Disclosure: Justin Moore is a paid subscriber of this publication but he didn't pay for this story or ask me to write it. It was relevant enough to share with you.
Sponsorships expert Justin Moore launched Sponsor Mole today, a new app to help you find and pitch brand deals. For those who are tired of sourcing their own sponsorships, searching for contacts or figuring out what to pitch, you might find what Justin built useful.
Before you read more, you should know that I am a certified Justin Moore fanboy. I have his book Sponsor Magnet, I went to his conference by the same name. I've been to his challenges. I've seen him speak live. I am consistently impressed with his advice and his execution. Sponsor Mole was no exception.
I attended the online launch event for Sponsor Mole today with about 100 other people to see how the app works. The promise of Sponsor Mole is that it will "dig up your next brand deal." In the demo, Justin showed how you can connect your channels, choose your niche and location and Sponsor Mole will serve brand deal ideas to you. You can also search for contacts directly if you know which brands you want to work with—you'll get an email address for the influencer partnerships contact. Justin said they partner with sales intelligence platform Apollo to grab those email addresses.
If you liked this piece, you should subscribe to my premium newsletter. It’s $70 a year, $18 a quarter, or $7 a month, and in return you get a weekly newsletter that’s usually anywhere from 10,000 to 18,000 words, including vast, detailed analyses of NVIDIA, Anthropic and OpenAI’s finances, and the AI bubble writ large.
My Hater's Guides To the SaaSpocalypse, Private Credit and Private Equity are essential to understanding our current financial system, and my guide to how OpenAI Kills Oracle pairs nicely with my Hater's Guide To Oracle, as well as the Hater’s Guide To Oracle (Part 2).
Subscribing to premium is both great value and makes it possible to write these large, deeply-researched free pieces every week. This week's premium will be the finale to The Hater's Guide To Circular Financing, where I’ll talk about the history of this particular flavor of financial shenanigans, and the current users outside of NVIDIA.
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 The Terminal.
This blog is live updated all week—check the "last updated" date above
It's a nice and slow Monday for small business news. Not much going on other than the US and Canada still at odds about their trade agreement. We'll be paying a lot more for many types of goods starting September 8 if they don't figure it out. Apple's gearing up for their big iPhone event next week so it's a good time to rush out to the Apple store if you've been meaning to upgrade. I've got some alts for Loom if you're bailing on them with the price hike.
I'm keeping an eye on what Stripe is up to (read my updated story on what's been happening with their acquisitions) and Airtable's projected downfall post-Bending Spoons buyout.
Here's what's shaping up this week...
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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If you find yourself traveling through Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson airport, you might stumble upon a local restaurant named Paschal's. It's a plain looking establishment with a warm buffet full of soul food in front. You wouldn't think much about how this place came to be while enjoying their famous Southern fried chicken, but their existence takes us back decades into the fight for Black-owned businesses to simply have the opportunity to do business with the city.
Paschal's was founded in 1947 as a small sandwich shop in Atlanta's Historic West End by two brothers, James and Robert Paschal. They quickly grew from there, expanding their restaurant, adding a motel, and opening a jazz club. Their venue—La Carrousel—was the only nightclub in the city to allow Black patrons at that time. By the 70s, business and living conditions were finally starting to change, thanks to decades of civil rights work, much of which happened at Paschal's. Their restaurant was a favorite gathering spot of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr and his colleagues. Ebony magazine dubbed Atlanta the Black Mecca in 1971, citing the success of the Paschal brothers as part of the progress. Maynard Jackson became Atlanta's first Black mayor a few years later.
One of Mayor Jackson's key projects was expanding and updating the airport, hence why it bears his name. Along with that airport development came new contracts for vendors to service the facility and Paschal's was well-positioned to be part of it. They linked up with a Memphis-based corp named Dobbs House, who were already involved in the airline business nationwide, to pitch a joint venture running food, beverage and retail at the Atlanta airport. Together, they won the 15 year contract. It was one of the largest government contracts ever won by a minority-owned business. Paschal's would go on to run concessions at 18 airports at the height of their operation and to win additional contracts with Hartsfield-Jackson airport. You can still taste a piece of their legacy if you stop by Concourse B.
I wasn't around to interview James and Robert Paschal about the moment when they signed that first contract but I imagine it felt like taking one big whack at a racist system that was only going to keep crumbling down. Yet, here we are 46 years later, plastering over all the doors they pried open.
What are you doing for Black Friday?
I'm always a Last Minute Nancy about Black Friday, coming up with a promotion the week before. But e-commerce marketing experts say you should be preparing now or maybe that it's even too late. I'm thinking about what I should do for Black Friday and I'm wondering what you have planned.—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.
[NVIDIA Company Meeting, the present day, YMCA playing]
JENSEN HUANG: We love NVIDIA, don’t we folks? We’re the biggest, most-beautiful semiconductor company, we make the biggest, hottest GPUs for Clammy Sammy and Wario Amodei’s huge, beautiful AI labs, but they can’t afford them because they’re losing so much money! [crowd booing]
It’s okay! It’s okay! Big strong men, the biggest muscles, big, beautiful, strong men like Satya Nadella are calling me, begging — they’re begging, can you believe it? — they’re begging me, “Sir, Sir, please ship me Vera Rubin sir! I can’t get enough!” [crowd braying] they can’t get enough of Vera Rubin! They’re begging me to get Vera over there! Vera! Where’s Vera! [scanning crowd] get her up here! No, no, don’t do it, she’s too shy!
We love Grace too, [voice turning gravely] Grace Blackwell, what a gal! I told them all we’re going to ship a trillion dollars of Grace Blackwell and Vera Rubin by the end of 2027, our beautiful girls Grace and Vera, they’re our biggest and most-expensive girls yet, our Gee-Pee-Yous, the media says “we don’t believe you sir!” but I’m gonna make everyone buy ‘em, hell I’m gonna give ‘em the money to do it like I did with CoreWeave and then I’m gonna tell Clammy Sammy and say “Samuel, give ‘em a few billion like you gave to Michael Intrator,” and he’ll say “yes sir!”
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.
For those of you just tuning in (aka YOU, you gorgeous soul): I wanted to make sure that you were aware of this series that's been happening for the last few weeks in the House of Study; it's been a lot of fun. We've been looking at the history of Jewish mysticism, both through looking at specific texts and by connecting a bunch of historical dots that aren't often connected for layfolk because so many people look at trees and not the ecosystem of which the forest is a part. The first two installments are below. Would love to have you join us in this conversation. 🌱❤️
Welcome back to YOUR Jewish Mystical Mystery Tour, Part Three!
Catch up on One and Two, if you'd like– or just come along for this ride:
Which tech company could destroy your business?
I've been thinking about which tech tool my business relies on so much that if it was sold or shut down, it would severely slowdown my work. I've got one in mind and I want to hear yours, if you dare to share. —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.
They disinvented the VCR. You might think that the reason we don't have VCRs anymore is because VCRs were supplanted by DVDs, PVRs and streaming, but that's not the case. They had it in for the VCR from the very start, and they never stopped trying to kill it. Eventually, they succeeded.
The VCR was one of the fastest-adopted technologies in the history of the world, and it was disruptive. The fact that you could record shows to watch later, skip the ads, build a library of your favorites, even loan your tapes around – it drove the studios and broadcasters nuts. The VCR hit the market under a cloud of litigation, and the lawsuits went all the way up to the Supreme Court, culminating with 1984's Betamax decision, whose key precept is that a new technology doesn't violate copyright law if it can "sustain a substantial, non-infringing use":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Corp._of_America_v._Universal_City_Studios,_Inc.
As important as the VCR was as a device – creating the home video market, which begat DVDs, then streaming – the Betamax decision is even more important.
If you liked this piece, you should subscribe to my premium newsletter. It’s $70 a year, $18 a quarter, or $7 a month, and in return you get a weekly newsletter that’s usually anywhere from 10,000 to 18,000 words, including vast, detailed analyses of NVIDIA, Anthropic and OpenAI’s finances, and the AI bubble writ large.
My Hater's Guides To the SaaSpocalypse, Private Credit and Private Equity are essential to understanding our current financial system, and my guide to how OpenAI Kills Oracle pairs nicely with my Hater's Guide To Oracle, as well as the Hater’s Guide To Oracle (Part 2).
Subscribing to premium is both great value and makes it possible to write these large, deeply-researched free pieces every week. This week's premium will be The Hater's Guide To Circular Financing - and how the AI industry is increasingly turning into a scheme to funnel money to NVIDIA and Broadcom at any cost.
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 The Terminal.
As Canada is learning (the hard way), the "art" of all of Trump's deals can be summed up in a single word: "renege":
https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/22/table-flipper/#graveyard-of-indispensable-nations
In 2020, Donald Trump ripped up NAFTA, a trade deal that conferred a huge advantage to the USA at Canada's expense, and replaced it with CUSMA, a trade deal that was even more advantageous to America, and even worse for Canada. In 2024, after being elected for the second time, Trump publicly railed against CUSMA using the exact same language he'd used to decry NAFTA, branding it "a very bad deal" that needed to be shredded and renegotiated.
To that end, Trump declared sweeping tariffs on Canada's exports, thereby raising the costs Americans paid for many everyday goods, because while Canada does not ship a lot of finished products to the US, it is a key supplier of parts and materials, all of which were made instantly more expensive thanks to the Trump tariffs. Trump went on to insist that Canada should annex itself to the US, becoming the "51st State." His operatives openly meddled in Canadian separatist movements, backing the "Wexit" partisans who want to separate the oil-rich, boom/bust-plagued province of Alberta from Canada.
Good morning, good afternoon or good evening. Over the weekend, the US and Canada decided to escalate themselves into a trade war and we all know who's fault that is. More tariffs are coming in both directions starting in September unless something changes fast.
LinkedIn, the people who brought you optimize this post with AI, say that their "seems like AI slop" button is working. Elsewhere in AI news, the real cost of running models like Anthropic's Fable 5 is separating the haves and the have nots.
The EU adopted new laws this month to ensure businesses are more responsible with their packaging, but the founder of a maker's marketplace says it could force small businesses to stop shipping to the EU altogether.
Here's what's shaping up this week...
This is Life as a Sacred Text, 🌱 an everybody-celebrating, justice-centered voyage into ancient stories that can illuminate our own lives.
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Jessi Jean says she made $7.4M this summer selling the Yap Challenge. How? It didn't hurt that she kept telling everyone how much money she was making in short spans of time. By my estimation, over 24,000 people joined Jessi's challenge with high hopes and big dreams to ride her coattails to their own multi-million dollar results by "yapping" on the internet.
Sure, some people wanted to learn how to make winning Instagram reels. But I spotted a lot of people buying this who wanted to replicate Jessi's success. They saw the growing revenue claims, starting with first launch on June 3, which yielded $1.2M according to Jessi. A month later, she recorded $1M in sales in about an hour. All summer, she posted videos about how much money the Yap Challenge brought in. For anyone watching this and the related conversation around it online, many seemed to believe that they could get a similarly exciting result either from the challenge itself or from studying the launch.
And Jessi makes it look so easy. All you have to do is just...yap.
The allure of easy revenue is strong. Life is expensive. Business is hard. Once we find the hidden door to the easy chute, we'll land on a big 'ol pile of cash and never struggle again.
Staying Solo debunks the business advice we get as solopreneurs that's really meant for bigger businesses than us. Maggie offers us a new framework for finding our own path to happy, successful solo businesses. We gathered in August 2026 to discuss what it means to stay solo right now.
Maggie Patterson is a consultant for service-based business owners tired of the same old business advice.
With over 20 years of experience as a self-employed service business owner, Maggie brings a flexible approach that works for you and your life because business should work for you, not the other way around. Find Maggie on her website and check out her podcasts Staying Solo and Duped.
What was your first paid speaking gig?
I'm writing a story about how entrepreneurs booked their first paid speaking gig. I want to hear about yours. Where was it and who was it 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.
Any frank assessment of your own achievements starts with an equally frank assessment of the world-historic forces that attended those achievements. For example, I often tell young people who want to get into tech, "Well, if you don't have the foresight and work ethic to have been born in 1971, I can't really help you."
When it comes to tech, being born in 1971 – to a computer scientist father, no less – conferred a tremendous advantage for my career chances. My dad – a refugee – came to Canada at a time when post-war public services meant that he could become the first person in his family to go to university, all the way to a doctorate.
That set me up for life in a house where tech and education were all around me. Both my parents are teachers, both from working class families where no one had ever gone beyond high school, who found themselves in a time and place where it was easier than at any time in history for people from backgrounds like theirs to attend university. I got to go to university, too, at a time when education was cheap enough that I could drop out of four schools before figuring out that it wasn't for me, and still be debt-free, largely thanks to income from a series of part-time jobs.
When I dropped out of my final degree program, it was to take a job in tech at a time when anyone with a little creativity, work ethic, aptitude and curiosity could walk into a career. Millions of us did it, and I ended up working as a freelancer, then founding a startup, and then going to EFF. I know I work hard, I know I apply myself to understanding the world around me, but also…when it comes to this kind of career, I was born on third base.
AI is alarming for many reasons: it's a dangerous financial bubble, an environmental catastrophe, and a tool for eroding wages and labor power. But in addition to all that, AI is an epistemic disaster.
We've had photoshopped images, voice impersonators and visual effects for years, of course, but with deepfakes, we've democratized access to reality-bending images, sounds and videos that appear real but are not. It's harder than ever to know what's true. Politicians and celebrities and activists show up in our feeds, declaring their fealty to this cause or product, or their fury at some turn in the world's events. Battlefields mound high with bodies and influencers marvel at impossible, sumptuous meals. It all seems plausible, and some of it is real, but not all of it, and because we know some of it is fake, we can't be sure if any of it isn't.
It's a very putinesque way of living. Vladislav Surkov was Vladimir Putin's media strategist, and he had a deadly effective tactic: he announced that he was covertly funding some of the groups that publicly opposed Putin, but did not disclose which of those opposition groups were fake. That meant that any of the groups could be fake, which meant that any discussion of the opposition was liable to devolve into an argument about its authenticity. Anything could be a lie, so nothing was necessarily true. Putin's method isn't to get you to believe a lie – it's to keep you from believing that anything is true.
That's life under AI – a world of uncertainty, an epistemological void full of plausible phantasms, some of which are actually real. A world where it's impossible to know what's true, and where anything might be fake.
You've got the writing part down but when it comes to publishing and selling your book, you're swimming in decisions. How do you actually find an audience of readers for your new book?
Lulu and I are here to help! We're partnering to bring you an event series this October on how to sell your book as an independent author.
Lulu is a tech company that can help you publish, print, distribute and sell your book or magazine worldwide. They've helped over 2M authors find their path from manuscript to market and they've worked with lots of people you know like author Justin Moore who wrote Sponsor Magnet and Indie Author Magazine.
Lulu enables you to sell books and automate fulfillment of orders directly from your website with print-on-demand. Lulu Direct and the Lulu API make it easy to know your customers and grow your business. They can also connect you to major retail paths like Amazon and Ingram. Lulu supports authors with generous resources on how to prep books for publishing and where is most effective to sell your books. Plus, they have an expert marketplace if you need to connect with an editor or cover designer for your publication.
Welcome back to part 2 of our Jewish Mystical Mystery Tour!
Here's Part One, if you missed it, or want a refresh:
So before we go much further we gotta look at the concept of the sefirot– what's often translated as "emanations" – of the divine.
The word is possibly from the Greek for “spheres” and possibly from the Hebrew for sapphire, in reference to Moses’ and the elders’ vision of God in Exodus. (As we saw last week, there's also a wordplay on the word for reading/speaking/counting.)
We first find them mentioned in Sefer Yetzirah, as mentioned last week. Unlike what we'll see later on, here they're considered truly to be dimensions of the physical universe.
Maybe it seems weird that AI bosses won't stop publicly rending their garments about the terrible potential of their products, from the jobspocalypse that will ensue when AI can do our jobs better than us, to the impending moment when the word-guessing programs learn too many words, wake up and turn us all into paperclips.
It seems weird that they won't stop fretting about this terrible potential – until you realize that every public pronouncement about this terrible potential is also a public boast about its potential, period.
That's very, very important, because all AI really has is potential. Actual, existing AI is useful at the margins, if you're already a skilled practitioner who can discern correct from incorrect outputs, and if you integrate AI judiciously so that it doesn't overwhelm your ability to pay attention to those outputs and apply your discernment to them:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/28/hitl-ers/#ai-ai-oh
If you liked this piece, you should subscribe to my premium newsletter.
It's $70 a year, $18 a quarter, or $7 a month, and in return you get a weekly newsletter that’s usually anywhere from 10,000 to 18,000 words, including vast, detailed analyses of NVIDIA, Anthropic and OpenAI’s finances, and the AI bubble writ large.
My Hater's Guides To the SaaSpocalypse, Private Credit and Private Equity are essential to understanding our current financial system, and my guide to how OpenAI Kills Oracle pairs nicely with my Hater's Guide To Oracle, as well as the Hater’s Guide To Oracle (Part 2). I've even done a two part Hater's Guide to NVIDIA.
Subscribing to premium is both great value and makes it possible to write these large, deeply-researched free pieces every week. To subscribe, use one of the following links: $70 a year, $18 a quarter, or $7 a month.
You don't have to believe that AI "art" is any good (I don't), nor do you have to believe that AI "art" can be any good (I don't) to understand that the reason that the capital markets are putting trillions into AI is that they believe they can fire workers of every kind and replace them with AI:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/18/asbestos-in-the-walls/#government-by-spicy-autocomplete
I'm an artist and a worker. I want to protect my labor interests. So do my peers from across the "creative industries." But a sizable group of my peers think the way we're going to protect our interests is by expanding copyright so that it's unambiguously illegal to scrape the internet, analyze the files retrieved by those scrapers, and publish that analysis (a process more familiarly known as "training AI"):
https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/17/how-to-think-about-scraping/
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. ❤️
Nobody explains copyright like Jennifer Jenkins, the director of the Duke Center for the Public Domain, in which capacity she is responsible for the annual New Year's roundups of all the materials entering the public domain (a series that started in the decades during which the public domain was frozen by the Sonny Bono Copyright Act):
https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/20/em-oh-you-ess-ee/#sexytimes
Jenkins has a gift for making one of the most complicated, worst understood, most consequential areas of law not only comprehensible, but also fascinating. Her late 2023 explanation of what "Mickey Mouse's copyright is expiring" actually meant was the single best explainer on the subject, in a crowded field:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/15/mouse-liberation-front/#free-mickey
I’ve heard from people in the past that my articles are too long, and I wanted to start by saying that, for the most part, they’re going to stay long, because I feel like the only way for me to make my arguments is to be as specific and detailed as possible about the things I’m talking about.
Then again, sometimes it’s just because I imagine arguments against my work in my head and want to pre-empt them.
Something about the AI bubble has made the boosters genuinely insane. They see these otherworldly declarations — hundreds of billions or trillions of dollars — and assume that nobody would say them in bad faith, and that the tech industry would never fail to live up to them, even though we’re barely a few years divorced from when Mark Zuckerberg burned $80 billion on the metaverse, what will one day be known as “the second-worst misallocation of capital in corporate history.”
When the boosters hear that OpenAI plans to spend $750 billion on compute costs through the end of 2030, they shrug their shoulders and say “it’ll work it out.” When they hear that hyperscalers have $1.65 trillion in off-balance-sheet obligations and debt, they nod approvingly, saying that “these are some of the richest and most-profitable companies in the world,” and that they will “simply keep raising debt.” It’s somewhere between number-blindness and make-believe — these are such unfathomably-large sums that it’s hard for the average person to assume anything other than that nobody would sign contracts agreeing to pay them without the confidence they’d be able to do so, even though it’s all very silly.
Funny thing about competition: there's both a pro-market and an anti-market case for a competitive system.
https://pluralistic.net/2026/08/13/one-chokable-throat/#too-clever-by-half
If your theory is that markets deliver prosperity by spurring businesses to provide the superior products and services at lower prices needed to attract and retain workers and customers, then competition is a must-have. Without competitors, companies are "too big to care":
https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/04/teach-me-how-to-shruggie/#kagi
Meanwhile, if you think that the pressure of greed will always drive companies to cheat, and want companies held in check by democratically accountable lawmakers and enforcers, then you also want competition, because otherwise, disorganized sectors of hundreds of small businesses collapse into oligarchic cartels. Members of these cartels cease to compete directly with one another and instead collude to rip off workers and customers, leaving them aslosh in ready cash they can mobilize to capture regulators, securing an enshittogenic policy environment that reflects the easily arrived-at consensus that's only possible when you boil a sector down to a small handful of firms, each of them "too big to jail":
I hope you're all doing well in the heat of the summertime, and perhaps getting your own moments with the fishies.
As we speak, I have the privilege to be on retreat with a number of brilliant faith leaders across traditions, working on the question of how best to expand support and engagement around trans rights and safety in our communities. (Can't say more than that now, but I'm allowed to share that much.)
As for us, well: It's time again: We all 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.
(We'll come back to the mysticism series next week.)
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.
One of my favorite rhetorical and analytical moves is joining things together (showing that two different, seemingly unrelated ideas are aspects of the same phenomenon) and taking them apart (resolving a paradox by demonstrating that what appears to be one, contradictory thing is actually two different things that have been lumped together).
"Taking things apart" is a very useful framework for understanding AI. How do we resolve the (seeming) paradox that some skilled workers report wonderful results from their work with AI, while others are full of dire warnings about the lurking defects in their AI-assisted outputs? Simple: the first group are "centaurs" (humans who are assisted by machines) and the second are "reverse centaurs" (humans who have been pressed into service as peripherals for machines):
https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/05/pop-that-bubble/#u-washington
What are we to make of the people who've been fired by bosses who replaced them with AI, in light of the fact that AI is demonstrably not able to do their (former) jobs? Again, it's simple if you separate out two distinct phenomena: "AI can do your job" is the first. The second is: "Your boss is a credulous dolt who is infinitely horny for replacing lippy workers with pliable machines, which made him an easy mark for an AI salesman who convinced him to fire you and replace you with an AI that can't do your job":
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.
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In the summer of 2013, two esoteric, technical, incredibly important texts were published within weeks of one another: the first is the Snowden leaks, which revealed a system of global, pervasive digital surveillance; the second was Thomas Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century, a book about the economic inevitability (and political instability) of oligarchy:
https://memex.craphound.com/2014/06/24/thomas-pikettys-capital-in-the-21st-century/
In 2013, it wasn't immediately apparent how these two works connected with one another, but in the years since, I've grown increasingly convinced that Snowden and Piketty can only be properly understood as describing two aspects of the same phenomenon.
Piketty's landmark volume was grounded in a detailed analysis of 300 years' (!) worth of global capital flows, painstakingly compiled by a large team of grad students from a massive set of heterogeneous records. The book's conclusion is the statement that "returns to capital exceed the rate of growth over the long term" (abbreviated as "r > g").
For a little under a year, everyone — myself included — has compared NVIDIA to Enron, largely because NVIDIA insisted, in detail, that it was nothing like Enron, WorldCom, or Lucent, a potent example of the Streisand Effect that would be much funnier if NVIDIA wasn’t holding up more than 7% of the value of the NASDAQ.
And as I covered in the first part of the Hater’s Guide To NVIDIA last year, there are material concerns about how the company makes money today and will continue to do so in the future.
I will concede that NVIDIA isn’t exactly like Enron in the sense that it isn’t, to my knowledge, doing anything outright fraudulent, like attempting to hide massive amounts of debt inside SPVs as Enron did with its “Raptors,” which I must be clear are distinct from the SPVs used in AI data center debt, though I’ll add that something being legal doesn’t make it a good idea or ethical.
That being said, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang has employed many of the same tactics used by Lucent, Nortel, and many of the big dot-com busts, but has been smart enough to make everybody else carry the risk.
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As I discussed in yesterday's free newsletter, analyst estimates have OpenAI and Anthropic making up over 70% of all AI revenues across Microsoft, Google and Amazon.
While some might have disagreed, Bloomberg is now reporting that OpenAI "accounted for more than half, and likely about 70%, of Microsoft's actual AI sales during its most recent fiscal year."
Bloomberg's maths is explained as such:
The actual disclosure from Microsoft comes from its most-recent earnings:
If you liked this piece, you should subscribe to my premium newsletter.
It's $70 a year, $18 a quarter, or $7 a month, and in return you get a weekly newsletter that’s usually anywhere from 10,000 to 18,000 words, including vast, detailed analyses of NVIDIA, Anthropic and OpenAI’s finances, and the AI bubble writ large.
My Hater's Guides To the SaaSpocalypse, Private Credit and Private Equity are essential to understanding our current financial system, and my guide to how OpenAI Kills Oracle pairs nicely with my Hater's Guide To Oracle, as well as the Hater’s Guide To Oracle (Part 2). I've even done a two part Hater's Guide to NVIDIA.
Subscribing to premium is both great value and makes it possible to write these large, deeply-researched free pieces every week. To subscribe, use one of the following links: $70 a year, $18 a quarter, or $7 a month.
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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A great deal of the discussion of the so-called benefits or problems with AI comes down to the theoretical jobs that are (or are not) lost as a result of things LLMs can (or cannot do), or the equally theoretical productivity benefits that’ll come from using LLMs in place of (or in conjunction with) humans.
Anthropic’s Economic Index and OpenAI’s Economic Research Exchange are marketing operations that exist to propagate the (wrongheaded) belief that LLMs are either leading or will soon lead to massive economic or productivity shifts, even though little or no actual evidence exists to show that this is the case, other than the occasional story about LLMs make people worse or slower at their jobs or single lines in studies that are used (incorrectly) to prove that “AI is making it harder to find a job for young people.” In fact, Anthropic’s Head of Economics recently said there was “no material increase in the unemployment rate to date.”
These conversations materially detract from the actual harms or effects of AI, and exist only to make you scared that AI will take your job. They do not have any vested interest in expressing the actual economic effects of AI, which are, at this point, a simmering cauldron of different speculative bets on whether or not LLMs — a definitively niche technology — will create or become general-purpose software (per Roger MacNamee) that scales into the next Google Search, iPhone, or Microsoft 365.
As I’ve argued again and again, the AI industry’s revenues are, outside of Anthropic and OpenAI, incredibly small. Even in Exponential View’s deliberately-pro-industry analysis, there’s only around $110 billion in trailing twelve-month revenues across the entire industry, including OpenAI and Anthropic’s cloud spend.
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Hey, let's talk about Jewish music and remixes today, because why not?
That is to say– taking some classic songs and setting them to more contemporary beats. Does it work? Does it not? When does it work? When not?
I'm not presuming that you necessarily know all the originals–I think you can get a sense of what these artists are doing even if you don't. In a couple of cases I've linked to other versions so that you can access them.
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.
This is Life as a Sacred Text 🌱, an everybody-celebrating, justice-centered voyage into ancient stories that can illuminate our own lives. 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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Life is a Sacred Text is about truth & transformation, with ancient stories serving as mirrors & lights. Collective liberation. Everybody-celebratory.
I'm excited to (re)introduce you to some of the work of the wonderful, badass Elsa Sjunneson–novelist; memoirist; lifelong activist; three-time Hugo Award winner; sometime writer for Marvel Comics; self-described Deafblind hurricane in a vintage dress who will be our next LEARN, TO DO speaker.
What appears below isn't quite like what you'll see in the LEARN TO DO training, which is really about applying the wisdom of the Disability Justice movement in ways that can transform all of us, not only in our understanding of access, but our ways of doing... everything. As Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha wrote in Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice,
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
This is Life as a Sacred Text 🌱, an everybody-celebrating, justice-centered voyage into ancient stories that can illuminate our own lives. 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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Life is a Sacred Text is about truth & transformation, with ancient stories serving as mirrors & lights. Collective liberation. Everybody-celebratory.
Tonight begins the holiday of Tisha B'Av, during which Jews mourn the destruction of the First and Second Temples, the expulsions from Spain and elsewhere, and many other harms and calamities.
(Reminder: If you're fasting, drink lots of water now, and there are many, many reasons not to fast; if you have one, it's a mitzvah to eat.)
President Donald Trump’s most recent financial disclosure reveals that he earned more than $1.4 billion in income from his cryptocurrency businesses alone last year. These crypto-related ventures account for more than half of the $2.2 billion in income Trump reported overall, through an unprecedented self-enrichment scheme that has made him and members of his family fabulously wealthy while investors who bought into his projects have lost money hand over fist. Forbes most recently estimated Trump’s personal net worth at $6.5 billion, a staggering increase from his estimated $2.3 billion valuation as a private citizen in 2024.1
The bulk of the crypto windfall came from Trump’s two primary crypto ventures. He brought in $635 million thanks to a licensing agreement with “Celebration Coins” — likely an erroneous reference to Celebration Cards LLC, one of the firms in the web of companies responsible for the $TRUMP memecoins. Another $529 million came via sales of World Liberty Financial’s $WLFI token, whose buyers are not named in the disclosure but include crypto billionaire Justin Sun.
The filing also reports more than $260 million from equity sales in Stablecoin Holdco LLC and WLF Holdco LLC, both entities in the World Liberty Financial tangle of companies. Again, the buyers are not disclosed, but some of these proceeds are likely his share of the $500 million investment by the United Arab Emirates into World Liberty Financial, inked shortly before the White House approved the sale of highly restricted AI chips to the country [I83, 87, 93, 94]. That we know the investment came from the UAE, which was simultaneously negotiating deals with both President Trump and World Liberty-connected Steve Witkoff [I95], is known only thanks to outside reporting by the Wall Street Journal.
Trump’s family members are also profiting handsomely from their roles in the family’s crypto empire, and from their own crypto-related ventures. Industry groups clearly see them as conduits to favorable political outcomes — Donald Trump Jr. was named to advisory roles at both the Kalshi and Polymarket prediction market platforms, for example, and likely not solely on the basis of his business acumen. That segment of the industry has enjoyed a particularly favorable shift in regulatory stance, with the CFTC — under the control of a single Trump loyalist Commissioner — intervening to fight back against state regulators in court cases against these firms [I101, 104, 105]. But because they don’t serve in formal roles, Trump’s family members are not required to file financial disclosures, leaving much of their earnings hidden from public view. Despite this, both sons have met with high-level officials from at least eight foreign governments since Trump’s re-election, to talk both business and policy.2
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.
I was hard at work building Tech Influence Watch, my campaign finance tracker that helps you follow how the cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence industries are influencing politics, hence the slightly longer gap between recap issues. The industry spending didn’t slow down in the meantime — if anything, it’s ramped up as more states held their primaries — and crypto-related Trump corruption and legislative maneuvering has continued apace. That means there’s lots to cover, so let’s get right into it.
I helped Reuters with a recent report that concluded that, unlike their investors, “the [Trump] family always wins” in its crypto business deals. While the Trump family has profited $2.3 billion from their crypto ventures, according to Reuters’ estimates, investors have lost a conspicuously similar $2.3 billion. I saw a lot of reactions to the piece to the effect that investors didn’t “lose” money, they were merely paying for pardons or other benefits. But I think Reuters did a great job of highlighting the everyday people who’ve been suckered by the Trumps’ various crypto schemes, who genuinely believed they would make money if they bought the $TRUMP memecoin or shares in the family’s crypto-linked businesses. “When a stock has presidential backing in a way — at least from his sons — you would think it would go up,” explained one buyer of shares in ALT5 Sigma. (ALT5 Sigma is a Trump-linked treasury company that holds a significant quantity of $WLFI tokens issued by the Trump family’s World Liberty Financial [I90, 92, 98].) He’s a machinist who’s lost $32,700 — 79% of his initial investment — not someone pursuing a pardon or regulatory relief.1
And although that machinist expresses hope that his investment might recover, he may well be in for an even worse outcome. Alt5 Sigma, which recently renamed itself to AI Financial,a has reported in its most recent quarterly SEC filing that it is continuing to lose money, raising “substantial doubt about the Company’s ability to continue as a going concern within one year”.2 The company tries to soften this news with the claim that it has a “significant financial resource” in the 7.3 billion $WLFI tokens held in its treasury, but also acknowledges “significant market price risk” if it were to sell them.
The filing reports these tokens have a fair value of $703.4 millionb — a figure the company derives, in its own words, from “quoted (unadjusted) prices”: that is, the number of tokens × market price, with no discount for the position’s size and illiquidity. That “value” was stale almost immediately. In a June 10 disclosure, the company valued the same holdings at roughly $380 million, having lost more than $300 million in paper value in just ten weeks.3 Even that figure overstates what a sale could fetch, because a company in distress holding a fire sale on tokens issued by a related company is practically guaranteed to crash the token price. And furthermore, the firm acknowledges that all tokens are locked until at least late August, with some subject to extra conditions on sale.
“[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.
The Second Circuit of Appeals, which in November 2025 heard oral arguments in Sam Bankman-Fried’s appeal of his November 2023 conviction [I96], has upheld the verdict and rejected Bankman-Fried’s request for a new trial with a new judge. I’ve purchased the full document so it’s uploaded to CourtListener’s RECAP archive.
The appeal was one of Bankman-Fried’s few remaining options after Judge Lewis Kaplan denied his motion for a new trial in April [No new trial].
Bankman-Fried tried to argue before the Second Circuit that his FTX cryptocurrency exchange was solvent before, during, and after its bankruptcy, and that its dramatic collapse was simply the result of a temporary liquidity squeeze caused by a sudden wave of withdrawals. (At various points he has made clear that his definition of “solvency” is his own, novel one.)
Indeed, some of FTX’s investments — particularly one in the Anthropic artificial intelligence firm, which develops the now popular Claude suite of AI tools — proved lucrative after FTX’s demise, and substantially helped to fund restitution to FTX’s customers.
Sixteen years after the Citizens United decision opened the floodgates to unlimited corporate spending in American elections, corporations and billionaires are regularly spending tens of billions of dollars on our elections. While many people are aware that interests like big oil, big pharma, and big banks spend heavily on elections, there are some newer entrants in this field that voters largely don’t know about. The cryptocurrency industry alone spent $130 million in 2024, and is on track to spend even more in 2026. Now AI is following the same playbook, with the same operatives running both campaigns.
I’ve spent the past two years tracking this spending through Follow the Crypto, which I just relaunched this week as Tech Influence Watch — an expanded real-time tracker covering both crypto and AI political spending across the 2026 cycle.
But crypto and AI are just the newest entrants in a system that was deliberately built to let them do exactly what they’re doing. To understand that system, I wanted to talk to someone who’s been fighting for years to dismantle it.
Tiffany Muller is the president of End Citizens United, the organization working to end the influence of big money in politics. In this conversation, we talk about what Citizens United enabled, how it’s shaped policy outcomes on everything from climate to gun control to healthcare, what’s different about this newest wave of tech industry spending, and what it would actually take to fix the system.
I’ve been running my website Follow the Crypto since 2024, tracking the cryptocurrency industry’s influence on our democracy. The industry spent more than $130 million buying the 2024 elections, and the strategy worked. Pro-crypto politicians have proposed or passed industry-drafted legislation that threatens to open the floodgates to even more predatory crypto products, regulatory agencies were gutted, and crypto executives bought direct access to the President and positions in the White House. Now the artificial intelligence industry is following the same playbook.
Continuing to track only crypto would mean missing half the story. The same operatives are running both campaigns. Josh Vlasto, longtime adviser and spokesperson for Fairshake — the cryptocurrency super PAC network responsible for the bulk of crypto’s 2024 spending — is now simultaneously heading Leading the Future, a pro-AI super PAC network.1 Chris Lehane, the political consultant and Coinbase board member who helped establish Fairshake and famously told Coinbase employees who questioned whether a crypto voter bloc existed that they would simply invent one,2 is now also an OpenAI executive and one of the people behind the Leading the Future PAC network.3 The same venture capital firms are funding both: Andreessen Horowitz, a crypto heavyweight in the 2024 elections, is now splitting its political spending across crypto and AI PACs.
The PACs may look different from the outside, but they’re increasingly the same operation with aligned goals: deregulate the tech sector, slash consumer protections, and allow tech companies to capture even more enormous profits at the expense of everyday people.
So I’ve expanded the site to track both. It’s now called Tech Influence Watch, and it documents more than $400 million (and counting) in contributions from crypto and AI companies and their executives this election cycle. When two industries with shared backers and shared operatives are spending this much to write their own regulations, someone needs to be watching.
I was reading Hacker News the other day, as one does, and a post titled "Using AI to write better code more slowly" had climbed near the top. I read it, and then I just kinda sat there chewing on it while I worked for the afternoon. Ultimately, I think Nolan has named something I'd been turning over for months without quite being able to articulate.
I've been writing about AI tools for a little while now, With the general tone being somewhere between lightly skeptical and inquisitive. Right now I'm basically of the belief that AI leaves the hard problems exactly as hard as they were before. The easy stuff is inarguably easier, and boilerplate is functionally eliminated, but it isn't the society-ending inflection point everyone keeps fretting about.
What Nolan's post did was clear a path through the part of the question I hadn't worked out.
Before I'm branded a hater or in denial, let me be clear about where I'm standing: I'm enthusiastic about these tools. I use them every day, and I've built things in the last year (including a business) that I would not have started, much less finished, without an agent (or several) at my elbow. I regularly teach, encourage, and recommend the use of these tools at work and as a freelancer
The spat between World Liberty Financial and Justin Sun has escalated to dueling lawsuits after both sides raced to the courthouse. Sun, who only just escaped fraud allegations himself after investing more than $200 million in Trump family crypto projects, is now accusing World Liberty of the very behavior he was accused of, while simultaneously trying to convey to Trump that he’s still a huge fan.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who supposedly divested from his Cantor Fitzgerald financial firm by transferring it to his sons, was still the man GOP leaders tried to get on the phone when they discovered a Cantor-funded pro-crypto super PAC was planning to back Ken Paxton in the Texas Senate Republican primary runoff. And despite Lutnick’s supposed lack of involvement with his former firm, the $1.75 million planned ad was still nixed.
Crypto’s back to trying to convince politicians that voters care deeply about crypto, but a CoinDesk poll found that 76% of voters they polled don’t find it important to the upcoming elections. With 60% of respondents saying they think crypto will be a negative force in the economy, 73% disapproving of senior US officials having personal business ties to crypto, and 62% saying they don’t trust the Trump administration to properly oversee crypto, I’d be curious to know how many of those voters who said they do find it important feel that way because they are concerned about crypto’s current regulatory trajectory.1
Last month, the feud between the Trump family’s World Liberty Financial and its largest token investor, Justin Sun, escalated to furious tweets and legal threats after the project froze Sun’s WLFI tokens and refused to unfreeze them for months [I104]. Both sides have now filed near-simultaneous lawsuits against each other.
If you followed along with the recent joyful celebrations of the Artemis cruise around the moon, and took a moment to dive into the photographic archives of the mission, you might have noticed that all of the original images were shared by NASA on the venerable photo sharing service Flickr. What you might not know is… why?
First, some background for folks who might not know what Flickr is, or who may have forgotten. Flickr is a social sharing site for photography which was founded in 2004, and these days people might say that it shares some of its cofounders with Slack, though back when Slack started, everybody said that the company was started by some of the founders of Flickr. That’s because Flickr was arguably the most influential site of the Web 2.0 era, helping define everything from the user interface design to the bright colors to the easy way that developers could access data from the platform. A lot of the things that we take for granted on the modern social internet, like a friendly “voice” used to communicate to users, were pioneered by Flickr, and then quickly came to be considered standard expectations for the apps and sites that followed. It’s hard to imagine that sites from Tumblr to Grindr would have omitted their final “e”s without Flickr’s precedent.
Flickr spun out of a Canadian gaming company called Ludicorp, founded by Stewart Butterfield (later CEO/co-founder of Slack) and Caterina Fake (later an investor and chair of Etsy). The photo-sharing service was extracted from the pieces of a somewhat unsuccessful attempt at multiplayer gaming called “Game Neverending”, but it retained the playfulness of that game even as it became a social app. Flickr also inherited the fine-grained privacy controls and thoughtful community features of earlier social platforms like LiveJournal — along with being actively, intentionally moderated by actual humans who worked diligently to prevent destructive behaviors on the platform. This meant that, more than 20 years ago, this early photo sharing community typically had better social norms than people see on today’s social media apps. (A little side note: Part of Flickr/Ludicorp’s initial funding was with public money. What a remarkable way to fund lasting innovation!)
With all of these groundbreaking features, Flickr didn’t just inspire lots of other entrepreneurs to create a new wave of Web 2.0 startups, it also attracted millions of users who, for the first time, began taking photos with the primary goal of sharing them online. Prior to this moment, the earliest phones with decent cameras were coming to market (it would be years until the iPhone came out), and other photo services of the time were still often oriented towards taking film to processing facilities, and then having the professionals at those facilities scan the resulting images and post them to a clunky online service where you could tediously click through them in a virtual album. Until Flickr, photo sharing online was essentially still analog, even if the experience was technically happening online.
The cultural battles over AI have broken down over predictable lines in the past few years, with critics rightfully calling out the big AI platforms for training on content without consent, recklessly building without considering environmental impact, and designing platforms that are unaccountable because their code and weights (the parameters that describe how an AI model works) aren’t open for third-parties to evaluate. The AI zealots have done themselves no favors, by not only dismissing all of these valid criticisms, but by also making increasingly outlandish and extreme claims about the capabilities of the Big AI platforms, while simultaneously scaremongering about the brutal effect they’ll have on people’s lives and careers. It’s no wonder the public sentiment about AI has become so negative.
But a small cohort of us who are curious about LLMs as a technology, yet deeply critical of Big AI companies for their impact on society, have been asking what would “good” AI look like? Is it possible to make versions of these technologies that provide real benefits, and actually help people, without all of the attendant harms? We’ve had prior eras of machine learning tools that were useful technologies without being massively destructive — are the negative externalities intrinsic to LLMs in general?
We might have just gotten our first glimpse at an AI that’s actually good.
This is just one small example that I saw recently, in a very unexpected place, but I can’t get it out of my mind. It’s not a tool that every person in the world is going to use, but it feels a bit like the famous William Gibson quote, “The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed.” This might be a little tiny bit of a good AI future, and now we just need to distribute the same kind of thing to a lot more people.
It's been a decade since we lost Prince, and I wanted to take a moment to offer a look back at some of the pieces I've written over the years, and share some of the work I've done, and hopefully it will give you a chance to explore some aspect of his artistry or legacy that you haven't yet had a chance to discover!
Perhaps a good place to start: It's time to discover Prince — a set of starting points to look at Prince's musical catalog, with selected albums (with more than 40 albums to pick from, it can be overwhelming to know where to start!) and some playlists that I created specifically to help new fans find out exactly why we love his music so much.
Another comprehensive overview: Every video Prince ever made. I walked through all of the music videos Prince made over the four decades of his career, offering some info and context that might help you find which ones are most compelling (or weird!) and worth your time.
I've also gotten to guest on a number of podcasts and in other media over the years to discuss various aspects of Prince's career. Perhaps none was more exciting for me than talking about Prince's history of technological innovation for the official Prince podcast. Then, no less than the New York Times described me as a "Prince scholar" when it covered the discovery of the earliest known footage of Prince as a child. There are a bunch of other podcast appearances (see below) but these felt like the pinnacle of legitimacy for my career as a Prince fan.
I'd been using Claude Code for about a week when I asked it to scaffold a Laravel authentication module. It generated the routes, the controllers, the middleware, the views. Clean code. Well-structured. Proper separation of concerns. I skimmed it, nodded, ran the tests.
Green across the board. I pushed to staging, opened the browser, typed in credentials, and watched it redirect me to a 500 error. The middleware was checking for a session token that the login controller never set. The tests passed because the test helper bypassed middleware entirely.
I fixed it in ten minutes. But the thing that stuck with me wasn't the bug. It was how convinced I'd been, for about thirty seconds, that the AI had just written a flawless auth system. The code looked right. The tests said it was right. The only thing that caught the problem was actually trying to log in.
I want to tell you this was a one-time thing, that I learned my lesson and it never happened again.
It’s rare that you get to see work that directly helps those who most deserve it, but I want to tell you about the opportunity we so seldom get to actually contribute in a way that we know will have real impact.
I’ve been on the board of the Lower Eastside Girls Club for about a decade, getting a front row seat to seeing what a truly community-focused and effective organization can do for those in need when things are done the right way. This is the model of what we want our public institutions to be — laser-focused on the needs of its members, extremely ambitious in its goals, and measurably effective in its outcomes.
I’m asking you to support the Girls Club in one of two ways:
The Girls Club serves girls who are amongst the most in-need in all of New York City, and boosts important measures like graduation rates to levels 15% higher than the district average. The way that the club does it is by providing year-round programming in the arts, STEM, civic engagement, leadership, wellness, college and career pathways, and much more — including a deep connection to a sense of community. All of this happens in a facility that is nothing short of magical, where there’s a green roof, a full recording studio, a commercial-grade kitchen, a wonderful crafting room, and even an actual planetarium. And all of these resources are made available to the girls entirely for free.
We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.
You install an AI coding assistant. You type a prompt. It writes some code. You fix the parts it got wrong. You type another prompt. This is the loop, and for most people it stays the loop forever. Prompt, generate, fix, repeat.
I did this for about three months. It was useful. I built things faster than I would have alone. I explored codebases I didn't know. I generated documentation nobody else was going to write. The tool was good at its job, and I was good at asking it to do that job, and that was the whole story.
Then in December something shifted, and the story stopped being about a tool and started being about a system.
In just the last few weeks, we’ve seen a series of software security vulnerabilities that, until recently, would each have been the biggest exploit of the year in which they were discovered. Now, they’ve become nearly routine. There’s a new one almost every day.
The reason for this rising wave of massively-impactful software vulnerabilities is that LLMs are rapidly increasing in their ability to write code, which also rapidly improves their ability to analyze code for security weaknesses. These smarter coding agents can detect flaws in commonly-used code, and then create tools which exploit those bugs to get access to people’s systems or data almost effortlessly. These powerful new LLMs can find hundreds of times more vulnerabilities than previous generations of AI tools, and can chain together multiple different vulnerabilities in ways that humans could never think of when trying to find a system’s weaknesses. They’ve already found vulnerabilities that were lurking for decades in code for platforms that were widely considered to be extremely secure.
The rapidly-decreasing cost of code generation has effectively democratized access to attacks that used to be impossible to pull off at scale. And when exploits are less expensive to create, that means that attackers can do things like crafting precisely-targeted phishing scams, or elaborate social engineering attacks, against a larger number of people, each custom-tailored to play on a specific combination of software flaws and human weaknesses. In the past, everybody got the same security exploit attacking their computer or system, but now each company or individual can get a personalized attack designed to exploit their specific configuration and situation.
Now, we’ve had some of these kinds of exploits happening to a limited degree with the current generation of LLMs. So what’s changed? Well, we’ve been told that the new generation of AI tools, currently in limited release to industry insiders and security experts, are an order of magnitude more capable of discovering — and thus, exploiting — security vulnerabilities in every part of the world’s digital infrastructure.
These days, we’re all living in a constant state of crisis, foisted upon us by a world where those who are meant to keep things stable are the least stable factors in our lives. The chaos and stress of that reality makes it difficult to make any plans, let alone to make decisions if you have responsibilities for a team or organization that you’re meant to be leading. It’s easy to imagine there’s nothing we can do, or to feel hopeless. But a resource that just arrived served as a timely reminder for me that a crisis doesn’t have to be paralyzing, and we don’t have to feel overwhelmed when trying to plan how we’ll respond as leaders.
The topic of crisis has been on my mind again as I’ve been looking at the work of some friends who are the most fluent experts on the topic of crisis that I know, prompted by the release of Marina Nitze, Mikey Dickerson and Matthew Weaver's new book, Crisis Engineering.
There’s nothing more valuable than people who can step in during a moment of crisis and provide clarity, not just on how to make it through that moment, but how to seize that opportunity to actually make better things possible. A few years ago, at some of the most stressful and harrowing moments I’ve had as a leader in my business career, I got to connect with a remarkable team who ran towards the crisis that our organization was in, and helped our team get through that moment and not just persevere, but to thrive. I thought a bit about the famous Mr. Rogers line about “look for the helpers”, and Matthew, Marina, and Mikey's team at their company Layer Aleph really were the equivalent of the helpers when it comes to the place where where technology meets the real world.
I’d first heard legend of their way of working in the days and weeks after the notoriously rough launch of Healthcare.gov (This was back when the federal government aspired to competency, inability to deliver was considered a scandal, and media would accurately describe something that didn’t function as a failure.) A small, scrappy, multifunctional team had been able to transform the culture of this hidebound segment of the federal government, and deliver a set of services that are saving American lives to this day. That story is detailed well in the book, but at the time, the conventional wisdom was that this was a catastrophe so impossibly complex, in a bureaucracy so hopelessly broken, that nobody could possibly fix it. And then they did. (With the help of a lot of brilliant and motivated colleagues.)
One of the most infuriating tropes that I see repeated in media is executives (usually from boring old companies) insisting that their employees don’t want to work hard. Media outlets dutifully repeat this pernicious lie, despite there being no evidence to back it up, and then cultural commentators either credulously amplify it, or actively take part in advancing the narrative as part of their agenda, even though they know it’s false. There is an apparently infinite attention appetite for commentators who troll for attention by saying how “kids these days” don’t want to work hard.
As has often been documented, the hoary chestnut of saying “nobody wants to work anymore” dates back decades, if not centuries, and it’s never been true in all those years of deletion. It is, firstly, a tactic that bosses use for negging workers in a vain attempt to try to drive down wages (and to successfully get media to blame people for their own underemployment), but it also serves as an effective demonstration of just how little society understand about what actually motivates people.
I’ve helped found six companies in my life, and been involved in the start of a handful of other startups and nonprofits, and literally every single one was full of people who love to work hard. The simple reason for that shared trait is that all of those teams were comprised of groups of people with a few key things in common:
If people have these things, and believe in what they’re doing together, they will joyfully work their asses off.
I keep a file called history.jsonl on my laptop. I didn't put it there. Claude Code did, logging every prompt I've sent since October. The other day I counted the lines: 3,976. Six months, almost four thousand requests, across a dozen projects and at least five programming languages. That's roughly 23 prompts per day if you average it, though averages lie, and I should know better than to trust them.
I wasn't looking for this file. I was looking for something else entirely, the way you find an old journal in a drawer when you're hunting for a screwdriver. But once I started reading, I couldn't stop. Not because the prompts were interesting on their own. Most of them are mundane. But the shape of them, the way they change from October to March, told a story I hadn't noticed while I was living it.
My first prompts average almost 300 characters. That's roughly two solid sentences, sometimes three. They're polite, contextual, and careful. "Given the database schema located in './packages/api/db/data/schema.sql', generate a mermaidjs diagram explaining the database entity structure and all relationships." I'm specifying file paths. I'm explaining what I want and why. I'm framing the task before delegating it.
Reading them now, they sound like emails to a new contractor. Here's the work, here's where to find things, here's what I need back. There's a formality to it, a hedging, that I recognize from every first week at a new job. You over-explain because you haven't calibrated trust yet. You don't know what the other party knows, so you fill the gaps preemptively.
