Where do you sell your book(s)?
We're about to launch an event series on selling your books and we're revisiting the story Are books a revenue stream? today. I want to hear how you're selling your books. Ebooks count too! Where do you sell them? How do you promote them?—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.
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, his 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.
If you liked this piece, you should subscribe to my premium newsletter. It’s $70 a year, or $7 a month, and in return you get a weekly newsletter that’s usually anywhere from 5,000 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. On Friday, I'm going to pull together exactly how much money is needed to keep the AI bubble inflated in the next three years. It's gonna be a laugh-riot. Or very scary, one of the two.
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.
Last week I put out one of the most consequential newsletters I’ve written yet, pulling together multiple distinct financial analyst notes from Wells Fargo, Barclays, and UBS that directly estimated that 70% or more of the AI revenues of Microsoft, Google, and Amazon were from either OpenAI or Anthropic. To be clear, UBS estimated that next year, Anthropic and OpenAI’s compute spend would be 48% of all Google Cloud revenues — which means that they likely account for even more than 70% of its AI revenues, but I wanted to be fair.
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/
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/08/11/tragedy-of-the-commoners/#piketty-snowden
According to an Economist editorial, "AI is breaking the British state" by making it too easy to file complaints, demands and appeals, which will "drown the state" with "demands as well-crafted as a first-class lawyer's":
Let's pause a moment to appreciate the Economist's touching credulity about AI's coming legal mastery. The law seems to be the area where AI is most prone to "hallucinate" (that is, "produce defective outputs"), which can only be sorted through by skilled practitioners whose experience gives them the discernment to distinguish useful arguments from foolish ones:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/28/hitl-ers/#ai-ai-oh
(And this requires those skilled practitioners to avoid the "automation blindness" that afflicts people who are asked to remain vigilant for things that seldom occur, a phenomenon that has turned every TSA agent into the water-bottle-detectingest motherfucker the human race has ever produced, who still misses 95% of the guns that red teams bring through the checkpoint):
What role does social media play in your business?
One of our most popular stories is Should you quit social? I've been thinking about how nice it would be to quit but then I remember how social helps my business. A lot of us use it for audience growth but some of us use it for intel or to keep up with clients or people we already know. What role does social media play in your business?
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.
Hardly a day goes by without my getting an email from someone looking for a way to do good with technology. From computer science students thinking about post-grad careers to seasoned coders with decades of experience, there's an army of hackers looking for a way to turn their expertise into public goods.
There's a name for this movement: it's called "Public Interest Technology" and the people who work in it are called "public interest technologists." There've always been techies who understood the link between tech and public wellbeing and who committed themselves to working for the betterment of society, but their numbers swelled as Big Tech companies saturated their markets and switched from growing by making products people like, to locking in their users and then extracting more value from their technological prisoners:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan
It was the era when (in the words of Facebook's Jeff Hammerbacher) "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads":
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.
I'm sure that working in social media – dealing with people as mass statistical abstractions – is a cognitohazard, the sort of thing that could make anyone a little solipsistic, convinced that everyone else is a kind of stimulus-responding automaton lacking the interiority that you yourself experience.
But when it comes to Mark Zuckerberg, I'm increasingly convinced that he didn't acquire his worldview through the self-inflicted brain damage of his long exposure to the back-end of a vast social media system. I think the causal arrow points in the other direction: I think that Zuck founded Facebook because he doesn't really believe that other people are truly real, at least not as real as he is.
We see this in Facebook's very earliest days, as we see it today, as we see it at every critical juncture in Facebook and Zuckerberg's history.
Consider Facebook's origins, founded by a young Zuckerberg in his dorm as a means to nonconsensually rate the fuckability of his fellow Harvard undergrads:
Are podcasts a good idea for lead generation?
I know some business owners have a podcast mainly for lead generation, but they seem like a ton of work for just that purpose. I'm curious if you have a podcast (or had a podcast) that was mainly for lead gen and finding clients, is it a good idea? What do you like about the podcast approach vs other ways to find clients?—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.
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. ❤️
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:
Forget "Don't be evil"; Google's true motto is a form of vulgar spidermanism: "With great power comes no responsibility." The internet's de facto boss is an absentee landlord.
Google – a thrice-convicted monopolist – is the gateway to the internet, with more than a 90% search market share that it attained by buying out all its competitors and bribing Apple more than $20b/year not to start a rival search engine:
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/8/6/google_monopoly
Google likes to position itself as a wise steward of the internet. They say they use their vast troves of data about the internet and its users to connect the right person with the right information at the right moment. As their mission statement has it, "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful":
Bending Spoons is buying Airtable and it has small business owners confused about why this is BAD. Can't venture capital investment be good? Shouldn't we wait and see?
This is not a venture capital investment. It's an acquisition. These two terms may seem like a technicality but let me explain why they are completely different transactions—and more importantly, why the difference indicates how many alarm bells should ring for you when you read the news about your fave tech tool.
Let's start with private equity. I'm classifying Bending Spoons as private equity. They don't agree with that definition because they're cool, young Italian guys who wanted to be founders, failed and get to cosplay as founders now. But they basically operate like private equity minus the fact that they don't sell off the companies they acquire (they're also a fairly new company so we should expect this to change, in which case they are exactly like private equity). I am not the only one who considers them part of the PE crowd. Here's stories from Bloomberg, Seeking Alpha and TechCrunch likening them to private equity.
Private equity usually BUYS companies to own them and extract a return quickly. It's an exit for the founders and (if relevant) investors. The original team almost always leaves and is replaced by transitional leadership who are there to squeeze cash out of the business before the PE firm sells it off for profit a few years later. The company you knew as a customer is gone and is replaced by a much worse version with less service, higher costs and absolutely no soul. Think Squarespace—they sold their entire business to private equity firm Permira in 2024 and they're already a shell of their former selves.
If you liked this piece, you should subscribe to my premium newsletter. It’s $70 a year, or $7 a month, and in return you get a weekly newsletter that’s usually anywhere from 5,000 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. On Friday, I’ll publish the second installment of the Hater’s Guide to Nvidia — where I’ll take a look at how the AI bubble transformed the company from a pure hardware player to a purveyor of the financial dark arts.
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.
Soundtrack: Tool - Forty Six & 2
Some of this story was pulled from my previous story about Bending Spoons.
Corrections: I updated it post-publish with more info on how to leave Airtable. Added info about Filmic layoffs and comments from Airtable pro Ashley from Systems Over Stress. Added price hike details from Ted Fickes re: another Bending Spoons acquisition Harvest (August 4)
Airtable was overdue for an exit. They were founded in 2012. Fourteen years is a long time in the venture world. Most exits happen in ten years or less. Anytime you use a venture or private-equity backed application, the clock is ticking on that borrowed time and, for Airtable, that time is up today. The death brigade known as Bending Spoons has acquired them for $1.3B.
Why is this the end of Airtable? Because of what Bending Spoons does to companies. Price hikes. Mass layoffs. Degraded products. Reduced service. Their portfolio is a graveyard of apps you used to use.
Obviously, the non-American world has a digital sovereignty problem – Trump has means, motive and opportunity to order his tech companies to shut down any public official, large corporation, or individual who displeases him:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/18/their-trillions-our-billions/#eyes-on-the-prize
But Americans face the same digital sovereignty risk. America is a lawless place now, where a pliable Supreme Court and supine Congress have affirmed that "it's not a crime if the president does it." The same tech giants who sold out to Trump for tax breaks and protection from antitrust enforcement will happily disconnect any member of the American public, any American company, any American official who displeases Trump.
It's a strange irony that in this moment when so many of us are struggling to "de-Google" our lives, a forcible, sudden de-Googling amounts to a sort of digital death penalty:
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. ❤️
The greatest magic trick of them all is lying. The reason you can't figure out that coin vanish even after the conjurer performs it three times in a row is that they didn't do the same trick three times in a row! They did three different tricks: "Didn't catch it? Here, let me do it again!" is a lie:
https://magiciansmag.com/3-cool-coin-disappearing-trick/
There's times when it makes sense to treat two outcomes as the same, even if they were produced by very different means. As a reader, my enjoyment of your novel is the same whether it was dictated, typed on an Underwood Noiseless, keyed into a word processor, or scratched out with a fountain pen:
https://nealstephenson.substack.com/p/writing-by-hand-is-good-for-your
I shoved my way through a garage filled with gamers to get to the bar at the brewery. It was video game night and the space was lit up with all kinds of vintage computers and gaming machines but I wasn't there to play games. I was there to talk to the taproom manager about a job.
I sat down at the bar next to this guy named Anthony. Anthony, I would learn later, worked for the city repairing sidewalks. He had worked for the city his whole life. His dad worked for the city too. Anthony had union wages. Predictable hours. A house. A pension. A TikTok account that was just for fun.
I didn't get the job at the brewery but the taproom manager took pity on me and gave me a free beer while I talked to Anthony about what it was like making a stable living.
The reason I had applied in the first place wasn't really about money. I had just quit working for tech companies which famously pays pretty well and making part time minimum wage at a brewery with no benefits in California pays less than unemployment. I just needed something to do that wasn't staring at a computer wondering what I'd done wrong that led me to this dark moment.
I am taking a week off from publishing for the first time since we started Revenue Rulebreaker in the fall of 2024. It's just one week. It feels more substantial for some reason. I rarely take time off.
I will be out from August 5 through 13. I'm traveling back to the US (Portland) for a wedding anniversary celebration of two of my favorite people and I'm also visiting family and other friends.
I'm back in the office on the 13th and we are hosting a book club that day on Maggie Patterson's book Staying Solo, but I won't publish anything new.
It's hard to take this time. I'm struggling with it, especially after welcoming so many new Legends. I've worked over nearly every holiday and birthday for as long as I can remember. I'm trying to build more of these breaks in though. We kind of have to do them or I'm not gonna last that long.
What's your advice for someone just going self-employed?
We've had some new folks join our newsletter who are just thinking about going out on their own. Most of the Legends have been in business for years, so I want to know, what would you tell yourself if you could go back to when you started? What's your best advice for someone just going self-employed?—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.
Last updated: Sat, Aug 1 at 6:33pm CT
We're getting a late start as I'm a tad under the weather, but the news is coming fast this week. Stories we've been following about PayPal possibly being bought, Apple's price increases, social media age verification laws and authors suing AI are all becoming more clear with fresh info coming out.
Also, the small business headlines are paywalled for paid subscribers, but I'm running a sale this week for 25% off a year in Legends. We're 33 Legends away from hitting 400. You can be part of the Lucky 400!
Now, to the news. Here's what's shaping up this week...
Neoclassical economics assumes rationality. The corollary of, "If you're so smart, why aren't you rich?" is "you're rich, so you must be very smart!" Thus it is that many people assume that if powerful, well-compensated CEOs insist that "AI is changing everything," well then, AI must be changing everything.
But the evidence for this "changing everything" thesis is thin on the ground. Despite a global mania that has reduced the real, pressing need for digital sovereignty to the imaginary need to create "sovereign AI," no one can really articulate the case for "sovereign AI." If Donald Trump ordered Big Tech to turn off all of your country's chatbots tomorrow, nothing would change. Every one of your country's ministries and corporations would chug on with nary a hitch. Households, too, though perhaps a few of the younger members of those families would have to do their own homework again.
(Contrast this with what would transpire if Trump directed his tech giants to switch off your country's Office 365 access, or to brick your Android and iOS phones, or to killswitch your John Deere tractors. Your country would effectively cease to exist. If "digital sovereignty" means anything, it means doing something about this urgent fact):
https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/18/their-trillions-our-billions/#eyes-on-the-prize
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.
From its inception, I've loved Creative Commons. I hung out with Lisa Rein, Matt Haughey and Aaron Swartz while they coded up the first version of the site, and my first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, was the first professionally published text ever released under a CC license, just weeks after CC itself launched:
In those early days, CC licenses were primarily of interest to people who were steeped in copyright law, lore and litigation; so many of the early debates about these licenses turned on esoteric (but important!) questions about copyright; for example, how CC would interact with copyright's "limitations and exceptions."
You see, copyright has never meant the absolute right to control all uses of a work. Every system of copyright includes a set of "limitations and exceptions" for people making use of copyrighted works without permission, even if the copyright holder objects to that use. The best-known example of this is "fair use," a concept from American law.
Fair use is (potentially) extremely broad, but it's also extremely "fact-intensive" – that's the phrase lawyers use to describe the kind of legal question whose answer is almost always "it depends." Fair use might let you copy the entirety of a work, even for a commercial purpose. It might let you create new works based on existing works. It might let you do these things specifically to discourage people from buying the original. But…it depends.
This drive wrapped on August 1. Stay tuned for future ones by getting on our newsletter!
Small business owners have a harder time swallowing the paid subscription model than nearly anyone else. We all agree there needs to be WAY MORE independent small business media—that it sucks when all small biz information is selling you a product or a service—but are we willing to fund the alternative?
Revenue Rulebreaker is here to provide that. Community-backed media that covers solopreneur businesses and the world around them.
I've been commenting on daily headlines that affect our small businesses, producing well-researched stories about things like fractional work and how entrepreneurs retire, and preparing to relaunch a podcast about the money behind the demise of our tech tools. We brought in guest contributors to cover Pride from an entrepreneurial lens in June, we ran a robust series on growing your audience in May, and we explored the different lifestyles of solopreneurs.
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:
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. Everybody-celebratory.
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.
If you liked this piece, you should subscribe to my premium newsletter. It’s $70 a year, or $7 a month, and in return you get a weekly newsletter that’s usually anywhere from 5,000 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.
Soundtrack: Queens of the Stone Age — Infinity
Two years ago, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang said that “the more you buy, the more you save,” referring to its new (at the time) Blackwell GPUs that would “reduce LLM inference operating cost and energy by up to 25x.” Two years later, those supposed gains have been pared back to 10x, based on case studies with private inference providers that do not share their margins and are most-decidedly not profitable, and absolutely nobody seems to mind that NVIDIA overstated the gains on Blackwell (in a vacuum, in specific circumstances) by 150%, partly because these numbers are utterly meaningless, and partly because the media in most cases ardently refuses to criticize this company.
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:
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. 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,
Good morning premium subscribers! As ever, please ping me at ez@betteroffline.com if you have any questions.
Oracle has one of the strongest mythologies in the tech industry. Ask a regular person and they’ll tell you that it’s “incredibly profitable” and “growing fast,” that it’s “unstoppable,” and that Larry Ellison has the mandate of heaven with regard to the continual sales of software and hardware related to databases and AI.
And those people are completely and utterly wrong.
The original title of this article was “Is Oracle Dying?” because I assume, when I took a deeper look, that there’d be some sort of debate, some sort of bull case for a decades-old quasi-hyperscaler run by one of the more nakedly-evil CEOs in the history of tech. I assumed — incorrectly, I might add — that Oracle as a business was doing fine other than the ridiculous commitments it made to support the whims of Sam Altman and OpenAI via deals that I believed (and still believe) will kill Oracle.
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.
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.
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
Thanks for reading this week’s free Where’s Your Ed At newsletter. Friday’s premium newsletter will ask the simple question: Is Oracle dying?
It’s been one year since I launched the premium newsletter, and I’ve decided to extend the discount on annual subscriptions. Between now and 12AM ET, July 26, you can get a permanent annual rate of just $60— a $10 discount on the usual price of $70 — for life. Click here for the offer.
In addition to getting access to the entire back catalog of premium posts, you’ll also receive one additional post each week — usually anywhere between 10,000 and 20,000 words — covering the most pressing topics in the AI bubble — the best value in tech analysis. Highlights include the Hater's Guide To The Memory Crisis, a guide to how AI made everything more expensive, How OpenAI Kills Oracle (which pairs nicely with the Hater's Guide To Oracle), The Hater's Guide To NVIDIA, The Hater's Guides To Private Credit and Private Equity, and how the entire AI Compute Demand Story Is A Lie.
Soundtrack: Dillinger Escape Plan — Black Bubblegum (2007)
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:
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. 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.)
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:
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. Everybody-celebratory.
Tisha B'Av (literally: the Ninth of Av) is the day on which Jews grieve the destructions of the First and Second Temples; the expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492; massacres during the Crusades, and more.
The time from the 17th of the last month, Tammuz–marking the Romans breaching the walls of Jerusalem before the fall of the Second Temple–until Tisha B'Av is called the Three Weeks, a time in which many observe practices connected to mourning like not holding weddings, getting hair cut, or listening to music. The time from the very beginning of the month of Av (which began yesterday) until Tisha B'Av is called, yes, The Nine Days, during which even more mourning practices are observed.*
Thanks for reading this week’s free Where’s Your Ed At newsletter. As I said last week, I’m taking the rest of this week off, so there won’t be a premium on Friday. That said, if you aren’t already a member, now’s a great time to subscribe.
To celebrate the one year anniversary of the premium newsletter, I’m offering a sale on one-year subscriptions. Between now and midnight July 22, you can get a permanent annual rate of just $60— a $10 discount on the usual price of $70 - for life. Click here for the offer.
In addition to getting access to the entire back catalog of premium posts, you’ll also receive one additional post each week — usually anywhere between 10,000 and 20,000 words — covering the most pressing topics in the AI bubble - the best value in tech analysis. Highlights include last week's Hater's Guide To The Memory Crisis - a guide to how AI made everything more expensive - How OpenAI Kills Oracle (which pairs nicely with the Hater's Guide To Oracle), The Hater's Guide To NVIDIA, The Hater's Guides To Private Credit and Private Equity, and how the entire AI Compute Demand Story Is A Lie.
Today’s piece is one of the largest free newsletters I’ve ever written, and pulls together the last six months of my work.
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:
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. Everybody-celebratory.
As many of you know, about a month ago Pope Leo issued an encyclical –a special letter to bishops– on the use of AI. There, he wisely noted that though technology is neither “a force antagonistic to humanity” nor “inherently evil,” it can certainly be problematic when used badly. And, he continued:
He called on the tech industry to avoid
Hi premium readers! I’ll be taking a week off of the premium next week — July 17 — to have some well-earned rest. This will mark only the second time I’ve missed a premium piece since I started this newsletter in June 2025, and I hope you’ll forgive me for the (short) break.
Don’t worry. Today’s piece is also an absolute banger.
Everything’s more expensive, and it’s all AI’s fault.
An AI data center is full of servers, which are in turn full of (for the most part) NVIDIA GPUs. Each NVIDIA GB300 has two B300 GPUs, the two of which have 576GB of High Bandwidth Memory (HBM, or HBM3e to be specific), and a CPU, which has 480GB of lower-power LPDDR5X RAM (the kind usually used in cellphones and other mobile devices). These systems tend to be sold in an NVL72 rack with 18 compute trays, bringing us to 36 GB300s, for a total of 20.7 terabytes of HBM and 17 terabytes of LPDDR5X RAM, and that’s before you get to the RAM associated with the high-speed networking gear and other associated components.
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:
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. Everybody-celebratory.
So I thought it'd be fun, as we've done occasionally in the past, to share biographies now and then of Jews To Know throughout history. Have a look and offer your thoughts?
Today: The naked Jewish mystic possibly Sufi, probably Kabbalist Persian-Armenian likely gay teacher in Mughal India whose life was even more colorful than that topline description. Come and learn.
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:
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. Everybody-celebratory.
Over here in These United States, we're just about at Fourth of July weekend– during an election year, while white supremacist Christian nationalism is running the government and the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence is being marked. It's... a lot.
So I thought I'd remix something I did a couple of years ago, using the base text getting celebrated this year. So.
But first, I want to remind you that our first LEARN, TO DO is in just one week. For those of you less familiar with Mariame Kaba's work, she is, truly (as far as I can tell, and I do not say this lightly) one of the most important and visionary doers and thinkers of our era, and I believe that at some point will be more universally regarded as such.
(My friends, I'm not picking these people capriciously! Every single one of these sessions is going to be paradigm-shifting, and I mean that.) So this session, as all of these, is really a special opportunity to learn from truly extraordinary voices at a pivotal moment in our nation's history.
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:
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. Everybody-celebratory.
Today's going to be an Extra Special Double Thursday– two emails today! Hey, it's a long weekend, space 'em out however you like, just read 'em both as you like!
(I considered just embedding the second into the first but why? You can handle this. 😉)
This first one jumps right into the hard question embedded in the Declaration of Independence (turning 25o this weekend, wild). The one to come in a few hours is more of a slow slide towards the deeper end, and that one is getting shared more broadly.
Regardless, not all of you have signed up for this yet and I am telling you that if you do not know why Mariame Kaba is one of the most important, visionary voices working today then you will understand by the end of this. Not overstating, here.
Finding your role in the work with Mariame Kaba, July 8, 7ET/4PT.
I'm not kidding.
Even if you feel that you have your role in the work this conversation will be worth your time and you will learn so much, as will we all. Click through and just do it already.
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
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.
President Trump’s $TRUMP memecoin, down 42% since his most recent token-gated event only four days ago and 97% from its peak,a is poised to launch a new attempt to resuscitate prices.
The website has quietly introduced a signup page for a “members only, limited access” $TRUMP Coin Club, which it describes as “invitation-only luxury suites at the biggest sporting events in the world, private dinners, and the most elite and extraordinary experiences”. The club itself hasn’t launched yet, and the memecoin project has yet to formally publicize the waitlist registration.
Although tiny print amid the legalese in the website footer notes that “Club membership will be open to all qualifying community contributors; no purchase, holding, or ownership of $TRUMP or any crypto asset will be required”, the website prominently features a placeholder for a leaderboard that appears poised to rank holders. Like the $TRUMP project’s previous one-off events — a May 2025 dinner and a “gala luncheon” this past Saturday, both featuring brief Trump appearances — the leaderboard appears designed to rank members by both the amount of the token they hold and the duration they’ve held it, continuing the time-weighting approach implemented after holders immediately dumped their tokens following the first dinner.
The $TRUMP Coin Club website prominently features a token holder leaderboard, despite fine print claiming that no $TRUMP holdings are necessary for membership
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.
I finally got the chance to drop by one of my favorite podcasts, The Vergecast, where David Pierce had me on to talk about the recent conversation about Apple's moves around video podcasts, as well as the much broader big-picture considerations around keeping podcasts open. We started with grounding the conversation in the idea that "Wherever you get your podcasts" is a radical statement.
The episode also starts with a wonderful look back at Apple's first half-century as they celebrate their 50 anniversary, courtesy of Jason Snell, whose Six Colors is one of my favorite tech sites, and whose annual survey of tech expert sentiment on Apple is indispensable. He's completely fluent in Apple's culture and history, and minces no words about their recent moral failures. Definitely worth the watch! I hope you'll check out the entire episode, and let me know what you think, and I'm really glad to get to continue conversations that start on my site and bring them to a broader audience.
If you liked this one, here are some related pieces from the archives that you might want to check out:
Yesterday, I had the chance to witness someone who's one of the most dedicated, competent advocates for privacy and digital rights bring that message to a whole new platform. It turns out, it's pretty delightful, especially in a moment when our civil liberties and rights online couldn't matter more!
Cindy Cohn, the executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, has been a tireless fighter for protecting everyone's digital civil liberties, and I was lucky enough to get to tag along as she took the story of that work to The Daily Show yesterday. It was no surprise that the conversation was so fluent and insightful on the topic, but I think a lot of people in the audience didn't expect that it would be such a fun and even delightful conversation about a topic that is, too often, confusing or complicated or boring.
Six years ago, when I first joined the board of the EFF, I was already a believer in the core principles the organization stood for, but one of my biggest hopes was that the messages and mission of the entire team could just be brought to a larger audience. That couldn't have been more perfectly accomplished than seeing Cindy translate some topics that were fairly technical, or which involved fairly arcane legal concerns, and make them very accessible. And this work is vital because both the overreaching, authoritarian government, and the irresponsible, unaccountable forces of big tech are threatening our rights more than ever.
I gotta admit, it was pretty fun to watch Cindy hand Jon a "Let's Sue the Government!" t-shirt. You can get one just like his if you donate to EFF or become a member!
