision that would expire when Trump leaves office, enforced only by a Justice Department run by his former personal lawyer — has been met with the response it deserves: Senator Angela Alsobrooks, one of two Democrats who voted to advance the bill out of Senate Banking, called it “an unserious offer”.
The crypto industry has spent $200 million (and counting) since 2024 to elect a Congress that would pass sweeping deregulatory crypto legislation. What they got was a bill too corrupt for Democrats to pass, a Republican majority too cowardly to rein in the president, and a president who won’t sign anything that meaningfully threatens his $1.4 billion-a-year grift.
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With the Senate only in session for about two more weeks before the August recess, the Clarity Act cryptocurrency market structure bill’s chances of passing are growing slimmer by the day. Any hope of the bill clearing both chambers before August is already dead, given that the House begins its recess session at the end of this week. The Senate has a little longer — until August 7 — although some Senators have already said they will be absent next week to attend the funeral of Senator Lindsey Graham.1
One aspect of strategy that’s been largely lost in the tech industry in recent years is how to compete against platforms, since the major tech companies have gotten so big that markets are no longer competitive. However, the AI market is still early enough, and users and society are still angry enough, that the Big AI companies can lose.
But for them to lose, everybody else in the ecosystem has to carry out the nearly-lost art of platform strategy. Tech companies (and even open source communities!) used to carry out these tactics in emerging product categories ranging from desktop office suites to operating systems to web browsers, though over the decades, the lesson that big tech learned was, basically, that they should play dirty.
You win platform strategy battles through power and persuasion. We're going to get both.
Historically, we would have relied on regulators or media to help hold bad actors in the tech space accountable, but in the United States, these entities are largely not going to help very much. Some state and local governments may assist, and some independent journalists or smaller media outlets are pushing for accountability, but the most powerful entities are either captured or complicit in many cases, so we don’t have the institutional pushback that had sometimes been present in earlier points of technological change.
“[T]here can be alternatives. What we can imagine is, rather than the ChatGPT killer, a lot of different little AIs from little responsible players.”
That’s me, in The Guardian a few days ago, trying to distill a message that I’ve been trying to get out as broadly as possible for quite a while now. It's sort of like hoping a comet will take out the major AI players and a bunch of smaller new players will be the smarter, better-adapted mammals that take their place instead.
We’re in another one of those big inflection points for AI. Trump administration policymakers for AI suspended access to Anthropic’s newest product. All of these policymakers have a web of investments in competing players — including SpaceX, which is about to IPO — and the corruption and grift of this cohort are so extensive that it’s impossible to judge what the actual risks and reality are around any of these platforms or technologies, since no one involved is an honest broker.
More broadly, there’s been the widespread pushback against AI culturally, one that is undeniably strongest amongst those who were born in this century. But the adoption patterns and usage data show that even younger people are using some AI tools. And that’s a pattern that we’ve seen before, with social media. We have a significant group of people knowing that a technology contradicts some of their values, preferences, or beliefs, but using it anyway.
AI didn't make me faster. It made me willing to throw away a draft I would have died defending.
