The most reliable way to lose a political battle is to let your adversary define the terms. For example, if you're an artist and you let your boss define the fight over AI, he'll make it all about "IP" (not labor) and ask you to help secure a victory that will make him richer and you poorer:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/09/02/scrape-scrope-scrap/
If we want to win these important battles, we can't let our adversaries define them. That's the blunder we made 50 years ago, when we let the neoclassical economists redefine the problem of monopolies. Before the Carter era, the monopoly fight was about power. Monopolies had to be fought because wealth concentration would create "autocrats of trade," so powerful as to be beyond the reach of any regulator, any union, any competitor. Even if a company achieved its monopoly by being the best in the world – by making the best products at the best prices while paying the best wages – its power still needed blunting, lest it change its mind and start charging more, reducing quality, and paying less:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/20/we-should-not-endure-a-king/
According to The Information, in early 2024, Broadcom CEO Hock Tan hosted a “coffee chat” with employees of the recently-acquired VMWare, and introduced them to his particular brand of management:
He may not be your dad, but Hock Tan sure is a motherfucker.
Broadcom is a company you likely know for its XPU platform — a collection of different bits of intellectual property and access to semiconductor parts that allow it to build custom AI chips, the best-known of which are Google’s TPUs. It just signed a $30 billion deal with Apple to build “custom ASIC silicon products.”
Apple was already a massive customer of Broadcom, which historically provided a good chunk of the wireless and radio frequency parts that you’d find inside iPhones and its other devices, representing at one point more than 20% of revenues, dropping to around 10% to 15% with the growth of AI chip sales and the acquisition of VMWare.
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I once asked an activist friend how they managed to go viral every single day. They said, "I tap into a conversation that's already happening."
That's what came to mind when I saw the news about Nathan Fielder and Elizabeth Holmes' new documentary, You Can See Everything.
What keeps you relevant is your proximity to other relevant people.
Every story about this surprise film has said that Elizabeth Holmes asked Nathan and Lance Oppenheim, his co-director, to document her last days of freedom before prison to "clear her name." But if you want to clear your name, you don't bring a documentary crew into your house and you certainly don't work with Nathan Fielder. This is the guy who designed a giant puppet version of someone else's mother with the capability to breastfeed him. You get Fielder involved because you know you're about to fade into obscurity behind bars. Coasting off his popularity to keep people talking about you makes clemency much more likely.
Are there any types of clients that are off limits?
In light of designer Jessica Hische taking heat for working with Meta on an AI logo, I'm curious if you have types of clients you wouldn't ever work with.—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.
As once-extinct diseases sweep through America, sickening, maiming and killing, the wild lunacy of anti-vax superstition grows ever more difficult to excuse.
Even the most uncomfortable vaccinations are nothing compared to the agony of the diseases they stave off. The worst I've ever felt after a jab was when I insisted – against doctor's orders – on getting the shingles, flu and covid jabs at the same time (I was about to leave on a complex trip where I'd be in a lot of enclosed spaces with a lot of different people, and I'd just had a cancer diagnosis and didn't want to get sick in case that foreclosed on my oncologist's therapeutic plans).
I felt like dogshit for about a day, and it didn't matter. Every time I felt like groaning and complaining, I thought about Rusty, my grandmother's wonderful boyfriend (they shacked up after my grandfather died, but didn't get married because she would have lost her widow's benefits). Rusty was the toughest guy I knew, an ex-bodybuilder who never showed any sign of discomfort, not even after his knee-replacements. The only time Rusty ever lost his composure in my presence was when he had shingles, when the agony reduced him to uncontrollable weeping. I knew that no matter how ooky all those vaccines made me feel, it was better than going through what Rusty had experienced. There was no way I'd handle it nearly so well as he did.
Rusty's shingles experience was the best case. He didn't end up with years of crippling nerve pain. He didn't lose his sight or hearing, didn't experience brain damage, didn't die of encephalitis. Fuck yeah I'll get a shingles vax.
If you liked this piece, you should subscribe to my premium newsletter, and you can subscribe on the following links: $70 a year, $18 a quarter, or $7 a month.
In return you get a weekly 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 also just did a two part Hater's Guide To Circular Financing, covering the depths of NVIDIA's circular madness and the history of a very dangerous kind of "financial innovation."
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 Broadcom, a company that has long ceased to innovate, and whose existence centers on buying successful companies and jacking up prices, and now, building chips for Anthropic and OpenAI, while also taking on (and backstopping) insane amounts of debt. In short, Broadcom is the unholy lovechild of NVIDIA and Oracle.
It's a holiday week in the United States, Canada and Brasil but online businesses rarely take a break like our governments do. I'm kicking off this week following up on some stories we were tracking last week.
I am on the lookout for news about Airtable. Their deal with Bending Spoons was just finalized at the end of last week and we are all expecting layoffs and price hikes to be coming next. I'm also watching Stripe closely on their acquisition spree, though rumors say that they have possibly stalled on trying to buy PayPal (according to Bloomberg) which is GREAT NEWS FOR US. Payments monopolies are bad.
Here's what else shaping up this week...
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Paid subscriptions allow our tiny team to keep doing this work.
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Shana tova to those of you who are preparing for a shiny new year! And big new year love to everyone else, too. Today I'm going to share an old favorite, below, that some of you might find helpful to reread (or encounter for the first time) just about now – but I'd like to share a few other resources of spiritual sustenence for the season, first:
You know that I wrote you a book, right? Good.
"If economists wished to study the horse, they wouldn’t go and look at horses. They'd sit in their studies and say to themselves, 'What would I do if I were a horse?'" -Ely Devons
Half a century ago, a group of lavishly financed economists from the University of Chicago (the "neoliberals") convinced governments all over the world to completely upend the way they treated monopolies. Up until then, the purpose of competition enforcement was to reduce corporate power, with the understanding that once a corporation became more powerful than the government, it would be impossible to force it to follow any rules:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/20/we-should-not-endure-a-king/
But for the "Chicago Boys," monopolies were evidence of efficiency. When you encounter a company in the wild that has acquired a commanding market share, your first assumption should be that it has taken over its sector by being better than anyone else – you should not assume that the company cheated its way to glory. After all, if a company with a large market share was cheating – say, if it was increasing its profit margins by reducing quality or jacking up prices – then smaller companies would rush into the market to poach its dissatisfied customers.
Do you embrace the hustle of Q4? Or take it easy?
First of all, I know it's not Q4 yet. I'm seeing lots of chatter about it being HUSTLE SEASON between summer and the winter holidays. Some people are saying it's time to go balls to the wall. Others are saying those people have been poisoned and need to chill the fuck out. Where do you fall? Is it time to run head on into your goals? Or is it time to hibernate? —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.
Rome wasn't overthrown in a day. Oligarchies are stubborn, and by the time they've established and entrenched themselves, they have resources, power blocs and even mercenaries they can deploy to repel would-be dethroners.
The USA got its first antimonopoly law, the Sherman Act, in 1890, but it took 22 years before that law could be used to crush John D Rockefeller's corrupt, sprawling empire. Senator John Sherman promoted his law as a way of preventing monopolies from emerging, warning the Senate that they would struggle to overthrow the "autocrats of trade" that monopolies created:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/20/we-should-not-endure-a-king/
The Senate passed his law and Harrison signed it, but then successive administrations left the Sherman Act to gather dust on a shelf as Rockefeller went on a spree, accumulating the kind of power that made him a true "autocrat of trade," so powerful that he and the US government were practically evenly matched.
You know, sometimes it’s kind of hard to explain the “circular” part of circular financing to people, in the sense that some of the agreements are kind of clunky. NVIDIA funds OpenAI, who then spends that money to rent back NVIDIA GPUs from Microsoft, Google, Amazon, or CoreWeave, and then that money is used…to buy servers from Taiwanese ODMs (original design manufacturers) that build their servers, who then buy GPUs from NVIDIA to put in them.
The reason it’s clunky is that people will, even if it’s not true, claim that there’s some indeterminately-large “other” subset of customers that are also buying compute or NVIDIA GPUs, and that we should as a result ignore our lying eyes and, if anything, celebrate how well this is all working. While there’s a ‘circle’ of ‘finance,’ it’s not a problem because somewhere in the mess of money exists a few real dollars, and because we can’t precisely measure them, there’s nothing to be concerned about!
Fear not, dear reader, because we finally have a pure, unfiltered circular financing operation to obsess over — SoftBank subsidiary SB Energy just filed its S-1, and it’s so incredibly circular that I’m genuinely surprised that they bothered to list.
That’s a good question, and not as obvious an answer as you’d think.
Amazon's own balance sheet presents the most compelling evidence that we are stuck in the Enshittocene, the era in which everything is turning into a pile of shit, because the worst ideas of the worst people now make the most money.
Amazon is a many-tentacled monster, with several prominent lines of business wrapped around the world. There's its logistics and fulfillment business, which is so successful (at the expense of its workers' labor rights, bodies and bathroom breaks) that it is more than fully subsidized by Amazon's platform sellers, the independent merchants who depend on Amazon to sell and deliver their goods.
This means that it costs Amazon itself nothing to get the merchandise it sells to your door: more than 100% of the cost of operating the fulfillment side of Amazon is covered by the fees it extracts from its independent sellers (who compete with Amazon in many instances, and for whom delivery is a cost center, not a source of profit).
Then there's AWS, Amazon's cloud business. This is another extraordinary success story: every company needs servers, and that's especially true of an e-commerce company like Amazon. By building more servers than it needs, Amazon transformed its own data infrastructure from a cost center into another profit center. Amazon's customers – many of whom are also its competitors – pay Amazon so much to rent space on its servers that Amazon gets its own (prodigious) computing for free, and realizes a profit on top of that.
When I talked about the rise of Cancer Capital, I mentioned that it represents a massive shift from how venture capital has worked over the years. But my conversations in recent years with people in tech, and especially with those outside the industry, reveal that most folks have no idea just how huge that shift has been. It's easy to illustrate exactly how extreme things have gotten just by using a few examples, starting with companies that are familiar to everyone, and sharing some details of what I've seen firsthand.
First: The companies that defined the modern era of tech weren’t founded with venture capital.
Neither Microsoft nor Apple took a penny of venture capital funding when they were founded. Both got started from money they got from their founders and their first customers, and took off from there.
In Microsoft's case, they didn't get any venture capital investment until the company had been around for six years, and were already doing $17 million dollars a year in revenues. (That was a lot in 1981!) The founders didn't need any startup capital at the beginning because they basically formed the company in order to serve their first customer, and had revenues from the start. More strikingly, Microsoft didn't close their venture capital funding until after they had made their deal with IBM and shipped MS-DOS — the deal that actually made Microsoft into the industry-dominating player that they've been ever since.
Welcome back to our fourth and final installment of the Mystical Magical Mystery Tour, wherin we are going to wind our way to Tzfat and take it all home.
You can catch up on episodes 1-3 here:
When we last saw our heroes, there was a big flowering of Kabbalistic work all over medieval Europe – and we don't have all the receipts, but there are at least a few clues about where some of those traditions might have come from. Most notably, the Zohar came out of Spain ca. 1200.
Today we'll talk about a number of the ingredients that went into creating the famous, distinctive movement that was Tzfat Kabbalah, why it wasn't as much of a bro-zone as is often thought, and what happened after.
Kabbalah spread as Jews did: often not willingly. In addition to various pogroms and expulsions across Europe between the 12th-16th centuries, the expulsions in 1492 from Spain and by 1506 from Portugal were epoch-defining for the community. Many of these latter Jews wound up in Ottoman lands, including the families of Rabbis Joseph Karo (author of the cornerstone Jewish legal text the Shulchan Aruch) and Solomon Alkabetz (author of the liturgical poem Lecha Dodi), both enthusiastic students of Kabbalah.
Karo regarded himself as regularly visited by a heavenly mentor ("maggid") called the Mishnah that revealed kabbalistic doctrines to him. (Perhaps not coincidentally, this spirit thought Karo was the smartest teacher out there.) In 1534 or 36, in either Adrianople, Türkiye or Nicopol, Bulgaria (scholars disagree), Alkabetz, Karo and others were staying up all night studying Torah for the holiday of Shavuot when, as Alkabetz wrote:
What if post-Trump America is even worse?
I know, it's tempting to think of Trump as a cause, rather than an effect – as an aberration who dragged America into fascism. Trump is exceptional, but the thing that makes him exceptional isn't his corruption, recklessness or cruelty. What makes Trump exceptional is his ability to cajole, intimidate and flatter America's most corrupt, reckless and cruel people into a coalition.
These people hate each other. Nick Fuentes drifts off to sleep every night furiously fantasizing about turning Stephen Miller into a lampshade. Laura Loomer just got ICE to intervene in a Twitter feud by having a guy she dislikes violently arrested, shackled at wrist and ankle, perp-walked, and then shuffled from location to location so that he couldn't meet with his lawyer before being deported:
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2026/08/milo-yiannopoulos-deportation-trump-maga-laura-loomer-benny-johnson-raheem-kassmm/
Who would you sell your company to?
It's no secret that I hate acquisitions but I was pleased to see Pat Flynn's choice to sell his company to Liz Wilcox this week. That feels like best case scenario for a founder who wants to make an exit. I'm curious if you ever think about selling your company now or in the future and who might be a good, ethical buyer for you. You can name an actual company or a type of company or share thoughts about this in general.—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.
I've been wondering what's up with Liz and Pat teaming up these past few months. They keep emailing us at the same time. They're wearing matching t-shirts. Was she working for him? Was this a partnership? Now, it's clear. Pat just sold his business, Smart Passive Income, to Liz.
In my view, this is the best possible exit for any business and it's one all creators should learn from. I've never paid much attention to Pat Flynn but this deal makes me an immediate fan. He didn't want to sell SPI to investors or private equity who would destroy it. He sold it to another creator who would breathe fresh life into it. Certainly that makes him less cash but it's an ethical exit that takes good care of his audience while allowing him to move on with money in his pocket. I'm estimating this was a low 7 figure sale because Pat alludes to getting 8 figure offers though it's possible they worked out some kind of longterm profit sharing model.
This peer-to-peer sale is a rare move at a time when creator businesses are highly sought after by soulless finance types. Starter Story got bought by HubSpot earlier this year. TBPN was sold to Open AI a couple months later. Successful YouTubers have been handing their channels off to private equity firms. It's notable to me that all of these exits are getting mainstream media coverage when Pat and Liz's deal has seen not one single article all year.
Pat was early to the content sales game launching Smart Passive Income in 2008, just 3 years after YouTube went live. SPI is a content and course business that helps creators make money through things like email marketing and YouTube. Pat wrote the book Superfans about how to build a powerful audience and he's a big YouTuber and podcaster too. Liz Wilcox is an email marketer, famous for her $9 email template membership and her stint on Survivor.
After half a century of neoliberalism, we are all drenched in capitalism's established religion, the worship of property rights. We are so marinated in property worship that even capitalism's critics frame their critiques in "property talk," to the exclusion of other, more important rights, like human rights, labor rights and privacy rights.
To do this is to surrender before the battle even starts. Critics lose when they allow oligarchs and their apologists to choose a battlefield where they have a nearly unbeatable advantage.
Take privacy: privacy is a human right, not a property right. Human rights aren't for sale. You can't sell yourself into slavery, you can't sell your kidneys to make the rent. If privacy is a property right – one that can be traded away – then Facebook's industrial-scale privacy invasions are actually fine, since you "traded" your privacy to Mark Zuckerberg in exchange for the privilege of talking to your friends.
Some self-styled critics of tech monopolists say that the answer to Facebook's privacy invasions is to force the company to pay for your privacy with cash, rather than services:
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.
We really, really need to talk about venture capital. Because it’s not “venture capital” anymore.
There’s a huge disconnect between what most people think of VC, where an investor has a big fund and cuts checks to help a founder build a company, and the current reality, where a handful of billionaire extremists use the cover of “VC” to advance an outrageous agenda where they’re accountable to no one.
I’m gonna explain this from a standpoint that almost never gets articulated: I’ve personally raised tens of millions of dollars in venture capital funding as CEO of startups, and been directly involved as a board member or advisor in raising hundreds of millions more. I’ve sat in board rooms, across the table from the people I’m talking about here, or been at the industry events that they frequent. So this isn’t sour grapes because these VCs wouldn’t cut me a check, or some chip on my shoulder about these investors due to a business deal. This is what I know about these bad actors because I’m part of the community of creators and inventors who build the things that they used to invest in — back when they still cared about innovation.
Many of the trends in society and politics that people are most angry about, from data centers being forced down everyone’s throats, to all of our favorite apps and services being enshittified, to politicians being paid to ignore the will of the people, are all being supercharged by these cancer capitalists. They have warped the structure of venture capital into a form of oligarchy that answers to no market, no regulators, and no voters. So it’s worth understanding exactly how they did it.
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.
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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[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:
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.
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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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. ❤️
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.
These days, the conversation in tech and business, and in a lot of society, is still all AI, all the time. And one of the most fundamental questions boils down to: How do you get people to change what they’re doing in regard to AI? For people who (understandably) have moral or ethical objections to the many harms caused by Big AI, there’s the challenge of how to drive action while lacking the resources and capital of the tech tycoons who’ve driven the broad cultural push towards AI adoption.
As a result of the power differential between those pushing AI and those fighting its advances, the typical rhetorical tactic for AI critics has been to try to attach stigma to the use of AI, and to the outputs of AI systems. There is also little cultural discussion, or even mention, of alternative offerings that aren’t from the Big AI companies, so the entire narrative is framed as either using the most harmful, exploitative, damaging AI tools from the likes of OpenAI, or using nothing at all.
And for the most part, this has been pretty effective for people who have any taste or sense of culture. If you’re a creator, or engaged in creative culture, you probably either can’t stand the AI aesthetic, or feel betrayed when you find out something that was appealing to you was AI-generated or made by someone who used generative AI to create it. The only creative discipline that’s broadly an exception to this is coding, where for the most part people don’t have as many aesthetic objections, but even there, people pretty stridently object to the slop aesthetic in user interfaces and other human-facing aspects.
There are, of course, diehard cohorts of AI advocates who insist that they love the AI aesthetic and don’t mind the hyper-real look to what these systems output, but the mainstream discourse in the arts, design and creative disciplines reached a consensus some time ago, and it’s fairly stringently enforced amongst fan communities.
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.
For years, I’ve wanted to have a standalone version of Apple’s Touch ID authentication feature for my Mac, but without having to use an Apple keyboard. (I generally like their keyboards, but my daily driver keyboard these days is a big clicky mechanical beast.) I’d gone down various dead ends of trying to find substitutes, and even checked out the efforts where people had ripped apart expensive Apple keyboards just to scavenge the Touch ID sensors out of them. None of them quite solved the problem.
So today, I’m sharing an open source project called Dashboard Touch, which lets you make your own Touch ID-style sensor for your Mac, using low-cost off-the-shelf part. It’s based on an extensive refactoring of the excellent tinyTouch project by Zimeng Xiong, who recently cracked the code on how to make a useful fingerprint scanner system that’s also reasonably secure for regular Mac users. (You should definitely check out his project and support his new hardware build if you’re interested in this stuff.)
I took my own approach to this work because I wanted to focus a lot on having a friendly web interface for configuring exactly how the fingerprint sensor system works on your computer. When you get Dashboard Touch set up, it presents you with a nice web interface that runs right on your own Mac, letting you do things like set the color of the ring light on the fingerprint sensor, or capture your fingerprints so they’re recorded in the system.
Behind the scenes, the way the system works couldn’t be simpler. You buy a little fingerprint sensor, and a small microcontroller, wire them together (it was actually fun to get back to soldering stuff!), and then plug them into your computer with a regular USB cable. After you run the setup script, you just go to the web interface and add your finger(s) to the system.
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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.
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.
The crypto industry is having an increasingly rough time as prices remain depressed. Bitcoin is hovering around its lowest price since autumn 2024, well below the “Trump pump” prices spurred by traders who hoped his inauguration would bring about a crypto renaissance. Robinhood reported crypto trading revenue down 38% and trading volumes down 35% year-over-year.1 Coinbase reported a net loss of $359 million and has stopped using trading volume as a key metric, claiming it “no longer reflects the breadth of our business”. This is, I’m sure, entirely unrelated to the fact that their trading volume is down 38%/48% over the past three/six months.2 At least three crypto exchanges — AscendEx,3 BitMEX,4 and BitMart5 — announced in July they would be shutting down. Other darlings from the web3 bubble have also announced they’re closing up shop recently: the Proof of Attendance Protocol [W3IGG], the Step App “move-to-earn” product [W3IGG], and MVMT Labs [W3IGG]. Poolin, a bitcoin mining firm that once accounted for a fifth of the global hashrate, has filed for bankruptcy [W3IGG].
The president’s own Trump Media & Technology Group posted a $238 million loss. While losses are routine for the company, this quarter’s came alongside announcements that the firm would be unwinding multiple crypto-related partnerships with Crypto.com.
And despite many, many promises from pro-crypto senators, the Clarity Act didn’t make it to a vote before the August recess. A cloture vote is scheduled for shortly after the Senate reconvenes, though it now looks less like a serious attempt to pass the bill and more like an effort to provide crypto industry super PACs with a list of opposition spending targets.
Citation Needed is an independent publication, entirely supported by readers like you. Consider signing up for a free or pay-what-you-want subscription — it really helps me to keep doing this work.
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.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.
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.
This is Life as a Sacred Text, 🌱 an everybody-celebrating, justice-centered voyage into ancient stories that can illuminate our own lives.
It‘s always human-authored, and it's run on a nonprofit, so it’s 100% NAZI FREE. More about the project here, and to subscribe, go here:
This newsletter is a reader-supported publication.
Paid subscriptions allow our tiny team to keep doing this work.
If you want in to the House of Study but paying isn't on for you right now, reach out and we'll hook you up, no questions asked. Always.
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Life is a Sacred Text is about truth & transformation, with ancient stories serving as mirrors & lights. Collective liberation. Always human-authored, run on a Nazi-free platform. ❤️
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. ❤️
My newest Citation Needed project made an appearance on Last Week Tonight with John Oliver!
It’s a work in progress, but you can see the new interactive version of my map of the Trump family’s crypto ventures at map.citationneeded.news.
The map contains hundreds of business entities and links to the Trump family (with more being added!), augmented with data from the president’s most recent financial filings to estimate how much money is flowing in. It will be queryable by other researchers and journalists.
Click any node or connection in the Trump crypto empire map to open its panel and view explanatory annotations and citations. Toggle the income overlay to see financial-disclosure figures from the most recent filings. Search for entities, or filter by category.
The vast majority of the documents people use to do business are really quite poor. Presentations that make your eyes glaze over, memos that are inscrutable or unclear, and all kinds of artifacts that say more about how they were created than whatever message they were ostensibly trying to communicate. It's been one of my great frustrations for years, and a big part of why I wrote Make Better Documents a while ago. That post captured a list of the suggestions I've been giving people for years on how to make better, more effective documents that can actually do work for you, instead of fighting at cross purposes to your larger goals.
To my great surprise, that list of suggestions on how to make better documents got a pretty huge response, and a lot of people told me they found it really helpful. So now, I've created a Better Documents skills.md file for people who use LLM tools like Claude to help assist them in creating business documents, to prompt their AI tools to make better documents by default.
If you're not familiar, agent skills are simple text files that describe new capabilities or processes that LLMs can take advantage of when carrying out tasks. (They're Markdown files — more proof of how Markdown is taking over the world!) The way this skill works is that it's distilled the broad principles I outlined in that post into a series of 5 tests, covering areas like whether you've properly considered your target audience, whether the overall structure is correct, if you've overdone things with your formatting, and if things are named clearly, and then either generates a new file that follows those rules, or reviews an existing document to make sure it is obeying best practices.
It's nothing too fancy, but I've been using it for a while, and shared it with a few friends, and people have told me they found it handy and it's improved some of their routine documents. I'm especially glad that people have found it useful even if they're the kind of folks who would never let an LLM generate a document on their behalf, but do think software tools are useful for things like spell check or grammar check. I see this as being a tool in that kind of category.
The Clarity Act, a sweeping cryptocurrency market structure bill aimed at enshrining the crypto industry’s deregulatory wins into law, may be dead. Republicans’ “compromise” on ethics, endorsed by the President — a temporary provision that would expire when Trump leaves office, enforced only by a Justice Department run by his former personal lawyer — has been met with the response it deserves: Senator Angela Alsobrooks, one of two Democrats who voted to advance the bill out of Senate Banking, called it “an unserious offer”.
The crypto industry has spent $200 million (and counting) since 2024 to elect a Congress that would pass sweeping deregulatory crypto legislation. What they got was a bill too corrupt for Democrats to pass, a Republican majority too cowardly to rein in the president, and a president who won’t sign anything that meaningfully threatens his $1.4 billion-a-year grift.
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
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.
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.
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.
